Cthulhu Calling: Inspiration in the Depths of the Ocean
By Dania Sonin
November 10, 2010
I’ve always been fascinated with the mysterious and the unsolvable. I remember nights innumerable, snuggled up to my eyes in blankets in my parents’ room watching Unsolved Mysteries. Among the stories of missing persons and escaped villains, the ones that always tweaked my interest and kept me up were the ones that seemed almost too natural to not have an answer. UFOs and strange forest monsters, the sort of things that should, by all accounts, have evidence for or against their existence. Instead, the tapes were always fuzzy, or the object just out of frame, or the witnesses suspect. These scared me the most, but in a fun way, in a fictitious way, like reading creepy pulp before bed.
As I got older, my tastes changed and my scepticism grew until I could proudly and firmly claim not to believe in the Loch Ness monster or little green men abducting cows. But they are still fun to look at because in some cases, they really are unsolved, and even if they’re complete and utter hoaxes, they certainly can get the imagination going.
I thought I’d start off with something close to home and truly mysterious. It seems almost innocuous, in fact, that the ocean should be so large and so deep, but its depth has long been the sole barrier to exploration by man. Space can be conquered because air can be stored and transported, cold can be kept out, and gravity can be done without for long periods of time. The ocean, on the other hand, proves to be perilous. Two factors keep humans out: volume, and depth. These two things create pressure that we are not evolved to face, that even machines cannot endure. So, we’re left to wait for technology to evolve and in the interim, we come across strange creatures, Lovecraftian in nature, who can live and in fact thrive, only in the deep where not even light can penetrate.
It's enough to wonder what sorts of things live down there without having to worry about how big they are, but in 1997 a sound was heard that shook marine biologists. The U.S. National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration picked up a sound off the coast of South America in the Pacific Ocean that to this day has no identifiable source. The sound was of a low frequency but powerful enough to have been picked up by multiple sensors at a range of over 5000km. It lasted a minute and rose in frequency. It was determined that the sound was probably not the result of any man-made or geological phenomena. The signs seemed to point to an organic origin: life. It seemed that something was down there, stirring, and it was big.
To me, an avid horror fan, it could only be one thing: the call of Cthulhu. But, since the world isn't being thrown into chaos and nobody has reported any catastrophic sea voyages, I'm going to go ahead and be very disappointed. What makes this most mysterious though, is that it could very well be a gargantuan creature brooding in the depths of the sea. There are terrible things that lurk in the deep, giant cephalopods with tentacles that stretch out like tendrils of smoke, just waiting to ensnare some unwary diver. The water has always been a haven, and evolution has no rules against monsters. Here on land the rules are simple: we only have so many axes and we evolve to navigate them. In the ocean though, no such rules apply. Once you get deep enough, where there's no light, the sort of senses we're used to become obsolete. A monster doesn't need to see and so doesn't need to evolve to be aesthetically pleasing to anything around it. They are constantly under immense pressure so there are two options: evolve a body rigid enough to withstand that pressure, or evolve a body that doesn't require structure at all. If recently discovered deep sea creatures are any indication, it would be immense, slimy, and with a clear hide through which we'd be able to watch it digest and breathe.
Jellyfish are a fairly good example of the sort of thing we might expect. They're useless on land, but in the water, they flow and ebb and reformat themselves constantly. They are only so very loosely held together as a body and, believe it or not, some jellyfish actually have outsmarted death. Once they mate and spawn, they revert to their premature selves and go through puberty all over again. So, our deep sea dweller could be immortal along with being large and malleable enough to engulf you, digesting you as if through a window for all to watch, for you to watch as well, as your friends swim away in terror, leaving you to be fertiliser for whatever plants may thrive so close to the Earth's core.
The things that we may yet discover, might be more alien to us than anything we've come to imagine flying in from Mars. And that, to me, is frightening in the most exciting way. It's all speculation and fantasy and imagination -- with a little science mixed in to make it plausible. But we don't know and can't know what's down there, what made a sound so loud that it was picked up at such distant points.
Not knowing has always been the scariest thing to me, the thing you can't fix if there's no information to glean. The thing that leads to being unprepared, at the will of whatever decides to exploit your ignorance. But it's also fuel for imagination. It gets the mind going, wandering to dark places and nightmare landscapes where Cthulhu really can exist. And that's exactly what I'd like to do. I'd like to get your mind going, because we all need help every once in awhile, and there is no better inspiration than the mysterious.
Editorial Assistant, Dania Sonin, is the newest member of the Gloaming's staff. She has been helping writers edit their stories for years, and will be writing a series of articles on the unexplained and mysterious for the magazine. Stay tuned.
See Dania's Blog for more information about her and her work.