Nick Cutter - The Deep

Their mother smiled. The most feral, cunning expression Luke had ever seen, her head cocked coyly to one side. The look of a predator who’d boxed in its quarry. She turned, carefree, and locked the door. Then she untied the sash on her robe, her back still turned. She did something with her hips, a lewd little shimmy; Luke felt the hairs standing up on Clayton’s arms. She slipped the robe off one shoulder—the salacious movement of a peep-show worker—and turned to look over that same shoulder, pinning her son in a flat and viperish stare.

When she faced him again, the robe was open a few inches. Her body was obscenely enormous, bulging in thick rolls down to the shadowy delta between her legs. A smell wafted off her: not her normal stink, the one a body develops when deprived of sunlight and clean air, when all it does is sit on a cracked chesterfield and shovel porridge between its spittle-wet lips, a smell not unlike the stink that wafts off a mildewed shower curtain—no, this was raw, throttlingly hormonal. The smell of arousal.

“Come here, boy,” she said softly. “Come to your mama.”

Luke felt it seeping out of Clayton’s skull—a jumpy, rabbity tick-tick-tick that made him think of cockroaches roasting and sputtering in a hot pan. That jumpy pop and crackle washed all through Luke’s piggybacking mind, too—it was fear, or the closest approximation to that emotion his brother could feel.

Their mother advanced, limping slightly. Clayton backpedaled, his hip knocking a flask off the lab bench, where it shattered on the floor.

“Tsk-tsk. Clumsy boy. You’ll have to pay for that in trade.”

Her body was a sheet of suffocating flab but her arms were oh-so-strong. Luke felt his brother’s heart pounding as he fought back wildly, aiming a knee at her wounded hips; she only laughed and pulled him closer—his struggles were nothing compared to that of the residents at the Second Chance Ranch. The heat of her body was weirdly narcotic; Clayton went limp, exhaling into the shelf of her enormous breasts, lips sputtering as he gasped for air.

“It’s okay,” their mother cooed, one hand fussing with Clayton’s trousers. “You like it, remember? If you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t get so… so…”

The scene fried out in a stinking puff of smoke. Next: Clayton was back in the lab. Alone. The pot of tree killer sat on the bench. Clayton was concentrating on it intently. Luke could feel his furious focus. Clayton opened the lid and tapped a small amount of the pale blue powder onto the bench; it looked like pulverized robin’s eggs. He opened other jars and vials containing compounds Luke knew nothing about. Mixing, measuring…

A series of memories shuffled past like holiday photos in a slide projector:

Flash: Clayton in the bathroom, shaking powder into their mother’s shampoo bottle.

Flash: Clayton in the master bedroom, stirring powder into their mother’s facial cream.

Flash: Clayton in the kitchen, tipping powder into the huge pot of porridge simmering on the stove.

A final memory:

Luke staring through Clayton’s eyes again, up the basement stairs at their mother, who lay on the kitchen floor, nothing but skin and bones. She’d lost hundreds of pounds, the weight sloughing off. Doctors and specialists had paraded through the house for months by then; she’d visited hospitals as far distant as Houston and Rochester, Minnesota. Her condition left the best medical minds stumped. Bethany Ronnicks continued to wither into decay, her body the equivalent of an old jack-o’-lantern left on a front stoop weeks after Halloween had passed.

“Please,” she whispered. “Stop this. I know it’s you, Clayton… a mother knows .”

Luke felt a smile spread across Clayton’s face, a sliver of teeth in the dark. He must’ve looked beatific, a child saint.

Upstairs, their mother wept. These raw, hacking sobs.

“You bastard… rotten-ass bastard.”

Luke felt something trickling down from the fuming stew of Clayton’s subconscious. Pleasure . The most incredible pleasure imaginable, beyond sexual in its intensity.

Luke had always known Clayton was a monster of sorts—he now understood that Clayton grasped this fact of his essential self with a rational, clinical objectivity. He was a monster of detachment, eternally unmoored from his fellow man.

But their mother was a monster, too, and one much worse than Clayton. She’d given Clayton a reason to let his own monster out of its box… and his monster was a steely, calculating, devouring one, able to kill another of its kind with relative ease.

Clayton lay at the base of those steps, drinking in the sobs of the woman who’d given him life—the woman whose life he stole by subtle degrees until she was gone, her scarecrow remains buried in a cedar casket in the Memory Gardens cemetery on Muscatine Avenue in Iowa City—and he smiled. His contentment was more sublime than anything he’d ever felt until then or had felt since.

LUKE’S FINGERSpulled out of the ambrosia rope with a gluey suction. His consciousness fled back into him as he broke contact with Clayton’s mind. Luke gagged, his skin feeling too heavy on his bones—like being smothered under a sopping bear pelt.

Clayton slumped against the generator, his eyelids hanging at half-mast. Just taking a little catnap , as their mother called them. Luke was still reeling from the revelation—not a vision, not a dream; that had been a truthful recounting of his brother’s past, a shard chipped off the granite of his memory. He’d killed their mother. It was that simple. He was smarter than her and he’d made her pay. No guilt, no consequence. Clayton was simply expressing that monstrous part of himself—perhaps the truest part.

And Luke was grateful to him for that. He’d surely saved them both. But, like most of the great things his brother had done, it had been to satisfy himself and nobody else.

“I could try to cut through it,” Luke said softly. “Maybe we could still…”

The cord undulated lazily, as if it had heard Luke’s plan; Luke could sense its immense power coursing through his brother’s body.

“You go, Lucas,” said Clayton. “Go up. Go to the people you love, if they’re still there. You… you try . You keep on trying, yes?”

The cord jerked, dragging Clayton with it. Luke reached for him… then he stopped. This was how his brother wanted it. More importantly, it was what he’d earned. Clayton belonged to whatever lay on the other side of that hole more than he’d ever belonged to the human race. Maybe the voices had sensed this and called out to him. They’d found a way to bring him down.

Clayton smiled. He kept smiling as the cord retracted into the hole. Smiled as his stump and shoulder were swallowed into it. Smiled as his skull bent against the Trieste ’s unyielding wall. Smiled as his spine broke with a wishbone snap, his heels beating a jittery tattoo on the floor. His head was consumed. The rest of his body followed.

Afterward all was silence. Nothing came back out of the hole. Maybe it had taken all it could possibly take.

“Will you let me leave?” Luke asked it. “I only want to see my wife again.”

Nothing answered him.

Luke faced the Challenger ’s hatch. He hadn’t been back inside it since Alice had sent him through into the Trieste .

The wheel spun smoothly. The hatch opened with machined precision. He anchored his hands and boosted himself up into the—

—INSIDE.

Light . The first sensation. Stinging brightness. His rods and cones went haywire; tears squeezed out of his eyes and sheeted down his face.