It Called in the Night

“Did you hear that?”

The problem is yes, I did hear it. It’s the sound of something very large and living and it sounds hungry. The deep vibration of its starved voice suggests a thing of colossal size, which surely could not exist in the waters we are monitoring.

I slide off my headset and race over to see the spectrogram printed out of the low frequency sound we have just detected. The printout shows a squiggled glow of yellow outlined in orange confirming the sound’s rise and fall, this flame like imagery is the depiction of a marine beast calling out in the icy waters, but it cannot be.

“It must’ve been an ice quake,” Darryl says quietly.

I look over to him and see wrinkles of worry pulling down at his dark eyes. I get it, we’re alone out here and this terrifying, awful sound isn’t just disturbing for its abnormal, implausible frequency but for its location too. The source’s latitude and longitude indicate that it is at the water’s edge only a few feet from the lab we have made our home from home.

I wonder if we should go outside to investigate. Even with the floodlighting set up around the perimeter it will still be dark out there. Night is different down here, the shadows come early, rolling over us in deep, sapphire shades and sending us scurrying for shelter because we’re never quite certain of what lurks in the dark. For such a desolate desert where so little should live given its unforgiving, frozen landscape, there is a disturbing amount of activity in the night.

“Oh.” Darryl goes white and his body turns rigid. He reaches a trembling hand up to his headset and I am shocked as I see tears trickling down his cheeks.

“Darryl, what is it?”

“Do you hear it?” His voice comes out hushed and frightened.

I hurry back to my counter, grab up my headset and place it back on, curious and worried all at once. Why is he crying? Perhaps it’s the stress of having been here for so many months with limited company, resources, space, and distractions. I feel the pressure of it too, the suffocation of one sole companion to see daily without reprieve, and the irony of feeling lonely even when you have someone else with you.

It seems odd that there should only be the two of us down here, the expensive nature of the equipment we have suggests the budget could have extended to more workers. There were a few subtle hints that it was more to do with keeping a limit on the number of people to have knowledge of here. I did not probe too hard with it because I needed the money, and the opportunity was too great to resist. It’s not often one gets selected for a government sponsored investigation down in the Antarctic.  

Through my headset I hear the low, repetitive crackle and murmur of the deep ocean as it moves constantly in currents, ebbing in and out from the shore, wearing away at ice weakened by time and damage. I think perhaps the noise was just ice shifting, or maybe a curious whale or squid come closer than the normal. We have let complacent boredom drive us to imagine monsters when there are none.

A loud, deep cry echoes through my head. Even with the distortions of the deep waters, the electronic interference of the hydrophones recording, and a dozen other things that I wish could excuse this, I know this is something that has been unheard until now. This is something big and it is right outside our door ready to devour something.

How is it that I know it’s hungry?

Alarmed, I push off the headset and look to Darryl once more. He is trembling all over and his face has become soaked with tears. I understand his upset, although we should be considering this an incredible find, I must admit feeling something sinister in the sound. What enormous beast might we at the mercy of? For if it is the size its cry indicates, our lab would be a mere appetiser to it, and it would not take much for it to rise to shore and swallow it and us too.

Darryl throws off his headset violently, sending it in a clatter against the desk and almost to the floor, it is saved a collision with the tiles by the thick chord it is attached to. He runs for the satellite phone in a box against the wall, grabs it out and dials while waving it about searching for a signal.

“S.O.S! S.O.S!” He almost sobs as he yells the letters of desperation.

I am baffled as I watch him, wondering if I should share his hysteria or if I should attempt to subdue it. What have we heard? I feel fear threatening to overwhelm me and clench my hands as I try to subdue it for reason.

I look to my headset warily as I debate what to do. Listen some more or go outside? Will I see anything out there in the frozen dark? What if I do see something? I don’t know what is worse, to continue with imagined answers and unanswered questions or to go out and find something, the horror of which may drive me mad.

I swallow hard and head over to the coat hangers. I am a scientist, I came here to discover and learn, if I shy away from a chance to spy upon something new then I am failing in my craft. As I reach for my padded coat I try to reason that if it is a living thing well then it is but an animal, a dumb beast most probably, and it should be unlikely to do anything other than head back down to the depths it probably arose from. If it should be anything at all it will be an abnormally large whale but still just a whale, something known to man.

Coat on and zipped up, I reach next to pull down a waiting hat and tug it on.

“Yes, yes!” Darryl must have gotten a response. “We need assistance, we need to leave!”

I pull up my hood and tug on my gloves before heading for the door. I need to know what we heard.

“No you don’t understand!” Darryl starts to sob as I open the door. “It’s not normal! It’s going to kill us!”

I close the door behind and step out to an icy land of eerie silence. The floodlights are on but there is little to see, a limited stretch of flat, snow smothered ground and then blackness. It is as if one might be devoured by oblivion if they step outside the boundary of the light beams.

I hug my coat close and turn to the left, heading slowly towards the water.

There is a coldness here that is difficult to describe, it freezes you up from the inside out and no matter how well wrapped you are it still finds a way to trickle in and sap away your strength. I try to quicken my pace so that I might get back to the lab and the limited heat it offers sooner.

I halt for a moment and glance back to the lab briefly. As I look, I feel a small tremor below me before another cry fills the air. It is so much more terrible to hear in this raw fashion, with no headset to buffer, I almost deafened by the cry. Nausea quivers up my torso and I fall to my knees. As the ground continues to quiver, I have a wild image of it splitting like ice and sending me to the dark waters below.

I close my eyes, clench my gloved hands into the snow and swallow hard. I have come this far; I must know the cause of this wretched sound! Perhaps it is some siren to sing me to my doom and I am a fool for following but I think I am doomed anyway for if I do not go to this beast, it will only come and devour me.  

As the tremors stop, I push myself to my feet and hasten forward.

I follow a thin pale path of light up to the rippling black that signals the end of the shore. For a moment there is only the light lapping of the water of the night.

I take a tentative step forward, searching the waters for what I do not know. There is only a wide stretch of darkness.

I look ahead and see the light catching on jagged, rocks that are strangely submerged. Only when they start to slowly move do I start to realise my folly.

The stretch of darkness is not just the water but a great gaping mouth.