A Belly Ache Under Pressure

The tide lapped hungrily at Waxham Sands Beach. Dr Jeffrey Ames, clad in a neoprene drysuit, waded into the murky water, ready for his third attempt to collect samples from an unidentified siphonophore.

The radio at his shoulder crackled to life as the shore team checked his status amid the lapping waves. Jeffrey raised a gloved hand. The iodine scent of the local beach was welcoming. Waxham was lovely, he thought. Next time he should bring Josephine. He turned to the sea. Seafoam collided against his mask when he dived under the surf. He would not leave the water empty-handed. Not again.

He kicked through the surf toward the most recent sighting. The shore faded from view, swallowed by the brooding sea mist. Squeezed tight in his suit, Jeffrey felt at home—this was how he spent most of his doctorate field work some ten years ago. He missed diving.

Rumours had spread like wildfire about the creature. A few unlucky swimmers experienced the siphonophore’s sting. The local rags spun ominous names like Black Shuck or The Wash Monster. So far, the Waxham Water Demon stuck. When Jeffrey was interviewed about the creature, he waved his hands and returned the discussion to what is known, dismissing the sensational reports. He is the expert, people exaggerate.

Likely it was a jellyfish bloom, or a Portuguese Man-Of-War blown in by a storm. Regardless, jelly stings hurt, so locals were avoiding the water. Fine with him.

Jeffrey hoped, with his protective gear, he could successfully detach a segment of the organism without risking a sting. The highest priority was determining if the authorities had to close the beaches in the area. Though if he found something interesting, like the reports suggest, he’d have his next paper to write.

Jeffrey had been on a post-graduate program studying the rehabilitated seals around Hunstanton. But, as his doctorate was on siphonophore reproduction during the climate crisis, here he was—in his dry suit—cutting water. There are perks to being a local expert.

Jeffrey swam further from shore. His radio crackled with a blood-curdling scream. He jolted before realising it was his beach crew standing too close together.

“Sorry Jeff, that was Max,” Eddie said. Their research student had both the body of a teenager, and the lack of sense to match.

“Given up on collecting shells?” Jeffrey asked.

“Naw, mate, he just wants to know if you want to hit the chippies tonight. I’ve taken his radio.”

“If he buys me a pint, I’ll tell him about the Screaming Man of the Sea.”

Max howled from the shore.

Something slid past Jeffrey’s foot. Perhaps maritime myths held some truths after all.

Pain erupted through his body as if charged by lightning. He recalled the accounts—stings felt like searing acid, white heat, and serrated knives. But the descriptions shattered against the living sensation.

This was a violation beyond language—a foreign toxin crawled through his skin, each nerve alight in revolt. The agony swelled until his universe collapsed into the burning tether at his leg. Time and training failed under the mindless brute pain.

Only when the creature released its hold could Jeffrey mentally catalogue the agony in direct, clinical language. But behind each logical disassociation, an animal howl echoed.

Eddy’s voice buzzed in his ears. The shore crew’s words muted as if travelling through yards of gauze to reach him. He sensed the vibrations of their voice more than discerning each syllable. They watched him thrash around in the water.

Jeffrey relaxed his body. “Eddy, I’ve been stung. Got me right over my rutting ankle.”

“Bad luck mate, you need to come back?”

“It’s not bad. Hurt like the dickens. Under control now. Get the dingy closer. I see some floating masses. I’ll get a sample.”

“No worries.” Eddie was still tugging at his suit. A jammed zipper stopped his dive. “See a few around you, below the surface. Yellowish. Not bluebottles, eh?”

“Not seen the buggers proper like.” Jeffrey said, fatigue was setting in, talking was sapping energy needed to swim. He rinsed his mask and let his body sink. Ahead was a floating chain of translucent blobs out of arm’s reach.

There were similarities to the Portuguese Man Of War - thick pouches just under the surface bobbed with each wave, the prominent gas-filled pneumatophore keeping it afloat.

Jeffrey looked to the sides. Eddy was right, he was surrounded by the creatures. He moved towards one. They had the give of a cheap tennis ball, or dog toy. Not what he expected.

“Slippery buggers. Seems we have a bloom, but not jellies. Diving to assess.”

“Received.”

Jeffrey bit into his regulator, then kicked through the water. The creature was strung like an enormous garland. Gas sacks in translucent pink and purple were chained together with what resembled translucent billiard balls.

There are records of these creatures growing longer than a blue whale—but those examples were simple chains, no thicker than a broom handle.

Deep in the pale green, near the man-made reef, the chains converged into a rat-king jumble of translucent blobs. The size defied belief, dwarfing any siphonophore on record. A fascinating feat of nature’s engineering—one Jeffrey would thoroughly document. Stinging pain be damned. This was the find of a lifetime. He surfaced.

“Blooming heck, it’s huge.” Jeffrey checked his air, 30 minutes with a bit of safety after.

Not waiting for a response, he plunged into the frigid depth. Bioluminescence swirled about his vision, faint halos of sapphire and emerald wavering in the disturbed waters.

He swam hard towards the glimmering haze until the siphonophore could be fully appreciated.

Tendrils glowed as if lit from within by a thousand spectral orbs. The beast appeared so vast and resplendent it defied earthly reckoning. Each convulsion of its diaphanous bulk discharged bulbs of azure radiance—hypnotically beckoning the scientist. It shone brighter than the drowned stars.

Dr Ames ached to grasp that living light between his mortal palms.

He reasoned he could wrap a section of tentacle in a sample bag, then cut it off. If he was quick. Each piece is a specialised variant of the beast—study one section, and you can describe it all.

Reaching for a dangling tendril, Jeffrey was yanked below the waves. The siphonophore wrapped a tangled mass of thick ropy tentacles around his torso.

The beast wrenched Jeffrey below the waves; the sea turned against him—sunlit surface banished for bone-numbing cold, clarity displaced by murk dark as spilled ink.

He fought the tentacles’ pull, their strength inexorable as iron chains crushing his chest. Pressure mounted against his mask. A taste of copper flushed his tongue as each frantic gasp drew less and less air.

Panic clawed inside Jeffrey’s mind, all rationality burned away by atavistic horror. His thoughts scattered into fractured shrapnel—flitting from hope, to rage, to despair faster than he could grasp each emotion. The scientist dissolved until only the animal remained, kicking vainly while shrieking bubbles spiralled up and broke against the flawless night.

A blinding pain jolted his nerves as Jeffery was forcefully shoved into the belly of the beast - the gaping gastrozooid clasped around his diving suit, then spasm after spasm followed, each pushing him deeper.

Jeffrey convulsed as water flooded lung and sinus, the salt ripping into delicate tissue like hot cinders. His vision tunnelled from the pain, synapses firing white-hot before shorting out. Just as consciousness ebbed, one last spark of mortal terror jolted his animal brain. The creature was claiming him as its own, and Jeffrey was already as good as dead. Disoriented in the cramped, pulsating cavity, Jeffrey could barely twist his body.

He expanded his chest enough to manoeuvre his secondary regulator into his mouth. He relied on his training—slow, calm breath.

Panic kills.

Once he calmed his breath, he could focus on the blinding pain. The entrance to this enormous gastrozooid had contracted about his leg. With a swift push and twist with his other leg, he retracted his foot, losing his flipper to the sea.

The beast’s stomach was filling with his warm breath. He allowed a few deep coughs.

“May...day...” he sputtered over the radio between agonised breaths. “Require...help...”

He needed to orient himself.

Despite the fire flooding his constricted limbs, Dr Ames clung to detached scientific awe. This was a unique experience.

The creature jostled, then dropped ten meters deeper into frigid blackness. The sudden increase in pressure was stunning. There wasn’t time to regulate his ears properly. Tears welled from the sudden crush of two atmospheres. His right ear made a sudden popping sound. His mask pressed hard against his cheeks as the volume of air shrank by half over the few seconds of dive.

Jeffrey thought fast—he purged his respirator valve, dispatching precious air to inflate the gastrozooid. The creature’s translucent belly stretched just enough for Jeffrey to pull out his diving knife. If he was lucky, the extra gas would prevent a dive long enough for him to cut his way out.

He mashed the radio send button and after a quick breath from his regulator, he said, “In a bit of a bother. Been eaten. Send…everyone.”

He hacked at the translucent purple walls, but the tough membrane barely nicked under his awkward strokes, like a spoon on hard ice cream. Jeffrey’s left ear popped. A pain like an ice pick stabbed into the sinus between his eyebrows.

Agony.

As he imagined the black depths swelling below, frustration boiled into rage. He thrashed and kicked with abandon, his echoing screams drowned by gulps of invading saltwater. Feeling another sharp descent, Ames punched his purge valve again. More air screamed past his lips. He would not be dragged into the lightless abyss without a hellish fight.

His world narrowed to the walls of undulating flesh. The scientist grappled with a truth more dreadful than drowning—he was utterly trapped.

Even as frustration gripped him, Dr Ames beheld the extraordinary anatomy enfolding his broken body. He admired the rippling gastrodermis. At this scale, he could see the muscles fire around the gastrozooid. He traced one with a finger, then kicked the walls out of sheer spite.

The creature levelled out.

“What should I call you, old bean?” After running through a few options, he settled on Ames’ Bythos, after an Ichthyocentaur who attended the birth of Aphrodite. After a moment’s consideration, he changed his mind. This creature was enormous, ‘Titanobythos’.

By cataloging every fold and bulge in the wall, the scientist distracted his fraying mind from the present horror. He focused on his captors’ magnificence—how assuredly its pneumatophores sailed the sea, buoyed by metabolic gases. Jeffrey even thanked fate that, if doomed, it was by no common jellyfish, but an embodiment of evolutionary grandeur.

He strained his cracking voice to share each observation through the radio. More for some phantom audience beyond than the uncomprehending surrounding walls. The discoveries flowed relentlessly. A biography of a world-changing creature spelled out between intakes of compressed air. He didn’t know if anyone could hear him. His ears were shrieking a dissonant song of pain and loss—a blur of tinnitus and ocean waves. If he survived, it’d be a miracle if his hearing returned.

As the siphonophore slid over the reef and down the ocean shelf, Dr Ames grasped for half-remembered prayers. All were fragmented rhymes and colourful images lingering from childhood.

Jeffrey envisioned grizzled prophets calming mortal storms, saints glowing righteous against infernal beasts. If any spiritual force governed this alien abyss, it ignored his foreign entreaties. The only reply was the reef’s stony scrape, the walls buckling under unholy pressure.

He searched his fading memory for the right sacred words - absolution, benediction, hallowed names to chant as talisman against the dark. But Dr Ames found no holy language fitted for this place outside creation. If any gods heard him, they too were long dead in the endless deep. No hand would redirect this leviathan. He laughed, his useless brother was named Jonah, Jeffrey would happily trade places with him, Georgia was nice this time of year…

The siphonophore dragged Jeffrey deeper into lightless purgatory. He pleaded into the undulating flesh. “Mighty Bythos, release me as you did Jonah!” He removed his glove to pound his fist against the beast with each entreaty.

The submerged world faded to midnight. Pressure mounted. Dr Ames slipped back into despair. “Please mighty giant, spare me!” His begging gave way to defeatist mutterings about delayed diving buddies and forgotten emergency beacons. All useless this deep under the waves.

As the scientist sank into mental oblivion, he pulled his phone from his waterproof pocket. A picture of his wife greeted him. He pushed hard against the wall to allow his eyes to focus on her smile.

Why didn’t he stay at the hotel with her? He even turned down breakfast to get on the road earlier. Now he was some leviathan’s supper. He shook his head, refocused on her photo. No glory could repay this worthless death. She deserved a last goodbye.

The splitting pain in his skull roared.

Jeffrey’s senses eroded to splitting agony. His eardrums rang mercilessly. Lungs clamped down in revolt. But one priority eclipsed his failing biology - to apologise to his beloved wife. As the creature plunged into the deep, the air compressed in his fleshy coffin. The force intensified until Jeffrey felt his organs flatten, lungs crackling in his chest, lips numb. He held his phone screen against the fleshy walls, his wife’s image now framed in red from the burst blood vessels in his eyes.

His glove floated on the creeping water by his chin. It annoyed him.

He couldn’t type well enough to compose a text message—not that he had service at this deep. He switched to the presentation software on his phone. It had a drawing function. He opened a lecture he’d presented only a week before. His words bled like open wounds across the page. He scribbled his thoughts over calculations and diagrams with the cramped desperation of a dying insect covering its burrow walls with revelations.

My dearest, the letter began, before cramping into an indecipherable scrawl. His fingers were shaking from oxygen poisoning.

Jeffrey cursed his stupidity. He opened the video function of his camera. How could mere language encapsulate a life shared? He thought. Their first bright glance across the university courtyard. Moonlit evenings wrapped in contented silence. The scent of her hair as they swayed gently to songs only they could hear. A thousand moments beyond capture poured through Jeffrey’s mind, clarified by approaching oblivion.

Fighting the blurring blindness, he took a deep a breath, then started recording.

“My dearest Kate, I’m sorry I missed our breakfast. I wish I said goodbye. Forgive my foolishness and know I’ve always... loved only you.”

In delirious honesty, he confessed his shameful affair with his graduate student before frantically deleting the video. Kate deserved better than his regrets projected onto her grace. He started again.

“My dearest Josephine, I’m sorry I missed our breakfast. I wish I said goodbye…”

As convulsing shocks wracked his ribs, Jeffrey knew his time was coming. He stopped the video. All that could be said was said.

With a final coherent act, he stuffed his phone into his glove, then both inside a sample bag with only enough air to let the phone float. Inch by inch, he forced the package towards the gastrozooid’s entrance, releasing all remaining air in his tank to give his body enough room to rotate head down. His crushed arm exploded in agony as he forced the package as far as he could reach.

It was strange, the humour of his precious oxygen, now toxic from the depth, firing his phone out of his hand and on its journey. The thought of a Titanobythic fart amused his inner child. The dot of light from his phone’s torch spun away, a tiny light house loose in the sea.

Please let them find it. Please.

The light from his phone faded. He was now surrounded by bright purple luminescence. Regret filled him. He wished he had turned off the light earlier.

His penultimate thought, before blackout, was to wish Kate could understand…that his love for her, not science, which eased him into the void.

His last panic-stricken thought was, did I say “Josephine”? He tore at the puckered opening, desperate to get his phone back.

~ * ~

[translation of the bioluminescence]

This fleshy land-fish, we do not like its poke. Not tasty, hard and bony as our sisters spoke. We told them once before, but still they tease and joke - “Just try it, just one bite!” But we always choke.

We swallowed it right down into our gastric intake. A squeezy awful morsel! Big mistake, big mistake. It flails and thrashes and bleeds inside—our belly ache. We should have learned before. Our judgement we forsake.

Down deeper to our home, we dive to let digest. Its crackly crunchy body gives our gut no rest. Next time we trust our truth, we know what’s best. No more land-fish! We now lay claim to rest.

*

Our belly burned fierce from the land-fish bite. We lurched and spewed out that pale beast in spite. Its bony body pricked us fierce with fright! Good riddance now, no more such craving or plight!

Adrift on gentle swells in dawn’s dim glow, a float emerged from the sea below. We cared not what the tides bestow. Just thankful the sharp fish ceased its torture so.