thethemeis: An Impulse
theauthoris: Gary Sykes-Blythe
Down, deep in the dark, is where the world is cold and ancient and the animals are more than monsters. Pasty white things are there, translucent teeth that glow with nacreous inner light and ghostly, nightmarish leeching creatures that suck the good from the bodies of long dead victims of time and current. Beings with gleaming black saucer eyes that have never seen the sun’s rays, never heard the wind or known the solid sand at the bottom of the endless, sunless night of the deep sea, lurk to feast on the weak and floating.
Great circus rays sweep majestically through the columns of water and cold and silence. They fly through the endless night, hoovering the swimming things with spines and crunchy shells that hang, unknowing, waiting for death. In huge flights they cruise the depths and surf the great currents that wind around the world and disturbing leaf-blown clouds of indolent jellyfish that flash irritation, or lust, or longing.
Deep, deep in the black, where the sunless night rolls without incident to life’s end, the boneless bodies bend and deform under the weight of all of the water in the sea; where the all-night grows so cold that water would freeze, if it only had the space to do it. Small flashes of gleaming, tiny filament hairs along the outer edges of combs and bowls and jellied shapes uncountable that flock together in the dense night to drift and tumble.
Yet deeper, down to the tallest tips of the spires of the deep-sea floor, where the monstrous many jointed things crawl and scurry. The insect-like beings, not crabs nor even lice, but some greater ancestor’s declined offspring that fell from the youth and glory of the world, clinging to the towers of rock and slime. Busily they clean the skin of the towers of particles of dead flesh, scraps of glowing worms and the waste of the above-place. There are no bones here, no spines of calcified scaffolding to hang meat on, just the sludgy soup of ooze that clings to the spires in the night.
Deeper. Near the bottom now. The bases of the spires reveal further sub-columns. Mysterious and warm, the energy of the raw Earth spills into the sea here in choking, boiling pseudo-smoke. Bacteria, worms and half-cooked shrimp strut amongst the shimmering and torrid fluid, where nutrients still full of mineral flavour sustain diversity so far, far away from the sun and the air and the days and time.
Somewhere, perhaps far or near it is difficult to judge, there is massive movement. The sounds of concrete clicks of a hideous clipping, scything beak bounce around the spires from deep inside. The thing ruminates and considers. It has a deep, alien intelligence that would embarrass Cthulu and shame Kraken, Scylla and Charybdis. The water shakes and heaves as great pressure waves rock and pulse through the dark. The rhythmic rush of water waxes rapidly; the sensitive and delicate boneless life flinches away as it sweeps overhead or underneath. Hard waves of current, given the power to smash by the colossal force of the movement, crack and splinter the tiny minds of the blind and thoughtless life. The rush passes. Were there eyes that could see, those brave enough to glance toward the thing would see some darker shadow, longer than the night and trailing hideous fingers behind.
***
The whale knows all things as he falls. He sees all with his voice and knows their density and direction with his ears and in his bones. He dismisses them idly as unworthy of his attention and chases the thing, altering the angle of his descent to glide silently from above onto the beast. The ribs of the whale are crushed, but the feeling is not at all of pain. It is simply sensation. The gases that would normally hold the space were pushed, much further towards the surface, into the blood of the whale.
Head down, the whale descends like a fallen star in the mythic sky above. He falls elegantly and smoothly, as loud as time and as hungry.
The whale searches in the night as he faces down into the gloom. It has taken just five minutes to plunge the height of the ocean, through the saline layers of sterile sea and drifting sheets of empty, useless life. He hunts. He knows it has been here. He can sense the ammonia in the water of its blood. He can see the shape of its wake in the water with his voice. He sees the blooms of disturbed water that the thing uses to push, to impel, to breathe and to fly. The pulsed clouds of disturbed water stank of ink and unclean things that have never breathed the air. Somewhere in the tightly focussed hunting brain of the whale there was a sense of excitement; a delicate flare of pleasure clouds the mind of the whale. The whale flexes for the first time in minutes and the sensation of crushing shifts slightly with the muscle change. The mighty tail sweeps once up and then immediately down and the whale surges forward, launching the soft bodies away into the black behind him. Across the brain of the whale there is only patient, icy calm. He follows the ammonia stink and the wake of the thing.
The whale pursues the thing for some minutes through towers and chimneys of rock and sludge. As he sweeps his voice across the sea, he sees the outline of the hard, the solid and the tangible as well as the ephemeral and delicate. His brain notes with vague interest a cluster of bones that recline across the seabed. A cheerful whale skull, like ancient sculpture, is a definite and fixed point in a void without solidity or landmarks. The whale does not feel sadness as he piston-hard pumps his tail, each sweep accelerating and stirring thick cloudy soup for arthropods, bacteria and yet more bizarre life. He jinks like a motorcyclist through the high architecture of the seabed and pursues the thing always, dogged like a wolf and patient as a snake. The gap closes slowly, so slowly, but the whale has time. By some sense he knows that he has breath enough.
***
The thing sweeps gigantic, meter-wide eyes into the dark. ‘It’ is female. She feels that something is not at all correct. She is the queen of the boneless beings in the night. She knows there is no force in this ocean that could match her speed, her strength or her cunning. She clenches anew the aperture that pushes her body through the sea. A colossal valve, the size of a car, heaves water through a vast cavity into her body and out again with a gigantic pulsing force that surges her through the water, only to draw in again and surge anew. Rhythmic and powerful she cruises along the seabed like a vast torpedo. Smaller squid and the mutant-horror fish that live at such depth scurry from her dim sight. She does not slow as magnificent, fleshy tentacles like the trunks of trees delicately pluck at morsels of food, waste and foetid matter that she tastes with her fingertips. Were it light enough to see, she would be seen to shimmer and glow, not with light, but some other thing that bulged from her body. Her mottled colours, so many unseen shades and hues, communicate her sexual power and her anger. She sings in colour all along her body, first pleasure with food, then, suddenly, anger. That feeling again: an intangible sense of wrong, but much more distinct now.
She felt it again much sooner the next time, too. Like a shudder, but from somewhere outside. A tangible vibration that shivered through her boneless, jelly body.
***
The whale pushes his voice out again and again. He’s sure he can sense the shape, but it is too indistinct. So much like the water, so soft and pointless, and delicious. His steady calm heartbeat picks up by a beat or two a minute. In his excitement he flexes harder and faster into the endless night. He can almost sense the thing. So close...
***
The thing in its dark deep and ancient mind felt something familiar from the past. Her vast, attuned brain flickered recollection and the vibrant sensory organs on either side of her head, massively disproportional to her body. She felt uneasy and accelerated the pulsing and fled. The giant of the seas and monster of the deep was afraid. The feeling swept over again, the shudder, so much more intense now. It raked along her length like a sonic harpoon.
Sonic.
Sound.
Harpoon.
The steady slow mind of the squid began to form connections and links; without thought she accelerated further still. The opening in her body throbbing and pulsing to impel the shape through the water with elegant, efficient jet propulsion. She knows there is a predator and she feels the unfamiliar sting of fear again. This is unusual. She is the queen of the boneless things and there should be no challenge to her midnight majesty. The sound is growing all the time until her mind is full of it. Even without ears or bones she feels it deep and hears it all across her brain. Her skin pulses red, then violet, then white, then red in a hostile and invisible display. She is chased by the fearsome sounds into the night.
***
The whale quickens his pulses of sound, now trying to use them as much as a weapon, a whip to harry his prey as he chases. He arches his back to change the angle of approach and swoops through the dense night. His jaw now opens and closes rhythmically in his urgency. Clack; clack. He attacks with the cannon of his voice again and again, causing the thing to turn left, and now right, as it is driven in flight. It knows the whale is coming, all ambush pretence abandoned he closes for the kill.
As he closes behind the squid, he turns hard to the right and then cuts back to the left. The squid with an eye so gigantic that it dimly perceives even down in the gloom, sees the flashing white of the whale teeth far too late.
The whale’s gigantic snapping mouth clamps onto the squid just a few metres behind it’s gigantic staring eye. The response is sudden and dramatic. A violent shuddering, thrashing struggle begins as the whale slashes and crushes using his teeth and bones and strength whilst the squid rakes at the flesh of the whale’s underside and claws at his eye and blowhole. They embrace in a death grip and twist and turn as they sink. Ink blossoms in submarine fountains from the battling masses.
Blood bursts into the water, perhaps also more ink, and the whale shrieks. It could be rage or pain or both. He thrashes his head from side to side as he uses his teeth to rasp away the quivering, greasy skin of the squid. Blood, ammonia and bitterness tasting fluid floods the sea around and a sudden cloud of mites, worms and bottom feeding monstrosities swarm around to seize the richly flavoured blood, ink and waste.
***
The queen of the boneless things squirms horribly in her mortal agony. For the first time she feels the solid, hard teeth of a surface predator. For the first time she feels the strength of the endoskeleton and the muscle and vigour of the warm, air-breathing world. She fights for her life, she wraps her arms around the whale in a loving embrace and claws and wrenches and rends his flesh. Some part of her mind knows that the whale cannot stay underwater for long, that it is a stranger and unwelcome so far down, but she feels her strength wane.
She pushes hard with the jet inside her body and tries to pulse away to safety. Dextrously she scratches and rakes with all of her limbs at once. She gouges a deep gash in some part of the whale that she can reach with her beak, but when she tastes the blood she knows the wound will not be enough.
Enraged, the whale thrashes and writhes all the more. The water all around them churns and swirls as the whale shifts his grip with his teeth. Now, the rows of hard teeth are right over the eyes of the squid. Ink jets all around to turn the water yet darker and the whale tastes it. Deep inside, the squid feels the vibration as the whale shrieks and calls in triumph and glee. He crushes down hard on the turgid mass of the great eye of the squid. He increases the pressure, again, again, again. Tentacles whip and tear at his skin, but he grips harder with his jaws.
Pop.
***
He feels her body quiver, a last gasp of ejected ink and then she relaxes with what would be a sigh on the surface. Her great bulging propeller-pulse generator fell slack. She is just a tube of meat to him. He chomps through her body now and swallows gigantic bites whole.
He slowly begins to swim upward, relaxed, content and happy. He looks upward to the lesser dark and thinks of breath.
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