This is a true story...
“If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m staring into the jagged maw of a prehistoric pillbug as its three-inch mandibles rend the hog’s severed head into sinewy stripes of bacon and brains. Karl claims it’s called a giant isopod, but this meter-long monstrosity might as well be dubbed “Hell’s Cockroach” given the manner in which it methodically crunches through poor Piglet.
Semi-translucent corkscrews of spaghetti worms drill their way through the swine’s skull, popping volcanic tracts through its empty eyes holes. A particularly large worm burrows into the pig’s lower jaw; hundreds of white tentacles fringing the worm’s grotesque head erupt out the pig's mouth, sprawling like sentient snot strands in the surrounding water column.
Nearby squats a neon-red pair of aptly-named Squat Lobsters. They dance around each other like fencers duelling along the hog’s mutilated snout, their oversized pincers desperately grasping porcine morsels from the turbulent snowstorm of fleshy filaments. Yet another one of the clumsy creations concocted along evolution’s slow and sloppy path, these creatures sport comically oversized lobsters’ tail stapled upon a scrawny shrimp’s torso.
This horrific vision of an alien menagerie engaged in an eternal quarrel is rendered even more grotesque bathed beneath the dim red glow of our landing site. At this depth, animal life has never evolved the ability to perceive the color red -- after all, red wavelengths are completely absorbed within the first thirty feet of penetrating the ocean’s surface. Most of the creatures are red-hued themselves, for under the impenetrable darkness enveloping the ocean’s Bathypelagic Zone, red is the new black-- that is, if you’re red, you’re as good as invisible.
Our submarine is painted with a garish yellow that one would expect from a Beatles cartoon, yet, under the faint crimson glow, everything becomes a muted contrast of white on black. Karl has switched over to red lights in order to lure these Lovecraftian creatures closer to our submarine. At this depth, our array of strobes are likely the first, last, and only light source these aquatic abominations will ever witness in their entire existence. Whom among their species will believe Izzy the Isopod when he tells them of the glowing UFO that fed him this miraculous meat these strange surface-siders know as “bacon”? It would be like a wasted Iowan stumbling back into the local pub ranting about alien abductions and anal probes: all eye rolls and rapidly vacated bar stools.
Even in the clear conditions of the Caribbean sea, all plant life ceases approximately three hundred feet from the surface due to the absorption of the green wavelength of light, the vital component to photosynthesis. Beyond this depth, nearly every creature, no matter how horrific, is technically a member of the animal kingdom. In this endless expanse of eternal darkness, their food falls as a slow and steady snowfall of detritus from the surface. Our terrestrial decay literally sprinkles the mana of life for these phantasmagoric partisans of Neptune’s netherworld.
The creatures I have witnessed within the last few hours would be considered extraterrestrials by the Average Joe. The Average Joe, I remind myself, who lives only a quarter mile away. A quarter mile, that is, straight up.
I’m looking at the faint outline of the dial on the depth gauge to my left. I can barely distinguish the thin needle hovering just past a glowing four-digit number. I wipe the condensation from the dial’s glass face and confirm that yes, I am in fact one thousand five hundred feet underwater in a homemade submarine.
All that separates me from the organ-shattering implosion of over 650 lbs per square inch of pressure is the following:
-- A three-inch thick convex glass dome scavenged from a Vietnam-era bomber
-- The supposed engineering genius of an eccentric self-taught inventor
-- A metric shit ton of faith
To my right, my companion nods in and out of consciousness. The alien meat orgy transpiring a mere meter from our seats is old news to her by now. We have been down here for six hours already, plenty of time for the submarine’s internal temperature to plummet causing the tropical surface-side air to condense into an uncomfortably chilly dampness. On the other side of the glass, the seawater is actually below freezing -- it only maintains its liquid form due to the immense pressure overhead coupled with the salinity of sea.
“Is zeet here yet?” my companion mutters in her thick Turkish accent from beneath a stack of mildewy sheets. “Not yet,” I reply wearily.
We’re not sitting on the bottom of the ocean this long just to watch these deep-sea crustaceans devour a pig. No, this decapitated Wilbur serves a greater and far more outlandish purpose: we are attempting to directly “hand feed” a prehistoric six-gilled shark as if this were Lord Cthulhu’s personal petting zoo.
For the last few hours, one of these living leviathans has flirted around the outskirts of the submarine’s strobes, cautiously crossing the edge of the light zone every thirty minutes or so. As a peak example of a primaeval predator, the six-gilled shark is notable for being the last remaining remnant of a long-since aborted branch of evolution, as all other known species of sharks only have five gills. In exchange for an extra gill, this species has ditched the signature dorsal fin associated with sharks, for there’s no need to play Jaws when you never venture closer than six hundred feet from the surface.
Karl estimates that the specimen circling us is a fifteen-foot-long female. Judging by the slight ovoviviparous distension of her stomach, she is currently gestating a couple dozen clones of herself. She moves without any sense of urgency -- after all, most of her meals consist of creatures long since dead, and with her massive size she faces no serious threat of predation.
And so here’s the gist of the mad proposition which has landed me over a quarter-mile underwater: yesterday Karl bought a hogshead off a local farmer, strapped it the front of his homemade submarine with a clever combination of PVC and chicken wire, and set out to feed a prehistoric shark in its natural environment.
And here’s the kicker: somehow, after a few shots of Flor de Caña rum, I became convinced that going along with him was actually a good idea...
TO BE CONTINUED...
Photographs courtesy of Lia Barrett, Karl Stanley, and
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