The Deep by Nick Cutter Page B

into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”
    “And you expect me to go down into that?”
    “The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “ One , because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and two , because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning, Challenger 4, which had been docked to the Trieste , began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.
    “A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the Trieste altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”
    Someone or some thing, Luke thought irrationally.
    “Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened to him. He could only have done it to himself.”
    Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.
    “You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.
    Without another word, she did so.

15.
    AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELL what he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.
    Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was all scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.
    It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.
    Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.
    Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.
    Sweet Christ, his face . The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.
    “Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”
    Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.
    “How . . . ?”
    “I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”
    “It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma . . . how long does it take to surface?”
    “Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”
    “He did this to himself?”
    “Who else? The submarine was empty.”
    Totally empty? Luke wondered. What if Westlake had been carrying that