The Deep

Several hours later, Luke and Al wrestle the generator through the Trieste’s tunnels, which seem to shift and stretch. To push it through a narrow chute, they strip off their overalls to use as a crash mat. Unexplained footsteps echo toward them and then vanish, but they keep moving. They finally reach the storage area near the Challenger. Al starts connecting cables and orders Luke to monitor Clayton while she finishes.

Luke returns to the main lab and glimpses a colossal, multi-limbed figure moving in the darkness outside. Clayton appears, his body looking compacted, as if the pressure had shrunken him. Luke reports Toy’s death; Clayton shrugs it off, declaring he cares only about studying ambrosia and believes humanity needs culling. Enraged, Luke pushes past him into his lab after hearing a steady drip.

Luke tracks the dripping to an Einstein poster. He confronts Clayton about what is behind the poster, and the argument explodes into a physical fight. Clayton overpowers Luke until LB, Luke’s dog, bites Clayton to defend Luke. Clayton staggers back and rips the poster from the wall, revealing a hidden, shimmering hole.

From the hole, ambrosia runs in steady drops into a collection vessel. A powerful psychic pull grips Luke. Clayton warns him not to look directly at it. To break the pull, the brothers sing a children’s song together. Clayton re-hangs the poster, and the force pressuring Luke disappears.

Clayton explains he first sensed the hole and hung the poster to keep it from seeing him. He admits he lied to Westlake about how he collected ambrosia to hide the hole’s existence. Luke argues that the hole is dangerous; Clayton dismisses him. During the argument, Luke notices the bandages on Clayton’s hand have come loose, revealing foul, transformed flesh beneath.

The station’s power fails, leaving only red emergency lights. Clayton goes to check the breakers. Luke opens an Extinction Kit (a kit for euthanizing animals that he is familiar with from his veterinary practice), draws up two syringes of Telazol, and waits. When Clayton returns, Luke drives a syringe into his calf. Clayton attacks, his arm stretching unnaturally. He snatches LB and tears part of her ear. Luke recovers the second syringe and jams it into Clayton’s neck.

Twenty minutes later, Luke straps the unconscious Clayton to a bench and cuts away the bandages. His arm is hideously changed—first black, then white, then translucent enough to show bone. Luke realizes Clayton had taped down his fingers to hide how long they had grown, even from himself. Though sedated, Clayton’s hand clenches on its own, and the fingers slowly unfold.

Clayton’s fingers extend to monstrous lengths. Before Luke can react, the hand hooks the bench edge and tears itself free at the wrist. The stump does not bleed. Luke wraps the stump at the end of Clayton’s arm and kicks the twitching hand under the bench.

The severed hand, which Luke dubs Mr. Hand, crawls out and brushes his leg. Luke grabs it and hurls it into a lab cooler, where it violently crushes the frozen guinea pig. Luke slams the lid, weights it, checks Clayton’s restraints, and leaves with LB to find Al.

At the storage tunnel, Luke finds the area empty and Al gone. He searches fruitlessly; the Challenger hatch is locked. His flashlight dies, leaving only dim red illumination. As his mother’s voice needles him that Al has abandoned him, the emergency lights fail, plunging the station into darkness.

In total darkness, Luke loses LB and sprints from the dragging, clicking noises. He finds a working flashlight and returns to see an insect-like thing in his dead son Zachary’s pajamas, which are hanging from the ceiling. It speaks in Zach’s voice and tries to draw Luke’s eyes to its face. Luke kills his light, and the thing vanishes.

Back in the main lab, new holes pock the ceiling. A hand slaps Westlake’s lab porthole from the other side.

The hand looks feminine, but the hatch will not open. Luke writes it off as a trick and turns to moving Clayton to the Challenger. In a crawl-through chute, a giant maggot pursues him, its face morphing between his mother, his wife Abby, and Zach. He shoves himself and Clayton through just ahead of it. The creature disappears.

Luke gets Clayton to the Challenger, then spots an apparently wounded LB retreating down a tunnel. He follows her into Clayton’s lab and finds the cooler torn open. The dog is not LB but Mushka (Little Fly), the station’s other dog, twisted into a stick-legged thing. Luke understands that Clayton shoved Mushka through the hole as an experiment.

LB charges and slams into the Mushka-thing. Its mouth locks onto LB’s flank, and their flesh begins to fuse. The fused mass drags LB toward the hole behind the poster. Unable to free her, Luke holds LB, calming her as she dies. The Mushka-thing rips down the poster and drags LB into the enlarged hole.

Grief-stricken, Luke sees Mr. Hand clinging to the wall, now with eight spider-like fingers. It crooks its digits, leading him to Westlake’s keypad as his mother’s voice jeers in his head. Mr. Hand punches a code. The hatch unlocks and opens with a blast of buzzing.

Whispers drive Luke inside Westlake’s lab. A vast beehive fills the room, its cells built from human parts and lab equipment. Luke finds Al’s flayed but conscious head protruding from the comb, the rest of her body woven through it. She smiles as a translucent sac bursts, releasing a new creature. Luke runs, and the hatch swings shut on her laughter.

Moments later, Luke is in the storage tunnel with the unconscious Clayton, with no memory of how he got there. A fleshy umbilical cord runs from a new hole in the wall to Clayton’s wrist stump. When Luke touches it, he drops into Clayton’s memories, witnessing their mother’s sexual abuse and Clayton’s methodical poisoning of her. He snaps back to the present, and Clayton tells him to go as the cord retracts, pulling him into the hole. Luke lets him go and climbs into the Challenger.

Inside the bright, warm sub, Luke finds Al, looking whole and healthy. He questions her, and her features decay as something strikes the hull. Her eyes liquefy into black fluid that spreads across the interior while her voice shifts to Zachary’s voice. The power cuts out. Darkness fills the sub as Zachary’s voice leans to Luke’s ear and welcomes him home.