Dead Water

The rain poured against the rocks and water of the sea, spraying up in a chaotic mist. I sit on the wet wooden boards of the platform, splintering and rotting. The rain settles into the grooves of the wood, then, overflowing and falling onto the rocks and water below.

The sound of the water is consuming. It clouds up, so thick in the air it had an almost physical presence, the sound of this rain hurling itself against the mossy, barnacled stones, and the rotting gray wood, and the malleable green fabric of the ocean. If given enough time, this rain would systematically and unstoppably wear down everything into a conformed blank surface, and wear down my ear drums and brain, in a flood of white noise.

In the far north, midnight clouds move steadily south. I cannot see to the end of these oily, myriad clouds, but that might just the hazy rain. I stand up, stretching my legs and my eyes, and slowly walk across to the east of the platform. The platform isn’t very big. Eight wooden planks nailed down, side by side, propped up onto four wooden posts, suspended over the low lying island. It looks bigger now, maybe because the paint has been stripped away, or that the nails rusted and the planks were slipping apart. Both of us have sat for too long.

The stairs lead down to the storm-aggrieved surface of the sea, and the gray and green rocks, but I can still reach the doorway in the rock. A simple pair of double metal doors, embedded into the rocks with thick screws with precision and accuracy. The platform may rot, but these doors would stand for another hundred years. I open them on rusting hinges, and begin descending a flight of wet and steep stairs.

It goes deep, deep underground, curving gently to the left. Every twenty steps, a bare bulb hangs from a suspended wire, and hooks in the ceiling. Each step is precision cut, all the same width and height, all the way down. It takes two minutes and thirteen seconds to make my way to the bottom, seventeen seconds faster than what it usually takes me.

At the end of the stairs is my room. Also finely cut in the shape of a rectangle, there are only five pieces of furniture in the room. The first is my bed, if you could call it a bed. It was just a thin cot, strapped between some planks of wood, with a bright red blanket and sheets. At the end of the bed is a wooden chest, where I keep my things, like dry clothes, paper, and a broken telegraph machine.

At the other end of the room is a table and chair. On the table sits a typewriter, and a carton of ink ribbons. In the aforementioned chest, there are two piles of paper. One of them is empty, clean white paper. The other pile, much larger than the other, are reports that have already been written. Two years ago, I flipped it upside down, so that I could more easily stack the reports. The reports contain detailed descriptions of oceanic monsters of the deep.

Every day, for the past thirteen years, I have sat in the rain on the platform, waiting for the monsters to come.

They always do.

I was first dropped onto the Island on June sixteenth of 2005, it rained gently, foreshadowing what would be to come. I came on boat, which came from New Zealand, where I lived for the first twenty two years of my life. The boat contained a slew of historians, obscure scientists, shunned biologists, conspiracy theorists, and a madman, who was the first person to gather everyone. I was given my supplies, and my instructions. Every day, I was to go up, sit on the platform, see the monsters, and at the end of the day, to write down what I saw on the typewriter.

On June seventeenth, I went out in the morning, a heavy rain clouding the air with droplets, and blended the sea and the air. Although it seemed at first a heavy rain, I would quickly learn that heavy rains were the normal on the Island. It rose quickly through the water, propelling itself twenty feet above the surface. At first, a large, bulbous head, a spread-eagled pile of tentacles, and a beak sharp enough to snap through bone. Its skin was alabaster white, like paper, turning gray in some places. At the apex of its temporary flight, it opened its beak and produced a scream.

It was an ear splitting scream, but it only lasted for a second. I doubled over onto the surface of the platform, my ears ringing and my head spinning, destroying the curtain of white noise and leaving only a bloody echo. I sat there, eyes closed, and my hands pressed over my ears for minutes, blocking out the noise of the loud splash the followed it, and waited for the bells to stop.

My hearing did come back, and at the end of the day, I went down, put in a piece of paper, and typed in the report of the monster, sending the spindly metal arms of the typewriter smacking and ringing against the ribbon onto the paper. It took five minutes to write the report, describing the thickness of the rain, the time, width, height colors, the screaming, the beak, every detail I saw, I wrote down.

I have done this every day, since 2005, until 2018. Every day, I have seen a monster arise from the ocean.

Some are similar. There are whole genus’s and families of these monsters, they aren’t displaced gods or some magical fantastical creation, they grow and die and exist just as any other animal. I have seen screaming octopi, some that shriek, others that roar, and some that are silent altogether. I have seem eels, a hundred feet long, that never fully break the surface, luminescent against the gray of the clouds. I have seen giant crabs, brobdingnagian whales, leviathans with huge crashing teeth. Even, on a day with a light rain, with rainbows in the sky, a tall seahorse arose from the ocean, with opalescent scales, and we looked at each other for a minute, before it ducked back into the light waves.

However, all of these monsters pale in comparison to the monster I saw in December of 2018.

The storm had lasted for days, but it wasn’t a rain that could be described as a rain. It was a deluge, a tsunami in the sky, a continuous stream of water that lasted seemingly an eternity in the freezing stream of water. It is when the rain is thickest that the largest, and deepest dwelling monsters come, when the line is blurred the most between the sky and the sea.

On the third day of the flood, a distant rumbling agitated the ground and the waves and the platform. Far off, the east, something was rising fast. It took twenty three seconds for it to fully break the surface of the water. As it did, the water rose like a plateau from the surface, whatever was beneath it was moving too fast for it to move first. The wind howled and blew in a gale, knocking me down onto the boards, and the waves washed against me, threating to drag me into the ocean. I cowered against the platform, digging my fingers into the space between the doors. Then, when it finally did, a boom erupted, like a cannon blast next to me.

It had a gleaming, silver carapace, free from barnacles like some of the other ones have. This one stayed too deep for barnacles to live under the pressure. It was silver like a pearl, and unblemished like a clean lake at midnight. Its head hanged from a large neck, like that of a turtle, but it had no eyes. The Carapace wrapped around the top of the body, and where it ended, a collection of red skin began, red like oxygenated blood, and an enormous pair of claws rested below a pair of wings.

As it rose, they unfurled like the sails on an enormous ship. The body was long, maybe the size of two city blocks, but nothing could accurately describe the size of these wings. These were not the stunted, small wings of flightless penguins. These wings were made for flying. They were red like red paper held up to light.

At the end of its body, a silvery tail emerged, and I could see from its proportionally small size, it was not the tail that moved it through the water, it was the wings as well.

It had cleared several hundred feet into the air, just below the storm clouds. I was pressed on my back on the platform, awed at the sight of this huge, sparkling creature that seemed to have sprung from the mind of a child or a madman.

As it reached the apex of its launch, it brought its wings down, and began to fly.

It was heading north east, propelling itself up and forward, until I couldn’t see through the clouds and rain. With each downward push, a boom erupted, from the displaced air. It flew away steadily though, until all I knew of its existence was a distant drumbeats, barely audible. Then however, it roared.

This roar couldn’t have been produced by anything human. Anything seen before really. It didn’t leave me deaf; it did the opposite. I heard the primordial wail of this thing, I heard the screams of the countless souls it had preyed upon. I heard the entire history of our planet, from its meteor picked and sulfurous beginning, to the flooded, rocky start of life. Through the extinctions and ice ages, it had lived, in the water and in the sky, showing itself to only a few. I heard the cry of a beast who is omnipotent, omniscient, and very, very hungry.

I was supposed to leave this platform after a fourteen year mission. I was told a boat would be sent back to collect me and my writings on June 2019. That was two years ago. I haven’t heard anything from the outside world. No boats have come within distance, no signals to the telegraph machine. It is now 2021, March. Last year, I brought up my still functional telegraph machine, and attached it to a special set of wires in the wall. They connected to a machine which sent signals through the water. However, when I was just finishing the message, a pop sounded and a spark flew off the wires. It turned black, and I don’t know if that stopped the message, but no one has come to get me.

Maybe they forgot about me, maybe the wires corroded, or that the receiving signal was dismantled. I haven’t heard anything from the outside world after the flying monster came and left. I haven’t seen any other monsters either. Nothing alive except for the occasional bloated dead fish that arises. The rain hasn’t stopped, but now, instead of churning up monsters, it just remains a black, dead water.

I don’t know if the flying beast did anything. Maybe nothing, maybe the boat will still come. But it has been two years, and my food is running low. I have used the last of my paper to write this message, and if my knowledge of oceanic currents is right, this should make its way to western coast of South America, and then float up, through the Pacific to Asia, and then, if no one there has recovered it, along the coast of California. If you find this message, please send someone down to find me. I don’t have much more time.

Monsters are real.

My nautical coordinates are: Lat: -59.4451 Lon: -123.1347