Abyssal Whispers: Tales From The Ocean's Unseen Depths

The Rig (by Lady Eckland)

The rig shuddered and groaned as I stared out at the black expanse of the Atlantic, the wind and rain lashing at the reinforced windows of the control room. Weeks of drilling out here, pushing deeper and deeper beneath the ocean floor in search of a fresh oil reserve. The company had high hopes for this site.

"How's it looking, Mike?" I called out over the noise to my lead driller hunched over the displays.

"Depth is 8200 meters and rising steady, Zack. Pressure and temp readings look good. If there's oil down there, we'll find it."

I nodded, sipping bitter coffee from a stained mug. The P&L reports upstairs were depending on us hitting a gusher. Our contract—and our jobs—depended on it.

The rig jolted, metal screeching against rock and I nearly spilled my coffee. "The hell was that?"

Mike jabbed at the controls, brow furrowed. "The drill...it's stuck. RPMs dropping fast. It's like we hit a wall down there."

I hurried over, looking over his shoulder at the flashing warning lights. This was bad. A stuck drill meant days or weeks of delays while we tried to recover it or risk having to start over from scratch.

"Kill the pumps! Try and back us out of there."

Mike input the shutdown sequence and we listened to the groan of the massive drill as it spun down. But the shaft remained lodged in place, unmoving.

"Dammit! Call up a maintenance crew and get-"

A deep boom reverberated through the rig, the steel beneath our feet shaking. Muffled but powerful, like something huge had smashed against the rig's submerged hull. Mike and I exchanged puzzled looks.

"Did we-" he started.

Another boom, louder this time. Then a screech of overstressed metal. The rig swayed precariously. I grabbed the PA mic.

"All hands, brace for impact! This is not a drill!"

More impacts now, one after another, growing in intensity. Through the churning black water outside I glimpsed massive shadows moving in the depths, lit by the rig's powerful spotlights.

A garbled voice came over the radio, panicked. "Zack, y-you need to see this...port side observation deck..."

I ran from the control room, boots pounding on the steel grating as I descended deck by deck, all the while the horrible booms and screeches assaulting the rig.

I pushed open the hatch to the observation deck and froze in horror. Rising from the abyss was a mountainous mound of sickly grey flesh, covered in pulsing red bioluminescent patterns. Tentacles thicker than the rig's mighty pylons uncoiled from the mass, reaching up, up towards us.

My radio crackled with static and screams. The rig's hull buckled inwards with a devastating crunch, girders and pipes crumpling like tissue paper. The deck tilted beneath me.

That's when I saw it—a single gigantic lidless eye the size of a house, glowing hellish orange in the darkness. An inhuman intelligence gazed out from that abyssal orb, ancient beyond reckoning. We were less than insects before it.

The rig's lights flickered out as the leviathan's tentacles crushed it like a beer can. Freezing seawater crashed over me as the observation deck collapsed. In the strobing emergency lights I saw the silhouette of the immense creature, rising, uncoiling, stretching across the horizon. Titanic. Hundreds of meters high.

I clung to a floating chunk of wreckage as the remains of the rig, my crew, were pulled into the creature's gelatinous maw. Thousands of hooked barbs lined its gaping throat.

As the last lights of the rig sputtered out and I lost consciousness in the frigid water, a final horrible realization crossed my fading mind—that gargantuan thing had been trapped down there in the abyss, slumbering for eons in a forgotten undersea cavern. Until we in our greed had awoken it.

The last thing I heard was its world-shaking roar of triumph ascending from the stygian depths as it rose to reclaim the seas once more. Then darkness took me.