Nick Cutter - The Deep

— basement —

…root cellar.

The wood was warm and faintly pulsating. The skin of a slumbering elephant.

Luke gripped the bolt and pulled. Narrow stone steps sawed down.

“… Daddy! …”

Zach’s voice quivered up out of the dark, strained and fearful.

“The Fig Men, Daddy!”

“They’re only figments,” Luke croaked. “Figments of your imagination. They can’t hurt you if you don’t believe in them.”

Silence. Then: thick, chortling laughter. The laughter of the Fig Men? The hairs stiffened on Luke’s arms. His son was down there somewhere. And he needed his father.

The steps were worn smooth, as if subject to much traffic; the stone wept beads of moisture like the rock in a cave. Luke’s feet fit perfectly—the steps could have been built for him specifically. They carried him down under the lab to the bottommost place on earth. The true basement of the world.

Darkness slipped up his calves and knees in sly tendrils. It coated his chest and filmed his eyes. Somewhere above—a few feet; a million miles—the wooden door slipped softly shut.

He could see here in the dark. Not well, but enough to navigate by. Luke got the sense he was on an unsupported stairway spiraling down; if he slipped he’d fall forever, never hitting anything…

…or perhaps something would catch him eventually.

The air grew thicker. He inhaled the scent of ancient earth. He was beneath all things now. Beneath every pure element in life, beneath hope and joy and perhaps even love. None of that could touch him here.

A rock wall materialized to his left. It ran sheer beneath his fingertips, as cold and featureless as iced steel. He heard a sharp thunk somewhere below. It sounded a little like a door sliding open.

He followed the stairs until the rock vanished under his fingertips. He stared at the spot where it had been with dull shock.

“Hello, Lucas.”

Clayton was curled into a box carved out of the rock. A perfect square cut into the sheer rock face, barely big enough to hold his body. Luke stifled the moan that rose up in his throat. His brother was naked and skinnier than any human being should possibly be. A living skeleton. His joints bulged. His head was nothing but a skull covered in latex-thin skin. He was folded into the rock-box in a cross-legged swami pose, his head bowed to fit.

“How… how long have you been here?” Luke whispered.

Clayton cocked his terrible fleshless head, considering his brother’s question.

“I can’t say exactly,” he said. “How long is forever?”

Clayton’s hands fussed over his caved-in stomach. His fingers, tipped with sharp black nails, sunk into his belly. The flesh ripped with sickening ease. He tore and gouged at himself. The thinnest hint of a smile painted his lips.

“Oh, Clay, really, I wish you wouldn’t…”

Clayton’s innards spilled into his lap. They were chalky and dry, like sausage links coated in flour. He rummaged through the knotted loops, selecting the finest portion and raising it to his mouth. It made the lovely snap of a good Coney Island hot dog when he bit into it. Fine bluish powder spurted out. Robin’s egg blue: same color as the chemical inside the pot of tree killer.

Clayton chewed thoughtfully, absorbed in the act. His lips were stained dark blue, like a child who’d eaten too many grape Popsicles.

“I really shouldn’t,” he said shamefacedly, “but honestly, I can’t help myself.”

He turned away, embarrassed. Luke was filled with an ineffable despair; he reached toward his brother—then the rocks slid over him in a solid sheet, shutting Clayton back inside his tiny box. The wall was solid again: not a seam, not a mark.

He continued down until the stairway abruptly ended. Luke stumbled the way a man does when misjudging the number of steps in a darkened house, his arms outflung.

The ground was spongy. He got the sense of standing atop a pair of lungs taking the shallowest breaths.

Zachary was there. Luke saw him clearly. He looked the way Luke remembered him. His hands and fingers proportional again. Luke beheld the boy he and his wife had raised in a cheery sunlit house in Iowa. The boy who still held his plastic cups with both hands when he drank cherry Kool-Aid, which left a crimson mustache above his lip. The boy who would nestle his chin into the swell of his father’s throat at bedtime—the groove so perfect, two bodies locking together in flawless synchronicity—and whisper: I love you more than ice cream and pizza.

It’s very nice to be loved , Luke thought. Is there anything nicer in life?

He opened his arms. “Zachary. Please.”

The space behind Zachary swelled with light. The darkness blew away; beyond that lay a new emptiness, illuminated by an aquifer of sickly light. A pair of arms filled that emptiness. Enormous, world swallowing. Flabby and wrinkled, sallow flesh draping the bones like proofing dough. Ghastly arms ending in huge, cruel hands. Thick knuckled, each finger curled into a sickle.

Familiar hands. Those of his mother.

Behind those hands lay a shape or shapes that Luke could not fathom. It spanned out and up, sheer as a cliff face, rising beyond the reach of his sight and his mind. The cliff shone in places—the dazzling but condensed light of a camera flash reflected in tinted glass. It was dark in other spots, a shade more profound than any Luke had known.

Zachary ran into those hands the way a child might chase a bouncing ball onto a busy street. Luke opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The hands enfolded his son. Zachary turned and stared at Luke through a gap in those massive fingers. His eyes emptied out, his face melting as his skin ran like candlewax.

The hands opened. They were empty.

Next the hands decayed and collapsed, flesh dripping off in gobbets until only the bones remained. Those were then absorbed into that nest of livid industry…

…but they left something behind. An ovoid ball that pulsated gently.

Next, his mother and father stepped from the trembling darkness.

A CHILL SWEPT OVER HIM.His mother, corpulent and fearsome—and a few steps behind her came his father, stooped and hangdog.

“You have come, child. After all this time.”

No, it wasn’t his parents. That wasn’t his mother’s voice. Whatever these creatures were, they were merely draped in the flesh and figure of his parents. The imitation was good, cunning, but imperfect in some way—perhaps purposefully so.

The two figures who stood before him seemed to have been birthed from the cliff of flesh that backgrounded them. Their fleshy coverings withered and peeled. His mother and father’s faces rotted away in pestilent rags. The creatures underneath were humanlike in their rudiments, but not so in their particulars.

One was tall and shockingly thin; the other was squat and pear-shaped. Their flesh had a boiled, piglet-pink sheen; raw sinews cabled the visible portions of their anatomies.

Their legs were squat and elephantine, their groins sexless. Their arms were so long and thick—engorged fire hoses—that they trailed to the ground and curled back, networking into the roiling cliff.

Luke found his voice. “Dear God…”

“ God is not here ,” the tall one said.

“ Perhaps he should apologize for his absence ,” said the squat one.

Ancient . These things were older than anything any human being had ever laid eyes on. Their flesh was flayed open, the raw tendons scored with tiny cracks. Yet their skin was nearly translucent, too, as if their bones had been smeared with a thick coating of Vaseline—it was as though the years in their endless accumulation had sucked the pigment from it. Their skulls showed through in places, the bone as brittle as the parchment in a dusty book.