For a good while I’ve been pretty quiet with these stories if only because they’re too ridiculous for most to believe, though I figured they may as well be worth a tell for entertainment purposes. So everyone doesn’t immediately think I’m a tart, I’ll go ahead with one of the more believable things I’ve encountered diving. No need to get too into specifics or introductions, though I’d been a marine biologist for several years when these events took place. I’d been obsessed with the ocean since childhood and found it the closest to an alien world I’ll see in my lifetime. Why, after this event, I continued in my profession is likely down to this fascination. Terror could only keep me away so long. Eventually it became intoxicating in a sense. I’m a pretty weird fellow.
Off Australia’s coastlines, landwise where I’d found my employer, we were engaged in a research dive. It wasn’t my first, far from it, as snorkeling and diving were other passions of mine, likely because they tied in with my foremost. Feeling water pressure is fascinating, especially when you can breathe. Weight bludgeoning down on you, your ears filled with what feels like mud, or concrete. You don’t belong in the depths, yet you’re there. And you can stay there. How I don’t envy those who haven’t experienced reef waters. Their comfort. Clarity.
There’s a scene in a certain animated fish movie most people are aware of which encapsulates the ‘pit’ as I call it. A vibrant, teeming, forest darting with rainbow fish too many for even I to name at once, in constant motion and never the same, and then a rocky shelf plummeting away into sheer abyss. Unending darkness where twilight beams glitter and ripple away into nothing, as though a black hole fumed below these stygian depths. Noiseless. All-consuming. Were a human to be brought to Mariana’s Trench, the deepest waters on Earth, and find themselves for even a fraction of a second in its very bottom, water pressure would crush their lungs and anything with air in it like a puddy ball in a hydraulic press. Yet there’s life here regardless which exists naturally. Thrives. What I’ve seen hasn’t been documented by science. It exists in a grey, cavernous, zone in Earth’s oceans dating back to an existential age before superstition or its very concept. A primordial void of ancestry forgotten and feared, driven into mankind’s instinctual consciousness and labelled ‘superstition’ until one is forced to admit its dreadful truth.
I witnessed my first ‘thing’ in the pit. We were keeping to the reef, though I’d maneuvered to the pits edge, still comfortably hovering over waving anemones and twinkling, brilliant, coral. At the threshold. I first caught it in my peripheral and what stands out above anything else in my mind is its silence. How noiseless it had been as the limb speared its way over the cliff overlook. Not far, mind you, but enough to where I knew it to be a lance end, veiling a stomach-fouling immensity as it began to fray apart further from a great wedged pad blistering in legions of hook-bearing cups at the very end. A flexile limb, one which drooped lazily, writhed this way and that in worm-like suggestion. Past its spear tip pad, its girth traded hooked cups for gnawing, ivory, beaks. Maws each perhaps grouper mouth in size bearing some carnivorous purpose to a pliant and translucent peach limb rippling in magenta shocks in a manner reminiscent of a cuttlefish. My spine only iced over once I’d witnessed this light. Long, filmy, eyes dug gashes into its center length, each two eye lengths apart with thin oval pupils stretching a watermelon or so in dimension. They’d ignored me at first, my body having frozen as though some paralytic venom pounded through it. Leaving me drifting idly above chapped, wine-tinted, corals and silver, darting, fish. Useless. Its eyes gazed listlessly for a time before noting me, inkstain pupils shifting apathetically one by one numbering what must’ve been over ten in totality. Fierce lavender surged across its flesh in waves, my presence likely having excited this response. Breaths hissed between my skull faster and faster, my mind formulating a dozen ideas at a time which seemed valid though none I’d act on. Maybe the reason I couldn’t move was because I’d thought it wouldn’t register me were I to not act, though from the situations suddenness and impossibility it were far more plausible my rational self shut down. Froze.
Seconds stretched for hours and every motion and movement from both myself and the thing I could recall in endless detail. Shifting my leg upwards barely an inch, its eyes twitching, tentacles writhing. After veritable days came and went, it swished back into the depths in a single conjoined action from its limbs, warping water with its speed. Gone. My thoughts consuming me, the way back to the surface and back to land blurred by. Words were exchanged, questions asked, concerns leveraged. It all passed. Now it’s just a wound on my mind. One amongst many. I couldn’t return to the water for awhile, and whenever I have I’ve always pictured this creature staring at me from just behind, or waiting beyond some sunken cliff. Waiting within the darkness. Despite its appearance, the eye remains what disquiets me most. In that eye, it knew. Thought. Perceived.
Just maybe, if you find yourself at sea, you could see it too. And maybe, like me, you’ll keep the tale hidden. Hopefully, if that time comes, its discovery won’t break you in ways which eventually befell me. It’ll be that least bit familiar.