I still fucking hate LJ cuts.
You talk about the ocean like we don't know what's down there. That's bullshit. We know exactly what's down there. The problem is, the people who know won't talk about it. Partially because no one would believe them, partially because they don't believe it themselves. But mostly, it's because they've all gone stark raving mad.
A few people have managed to keep their sanity. But those people never actually saw half of what went on down there. They might have heard some things, or read some theses, but actually see the shit that lurked down there? No.
Lovecraft was one of those bastards. And he got most of the important details right. But the specifics he screwed up. His Old Gods aren't waiting for anything, they aren't sleeping, they aren't even aware we exist. They're down there, alive and awake. And they're terrible beasts. The only reason we're alive now is because they don't know we're up here. They're so content down in the dark lairs that they don't even think to go up. But after what happened down there? They know about us now. They have to. I mean, they devoured so many of us they can't ignore the new taste.
Eventually, when they realize that all the little pink food is gone, they're going to start looking for us. You might be thinking that they won't bother with something as small as us. We thought the same thing.
A handful of us survived the initial attack. We held out in the deepest part of the base, we kept everything to a minimum, no lights, no sound, only the air recycler and pressure normalizer. It wasn't enough. We thought if we avoided them, left them alone, they'd go away. They'd go back to eating whatever crazy shit they were eating before. We were horribly wrong.
At first it was quiet. It always is in these situations isn't it? And to be fair that wasn't the scary part. We'd gotten use to silence. That deep underwater you don't hear the base creak or groan. Hearing that normally meant something was weakening and we were going to die. That deep underwater, the base structure was at its best.
But when you're waiting to die. Surrounded by other people expecting to die, silence is terrifying. And of course, the giant bastards that lived in that hellhole didn't make any noise either. When everything is blind, the only way to hunt is by sound. The predators got real good at keeping quiet.
When it came back there was no warning. Some of us were asleep, some of us were eating. Most, however, were sobbing softly. We can't tell you how long it had been since the first attack. With nothing left on, we didn't really have any way of telling time. Watches were pretty much useless in the deep. We actually operated on 28 hour days, it led to more efficiency.
But were not here to talk about our day to day routines. I was telling you about how it all ended.
When the second attack came we were unprepared. We thought that we'd be able to do something, but obviously there was nothing we could do. The second attack was worse, in many ways, than the first. The first attack was random. It came from nowhere and left us disorganized and confused.
But this time? It was like a hunt. It knew we were there, and it knew we tasted good. This time, it was on a mission.
It all happened so quickly. The sirens went off, bathing everything in flashes of red light. And the sound, after so much silence, was unbearable. We all moved into the emergency tunnels. Massive reinforced pipelines that connected various parts of the station. Turns out they weren't designed with the expectation of some unholy abomination trying to break into it. We lost half of the survivors to that attack. The fucking beast had apparently attacked the opposite end of the base hoping to lure us into the tunnel. Once we were in there it bit into the concrete, shredding all the steel and stone that protected us. A few of us were fortunate enough to be close enough to the opposite end. A few of us managed to get into the security room and slam the hatch closed.
A few caught a glimpse of the beast.
They all went insane.
By the end of it, we'd been attacked at least a half dozen times. We tried to stay in the security room when it attacked, hoping to not give in to its plan. Whenever we did this it would attack the room itself, forcing us to run.
Our numbers were shrinking rapidly, each time us survivors were cutting it close in getting to the hatch. After the third attack I couldn't help but think it was toying us. But that wasn't possible, it was simply a predator right? It just wanted to eat, it couldn't think could it?
Eventually, after untold hours of this, fatigue and terror began to take their toll. At this point there was only a handful of us left. Mostly men, all fit but exhausted. We decided there was no point in keeping quiet any longer, the beast obviously knew where we were. In our inspection of our temporary haven, I stumbled across a map. It had originally been framed and mounted on the wall, but with the attacks it had fallen to the ground.
It seems that the next security room was one with micosubs. If we were ever going to escape that would be our final staging point.
We made it into the room fairly easily. I had explained the situation to the rest of the survivors and I'm guessing the hope of escape gave them a burst of energy because this time, we didn't lose anyone in the tunnels.
I think that pissed off the behemoth. We had just gotten the hatch locked when all hell broke loose. We heard the sounds of the base being ripped apart. At first we thought it was provoking us again since it hadn't gotten a snack out of that last run. But when we weren't going to enter the tunnels again, we were leaving.
We had everything ready to go when the hatches on both ends of the security room blew out and water started flooding in. Whatever the fuck we did had seriously pissed it off and it wasn't playing around anymore. It didn't want us running, it wanted us dead.
We launched the minisubs and threw on the lights. At this point there was no sense in trying to hide. We needed to haul ass to the surface and we needed to be able to see.
It turns out the beast hadn't been eating anything. As we jetted towards the surface we plowed through a mass of bodies. All of them with faces swollen and distorted in terror. After all we had seen, this proved to be too much for some. I watched as other minisubs stopped moving. I watched as the mechanical arms reached out to move bodies aside.
They were seeing members of their family in that pile. I had forgotten how long the base had been down there. Long enough that people had started families. I wasn't one of these people, and rather than linger and risk getting us all killed I pushed onward.
I tried not to look back as I hard the sounds of steel grinding. The other people on the sub with me looked back and before long were piled on the floor sobbing and muttering nonsense.
I couldn't make out what they were saying. It was too ridiculous to be true. It couldn't be real. If it was it meant that whatever the hell we were running from had been playing with us the entire time. Whatever horror we were leaving behind could wipe out our entire species on its own. If what my basemates were saying were true...
the beast was POPPING the minisubs...
with its fingers.
I looked back as the jet carried us away from the base. I know I shouldn't have, but I couldn't help myself.
All I saw back there was darkness. Just the same inky black that surrounded the base. The longer I watched, the more my eyes adjusted. I could see the faint glow that encircled the base. The perimeter lights. We were moving quickly now, and were far away. I could see the entire ring of the base, it was huge. I remember someone telling me it was a mile in diameter.
As we continued away the base finally succumbed to the beasts attacks and imploded, the built up pressure finally escaping from the confines of the steel and concrete. The lights fizzled out before shorting out blowing the base to hell. The electric lines must've conducted through the water and met with built gas. Or a thousand other things. The hell if I know. I just know that a building a mile across blew up.
And then I saw it.
The short lived flames illuminated the beast. In the darkness all I could make out was it's outline. I had imagined the thing to be huge, but nothing could prepare me for the sheer scale of the beast. From head to tail the thing was at least as big as the base. It was no wonder it could attack one end of the base and be at the tunnels so quickly, it was huge.
As the fire died down it turned it it's massive head towards our sub. It was beyond words. There was no way to describe the hellspawn I was looking at. It raised one of it's arms. In its hand was a small sphere, metallic and... oh god, it was a minisub. The same as the one I was in with the other 11 survivors I got on.
It's held the sub between a finger and thumb and squeezed, effectively popping the sub. I saw air bubble out from within and I could almost hear the snuffed screams of the survivors inside.
I lost my mind then. I had to. Because if what happened next is real, there is simply no hope for humanity. There is no hope for life. All that awaits us is the worst kind of death.
It looked at our sub. It looked through the port window I stood at. It looked into my soul. It's blind yellowed eye looked at me. In that moment I saw into this beasts past. I saw it's birth from the ether. It had not father or mother. For as long as it could remember it had always been. It had lurked in the depths of our ocean for eons, older than our race and wiser than our collective species. Nothing we could muster against this beast would hurt it. Its dreams alone were more than anything humanity could hope to achieve.
It turned from me then, leaving me reeling. I had snatched a glimpse of the future in its eyes too. And what I saw there didn't make sense. Fragmented images of darkness and death clashed with an ungraspable idea of nothingness. Its all but impossible to to explain. If you took void, and took it away from itself... this is what this beast saw in our future.
It lumbered away, slowly to my perspective. The fires of the base were almost gone now, the glow just enough to illuminate as the beast laid a monstrous hand on the ground...
...and hope into the darkness.
It had come to us from a place even deeper. And we thought we had built our base on the bottom of the ocean floor.
We were wrong.