I can only describe the head as a bulbous, a lumpy sphere with small, dull eyes, tiny ears, and a small proboscis as a mouth.
Seven of the creatures arrived, walking past us towards the mournful singing. I can only say that they followed the voice. One by one, they walked off the edge of the rocks, and we heard violent splashes. As the last passed and fell away, we ran to see what became of them. It was a sort of cliff with water, no more than twenty feet below.
Without thinking, each had followed the one before. Not a one seemed aware of what was happening.
The giant shark swam there beneath the cliff in the water and in a mad frenzy; he ripped the creatures to pieces and swallowed the chunks. The oddities bellowed like bulls as the shark tore them apart and ate them alive. Within seconds, every trace of the mighty animals, save the dark blood, was gone, and the shark flicked his tail with pleasure.
The singing had stopped, and we saw a woman--only she was not a real woman, of course. Her red-gold hair streamed about her shoulders in long curls, and we could still see her milky white flesh and full, round breasts. She was beautiful, and if she sang to me, I too would want to join her. But she did not sing, but instead, flipped over, and the last we saw of her was a glistening, wide-scaled, tail vanished into the red-stained sea.
The temple was built of columns, but they leaned to the center with round disks carved along the lengths. On top was a roundish shape with two red disks.
“What… what is that? I feel as if it is faintly familiar but….” Jenny began.
“If you know sea anatomy… creatures….” I said
“A squid,” Grimes said, “it is a mockery of one, but see the head there, round, and the disks are the eyes. The columns are tentacles, and those disks are suckers.”
“But it’s not correct,” I added, “the tentacles reach out from its face, see?”
“It is a squid,” Edwards pronounced, “a temple to a squid, how queer.”
We followed Edwards inside. It should have been pitch black inside, but there was a glow from the walls so we could see quite well. The floor, made up of odd shapes, was colorful. I knelt, and my jaw dropped. One square was soft in emeralds; one was made of pinkish rubies. One was pale jade, one bright blue sapphire, and another was deep golden topaz. One large area was open and filled with the stinking ooze, greenish, and slick. Yellowed bones littered the sludge.
To my shock, I realized the portion of noxious mud was just as valued here as the section of rubies.
“The walls….” John Morton said. He was a bit of an astronomer and pointed out the wall décor. The walls were of obsidian and set here and there with bright, shining diamonds, rubies, and light gold topaz. “It’s the night sky, and those are the stars, see, but it isn’t the sky we see when we look up. This is… different. It seems a pictorial of an older sky. An ancient sky of stars.”
“It is odd,” Jenny said.
“It is almost beautiful, but it is also….” He tilted his head with confusion.
“Chaotic,” I said.
Lilia pointed out a particular jewel that was a large, brilliant sapphire, deep blue like water. She gestured to it many times. Not far from it was a red-orange jewel. Right next to the big blue gem was a small opal.
“Earth,” John said.
“What say you?” Merle asked.
“This one is earth, see. It is blue for water. Look there, above the altar, another blue sphere of sapphires and aquamarines. Earth is meaningful here. The water is important.”
“What is this place?”
John shrugged and looked at Jenny, “A place of worship. The one they worship is on earth, perhaps, and maybe it lives in the water.”
“The shark?”
“No. He is a part, but you saw the outside of this temple. They worship that creature. He is their god. The squid, I mean.”
“He is disgusting,” Jenny said, “and who is ‘they’? Who worships him?”
John shrugged, “I am just guessing.”
Edwards, using a small knife, managed to pluck loose several stones, “I am gonna be a rich man now. Do you all want some? We can fill our pockets.” He held up a ruby the size of his eyeball.
“That may not be a good idea,” Jenny said.
Lilia shook her head and frowned.
“Let’s leave,” I said. I had a bad feeling about the place and certainly about what Edwards had done.
As we left, Edwards suddenly screamed. I can honestly say it did not surprise me very much. I expected something bad to happen when he stole from the temple.
Thin, curd-colored arms or tentacles, I could not say which, rose from the muck in the one area. There were five of them, each ending in three fingers with sucker pads on the tips. They wrapped about him, entrapping him in the blink of an eye. He flew off his feet, soared through the air and plopped into the slimy mess.
Oh, how he screamed. His flesh dissolved in acid, it seemed, making a fatty scum on top of the slime.
In seconds, he vanished below the nasty surface, and there was not a ripple or disruption again as he and the thin arms disappeared.
We ran.
We planned to go back to the lifeboat and get away, but as we fled the temple, we saw a cave in the trees, and it called to us, drew us close. It was huge, the opening lined with terribly sharp, triangular rocks. My gut told me to flee, but I stepped over the rows of sharp rocks and onto a smooth surface.
“I feel this is important here,” I said, “I cannot imagine what amazing secrets this place holds.”
“The ceiling… it is like a boat with a beam… and beams to the sides….” Grimes said.
I did not agree with Grimes. It reminded me of something else I could not place. We should have run, but we were drawn inside and walked carefully down around corridor, like a tunnel. It opened into a great room that we stared at, confused.
Again, we had no light but could see well.
Here was a man in a lifebelt, his lower half snipped away and beside him. There was a woman. Several men in lifebelts. A steward I had seen often aboard Titanic.
“Hundreds. Some are… in half… and some are whole, but they have on life belts. I know some of these men. I knew them, I mean.”
Jenny listened to John and screamed, sinking to the ground. She understood what we saw.
Lilia latched onto my arm.
I knelt to examine one of the men from the ship. He was ice cold, bluish, and quite dead. His hand still gripped a tiny bit of wood, a table leg, maybe. All of them were soaked: their hair in wet strands and clothing salt-stained. I motioned everyone to follow me out and pointed above to the curious ceiling.
“Not beams,” I said, “but a spine, and those are bones that grow out… do you see? Like ribs?”
I led them out to the opening. “Look here, and tell me what you see.”
“Sharp rocks. In rows,” John said
“More.”
“Triangles,” Grimes added.
“And above?” I asked.
“The same. Like….”
“Like a maw. A gigantic mouth with rows of teeth top and bottom, a spine inside, and a stomach full of men that it picked up as it swam about the lifeboats and people in the water.” I sighed, exhausted.
“Oh, God have mercy. It is a stone version of the shark,” Jenny said.
“But how can the victims be here? It was over there and ate the creatures.”
I shrugged. I could no more explain it than anything, but it was true. I knew that. “There is a terrible power here. It is not active, or we would all be dead, but it is there, asleep, maybe dreaming. The dreams are what attack us. I do not know how I know that, but it sounds right to me. I feel the power beneath us.”
“Howard, you are insane. That’s impossible,” Grimes said.
“Help us….” We heard someone scream.