Post by Lord Greevon on Mar 10, 2014 1:57:21 GMT -5
Beneath the Rolling Waves
In the summer of 2010 I was completing an undergraduate project in the middle of the Pacific, a research internship. I was majoring in biology and wasn’t sure exactly what field I would go into. At the time I was heavily considering marine biology, so I got to spend four weeks at sea doing absolutely nothing while a couple of actual scientists surveyed the water for different kinds of plankton. Needless to say, it was a horrible experience filled with the mind-numbing boredom that I had previously only been able to attribute to my Bio-chemistry professor. It wasn’t this that made me change my mind about marine biology, to tell you the truth I actually found it kind of neat the few times Dr. Minorsky, the project coordinator, gave me something to do. No, it was what happened in the middle of my four week trip that made me swear to never go near the ocean again so long as I live.
Three other students and I were packed into a small boat along with the research team and crew. None of us knew each other very well. Although we were all there for the same reason, only one of the other students went to the same university as me and even then I don’t think I ever saw him around campus. So, even though I was surrounded by people on this cramped little research vessel to the point of claustrophobia most of the time, I felt pretty alone for those four weeks. The atmosphere on the ship grew increasingly hostile as the tight hallways filled with body heat and people were pushed up against the rusted walls as someone passed to do one thing or another. Most of the rooms on the ship were about the size of closets and when the doors shut it really felt like you had just entered an elevator filled beyond capacity. The area below deck where the other students and I slept was spacious enough compared to the rest of the rooms, but the smell down there was terrible. Our quarter was originally a storage area and while I don’t know what they had stored there before we moved in, it’s odor must have clung to the walls and been absorbed by the floor the way a corpse leaves a scent that, when you let it decay and permeate, simply never leaves. Inside this area were four small cots with itchy blankets and no pillows. Sometimes we would wad up our jackets to use them as cushioning, but more often than not it was so cold at night that not wearing every layer of clothing available to you was insanity. To the left of our sleeping area was a hallway leading into the rooms where the research team had set up and beyond that were the stairs leading up onto the deck. The rooms where the crew and research team slept were to the right, we had no reason nor were we allowed to go in there. So, most of the time we spent the day playing cards or making up games in our cabin along with that horrible smell that we could never quite get used to.
Dr. Minorsky and his team rarely called us in to help out with the project we were there for and when they did it was mostly clerical work, jotting down numbers while given no context as to what they meant. Naturally, we would often get restless and find ways to stay entertained. Mostly I enjoyed going up on deck to watch the waves slowly beat against the side of the ship. Often I would gaze out to the vast nothingness of the ocean and wonder what secrets it held just beneath the surface. This was the ancient birthing place of life, where some strange creature slowly pushed itself up and forward onto land, legs like crutches, and brooded all of terrestrial life into existence. The history of the ocean is the embryonic history of mankind, but I know now that it is a history best left crumbled beneath the passage of time and rolling of waves.
I awoke late one night to the sound of a soft rain. It was a kind of awakening that transitioned me quickly into perfect awareness, as if I was not sleeping at all, but rather had been lying down with my eyes closed and rose to address the call of my name. In fact, for a second I felt as if someone had indeed called my name, but there was only the sound of the light pattering of rain against the deck above. I struggled against the darkness of the room, willing my eyes to see clearly my surroundings, but an absolute darkness had filled the quarter. Being a storage room by intent, there were no accommodations for natural lighting nor could I turn on the one dim overhead light for fear of waking up the other three students. The easiest way to get on the bad side of a teenager or young adult is to interrupt their slumber. Instead, I reached over to turn on a battery operated lamp by the side of my bed (again, since this was supposed to be a storage room, we had no electrical outlets.) Not quite being able to find it, I turned on my phone and tried to use its dull blue light to find the switch, but by the time I had accomplished that I decided I really didn’t need care about whatever it was that awoke me. If somebody wanted my attention, they could call my name again, a little louder this time maybe. Or turn on a light for me. “That would be nice,” I thought, rolling over onto my side to get back to sleep.
Right as I had started to drift off to the sound of the rain, I thought I heard a quiet shuffling sound overhead. Dismissing it as a bird seeking shelter from the rain, I again tried to go back to sleep, but then I heard the sound again a bit louder. It wasn’t exactly a shuffling, it was more like… a slapping sound. I turned my phone back on and started to look about the room. All the others were still asleep; the noise was clearly not loud enough to wake them. I climbed out of bed, making sure to listen closely for the sound again. I stood still to be certain the sound of my own body moving wouldn’t drown it out in case it happened again. When I didn’t hear it for a while, I began to walk towards the hallway leading up on deck. I cannot say why I was so curious, I had heard plenty of sounds novel to this strange new environment: the croaking of the mast while the metal cools, the rumbling against the hull from subsurface currents, the humming and sloshing sound as water hits the vessel. Perhaps it was that this sound was resolutely different from the others. It was organic, uneven.
I neared the hallway and the small drone of electronic equipment filled my ears. It was from the machines the research team was using to process and hold samples. Even as I willed myself to speed up so that I could be clear of the annoying background noise, I felt my body slow to an interminable crawl.
My heartbeat began to pound in my ears, I was filled with apprehension, I was afraid of any number of horrible things that my mind had conjured, but I admit now that my mind at that point could only skim the surface of the truth that lurched above. My body still moving towards the stairs, although at a rate that had begun to be nearly imperceptible, I heard the noise again. Resolute and sound, I heard that slapping and shuffling noise over the drone of machinery and over the beating of my heart, over the unceasing din of a universe teeming with life and chaos, that noise, the noise of a forgotten point in man’s past, the hollow beginnings of humanity – that horrible shambling of wet flesh against the deck struck through to my brain and my soul and caused me shudder violently before swiftly turning my body and attempting to retreat back to my cot. Running blindly, I tried to clear the end of the hallway but when I neared the open doorway of the room with the buzzing machines, my body jolted to a stop as I slammed into a dark figure. As my frame collided with its, my heart sunk to an even deeper level of dread. I was about to scream, but my voice choked up. My mouth simply dropped open in horror, no noise escaping.
“What the hell are you doing over here?” James, one of the other students, looked down towards me, his eyes slanted in irritation. “Stop running around! If you wake me up again, I’ll tell Minorsky that you were up on deck after lights out.”
Instantly relieved that I had not just run into one of the shadow monsters from my imagination, I began to reply with a shy apology, but then his final words sunk in. He had heard the noise above as well. “I wasn’t… you heard that too?”
Quickly dismissing my question as some inane attempt at keeping myself out of trouble, he rolled his eyes and we both returned to sleep.
The next morning I spent the day asking around if anyone had been on deck during the night for any reason. None of the crew had come up for anything and I knew that I was the only one awake in the storage room when I first left my cot. Whatever had been making all that noise was not a person, or at least not a terrestrial one that came with us aboard the ship. I thought of different things that it could have been, just to ease my mind. I settled on a fish that had jumped up onto the ship and had flopped around for a while. Perhaps some of the birds had tried to eat it or carry it away, explaining the shuffling sound in addition to the wet slapping. This explanation, if it held any validity at the time, was shattered when I began to hear the same noises the next night. I awoke in a similar fashion, the same feeling as though I had been awake the whole time. The noise was louder now, and I could hear it much more distinctly. Slapping and dragging, over and over, it seemed to go in circles around the perimeter of the ship. Slap…drag. Slap…drag. Slap…drag. Whatever it was, it couldn’t move very easily on dry surfaces. Remembering the terror of the night before, I did my best to squeeze my eyes shut tight and ignore the horrible sound. While it seemed like it would persist all night, I finally found my way to sleep.
The second morning after I began to hear the sounds, I noticed the captain was not at breakfast. When I asked why, the crew said simply that he was feeling poorly. Minorsky was worried that if his sickness persevered it would affect the research goals as we would have to dock at the nearest island, which at this point was somewhere in the Philippines, I believe. I hoped his sickness worsened. There was only a small amount of shame or guilt in this want. If it meant getting away from this damned ocean, I would have let him puke his guts out and expel his entrails. As long as it would bring dry land away from these waters, I would have been happy. Of course, this did not pan out as wished and to this day I still believe that the captain had at least some small part to do with that horrid shambling monstrosity that plagues my dreams. After that night we saw no more of the good captain at mealtimes or leisure activities, although he insisted that he was well enough to captain the vessel. He checked in on the research team often, something he used to entirely neglect. Even after the entire affair, this behavior remained during the rest of the trip, as if he was expecting them to find… something.
Throughout the day I tried my hardest to find activities that would take my mind away from the coming night, but it was to no avail. I could not stop thinking about those strange sounds and the last night simply bled into the next. I didn’t even attempt to sleep the third night. I simply sat in bed, waiting for the noise to return. After hours of anxiousness and apprehension, I began to think that it would not reappear for a third time. Of course, the universe could never be so kind. Around three in the morning, I heard a first sickening wet slap against the side of the boat. It was a few minutes, or at least it felt so long for me, before I heard a succession of rapid swiping against the side of the boat. It was a sound similar to when a fish swims alongside and lumbers into the ship, its body beating against the hull for a while before it moves on. Only, this was more rapid. It sounded intentional, like it was trying to find something by thrusting a sort of limb or appendage against the side of ship. Each burst of spanking against the hull seemed to be targeted further down, away from where my cot lay. After a few more bouts of the increasingly violent striking further and further down the hull, I realized what it was doing.
The ladder! Oh, God, the ladder! It seemed as though my realization gave the creature whatever knowledge it lacked for just as my mind cried out in prayer against the monster’s pursuit, I heard the smacking of watery flesh upon those metal rungs. Step after step, a metal clang accompanied by a dull scratching noise, all the while that same repetitive sound of colliding tissue. The scratching, I surmised, stemmed from some spiny claw extensions, like the bone spikes of certain kinds of fish. It was unbearable, this symphony of macabre clatter. Each new noise revealed more horror than the last.
Finally it reached the deck and, with an inarticulate flop, I could hear it's entire body collapse onto the ship's surface. There was a rushing sound as the excess water ran off from its assemblage and back out into the ocean where it belonged. Then began that familiar slap and drag that I had heard the nights previous. I lay there a while, just listening in fear. No more than fifteen minutes after it had shambled on deck it began to rain. This was no soft rain like the night of the creature's first appearance, but nearly a full on gale. The ship swayed about slightly as the waves picked up and the rain grew in sharpness. My dread was almost mitigated by the rain as it may have drowned my ears from the creature's racket above, but it was not so. Ever so quietly, I could hear the shuffle and drag of extrinsic limbs above the wind and storm. I could bear it no longer. I stood up from bed and felt my way through the dark room, forgetting about my phone as a light source. Nearly tripping over the doorway, I floundered out into the hall and quickly into one of the rooms filled with research equipment. It was in here that I knew they kept all manner of tools for examining specimens and in quick time I found the object of my search: an anatomy knife, similar to a scalpel, used to descale and cut through exoskeletons on larger specimens. Still trembling, I began to ascend the stairs out onto the deck, prepared for whatever monstrosity lay in wait. The rain was heavy and stinging, I could barely see in front of me as I stepped forward to face my tormentor.
Looking about, I struggled to peer through the storm, squinting my eyes as they were barraged with the stinging rain. Water pooled at my brow and lips and I was drenched in mere seconds, but nonetheless I continued onward to the far end of the deck where I last heard the dragging sound. The ship swayed sharply to the right and I stumbled over, losing balance and falling prone. The knife clattered out from my hand and nearly slid under the railing and out into the dark waters waiting below. Now that I reflect on this, I am incredibly lucky that I myself did not become lost that night and never return from the Pacific, but at the time I had no thought of this. The only danger to my mind was that horrid thing.
As I attempted to gain a grip and erect myself, I heard a sloshing sound on my left. My senses were bombarded with a horrible stench, similar to the smell in the storage room, but compounded innumerable times over. It was like rotting fish and blood mixed together, the salty spray of a coastal tide rife with decomposing organisms. The water washing past me to run off the ship's edge appeared darker and thicker, forming a gray foam as it rushed along my arms. It was then that the slapping sound called my attention towards the area from whence the sloshing had come. It was faster and with less effort than I had heard it before. The creature was crawling towards me, apparently aided by the lack of friction from the wet deck. For a second my body reacted with useless spastic motions, not aimed at any particular goal, simply intended to get me away from where I was. I managed to coordinate my flailing limbs to drag myself towards the edge where my knife lay in the rain. Sliding along the deck, I managed to get myself to the knife with two sloppy pushes from my arms, all the while kicking and scooting my feet to aid in my backwards motion.
I felt my hand nudge against the knife just as the creature came barely into view. The night was dark and barely any light shone through the clouds from the moon or stars, but I remember with a distinctness only capable when so much adrenaline is pumping through your veins the form of that detestable monster. It had large bulbous eyes and jutting rubbery lips. Its head led straight to its torso, no neck linked the two, just as a fish's body. In front, extending towards me, was a large webbed hand with claws ripping out of its fingers like thin broken bones sticking through flesh. In utter panic, I gripped the knife in my hand with all my strength, partly missing the handle, leading to a large gash on my index finger, and swung the tool down at the beast's hand, cutting a portion of its webbed fingers diagonally from the extremity. Thick black blood flowed from the wound and the rotting smell struck me once again. It emitted a thin screeching sound before grabbing the deck with its other hand and pulling its form over mine. It stared down at me for a while with its soulless eyes of pitch before I struck it once more, this time in the creature's center. Pulling my arm away, the knife stayed behind, embedded in its bony interior. Now utterly defenseless against the creature's mangled claws and teeth, I simply shoved my arms forward to grapple the beast and attempt to thrust it over my head and beyond the boundary of the deck. Still stunned from my attack, the creature gave no resistance as it was heaved across my body and through the gaps in the metal railing.
I heard no splash as it descended into the waves, but I was in no condition to peer over the rails and look to see if it had gone. I stumbled back below deck and stripped in a small closet space and for a while tried to rid my body from the thing's rancid odor. Throughout the rest of the trip, the shuffling sound never came back, although many nights I stayed awake just to be sure. A few of the crew members asked if any of us had gone out in the storm that night as they had heard something, and although I lied and no others had any suspicions against me, from that night onward the captain would give me certain knowing looks, all the while clutching his hand that, the crew explained, he had injured while gutting some fish. Since that excursion into the Pacific, I have never returned to the ocean. Never have I looked back into that featureless expanse of mankind's origins, nor have I ever wished to. Some mysteries belong hidden beneath the waves.
In the summer of 2010 I was completing an undergraduate project in the middle of the Pacific, a research internship. I was majoring in biology and wasn’t sure exactly what field I would go into. At the time I was heavily considering marine biology, so I got to spend four weeks at sea doing absolutely nothing while a couple of actual scientists surveyed the water for different kinds of plankton. Needless to say, it was a horrible experience filled with the mind-numbing boredom that I had previously only been able to attribute to my Bio-chemistry professor. It wasn’t this that made me change my mind about marine biology, to tell you the truth I actually found it kind of neat the few times Dr. Minorsky, the project coordinator, gave me something to do. No, it was what happened in the middle of my four week trip that made me swear to never go near the ocean again so long as I live.
Three other students and I were packed into a small boat along with the research team and crew. None of us knew each other very well. Although we were all there for the same reason, only one of the other students went to the same university as me and even then I don’t think I ever saw him around campus. So, even though I was surrounded by people on this cramped little research vessel to the point of claustrophobia most of the time, I felt pretty alone for those four weeks. The atmosphere on the ship grew increasingly hostile as the tight hallways filled with body heat and people were pushed up against the rusted walls as someone passed to do one thing or another. Most of the rooms on the ship were about the size of closets and when the doors shut it really felt like you had just entered an elevator filled beyond capacity. The area below deck where the other students and I slept was spacious enough compared to the rest of the rooms, but the smell down there was terrible. Our quarter was originally a storage area and while I don’t know what they had stored there before we moved in, it’s odor must have clung to the walls and been absorbed by the floor the way a corpse leaves a scent that, when you let it decay and permeate, simply never leaves. Inside this area were four small cots with itchy blankets and no pillows. Sometimes we would wad up our jackets to use them as cushioning, but more often than not it was so cold at night that not wearing every layer of clothing available to you was insanity. To the left of our sleeping area was a hallway leading into the rooms where the research team had set up and beyond that were the stairs leading up onto the deck. The rooms where the crew and research team slept were to the right, we had no reason nor were we allowed to go in there. So, most of the time we spent the day playing cards or making up games in our cabin along with that horrible smell that we could never quite get used to.
Dr. Minorsky and his team rarely called us in to help out with the project we were there for and when they did it was mostly clerical work, jotting down numbers while given no context as to what they meant. Naturally, we would often get restless and find ways to stay entertained. Mostly I enjoyed going up on deck to watch the waves slowly beat against the side of the ship. Often I would gaze out to the vast nothingness of the ocean and wonder what secrets it held just beneath the surface. This was the ancient birthing place of life, where some strange creature slowly pushed itself up and forward onto land, legs like crutches, and brooded all of terrestrial life into existence. The history of the ocean is the embryonic history of mankind, but I know now that it is a history best left crumbled beneath the passage of time and rolling of waves.
I awoke late one night to the sound of a soft rain. It was a kind of awakening that transitioned me quickly into perfect awareness, as if I was not sleeping at all, but rather had been lying down with my eyes closed and rose to address the call of my name. In fact, for a second I felt as if someone had indeed called my name, but there was only the sound of the light pattering of rain against the deck above. I struggled against the darkness of the room, willing my eyes to see clearly my surroundings, but an absolute darkness had filled the quarter. Being a storage room by intent, there were no accommodations for natural lighting nor could I turn on the one dim overhead light for fear of waking up the other three students. The easiest way to get on the bad side of a teenager or young adult is to interrupt their slumber. Instead, I reached over to turn on a battery operated lamp by the side of my bed (again, since this was supposed to be a storage room, we had no electrical outlets.) Not quite being able to find it, I turned on my phone and tried to use its dull blue light to find the switch, but by the time I had accomplished that I decided I really didn’t need care about whatever it was that awoke me. If somebody wanted my attention, they could call my name again, a little louder this time maybe. Or turn on a light for me. “That would be nice,” I thought, rolling over onto my side to get back to sleep.
Right as I had started to drift off to the sound of the rain, I thought I heard a quiet shuffling sound overhead. Dismissing it as a bird seeking shelter from the rain, I again tried to go back to sleep, but then I heard the sound again a bit louder. It wasn’t exactly a shuffling, it was more like… a slapping sound. I turned my phone back on and started to look about the room. All the others were still asleep; the noise was clearly not loud enough to wake them. I climbed out of bed, making sure to listen closely for the sound again. I stood still to be certain the sound of my own body moving wouldn’t drown it out in case it happened again. When I didn’t hear it for a while, I began to walk towards the hallway leading up on deck. I cannot say why I was so curious, I had heard plenty of sounds novel to this strange new environment: the croaking of the mast while the metal cools, the rumbling against the hull from subsurface currents, the humming and sloshing sound as water hits the vessel. Perhaps it was that this sound was resolutely different from the others. It was organic, uneven.
I neared the hallway and the small drone of electronic equipment filled my ears. It was from the machines the research team was using to process and hold samples. Even as I willed myself to speed up so that I could be clear of the annoying background noise, I felt my body slow to an interminable crawl.
My heartbeat began to pound in my ears, I was filled with apprehension, I was afraid of any number of horrible things that my mind had conjured, but I admit now that my mind at that point could only skim the surface of the truth that lurched above. My body still moving towards the stairs, although at a rate that had begun to be nearly imperceptible, I heard the noise again. Resolute and sound, I heard that slapping and shuffling noise over the drone of machinery and over the beating of my heart, over the unceasing din of a universe teeming with life and chaos, that noise, the noise of a forgotten point in man’s past, the hollow beginnings of humanity – that horrible shambling of wet flesh against the deck struck through to my brain and my soul and caused me shudder violently before swiftly turning my body and attempting to retreat back to my cot. Running blindly, I tried to clear the end of the hallway but when I neared the open doorway of the room with the buzzing machines, my body jolted to a stop as I slammed into a dark figure. As my frame collided with its, my heart sunk to an even deeper level of dread. I was about to scream, but my voice choked up. My mouth simply dropped open in horror, no noise escaping.
“What the hell are you doing over here?” James, one of the other students, looked down towards me, his eyes slanted in irritation. “Stop running around! If you wake me up again, I’ll tell Minorsky that you were up on deck after lights out.”
Instantly relieved that I had not just run into one of the shadow monsters from my imagination, I began to reply with a shy apology, but then his final words sunk in. He had heard the noise above as well. “I wasn’t… you heard that too?”
Quickly dismissing my question as some inane attempt at keeping myself out of trouble, he rolled his eyes and we both returned to sleep.
The next morning I spent the day asking around if anyone had been on deck during the night for any reason. None of the crew had come up for anything and I knew that I was the only one awake in the storage room when I first left my cot. Whatever had been making all that noise was not a person, or at least not a terrestrial one that came with us aboard the ship. I thought of different things that it could have been, just to ease my mind. I settled on a fish that had jumped up onto the ship and had flopped around for a while. Perhaps some of the birds had tried to eat it or carry it away, explaining the shuffling sound in addition to the wet slapping. This explanation, if it held any validity at the time, was shattered when I began to hear the same noises the next night. I awoke in a similar fashion, the same feeling as though I had been awake the whole time. The noise was louder now, and I could hear it much more distinctly. Slapping and dragging, over and over, it seemed to go in circles around the perimeter of the ship. Slap…drag. Slap…drag. Slap…drag. Whatever it was, it couldn’t move very easily on dry surfaces. Remembering the terror of the night before, I did my best to squeeze my eyes shut tight and ignore the horrible sound. While it seemed like it would persist all night, I finally found my way to sleep.
The second morning after I began to hear the sounds, I noticed the captain was not at breakfast. When I asked why, the crew said simply that he was feeling poorly. Minorsky was worried that if his sickness persevered it would affect the research goals as we would have to dock at the nearest island, which at this point was somewhere in the Philippines, I believe. I hoped his sickness worsened. There was only a small amount of shame or guilt in this want. If it meant getting away from this damned ocean, I would have let him puke his guts out and expel his entrails. As long as it would bring dry land away from these waters, I would have been happy. Of course, this did not pan out as wished and to this day I still believe that the captain had at least some small part to do with that horrid shambling monstrosity that plagues my dreams. After that night we saw no more of the good captain at mealtimes or leisure activities, although he insisted that he was well enough to captain the vessel. He checked in on the research team often, something he used to entirely neglect. Even after the entire affair, this behavior remained during the rest of the trip, as if he was expecting them to find… something.
Throughout the day I tried my hardest to find activities that would take my mind away from the coming night, but it was to no avail. I could not stop thinking about those strange sounds and the last night simply bled into the next. I didn’t even attempt to sleep the third night. I simply sat in bed, waiting for the noise to return. After hours of anxiousness and apprehension, I began to think that it would not reappear for a third time. Of course, the universe could never be so kind. Around three in the morning, I heard a first sickening wet slap against the side of the boat. It was a few minutes, or at least it felt so long for me, before I heard a succession of rapid swiping against the side of the boat. It was a sound similar to when a fish swims alongside and lumbers into the ship, its body beating against the hull for a while before it moves on. Only, this was more rapid. It sounded intentional, like it was trying to find something by thrusting a sort of limb or appendage against the side of ship. Each burst of spanking against the hull seemed to be targeted further down, away from where my cot lay. After a few more bouts of the increasingly violent striking further and further down the hull, I realized what it was doing.
The ladder! Oh, God, the ladder! It seemed as though my realization gave the creature whatever knowledge it lacked for just as my mind cried out in prayer against the monster’s pursuit, I heard the smacking of watery flesh upon those metal rungs. Step after step, a metal clang accompanied by a dull scratching noise, all the while that same repetitive sound of colliding tissue. The scratching, I surmised, stemmed from some spiny claw extensions, like the bone spikes of certain kinds of fish. It was unbearable, this symphony of macabre clatter. Each new noise revealed more horror than the last.
Finally it reached the deck and, with an inarticulate flop, I could hear it's entire body collapse onto the ship's surface. There was a rushing sound as the excess water ran off from its assemblage and back out into the ocean where it belonged. Then began that familiar slap and drag that I had heard the nights previous. I lay there a while, just listening in fear. No more than fifteen minutes after it had shambled on deck it began to rain. This was no soft rain like the night of the creature's first appearance, but nearly a full on gale. The ship swayed about slightly as the waves picked up and the rain grew in sharpness. My dread was almost mitigated by the rain as it may have drowned my ears from the creature's racket above, but it was not so. Ever so quietly, I could hear the shuffle and drag of extrinsic limbs above the wind and storm. I could bear it no longer. I stood up from bed and felt my way through the dark room, forgetting about my phone as a light source. Nearly tripping over the doorway, I floundered out into the hall and quickly into one of the rooms filled with research equipment. It was in here that I knew they kept all manner of tools for examining specimens and in quick time I found the object of my search: an anatomy knife, similar to a scalpel, used to descale and cut through exoskeletons on larger specimens. Still trembling, I began to ascend the stairs out onto the deck, prepared for whatever monstrosity lay in wait. The rain was heavy and stinging, I could barely see in front of me as I stepped forward to face my tormentor.
Looking about, I struggled to peer through the storm, squinting my eyes as they were barraged with the stinging rain. Water pooled at my brow and lips and I was drenched in mere seconds, but nonetheless I continued onward to the far end of the deck where I last heard the dragging sound. The ship swayed sharply to the right and I stumbled over, losing balance and falling prone. The knife clattered out from my hand and nearly slid under the railing and out into the dark waters waiting below. Now that I reflect on this, I am incredibly lucky that I myself did not become lost that night and never return from the Pacific, but at the time I had no thought of this. The only danger to my mind was that horrid thing.
As I attempted to gain a grip and erect myself, I heard a sloshing sound on my left. My senses were bombarded with a horrible stench, similar to the smell in the storage room, but compounded innumerable times over. It was like rotting fish and blood mixed together, the salty spray of a coastal tide rife with decomposing organisms. The water washing past me to run off the ship's edge appeared darker and thicker, forming a gray foam as it rushed along my arms. It was then that the slapping sound called my attention towards the area from whence the sloshing had come. It was faster and with less effort than I had heard it before. The creature was crawling towards me, apparently aided by the lack of friction from the wet deck. For a second my body reacted with useless spastic motions, not aimed at any particular goal, simply intended to get me away from where I was. I managed to coordinate my flailing limbs to drag myself towards the edge where my knife lay in the rain. Sliding along the deck, I managed to get myself to the knife with two sloppy pushes from my arms, all the while kicking and scooting my feet to aid in my backwards motion.
I felt my hand nudge against the knife just as the creature came barely into view. The night was dark and barely any light shone through the clouds from the moon or stars, but I remember with a distinctness only capable when so much adrenaline is pumping through your veins the form of that detestable monster. It had large bulbous eyes and jutting rubbery lips. Its head led straight to its torso, no neck linked the two, just as a fish's body. In front, extending towards me, was a large webbed hand with claws ripping out of its fingers like thin broken bones sticking through flesh. In utter panic, I gripped the knife in my hand with all my strength, partly missing the handle, leading to a large gash on my index finger, and swung the tool down at the beast's hand, cutting a portion of its webbed fingers diagonally from the extremity. Thick black blood flowed from the wound and the rotting smell struck me once again. It emitted a thin screeching sound before grabbing the deck with its other hand and pulling its form over mine. It stared down at me for a while with its soulless eyes of pitch before I struck it once more, this time in the creature's center. Pulling my arm away, the knife stayed behind, embedded in its bony interior. Now utterly defenseless against the creature's mangled claws and teeth, I simply shoved my arms forward to grapple the beast and attempt to thrust it over my head and beyond the boundary of the deck. Still stunned from my attack, the creature gave no resistance as it was heaved across my body and through the gaps in the metal railing.
I heard no splash as it descended into the waves, but I was in no condition to peer over the rails and look to see if it had gone. I stumbled back below deck and stripped in a small closet space and for a while tried to rid my body from the thing's rancid odor. Throughout the rest of the trip, the shuffling sound never came back, although many nights I stayed awake just to be sure. A few of the crew members asked if any of us had gone out in the storm that night as they had heard something, and although I lied and no others had any suspicions against me, from that night onward the captain would give me certain knowing looks, all the while clutching his hand that, the crew explained, he had injured while gutting some fish. Since that excursion into the Pacific, I have never returned to the ocean. Never have I looked back into that featureless expanse of mankind's origins, nor have I ever wished to. Some mysteries belong hidden beneath the waves.