The Abyss Regurgitated Me
A thin stream of bubbles escaped through the exhaust valve of my drysuit as I descended. I turned my wrist towards the beam of my light.
48 m.
PO₂ stable at 1.2.
3 h 15 min left on the scrubber.
Everything according to plan.
My buddy was a few metres ahead of me. He turned, raised one hand and gave me the signal. All good. We stayed on the guideline.
Then something tore through the water. A heavy vibration passed through my chest, my teeth, every bone inside me, and snapped my whole body sideways before I had time to react. It was violent and impossibly fast.
"What was th —"
A second, stronger vibration came before I had finished the thought. I blinked, and my buddy was gone.
The sound arrived a fraction of a second later. A cracking roar so horribly loud that it felt as though something enormous had broken directly inside my skull.
Where my buddy had been, there was now a wall. I reached out and touched it. Nothing but rock.
I directed my light upwards. The wall continued for metres and metres, climbing beyond the reach of the beam and disappearing into the black. Then I looked down. The passage we had been swimming through was no longer there. In its place was a drop with no visible end. An abyss.
I was still staring into it when a black current filled with sand, jagged rocks and fragments of the cave swept me away as though I were nothing more than a branch caught in a river.
I glanced at the computer on my wrist. The numbers kept climbing.
55 m.
75 m.
98 m.
I was falling too quickly to think. Too quickly to equalize. Pressure drove needles through my ears. My vision pulsed. The breathing loop tightened against my chest, and every breath became smaller than the one before it.
I could feel every empty space inside me collapsing. My ears. My lungs. My head felt as though it were about to split open.
And during what I believed was the final second of my life, my limbs twisted into spirals, pulled in the direction of the current that was forming. My diving gear had disappeared. My bones cracked and bent as though I had been caught inside a whirlpool, inside a narrowing tube that kept growing tighter and tighter. Under the crushing pressure, I no longer had a body, only an unrecognizable mass of mangled flesh. Inside that mass, the abyss had left me a single eye at its very centre. Through it, I could still make out what was happening, as though the abyss itself had decided that this was how I was meant to experience it.
And still I continued falling.
"What was that light beneath me? It was beautiful."
A luminous lake lay at the bottom of the abyss, perfectly smooth, impossibly bright. Such a pure blue.
Something was rising from it. At first, it was wormlike, growing longer and longer. Its bluish body was dull and scaleless, with white eyes and small tentacles surrounding its mouth. That mouth drew closer and closer until it swallowed me, savouring every part of me. I could feel not only the way it digested me, but also the way it transformed. Its body gained substance. It became more familiar. More human.
At last, once its new body had fully formed, the creature blinked — and I saw through its eyes. I watched the earth split apart beneath me. I felt my body twist and tear apart again.
Again.
And again.
Yet every time it feels different. Each cycle draws my attention to something new, as though my mind keeps searching for an explanation that will never come.
"Why?"
The pain is real every single time. I feel the surge of adrenaline rushing through my body. I watch my limbs bend until they no longer resemble anything human. I watch the last of my air escape in a stream of bubbles, and it hurts every time. Even the lake hurts. Its impossible beauty.
I feel myself sliding across its tongue, then through what seem like endless intestinal passages, one after another, as though I were trapped inside a body that can do nothing but regurgitate me, only to swallow me again. As though its own body were caught in a loop as endless as mine.
"Please.
Someone, get me out of here."
Author’s Note:
Inspired by one of my old paintings, the short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, my fascination with the beauty of the abyssal plains, and the hagfish, one of the few scavenger fish capable of surviving in extremely harsh deep-sea environments.
For the mirror prompt, I began wondering what a reflection might look like on the surface of one of those underwater lakes, and what something from the abyss might become when reflected back.
Published in the Dark Lore Digest
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