In Brief: The Sea is Full of Horror

Eons ago, the greatest horrors of our world returned to the sea from whence all life originated.  Some say that said horrors were banished there, as though such things could be banished, or would accept banishment.  Others say they took to the deep because the land had no challenges for them.  The truth lies somewhere in between, if much closer to the later.  Beneath the surface of gentle ocean waves, they look and act as beings of purest grade nightmare fuel.  On our surface world, they'd be reduced to hunting (or, for them, playing).  But in the vast darkness, these things of seemingly eternal lifespans (we don't actually know how long many sharks, for instance, live.  But does this look like a thing that can die?  Case rested) need not sink to something so base and can be patient, waiting for us to make the mistake of coming to them.  And we will.  Oh, we will. 

The brief glimpses we get of their tricks--that octopus above, for example--are but parlor tricks for simple amusement.  Their simple amusement.  Their true games are played much deeper, down where the light refuses to stretch.  It is no coincidence that H.P. Lovecraft identified the ocean floor as the location of R'lyeh, resting place of Great Cthulu.  From where else could an incomprehensible horror from beyond the stars rule without prematurely annihilating the planet through terror-driven insanity? 

Most people think that burying Osama bin Laden at sea almost a year ago was a geopolitical maneuver; no one really wanted the bastard, plus it denies his adherents a grave site for pilgrimages.  But those are mere fringe benefits, logical explanations for a world that does occasionally demand logic, if only because it has trouble contemplating the non-Euclidean horrors that lie beneath.  The truth is far more ghoulish than we mere land-dwelling mortals dare attempt to absorb.  In the place where the monster bin Laden now rests, he is not worthy of the title "monster."  Or even "terrorist."  Down there, he'd hardly rank as an amateur.  Nothing we could have done to him would have been fitting enough.  But we could feed him to the seeping moist, to be forever surrounded by those malevolent, invisible, slithering, toothsome creatures, with escape an impossibility. 

They will terrify him and then kill him.  Again and again and again.  Because fear is the most delicious condiment of all.  

*Credit to my wonderful fiancee on the title.