Probably…probably just the wolf-things, right?

Even as she had the thought, Lucy knew it was wrong. Whatever had done this to the spike bacterium had been far bigger than that. The flesh was rent and torn, leaving flaps of its outer membrane waving in the current.

The corpse was freshly killed, with cytoplasm still dripping out in great messy globs.

Suddenly the tingling in Lucy’s cilia turned to dread, cold and complete.

A memory rose up in her mind, a moment of terror she’d experienced as a child on a family vacation to the ocean. Her parents had splurged on a boat trip to go deep sea fishing. She hadn’t been much interested in the fishing, and had begged her parents just to let her get in the water and swim for a while. During lunch when no one had lines in the water she and her dad had strapped on their life vests and hopped in.

Her mom had very responsibly already been wearing her life vest, and stayed on the boat.

As soon as Lucy’s feet hit the water, she’d begun to feel uneasy. It had been cold. Far, far colder than she’d expected or ever experienced. But she had begged all morning to be allowed to swim, and she was determined to enjoy it.

Her dad chatted to her as they treaded water. Lucy couldn’t remember now what he’d been saying, but at some point he had casually dipped his head into the water and come back up, slicking his hair back with a hand and grinning. Then they kept chatting and joking, and Lucy forgot her feeling of unease.

Just when mom called it time to come back to the boat, Lucy dipped her own head into the water. She wasn’t sure why her dad had done it, but he had, so it must have been something worth doing. Dunking down below the surface, she felt the chill across her body as the last of the sun’s warmth fled.

Her mistake had been opening her eyes.

It had been a bright spring day, seagulls cawing and sunlight shining through the breeze. Underwater, however, things were different.

The salt stung her eyes with a fierce pain, blurring her vision. Even when she blinked away the pain enough to see, there had been nothing below her. Nothing.

For a moment of wild vertigo she felt like she was upside down and staring up at the darkening sky. Except the sky never got that dark.

It seemed the only thing accomplished by the presence of the light above was to illuminate the vastness and depth of the darkness below. Shafts of sunbeams stabbed down into the murky deep, illuminating the plains of empty space beneath her dangling feet. There was nothing there but darkness and whatever lurked within. Her mind shaped it into the looming forms of monsters just out of sight.

Lucy’s legs had suddenly tingled madly as images flashed through her mind of tentacles rising up from below where she couldn’t see, of shark jaws with a hundred teeth latching on to her legs from below. No matter how hard she looked around herself, it always felt like there was something just behind her, like she’d turned off the lights and was running up the dark basement stairs. When she had to come up for air and was thrust up into the air and sunlight above, the sensation grew even worse as she couldn’t see if anything really was coming toward her.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Lucy’s body froze up, and before she could yell for help she had sucked in a mouthful of cold salt water. If her mom hadn’t noticed something was wrong and shouted for her dad to turn around, she had been sure she would have drowned, her body floating slowly downward into the cold darkness like a tiny mote of dust.

In the terror of the moment, she had forgotten all about the life-vest, about her father swimming just in front of her.

When they’d gotten her safely into the boat and asked what happened, she been unable to explain what had happened. The sensation of it had barely left her body, but the words wouldn’t form in her mind to give the experience shape.

She had been ten. Nothing had actually happened. It was sunny out and she’d been wearing a life vest. It had been one of the scariest moments of her life.

Later, when the boat was heading back towards shore and they were in a shallow, sunnier portion of the ocean, Lucy’s parents had gently encouraged her to try swimming in the water again. She had reluctantly agreed, holding on for dear life with a parent on either side of her.

The worst part was, there really had been something down there that time.

It was a conning tower, her father had assured her later, not a building. But in Lucy’s mind the pale spire reaching up from the depths had looked like nothing so much as the antennae of a skyscraper, the tallest point of a building whose base nestled somewhere in the unseen ocean floor below.

The captain of the boat had a tradition of visiting a certain shipwreck on the way back in to shore, apparently, and Lucy’s parents had missed the memo.

It had been slightly scarring, Lucy felt, to face her fears and brave the cold water once more only to be horrified anew, her indistinct fears from earlier given shape after all. For a long time after, it had seemed like a strange trick played on her, and the dead city she imagined below lingered in her mind throughout her teens.

She’d forgotten about it until now. Until the tingling dread she felt in her cilia recalled the horror and nightmares from that sunny day.

There had been something down there after all. Her fears had been right.

Lucy didn’t realize how long she’d been staring at the corpse until her cilia picked up the small vibrations that heralded an explosion from below, and she jerked back to reality. For a moment her mind panicked completely as she realized she was in the place of her childhood terror, miles below the surface.

But there was light nearby, and suddenly Lucy needed it like she’d needed air as a human. It felt like it was the only thing nearby that could save her, like her father’s arms pulling her up and out of the terror and cold.

As she got closer to the light though, her mood darkened. Without photoreceptors or nerve cells, she couldn’t actually see the light. Couldn’t feel its touch on her skin.

Her memory, as it always did, reminded her of who she was. The picture wasn’t always pretty.

A thought prickled her mind, cold and piercing.

Scared children grow up to be scared adults.

She was scared now, that was for certain. She could feel the icy fingers of panic threatening to pull her under completely.

Lucy brought herself back to her current situation, dragging her attention by force. The water was trembling violently now. There were bigger and badder things lurking in the deep, and she had a long way to go if she wanted to stand a chance against them. If she wanted to continue moving forward, she needed to act now.

As the eruption started to build in earnest, Lucy moved.

She pushed herself forward with all her strength. It would have been a microscopic distance to a larger creature, but to her it was like running a full sprint race. The tunnel flashed by, her cilia blurring as they swirled her through the water.

Just to the light, she thought, as the water around her began to warm and the once-delicious scent of sulfur began to overpower her senses. If I can just get to the light, then I’ll—

She would what? Unless the cave opening below curved in some truly creative ways, she wouldn’t have time to get far enough into it to actually avoid the blast. If she could make it there in the first place.

Even before bubbles started to blow past her, pushing pieces of the torn corpse apart and up, Lucy knew she would be too late. She had waited too long, fighting the current and dredging up dark memories. But now the blast was building in earnest, and the flow of the current increased with every passing moment.

Even with her cilia improving her ability, she wasn’t going to make it to the light.