"Traditions. Our survival, as a species, depends entirely on our collective behavior. Traditions are collections of behavior that time has proven are good for our species survival." Mr. Hisomeru told me before he ate some of the raw seafood between us.
I stared at him until my eyes burned. Meg and her mother were still in the bathroom. The whole restaurant seemed to be watching us.
I felt like that moment was the crossroad of my life. If I had gotten up and dropped my napkin and left, then nothing would have changed. I realized I could go back to school and leave Meg with her parents, and we would not get married. It would all be over.
"You do not approve of me, because I am not like you?" I asked him. I heard myself speaking, unsure how I had the boldness to speak so plainly to him. Perhaps it was the realization that I could walk away or else he would make me walk away. I wasn't going to marry his daughter; Mr. Hisomeru was a powerful man and he had said 'no'.
Except he hadn't actually said 'no' yet. I felt like he had, but he hadn't. He had something on his mind. He wanted to confide something deep and dark and horrible in me. He saw me very differently than I thought he did, in that moment, in the restaurant.
"Sushi is uncooked fish." He seemed to be ruminating something else while he spoke. I attempted to engage while some caprice of frustration made my choice of words facetious sounding:
"Sushi is half-assed and homophobic. The Red Hot Chili Peppers say: 'I like the sushi 'cause it's never touched a frying pan' and that's that." I snapped.
Mr. Hisomeru slowly raised one eyebrow and sipped his water. He cleared his throat, a satisfied 'ah'. He looked intently at me and spoke:
"You remind me of someone I have learned to fear and respect. You are defiant and a little crazy - inspired. An artist - no doubt." Mr. Hisomeru spoke carefully to articulate himself with precision in his third language of English. "And I like you very much. I understand my daughter's passion. I am not angry with you about the pregnancy. I am looking forward to having you for a son, David." Mr. Hisomeru sounded sincere and strangely so, after my little outburst.
"Then what is it? What is this?" I gestured at his demeanor, his coldness, his distance. Mr. Hisomeru had calculatedly put me down since we had met an hour earlier and relentlessly observed me, as though he were inspecting me for flaws and finding them in abundance.
"I need your help. I have searched for someone like you and my greater quest is at a standstill. I find it ironic that I did not consider the man Meg described as anything but a reflection. Yet here you are: perfect. I do not know what to think or say. I feel embarrassed that I have so much to say to you and I am so impatient to get to know you. I am proud of Meg and I am...I am...I am proud of you." Mr. Hisomeru was not bothered by my insolence. He contradicted himself by telling me that his real feelings were positive. I felt my face go red and hot. I did not know how to take his sudden departure from his formalized degradations.
"I misunderstood you." I said quietly to him.
"Don't." Mr. Hisomeru said sternly. "I was precisely like you are - when I was a student. I also found myself distracted and my studies halted by finding a woman that I loved as dearly as you love Meg. I also had the same initial goal of finding the last great secret of this world. I also knew where to look. Most of all, you are just like me, you do not know how to apologize."
"I was going to marry her despite you." I admitted. "I knew I should go, but I couldn't."
"I know." Mr. Hisomeru had a strange, almost imperceptible smile. "You do not know when it is time to give up, you do not realize when you are caught, trapped."
"What is your greater quest?" I asked him.
"To my business partners I am a happily married fisherman with one child: a grown daughter. I have humbly elevated myself to the owner of a small fleet and a facility where we now attempt to breed captive Pacific eels."
"Attempt?" I wondered. "Eels do not breed in captivity?"
"Eels do not breed." Mr. Hisomeru stated.
"The quest." I realized. "It is an old one. The Holy Grail of Science."
"To my son I am King Arthur. A man only really cares about what his son sees in him, not the rest of the world." Mr. Hisomeru's eyes watered slightly. He was being sincere with me.
"I feel like I've known you much longer than this dinner." I nodded.
"We share a truth, and it is only the first." Mr. Hisomeru made a smile and in that gaze: I saw a glimpse of the horrors to come.
The women returned to the table and seemed grave. They had discussed the bleak interaction between me and Dad and decided things were not going well. We (Dad and I) surprised and delighted them when we reached across the table to feed each other a piece of sushi with our chopsticks. Then Mr. Hisomeru ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and told the waiter that we were celebrating an engagement.
I thought about that dinner many times. I thought about how that was the moment when everything changed for me. I had begun a path of destiny, one that would lead to my fate and the discovery of a lifetime. It was a memory of my first step on a path towards ultimate horror.
While I sat in Venya Industries fishing fleet administration with my application: I felt strangely nervous. I couldn't speak Japanese or Hindi and I felt like I had no relevant skills or education. I questioned what I was doing there and how I had arrived. I wanted the job, I wanted to join Mr. Hisomeru on his quest, that is all I knew.
I knew I loved Meg and that she was even more nervous about my interview. If I didn't get the job, what would I tell her? What would her parents say?
"David Whitemoon?" The heavily accented recruiter called me into her office. I looked around, wondering about the size of the international organization.
She had my file in front of her and had read it. I waited for her to ask me something but instead she just sat filing her nails. I cleared my throat and stopped waiting when I asked:
"Did I get the job?" I asked.
"Nepotism is alive and well, Mr. Whitemoon." She looked away from me to gaze at a giant crab claw taxidermied and mounted on a board on her wall.
"Jokes aside, what exactly are the qualifications for the job?" I asked. She pondered my English and responded:
"You are incomplete of many skills: swimmer, scientist, diver, biologist. Son of important business partner. You have the job. Paid internship for student. That is job I have for you." She didn't look at me. "Details printed out for you. Staying at company apartment. You leave with expedition in three weeks."
When she stopped talking and began humming to herself: I got up and took the printout and left. I spent the last of my money on the taxi back to the company apartment. Twelve other employees from Venya and Nippon were already staying there, with room for more. I became acquainted with all of them, although none of them spoke English. While the weeks went on, I studied my classes online and met more sailors and scientists gathered for the expedition.
Our vessel, Miyamoto, was owned by my future father-in-law. As we all went from the shuttle up the gangplank with our bags, I saw him there: Mr. Hisomeru. I looked at him watching his expedition team boarding. He looked very proud and regal.
Later, alone, Mr. Hisomeru told me the most vital details of our mission. Only he and I knew the exact scope of our search. Each of the other team members all knew what they needed to know to do their part and Captain Ishikawa and his crew were competent enough to get us to the expedition site.
"You must know we are going after the Atlantic eel, in the Sargasso Sea. The mythology, the facts, these are just the tip of the iceberg. We will find out the truth." Mr. Hisomeru began. "Years ago, there were researchers that tried to watch eels breeding under the sargassum using cages suspended from buoys. If all we had left to do to solve the great mystery is that, then it would have worked. Unfortunately, the cages were all destroyed by something unknown and unseen. Since the beginning this is always what happens, anyone who seeks the secrets of the eel only finds deeper mysteries. Maddening mysteries."
"Something is down there." I deducted.
"Is there?" Mr. Hisomeru gestured for me to elaborate.
"The eels are born there and return there. They do not breed. Somehow, they find their way from fresh water back to the darkness and horror of their birth. What is down there, that is nowhere else?" I thought-out-loud.
"Questions I have asked. Consider that the count of mature eels does not change from season to season. How do the eels know when they will arrive, if they all leave from different places and at different times to return home? The seasonal fishing of eels, traditional harvests, only anticipate where and when the eels will migrate. Greatly curious scientists have spent their lives and funding at sea, narrowing it down. Such knowledge is still missing the big picture." Mr. Hisomeru walked slowly to a hand drawn map of the coasts where eels were fished for, colored to match the seasonal fishing and the maturity of the eels in the waters.
"We've known for a long time that they return to the Sargasso and never leave." My voice trailed after his, following his thoughts to their conclusion. "And that young eels come from there."
Mr. Hisomeru sighed and reverted his thoughts to dismiss what we thought we knew already: "Yet they do not go there and nest in the sargassum and they do not breed. Aristotle thought that eels must spawn from mud, Freud that they are sexless. Svennson wrote that Eel is, for lack of scientific quantification, truly mystical." Mr. Hisomeru looked at me, from his map, over his shoulder.
A strange and alien sensation of horror began to rise up inside me as I imagined the shaded sea under the green umbrage full of writhing eels. I knew then what I was expected to do. There was something beneath the mass of knotted serpents that watched them and knew them. Something that lived always in darkness and felt worshipped. A pillar of the oceans, a monster, something beyond what I could imagine, something truly beyond comprehension. I must have looked pale as my mind's eye anticipated the world I would see down there.
Stolen story; please report.
"If you do not wish to discover it, if you are too afraid..." Mr. Hisomeru turned and looked at me, concern, disappointment and relief all evident on his unmasked expression towards me.
"This is what you have chosen me for." I said with my voice trembling.
"I chose you?" Mr. Hisomeru denied it with his tone-of-voice. "This is greater than you or I. This quest started thousands of years ago. It is more important than visiting the moon or splitting the atom. The secret, the last secret, is also the first." Mr. Hisomeru sounded like he found Eel to be mystical.
"My fears and my wishes are in conflict. I want to see my child born." I realized there was certain danger, even from imaginary sea monsters.
"My grandchild will be born into one of two worlds." Mr. Hisomeru spelled it out for me. "This old world or one that the father has made whole."
"I see." I agreed. I intended to conquer my fears. I was an expert swimmer, a diver, a student of biology and I was a scientist; I had a job to do.
The weather held up during the first four days of the expedition. We collected the buoys set out in the previous weeks by Vimana on the company's precursor expedition. The cages under them were all missing or mangled.
"The underwater trail cameras show the eels in the light. We uploaded as many pictures to satellite as we could and then we tried to recover the cameras. As you can see by the condition of the cages: the cameras did not survive." Dr. Ryu reported what her team had found. "These images show that the cages were destroyed while the eels were inside. When the cages were badly damaged enough, the eels escaped."
"What destroyed the cages?" I asked after there was a pause in the report. It was what everyone was wondering.
"Exactly." Dr. Ryu pointed at me and then shrugged. "Who takes it from here?"
"Thank you, Dr. Ryu and Team A. Your work will be handed over to my research laboratories at Nippon and also to Venya. We have to keep the investors informed of our progress out here. You all may go back to your cabins; Team B will be briefed independently." Mr. Hisomeru told Dr. Ryu and the rest of Team A.
When only Team B remained, he looked at me and the others. "You all have your orders when you go down there. You are there to support Whitemoon, your dive leader. The difficulties of this dive rate it as extremely hazardous, dangerous even. Nobody has attempted this before and if you fail, if we have any casualties, I mean, it will probably be the last. That is why I am going to say that we only have one chance. That is why only Whitemoon will complete the dive. David is the only one among you that I trust with our future."
"Sir, may I ask?" Riddin raised his hand. The whole dive team was required to speak English for my benefit and Riddin and Neveah were both Americans, like me.
"You may ask, but I doubt I could answer and if I could, I probably wouldn't." Mr. Hisomeru disclaimed.
"What do you expect to find down there?" Riddin seemed boyish and jocular as he smirked.
"The truth." Mr. Hisomeru said honestly.
We prepared for our first and possibly our only dive. I felt like we should be getting prayed over by a chaplain or something, even though I had no beliefs. We all felt nervous and made our preparations in a kind of uneasy silence. Riddin kept telling inappropriate jokes that ended with him asking us "Get it?" until Neveah said to him:
"Nobody is laughing except you. Get it?"
I inspected everyone's gear and then I said: "It is time."
Neveah was to go first into the water, and I was to be next. After her and me the rest of the team followed. They remained in position, filming, holding lights and communicating with Miyamoto. I descended into the darkness.
The light quickly faded. The chatter became more scrambled. I was approaching my maximum depth and I had never felt so alone and helpless in all my life. Then the silence and the cold and the darkness were absolute.
I was in another world. The seafloor was below me somewhere. Down there, beyond my limits, an even darker and more terrifying landscape lay as a wasteland that had never known daylight. Down there something lurked, waited and knew the answers I was there to learn.
I could not control my imagination. Fear began to take hold of me as I hovered at my maximum depth, noting that I was surrounded by living creatures, all of them eels. They swam lazily, waiting for something as I did. They knew what we were there for, and I did not.
"What am I doing here?" I asked.
"Unclear, repeat. Over." Neveah's voice was digitally reconstructed by the communication equipment. She sounded robotic and far away. It only added to the surreal dread I was feeling.
The eels seemed to hesitate. It felt like the moment between a flash of lightning and a thunderclap. Then some massive thing I could not identify rose just past me and took them. It was there, taking them, then it was gone, swiftly descending back into the world of night everlasting.
"There's something down here." I choked on the words, trying to whisper them quietly. I felt exposed, surrounded and watched. The eels were gone, would I be next?
Terror was growing inside of me; I could not say when it began or how it blossomed. I felt the edge of panic and fought it down, knowing that such hysteria would certainly get me killed. Whatever was there should strike if I tried any sudden movement. Even if I escaped and swam back up as fast as I could then the nitrogen in my body could boil and I would die even more horribly.
Two of my dive team moved into a closer position, thinking I wanted them to. They shone lights down on me and I gestured to them that I was alright and to hold their position. With the lights on me I somehow felt even more exposed than I did in the darkness. I still couldn't see anything.
I moved forward at my depth, slowly, while they followed me from above with the underwater lights. I found another swarm of eels congregating and I watched and waited.
"Is the camera getting this?" I pointed. I was trembling in dread and barely able to maintain my composure. I fantasized about being safe at home and holding my newborn. My mind rejected the peaceful anticipation and insisted I was in serious danger.
"The cameras are rolling on Whitemoon. Over." Riddin's voice assured me.
I checked my diver's watch and sighed. There was no more time to wait as well as the fact that my nerves were gone. I feared the part of me that was doing the job despite the obvious morbidity. I heard the voice saying, in my thoughts: 'Someone I learned to fear and respect'. I had to begin my gradual ascent. It was when I left my position that the nightmares became reality.
At that moment I was trapped, caught, unable to escape. Between two worlds, one of light and one of dark, one that I belonged to and the other my bane, I was held. I did not see what happened to Riddin. There was a camera that he had which would show what happened, if it were ever recovered. Perhaps it will someday wash up on a beach; but judging on the capacity of the thing that took him, that would be unlikely.
After we listened to his screams of insane horror in our communications, all of us were pushed over the precipice of fathomless scare. I don't remember what I said, the recording failed to catch my voice. My team opted to take their chances with a rapid ascent. They wanted out of the water.
I couldn't blame them. I had reached a level of panic that I could not function within. I had frozen in hesitation, unable to see or know from which direction the greater danger was coming. Should I kill myself with a rapid ascent or feed myself to whatever had gone for Riddin?
Like a drunk I blacked out. My mind was gone somewhere else while my internal amphibian gave the commands from the reptile-layer in my brain. While my skull became the bedlam of an insane asylum my body gently hovered, taking calculated steps towards the surface until I was retrieved.
I was aboard Miyamoto in the sick bay. Only our nurse Yui and Mr. Hisomeru were with me. I blinked and recalled, like the black fog of an evil dream, the sound of Riddin being taken, as his cries explained that the horror was real.
"Riddin?" I sounded hoarse. I sat up and cleared my throat.
"We have lost Riddin. The mission is over. We had to report his death and now we are done. They are shutting us down." Mr. Hisomeru sounded bitter.
"It's down there. We found something. It was huge, taking eels." I told him. He looked up and the spark of King Arthur was in his eyes for just one instant. Then he remembered the quest was at an end. We had failed.
"Leave us." Mr. Hisomeru told Yui. She obeyed and silently left us alone.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I cannot send the team back down there. We only have six hours until we must be underway. Captain Ishikawa insists on honoring our orders." Mr. Hisomeru explained.
"That's plenty of time." I heard myself saying. I couldn't believe I was tempted to return to the realm of inescapable night. Then I could feel the crawl on my skin of the nearby lunging thing, taking whole swarms of eels in a bite, or even a diver.
"I'm not losing you down there." Mr. Hisomeru objected.
"We lose everything, then?" I asked. He sighed and realized I was right.
"Let me speak to Captain Ishikawa. I do own this ship, should have some say in our departure schedule." Mr. Hisomeru stood to go. "Get some rest. Yui will have to approve of your condition before you dive."
"She isn't a doctor." I noted.
"For my own worries, son, for me." He put his hand on my right shoulder before he left me alone.
When I was alone in the dark, I was back there, in the dark and all alone, the world above was far away. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine being home. It wasn't easy. Instead, my thoughts reassembled themselves in a dream, a memory, an epiphany. I knew what was down there. I realized: Everyone does, we just choose to believe that it isn't real. That is the eels' secret: Eel accepts it. It is their destroyer - their creator.
Captain Ishikawa wanted to see me before I dived. He couldn't speak English, so Mr. Hisomeru translated. "He is telling you that he does not want you to go into the water. Losing one man is bad enough, he does not believe you will survive. He says that today he has come to believe in sea monsters."
"The real monster we face is not in the water. The real monster is the monster of ignorance." I told him. Mr. Hisomeru translated my words as the captain shook his head and looked at the two of us in comparison before he left us alone.
"There is a storm coming. We cannot hold back the weather." Mr. Hisomeru plotted.
"Activity down there precedes the violent seas." I hypothesized.
"We will find what we are looking for." Mr. Hisomeru anticipated. He agreed that the approach of the weather was fortunate for our efforts, even while it limited them.
"I will dive alone, without support. I will have to take the camera and light with me." I understood, with anxiety. Even without the danger the difficulty alone presented potential hazards. "I don't know how I will do it."
"I will go." Neveah was there, in the portal.
"I don't think so." Mr. Hisomeru told her without looking at her.
"Cameras rolling on Whitemoon, get it?" Neveah argued strangely. "Let me finish this."
Mr. Hisomeru sighed as he saw the look on my face. "Very well. Be ready to dive in one hour."
"I'm ready now." Neveah held herself akimbo.
"Let me suit up." I got up, fatigue washing over me briefly, despite the rest I'd had. It was the fear, rooted deeply in me, that took my energy like the creature had taken the eels.
"It comes from below. So, we film from below, instead of the strike zone." Neveah added her thoughts. Our eyes widened as we realized she was right.
"You are right. We both complete the dive. It is how we will find the Grail." I smiled at her plan.
The time it took to get back into the water was spent in morbid illumination. Then we were in the holy black seas, waters filled with living things.
"I am afraid." Neveah confessed.
"So too am I. Over." I told her. I felt nothing. The fear had become so familiar that it had somehow become a comfort, assuring me I had not met a most horrendous fate.
We found a swarm of praying eels as they slowly circled in sacred holding patterns. Together they formed a mouthful for their god. We were filming, waiting while every second seemed eternal. At any moment the strike would happen, instantly and unavoidable. We were beneath the swarm and our light shone upward. I felt safer, outside the buffet line. We were not safe, it was only a good camera angle.
The eels slowed, coming together and holding perfectly still. I sensed it in the water beneath us, I felt what they felt. Neveah said "Whitemoon." and then she was gone, or rather, I was.
It had come from below and taken me in a single gulp. I was disoriented, engulfed and pressed. I was inside the Grail, as it retracted to the depths that were its home. Something slick was wriggling along the lining inside of it. I took a handful of it and felt a strange push from below. Inspired by the reaction I pushed my hand into the soft interior. Every time I did, I was drawn deeper into it and crushed more. I was able to get my dive knife in my other hand. I cut into the Grail, and I saw light as it launched towards Neveah for a second attack.
In a cloud of blood: I was ejected from it, still alive. "You're alive!" Neveah called me, shining her light into the murky crimson. All around me were newborn eels. I still grasped what I had taken from inside. We made our ascent, our horrible fears manifesting as manic laughter. Perhaps something was wrong with our mixture.
"Get it?" Neveah kept saying.
The weather had begun to menace Miyamoto. In the diver's prep room I finally ungrasped my prize. They lay there wriggling on the table while Neveah, Mr. Hisomeru and I stared and smiled like lunatics. Living eels, freshly born.
Mr. Hisomeru hugged me and said into my ear quietly, so the monsters could not hear:
"While you were down there, I got a call from home. Just a few weeks premature, they will be fine. Twins."
"I guess that is two good reasons to marry Meg." I laughed and grinned.
"Well, son, it is tradition."