The creaking wouldn’t stop. The sound crushed her soul, along with the metal cage closing in around her. She blocked it out by cupping her ears but she knew it was still there. Reverberations sent shivers up her spine, reverberations that echoed into the great deep below, into the great expanse of nothingness, cold, darkness, and despair.

Meghan didn’t know how long it would take to sail from Miami to Sandy Point but she knew she would be shaking, curling into a ball, the entire time. And she had only been in the car for twenty minutes! Could the transport ship be any louder with its low humming and ruckus of the working crewmen going around the other cars parked on the ship, yelling and joking? She peaked out the back passenger window and saw a man with headphones laughing stupidly. Beyond him was the expanse of the Atlantic, rippling blue, undulating with sickening motion. She ducked down when the man turned toward the SUV. If she was caught now, they might just take her back to Miami. It had been so long since Meghan had seen her mother ever since she moved to the islands. Her mother knew she was afraid of the ocean and her father had left her with a babysitter back on land. But her father couldn’t have expected that she’d stowaway in his SUV, and probably wouldn’t have cared either way.

She had to face her fear of the ocean somehow, and pretending this was just a simple car ride made it a little easier to bear. But why did their SUV have to be so close to the edge of the water? She could even see the sun blaring through the back windows and sides. It was like she was practically hanging over the back of the boat…When the ship hit a wave, she could feel a gut-churning sense of falling when the car angled toward the water.

The hairs of Fluffy tickled her nose as she held the plushy close to her chest but she barely noticed. A man was shouting, running by the car, saying something about a chain and ramp. The man was walking away, thank god. She closed her eyes and drifted into a daydream about having wings, about flying away, from her father, from school, from herself. It was the only thing that prevented her from being trapped in her own mind, in her own worries and sadness. Then suddenly there was a loud snap, shortly followed by the unraveling of a chain and another metal ka-chunk as the car started to shake….and suddenly…fall. The hair on her neck stood up as she grabbed the driver seat headrest while the drop sucked the air from her lungs. “No, no, no, no, no.” She squeezed her eyes shut only opening them when she heard and felt the heavy vehicle hit the waves and saw the transport ship and the loading bay fall away from her through the windshield.

Water collapsed all around the SUV, engulfing it, swallowing it down. The only other sound she heard was the chain sliding away. As she sank, the view of the underside of the ship faded quickly. Her heart raced and her eyes were wide as she sat speechless and motionless, seeing the car turn away from the ship and point towards the endless abyss below. It was several seconds before she realized she was screaming and screaming, the dry pain in her throat was the only thing that made her stop. This was it, she thought as her chest heaved, this was how she was going to die, this was where her entire sixteen-year-old life was leading her, into the endless deep, to suffocate slowly, forgotten, missing, to sink into darkness and be crushed by the pressure that would inevitably take her.

As the vehicle pointed down, gravity took over and tossed the luggage from the back into the back seat, throwing her down onto the driver and passenger seat. Tears streamed down her face and onto the windshield as she let out gasps and choked screams. The darkness, sprinkled with rays of diminishing light, stretched out for miles in every direction. Survival instincts kicked in but there wasn’t much she could do. She was too small to kick out the windshield and even if she did, she wouldn’t make it to the surface as every passing moment carried her deeper and deeper. Even if she could, the ship…. the ship would be long gone and she would be left…alone.

She laid there for the first hour, staring into the deep, tears on the windshield, trying hard not to hyperventilate. There was a lump in her chest but as she leaned back, she realized it was her stuffed rabbit. The same rabbit that her dad won at the faire for her. She started to wonder if he would be more upset at the loss of her or the car. Or maybe he would be happy that she was gone. Not having to deal with her meds and therapy. Those were some of the things she wouldn’t miss, talking to Ms. Guile on Saturdays, sitting in that leather chair and exposing her inner fears and anxieties to someone she didn’t even know. No one ever really understood Meghan and they never would.

By the second hour she was feeling dizzy and didn’t have the strength to cry anymore, no matter how much she was enshrouded in darkness. She only wanted someone to talk to but she was trapped with herself, stuck with the thoughts that only made her weaker. Her psyche meds were in her backpack and she smiled, knowing she wouldn’t need them anymore. All the money her dad spent on her was pointless. Everything she ever did was pointless and meaningless. It was no wonder then that she had always felt this way. She always knew that nothing ever mattered.

Time slowed and every moment felt like a grain of sand in the hourglass or maybe the dripping of water into the cabin of a sinking SUV. By this point she couldn’t tell if she was falling anymore as everything looked the same, darkness below, darkness above. The only thing she could focus on was whether or not her death would be painful, whether the deep pressure would burst her eyes from their sockets or crush her skull, if she would cry tears of blood, something she wished she could have done in school, to show the others how she really felt inside. In fact, her eyes did start to burn, to tingle, to feel bigger. She wondered if her sanity would go before she died, before she hit the bottom or if she would just sink….and sink….and sink, like a forgotten ghost, alone, trapped in an unearthly limbo forever. Her worst fear, the fear of the great deep below was the only thing she had, the only thing she could see, the fear drowning her, forcing her to look into the abyss, never able to look away. Her eyes bulged. Her mind swelled with doubt that this was even happening, that she still had things to do with her life. That she wanted to tell her friends about the new boy band she found and that she wouldn’t be able to surprise her mom and that no one would even know she disappeared since no one knew she decided to be a stowaway.

She tried to cry again, tried to force out the tears but couldn’t. But through blurry vision she saw something other than complete darkness…Was it a whale…? A mass of rippling skin appeared slowly, running parallel to the vehicle, stretching down into the blackness. It couldn’t have been a whale; it was too big. Her heart started to race with what it could be. The hulking, gray flaps billowed with the water like an accordion. It was smooth otherwise. She chose not to breathe for several seconds, shaking at the sight of the thing. In school she was always taught that the deep was filled with things and places that had yet to be discovered. Again, she tried to cry but found that her chest ached with every gasp of air.

After another long hour of staring at the strange creature she became even weaker, her eyes growing heavy. It was almost comforting to have something physically represent her loneliness, the creature living in the deep, in the great unknown, for so long that it probably forgot what it felt like to be around its own kind. Or at least that’s what she imagined as she drifted off to sleep, the company of the giant wall of flesh calmed her, as if she were sedated by solidarity.

A budding flower, petals of flesh and tentacles, contained at its center an eye of immense size and….and a jaw…or beak that quivered when it opened. This was what met her gaze when she woke again, staring down through the windshield. Her hands were moist, wrapped around the rabbit. She tried to push back but she found that her arms were useless and her body was limp. Paralyzed, numb, water dripping on the back of her head. She was forced to look at the giant creature, forced to look upon it with terrified eyes. It was about a half mile below her, lurking in the dark, as big as…anything she had ever seen.

She screamed and moaned as much as her dry throat could handle, her arms trying to move but couldn’t. The creature approached slowly, its gray tentacles reaching out and attaching loosely to the vehicle. “No, no, no. God please no.” This couldn’t be real. She was hallucinating, she had to be. Or brain dead or dead. There was a buzzing in her head that she couldn’t ignore. It rang and rang until she held her ears shut, which didn’t help. She gritted her teeth as the terrible monster approached. Her head was pulsing and felt inflamed as if her brain was pushing against the skull. The eye of the monster grew larger and larger until she couldn’t hold in the terror and choked out tears. Then suddenly everything went quiet and the pain stopped.

She looked down. The unavoidable gaze of the giant eye penetrated her soul and caused her to freeze, trembling only a little. The buzzing became a soft melody, a sound unlike anything she had ever heard, soft and angelic, like a distant moan. Every terrible feeling, every fear, and anxious moment was in that moan. She felt it all at once. That night when she saw her closet door open by itself when she was in bed. It the same feeling she got when she saw a shadow in the dark in the basement. That time she fell down the stairs and broke her thumb. The pain of hearing her mother say she was getting a divorce. All of her fears were brought to the surface. All of the damage that had been done to her, her entire miserable little life. They drowned her.

And then the creature spoke to her. The soft melody became a concentrated ringing and she suddenly could understand everything the creature wanted to say but without words. It was telling her that she would never be understood and that nobody would ever care for her, that her fears were true and that the only way to be free was to embrace them. Her eyes bulged on the windshield, drool seeped from her mouth and mixed with the sea water that was pooling around her cheek. She moaned and gasped, face pressed against the glass.

It continued to speak, whispering thoughts in the back of her mind, reminding her over and over again that she was not good enough, that she would die soon if she didn’t allow it to enter her mind. “Why?” she groaned. The thing gave her visions of it invading other people’s minds, of minds being implanted with a parasite that lived in the dark recesses of the human mind, subsisting on fluid from the adrenal gland. She saw people cowering in fear, locked away in quiet places, stuck in their own heads, letting the parasitic entity control them. The parasites were small. They were the creature’s children and she could see these too, through the visions, pooling around her face. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to end up like that, eternally influenced by some mind-altering creature, her body a husk to her former self. Desperate, alone, empty, infected, lost in the deep…forever.

—-

There was a loud thud when the vehicle hit the deck of the transport vessel. Bill lifted up his hardhat, amazed they were able to use the crane to pull the chain and the vehicle from the water. The thing must’ve been down there for a few hours. The owner of the vehicle was pretty lucky that the chain didn’t snap and send the SUV to the bottom of the ocean. The owner, a man in a jacket and a worried expression, rushed to the car and opened it, pulling out a ball of clothes. But it wasn’t clothes, it was a girl, coming out of unconsciousness. The man was her father and he hugged her but the girl didn’t react. The father held her shoulders and asked if she was okay and what she was doing but the girl, the stowaway, stared back with a flat expression and only said, “The darkness –the darkness lives inside me now.”