"Karl, there's something freakin' huge outside!"
--Me (aka)
Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
The submarine sharply lurches towards starboard, shocking me from my internal reverie. The sub’s shell screeches with the sound of Satan scratching his fingernails down the universe’s chalkboard. Our viewport explodes in a violent fury of phosphorescent fireworks.
With a few a quick clicks, Karl throws the sub’s switches on. As my vision blurs into focus against the sudden influx of retina-scorching light, I resolve a shocking sight smack against the submarine’s porthole: a single eyeball, black like a doll’s and as large as my fist, glaring at me indifferently as three thousand serrated teeth sever the hog’s head like an Italian meatball.
The six-gilled shark has come in for the kill and is pulling the entire submarine down the sandy slope towards its Cthulian home. The saturated sandbags at our feet slide forward, adding acceleration to our unplanned descent. The indicator on our bathyscaphe’s depth gauge digs ever-deeper, indicating the increasing immediacy of our emergency with each dip of its blue needle.
She is in no hurry to finish -- after all, she only feeds upon the flesh of deceased, which is not exactly known to flee upon attack. But with each elongated twist of her enormous head, we are dragged deeper into the darkness. Only the distance of a few hundred feet separates us from our inevitably implosive doom!
In the piercing glare of the strobe lights, I am able to discern the disintegrated debris of what once was a pig. Chunks of serrated shark’s teeth are shed from the six-gill shark's mouth as quickly as we humans lose hair. The mess coalesces into a chunky concoction of eviscerated pork and mangled chicken wire caught in shark’s mouth. Fibrous specks float out from the her signature six gills with each snap of her jaws.
Her colossal eyes nonchalantly cross mine. In this moment of existential carnage I know that she sees me, personally: this alien transgressor invading her abode in our little yellow spacecraft.
The sub shifts swiftly to port as my Turkish companion is slammed against my shoulder. She emits a shrill grunt emoting the fear, pain, and panic of our predicament: that, with each severe shake of the submarine, the she-shark has embedded herself further into our bait trap. Billowy clouds of fine sediment stirred up from the shark’s trashing obscure our vision; even Karl’s superluminous strobes cannot penetrate the the veritable wall of sand suspended the in water column.
To my left, the needle on the depth gauge is rapidly dropping… sixteen hundred feet, sixteen fifty, seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred… and deeper... and deeper...
To my right, my arm burns with the sharp sensation of claws burrowing into my flesh as my companion clutches my arm in a vice grip.
To my back, I hear Karl swearing and rapidly shifting switches as the quad propellers roar into a violent reverse thrust.
To my front, strands of sand and swine spiral around black pit of the the shark’s emotionless eyeball.
With a single snap of her head, she severs the PVC pole from the submarine. Her tail smacks the porthole hard, rocking the submarine into a steady wobble. The ballasts slam the sandy bottom, surrounding the sub a plume of fine sediment like a smoke bomb.
And then it stops.
Shaking and huddled together, we watch as the shark’s slender profile gradually fades into a tenebrous white strip, then vanishes forever into the perpetual shadow of the abyss.
We all sit in silence as we slowly ascend the towering walls of the Cayman Trench, each internally processing the profoundly peculiar circumstances of the previous eight hours.
It all started with a random proposition by Karl:
“I need an extra body on my sub dive tonight. We’re going to try to feed a shark. Want to come?”
It was followed by a random rum-assisted choice by myself:
“Sure, why the hell not?”
It ended with a random encounter: after all, what were the odds that tonight we would actually witness the unprecedented first-time feeding of a deep-sea shark by a submarine? Is all of this just random?, I wonder as the fossilized coral wall from the last Ice Age whizzes past us, Or is any of this random at all?
As the submarine nears six hundred feet of the surface, Karl turns the stereo back on again -- David Bowie this time. My companion and I toss the saturated sand bag back towards the stern at Karl's command, adjusting the buoyancy of the sub so that it enters a rapid ascent.
As the submarine starts to swiftly rise, Karl again kills the lights. Our little tin can spirals towards towards the surface. Like the Millennium Falcon leaping to hyperspace, glowing lines of bioluminescent jellyfish and panicked squid streak past the convex porthole. Against this endless stream of rippling light, I can barely discern the cliffs of coral crashing down upon us as we rocket towards the surface.
We splash through the sea’s surface with a stomach-wrenching bounce. Karl pops open the cockpit hatch. The voluminous humidity of warm Caribbean air permeates the sub. We breath deep, allowing this refreshing wave of fresh oxygen refuel our lungs.
We are surface side. We are safe.
I stare down into that black abyss from whence we just emerged, barely perceiving the dim star-like glimmer of bioluminescent life suspended below. Above, the endless expanse of the Milky Way sparkles against an infinite darkness, beckoning mankind to explore beyond.
Despite the allure of the stars, I know that our final frontier -- at least within my lifetime -- is not above, but below. The surreal space oddities I have witnessed tonight beckon me to return.
And here I am, like Major Tom, stepping through the door.
Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
Photographs courtesy of Lia Barrett, Karl Stanley, and
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