Bigger Fish-Nygren

Bigger Fish

Isabelle Nygren

Regina didn’t have to take a manned submersible down to the whalefall, but she wouldn’t be Regina if she hadn’t.

A remotely operated vehicle used by colleagues in a different department had been monitoring crab life off the Alaskan panhandle. They’d spotted the freshly fallen blue whale carcass and had been considerate enough to immediately alert the university’s wunderkind cetologist. It was a rare treat, not just for all the marine biologists at the university, but also for all the things that lived beneath the waves.

We were at home when she got the email; it was Taco Tuesday. I was searing rock fish I’d caught on my last fishing trip when I heard a squeal from her office. I went running and found her beaming. She explained the circumstances in overlapping sentences as she spun in her office chair and rattled off all the things that would be eating a body so fresh. “Salmon sharks, lingcod, red king crab, squid.”

ALVIN was hauled up from California; a manned vessel that would allow for a closer, personal look. I knew from the start I wouldn’t be in it. Not a lot of space onboard the submersible, but plenty aboard the ship it would be launched from.

“And it could be fun to have you watch a live feed from up top!” Regina said as she jammed any clothing within reach into her backpack.

And I agreed, because it would be fun.

I’m reconsidering that now.

I’m the only non-scientist in the lab room. They’ve set up a big projector to broadcast a live feed from ALVIN’s front-mounted camera. The sub is still above water. It looks out on an endless, glistening ocean. It’s a cloudless day with hardly any wind. Great for going under, I overhear.

Everyone’s polite enough, even the subject of several post-work vent sessions, Steven. (“But call him Doctor Harmon, babe, or he’ll hate you forever.”) He’s a little older than either of us, a little taller than I am, a little skinnier than I am. “She only has nice things to say about you,” he says dismissively, ignoring my extended hand. (“He’s probably pissed that he can’t go, but he isn’t the one getting grants for the department, so …”)

“Glad she hasn’t mentioned the beatings,” I say with a laugh, but the joke, which was admittedly bad, falls flat. I clear my throat and retreat to a corner of the bright, clean room. I’ll let them do their work.

I spot Miriam, Regina’s only work friend that I’ve met; she comes over for board games and a glass of wine once in a while, and she always brings her overweight ragdoll, Felix. She waves at me from across the room, smiling, and I wave back.

Miriam gestures me over to a panel near the screen and hands me a chunky plastic microphone on a cord. “It’s a direct comm into the sub.”

Regina’s always been at home in the ocean, but I’m very content on land, where my odds of being crushed by the weight of all that water are substantially smaller. But ALVIN’s safe, I tell myself. ALVIN is top of the line, unfailing and unlethal.

I take the mic from Miriam, hold down the button. “Hey, Gina. How is it in there?”

“Stuffy.” Her voice comes through as grainy but intelligible. I can tell just from the sound of her voice that she’s beaming ear-to-ear. “I’m pretty sure Eric farted.”

I hear someone complain in the background.

“Feel secure?” I try to keep the nerves from my voice.

“I’m in a seventeen-ton metal sphere, babe. I’ll be fine.” She knows I’m worried. I smile to myself and repeat those last reassuring words in my head as we watch the camera lower, as we watch the briny water lap at the lens, as we watch the sun vanish.

It gets dark fast in the ocean. Regina’s told me about the different oceanic zones, tracing out a diagram on my chest that only makes sense to her. That kind of stuff is her idea of pillow talk, but I’m generally too preoccupied with the contours of her face, the way the moonlight seeps in from the window and lights in her hair, to pay much attention.

“So. How deep are you guys headed?”

“Down to the abyssal zone.” She sounds like a kid on Christmas. “Where all the really weird shit is. This is a big event for them, like Bob Dylan coming to a small town that never sees any action. All the major players will be there.”

From what little I can recollect, it’s the deepest of the deep, and the camera feed reflects that. Soon, it’s almost entirely dark. Though ALVIN does have lights, they aren’t nearly sufficient to keep all my imagined horrors at bay.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come.

“Worried?” Miriam asks. I realize I’m chewing my nails and hastily drop my hand to my side. “And I thought you were a nervous wreck when I rolled a seven in Catan.”

“I don’t know how you guys do it. Even pictures of the deep ocean freaked me out as a kid.”

“That’s the secret.” She grins with a smile reminiscent of Regina’s. No wonder they became work wives. They have that same streak in them. “You’ve gotta be born stupid to be a marine biologist, so you aren’t scared of all the things that normal people are.”

A transmission from the pilot crackles over the speakers set up to transmit to the whole room. “We’re almost at depth.”

The room stirs. All eyes are on the monitor. From the darkness, solidity. The ocean floor. Loose, silty, colorless.

Movement: a crab. I’ve never heard so much excited discussion around a crab. What species, what age, what sex. Even more exciting for all of them, it’s going in the same direction as the sub.

“Toward the whalefall,” Miriam helpfully whispers to me, the only idiot in the room.

I watch the screen, expectant for the big show. A hush moves like a wave across the researchers.

Silt. Crabs. More silt. Excited murmurs at a big-looking fish. (“Salmon shark!”) Then, the pilot, over the speakers: “You sure you guys gave me the right coordinates?”

I take my cues from Miriam, who looks puzzled. Her hands go to her hips, her lips purse quizzically.

There are numbers repeated over the radio, the sounds of physical and digital maps opening, arguments. I stand, feeling useless, and radio to Regina: “Do you have the right coordinates?”

“I wasn’t the one to get them initially, but the location corresponded with blue whale migration paths for this time of year, so it seemed right.”

Someone grabs their own mic, calls in to the pilot, “Your coordinates are lining up with where we found it.”

Steven – Doctor Harmon, I mean – fidgets with a pen, clicks it against his chin. “Are we sure the Z-axis is also right?”

Miriam rolls her eyes in his direction. “They’re on the fucking ocean floor, Steven, how much deeper could they go?”

“So it moved?” I ask, looking from one baffled face to another.

Steven scoffs. “Two hundred tons of meat and bone just moved? God, you’d mistake an Atlantic cod for a Pacific cod.”

“But if it floated, it could have—”

Miriam nudges my arm. “They have negative buoyancy. That’s how they end up here.”

Regina’s voice crackles through the room. “Wait, angle us down.”

All eyes are on the screen as the twin beams of light swing down, illuminating thick marks. Ridges, subaquatic dunes. Whatever you want to call them, they’re there, a distinctive change from the otherwise flat ocean floor. A few crabs still skitter around. Two of them seem to be fighting over a scrap of something stretchy and dark.

I lean down to Miriam. “So it was there?”

She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even look at me. Her brow is furrowed as she steps toward the screen.

Regina’s voice cuts through the silence, over the room’s speakers. That girlish giddiness is still there, just subdued. “Initial visual impression is that it was … dragged off.”

Steven stumbles toward the mic, picks it up. “With all due respect, Doctor Mallory: it was a fucking blue whale.”

“I’m just describing what I see, Doctor Harmon. They’re my initial observations and I could very well be wrong.”

The lights hang on the marks; ugly scars, sharp edges on an otherwise flat expanse. Even the crabs skittering about seem confused. I feel less alone now that everyone is baffled.

Regina is a force of forward motion. “It obviously went somewhere. And we know in what direction,” she says into the mic, and then, to the pilot, a little less obviously, “Let’s follow the track marks.”

I wait for someone to say something, but no one does and so my hand is forced.

“They originally found the carcass with a remote device, right? Can’t they just … follow the tracks with a remote device?”

Miriam cocks her head. “If something moved the corpse, it’d have to be insanely strong to do that.”

“Don’t stop. Keep going,” says a breathless Steven into the mic. The whites of his eyes are visible, the full rings of his irises exposed. The excitement on his face is on everyone else’s, everyone save Miriam’s. She frowns at the screen, the only validation of my own fears here.

“Do you think it’s safe?” I ask into the mic.

“This thing’s sturdy,” Regina laughs.

And what am I meant to say?

ALVIN moves slowly. Too slowly. The light drags along the ground. Small things skitter in and out of the little pool of visibility. They’re all hungry, and just as lost as everyone on this side of the screen. I watch for things outside that light, in the darkness at the edges of the screen where no one else is looking. I watched horror movies with my family as a kid. I remember waiting then, watching for horrors. I’m chewing on my nails again, and it’s harder to stop.

A huge ridge jump-scares me. The tracks move parallel to it. It rises from the stretch of nothing, impossibly tall, gutwrenchingly massive. I stare up at the rising body of earth and I want to be sick. I reach for Miriam’s hand, catch myself and clutch my own hands together.

The headlight moves with a treacherous slowness. It drags along the sand – the sand, the endless sand. I reach for the mic. “So … what are you going after?”

Regina whispers, “I’m not sure yet.”

I’m not sure how long I stand, holding my breath, but I find a moment to gasp in more air when there’s a change; a hole in the cliffside.

ALVIN’s signal is grainy here, but in the static I can see the gaping maw in the sand, held up by dark stone.

I can’t help myself. I grab the comm. “This feels like a job for something without people in it.”

“Babe. Please. My colleagues are here. And we’re already so close.”

The vessel points down, I would assume to light up the drag marks that must lead into that yawning darkness. They reveal more bones. There’s nothing for scale on that screen, and yet in that pool of light they are hulking, bigger than a person, bigger than my capacity for breath. Tears gather in my eyes, but it’s silly to cry, isn’t it? This is a safe maneuver, and I’m letting my own fear of deep water get the best of me.

“Another blue whale,” says Steven, nodding too fast to himself.

“Maybe … this is where they go to die?” A hopeful voice. I cling to it. Maybe the whalefall they were all so excited about was just something in a deep sleep that let itself descend into the darkness. Maybe it woke and came here to be with its ancestors.

The tears are trickling down my cheeks now. An animal instinct thumps in my chest, the kind that would have told our forebears we were being stalked by lions, the kind that begs us to run and hide. It’s only the dark. It’s only my irrational mind. I use my shirtsleeve’s hem to dab the tears away, hoping no one’s noticed.

The sub follows the drag marks into the void. With all that earth above it, the signal gets even worse. The static makes the dark come alive, creates patterns that could be alien forms moving at the edge of ALVIN’s feeble light.

I want to say something to Regina, but no words feel right. There’s nothing I can say that will take her out of there, that will spirit her away to safety. I taste iron and salt. I’ve chewed too deep into my thumb nail, and now a bloody bud wells up. I fist my hand and jam it into my pocket. The little exposed injury stings. It’s a welcome distraction.

The space they’ve gone into is deceptively vast. ALVIN keeps pushing forward, and, just when I think it’s reached the end, it turns a corner and multiple pathways open up, each as black as the other.

They keep following the tracks, which are all the darker and more defined here where the ocean currents can’t find them. They’re sometimes bordered by smaller marks, light and delicate like the imprints a bird’s wings leave in the snow as they take flight.

I don’t know what to make of it, but I overhear Steven whisper something to someone else. I don’t catch most of it, but “Architeuthis Horvus” is said with slightly more reverence than the rest. I turn to see the recipient of the statement shaking his head slowly. His eyes fall on me, briefly, and he sees me staring back. He shoots Steven a reprimanding look.

“Does anyone here know what’s going on?” I ask Miriam.

She’s gone very pale. She doesn’t nod, doesn’t shake her head, doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t acknowledge me.

The mood here has fallen. The only people enthusiastic about the findings seem to be ALVIN’s passengers.

Regina talks rapidly about how interesting it is that we aren’t seeing more life in what would be a good habitat for so many different creatures, how one would normally expect to be seeing so much more, how maybe climate change is creating patches of ecologic dead zone.

Miriam seems about to say something into the mic. Steven starts towards her. Her lips close, tighten to a thin line. Her hands are shaking.

I open my mouth, not sure what I’m about to say but certain I need to say something, anything, to break the oppressive quiet that’s fallen over the room. They know something I don’t, know something (perish the thought) that maybe even Regina doesn’t know.

As I’m finding the words, ALVIN keeps moving. Another almost dead end, but then the narrow, rough walls of that subaquatic cave open up into a chamber so large that the vessel’s headlights touch nothing but the ocean floor. Distant dots of light, slightly more distinct and constant than the static, which has only gotten worse. Stars in an endless night sky.

And the tracks have come to an end. There’s the body, huge and rotting but not teeming with life like they’d expected. It’s on its side, I think, and the upright fin waves lazily in the water. White glistens from beneath the dark, mottled skin. It’s so disfigured, so amorphous, I’m not sure if it’s facing towards us or away from us.

I shakily exhale. “Okay. We’ve found the whalefall. Mission success.”

Regina’s still smiling, I can hear it in her voice: “But what brought it this far?”

Miriam makes it to the mic before Steven can stop her. “Could it be a Horvus?”

Regina laughs. It’s the least confident sound she’s produced all day. There’s an edge to it that rarely comes out. She’s rarely afraid, but when she is there’s a pitchiness to every sound she produces, and it’s starting to edge into her communications. “They don’t come this far North.”

“They haven’t been observed this far North,” Steven corrects.

I look between the two of them. “What’s—”

A gasp ripples through the room, a few murmured prayers, as ALVIN pitches upward, directing its camera and beams of light directly ahead.

In the center of that colossal cavern stands a slick white pillar. Not made of stone. It’s too soft. It moves gently in the water.

Miriam, still at the mic, talks fast. “Now we know, mystery solved, you should get out of there.”

Regina doesn’t listen. “Can you take us closer?” she asks the pilot. Regina and I aren’t religious, but, for the first time in my life, I hear something approaching reverence in her voice.

“What the fuck is that thing?” comes his distant reply.

Steven pushes past Miriam, takes the mic, says, “It’s the most well fed we’ve ever encountered. ALVIN’s still fully equipped, right? We could get samples off this one.”

Miriam leans past him. “It’s not worth it. We know where it’s habitated, we can come back later with a remote vehicle.”

The camera feed grows grainier as they close the distance between themselves and the pillar. It stretches in both directions, towering above and below. It bows out a little in the center.

“Horv – Horvus what? What is it?”

“It could move,” Steven says. “It could relocate. This could be our only chance to get a sample of DNA. If it’s extraterrestrial, Dennis owes me $5.”

Regina speaks rapidly to the pilot. The camera jostles. The static’s so bad, the only thing there is the column. Metal appliances poke into frame, jab at it.

The column begins to shake.

“Miriam?” I’m desperate, I think my voice cracks. I grab her arm. “Miriam, what—”

Silt rises around it.

I shove through the throng to grab the mic. “Gina—”

Through the static, an eye. Glowing sclera, a perfectly round pupil, the eclipse of a too-small moon against an unnaturally colored sun. The silt, the static, the chaos. A flurry of narrow tentacles moving towards the camera. Huge slabs of pale flesh emerging above. Too many geometries, shapes, and people are talking fast and loud around me and I’m trying to reach Regina, focused on reaching Regina, talking fast and loud and my voice is lost. I don’t know what I’m saying; maybe a spell, eldritch knowledge, something to pull her from the mess.

The screen goes black.

My chest is heaving. I’m the only one shouting now.

The rest of the room is silent, save for apparatus beeping at random intervals. The lab’s white lights are colder now. The room has become clinical, morgue-like. I didn’t notice the reek of chemicals in the air before, but now they press in, turning the air almost opaque. I might be sick.

Miriam’s hand rests on my back. I glance back at her. “What …”

Steven breaks the silence with a clap of his hands. “We’ll have to get an NDA. Are they where they usually are?”

The world is too thick, the flow of time all wrong. I am dreaming. I will wake soon. I look back towards the black screen. I will open my eyes soon. I will be in bed, and Regina will be next to me.

Miriam’s voice is soft. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What did she—”

There’s a paper being shoved in my face, a pen shoved into my hand.

“There’s some organisation that does compensation for this kind of thing,” says Steven. “You’ll have to sign, of course. Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you didn’t.” That last bit’s said with a wink.

He leaves me standing there with a clipboard and a pen, running off to go look at something on a monitor. The horrified silence is gone. Now, there’s a clamor again. The room is even more excited than it was before the descent. I turn to Miriam. Questions. I have a lot of questions: When’s Regina coming back up? What was that? What’s the protocol for this kind of thing?

But Miriam has darted off, and is leaning over a screen and conversing rapidly with other people in white coats.

I look back down at the paper. Even reading’s become a challenge. Words swim on the page. I catch phrases like “anomalous entity” and “classified”. There’s something about prison time.

I want to ask someone, anyone, when Regina is coming back up. No one seems to be doing anything. There has to be something they can do. ALVIN’s sturdy, ALVIN’s safe. ALVIN’s built different, built to last. Gina told me so herself when I told her I was worried about her going down.

The pen drops from my fingers. The sound of it hitting the floor is lost in the hubbub around me. “Hey,” I say to the air. “What’s going on?”

Nothing.

“Can someone tell me what’s going on?”

Miriam laughs at a distant joke, jabs a finger at a screen. On the other side of the room, Steven is rapidly typing something.

“Can anyone …”

Isabelle Nygren is a born and raised Alaskan pursuing her MA in London. She’s had a variety of horror and dark fiction published across multiple anthologies and literary journals, including Frost Zone’s 2026 Spring Edition and Words Faire’s A Survival Guide for a Dystopian Utopia. She’s currently working on a gothic novel inspired by the intersecting themes between Rebecca and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. In her spare time, Isabelle enjoys crocheting, experimenting in the kitchen and taking pictures of squirrels in parks. You can find her other work and updates at her website: https://isabelleanygren.wixsite.com/cwcannibalism.

Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of any part of this story to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, locations or general circumstances is entirely coincidental and/or used in a fictitious manner.

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