Draug — Deep Ones

Webbed claws drag you from your bed, pull you out the window. You try to scream, but a suction-cupped palm smothers your mouth. They pull you into icy waters. They pull you beyond light. They pull you down to the crushing depths where titanic pressure pulps you into something more edible.

Normally, the sea keeps its carnivorous secrets, but even the ocean mouth can’t hold back the vicious punchline all of the time. And so, the Deep Ones emerge. They are native to the cold depths of every ocean. They rarely see the sun, build their cities among the thermal vents, in those alien environments that do not require solar energy. And now they rise, the infernal fish-frogs.

For the first time in several human lifetimes, they have emerged, en mass, from the New England waves, slick and dripping. They have come to land, where they seem more clumsy. You would almost laugh to see them hop-step, until you remember at what terrifying speeds they glide down under the water. Up here, they move with deliberate slowness, as though the passage of time means little to them. They communicate silently to one another, linked by thought and pheromones.

It was the draug who called them. The Deep Ones worship certain cosmic forces, certain dreaming entities. The vast vacuum of space is just as inhospitable to terrestrial life as the abyssal depths, and seems strangely familiar to the Deep Ones. They see the draug as priests and prophets of the sleeping gods that bubble and blaspheme at the edge of their consciousness. They follow the lead of the draug.

This is not the first time the Deep Ones have surfaced. From time to time they rise. They creep into settlements, looking to mix their genetic stock with humanity. There are lonely, decaying coastal towns, the world over, where the people have a certain look. Their eyes are a little too big. They move with a hopping gate. They look a little too longingly at the waves.

Did you know, sweetling, that your eyes start at the sides of your head? In the womb, all birds, reptiles, and mammals start off resembling fish. Even you. Slowly, you morph into your present symmetry. Your eyes move to the front. Your gonads, which start behind your liver, like a shark, drift to their proper place. The line over your lip, the philtrum, is the line left when your face fuses into something human. Even your hiccups are a relic of your amphibious ancestor’s transition from breathing water to air. You look so human, but your gills, fins, and tentacles are hidden behind the thinnest scrim of inhibitor proteins.

Deep ones, aren’t we all? Aye, sweetling?