Horrors of the Deep

This week's dose of fiction.

Hank loved freediving. He didn’t go for depth records, though he had taken a couple of deep dives just to see how far down he could go. He made it to just a hair over two hundred feet down in a free immersion dive in the Bahamas. Getting to use the rope not just as a guide but also as a way to pull himself down and back up was a crutch he needed at the time. He planned to try it again, using the rope as a guide next season. 

For now, he just loved snorkeling and taking underwater photographs. The water was perfect on this, his last day of diving. Visibility seemed to go on forever and the fish seemed to be posing. He went up to take a deep breath, set his countdown timer for seven minutes, and then dove to a particularly nice-looking bit of coral. There he took some closeups of the small shellfish and finfish which made it a home. He’d been down about three minutes when he decided to move on to another reef he’d spotted earlier.

When he looked up, there wasn’t a single fish to be found. His first thought was shark. God knew there were enough of them in these waters. He’d long ago learned to not be afraid of them. As long as he moved carefully and there was no blood in the water, avoiding attack was easy enough. Keeping calm was key.

He didn’t see a shark, though what he did see made his blood run cold. Looking at the thing hurt his eyes as if the curves and angles of its body went places they shouldn’t and didn’t meet where they should. It was all tentacles except where he glimpsed scales and what could only be described as a maw filled with splinters of bone. He’d been swimming in oceans and lakes all over the world and had never seen anything like this.

There were no visible eyes and it showed no inkling that it knew he was there. It propelled itself through the water with the aid of its tentacles. The water around it seemed to almost shimmer like a mirage in the desert. 

He was sure he’d pissed in his trunks, and he felt like he was going to puke. That would be a problem for multiple reasons, not the least of which is he’d lose precious air. He fought the urge to vomit and looked at his watch. He had three minutes of air in his lungs. It meant, he needed to start calmly heading to the surface in three minutes or less. Blacking out was possible, but unlikely. He’d just have to hope and pray it wouldn’t happen because he was solo diving today. Yes, there was someone on the boat. Help wouldn’t matter if he broke the surface and then passed out or got grabbed by the squid monster.

Hank looked back up and saw the creature hanging in the water. He was about thirty-five feet down. The thing was maybe twenty feet above him and fifty or sixty feet away. Maybe it was like a shark? He hoped and prayed it was. Just in case. He pulled the dive knife from where it was strapped around his calf. It was wicked sharp, but not very long.

Before swimming off, he took a few pictures of the thing and slung the camera back around. He decided to go straight up and try to yell for the boat. Then he could surface swim or just get another breath and go back under. He might be breathing oxygen in fifteen seconds.

The urge was to kick furiously for the surface so he would be able to breathe precious air. If he expended all that energy and wasn’t able to surface, he would be burning oxygen. He might also alert the thing. Knife in hand, he kicked slowly towards the surface. 

The tentacled horror didn’t seem to notice him at first. Then it moved. It was the way it moved that made his skin crawl and made the whole thing more surreal. It swam a bit, shimmered out of sight, reappeared closer to him, and swam some more. 

Was it camouflage? Or had the thing teleported? Either way, he wasn’t going to make it to the surface without a fight. It was simply too close. He used his legs to maintain his depth and held his knife out in front of him. 

Still, a good five feet away, it stopped and lashed out with a tentacle. The movement was quick and precise. 

Hank swung his knife and tried to slash at the appendage, but his arm moving through the water was clumsy compared to something born to the sea, even if it wasn’t this sea. 

The tentacle touched him, and it burned and froze him at the same time. Now he sawed at the arm as it pulled on him. Bizarrely unreal or not, the almost iridescent skin parted under the assault, and black blood streamed from the cut. 

A noise came from the thing like the end of the world, part scream and part buzzsaw. It ruptured one of his eardrums, the pain lancing through his head. 

Another tentacle grabbed him, and then another, and another. He slashed and hacked at the creature and as he was drawn towards what could vaguely be described as a mouth, he began stabbing and slashing. Whether the water darkened because of the ichor or a lack of oxygen, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was his end was close.

Pain seared his chest as spear-like teeth bored into him. He made the conscious effort to release what little air he had left and breathe in water to try and bring his end more quickly. His vision clouded and all he knew was pain until there was nothing. 

---

Pete dove into the water. Hank had been down there too long. Their agreement was he would go in at seven and a half minutes. Once in the water, he saw the red bloom of blood. Moving quickly, he swam to Hank’s body as it began to sink. In less than a minute, he had the man’s body out of the water and on the deck of his boat. The dive knife was lashed to Hank’s wrist, and as far as Pete could tell the wounds were self-inflicted. He shook his head. As far as he knew, you couldn’t experience narcosis from free diving. He checked the camera in case there was any clue there. The last couple of shots were just the open sea, except for a blur which might have been some current or a smudge on the lens. 

Covering Hank’s body, he moved to the front of the boat and hit the button to haul up the anchor, unaware of the tentacles wrapped around the chain.