Baited

Apparently, there was an aquarium near the Bermuda triangle. A tourist attraction, one I’d thought very little of even though I’d never heard of it before. The leaflet they had sent me gave me enough information to peg it as a tourist trap, though perhaps with a little more substance. It boasted a café with five-star service, near proximity to at least three ocean-view hotels, a wide range of the usual creatures you see in an aquarium, and the main selling point: an underwater tunnel that reached right into the Bermuda triangle itself, so you could impress your friends by saying you’d visited and survived.

I don’t know why I didn’t bother to look it up when I received the voucher I’d won. I’m of the habit to take online surveys once in a while, enter a sweepstake here or there, so even though I couldn’t remember where exactly I’d gotten the voucher from, it all seemed, well, perfectly legitimate. Several people got in contact with me, arranging dates and times and flights, and within two months of receiving that pale blue-green scrap of paper – Congratulations, Kraken! You’ve won a trip to the most mysterious place on earth! – I was on a flight, drinking tasteless airplane cola and looking out at the thick blanket of clouds. I’d even managed to get a window seat, though it was far from first-class travel.

Even then, when I didn’t know who was picking me up or what exactly I was doing there, I felt quite certain that everything was being handled, and I was in perfectly good hands.

I suppose, in a way, that was true. I definitely did end up wherever the people arranging it wanted me to be.

But still, I can’t believe it never even crossed my mind to check what was happening. I’ve always been so careful – I know better than anyone the dangers of internet giveaways, and have helped countless old ladies on my street avoid phone scams. I was always careful. I suppose that’s why everyone in my life didn’t try to stop me, instead assuming I knew exactly what I was doing. It’s not like I don’t travel often, and I certainly felt like I knew exactly what I was doing, despite how queerly sudden everything was.

I guess that’s part of the trap.

I was led to a hotel and gave my name at the counter, and again, now I think back, I’d never been told how long the trip was for. I just accepted the key without even checking the room number on the dusty leather tag, and followed the concierge up to the room, where I was left with a complementary bottle of cheap wine and a small ensuite all to myself. The view of the ocean was beautiful. Captivated by the waves, I… I’m not sure I ever actually went to sleep that night. There was just something so… Rhythmic… About the motion of the waves, far out at the horizon, as if there was something invisible and gargantuan, curling, writhing, seeping just below the waters.

In the morning, I checked out of the hotel – I remember leaving the key at the desk, as if somehow my fingers knew to put them there, knew I wasn’t coming back – and walked my way to the aquarium without even looking at a map.

I know I did bring luggage; I’m too used to travelling for it not to be a rote action. I can pack for a three weeks trip with a day’s notice, easy. I wonder if my brown suitcase is still sat in the hotel room, or perhaps it’s in some airport lost and found room. My camera was in there, an old antique my grandfather gave me, and the roll of film in it had almost been used up. I was looking forwards to developing it, a hobby of mine. I guess that won’t happen now. As much as I'd like to go back.

There was a quiet calm over the aquarium – for once, not filled with eager ten year olds sticking pressing their noses to the tanks like I had always done as a kid, nor with their parents telling them to stop leaving grubby prints on the glass.

It was almost entirely empty. Just a few chirpy employees lugging buckets of live shrimp and other meaty delicacies for the larger fish, or sharks, or whatever else they had in that place.

I passed by one of those anemone displays from my childhood, those shallow trays with little rocks on the bottom and a small layer of water, where you can gawk at the starfish and poke the anemones. I admit I’m not as grown up as I thought; I remember tickling an anemone and smiling as it clung tight to my finger, desperate for me to stay right where I was.

I know now, in my current clarity, why it felt so relaxing there. It was almost a picture-perfect recreation of the aquarium my parents took me to several times as a child, complete with that strong, salty fish smell coming from the restaurant section, and passing by the double doors leading to the café, I spotted racks upon racks of all kinds of souvenirs, from clunky wooden sharks to those little sticky yellow figures you find on every school ceiling.

It only put me further into whatever trance I was in, and it’s only after we left those achingly familiar halls that I started to feel any unease at all, for the first time since opening the thick handwritten envelope containing my voucher.

As a child, I’d always wondered what was behind the doors employees went into. I never did find out, and although my friend had worked in an aquarium for some time, I’d grown out of that childlike curiosity tinged with imagination, and so I'd never asked.

It was probably something like I’d imagined as a child – a long, eternally long, corridor, with dim blue lighting coming out of everywhere at once. As a child, I probably would have imagined little tiny crawl spaces for the employees to scuttle around, too, but this was just the one corridor, slowly shifting from near black to a stronger, deeper blue light.

I’d been sure there was an employee walking with me. When I looked around, I was alone.

That was the moment I first faltered.

I stopped, and started looking around, wondering why exactly I’d been led down here.

“Hello?” I called. “I think I took a wrong turn?”

No-one answered. I assumed I’d just been told to carry on and hadn’t heard the instruction – after all, I was suddenly aware I was feeling foggy, and foolishly chalked it down to a bad case of jetlag and an oncoming migraine.

So I kept walking, and the tunnel kept getting a stronger blue, until it was so painfully intense I had to hide my eyes, squeezing them tightly closed against the glare, wondering if I was hallucinating or having some sort of near death experience.

But when I opened them again, I saw I was in a glass tunnel. An underwater glass tunnel, the kind you see in every good tourist destination by the sea. It was beautiful, yes, with sharks and fish and a breathtaking array of red coral spattered across the ocean floor just outside it.

I had all but decided to tell the nearest employee I was feeling quite faint and needed to go back to my hotel room, when I noticed that just as I turned from one end of the tunnel to the other, I was suddenly... not in a tunnel at all. In fact, I was in what looked like a large, glass enclosure shaped a little like a lobster trap. Outside, there was nothing to be seen for miles around me but sea floor fading into inky blackness, above me as well as to the sides.

I thought I must have come up from some trapdoor in the floor, but even on my hands and knees, panicking now, I could find no sign of an exit. The smooth glass walls were, well… Just that.

I can’t quite explain how it felt. Part of me, perhaps the last rational part of me, was terrified. Mind numbingly, bone shakingly terrified. My legs went out under me and I sat on the floor, gasping up the air in that small glass box, remembering that one painting of a bird in a glass jar being starved of oxygen for the amusement of a crowd of people.

I’m not sure it was people crowded around me, pressed against the glass from the outside. It certainly wasn’t anything I could see, but I could feel the gaze of something, though I'm not sure if I could even call it a thing. It was a presence, a strong one, and otherworldly.

But the fear only coursed through a small part of me, just enough to weaken my body. The rest of me was just as foggy as I had been coming to the aquarium, completely willing to accept my circumstances, and perhaps that’s why I didn’t try any harder to leave, and why I just sat in a panicked mess on the floor.

At some point, the oxygen must have been all used up. It must have, because I was trapped in a glass box with no sign of an entrance, and unlike the bird in the painting, I could see no sign of a pump that would push any air back in after I passed out.

I don’t know how I woke up, but I did, and it was cold, and it shocked sheer clarity into me.

I was in the ocean, floating in the waves, not a sign of land ahead of me. Spitting out saltwater I desperately paddled in a circle, only to catch sight of, behind me, a few planks of wood, as if there was a wreckage of some small boat. I was about to swim over to grab one to cling on to, like I would do if I were in some movie, when I looked up further, hearing a low noise. And there, beyond the scrap wood: a small white motorboat.

Salvation was in reach, heralded by the thrum of an engine.

Still shocked by the cold water and gasping for air, though I had no idea at all how I’d gotten there (but now, at last, I knew that I really shouldn’t have been there), I waved my arms up and down, frantic, calling out in a hoarse voice.

And suddenly, I felt like there was something beneath me. Something big, and terrible. Something that was chasing me. I knew it, I just knew that that was why I was in that box. I was being hunted, being played with like a mouse, allowed to leave the glass just before I died and then chased around an endless expanse of water.

So I screamed for all I was worth, waving at the boat, begging it to come and get me out of here.

It came. I was almost sobbing with relief at that point. Or perhaps I was sobbing; it’s hard to tell apart saltwater and tears.

All I know is that someone was reaching out to me, a pretty young woman in a sailor’s cap and with a cheeky grin on her face, but as she pulled me up… I… I don’t know how to explain it. Something pulled at my leg. I know for sure there was nothing tied there, nothing physically on my leg, but I felt a tug. Or more specifically, as she pulled me up… I tugged at something.

Her smile faded as soon as she looked at me. I don’t know what expression I wore, but the horror in hers told me enough, and it only got worse when she leaned over slightly and looked down, her hand still gripping my wrist, and she stared unblinking down into the water.

And slowly, she opened her mouth and started to scream.

That day, another unexplained disappearance happened in that accursed patch of ocean. And I think, for both our sakes, I’ll spare you the details of what it was that I saw.

Because far too long after I could do anything at all about it, I realised something. Something that terrifies me, even more than what happened to that woman.

I’m not the prey.

I’m the bait.

And I still don’t know what it is that’s using me as such. I still have no idea what I awaken every time I beg someone to pull me out of the water. Even when I try to tell them to go away, panic overrides me and I start screaming to be taken back to the shore, please, I’d give them anything.

Somewhere beneath me there is a monster in the water. I don’t know what it looks like, I don’t even know what it is, hell, I think that maybe I'm a part of it... but I see well enough the horror in people's faces when they see it. I'm not sure if not being able to see it is much better, though.

It's a monster, whatever it is, and even if I am bound to it - I'm not a monster!

I swear I used to be alive! I swear I was a person once. I am human! Just get me out of this water, please… Please!