INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

The call from within

Gabriel Donaldson

Beyond the crumbling sands and clashing waves,

Far below the surface we hold so dear,

In the depths man dares not to explore,

a crushing hell below the earth,

There are beasts of unknown horror,

 so grotesque and disturbing,

One look will turn you mad

And it’s in this dark pit of nightmares

That he slumbers.

I am terrified of the ocean. I don’t mean that I’m afraid of swimming at the beach or of getting seasick. What I mean is the deep ocean, that endless, dark, crushing abyss of black water and death… the thought of it is enough to scare me shitless. Sometimes I don’t think people realise how big the ocean is, so allow me to rattle off a couple of statistics: The ocean covers seventy per cent of the earth’s surface, meaning that ninety-seven per cent of the earth’s water comes from the ocean. The deepest part of the ocean (that we’ve discovered) is the Marina Trench, which is 11km deep. For context, Mount Everest is only 8.9km, over 2km shy of the Marina Trench. For crying out loud, it is estimated that we’ve only explored five per cent of the ocean. Five per cent! We’ve discovered more about the solar system than we have the ocean. For all the years we’ve lived on the surface, with all the advancements we’ve made, humans have never dared to delve deeper. To explore the world hidden beneath that thick murky water. It's as if we know better than to stray too far from shore, as if some primal part of us, knows that the seas do not belong to us.

I will never be able to swim alone at the beach. I’ll never be able to go on a cruise ship out of fear it would sink. Even as I write this, safe on dry land, the thought of the ocean is enough to make me shiver, filling my lungs and drowning me in fear. My toes curl in anticipation as if suddenly I’ll be plunged into the depths, dragged below the water’s surface by God knows what. 

And yet, for some cruel reason, I am widely fascinated by it.

Deep in the dark abyss,

Stands the forgotten city, R’leyh.

A monolith of crooked spires 

and glowing hieroglyphs  

in a language no mortal was meant to read.

Its residents are no less disturbing.

Home to The Great Old Ones,

Dead, but still dreaming.

Dead, save for him.

It began with Left Shoe and the Foundling, one of the first books I ever read. I say read loosely because I was maybe five and couldn’t read. It was more of a visual book anyway. In Left Shoe and the Foundling, Left Shoe, an anthropomorphic dog from a village tribe of fishermen sets out on a voyage to gather food, only for his boat to be attacked by a giant squid. It gave me nightmares for a week.

Despite this, I kept reading the book, along with its sequels. A few years later, I got really into Pirates of the Caribbean, in spite of having to watch the scene where the Kraken destroys their ships through the gaps between my fingers.

As I grew older, my fear of the monsters beneath the waves grew stronger, and so did my intrigue. These creatures, which for all we know are real and stalking the deepest pits of the earth, terrorised my thoughts. But still, I found myself fixed to the screen whenever a horror movie was set underwater, and even excited when a sea monster showed up. 

For all their terror, all those tentacles and razor-like fangs that could tear a man to shreds, there is something undeniably beautiful about them. There’s a very intimate relationship that all people have with the thing that scares them the most. The more you fear something, the more it pulls you in. The more that morbid fascination grows, the more tempted you become to let the creature tear you to pieces, just to see it in action. Something about these sleek majestic-bodied monsters, that could kill me, makes me feel so alive. So awake.

The almighty priest

Lays dormant beneath the surface.

Yet even in his endless slumber,

This vast entity of putrid flesh 

Spreads its will of hysteria and madness.

These dark commands spread far and wide,

Infect the minds of all who dared listen

To that distant voice beneath the surface 

That man was not meant to hear:

“Wake me.”

I was sixteen when I read The Call of Cthulhu and since then it’s remained my “favourite” piece of sci-fi horror. If you’re not familiar with the novel, you’re probably wondering who Cthulhu is, and how to pronounce his name (Ku-foo-loo).

Cthulhu is fear and madness personified. An eldritch horror. The Priest of R’leyh. The Great Old One, who is dead but still dreaming, who can bend the will of men like twigs. A mammoth being that’s hard to make sense of; leathery wings, the putrid remains of a man’s flesh for a body, and a beard of tentacles being the only comprehensible part of his appearance.

Cthulhu is the most famous creation of sci-fi horror writer, H.P Lovecraft, an unhappy individual whose works reflect his misery. Lovecraft’s stories are rooted in the fear of the unknown, as most of the monsters in his books are characterised only by ominous and vague descriptions of flesh, rot and decay. As if the creatures are so incomprehensibly vile that even describing them is too much. Alongside The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s stories Dagon and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of the most bone-chilling stories for anyone with a fear of deep water. 

I hated that I loved it.

The fools who listened were twisted and changed,

Their free will replaced by the words of the Old God.

Men turned into murderers.

Civilised people became savage cultists.

Until all that remained were husks

Hollow, bleak and deformed.

Yet they danced and praised with frenzied passion.

Chanting over and over around a mountain of burning corpses,

And the voice they chanted in was his:

“Wake me! Wake me!”

The moment it saw me, there was no escaping it. I wasn’t sure where its eyes were supposed to be, but I could feel its stare all over my skin, beckoning me closer. Closer. Closer still, until we were face to face, locked in a standoff.

The piece was appropriately called Untitled. I don’t think there is any other title that could describe the deep-sea spawn I was looking at. If I wanted to be scared by an artwork I would have gone to MONA in Hobart. Apparently, the NGV had other ideas. Some people discussing the piece said it was an abstract piece that changed depending on the angle you looked at it. Others said it was like a Rorschach test, each disfigured piece of the work designed to be perceived differently by each person who viewed it. 

I saw a monster. A creature, at the top of the food chain, that lurked in the dark crushing depths of the ocean, who would ravage and devour anything unlucky enough to stumble upon it, just like I had now. In that black room with the dim lighting and cold air, it didn’t feel like I was in an art gallery. I was at the bottom of the ocean, a crushing hell below the earth. I was a trespasser in this creature’s territory, and they knew it. My body told me to run and hide and never come back to this place again. The nagging morbid voice in my head told me to get closer, just close enough for it to touch it. All I wanted to do was observe its krill-like features and gaze into the soulless sockets that I could only hope were its eyes. To my surprise, its gaze held no malice, at least not for now. It was intense, focused, as if it were calling to me. As if it were trying to reach some dormant part of myself. Trying to tell me something…

As the bodies piled higher

And the old god grew stronger,

What remained of the sane population 

Took matters into their own hands.

Raiding and slaughtering the cultists,

Before they shed enough blood to wake him

But even as the last cultist gagged his last,

He laughed in his voice.

Enough innocence had been sacrificed, 

And far beyond the safety of the shores

from deep below the waves,

Emerged the topmost part of his sunken city, R’leyh.

Leaving the NGV, I was more obsessed with creatures from the deep than ever before, and for the millionth time, I asked myself why. Why on earth would I want to go looking for more of the things that terrified me? Why would anyone actively seek out ways to interact with their worst nightmare? That’s the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do when you fear something! 

Fear, in an evolutionary definition, is designed to promote survival. if you learned to fear the right things, such as heights, animals higher on the food chain, and incomprehensible ocean deities, these fears would keep you alive. But for some reason, we enjoy interacting with the things that scare us. Adrenaline junkies get their kicks from sky-diving and extreme rollercoasters. Horror movie fans who’ll applaud when Freddy Kruger guts his next victim. Hypocrites who say their fear of the ocean keeps them awake at night more than anything, yet have a weird hyper-fixation on the unknown horrors of the deep blue abyss.

But there is another type of people who engage with their fears:

The ones who do it to learn about themselves.

Far beyond the safety of dry land,

On a sea the hides the terrors below,

Aboard a ship that will never return home,

A crew of doomed men spot an island on the horizon.

Curiosity clouds their better judgement,

And they step foot on stone 

That was never meant to see the light of day.

This island is non-sensical,

The very ground does not obey the natural order of things.

It warps and oozes as they follow the only visible path

To a gate sealed in glittering dark sludge.

They don’t know why, they’ll never know why,

But they’re compelled to pry open this gate.

With a final heave, the hellish gate swings open.

And from within, he laughs a vile, ancient laugh

That the men don’t understand, but they do fear.

He is awake.

Fear has a lot of negative connotations surrounding it. Fear is a powerful emotion. It's primal, unrelenting, and anyone who’s felt its grasp, knows you will bend to it in an instant. What is interesting is, all the same things are true about love, and yet, we see that as a positive emotion. The same chemicals, dopamine and endorphins, are released when we feel both fear and love. What I’m trying to say, is that despite resenting it, what we fear shapes us as much as what we love does. If you only interact with the things you love, don’t you really only know half of yourself? There will always be a part of you that remains asleep, lying in wait, for you to uncover it.

He rises from the tomb he called home,

And at long last feels the sunshine upon him

In all his hideous splendour.

What a cult spent centuries trying to achieve,

These poor sailors accomplished by accident.

And for their effort, they’re rewarded

With a cruel eldritch horror beyond understanding.

His toxic stench alone is enough to drive several of the crewmates mad.

His lucid form of damp rotting flesh 

Is enough to stop the hearts  

Of those who look upon him too long. 

Only one makes it back to the vessel and cast off to sea.

But great ‘Thulu pursues still…

I don’t think I’ll ever know what caused me to fear the ocean. I don’t think I want to know what caused such a primal response. But since my encounter with that statue at the NGV, I’ve accepted the fear of the ocean as a part of myself. I can feel that fear-driven part of myself beginning to stir within me. I’m more open to exploring it, delving into it’s depths. Little by little, I’m discovering the terrors that lie in wait within me. Ancient fears and insecurities I haven’t dared to accept until now. When I explore this side of myself, I always picture myself back below the waves. Deep where the sun can’t reach me, face to face with that untitled creature, its blank eyes gazing back into mine…

Calling to me.

With a scream of defiance,

The brave sailor swings the boat portside,

Impaling the bow into the Elder God.

Great ‘Thulu’s rotten hide falls in on itself,

And the Old One is yet again swallowed by the sea.

For days and nights, the sailor floated lost on the sea,

Until he was found, half-mad

And rambling of things no man was meant to see.

His saviours would never believe him.

The world would be none the wiser.

But the sailor will always remember.

He’ll see the Old God reforming,

Pulling his scattered chucks together in the sea foam,

And retreating back into the depths of R’leyh.

He’ll always know that far beyond the shore,

In the depths below the waves,

There are things that no man was ever meant to find,

But they found him,

And he is still calling.

Wake me.

Wake me.

Wake me.