Black Abyss

By and ©

DragonLady of Avalon, plagarisers will be fed to Wicked.

The museum was four stories tall, a brick building rising out of a capital city somewhat like a business building, blending in with the surroundings of the urban environment around it until no one spared it a passing glance, except those who knew what lay within, and they watched it with either excitement or dread of the wonders within.

The inside, despite the generic exterior, was exquisite for those who enjoyed learning, filled to the brim with stuffed representation of extinct animals, like an oversized armadillo, wooly mammoth, ground sloth, and, hanging above the main hall, a Charcarodon megalodon, complete with displays of triangular, white shark teeth, and a full-scale model of open shark jaws that would have gone inside the terror of the deep’s mouth. There were exhibits on optical illusions, the way the human eye can be fooled, a room that looked like an indoor pond with laminated fish swimming on a blue tarp with Velcro on their mouths, caught by sticks with strings glued to Velcro attached. It had displays on how humans, especially Americans, lived before electrical wiring.

Currently, though, the biggest exhibit wasn’t the traveling one about what aliens might be like, or the model of the megalodon, but something…much stranger.

The curator of the museum was a retired U.S. Marine officer and, despite being away from active duty for almost ten years, hadn’t lost his taste for adventure, his dependence on the natural drug that is adrenaline. Three years before, he had gone on a trip to Antarctica with some former corps friends and discovered his little cash crop.

They were hiking over what appeared to be a glacier that spanned miles, in the constant snow, with no civilization in sight. It was a place where if anything went wrong, there would be no turning back, no quick dial of 911. They knew the risks when they signed made flight arrangements, and so did the man that died.

His name was Sean O’Connor, and had served beside the curator, Daisuke Edigawa, during their entire service in the marines. The man was not yet in their fifties, none of them were, and had all the survival gear and training needed, even a guide to take them hiking.

There was one slight problem. They were hiking across a largely unexplored area, almost at the very bottom of the Earth, quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

As they hiked, dragging their emergency supplies and necessities on a sled behind them, the ice suddenly gave way. Isn’t wasn’t like the movies, where cracks went in all directions and the ground shook like an Earthquake. That wasn’t it at all. Sean’s foot simply fell into what, at the time, appeared to be a sinkhole.

Daisuke and the other three members of his team set to work trying to chip their comrade’s ankle out of the ice, when, overloaded with the weight of five grown men and sleds of supplies, the ice finished cracking, hidden by the snow and unbeknownst to the ex-Marines.

With a sickening crack, the ice tumbled into the widening hole and Sean fell with it…into a steaming hot spring thirty feet below. Sean’s piercing cry wracked the frostbitten air as he fell into the water below, where something big, black, and hungry stirred.

When blood pooled in the hot spring, the four remaining Marines turned around and ran back to basecamp, making the trip in half the time it took to get to the hot spring in the first place. For five days they sat around, staring at each other and trying to figure out what they saw eating their comrade, and how to tell his family that Sean had been eaten by something in the middle of Antarctica.

It was on the plane back to America that Daisuke had the idea. What better way to figure out what could be living in a hidden lake in the frozen bottom of the planet than to send a team back? And what better way to exert his revenge over his friend’s death by studying whatever it was, and bringing it back to his museum in cages and chains?

It took a year of study and a year of building to figure it all out and then make a place for them in the museum. They were a species virtually untouched by time and had never encountered humanity before. They were something so terrifying and vicious that humanity could never have conceived their existence, something so horrible that a new word for a grouping of animals was created: terror.

The lake, called Lake O’Connor in honor of the man who had died stumbling onto it, was a bubble hidden under half of the ice continent. Protected by thick walls of ice and snow and fed by thermal vents like the black smokers at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, an entire unexplored ecosystem lived there, unlike any the world had ever seen before. Dumb luck and weather had worn away the protective covering of snow, heat from the scorching lake below had melted the ice dome just enough for the weight of a human body with all the survival gear to crack it.

And there they waited.

Tommy Winchester snorted in disgust at the nerds running around her, poking and prodding at every little dinosaur tooth and fossil. She hated museums and hated learning in general. Museums were for nerds and dorks, those with so little social life that they were forced to spend their time reading and studying.

She was too busy for that. There were too many boys to check out, too much makeup and clothes to try on, to many songs to hear. She couldn’t be bothered with learning, but she was far from stupid and didn’t make low grades. She had a flat B-average…provided the class required no studying.

After all, she was not going to be a mathematician, engineer, historian, librarian, or translator, so why should she bother knowing math, history, literature, or foreign language?

She was much too cool for that, and had better things to do with her time than to stare at old bones in a museum.

She sighed and popped her gum. It was against school and museum policy for her to chew it, but she didn’t care. The teachers and management weren’t the boss of her, and they paid custodians to clean up chewed gum and spilled drinks and such lowly people shouldn’t complain about having to do so.

Her group, the only one with a chaperon who cared where she went and what she did, so she couldn’t go outside and smoke a cigarette or maybe something stronger, was dragging her down the escalator, from the top floor where the exhibits started to the second, where the new exhibit was.

Tommy had seen new stuff about the new exhibit, but she honestly couldn’t remember what it was. Some new dinosaur bones, probably. She didn’t care, beacue it hadn’t interested her. She’d been busy being angry at her mother for making her study for her literature test.

Outside the museum, on the middle level, Tommy had seen the aquarium and shapes floating inside, they looked like giant mushrooms. Once in awhile, shadows floated through the water, but she hadn’t watched like those darn nerds. She’d been too busy trying to figure out why those teachers would dare force her to come, then bus them to a perfectly good entrance, make her stand in the host sun while they babbled about whatever was inside the tank, and then make her walk, of all things, to the main entrance on the fourth floor.

As Tommy descended, her curious gaze landed on the tank, nestled beside her. She saw what looked like mushrooms in it, bigger than most of her upper body and floating in cloudy water with roots like tentacles on a jellyfish and brown caps.

Yuck.

She stepped off the escalator and looked around. All around her were murals and skeletons of the old seamonsters, the real ones with funny names she couldn’t remember. Some had long necks, some had short, all had a mouthful of teeth and a nasty disposition. Tommy shuddered, hating what it felt like to be underwater.

To her right were models of the dino-fish and the displays and murals, to her left was…!

They were big, bigger than dolphins, smaller than killer whales. They were black and shiny, sightless entirely with brown muzzles and steel gray melons, like a beluga whale. But these things weren’t cute and white and friendly, they were horrendous! Monstrous creatures that had no place in a human’s world, swimming in sharp, aggravated, pacing circles like a shark and grinning, grinning, as if seriously annoyed or darkly amused.

Tommy gasped and backed away, bumping into a crowd of people, staring at the creatures in the tank, dodging in and out of a sea of giant mushrooms and bubbles from artificial thermal vents.

A thin woman with pulled-back dark hair and a white lab coat was in front of the tank, describing the…things in the tank, and for once in her life, Tommy listened with utmost attention. They were called “black abyss”, because they existed in complete darkness, thriving without sunlight or eyes, working probably by echolocation, which was being studied here in the museum. They were predatory and apparently highly intelligent pack hunters, preferring live meat and the giant mushrooms in the tank.

She stressed to the group how dangerous the creatures were, how they fed on anything that moved in their environment and how many workers had been maimed or worse trying to load the abyss into their tanks. The monsters were aggressive and did not like being handled or petted. Even the youngest and cutest pup had sent someone home with stitches and a possible lawsuit against the museum.

The water in the aquarium was from Lake O’Connor, and everything inside it, from the murkiness to the giant mushrooms to the artificial thermal vents, had been designed to mimic the environment they came from.

The creatures themselves seemed to be a mix of things. No one was quite sure what category they fell into. Sure, Kingdom Anamalia, but what phylum? Were they fish or mammals?

No one could agree. Apparently the abyss were a phyla unto themselves, with gills that lined their black, glossy sides and a blowhole on the back of the neck. None had died so, due to an agreement with the Fish and Wildlife service, these creatures could not be dissected until one died of natural causes, meaning old age and not movement stress.

Just as well, because these things had not been bothered by moving, just sorely ticked off.

Tommy stared at them with wonder as one of them, a fairly small one the speaker identified as probably a male, #013, swam by. The lips on his sensitive brown muzzle lifted up into a chilling grin out of H.P. Lovecraft’s darkest nightmares, sending Tommy into terrified shivers.

Sudden claustrophobia claimed her, and she wanted to be above the waterline of the tank, away from the swimming nightmarish grins, away from the things that had tasted human blood and paced around like angry tigers in their tank.

She pulled on her chaperon’s sleeve, begging to be taken back up to the other side of the top story, telling the woman that the creatures made her nervous and how desperately she wanted to be away from them.

At first, the woman snapped, then sighed and saw the fear in Tommy’s eyes. The chaperone then called the rest of the group and hauled them toward the second set of escalators, on the right side of the tank, and forced them topside.

Much of this part of the room was dedicated to the vast, Olympic swimming pool-sized, two-story deep tank. The only thing that guarded stupid humans was a thin guardrail and signs that read “Do Not Cross.”

Apparently, Damon Caruthers thought as he leaned over the metal platform that reminded him all too much of a diving board, the theory was that anyone stupid enough to climb over the railing and jump in deserved the Darwin Award.

Yet there he was, looking down at a tank full of things that could probably have taken Big Meg herself down, holding a walky talky, lowering a shark of some sort or another into the tank.

The creature had been caught by the curator, by accident, and would have been let go, except the big bull was not on any endangered species list and a study needed to be shown on just how powerful the abyss were. Clearly Daisuke didn’t doubt their abilities, otherwise he wouldn’t be lowering a two hundred pound hammerhead into the water with them.

But there it went, on a sling, into the water, the terror of abyss swimming in circles around it, probably sensing the buzz of the metal of the crane. The hammerhead took off as soon as its belly hit the water, but it was too late for it. The abyss slinked up to it, graceful curved dorsal fins on their sharklike bodies slicing through the top of the water. Its brown nose barely seemed to bump the shark, who kicked its powerful caudal fin trying to escape from the nightmare it suddenly found itself in…but blood had already began to dye the water red, and it was feeding time.

The black abyss would eat anything, but they preferred live meat. In five minutes flat, there was nothing left of the hammerhead but a red smear on the top of the water and abyss licking their grinning, satiated mouths clean with prehensile tongues.

Damon shivered and then turned back to his possible future daughter-in-law, Tommy, and waved…at the same time something below the waterline went “thump”.

A/N:

Perhaps I should go into dream therapy…maybe I should learn to have more Scorpions more often. Works for whoever designed the Aliens, no?

So…anyone wanna guess what the “thump” was?