The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  Get closer, silly, she’d whispered. This isn’t going to work unless we’re pretty much touching, is it?

  Luke remembered being overtaken by the friendliness of it. Just a chummy blow job, followed by some aw-shucks sex. Y’know, the kind of thing pals do. Friendly, and practiced—Luke felt the tiniest ripple of concern about that: just how had she gotten so damn practiced? But Luke had felt so overjoyed at the fact that your ideal lover could be your best friend, too . . .

  Then Abby’s face changed. Her features went viscid, reshaping themselves into something dark and fearsome.

  Luke’s eyes snapped open. He swore he could see a face at the porthole now, peering in at him.

  Clay . . .

  No, Al . . .

  . . . then Westlake’s tortured face from the vault . . .

  All three faces blurred together and became something else.

  They became Zachary’s face. Luke’s son as a tot.

  His boy was laughing.

  Was there anything more wonderful than a baby’s laughter?

  Not now, though. This was menacing—too adult, full of cruel mocking.

  Luke couldn’t look away as Zachary laughed with unhinged gasps, his face shading redder and redder . . . the same color it’d been as he’d screamed with the millipede inside his sleeper.

  Laughing at his father. Laughing fit to bust a gut.

  Ha-ha! They won’t let you go, Daddy! They won’t never ever let you go!

  1.

  LUKE DREAMED that he was sitting at his kitchen table back home in Iowa City. The sunlight prickled his arms as it streamed through the window above the sink. Distantly, through the open door, came the giddy shrieks of children at play.

  Zachary sat in his high chair. The sunlight glossed the downy hairs of his infant head.

  “How’s it going, buddy?” Luke said, smiling. “How you doin’, Zach Attack?”

  Zach smiled. His milk teeth had punched through his gums, these rounded slivers that looked like soft, pale cheese. He still had that new baby smell, too; Luke would press his nose to his son’s scalp to inhale that fantastic scent.

  “Ahhh . . . Mama,” Zach said, his chin tilted proudly.

  “Close, bud. Dada. Try that. I’m daa-daa.”

  “Ahhh . . . Mama!”

  His son had been saying Mama for a month now—Mama and ball and even kitty. He’d never once said Dada. Gaga and tata and baba, oh yes, those syllables rolled merrily off his tongue. But not Dada. Not once.

  He gripped his son’s hands. “Dada, Zach. Say Dada.”

  “Tata.”

  Luke’s hands tightened.

  “Dada.”

  “Ahhh . . . yaya!”

  “Dada.” Say it, boy; you fucking say it. “Daa-daa.”

  Luke squeezed tighter, his son’s bones pulsing in his grip.

  “Ehhhhh! Wawa!”

  Tears leapt into Zach’s eyes. Luke had been gripping his fingers so tightly that they’d turned white, the blood crushed out of them.

  Luke whistled tunelessly as he walked over to the fridge.

  “He’s a hungwy boy, issa? Zachy want his wunch?”

  He took a bowl from the cupboard. There was a picture of a puppy on the bottom—Zach’s favorite bowl.

  Luke opened the fridge. Zach continued to cry; tears rolled down his face and splattered his bib. Luke rooted amid the tubs and bottles, still whistling. The jar his hand closed upon was warm—why would it be warm in a fridge?

  He had to lever his fingernails under the jar’s lid and dig them in; it felt like peeling off a massive scab. He slopped the container’s contents into the puppy bowl, not really looking, smothering the puppy’s grinning face with . . . whatever it was.

  The bowl gave off a strange heat, as if he’d just taken it from the microwave. He grabbed a spoon and sat next to his son. Zachary’s tears had dried up; he stared at the bowl with mingled hunger and revulsion.

  “Whoo da hungwy baby? Here’s some lunchy-wunchy for da fussy Zach.”

  Luke dipped the spoon into the bowl—it made a gross, squishy sound, like a shovel sunk into a pile of rotten seaweed. He brought the spoon to Zach’s mouth. His son’s eyes reflected whatever was in the spoon . . . its shifting scintilla reminded Luke of embers glittering in a campfire.

  Zach began to scream, a high, hopeless sound. Luke prodded the spoon into his mouth harshly—Just eat, please!—shutting those goddamned screams up.

  Zach’s eyes widened, so huge they seemed to consume all the sunlight in the kitchen. His mouth worked against whatever Luke had shoved into it, lips quivering in a futile effort to spit it out. But his gorge flexed automatically, he swallowed, and when his mouth opened again it was to scream.

  But not with pain. With hunger.

  “Issa good, Zachy? Issa tasty in the belly? Open wide, here comes the aiwwwwooowww-plane!”

  The spoon dipped and loop-de-looped, delivering its payload into Zach’s screaming mouth. His lips were coated in a glutinous gloss.

  “Issa hungry boy, issa? Mmmm, nom-nom-nom.”

  His son swallowed and opened his mouth again, screaming even louder now.

  A fine wire of unease corkscrewed into Luke’s chest. The ambient sounds and scents, previously comforting, had changed. The sweet smell of the backyard lilac had become a rancid foulness you might catch downwind of an open sewer. The sounds of children at play had become fear-struck shrieks, as if those children were being pursued by monsters intent on ripping them limb from limb.

  He continued to feed Zach. Strangely, the bowl never seemed to empty.

  His son’s stomach strained against his bright blue onesie. Zach’s cries intensified, louder and more demanding. His mouth stretched, the flesh loosening as it puckered into a sucker-fish orifice.

  A carp, Luke thought with distant horror. He’s growing a carp’s mouth.

  The force of Zachary’s shrieks caused the papery flesh of his new mouth to flutter like a flag in a high breeze.

  Luke tried to wrench his gaze downward to see what he’d been feeding his precious son, whose every morsel had always been carefully scrutinized. Abby would spend hours at the supermarket, reading labels on the baby food jars and buying organic produce to mulch in the Baby Bullet.

  With aching slowness, Luke’s neck finally gave out, his skull wrenching painfully down. His breath caught with an agonized hitch.

  Oh oh oh oh, was all he could think, his mind skipping like a stone on the still surface of a lake. Ohohohohohohooooooh—

  The bowl was full of ambrosia. Almost gone now: just a few pulpy balls stuck to the sides.

  The puppy’s face was gone, too. It had been erased. All that remained was a brownish smear, as if the ambrosia had eaten its face away.

  Don’t feed him another bite. Throw the bowl away, now. Stick your finger down his throat and make him vomit up all that he can. Take him to the hospital and get the doctors to pump his stomach. Get it out of him, Luke—for Christ’s sake, get it out!

  But in that awful way nightmares have, he scraped the sides of the bowl, collecting the remaining ambrosia into a tidy dollop. It sat on the spoon, tumorlike, heaving slightly as if breathing.

  Zachary issued a string of gibbering hiccups. He bucked in his high chair, his engorged stomach rattling the feeding tray.

  “Dada!” he screeched, the sound of a nail pulled from a sun-bleached plank of wood. “Dada! Daaaaaaadaaaaaaa!”

  “Shhhh,” Luke said. “Eat all you like. You can never have enough.”

  Luke stabbed the spoon into his son’s mouth; Zach’s lips closed over it triumphantly, sucking every last speck off of it. He stared at his father with a feral, too-old expression. Ancient hate radiated from his dead, gray eyes.

  He opened his mouth again, screaming, screaming.

  “There’s nothing left,” Luke said, holding up the bowl—which had melted entirely now, a gummy mess running down his fingers, burning slightly as something worked under his flesh.

  Zach vented
maddening, lung-rupturing shrieks in response. His strange new mouth stretched wider, wider . . .

  Luke saw something in there.

  Oh God. Oh good God, no . . .

  A dozen or more eyeballs stared at Luke from inside Zachary’s mouth. They nested in the soft pink flesh of his palate and throat, staring unblinkingly, appraising Luke with cold scrutiny.

  We all have different sets of eyes, my son.

  His mother’s voice.

  Very different, yes, but very lovely, Lucas. You only have to let them out, like I said I’d gladly do for stupid Brewster Galt. Let them out to see the world . . .

  The eyes in Zach’s mouth blinked in unison—a dozen lewd winks. They made an awful pipping noise as the inflamed flesh inside Zach’s mouth clipped shut for an instant, like the edges of a fresh wound making contact.

  Luke scooped his son out of the high chair and into his arms. Zach’s body had a sick, pendulous weight. His cheeks showed deep dents as they sucked greedily at the air. He kept screaming through his sucker-fish mouth, bathing Luke’s face with noxious breath. The mouth-eyes stared at him balefully.

  Luke rocked him, as he’d done every night since Zach was born.

  “Husha baby. Husha, husha, sleep now.”

  Sometimes when Zach was overtired, Luke would hold his eyelids shut. Very gently, rolling Zach’s eyelids down and keeping them shut with gentle pressure from his fingertips; he did so now. Zach’s eyelids strained as the muscles trembled under Luke’s fingertips, much like flies buzzing under Saran Wrap.

  Luke pushed a little harder. Keep those eyes closed, my beautiful boy. Please.

  Zach’s screams only intensified. The eyes inside his mouth rotated madly in their cups of flesh. The skin of Zach’s chin and cheeks and forehead was developing red throbbing cysts and Luke knew eyes would soon be sprouting there, too.

  Luke felt around in Zach’s eyes just a little. Gray fluid the consistency of model glue squished between the eyelids.

  “Shhhh, now. Sleep. What’s there to see? Nothing good.”

  His son’s face was cracking open in a dozen places. Luke peered at these new eyes, each one offering a hateful, shriveling stare.

  Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets.

  Luke pushed until the webbing between his fingers touched the bridge of his son’s nose. Zach’s flesh offered no resistance. Luke’s fingertips passed through the grooved tangerine of Zach’s brain to touch the inner swell of his skull.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he whispered, hoping his son could hear. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  The fontanel on the top of Zach’s head pulsed ominously, as if something underneath was struggling to free itself.

  Luke stared, trapped in the calm eye of his dread, as his son’s scalp split in a bloodless trench. Something pushed through the squandered flesh, horrid and spiky and flecked with white curds . . .

  . . . and turned in Luke’s direction, staring not with eyes but with a sense of merciless curiosity mingled with furious intent.

  2.

  LUKE STRUGGLED OUT OF SLEEP like a man crawling out of a mine shaft. Gummy strings of the nightmare clung to his brain. He heard Zachary screaming somewhere as the dream continued to unravel; Luke reached for his lost son—but his fingers closed on empty air.

  Luke’s brain felt unattached to his senses, the way it often felt following a bad dream. He blinked and stared around Westlake’s quarters.

  The hatch was open. Just a hair.

  Four small appendages were wrapped around the edge of the hatchway.

  A child’s fingers.

  Luke saw them . . . then he didn’t. They had slipped away.

  Next came a series of excitable, clumsy footsteps trailing down the tunnel.

  His son’s name passed over his lips before he could choke it down.

  “Zach?”

  Laughter bubbled up the tunnel. The sound grew fainter, threatening to vanish. Luke rolled off the cot and shoved the hatch open.

  “Zach?”

  That champagne-bubble laughter flooded the dim tunnel in reply—the kind of laughter Zach used to make when Luke hefted him under the arms and lobbed him into the air, catching him deftly as he came down.

  This is not happening, chirped a voice in Luke’s head. Your son isn’t down here. You know that, Luke. In your heart, in your head.

  But he didn’t, really. That was the thing—Zach was everywhere. Anywhere. That’s what tore you apart.

  Unthinkingly, Luke followed the laughter.

  The tunnel seemed to heave like an enormous pair of lungs, the walls constricting before expanding again . . . just a trick of the light. He stumbled forward heedlessly, borne on a bubbly foam of anxiety. Luke felt his boots sinking into the floor as if into some sort of weird metallic mud. He felt it sucking at his feet, a disturbing sensation, and told himself it wasn’t actually happening. His mind was playing a funny trick, was all. Ha, ha, real funny. Thanks, brain. You have a great sense of comedic timing. He glanced around in an attempt to moor himself. He noticed a string of pipes jutting upward along the wall like the flutes on a church organ, their curves winking dull bronze in the dim. A rhythmic churn emanated from behind the walls, the sound of motors pounding without cease in the center of the earth.

  Ahead of him in the darkness, something moved.

  “Who’s there?” Luke said, the tendons cabled down his neck.

  No answer, only the watery echo of his voice.

  . . . there . . . ere . . . ere . . .

  When it faded Luke heard, or was certain he’d heard, the low rustle of breathing. He stood in the tunnel dark, the hairs quilling on his forearms. That rustling did not come again. He was set to reject it as a figment (Fig Men) of his imagination, conjured by the terrible pressure of this place . . .

  A shape coalesced where his eyes were trained. He saw a pair of pajamas. Oh-so-familiar. They were Zachary’s favorites—his peejays, Abby used to call them; Zach it’s bedtime get into your peejays!—with a pattern of fire trucks and police cars, signifiers of law, order, and safety from harm. Small hands and feet jutted from the sleeves and leg holes, shining whitely in the gloom.

  He could not see a face. The air above the neckline was dark and empty.

  The headless pajamas turned—a coy movement that seemed to say follow me! follow me!—and scampered down the tunnel.

  Luke obeyed the directive. The floor sucked greedily at his boots; the metal flowed over his ankles as his feet sunk into the chilly muck at the bottom of the sea.

  Darkness closed in behind him, deeper and deeper shades. Zachary’s laughter pealed off the walls and rebounded all around Luke.

  “Zach! Hold on—please, stop!”

  Zach slipped around a bend in the tunnel up ahead. Luke let out a strangled cry.

  Nonononono, not again please not again . . .

  He tried to run but his boots were mired, making every step an ordeal. He finally rounded the turn only to see he’d reached a dead end. The blackness was absolute; it was no different than staring down a mine shaft.

  Three words were written on the wall in wet letters. Instinctively, Luke knew they were written in blood.

  DADDY COMY HOME

  Something tugged on his sleeve. A small hand, four small fingers gripping his overalls. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see his headless son . . . or something far more horrible.

  He tried to jerk his arm away. But the tugging was insistent.

  Look at me Daddy—LOOK!

  No, Luke thought. I don’t want to. You’re not my son.

  Oh, but I am. I’m your little Zach Attack. Right here in the flesh!

  The voice was not that of his son. It belonged to something ineffably older, more
calculating, and worse beyond anything Luke could imagine.

  A terrific jerk at his arm now.

  YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME NOW.

  Luke snatched his arm back. He overbalanced and fell, hammering his skull on the wall—

  . . . and came to slumped against the tunnel. The overhead lights burned. LB stood a few feet away, eyeing him with a canine version of concern. His sleeve was wet with her slobber.

  His son was gone. He’d never been here, of course. There was no dead end, no bloody words on the wall. He’d dreamed it all. Of course he had. He thought he’d woken from a nightmare only to now discover that the nightmare hadn’t yet finished.

  And yet he’d left Westlake’s room. He’d opened the hatch, never waking, and walked down the tunnel. He’d . . . sleepwalked? Bullshit. He’d never done that in his life. LB must’ve followed him, then tugged on his sleeve to wake him.

  Sleepwalked . . . just like Clayton might have been sleepwalking when he sent that transmission to the surface.

  Happens a lot on submarines, Al’s voice chimed in his head. Guys who never had the habit before. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy . . .

  “Thanks, girl,” Luke said. “You beat an alarm clock all to hell.”

  LB chuffed as though to say: No problem, boss. Just doing my job.

  Luke returned to Westlake’s quarters . . . then caught noise from the main lab. He followed it, craving any kind of companionship. LB tagged along at his heels.

  It was Clayton. He was leaning against the lab bench, his head lowered. He seemed disoriented—discombobulated, as their mother might’ve said. He had the look of a man who’d been kicked awake with a pointy-toed shoe.

  “You okay?” Luke asked.

  “What?” Clayton’s face swiftly recomposed into its regular withering expression. “Yes . . . why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Clay, I just had the strangest dream.”

  His brother said, “Yes, they can be incredibly vivid down here.”

  Luke decided to speak no further about it—the dream about Zachary eating ambrosia. After all, Clayton, wonderful sibling that he was, hadn’t even contacted Luke when Zach had gone missing. Not a phone call, not an e-mail, nothing. Complete radio silence. Maybe he hadn’t known what to say . . . or perhaps he hadn’t even known Zach had gone missing—or worse and probably more accurately, he hadn’t cared. He’d never even met Zach. Or Abby, for that matter. Clayton hadn’t responded to the RSVP for their wedding or Zach’s first birthday party. No cards, no gifts. What else should Luke have expected, anyway? It was fine, as far as Luke had been concerned. Better that Clayton exist distantly—his brother, the brilliant scientist. On a primal level, Luke hadn’t wanted Clayton’s presence wafting through the lives of the people he loved.