Horrors of the Deep

I’m a marine biologist, and I work in the Hatinggabi aquarium, the world’s first aquarium capable of simulating conditions in the midnight zone. For those who don’t know, the ocean is organized in three sections: the daylight zone, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone. The daylight zone is at the top, it receives the most light and is the easiest to study. Below that is the twilight zone; with significantly less light and more pressure, it requires specialized equipment to explore.

The deepest parts of the ocean are the midnight zone. No light reaches this deep, and the pressure is enough to crush basic submarine equipment. It’s only been the past couple of decades that we’ve been able to study the midnight zone.

The biggest hazard of the midnight zone is the pressure. Not only does it make it extremely difficult and expensive to get equipment down there, but the creatures that live down there have evolved to survive in that pressure. Because of this, bringing them up to the surface to be studied causes serious damage to the bodies if not done properly and very carefully.

Three short years ago, with incredible advancements in engineering, the Hatinggabi aquarium was up and running. It was built right along side the ocean, with a huge surface-level aquatic center, but the pride of this aquarium is the 700-meter-deep tank where creatures from the deepest parts of the ocean can be observed in their natural habitat. Only the most prestigious marine biologists are permitted to study here, but the aquarium built up revenue by opening to the public.

A transparent elevator system slowly brings tourists down the tube, where a combination of Plexiglas windows and TV screens allow you to see how the world changes from the colorful, lively daylight zone to the dark midnight zone. The elevators open to an observation room where tourists and scientists can watch the live camera feed or look through the windows. The tank is kept dark at first, so you can see the bioluminescent jellyfish and anglerfish, but lights are then turned on in the tank while a tour guide explains the creatures that you see.

People ask me all the time; what’s the scariest creature in our deep-sea tank? I usually respond jokingly with the vampire squid, or Henry the anglerfish, but it’s not quite the truth.

While I wouldn’t consider myself to be a particularly serious or stoic person, I have never scared easily. I’m not squeamish in any sense, and the often horrifying creatures that I have spent my life studying have always been fascinating and beautiful to me. But one day, I came face-to-face with a creature that rocked me to my core and gave me nightmares for the rest of my life.

When I started, one of my main duties was to record and document the development of one particular creature. Or at least, we assumed it was a creature. It looked like an enormous, oddly round rock, about the size of the suitcase. The rock had some smooth patches, and with instruments measuring temperature, noise, and movement from within the rock, we believed it was some kind of egg.

If it was an egg, it would have been the largest egg of any animal on Earth, and a fantastic discovery. I, however, thought it was some kind of mollusk or clam. I watched it for almost two years, dutifully recording the lack of development before moving on to other tasks. One morning, I walked into the lab and pulled up the live feed of the camera pointed at the rock, ready to record “no change” once again. I was almost an hour early, because I liked getting through some of the mundane routines free of distraction, which meant I was alone in the lab. I was startled, but not too alarmed, when I raised the lighting on the rock and saw that it wasn’t there.

I assumed that I wasn’t looking in the right place, but after checking that I had the right camera and looking around in nearby areas, I realized that this was the correct place, but the rock – or egg – had been broken, and now lay in pieces. I gasped and scrambled to make sure everything was being recorded, and sent a frantic message to my boss that it had hatched.

After switching through a few different screens, I went out to the observation room, scanning every screen and window I could see for anything new. I was afraid to look away and miss it. Later, I would backtrack the video recording to see what happened, but I wanted to find this thing so I could track it as soon as possible. I felt excited, thinking about this amazing new discovery, but scared that it was actually nothing and the rock had just fallen apart.

I looked around as I made my way to the lighting controls, ready to light up the entire tank until I found the creature, when something caught my eye. In the darkness, all I could see was a trail of bioluminescent green dots, traveling in a serpentine across one of the screens. They had gradually brightened in the darkness and then slowly dimmed again. The trail was significantly longer than anything we had in the aquarium, so I was sure this must have been what came from the egg. I hurried over to the nearest window to see it in person.

Through the glass, I saw the lights fading in and out and flashing in patterns for a moment. The trail of lights was long enough to be the body of an enormous eel or possibly jellyfish tentacles. I tracked its movements as it disappeared and reappeared. This time I was able to see a little more, and my jaw dropped open as I saw what appeared to be an arm, complete with a five-fingered hand at the end. It didn’t look human; it was a bluish black color with an eerie green overtone, but it was definitely an arm and not any kind of fin or tentacle I’d ever seen in marine life.

A thought crossed my mind, and I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it, that this could be a mermaid. For all I knew, it could be. But it wasn’t a pretty young maiden with a human face and long, flowing hair. The creature turned and began swimming directly toward the glass, one light in front of it glowing brighter than the rest as it came closer. The front light bobbed like an anglerfish and as the light grew near, its face emerged from the darkness.

The first thing I was able to see was a row of long, needle-like teeth jutting out from a lower jaw. Next, I saw the eyes; large, round, milky white eyes that seemed to be staring at me even though I knew with those eyes it almost certainly couldn’t see me.

I told myself this, as my breathing quickened, and I felt a growing sense of terror at the horrifying face approaching me. It slowed and stopped, hovering inches away from the glass. I couldn’t look away, too frightened to turn up the lights to get a better look at it. I tried to reason with myself that it was just an undiscovered animal, and I was beginning to wonder if I had imagined the human arm.

I didn’t have much time to consider this possibility, before the creature raised one of its arms. Just as I had seen, it had a five-fingered hand with human proportions, and the creature extended it toward the glass, as if reaching out to me.

I shook my head in disbelief. It could have been— it must have been a coincidence; it couldn’t have possibly been interacting with me. Unless, somehow, it could see me, and was demonstrating a level of intelligence that could be anything from an interest in exploring its environment, to an attempt to communicate.

I tried to collect myself and decided to get back to the lab and observe it from the cameras, but just as I took a step back, the creature looked up, and started swimming toward the surface. As it passed the window, I could see the dark, translucent body. Its head was attached to a short neck that turned into a thin torso, resembling a quadruped in the formation of the ribcage and shoulders, which were clearly defined beneath the skin. Just below the jutting ribcage was a narrow waist that grew into a long, eel-like tail with fins at the end. From the tip of its head to the end of its tail, it must have been around eight or nine feet long.

The creature continued to swim upward, and I hesitated a moment before rushing to the elevator and beginning to rise after it, keeping my gaze trained on it. The other scientists that worked in the lab would be arriving soon, and shortly after that, the aquarium would be opened for tours. I was afraid of what would happen if people saw the creature before we learned more about it, and as it rapidly approached the surface, I wondered if it would go all the way up to the surface level.

It began to slow down, and as I caught up to it, I saw that it was still rising too fast, not able to acclimate to the change in pressure. The creature’s body began to depressurize, bloating until it was more of a grotesque blob instead of the skeletal form it had before. The brighter light changed the creature’s skin from a dark bluish green to a milky gray. A disgusted scream came from my throat so suddenly that I didn’t recognize my own voice at first. I saw the creature from a few varying angles on the surrounding screens, before the elevator caught up to it where I could see it through one of the windows. I choked on a gasp and fell back against the far wall: exactly as I passed the window, the creature turned its face from looking upward to looking at me through the window, as it had in the observation room.

The elevator continued to the surface, passing the creature. When it reached the top and the doors opened, I exited on slow, shaky legs, desperately trying to think of how I could contact the small team of security personnel that occupied the center at all hours, or hoping that my coworkers would appear soon. I had lost sight of the creature, and I knew that it was my responsibility to study, but I hoped I would never see that creature again.

It was no good, as even the dry ground on the surface was not safe from this monster. Before I could get my bearings, the water in the pool that led down to the observation level splashed suddenly and violently. The creature had leapt out of the water, and I watched its body smack into the cement floor, leaving it a slimy puddle of fins and flesh.

It was still alive. It turned its face toward me, again, and I knew that it could see me. The body undulated, and the creature was able to get its thin arms to a position where the hands could grip at the floor, and it started dragging its shapeless form toward me.

I fell to the floor and screamed louder than I had ever screamed in my life, scrambling backwards and away from it. I continued screaming as it approached me, and the creature’s throat vibrated as it started making a sort of clicking sound, similar to the sounds heard on underwater recordings of coral reef fish. When my back hit the closed doors of the elevators, I thought for sure this was the end of me.

Pounding footsteps came running toward me from the entrance, and I could hear the shouts of several people. I couldn’t look away from the creature, but I recognized the voice of my supervisor, even though I couldn’t understand what he was saying over my own incoherent screaming.

The creature did not look at the new arrivals, but it must have noticed their presence, because it stopped. Scared and confused, the security team that had come running after hearing my screams hesitated, not knowing what to do, and there was a ruckus of shouts and footsteps as the small crowd panicked.

The creature turned then, back toward the water, and we watched on as it dragged itself with surprising speed to the short wall between land and sea. Somehow, it was able to reach the top of the wall, and pull itself up and over.

Having this distance between myself and the creature brought me out of my panicked state. I caught my breath and stood up, walking toward where it had disappeared without getting too close, in case it tried to attack again. The group followed cautiously, and we looked over the gentle waves anxiously. For a moment, I assumed it had returned to the bottom of the tank where it would certainly be more comfortable, but before anyone spoke, we saw the creature leap out of the water again, this time near the barrier between our tank and the open ocean.

It arced over the barrier into the ocean, where we would only be able to track it for a short distance, and swam away. I was not comforted by its disappearance; now, it could go anywhere, show up anywhere, and I still didn’t know if it was intent on hurting people.

I haven’t seen it since that day, and I hope it swam to the bottom of the Mariana trench to stay there forever. I live in fear that one day I will come across it again, in my line of work. Sometimes, I can’t get over the fear that I’ll see it dragging itself across the floor of my apartment.

The recordings worked, a team was assembled to analyze the footage of the creature, but I refused to take any part of further investigations. My supervisor and the owner of the center agreed that this event was best kept secret from the public, and I was forbidden from disclosing any information about it, which I was only too happy to oblige. Rumors spread among the locals, who told the tourists to scare them, but the whole thing was brushed off as an obvious hoax.

Sometimes I wonder if it was all some kind of dream or hallucination, but the people I work with who are still looking into the situation keep it fresh in my mind, asking me questions about what I observed and requesting my consultation on their reports. It’s starting to fade away now, as they’ve exhausted the extent of the recordings we had, and there’s been no sign of the creature since it left the boundaries of the aquatic center.

A part of me wants to forget the whole thing, but the scientist in me desperately wants to uncover its mysteries, Perhaps, if given the chance, I would study it again.