Galapagos Below Read online

  He found himself telling her about the ‘Mud Engineer’ Steve and one of his acerbic one-liners about the roughneck crew all being Planet of the Apes extras. He chuckled a little to himself as he wrote.

  He described their conversations quite often, and he hoped his latest descriptions of everything and everyone on the platform would not make her as bemused or perplexed as he felt.

  He turned to look at the picture on the wall of his kids and his wife, Lilly; her delicate features lit by the brilliant perfection of her smile stopped him in his tracks and made his chest ache, as he wondered for the millionth time why someone so beautiful and amazing would love somebody as average as himself.

  He sat on the edge of his bunk looking at the clock, knowing it would be an hour till he could call and say good night to the kids, as he waited on this heap of metal in the middle of the ocean, missing everything that mattered to him. He wondered again if the money was worth what he’d left behind.

  Thinking once more of the kids, he set about drawing another picture for Arron, who shared his love of drawing. He fancied himself a half-decent artist, and he started a picture of a wild-haired man standing on a raised metal area, gripping a railing with one hand and pointing out to sea with the other; behind him a storm was coming in.

  Hundreds of miles away and as deep as seven Grand Canyons, in the Puerto Rico Trench, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean’s reach, a being the length of a blue whale and twice its width rose like an ethereal shadow from the pitch black deep.

  Its upper surface the dark of night, its underside lightened like the sunlit shallows far above, its colouring camouflaged it from above and below.

  It stretched its senses wide, seeking for prey and danger alike, till its awareness covered miles of open ocean water, all monitored by its cold, calculating intelligence.

  A being with a name that we would understand as Agrushell accelerated effortlessly while water surged over his outer shell, flowing with frictionless ease around the fractal perfection of his shape. Thrusting like a spearhead through the water toward an unsuspecting giant squid, Agrushell was a dark disguised shape with infinite power and the prowess for fatality.

  Before his prey had opportunity to evade, a dull electrical thud resonated through the water, leaving the squid stunned. Suctioned coils gripped and newly formed blades entered like a clamp, till blackness was all that remained of the squid’s final moments.

  When the pleasure of the kill had been savoured, and his hunger sated, Agrushell began to feel a different kind of hunger, a yearning toward the cold waters of the north—the calling to where the females of his kind lay on the seabed in ancient hibernation, waiting for the time of awakening, breeding, death, and renewal.

  Streamlining his shape to maximize his speed, he began accelerating like an underwater jet to the north east, toward the oil fields of the North Sea.

  Agrushell is available from Amazon here