Only you can hear your screams.
I don’t know why, but for as long as I was down there, that was all I could think of. Sure the suits were heavy, but nothing weighed you down more than the cynical thoughts cooked up by your brain. Truly, out of its depth.
There were three of us on the expedition: Amaka, Sean, and myself. Amaka stayed on the sub. We were all trained for deep-sea immersions, but Amaka’s mental levels never stabilised enough for her to join us. She had a panic attack the moment we first submerged. It was a full blown meltdown. Both Sean and I had to restrain her and talk her out of the threats of self-harm and suicide. She was crazed, drooling in a spontaneous frenzy, crying out to forces we couldn’t see. We were ready to turn back then - get Amaka help and then try again later on - but organising another dive would have taken months, maybe even years. Our supervisor wouldn’t have that. There was supposedly too much hinging on our expedition being successful.
Amaka calmed down, but never recovered fully. We locked her in the Membay and started looping one of her favourites from her childhood. We saw the memory too. In it an eight year-old Amaka, with rosy knees covered in scrapes and boasting a boisterous grin, danced at the foot of a mountain. An older boy (her elder brother, Sahan, deceased at 34) ran out from the dense undergrowth of a rainforest, picked Amaka up, and started pretending that Amaka was flying. Delighted, Amaka joined in too.
The memories weren’t enough. I tried talking with her myself. Late one night, after Sean had finished his fifth and final compulsive check of the sub’s oxygen levels, hull vitality, and our food stocks, I knocked on Amaka’s door. A raspy voice told me to come in. She was in her bed, hunched over a pillow, rereading the last news received from the surface. I slipped into the bed next to her and wrapped my arms around her, as if it was the only reason we were down there. She didn’t push me away. She didn’t say anything. Her body relaxed a little. Then, the crying started. I hugged her tighter, holding as strongly as I could. She felt like water; I could feel her slipping away.
“Chloe”, she whispered, “Chloe, it’s waiting. It’s waiting for us, Chloe.”
I stroked her hair and promised that it would be alright. That age-old promise. The promise that no one can keep. The promise that predates everyone, and will outlive everything.
“I don’t know why, but I believe you”, she said, softly. She leaned her head into my arms. I became acutely aware of her lungs expanding and contracting, recycling the same air as my own. I’d never thought about how close to Amaka - and Sean - sharing the same space and air made me feel until then. It was like we were sharing the same womb - sucking on the same placenta.
I always believed that you could never understand another person, not completely. In my anatomy classes I always struggled to understand how such a tiny organ as the human brain - not even the largest in the animal kingdom - could cram in such endless, infinite complexities. Even then, ours weren’t even the biggest brains down that far: I wondered what sperm whales thought of as they dived so deep.
The descent lasted three months. It was supposed to take two days. Communication cut off on the third day, around the same time that we lost control of the sub. It was still functioning - completely operational - but we had no say in where it went.
Amaka’s condition worsened again. Her screams seemed at home in the now sinister halls of the sub - just another decoration. They embedded themselves into the walls and became cave art, ageless and transcendent accounts of a fate that had simultaneously already happened, yet was lurking in the future too. We tried to keep eating meals together to maintain some kind of normalcy. Amaka joined us sometimes, if she was in one of her stabler moods. Meanwhile Sean went silent. The only words he uttered were the same sentence at every dinner, as if he was saying grace.
“They gave us too much oxygen.”
By that point we had given up on trying to contact the surface for help. They’d cut us off, that much was obvious. They’d snipped the line of their fishing rod, and now the bait was vanishing into the bottom of the pond. Each of us had our own theories about why, but only Amaka believed hers wholeheartedly. When she was more lucid she thought it was a psychological experiment - an explanation Sean and I could at least understand.
Contrarily, in her more dissociative states she’d call us demons, sent to trap her and punish her for failing Sahan.
It shouldn’t have been possible. If we had really been descending at the same rate for nearly two months, we would have reached the centre of the earth by then. We were definitely beyond the hadalpelagic, probably deeper than anyone had ever gone before. The food stocks never ran dry, nor did the oxygen ever run out - there was enough to last us years. I dreaded to think what a year would be like down there. The sub was equipped with a filter, so we didn’t have to worry about water either.
For fifty-two days we tried to keep ourselves busy. Anything to distract us from the situation. Looking outside was the worst. It wasn’t simple darkness. There was a faint volcanic red to it, like when you stare at the inside of your eyelids until it hurts. For fifty-two days we were convinced that we were never going to stop sinking. For fifty-two days we quivered in dread, until the sub groaned abruptly, and came to a heavy stop.
There were three pressurised suits, but only two of us left to investigate. I threw the extra one out. Amaka was scared that Sean would force her to join us if I didn’t. Our handheld torches felt humiliating in the mouth of darkness that had swallowed us. Despite everything else being completely functional, no matter what we tried, the exterior lights on the sub wouldn’t turn on. It doesn’t want to be seen, I said as a morbid joke. Amaka stayed on the sub, hauled up in the Membay with the doors locked.
The sub had stopped on an impossibly flat seabed. Regardless of how far we swam, the terrain never changed. A sweeping blanket of maddening grey. The only markers were ourselves and the sub, which we forced ourselves to stay within the visible range of. At least we tried to.
Sean… Sean thought he heard a noise. He said it was like the sound of an organ - mighty and delightful. The last thing I heard him say through our coms was that the organ was playing a familiar sonata. His grandfather’s favourite that he would play religiously at the break of every dawn. I begged Sean to stay. I followed him as far as I could without dooming myself to an eternity wandering that cruel, ashen plane. He vanished into a cloud of sediment and under the grip of darkness, as if he’d never existed to begin with.
Amaka was taken next. I struggled back to the ship, tears lashing my face, and fear numbing my brain. After thirty painstaking seconds in the decompression chamber, I stumbled into the sub, frantically calling for Amaka to come and help me search for Sean. When there was no reply, I assumed that she was still inside the Membay. A desolate, broken air clung to every corner of the sub, and I swore I caught the putrid smell of rotting fruit, and the howling of monkeys in trees. Her memories were still playing, but there was no one in the room.
The sound of a metal door rolling open propelled me into action. The decompression chamber was open again. I rushed towards it, trying to shout at Amaka’s name again. But my throat turned dry. It felt hollow, and I forgot how to articulate her name. All I could think about was those nights I spent cradling her in my arms, smelling the rich scent of oranges that always stayed with her, never fading.
The decompression chamber was empty when I got there. At least I thought it was at first. Then I saw a hand, pruned and flaky, floating past the small circular window on the door. Amaka was in there - a bloated, blue corpse. She’d filled the chamber with water. I didn’t blame her. I’d rather the cold escape of drowning to whatever creature had snatched Sean outside. I placed my hand against the window, desperately hoping that Amaka would raise her own hand to mine and smile at me, as if it were all a tasteless joke that had gone on too long. When her face finally drifted within view, I saw that she was actually smiling. But it wasn’t a relief. That sardonic smile fell upon me like the blade of a guillotine, except I didn’t have the luxury of my head coming off before the real nightmare began.
I screamed and clawed at my face until my fingers were red and my voice was raspy. There was nothing I could do. I was completely alone, abandoned by Sean, by Amaka, by the bastards that had trapped us down here, by what felt like the whole merciless human race. I remember my body slumping against a wall, melting into a pitiful ball. My thoughts came unstrung. A sweet, wonderful darkness - estranged from the one outside - came over me, and I relished in the dreams of nothingness that followed.
When I opened my eyes, the sub was gone. I was outside, exposed to thousands of pascals of pressure. The darkness was still there, but I could make out a faint glow in the distance, like the only functioning lightbulb at the end of a vast corridor. I tried swimming towards it, using the most efficient technique that they’d drilled into us before the mission, but then it hit me. I was standing up, my feet glued to the floor as if I was walking on the surface. When I breathed, I finally noticed the bubbles dribbling out of my mouth. I wasn’t in a suit. I should’ve been dead. I should’ve imploded into a smokescreen of red, the pressure bursting me like a pin stabbing into a balloon.
It was impossible, so I treated it as such. Maybe the life-support systems had finally failed, and it was all just an oddly refreshing nightmare pieced together by my oxygen-deprived brain. The light made me feel a tingling sensation all over my body. I felt whole, then I realised I was just feeling warmth for the first time in two months. I walked towards the light, because what else was there to do? The surface had a dreamlike quality to it. It felt spongy, yet dexterous. I bounced on it a couple times, feeling the floor squelch then revert back to its normal shape.
As I got closer to the light, the surface slowly became more visible. At first I saw a strange liquid oozing out of a large pore. Then areas of the floor started peeling back, exposing a paler layer underneath, before it was hastily resealed once I stepped towards it. My foot caught on something, tripping me over. I was definitely still in water, but I fell over as if I was on land. My arms instinctively reached out to break my fall, but my left hand got caught in one of the seals right as it was closing. I was staring into a large black pupil, dilated as much as my own terrified eyes.
All around me the eyelids started opening. An infinite plane of deranged eyes was glaring at me. I started running, thinking of nothing but the reassuring warmth of the light.
The light was attached to an arching black pole that I thought was a streetlight at first. The pole was too organic though. It was withered and decaying, covered in a layer of green and pink algae. The light started swaying back and forth in a hypnotic pattern. I wanted to reach out and cling to it. I turned around and took one final glance at the attentive eyes watching me, then leaped for the ball of light.
It was the warmest thing I’d ever held. It wasn’t hot, but a perfect, comforting warmth. It reminded me of my nights soothing Amaka. It reminded me of the people I’d loved above the surface. It reminded me of my mother.
Then the warmth flickered out of existence. It was replaced by a dreadful coldness. The coldness of clarity, of reason and epiphany. The ball shattered in my arms, and a liquid like the one leaking out of the eyes was drenched all over me. I fell. And I kept falling, because there wasn’t a floor beneath me anymore to catch me. The void was back, and it had swallowed me.
Then I screamed. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed and I screamed, until the walls of my throat were slashed and burned, until the only sound I could hear were my own infernal screams.
That’s how they found me. The sub resurfaced, and when the three of them boarded it, all they found was me, screaming in my room.
I told them I was the sole survivor.
They told me that was to be expected, seeing as I was the only one that had been aboard when the sub had descended.
I asked them why there were three diving suits then.
They of course told me there was only one. The one I was in.
Fine. If they were going to be this ridiculous, then I’d show them Amaka’s body. But when we reached the decompression chamber, only a puddle of water was still there.
I cursed at them, shouting the foulest insults that would’ve made my mother proud. I forced them to follow me to the Membay, so that I could show them Amaka’s and Sean’s memories saved to the system.
They restrained me. Then they asked me what a Membay was.
Their three faces swirled into an indistinguishable fog. I saw my own face, Amaka’s, and Sean’s replace them. Their voices muddled into one discordant ringing. The faces faded out too, and the black, gnawing void returned, and suddenly I was there again, falling and screaming.
Screaming, screaming, screaming.