The two boys laughed as they watched another fish struggle to swim to the ocean depths without the fins it had moments before. Its grey sandpaper skin shone under the sunlight as it wonkily lurched in unpredictable imbalanced sways. The fish twirled every which way but forward before resigning to its fate and allowed itself to sink to the cold depths. The boys let out one last giggle as they watched the fish get enshrouded by the deep. As the fish sunk into the black, Alex, the one who caught the fish felt a tinge of guilt. It must have shown in his eyes because his friend threw a trout head at him for his hook with a grin. 

“It’s just a fish, man. They don’t even feel pain”. 

Alex nodded and let the guilt pass as he slid the slimy trout head onto the thick barbed hook and dropped it into the sea with a light plunk. He leaned over and splashed his hand around the water to wash the slime off his palm, but the fishy stench still stained him. As he patted his hand against his pants to dry, his rod tip dipped slightly, like something had tapped it. He focused his eyes on the tip and breathed slowly while he moved his hand towards the reel. Just as he grabbed the corked handle, a massive force yanked down and forced the butt end of the rod under his ribs fast and hard, knocking him to his knees. All the air within him left in an instant he wheezed for air while handling a death grip on the rod. Nate sat and watched the whole thing unfold like it was a slapstick comedy show made just for him. He wheezingly laughed like he knew it was wrong but couldn’t help himself. Alex staggered back to his feet under his own strength, trying to ignore his friend’s lack of sympathy. He gripped the reel handle with delicate fingers and began to fight. The force on the other end felt like nothing he had ever hooked before. 

Whatever was hooked on the end of Alex’s line was something not even the saltiest fisherman could comprehend. It began to jerk violently.

When Nate realized they might have something to show off back home, he suddenly felt the need to fight in Alex’s corner again. 

“KEEP REELING KEEP REELING,” Nate yelled from the back shoulder of Alex.

“What does it look like I’m trying to do,” Alex grunted. 

Alex tugged the rod up and reeled in as much line as his catch would give him. His shoulders burned, he had been fighting this fish for twenty minutes but his muscles felt like they’ve been lit aflame for three hours. In an instant, the line went slack. Alex’s muscles begged their thanks as the rod lifted back up to its prone state. The line curled atop the water’s surface. 

“Did it break off,” Nate asked looking to him, then craning his head over the edge of the small boat. Alex responded with a deep sigh, which said more than words could. He sat back on the bench with a defeated slouch. The boat rocked gently, as if nodding to accept his defeat.

Still gripping the cork of the rod, he jigged it up and down and watched the slacked line rise from the dark surface before twirling back down in a wide loop-de-loop. Sweat dripped from his armpits and slowly teared down his waist; a sensation he typically never noticed but today it served a frustrating taunt. All that hard work for nothing, it said. 

“At least you hooked something,” Nate broke the silence, “I haven’t had so much of a tug, and that was probably just the tide.”

“Or a crab,” Alex replied with a smirk. A few years before this outing Nate had sworn he hooked onto a state record Chinook, yelling and jumping, rocking their boat dangerously against the waves only to reel in an angry, snipping crab. Alex still likes to bring it up at parties, much to Nate’s annoyance. 

Nate gave him a hard stare and was just about to argue back when he saw Alex’s line suddenly snap taut again and quickly curve the rod downwards. He stared mouth agape as if he was in a trance. He couldn’t comprehend what could possibly be below them. 

Alex’s eyes shot wide and he snatched the bottom end of the rod just as it lifted up, catching it just before it could be pulled in. The counter protest was immediate. The boat lurched in the direction of the rod tip and they slowly began to move along the water, like the rod was magnetic and the boat moved in whichever direction it pointed. The tip quickly cut left, fully encircling the boat like the big hand of a broken clock. Alex was suddenly pulled from his feet but caught himself under his heels. His hands dripped with sweat while the skin of his fingers burned from the grip. The rod directed him to the center of their boat as he balanced awkwardly against the waves. Alex reeled, and reeled, and reeled. Whatever was on the hook had taken at least half the line. 

Nate suddenly snapped out of his trance once the spool stopped giving line. The sudden absence of the slow churning tick-tick-tick held the boys tense, anticipating the next round of battle with intense focus. Alex, beat red and drenched with sweat, and Nate, who had taken maybe two breaths since the line had gone taut. Both frozen in the eerie quiet of the offshore pacific.

Nate looked around them. The fish had dragged them further offshore than he wanted to be. The waves were getting rougher and more punishing than the boat could handle. They were only going to be dragged further out unless a miracle happens and they land the fish, the line snaps, or they cut the line. He thought about what could happen if they got pulled further out, forced to face those waves, or the chilling shroud of the sea if they were to go overboard. Logic prevailed within him unlike the countless careless sailors and dirty fishermen. 

“Cut the line,” Nate said, “Please.”

Alex gave a quick glance at Nate and back at the water. He scoffed and shook his head. 

“No way man,” he replied, “I’m not letting this one go,” he smirked and tightened his grip on the rod. 

The line went slack again and the rod tip flashed upwards, like the fish was coming towards the surface on its own. 

There was a moment of eerie silence that was cut short by a heavy, splitting groan that shook the floorboards beneath their feet and rippled the water for miles. The groan was old. It ripped like two canyons breaking from each other’s grasp. Their ears rang with the deep lulls that penetrated their young ears. It was monstrous, whatever it was.  Nate held his hands over his ears with so much force he felt like he was going to crush his skull. When the noise softened, he looked up towards his friend. Alex was looking right at him with wide eyes. Sweat ran down his brow line with a rainbow curve, each drop hitting the ground noiseless.

“That – that was a whale,” Alex shuddered.

Nate didn’t respond, he also hoped it was just a grumpy whale that had the misfortune of sticking their hook. They both knew it wasn’t. The reality of what was beneath them was too frightening to voice. The two boys held hard unblinking eyes for a moment. At that, Nate chuckled.

Alex scowled and spoke, “W-what’s so fucking funny,” he sputtered.

“What’s funny?” Nate asked, “what’s funny is that we are FUCKED, man. More fucked than EVER”.

The fishing line went taut in a blink and the rod bent down ninety degrees. Alex’s eyes shot back to the rod before finally giving up and letting it go. The rod flew from his hands and was tugged into the depths in a flash. The sudden loss of tension from the tug of war rocked the boat and the two boys reached out to the sides for balance, holding in place until the sway slowed. Everything was still now. The reel groaned deep below the surface, out of ear shot. There were no gentle laps against the hull. The two boys held their breath and noticed even the wind seemed to dull itself to a low whisper, like the Earth stopped breathing. 

Nate’s knees began to shiver before they gave out from under him and he hit the ground with a dull thud. The clunk of his body barely affected the boat’s equilibrium but the noise it made seemed to alert something very large beneath them. Fear and regret began to overtake him. His face felt hot and prickled with anxiety. 

Alex, eyes locked on to the edge of the Earth, cared deeply for his friend. He was grateful that Nate took him out fishing today, even if the genuinity seemed questionable. He sympathized with him in this moment, even if it wouldn’t be reciprocated had their roles been reversed. It is this sympathy he begins to express to his friend when a terribly large tentacle broke the surface of the sea and rose above them like an extraterrestrial spire. Their heads craned in disbelief as it grew across the sky. It had a wide, tree trunk sized circumference that grew the further below them it went. Hundreds of wide saucer-like suckers freckled the tentacle’s side from top to bottom. At the center of each sucker was a razor curved downwards, dark yellow and covered in decayed flesh and viscera. Thousands of barnacles infested the monster like a disease. Cold sea water rained down on the boys in fat ugly drops. Not allowing the boys to process the horrible thing, more tentacles began to rise around them, crashing through the surface with such power it sounded like a redwood splitting in two. Each tentacle rose halfway to the high clouds before sitting motionless like empty skyscrapers. The air stunk like a fish market at the end of a slow day; thick putrid grime wafted around them.

The stench overtook Alex’s motor systems and caused him to fall to his knees beside Nate, both dry heaving over the edge. Just as their stomachs settled, Alex and Nate both caught a glimpse of the incomprehensible entity they had the misfortune of reeling in that day and their stomach took another turn. It looked small, just a black dot like a dark marker spotted on blank blue paper. Unworthy of the impossible limb that touched the sky before them. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the fathoms beneath him, he could see it. The blue depth beneath them wasn’t just sea. It was an eye. An eye that stretched beyond human comprehension, one that saw every minute detail, and every soul.

In one slow, careful motion, it blinked. The dark eyelid shrouded the blue mirage, ink black surrounded the sea around them before blinding the boys with harsh sky blue. The heaving motion of the eyelid swept a swath of waves harsher and faster than any storm either of the boys had seen. They were suddenly picked up and forced upwards toward the clouds. Their ears popped and rang at the sudden elevation change. The boat began to splinter between their fingers with their grip as they both clung to the same side bracing for what might come next. Suddenly they found themselves floating in the air. 

For a moment, Nate thought they were spared a painful death and were now rising to heaven, but after this brief comfort, his stomach sank as reality crashed with a falling sensation as they plunged back toward the sea with gaining speed. The sea air blew through them like a windsock as their cheeks ballooned and skin rippled in waves similar to the sea below them. Their eyes were forced shut and all they could do was to brace and hope that the force of the fall would make it over quick. Just as the bow was about to crash through the surface, one of the massive tentacles snaked toward them and gripped the stern which halted them instantly, throwing them from the boat and toward the cold, dark sea. They ragdolled downwards fast like they were bullets shot out from the gun of the boat. Just before they themselves crashed through the surface, the tentacle coiled itself around the boat like a snake with its prey. In one flex, the boat was reduced to splinters. At that sight, the boys crashed painfully below the waves.

Nate hit the water first. He submerged back first and jolted as sharp pain flared up his body. Multiple bones had splintered within him. A horrible tingling sensation crawled under his skin and muscle, like a colony of a million ants crawled within him. He yelled in pain but the cold crushed any oxygen left in his lungs and not even a bubble escaped his mouth. He craned his neck painfully towards the surface, eyes spotty and lungs full of the sea. He saw Alex’s limp body buoyant towards the surface. His eyes were glazed and lifeless. 

Nate felt a little bit envious that Alex got a fast death while he had to wait and drown with shattered bones. He tried to claw his way up through the water, but his body protested with bullets of stabbing pain that halted him immediately. His vision grew darker as the sea began to take him, but in one final glimpse, he saw Alex’s lifeless body being dragged to the depths by an unseen force. His arms reached out like Superman, but there was no hope for this boy. The arm that had him began to pluck his limbs apart at their sockets. Blood floated like a cloud fountaining from every visceral opening. When he was nothing but a limbless limp mass, the thing released its grip and watched him sway back and forth in a pendulum-like descent before disappearing out of sight, doomed to be sustenance for whatever lurked deeper.

As his vision began to fade and the arms of death overtook him, he looked down at the icy blue eye beneath him. Its size seemed endless, truly incomprehensible. The inky pupil stared at him as he did at it, and multiple limbs grew out of its blackness. There were arms of indescribable shapes and limbs of unspeakable origins that grew long for him. They stretched and reached from impossible angles, grew into unseen shapes and hellish forms. In Nate’s final conscious moment, the comfort of death escaped him. Fear exploded within as the void welcomed him with hungry arms.