Thalassophobia

A mellow breeze blows the smell of saltwater into your face. You giggle as you blink away the playful wind and listen to the methodic sounds of the waves. To most people, this would be a relaxing experience, an escape from the noise of city life. But, there is a small subset of people where the true dangers of the ocean are made clear for them. The crazy part? No one believes these lucky men, not even myself. At least, I didn't.

My name is Howard Philipe and I am a young scientist from New England. I grew up on the coast of Maine, the cold gray ocean always peering at me from beyond the window. I have always been fascinated by the ocean. It seemed majestic and everlasting from the shore. I decided to spend my life discovering its secrets, and our impact on the gray majesty. I would spend many days and nights in my study reading scientific journals and ancient myths and legends about the oceans of the world. I dreamed of studying oceanography at the nearby University of Maine. And, in 2022, I achieved this goal, the first on a list of many.

While at the university, I became infatuated with the story of Atlantis, like many scientists before me. I had read of Atlantis before and believed it to be fake, nothing more than a thought experiment. But, in my junior year of college, a rumor began to circulate. Something big was moving throughout the ocean. It was too big to be a whale, but too fast to be a tectonic plate. No one knew what to make of this anomaly. Feeling an opportunity to, I gathered my team and a research fund to try and determine what laid beyond the murky cold waters of the Atlantic.

My research team met at Port Clyde. The members of this team were John Paul, the pilot of our vessel, and the only senior on the team, another Junior by the name of Alexa, and the only freshman is named Cassandra. We each had our own jobs, with Alexa as navigator and Cassandra on the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). I was in charge of computing the data on our seismograph, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the hydrophones in the area. We loaded up our gear on the Alacrity, the research vessel we hitched a ride on. John Paul was not needed until we got to the destination and moved to our own smaller ship, the Firefly.

“Guys, meet come here, I want to talk to you,” I told my team, motioning them to group up under the large bridge. “This could be big. This could be anything from some tectonic movements to Atlantis. Personally, I’m hoping for a new sea creature to name.” The team laughed and continued to joke with such wonderful suggestions as to the, “Not a Shark.” We were still kids after all. “Anyway, we have to do our best here. We might even get an award or two.” All of us were excited, or at least we all seemed excited. After we did a nice group huddle and chant, Cassandra came up to me.

“Hey, Howard, can I talk to you? In private, I mean?” I could only agree with the young girl. She pulled me over to the guardrail, underneath the lifeboats. She took a moment to start speaking, almost like she was choosing her words.

“I don’t feel like we should be doing this, Howard,” she explained in a nervous tone. “This could be something dangerous, like an ancient curse but real. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“It could just be butterflies in your stomach, you know,” I responded.

She looked at me with fiery eyes and spoke with a powerful tongue, “This is not butterflies in my stomach, rather spiders in the back of my brain, gnawing at the strings of thought that make me sane. It is a small feeling, but even spiders can kill a mighty lizard. I believe we could be that lizard.” 

When she came back to Cassandra, she noticed my terror, yet fascination. While I listened to her many apologies and adorable reassurances she will continue on the project, I pondered what just happened. I reassured her and moved into my cabin and began to rewatch the scene in my head. I was no doctor or detective that could deduce the cause of her episode, but I tried nonetheless. 

I spent hours on end watching and rewatching that small clip in my head, and reading and reading her small sermon. Something that got me through my grueling school years was my good memory. In the day and a half I spent on my junior, I came up with several theories, with only two being the most probable. She could only have told the truth, or the truth as she saw it. Which means something must have been affecting her mind. It explains her unnatural speech patterns. My only leading theories now are some sort of hypnosis or just anxiety. But, people with anxiety don’t randomly turn into Shakespeare.

Also during my day and a half in my room, we were nearing the middle of the Atlantic, where the disturbance was located. Still, as we drew closer and closer to the point of the disturbance, Cassandra’s pleads got bolder and bolder. By the time we got to the area of the disturbance, she threw herself at my feet with a knife and begged me not to go. If I did go, she would, “use the knife in ways that even the spider could not fathom.” It took the combined efforts of me, John Paul, and two crew members to calm her down and restrain her. She fainted soon after.

While the ship’s doctor looked after Cassandra, John Paul, Alexa, and I got onto the Firefly and moved out into the water. There, Alexa deployed the ROV and began to dive. It took her about fifteen minutes to reach the area of the disturbance. As we started to look around, I began to get headaches, almost at a consistent tempo. It was almost like the sonar we were using to see below the depths. Finally, we came to the disturbance. It was a statue of a spider, about the size of a child. Luckily, it was stuck on some rocks and seagrass so we could mark the location.

After some shuffling around, we brought the Alacrity into position and brought the statue on the ship with a crane. Almost as soon as it came out of the water, everyone on the ship seemed to get the same splitting headache. Another strange occurrence, but we kept working. Once on the ship, we began to study the peculiar object. 

Given the nature of the statue, we determined it to be an idol of the trickster god Anansi. We also determined from the footage that it had most likely been taken by the English slave traders. A piece of wood was caught between the legs of the spider with the name, Nemesis, etched into it. Despite our thorough analysis of the statue, even at my personal request, we could not find anything special about the statue. Its size was the only extraordinary aspect of it. Still, there was the biting in the back of my mind, a snake in the pit of my stomach, a fairy in my eyes, and a leopard always tailing behind me.

But, nothing. Nothing at all happened to me. We brought the statue back to the states so the historians could take a look at it and bring it to a museum. My research crew and I were rewarded with a grant for our efforts. Cassandra was given medical aid and almost completely went back to normal. The world followed suit, it seemed.

However, I was not satisfied. There were many strange occurrences during this trip, and my team also felt them. Even though everything was explained: Cassandra just had a severe case of thalassophobia, the headaches were due to the severe light reflecting from the statue and the statue itself just knocked over some hydrophones, giving it the effect of something big moving. Despite such practical explanations, my newly formed official research team and I devoted the rest of our lives to uncovering and understanding the mysteries of the ocean. Even those that understood it’s mysteries and were rightfully terrified. Those we name as paranoid for fearing the ocean.