I gazed at the sea from my balcony, and in that moment, I saw it in a completely different way than I ever had. I became a marine biologist because of the beauty I saw in the ocean. On a bright and sunny day, its waves were like a hand that benevolently motioned to you and said come with me. But tonight, as I stared out at this dark and endless body of water, the waves said something to the tune of I’ll snatch you if you come too close. It was a hell mouth of sorts, a monstrosity that wouldn’t hesitate to swallow me up and turn me into a memory. They could find me if I’d drowned in a lake or a river, but the ocean would turn my mere existence into dust. To call an ocean-bound body a needle in a haystack was to make an understatement that bordered on sin.
Until now, I had never seen the ocean in this sort of light. It had always been the place where life’s difficulties were forgotten. Staring out at the ocean exposed the pettiness of everyday life. Overdue bills, relationship troubles, university classes…everything became nonsense when staring out at a frontier more mysterious to us than the surface of the moon.
Even when I was an elementary-schooler, worried about what I had gotten on my spelling test the previous Friday, the ocean was where I realized it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Here existed a place that was here on Earth, and yet was an entirely different world in and of itself.
My wife, Amy, had said to me a few months earlier what’s wrong, Travis? She had never heard me say a negative thing about the sea, not in our entire ten years of marriage. And so, I told her about the instance that changed one of the core parts of my being.
It was one of those perfect days to be on the water. That cutting breeze that smelled of salt and wet sand was passing through our little Hawaiian town, and I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to take my class of bright-eyed marine biology students out to sea.
Not to toot my horn, but I was one of those professors whose class filled up within five minutes of the course signups opening. I liked to think it was because of my well thought-out lectures and effervescent charm, but it was most likely down to the fact that I would often take my students out on a boat. I figured the best way to know about the sea was to be on the sea. As far as I was concerned, time spent inside of those four classroom walls was time that could be spent in the ocean. Oftentimes, I’d even do a full-blown lecture while on the boat. My students’ favorite days were when we’d cast a deep-sea net into the water and see what abyssal critters it would collect.
On this so-called perfect day to be at sea, my students and I set a course for open water. We were going a half-hour out for a deep-sea trawling session. That boat ride was always the best. Feeling the ocean wind on my face was the closest I’d ever been to heaven.
When we got out there and prepared to cast the net to the water, a few students noticed a small boat a good distance away, bobbing up and down on the water. No one thought much of it. Once in a while, we’d catch another boat out this far. Usually deep-sea fishermen.
Ten minutes passed, and that boat bobbed closer to us. Most folks would have kicked their boat into gear by now and put some distance between themselves and a nearby vessel. But this boat just kept on bobbing up and down on the waves, and that’s when we realized we couldn’t see one person on it.
The boat was about fifty feet away now. That’s when we noticed that the entire floor of the boat was red. Gallons of blood trickled off the edge of the boat in a sickening red waterfall, clouding the water around it. There was so much blood that the air smelled like nickel.
I had a student radio in for help. The boat soon floated over to our boat and propped itself up against ours. As I leaned over to have a look, I noticed something lying there in this lake of blood. A little girl, I reckoned around six, lying there on her back as the gore soaked into her bathing suit and hair. She was blinking. Still alive, but in shock.
I peered around the corner of the boat’s cabin and saw a middle-aged man lying facedown in the sea of blood, and I could see that he was the source of all of the blood. Both his legs were missing, the left one more gone than the right. Torn completely off. Blood endlessly gushing out of the stumps. A couple of students puked upon seeing this, adding to the repulsive soup of bodily fluids surrounding the boat.
After we’d left, the coast guard came and retrieved the boat and its passengers. The man died from blood loss. The little girl survived, remained in shock for several days. I, along with a couple of coast guard members, visited the girl in the hospital to try and piece together what happened. All she could tell us was that she’d seen a demon come up out of the ocean and rip her dad’s legs off.
Many an evening was spent with my colleagues trying to figure out what happened. Some suggested it was a great white, but only a couple of them had been seen near Hawaii in the last half century. And the markings left on the dead man’s legs were all wrong. They didn’t match the jaws of a great white. No, it was like a giant needle had been poked through the man’s leg and then tugged on until it ripped the whole thing off. I couldn’t imagine the pain he’d felt. There wasn’t a single creature we could attribute this to, no boat injury that could do this.
Soon after the incident, whether coincidentally or not, things changed drastically around Honolulu, specifically at the beaches. Fishermen ceased to bring in a catch. People who went swimming or surfing began to get very sick. Upon a dive, myself and a few other researchers realized the sea was a dead zone. The seabed was littered with fish skeletons, and a fish that was actually alive and swimming became very hard to come by.
The once populated beaches in the area became barren and deserted. Nobody wanted to fish where there was nothing to catch, and no one wanted to swim in water that made you sick. The atmosphere at the university grew glum. Students in my morning class no longer wanted to go out on the water. They said it was because there were no living creatures to study, but I suspect they’d been traumatized by the man who lost his legs.
A couple months later, something happened on the water that made me glad I hadn’t taken my students out again. The coast guard received an emergency call from some college student out on a boat. This guy had been deep-sea fishing with three of his friends off the coast of Pahoa. That area hadn’t become a dead zone yet. He said one of his friends had lost her mind and went into a frenzy and fell into the water and drowned. He went on to say that his other two friends had been eaten by a creature that came out of the water.
A few of my fellow biologists and I rushed to meet with the guy, and we asked him what kind of creature he thought he saw. I asked him if it was a shark. His reply sent chills to my core. Ain’t no shark ever looked like that.
I was intrigued by the guy’s account of his friend losing her mind. He told me she’d taken a dip in the water for a good ten minutes. Shortly after, she took a nap and when she woke up, she had fire in her eyes and acted demented.
We went and tested the waters in the area and found it to be poisoned with radiation. That nuclear disaster at Fukushima had finally caught up with us Hawaiians. The radiation from the plant had begun to seep its way through the water and over to our little islands. And not only had it spread over to us, but it began to sink miles and miles into the deep. The sea around Hawaii became a dead zone. Well, except for the alleged monster swimming around and chomping people up.
So, here I was, standing on my, looking out at this monstrosity that is the ocean. The following day, I was to hop into a submarine and venture down into the deep in order to figure out what the radiation was affecting down there. Truth was, I was terrified. But there was something inside of me that I knew would win out and force me to undertake this. Something told me that I was a man of the sea and I had something to prove. God only knows why I listened to it, and my wife wasn’t too happy about it either. I refrained from telling my two kids of the expedition, and I forbade my wife from telling them. Far as they knew, I was just going to work that day and I’d be home for dinner by sundown.
It was sunny the next morning and yet the ocean looked ominous as ever. The way the waves bobbed and swayed felt like the sea was ready to jump up and eat me and drag me into the murk. I filled with dread the moment I saw the submarine floating there beside the dock. My colleague, Cameron, looked equally nervous as he stood on the dock. He was certainly hoping I’d call off the expedition.
“Someone looks like he doesn’t wanna go,” I jokingly stammered at Cameron.
“Ah, you know,” replied Cameron, “just another day at sea, right?” So we wished.
Getting in that submarine was a claustrophobe’s nightmare. It was a small crawlspace with a fisheye-type window at the back where one could look out and another large window at the front, in the cockpit. Cameron piloted. I was to copilot and control the robot arms of the sub, which could collect small creatures. I had my doubts about catching anything alive.
Our sub soon began its descent. The water had this bright emerald color but I knew it wasn’t long for lasting. Every minute that passed, we were just a little deeper, and the water became gloomier.
“Look!”
Cameron’s shout snapped me out of my trance. I looked to see where he was pointing. About a hundred feet forth, lingering near the continental slope, was a barracuda. It looked so alone as it floated through space, and at one point I questioned whether it was alive. Once the sub’s lights shined on it, it quickly swam into the gloom. I hadn’t seen a barracuda here in a while. Usually they’d be a scary sight, but now, seeing one was actually welcome. What scared me these days was the deathlike inertia of the water around the islands.
We continued down into the murk. We were now in the twilight zone, the place where your eyes played tricks on you, the light comparable to dusk. As we’d expected, we hadn’t seen any creatures down here, save for that barracuda.
The further we descended, the blacker the water grew. As it got darker, our lights began reflecting off of millions and millions of tiny particles in the water. The little specks just floated around endlessly, and if you stared deep enough into the depths, it appeared like you were looking into a starry nighttime sky. I always thought of Horton Hears a Who when I looked at those little specks. Maybe each speck was its own world, housing millions of tiny inhabitants.
A strange noise jolted me out of my peculiar thoughts. Neither Cameron nor I could make heads or tails of it, but it basically sounded like someone dragging their fingernail across velcro, or along the metal teeth of a zipper. But within the essence of this strange sound, there was the slight ghost of a voice. Like the sound I’d imagine a goblin making after a meal of flesh.
The sound entered the receiving end of the disc-shaped sonar device attached to our sub. It would occasionally pick up sounds from humpback whales when they swam around Hawaii between January and March. But this was five-thousand feet down. Thousands of feet further than a humpback whale dared to dive. Besides, I’d never heard a whale make a noise like this.
We sat there with our bodies and faces completely frozen and our eyeballs occasionally darting to the side as we aimed our eardrums at the speaker. The strange noise stopped a minute and then started back up and then stopped again. The most frightening part was that the deeper we sunk, the louder and clearer the noise became.
As the strange noise continued, it was met with the same noise, but a higher pitched version. The two noises occurred one after the other like some sort of horrific duet. No matter how long Cameron and I listened, we couldn’t deduce what they were.
After a while, the noises died down. They didn’t suddenly cease but rather underwent a slow and steady fade. I was tempted to ask Cameron if he wanted to bail and ascend to the surface, and I suspect that he, too, wanted to take off. But we held onto our pride, in spite of our childlike faces that emanated the terror of a scared bird.
As we descended to the midnight zone, I noticed something in the lower right corner of the window. At first, I figured it was my eyes adjusting to darkness, throwing blotches of light into my confused pupils. But after several seconds, I realized what I was seeing was real.
“Over there,” I said as I tapped Cameron’s shoulder. He squinted through the glass, and for a moment, I didn’t think he saw it. But he continued to scrutinize, and I knew he saw it, too.
“How close is that?” Cameron asked. I shrugged.
A faint light glowed in the water like some sort of lightbulb. Bioluminescence was plentiful down here, but you wouldn’t have been able to see it from so far away. The animals that glowed were always pretty small. I thought it to be an optical illusion, a light that was close but appeared to be far. But it wasn’t. It was about the size of a basketball and we could see it from at least a hundred feet off.
“How about this,” Cameron started. “Let’s go take a look. Then we can at least say we saw something, something for us to talk about back at the lab.”
I slowly nodded as I continued to stare at the light. Soon, I felt a slight shift of weight as the submarine turned and began a course for the strange light. The way we drifted through the dark water, past all of the tiny little white particles, it reminded me of the opener of Star Trek, where the camera drifts in a straight line through space.
“Pump the brakes,” I snapped, as Cameron came up fast toward the bulbous light. He slowed down. A second more and the orb would have smacked against the window. Cameron flipped the headlights off, giving us a more accurate vision of the orb.
We scrutinized the orb for a moment. It was so bright, filling the entire cabin of our submarine with white light. It bobbed around a three-foot radius like the bobber of a fishing line.
And then, like pulling the string on a lamp, the light went out. There we sat for a moment, in complete pitch darkness. You wouldn’t have been able to see something if it were an inch in front of your face.
And then, that godawful sound struck up again. But this time, it wasn’t merely coming through the speakers. This time, we could hear it through the glass of the submarine, like it was right next to our ears. It was loud as all hell, but the most horrifying part was when Cameron flipped the headlights of the submarine back on.
Staring through the window into our souls was the eye of the devil. All we could see was the eyeball and nothing of the creature that it belonged to, but I tell you the eye was enough to scare the hell out of us. It was soulless and milky and every couple of seconds, it twitched to one side or another. Every second I stared into that eye, I tried to find some trace of a soul or a consciousness, but I could not.
After what seemed like ages, that horrible shrieking sound struck up again, this time louder than ever. At the same time, the creature—which, at this point, I assumed was massive—darted past the window and slammed hard against our submarine. We yelped with terror as our sub went into a tailspin. As the submarine twirled through the water like a baseball that’d been knocked out of the park, all of the equipment inside—monitors and fancy lights and machines that beeped, buzzed, and whirred—began blinking and malfunctioning. This, more than anything else, caused my heart to sink further than the submarine itself had.
After a long while of hurling through the water, the submarine slowly stopped spinning, though I could still feel it drifting downward. Cameron spent about a minute puking his guts out to his side, thankfully away from me.
“Well,” I said, “let’s get the hell outta here.”
Cameron leaned forward and immediately began pushing buttons and flipping switches and grabbing levers. Nothing happened. The only thing on the sub that was on were the headlights. Everything else was kaput. Cameron stared down lifelessly at the control panel, likely seeing his life flash before his eyes.
“Oh, god…” I said as words caught in my throat. A moment of silence passed as we grew paler by the second.
“C-Can we call someone?” I stuttered.
Cameron slowly shook his head in response.
“Well, try!” I said.
Cameron reached forward and tried to turn on the communications device. It didn’t turn on. I already knew it, too. I was hopeful, but deep down I knew it was toast like the rest of this godforsaken sub. We now resided in a lifeless and useless object, which sank downward like a dead leaf in the fall. I could feel gravity’s pull as the sub sank faster than it was meant to. It felt like the first drop of a rollercoaster. I knew that once the sub hit bottom it would be totaled. But bottom wasn’t for miles.
As we sank deeper and deeper through the dark depths, five words replayed in my head over and over again…see you for dinner, tonight. That was what I said to Amy before I left that morning. I said it in a reassuring manner. As if it were an obvious fact that I would be back that evening, sitting at the table and asking everyone about their day. But that reality was now so far away.
“I can’t believe it,” said Cameron.
“What?” I asked.
“I can’t believe how…how petty everything seems, looking back on all of it. It makes you think…”
I began having these same thoughts. The thoughts were like a mirror image, the evil twins of the positive thoughts I used to feel while looking out at the ocean. Looking back on my life…most things just don’t matter. Makes you wish you’d focused on the things that did.
It was impossible to tell just how long we’d been staring through that glass into the dark and endless abyss. Checking the time on my now-worthless cellphone just seemed comical, to say the least.
More of those orb lights began to grow visible. There were now about six of them, but they weren’t stagnant like the first one. They floated elegantly through the water. Cameron and I peered at them and we began to notice other strange lights. Near the orbs were rows upon rows of smaller lights that came in shades of red and blue and purple, lit up and lining the sides and underbellies of these massive creatures like night-flying airplanes.
“My god,” said Cameron, “what are those things?”
We further examined the strange creatures through the window. As the submarine slowly rotated by way of the water currents, the lights shined toward the huge creatures. There were about six or seven of them that were visible at once, a few of them periodically passing in and out of the gloom.
The creatures were each about the size of a humpback whale. Fifty feet long. Fish, snakelike—or eel-like—in shape. Their dorsal fins had sharp spines on the top, the last spine protruding very far out, an orb at the end of it. But the most terrifying aspect of these creatures was their faces. Each one had milky eyes and razor-sharp fangs that protruded so far out that they didn’t even fit in their own mouths.
These creatures fit the profile of an already-existing animal in every aspect but size. They were viperfish, I was sure of it. But viperfish were ordinarily twelve inches in length. How these came to be, I did not know.
And then, I noticed something else about these leviathans. The cracks and crevices in between their scales glowed a neon-orange color. The glow pulsated at the pace of a heart’s beat, steadily growing brighter and then less bright. And through the creatures’ cavernous gills there was the same sort of glow. Radiation. The government sent us down here to unearth the effects of the radiation, but we would likely never have the chance to tell them.
As we sank deeper, more and more of the mammoth viperfish became visible. None of them had expressed much interest in our submarine as of yet. The huge viperfish drifted soullessly in and out of the murk. The ocean depths now felt hellish.
I peered out the window in a direction that I assumed was downward. After all the senseless rotation, it was hard to tell. I looked down and I saw what could only be described as a separate body of water.
This was an underwater lake, a well-documented area in the ocean depths. The shore, so to speak, was made of an endless field of clams and mussels. Some underwater lakes only span a few inches. Others might stretch for miles. This was the latter. As our lights shined upon this lagoon, it was apparent that it stretched on for a great distance. The surface of the moon was more thoroughly mapped than the deep ocean, so this lake could have been tens of miles wide for all we knew.
Regardless, we were sinking right toward the mouth of the lake. There was a thick veil of mist within it, and through the mist, I could see more of those orbs.
We sank down into the lake, falling through clouds of mist. I stared deep into the eyes of one of the viperfish. This one was big, but it was scrawnier than the others. In other words, hungrier. It set its sights on us and began to follow our descent. And as that scrawny viperfish neared our submarine with its jaw slowly unhinging, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t making it home for dinner tonight.