The Pit : Anonymous Accounts

The Tunnel

Her hand reluctantly laid itself on the behemoth, tubular organism. Cathy let out a burst of bubbles, shivering intermittently by the unexpectedly warm sebaceous leather amid the numbing temperature 36,000 ft underwater.

The creature carpeted her field of vision, fading away into further abyss. Cathy finned slowly as she brushed the membranous pipe, following its enormous trace.

The creature's skin occasionally oscillated with deep and low pulsations.  Slime surged and undulated within it, transmitting its festering heat through the tips of her fingers. Startled again by the silent yet vigorous life, Cathy felt a frozen streak skidding down her bowels. An update beeping of personal atmospheric record device was enough to make her jolt.

[Ambient pressure 16,406.8 psi.

Sensory pressure 2,500 psi.

Temperature 1.8° Celsius.

Internal tank volume 7.14 liters remaining.]

"Cathy, what is this?"

Cathy inhaled deeply, intensifying that hollow and dry wheezing sound from the tank. She shuddered as an absolute silence followed the ghostly remains of her breath.

"I don't know. It feels like a... very... gelatinous. It's humongous."

"Oh, it could be a specie of pyrosoma. Colonies of planktonic invertebrate animals called zooids. Can you get closer?"

Cathy focused the lens. Doctor Maasen and his crew saw not tiny organisms in a chain, instead bulging bullae filled with semi-translucent liquid, overspread in trypophobic pattern that covered the whole organism. They were the malignant melanoma, feverish blisters, glistening beads of seething juices. Before Maasen could warn, Cathy pressed lightly on one of the bumps. She suddenly emboldened and poked harder with her fingernail, until it burst into a milky ochre cloud of pus. Had Cathy not put on her atmospheric helmet, it would have crawled into her eyes.

Cathy jerked her hands, coughing spasmodic air into the tank.

"What is it, Cathy?" Maasen's voice was worrisome, but he breathed in before saying so. He held his breath whenever he decided to change his tone just before the words were out.

Two days ago Cathy watched a tape on the screen in the crew members' breakroom. 

"The black garden ant colony feeds on everything- from the wooden structures of your house, to mushrooms that they cultivate- as it survives as a mobile, singular society. But their predators are not always perceivable." Isn't this what they used to play at the center lobby?

An ant climbed onto the flower several hundreds times its size. It scurried up the petals, believing that it had found a large reservoir of sweet honey. The ant bent down, and fell into the flower. 

"But it does not come back out. The ant has fallen into one of the most ferocious carnivorous plants, the fanged pitcher-"

"What are you doing?"

Cathy turned. It was Maasen. 

"I-"

"You-" Maasen cut in, then halted as he began his own sentence.

 "...must be tired. Tomorrow you will create a intermediary report for the mid ocean ridge,"

Cathy knew. He meant her to create it now. She stood up, wishing to stare at him, instead said yes, and turned to the dim hallway. 

She turned to the bleached, spectral hull glowing faintly in dark blueness, the fragile body in which her crew depended on. Even by doing so, she could not stop feeling agitated.

"I'm fine. I just... didn't expect that to happen," Cathy sighed, fogging the concave of her globe.

"Well, we are now approaching the opening of the pyrosoma to extract the fluid, to see if it's not poisonous to your skin. Don't worry, most pyrosomes are harmless; they highly consist of gelatin," said Maasen's partner researcher Benji.

Cathy treaded towards her shelter, pulling the assisting rope, the umbilical cord between her and the world she knew of.

[Ambient pressure 17,132.4 psi.

Sensory pressure 2,550 psi.

Temperature 38.6° Celsius.

Internal tank volume 5.63 liters remaining.]

Cathy was reintroduced into the gaping maw of the submarine. As the brine drained out, a strange, inauspicious vision swept over her. The membranous entrance of the tunnel in which the hull slid through was deliberately mending itself. It gradually regenerated into a closure in delicate fractal pattern like a spider looming its web. Lost in the marvelous vista of evolution, Cathy fathomed the happening too lately and had to hastily scamper to others in the ship. The exit was no longer existent.

"Don't worry, pyrosomes have several closures and openings; really depends on how the zooids link with each other," Benji smiled assuringly, patting her shoulder.

But Cathy didn't. "Isn't it unusual that the zooids connected so quickly,"

"We're not going to get trapped, so look at that in front for now," Maasen pointed at the front porthole with his chin.

There was a round, gleaming globe, a cold fire. Glinting away in fading distance. 

"We think it might be another one of us, I mean, a crew like us. Not many sea animals can emit light in such radiance and size from this far. It must be from a submarine porthole," said Maasen.

Cathy, whose distress only kept growing, turned her hand. Her fingers, irritated by the unknown fluid, was flashing red.

"How about this?"

She brought it to her nose, and when she did, Cathy had to swallow her scream. Noisome and acrid, terribly sour. Spontaneously she imagined a swamp engulfing her, seeping through her pores and voraciously corroding into her bones. 

"Yes, about that... We collected a sample from the internal bullae of this organism. It is highly concentrated hydrochloric acid."

Maasen went on about the unexpected findings they can report to the upper world. Cathy did not listen. She saw herself stepping into an endless vertigo. I am dreaming, she thought, dream where her own figure escaped her fingers and into the light. 

The hull lurched towards the light. But it was not advancing by its own. It was being driven helplessly through peristaltic contractions of viscous, mollusk flesh, surging torrent of sizzling gastric juices that gnawed away the shining iron plate, and left malodorous debris of rotting sharks. A living organism designed as the phantasmal labyrinth for smoldering carcasses. 

When Cathy at last managed to veer her view to Maasen and Benji, she saw in them the primal fear human civilization have been long overlooked. They have discovered for themselves a terrifying enlightenment, an irreversible escape from the blissful oblivion: the fear of a prey.

And Cathy realized: they fell.

Their eyes were now fixed to those of the big-mouthed creature. A hundred identical moon glared at them with slick paleness, bulging with gangrenous gluttony and lust, inviting its prey into its eternally unblinking darkness.