One tiny dweller of the deep can swallow prey larger than itself.He tucked his legs underneath himself on the sofa and opened the book at random, finding a detailed drawing of the earth’s sphere, drawn with minute realism but in an unusual way. The oceans had been made as transparent as air, allowing the eye to roam their contours, their ridges, plains, mountains. He leafed forward and back through the four double-pages over which the map was spread, fascinated by the new geography it unveiled to him. Or the thalassography. Abyssography. The north Atlantic was dominated by a giant ridge, seamed and puckered like a scar, as though the ocean floor had been raked by a single cyclopean claw. In the south Atlantic, other ridges ran in parallel, as though other claws had raked there. The Pacific, north and south, was clustered or streaked with barnacle-like mountains or mountain ranges, some ringed with foam to indicate that they broke the surface. Strange how shallow the oceans were by comparison with the radius of the world, but how mysterious their cloak of brine made them. Shielding their depths from the eye. Deep dark. Deep down dark.Leonard Engel, The Sea (1969).
He looked at the rest of the book and found a tall drawing, swung horizontal over two pages, that represented marine life from the sunlit surface to the lightless abyss: mantas, marlin and flying fish at the top; blue-fin tuna and a sperm whale battling a giant squid in the middle; at the bottom, viper-fish, lantern-fish and others so strange they didn’t have names in English. Lamprotoxus flagellibarba. Platyberix opalescens. Predators and prey. Gaping, fang-crowded mouths and distorted, phosphor-studded bodies. One of the predators (Chiasmodon niger) was represented just after a meal, its belly distended grossly with prey that must have been larger than itself. An eye stared out through the taut, semi-transparent belly-wall.
He turned away from the drawing and a rectangular piece of paper fell out of the book. He picked it off the floor. A flyer, white print on black background, for a band called Abyssographer, it looked like. The name was printed in lowercase sanserif as if spewing from, or about to be swallowed by, the gaping mouth of one of the abyssal fish from the drawing in the book. He found the drawing again. Yeah, that was where it was from. A viper-fish, body curved like an inverted and mirrored L so that, on the flyer, its mouth snapped at the band’s name and its body bordered the text below the name. He started to read the text.
It was blenny years ago, sting-ray, submersed polyps taught the band to pl
He stopped reading. Like black tears, ink-drops had begun to roll down the flyer from its upper edge, sweeping over the white text in an irregular line. He dropped the flyer on the floor, not wanting the stuff on his hands or the sofa, looking up to see where the ink must have dripped from, but the ceiling was unmarked. Then, with a sudden premonitory whistle that broke into a harsh, sofa-shuddering roar, a fountain of ink exploded up from the floor, up from where the flyer was lying, hitting the ceiling an instant later and spraying off it in a million freezing drops. But it wasn’t ink. He could taste what it was, taste it on his lips as he got up from the sofa, still shocked and disbelieving, and he could smell it in the air. It wasn’t ink. The fountain was increasing in force and volume by the second, hammering at the ceiling harder and harder, soaking and freezing him with its spray even as it shattered and tore down the plaster. It wasn’t ink. He ran for the door, vaguely hearing shouts from the flat above through the huge, gleeful roar of the fountain. It wasn’t ink. It was water, icy and lightless from the abyss.