Afraid of water?…

I was anchored in the middle of nowhere. I had been hired by a faceless corporation to perform a specific task. Without breaching confidentiality, I can tell you that I was to sail out to a given location in the Pacific Ocean, dive down to the bottom and document whatever was down there.

When I arrived initially, I was conflicted. The payout for completing the job was astronomical, way beyond my normal fee. This alone would usually temper any particular fears or doubts I had, but the location they had provided me was unusual. I was weary of it from the beginning, mostly because it really was in the middle of nowhere. Most jobs that I pulled found me off the coast of somewhere, always within viewing distance of some type of landmass. Here though, there was nothing. I couldn’t see land anywhere. This fact by itself was unnerving enough, but on top of this I discovered the location was way off the grid. The nearest shipping path was hundreds of miles away, and the nearest landmass was twice that. This location was as remote a place as I had ever been. I had also been given strict orders to go alone, without a dive partner or even a navigator. This, strictly speaking, isn't exactly legal, and certainly against diving regulations. The money was just too good. I wasn't going to back off of this one.

I try, as a general rule, not to imagine what I am going to find underneath when I dive. My imagination always trumps whatever I discover on the bottom. Nine times out of ten I am hired to pillage a shipwreck, usually for parts, or lost items, or even body identification. Occasionally I get to track and catch some rare animal, but those types of jobs don't pay very well.

I should have known something was off when I arrived. I had so many warning signs before I even got into the water. I was so wrapped up in the thought of money, I never truly stopped to consider what I was doing there in that place. I went through the motions, right up until I was fully suited and about to fall backwards into the deep blue. I thought, for a moment, how strange this job was. How unusual the request was. I was always sent to recover. No one had ever sent me to simply observe, to document. Instincts took over, and I put my regulator into my mouth before falling into the abyss.

That's what it was, really. An abyss. On normal dives, one of the most unnerving things I come across is when the visibility is almost down to nothing. Where you have to strain just to see your hand in front of your face. Imagination takes over, waiting for sharp teeth to burst forth and chomp you to bits. Good dives give you several meters of visibility, perhaps as much as twenty. This dive was something entirely different. I could see...everything. Which is to say, I saw nothing. It was as if I had been dropped into a barren, endless desert and I could see all the way to the horizon in every direction. I could see miles and miles of absolute desolation, an everlasting ocean floor without so much as a single plant on its surface. I felt as small and insignificant as I ever had in my life in that moment. This place was what I imagined the deepest, darkest parts of space to feel like.

I could not fathom what I was supposed to document in this place. I proceeded to follow my anchor line to the bottom. My instructions were oddly specific: at precisely 11:23 am, I was to be on the ocean floor at the exact coordinates given and be ready to document...whatever. The message had only said that I would know what it was when I saw it. I checked my watch as I descended and hurried my pace when I saw I only had three minutes to reach the bottom. As I methodically measured each breath, I couldn't help but look around me. I don't think I had ever been on a dive with this much visibility, and I hated it. I felt as though I had fallen into an alien world. I had the overwhelming sense that I was being observed, like I was the fish in the fishbowl. I was constantly looking this way and that, aware that whatever was going to happen was going to happen soon. I was only going to wait for so long in this place.

I shivered as I began to reach depths where the sun's rays failed to penetrate. I hit the bottom with a minute to spare. My personal recording device had been filming since I went into the water, and at this point I grabbed my camera and got it ready by taking a few shots to make sure my settings were adjusted properly.

11:23 came and went. Everything was so dead quiet on the bottom, save for my breathing and the bubbles emanating from my tank. I have been on dives in shipwrecks where I have found bodies in various stages of decay, dives surrounded by hundreds of sharks, night dives where your light reflects off of glistening eyes belonging to unseen creatures. Never once have I been frightened. All my life I had been in the water for some reason or another. The water is a part of me, a way of life. Sitting there on the bottom of this barren wasteland, waiting for some unknown thing to happen, I was scared.

More minutes passed. I was ready to leave, to have this farce be over when I saw it. It was hard to miss, the only shape of a shadow that I could see in any direction. What it was, exactly, was another matter. My first thought was that it was a submarine, which would make sense given the specificity of the instructions. I was unnerved at the thought, to have so large a thing pass by me. I've been lucky enough to observe blue whales, the largest living thing to ever exist on Earth. But I knew most submarines dwarfed blues, and there is something inherently terrifying about being in the water with something so big.

My eyes straining through the goggles, my mind couldn't connect the shape to anything. It was still so far off, difficult to tell the size of it. Whatever it was, it seemed to be coming right for me. The shape began to grow and grow. Definitely not a school of fish. Too big. Was it a whale? No. Bigger than a whale. What's bigger than a whale? Maybe it really was a submarine. What had I gotten myself into?

The shadow began to take shape. No. Not a submarine. This thing was swimming. Moving with an alien fluidity.

My mind went to those images of giant tentacles wrapping around sperm whales. Of ancient tales, claims of monsters emerging from abyssal trenches and swallowing ships whole. The shadow had now grown to fill almost my entire vision. I couldn't breathe, my heart was caught in my throat. My whole body froze, my terror complete.

I knew all at once that whatever happened next, I couldn't face it. Whatever thing burst out of that all encompassing shadow was something beyond me, and I knew then and there that if saw what it really was, my heart would stop. My brain would overload and cease to be. So I hit the deck, so to speak. I laid down on the ocean bed, face in the silt and hands covering my head, a laughably feeble instinctual reaction.

I clenched my eyes shut, concentrated on my breathing. They tell you in diver training to breathe like Darth Vader. Slow and controlled. Limit your oxygen consumption. I slowly opened my eyes, but I dared not raise my head. The water around me was growing darker. It was close now. I tried to calm myself, my breathing was too quick, too shallow. I was wasting oxygen. Breathe slower. Calmer.

Inhale. I couldn't hear it, but I could feel it. It was over me now.

Exhale. It felt so close that I could probably have touched it had I raised my hand but a little. I could sense just how huge this thing was, like how your stomach drops looking up at sky scrapers.

Inhale. I was trembling. More from fear than the cold and crushing depths of the dark water surrounding me. I hugged myself, trying to draw heat from my own body.

Exhale. It was still over me. I couldn't tell if it had stopped or if it was simply so colossal in size that it was still passing by me.

Inhale. Then it made a sound I will never forget. A sound that wakes me up in the middle of the night, sheets soaked with sweat. It was a deep, guttural thing that shook my bones. Like mountains breaking. The earth cracking beneath me and swallowing me whole. I began to cry.

And then, it was over. I knew it was gone before I even opened my eyes. The sun breaking through the storm clouds.

I didn't bother to look around. I swam up with an urgency I didn't know I possessed, a speed driven by a crushing fear.

Too fast. I was rising too fast. I wasn't decompressing properly, I had been too deep for too long. I needed to make at least one decompression stop in order to reduce the excess pressure of inert gases dissolved in my body. If I didn't, any number of things could happen to my body, all of them not good. Several meters from the surface I stopped. Tantalizingly close to the outside air. I had to decompress for at least five minutes to be safe. I was only going to wait three.

One minute. I didn't want to look anywhere but straight ahead. I just knew that if I looked down I might see it. I felt so exposed, my feet hanging below me, suspended in the abyss. I tried to not to think about it, but what I had seen, what I had felt, what I had heard, was something beyond me. Something ancient, primordial. It was like a glimpse into another reality, and my mind wasn't prepared.

Two minutes. I was paranoid. Heart racing. Sweat forming despite the cold water. I dared to look down, only for a second. Nothing. Absolute blackness. I couldn't see anything, not the ocean floor, not my anchor line. Just darkness. I breathed a sigh of relief, but only for a split second. My brain whirled as I understood why I couldn't see the ocean floor.

It was right beneath me.

I screamed into nothingness. Forget the decompression. I was going now. I burst out into the the open air, ready to swim towards my boat. But it wasn't there. I screamed again. Where was it?

I whipped my head around, spotted it a few hundred yards away. Stupid. Separated myself from the anchor line. I made a mad dash for it. Swimmers technique thrown out window, just a desperate flailing of limbs trying to drive me through the water.

The longest seconds of my life, swimming towards my boat. It was a lifetime of eternities. I was just waiting for the moment for some...thing...to wrap around my foot and drag me back towards the abyssal darkness. I closed my eyes every time I put my face into the water as I attempted a beast stroke. I couldn't see it. Didn't want to see it. But I know it was there. I could still feel it, the enormity of it. I reached the ladder of my boat, and with a last surge of energy propelled myself up onto the boat. I remember very little after that.

The next few days were a haze of memories. By sheer luck the coast guard found me. I was dehydrated and confused, and one of my rescuers said I was babbling incoherently, that I kept saying “I, I, I” over and over again.

I still haven't reported anything to my employers. I know eventually they will come looking. I won't really know what to do when that day comes. I haven't examined the video recording either. I'm close to destroying any and all evidence I was ever out there.

I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes. Always the same dream. I'm in my bed, and it begins to swallow me. The sheets suffocate my body and I'm dragged underneath until I can't breathe. I am being dragged further and further down towards a cavernous black hole, and I look down for a second before I'm ripped awake and screaming. In those moments I remember. I remember seeing something when I was swimming towards my boat. When I couldn't help but open my eyes for the most fleeting of seconds.

An eye, like a cratered full moon in a black sky.

I will never go back in the water.