The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  But the basement door kept opening.

  The basement held the detritus of past renters, stored in dusty boxes. The steps were shallow . . . except one step was bigger than the rest; you’d hit that big bastardly step and just about go ass over teakettle every damn time.

  The basement ceiling was so low that I’d have to stoop like a crone. There was a sick, fruity odor that thankfully didn’t waft up to the next floor—it smelled a little like death. As if a cat or dog had died of starvation down there, or maybe of fright.

  There were spiders, too, big amber-bellied bastards—spiders and the odd skittering movement that may have been rats. I laid down traps but never caught anything. Still, every time I went down I’d hear something pattering through that warren of old boxes.

  So yes, the basement door kept opening. And it attracted my daughter.

  The first time it happened, my wife alertly swept Hannah into her arms and shut the door. She gave me a recriminatory look, as if I’d left it open.

  The next time it happened I was alone, keeping an eye on Hannah without keeping a direct eye on her—as a parent, you develop a sixth sense. When my eyes ticked up, the door was open. Hannah was perched a few feet from the basement stairs.

  I shot up and gathered her in my arms. She shrieked. Most worryingly, her arms reached toward the basement—as if she’d wanted to fall. As if she believed something down there would catch her.

  Afterward I found a wedge of scrap wood and pounded it under the door until the clockwork of veins at my temples thudded with blood.

  The last time it happened a blizzard was raging, snow slicing so heavily that we could barely see our neighbor’s porch lights. I was distracted. My grant was in jeopardy, the car needed a new muffler . . . off in my own little world. I wondered afterward if it had sensed that, and taken advantage.

  IT?

  How had the wedge popped loose? I’d pounded it in hard, driven by rage and fear: the wood had cracked, pressure holding it in place.

  Hannah stood at the lip of the stairs. The darkness was such as I’ve never known.

  My daughter said one word.

  Nanna.

  Nanna was her grandmother on my ex’s side. A narrow-shouldered, birdlike thing. But Hannah loved her, and fairly so: the woman doted on her.

  Nanna.

  One word, spoken clear as a bell. Hannah’s arms stretched toward the darkness.

  I saw it then: some ineffably old thing dressed in the skin of Hannah’s grandmother, the bones showing through in spots, staring up at my daughter and smiling through a mouth of rotted teeth.

  Come then, honeybug. Come hug your darling Nanna.

  I caught Hannah at the last instant—my index finger slipped inside her diaper, between the cleft of her buttocks. I felt the terrible weight of her body straining against the diaper clips. She would have fallen headlong . . .

  That, or something may have caught her.

  My eyes fled down the steps, even though every muscle and nerve ending in my body fought it.

  I saw nothing. Just the steps trailing into that twitching darkness.

  But I felt something howling up the staircase as loud and clear as if a banshee had shrieked at me.

  Not a sound but a sense. Of NEED. Of HUNGER.

  Something was starving in that basement. Something that had been born starving, maybe. It was never full, would never be satisfied.

  I grabbed Hannah tightly. There came a harsh snick! like the jaws of a bear trap snapping shut. That, and perhaps a ringing note of laughter.

  We moved out within a week. Shortly thereafter my wife and I divorced. The usual boring reasons: an accumulation of petty resentments and personal weaknesses. But a sentiment existed beneath those usual ones, unique to us: for two years we’d lived atop an unknown but festering horror that could’ve erased us.

  Whatever had invaded the basement of that colonial home in leafy Belmont had been there a long time. Eventually it would’ve beaten me, outsmarted or out-quicked me, and as its prize would’ve claimed what I loved most. It was old, ageless maybe, and far more cunning than I.

  How can a rational man run away from a basement? How could he admit that he was illogically frightened of nothing? But that sense of threat never abated; it was akin to that taste you’ll get at the back of your throat before a big storm sweeps through—it’s imminent, it’s coming, all you can do is find safety.

  Which brings me back to my recurring dream.

  Which is this:

  I am perched at the edge of those basement steps, about to fall. There is no preamble at all—I drift into sleep and that’s where the dream begins.

  In this nightmare I am an adult, and I’m naked . . . all except for a diaper, the same as Hannah once wore. It should be funny, but in the nightmare it only adds to the terror: every trivial detail is precision calibrated for maximum horror.

  I’m standing at the lip of the stairs with my arms windmilling for balance. I am about to fall—the nightmare seems endless and yet I am always just about to fall.

  It is dark at the bottom of the stairs, incalculably so. Something down there is shuffling forward, about to broach that thinning light.

  I’m staring down, wobbling, and see something. My waking self can’t even envision what it is—some things are confined to dreams, thank Christ.

  But it is coming. I feel it. Its need. Its limitless, timeless hunger.

  And then I wake up.

  HA! I can’t believe I wrote all that. I’d be laughed out of every academy in the country if this were ever found. And look, I’ve dulled three pencils making a potential laughingstock of myself!

  Who cares? I can’t sleep anyway. Why? Well, great galloping goose-shit, I’ve just told you, haven’t I?

  No matter. This has been very cathartic. And it will all be burned tomorrow. Unreadable ashes.

  Monday, June 23

  Well, here we are again. I didn’t end up burning anything. Never found the time or, I suppose, the inclination.

  I write to you from inside the Trieste. Belly of the beast.

  The journey down was surreal. We are creatures of daylight. That a world might exist below our own—a world of permanent night—is unthinkable. It is akin to asking a man to live on the moon without a spacesuit.

  Thank God for Al. The woman is armor-plated. She brought us down one by one: Clayton, then myself, then Hugo. The animals and insects came last.

  The Trieste is horrible. My first thought upon glimpsing it in the Challenger’s spotlights was: a spider. Some hideous arachnid like the ones lurking in the basement of my Belmont home. Impervious to pressure, insensitive to light, its limbs spread across the ocean floor.

  And we would be inside of it. In its twitching, repulsive guts.

  The ceilings are low and ribbed—they truly did give the feel of an intestinal tract. Odd noises race overhead, the pattering of footsteps. The pressure is palpable. More than once I’ve run my hand over my head to assure myself the crown of my skull hasn’t been driven flat.

  Each of us has our own private lab. We were shown to our cots and the bathroom quarters. Our waste goes into durable plastic bags, which were vacuum sealed; our deposits would be ferried to the surface for disposal. Alice made a crack about spending fifteen years in the navy only to end up a shit carrier. We laughed, but laughter holds a strange resonance down here. The acoustics rob the joy from it, making it sound spiteful and desperate.

  When Alice ascended, a pall settled over the three of us. Now that I’m down here, I can see that humans should not exist in such a place.

  The first night I dreamed of a squirrel. We used to have them around the yard of my childhood home in Ledyard, Connecticut. Big fat ones. They loved the peanuts my father would leave out for the jays and cardinals. He would shoot the squirrels with a pellet gun. A narrow-minded bastard, was my father.

  One afternoon I found one of them beneath the chestnut tree. It lay faceup and appeared to be breathing. But then I saw the tin
y scarlet star where one of its eyes should’ve sat—the spot where the pellet went through and smashed its brain.

  The squirrel’s chest burst open and maggots spilled out. Wriggling and tumbling over its coarse dark fur. I’d never seen maggots; the closest I’d ever gotten is when I’d smashed a fly on a windowpane and spied a hundred white specks—fly eggs—streaking the glass. The maggots boiled out of the squirrel’s chest cavity, squiggling in the grass; I raced down the street, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and that horrible sight.

  So yes, I dreamed of that squirrel. And of the maggots, too . . . but within their squirming lay another sound, sly and febrile—the buzz of honeybees.

  Everything is normal. Such dreams are to be expected.

  LUKE PAUSED. LB had been resting on his lap; she stirred, looking up at him questioningly. He couldn’t hear anything down the tunnel.

  “Hey, Al?” he called. “Everything okay?”

  For a moment, nothing. Then her voice filtered back to him.

  “S’okay. Trying to figure out this genny.”

  “Need a hand?”

  “Funny, Doc, real funny . . . I could use two good hands, but I’m managing with the one.”

  Luke petted LB, giving her those long strokes down her back that every dog enjoys; she whimpered gratefully and settled her head against his stomach. Luke yawned so wide that his jaw cracked.

  He picked the journal up and started to read again.

  Thursday, June 26

  As a child, I banged my thumb with a hammer. The thumbnail went black as a layer of blood formed between the nail plates. The entire nail peeled off. Underneath was a gummy residue of old blackened blood.

  That’s how my mind feels down here. A layer of blackness exists between my brain—the functioning gray matter—and my skull. It makes thinking difficult.

  The three of us have kept to ourselves the past day or so. It’s hard telling the days apart with no sunlight to mark the passage of time.

  The first few days we’d shared meals together. Conversation was sparse but cordial. But the fondness established between us on the Hesperus dried up. We’d been having difficulty locating the ambrosia. The sensors picked up nothing at all. Clayton had been working with the smallest shred, culled from Dr. Parks’ specimen and parceled out between him and Dr. Felz; it was nearly gone, either vaporized or collapsing from some organic malaise. The sea floor was empty. Had the station been built in the wrong spot? Was there any more ambrosia to be found?

  Hugo in particular is far from a happy camper. He complains bitterly about the temperature (admittedly frosty), the food, and other petty inconveniences that should be expected when one is living at the bottom of the Pacific.

  Hugo is agitated, too. His eyes scan the tunnels as if he’s tracking something—a runaway lizard or guinea pig perhaps. I’ve seen him blink flinchingly, as though tiny balls of heat lightning were popping in front of his face. Yesterday I encountered him in the animal lockup, a glazed expression on his face, drool bubbling from his lips.

  The sea-sillies, I believe Al called them.

  As yet, the bees register no adverse effects. The dogs seem jumpy and sensitive, however. Clayton claims it’s natural, but I’m not sure Clayton understands emotions at all, canine or otherwise.

  As for my own mental well-being . . . I feel as one ought to when eight miles underwater, in a conglomeration of spidery metal hoses that could collapse on my next breath, combing the ocean floor for scraps of effluvia . . .

  I had another nightmare last night. I suppose I should speak of it.

  A man named Huey Charles killed five children in my hometown when I was a boy. He was, of all things, an ice-cream man. He drove a white truck with a rainbow on the side. The van played a jingle as it drove down our sedate streets—a tinkling song, sort of queer, like when you open the lid on a music box to see a little ballerina pirouetting inside.

  Tinka-tink-teeeee-ta-tinka-tink-teeeeee . . .

  Huey—he asked you to call him Uncle Huey—was a rotund, bespectacled man. The last man you’d peg for a child killer, despite the fact he was an overalls-wearing Pied Piper who drove the equivalent of a glue trap for kids. I remember his glasses. Greasy and dirty, the edges gritted with the crust that accumulates at the edges of your eyes while you’re sleeping. I never ordered soft-serve from him—I was revolted by the thought that some of that eye crust might sift down from Huey’s glasses onto my vanilla swirl.

  He killed three boys and two girls. Although he didn’t just kill them—do creatures like Uncle Huey ever just kill? What he did was beyond anything you could imagine. He was patient. Years passed between the disappearances. He had a sixth sense, I guess, about when to strike. Those like Huey usually do. He’d wait until the daylight was guttering, until that last kid scampered up to his truck . . . He’d ask if they wanted one of his special sundaes. Just step into the back, then, where it’s dark . . .

  If that child’s parents should happen along, okay, well, Huey was only making the kid a special treat. That Huey, whatta guy! He was well liked around town, though nobody would have called him a friend or could recall spending time alone with him. He was a member of the Elks, the K of C, the Rotary Club; he’d stuff his bloated butt into a tiny car, slap a red fez on his head, and putt-putt down Main Street during the Ledyard Shriners’ Parade. Yes, good ol’ Uncle Huey.

  Now if that child’s parents didn’t happen along, well, then I imagine a certain look must’ve come into Uncle Huey’s eyes. And the time that child realized the danger in that look was the same moment it ceased to matter.

  He took them to the woods. Lots of woods in that part of the country. Deep, dark, silent. A kid’s scream could easily be mistaken for the shivering cry of a loon, or the screech of a mountain lion.

  What he did to them never made the papers—only the insinuations. One article said the police found a large tool chest in Huey’s house with the word Toybox on the lid. Plus there was the fact that the funerals were all closed-casket affairs.

  One of the girls lived a few blocks away from me. Tiffany Childers. In my memory she exists as a cliche. Blond hair spilling over her shoulders in ringlets, a starspray of freckles across her cheeks.

  They never found Tiffany’s head. That little tidbit did leak out to the public. Loose lips at the coroner’s office.

  Anyway. The dream. I’m in the woods. An orange band of light limns the horizon, casting its light between the firs.

  Huey’s truck rests on the periphery of my sight. I can see the rainbow on the side. I walk toward it, not wanting to but helpless. The truck’s making that tinkling jingle. Taa-ta-teeeee-tinka-tinka-taaa-teeeee. It’s awful—not even a song. It’s just a discordant collection of notes, an ugly sonic slap.

  The truck’s back doors are thrown open. The sun, gashing through the trees, highlights the slashes of blood on the white paint.

  Things are hanging inside. Dangling down beside the soft-serve machine and next to the sleeve of sugar cones. Parts of bodies. They hang on snarled lengths of copper wire. They brush against one another in a breeze that skates across the forest floor. They make a faintly musical note, like wind chimes. They shouldn’t, but they do.

  I look down and see that I’m wearing a white uniform—Uncle Huey’s ice-cream man uniform. I am fat, my belly swelling to the point I can’t see my belt buckle. Suddenly I realize I cannot see very well, either; it’s as though I’m staring through a crusty, grease-smeared window.

  I become aware of the sound of my own insectile thoughts. Imagine lowering a boom microphone into a tub of night crawlers—that squishy, squirming sound. That is the noise inside my skull.

  And the worst part is, I’m at home with that sound.

  I awoke back in the Trieste, in the tunnels. I’d gotten up and walked out of my quarters. I’ve never sleepwalked before, ever.

  I was caressing a pipe running down the tunnel . . . caressing it as I might the leg of my own daughter to soothe her to
sleep.

  I had an erection.

  A raging hard-on, one better suited to a hormonal teen. Even my second wife—the most inventive hellcat I’ve ever shared a bed with—couldn’t bring me to such nail-pounding hardness.

  Morning wood. That’s all it was. Morning wood.

  Monday, June 31 (?)

  Success! We’ve discovered trace elements of ambrosia. The sensors picked it up two days (???—time has surrendered most of its meaning down here) ago.

  With good news, though, comes bad. Hugo has isolated himself. Surely you know this already, having watched it on the monitors. He has locked himself in the animal quarantine quarters, abandoning his lab.

  He’s got the sea-sillies, all right. A crippling case. Clayton and myself debated capturing him, to make sure he didn’t punch a hole in the wall with the first sharp object he could lay his hands on. But he doesn’t strike us as dangerous. Only terrified and mistrustful.

  Not long before he locked himself up, I encountered Hugo in the main lab. He’d switched on the spotlights and was staring over the ocean floor. It is, admittedly, a soul-sapping vista. Your heart trembles just to see it.

  “If you look long enough,” Hugo said, “you can see it move.”

  Hugo’s hair was unkempt, his overalls stained, and his odor quite foul.

  “See what move?” I asked.

  “The floor, out there,” said Hugo. “It moves in waves. It stares at us with a trillion eyes.”

  I dropped my own eyes, speechless. It was awful to see a man go crazy right in front of your face. But I didn’t blame Hugo one bit. Minds crack down here. Pressure bursts pipes, as the saying goes.

  “We’ll be able to leave soon,” I told him. “Try to think of that. It helps me, Hugo. A simple lungful of fresh air, think of that.”

  Hugo stared at me. His face was a horrid, shuddering mask.

  “We’re not going anywhere, Cooper. We’re caught now. It’s got us. They’ve got us. We built our own trap, and now we’re snared.”

  It. They.

  “Hugo, for Christ’s sake,” I said, rising to quick anger. “Get a grip. Think of your family.”