The Deep House

Three hundred metres down, thirty-one times the weight of the sky is pressing on the walls. Immy Roake and her saturation crew will live in the Pelagia Research Habitat for thirty-five days, breathing helium, speaking in squeaks, and sealed away from the surface by a trunk of steel and a rule nobody is allowed to break. Above them, in the dry control module, sit the people who can bring them home. Below them, on the dark Kessler Shelf, something has begun to rise. The first message arrives within days, from a station that was supposed to be empty. It knows Immy's name. It knows the name of the brother she lost when she was eleven. Then, one by one, it begins to talk to the others, in the voices of the people they cannot bear to hear. Every night at 02:14 the hull taps three times. Every day the House climbs a little closer. And the crew can't come up, because coming up too fast will kill them just as surely as staying. It tells them only true things. That is what makes it so hard to ignore. The Deep House is a claustrophobic, relentlessly tense tale of pressure, grief and the voices we would do anything to hear again. If you liked the dread of The Thing, the isolation of Sphere, and the slow, wrong-sounding horror of Annihilation, don't go down alone.