Beneath Pehr's Darkness

Peter had been on hundreds of dives in lake Baikal, but this dive was different. On this dive, he heard a voice. “Peter,” it said to him. “You must go back to Pehr lake. This lake’s secrets have been revealed but it is that lake which will change the world.” At first, Peter dismissed the voice as the rapture of the deep and prepared to ascend back into the light. But before he could leave the area, a massive white hand reached out of the depths to block his path up. Knowing what he was seeing had to be a product of his imagination, he looked down into the depths, only to see a massive white face looking back at him.

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Pehr lake had been considered by many to be a phenomenon in the lake community. The lake had a very flat bottom according to sonic graphs. Almost uniform in how flat it was, the lake’s bottom had fascinated and repelled researchers for years. The leading theory on the lake bottom was that it was a layer of low density mud. Tests with anchors would sit on the mud “floor” and sink through and keep going. People were unsure of the depth and it was common knowledge to keep away from the middle of the lake if you needed to anchor.

Due to the opacity of the lake, tests with subs and diving were restricted. Driven to plumb the depths of the lake since he was a child, Peter wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery. Unlike most people, Peter revelled in dark places. He found that the darkness was a comforting balm to him as when he was a child, he had been burned in a tragic accident. Light and heat were reminders of that day when he gained his scars and the darkness took that pain away. Specifically, the dark waters of Pehr lake were the best balm for him.

It was this drive away from the light that ironically took Peter closest to it in the form of education. He had attended his state’s prestigious school and had attained the rank of doctor of limnology from that institution. Lakes had been his passion and he was shocked and interested in lakes around the world. He had gone to Lake Tahoe on a research grant one summer and had been shocked at how clear the water was and how high up the lake was. His dissertation had been on another lake though. One that would change his life.

Lake Baikal was known as the deepest freshwater lake in the world. Ten years prior, Russians had reached the bottom via submarine. Peter’s determination to do his thesis on this lake landed him in a post doc position at the nearby Irkutsk State University. He was able to go on many dives in submarines through that mystical lake that so mimicked his own. He would do both scuba dives and submarine dives through that deep water, reveling in taking samples and feeling the cool, dark water on him. He felt most at home in the scuba dry suit, sometimes going as deep as he possibly could into the Baikal rift.

It was on one of his deepest dives into the lake that Peter discovered the voice. “It is good to finally meet you Peter” the being said within his mind. It’s twin hands reached above him as if to embrace him. The lake had turned almost pitch black around him and for the first time in that water, Peter knew fear. “We have been watching you from the depths Peter and we believe that you may finally uncover us.” The voice was soothing to Peter. The embrace started moving him even deeper into the lake. He noticed that the face was not featureless as he originally thought but that there were huge tire sized black eyes in the humanoid features. The nose was a bump with small slits for nostrils and there was no notice of the mouth. “I am glad to see you admiring my features, but I am one of the lesser creatures you will meet on your journeys. You must return to lake Pehr to discover and reveal the secrets entombed there.”

With these final words, the water directly underneath Peter revealed a massive maw with jagged teeth that opened and rushed at Peter. He only had a few moments of clarity to see that the white hands and face were the only white things about the creature which was completely black everywhere else. As he was swallowed, Peter fainted from the rushing water and from the depths that he had gone to with this creature.

Peter awoke on the shore to a beautiful sunset. He was at the dive site that he had entered earlier that day. If what he saw was real, he should have been dead at the bottom of the lake. Peter tried to go about his studies as if nothing happened, but he found the words of the creature ringing through his head. Echoes of its telepathic touch rang through his head every night, keeping him from sleeping. His studies fell to the wayside as every waking moment he thought of Lake Pehr. He knew that he only had one option: he must return to Lake Pehr and discover what lies beneath its darkness.

Staring at the murky shores of lake Pehr from the house he had inhabited all of his life gave him a mixed bag of emotions. Peter was terrified by the creature he had seen in Lake Baikal and felt that if he revealed what was in Lake Pehr he would be unleashing that sort of horror onto the world. Another part of him revelled at being so close to the lake, his lake. He felt feverish, sweaty, and overly hot at being outside of it’s cooling waters. He developed a plan that day and night on how he would reach the bottom.

Peter had access to a small boat and submarine through the State University’s research center. The submarine was used on a monthly basis by the research center. According to the submarine maintenance schedule, the submarine would be ready for another dive in three days. Unfortunately, Peter knew he needed to be alone for this dive and that the research center would insist on taking a member of the facility with him. They also wouldn’t let him do what he intended to do with the sub. That left him with one option: to steal the sub.

Peter knew the facility managers and approached them with his idea for a new research project using their facility. He simply needed free reign of the facilities for that time. He would be doing dives from there so it wouldn’t be odd if he stored his gear there. The night before the dive, he snuck into the facility and put his gear on with the pretense of going out for a night dry dive. He waited until it was late enough that all others had left the facility and commandeered the submarine, using the keys he had stolen earlier that day to start it up and get it out of the facility. He had disabled the alarms so he had roughly five hours before people showed up and found that the sub was missing. Perhaps even longer before they got their other sub set up to follow him. By then it would be too late.

He set out to the middle of the lake, the only thing separating the inky darkness of the lake from the sky were the stars. The stars were reflected in the lake, but their sparkles seemed to somehow be sinister with the ripples of the lake. It felt as though what was above in space was also reflected in the depths of this lake. With these eerie thoughts floating in Peter's head, he descended through the water into the depths.

At first, the water was clear as it had always been but very quickly, Peter reached the darkness barrier. He immediately descended into it and found that the darkness was not mud as many had assumed but a watery slurry that greedily swallowed the submarine up. As darkness completely enveloped the sub, he checked his watch for the time. He was descending at a slow, but manageable rate and even if this lake was as deep as the ocean, he would take only 90 minutes to reach the bottom.

Time started to have no meaning to Peter as he felt as though he had been descending for days. He felt trapped in the sub, all sweaty and feverish, longing to touch the waters that he had kept himself from. It had been two hours since he had started his descent and he had yet to reach the bottom. He had seen strange things that he dared not believe were real outside of the submarine. Creatures like the one in Lake Baikal but also creatures with the face of a crocodile and the body of an octopus devouring those creatures further down. He had seen the discarded face of a Baikal creature floating past him and that had haunted his fever dream of a descent for the last hour.

Suddenly, the darkness lifted and he saw a sight he would not have dreamed of before. An ethereal glow came off from the surroundings, illuminating what was a massive city. To Peter’s dismay, the sub stopped responding to the controls. Peter watched in horrified fascination as his sub moved on its own accord towards buildings with designs which hurt his head to look at. His sub lurched through spiraling streets in which massive creatures, riding abominations and other horrors, were going about their day to day. It looked like New York City would to a pigeon. He noticed many creatures of the kind he had met in lake Baikal. He could see their forms clearly now and other than the whiteness on their hands and face, their bodies were completely black and amorphous.

The sub wound its way through the city, Peter noticed many disturbing and amazing things happening in the streets. Peter saw a familiar looking bulbous building in the distance with eight towers surrounding it. The building seemed to be more mobile than the other stone structures in the city and that’s when he realized the building was actually a Kraken! Beings floated inside and out of it but it was still alive, it’s tentacles moving crowds of creatures through the city. He saw creatures eating other creatures, crowds of what looked like barracuda people swarming one particular unfortunate squid. A passing blob, which looked for all the world to Peter to be nothing more than a mass of mouths, pushed through the swarm and came out the other side with a few barracuda people and one of the squid’s tentacles hanging out of one of its mouths.

Peter noticed the sub was being sucked into a massive pyramid structure on columns. As he neared the structure, he noticed that a bright bonfire was lit in the center of it. The sub went straight for the fire in the middle of what he now thought of as a temple. Directly past the columns, Peter’s sub landed on the stone floor. Before he could react, the access hatch on top of the sub opened up and Peter was exposed to something that was not quite water, not quite air. He found that the temperature and pressure were like a spring day on his body as he left his sub and headed to the bonfire.

As he approached the bonfire, Peter noticed a massive mass of limbs, tentacles, claws, paws, hands, hundreds of different appendages that he didn’t even recognize hanging from the shadowed ceiling of the pyramid. He felt terrified by the presence of this thing above the bonfire but powerless to stop his approach to it. He stood 10 feet from the fire and directly under the mass of appendages when a voice in his head spoke. “Hello Peter,” It said. “We have been waiting for you for many years, we are the creatures of Lake Pehr. We have been conditioning you all your life you see. We have been waiting for a human to be persuaded to come and seek us out.” It seemed to sigh as it said those last words. “You have done well on your journey this far. We have many things to share with the humans on the surface. Like Prometheus with his flame, we will give you so much light.” Excited by this prospect, Peter asked. “What things will you show us? What is our purpose to you?” The mass of appendages lowered one of it’s massive appendages toward Peter, this looked like a huge syringe. Peter felt a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach as that syringe appendage lowered to a spot just above his head.

“We wish to integrate you into our society. We need some creatures to be at the bottom of our food chain.” It said, “In order to do this, we need a vessel to carry our thoughts back up, we have chosen you to be this vessel.” Peter could only imagine what horrors these creatures would bring to humans. He found himself rooted to the spot despite his body crying out its need to run. “And if I refuse?” Peter said, mounting dread rising in his stomach. “I am sorry, we only need your body to do this.” The creature said as it thrust it’s syringe-like appendage into Peter’s head. The world faded to black as the creature said “Don’t worry Peter, at least your death won’t be painful, I can’t say the same for the rest of your kind.”