The Ocean Horror

My terrifying debacle began and ended at sea. It was under my wife’s prompting that I agreed to dive with the rest of the cruise ship’s thrill-seekers, although I would have been just as satisfied to have remained on board and enjoy the pleasures of the deck. A certain fear of the sea had always plagued me—I say plagued because this fear was coupled with a morbid curiosity whose limits were just as boundless as those of its subject. It was with this mixture of fear and fascination, along with the innocent desire of a newlywed to please his spouse, that I, for the first and last time, plunged myself backwards into the hellish sea.

            My wife was an adventuress and explorer to the bone. To one who knew her it would hardly have come as a surprise that we met in line for the Superman, back then the largest and fastest roller coaster in the US. Even at that time, the thought of thrills made my knees weak and my stomach nauseous, and it was only because of the pressure put on me by my college friends that I had gotten in line at all. Despite the nearly unbearable effects thrills have on men as squeamish as I, I found this woman attractive to the extreme and proposed to stay in touch with her. She had access to a life I knew nothing about, and, like the ocean, that life both terrified and fascinated me. During our engagement I underwent a skydiving adventure and a bungee jumping trip. Having survived both, I was deemed by my good-intending wife ready to step up the game. Although internally I viciously disagreed, I did not wish to spoil our honeymoon by so early a disagreement and so donned a wetsuit along with the twenty or so other prospective divers when the time came. It was not without qualms that I allowed the mask to cover my face, but for the sake of her whom I loved I swallowed my anticipation and gave myself up to the sea.

            The initial moment of submersion was one of confusion and fright to my senses. Human limbs evolved to function in the less dense fluid of our planet’s gaseous atmosphere, and adapting to the thickness and drag of the cold ocean water was, for me at least, a challenge. After my body had a moment to orient itself, I allowed myself to peek at the submarine world I was now a visitor of. If I intended to shut my eyes again in fright I was dreadfully mistaken. Far from the murky water filled with menacing selachimorpha, sinister squid, and oversized crustaceans animated with mechanical movements that I had expected, the scene that greeted me was one of pure delight. A rainbow of ocean fauna played among the clean waters, the corals their metropoles and the great expanses of rock in between their countryside. A wave of relief washed through my heart. The shadow of our cruise ship rocking comfortingly above us was a great consolation to me as well. As the rest of our posse broke the land-ocean border and adapted themselves to the aquatic environment, I began to move around, my fascination of the ocean reawakening now that my safety was so keenly felt. For those who have never dived, there is no comparison that can fully communicate the feeling of utter freedom I experienced upon finding myself hovering some twenty meters above a brilliantly live ocean portrait. Looking up, I caught the masked face of my wife, evidently laughing at the childlike expression of wonder on my face. That smile dispelled the rest of the qualms I had entered the water burdened with and I too broke into laughter, causing the bubbles from my breathing apparatus to diverge from their regular pattern.

            We were expected to remain more or less in a group, but the beauty of the ocean wildlife continuously sidetracked my wife and me. Once we even lost the rest of the group entirely, and in that moment all my fears returned. It was only because of the admirable levelheadedness of my wife that I did not end the trip early by sending an emergency radio signal back to the boat. After that fright, I resolved to remain in closer proximity to the rest of the expedition, but the daredevil I had wedded had other intentions.

            Upon reaching the end of the coral reef we had set out to explore, our flock halted. We were poised on the edge of an ocean drop off, the depths of which could not be discerned by the naked eye. In front of us was a clear blank blue; below us nothing but a darkness as black as if the abyss was filled with ink instead of water could be seen. About fifty meters off, almost too far for the eye to reach, another wall erupted out of the inky darkness, crowned, like the one we were on, with a coral reef and all the sea life that comes with it. The impending abyss extended left and right until it blended into the blue. No life was present on the vertical walls of the cliff. I shied away, overcome by the grandness of the scene and not a little frightened by its vastness. Our group took this opportunity to take photographs with the cheap underwater cameras that could be purchased on board. After ten minutes of this sightseeing, our tour guide began to herd us back the way we had come—our air was not unlimited after all. As I tuned to follow them, more than a little anxious to retreat from the sea hole, I felt a grip on my shoulder. Jumping in fright, I found only my wife giving me an impish smile. She seemed amused how easily I startled, something I suddenly found irksome rather than endearing. Signaling to me with her hands, she indicated that she intended to explore the walls of the chasm, and, furthermore, that she desired for me to accompany her. I glanced nervously back at our crowd, the distance between us increasing rapidly. As I looked back at my wife, my gut descended into my groin. I witnessed only the tail end of my wife as she pushed off—headfirst, mind you!—into the abyss. A filthy curse broke from me, then the tears welled up in the inside corners of my eyes. In another moment the woman I loved was gone, swallowed in a second by the blackness.

            My body broke. My mind deteriorated into a sobbing thing of no strength. My consciousness was destroyed. The choice was now mine: to turn my back on my wife who was currently plunging into the most sinister part of the ocean, or to dive headlong after her, an action that would be no less terrifying to me than leaping instead into the deepest and hottest pit of Hades. Then—perhaps it was the emotion, perhaps I was dizzy with fright—the gaping hole began to draw me in, as if the depths themselves were sucking the water deeper into its soaking mouth. I was pulled to the edge, violently, against my will, and for half a moment I found myself in a position not unlike a crucified man, arms outstretched and pinwheeling wildly, staring into the depths as the depths stared into me. Something in my mind cracked then and I laughed hysterically. Then my feet slipped backwards and my head torpedoed forward into the heart of the sea.

            I was so deep into the chasm before my wits were returned to me that I could barely pick out the light from the extreme darkness that surrounded me, a darkness that seemed to pervade aggressively into my soul. To my despair, even at this insane depth I saw no sign of my beloved. It occurred to me that I was deep enough down that I ought to continue my descent until I could touch my palm to the bottom (I recognize this now as the reasonings of a madman), and then I reversed myself. Call me chicken. Call me unfaithful. You were not there to experience the terror that I did. And just as I grabbed hold of the rock wall to heave myself back up to where insanity was not the norm, a hand from the depths wrapped its sticky, bony fingers around my knee. I let out a shriek, allowing a cascade of bubbles to flood out of my mouthpiece and zoom to the surface. How I envied them that I could not follow in their path! I kicked my leg, thrashed violently, struggled not to be overcome with fear. Then the fear was mixed with pain, and I found to my complete horror that the water around me was saturated with blood. The hand of the thing that had grabbed me was digging its fingers into my flesh. My hands in a death grip around a jutting rock being the only grace preventing me from being dragged forever into the darkness, I looked back and simply watched as my kneecap was separated from the rest of my body. I felt no pain—my mind was beyond that now—but I noticed to my extreme unnervedness that what was gripping me was a mixture of tentacles and human flesh. It was as if a medical quack of the worst degree had taken the limbs of a dead man and stitched them to the tentacles of a live octopus. The thing gripping my knee was suctioned with the cups of an octopus and fingered with the digits of a man. As I watched yet another limb of the same grotesqueness emerged from the blackness and seized the bone that had been ripped from my knee, pulling it out of sight and into what demonic mouth I am truly terrified to imagine. I swear a crunch emanated from below me. Then another of the same gross feelers brushed underneath my leg and gripped my thigh. For a reason I cannot say it was not this second grip that unhinged me completely, as one might expect; rather, it was when I looked back and saw suckers, no, mouths, complete with sharp, algae-covered teeth and pink protruding tongues, drinking the pulp oozing through my wetsuit from my bleeding knee that I lost it. It was a scene that should have been reserved only for the damned in hell. Perhaps if I had not seen it I could one day, through therapy and friendship, return to some degree of normality—but I do not have any hope of that now. My death instincts overpowered me; tunnel vision blinded me. I lost all sense of direction and all use of reason and writhed madly, willing to do anything to escape the grip of that nightmarish monster of the sea. My grip broke from the rock wall and I was pulled, dragged, into the lair of this thing that should not exist. Then its grip loosened and I saw our tour guide above me, firing harpoon after harpoon into its maw.

            I recall being hauled aboard and my mask and mouthpiece hastily removed by three of my diving companions. I tried to communicate to them the horrors I had just witnessed, but found myself capable only of sneezing violently and then of vomiting up a disgusting orange salmagundi. For the rest of the cruise I did not leave the hospital wing, and upon landing I was deemed mentally unfit for daily living and transferred to a mental hospital. It is here that I am writing down my experiences under the promptings of my therapists who have expressed some doubt as to the actual happenings of my aquatic calamity. I have been lectured repeatedly on the frighteningly bizarre effects of nitrogen narcosis on the consciousness. Also known as “raptures of the deep,” diving at levels deeper than thirty meters below the surface of the ocean can incur cloudy vision, impaired judgment, hallucinations, and even death, symptoms similar to those of extreme intoxication from alcohol. It is to this possibility of hallucination that my doctors attribute my monster, as they call it. Can a hallucination take the wife from a man? I insist I was mauled by a son of Cthulhu, but they shake their heads at me. They say my injury was caused by a common octopus, a normally passive creature which has been known to become aggressive at times for reasons unknown. My tour guide confesses not to have seen my predator well, it having been too dark at that level to see anything clearly, but still supports the doctors’ theory. I am done with them. Like I said before, I have no hope of rehabilitation. My only choice is to resign myself to the life of a hopelessly thalassophobic widower. Nevermore shall I explore the ocean’s depths. If no one believes my story, it makes no difference to me. Rather, perhaps it is better if I convince no one, and let the fear and I carry each other to the grave.