As I squatted in my boat with my net cast into the dark waters, I thought of how I had always detested the moon when it was full and what it brought upon my eyes and ears far out in the sea. The waters had this strange propensity to warp from something calm and familiar into something altogether dangerous and evil in the cover of night – with the moon seemingly playful and torturing in its illusions to the weary mind.

This was a rather mild summer. The wind was cool enough although the nights remained humid. Overhead, the moon was partially covered by the clouds, a company I loathe but cannot get rid of. I was quite far out in the openness and boundlessness of the sea where I felt lonely though I remarked to myself, strangely and with a shiver, I faintly felt the presence of a lurker watching me. Was it the moon’s presence? The ocean? I shuddered nervously. Though I was near enough that I could glimpse the small island I grew up in, it provided no comfort and served only to remind me of my solitude in this vast body of water.

I had been waiting impatiently for my net to fill with my nightly catch so that I may go back to the shore where I am once again on solid reliable ground when I felt the waves and ripples take on an unwonted rhythm and the rocking of the boat, whose pace I had grown accustomed to, had become agitated. I looked over and saw that the waves, indeed, seemed hypnotized, as if drawn by some other magnetic force that sought to disturb the natural equilibrium of the sea. The waves moved quite peculiarly as well. Soundless and glistening, these silver waters ebbed and flowed as if it were already on the shore, of only slight intensity but there was no mistaking it.

It is upon that state of the sea that the moon fully shone its preternatural glow, halted and suspended in the sky, all the while brooding as if standing vigil to something dark and treacherous. As it did so, I saw in that light a large mass that the dark had previously covered, it seemed to be an island but one I had never glimpsed in all the nights I had spent in these baleful waters. And on that coral-ridden mass, spires seemed to erupt from underneath, towers covered in sea grass and festooned with seaweed. Dead, slimy fish decorated this leviathan and knowing that to this raised place the dead come along to call it home, I shivered from a chill not caused by the cold sea breeze.

I gripped the sides of my boat as the tide suddenly surged towards that dead place whose towers and spikes now rose like the tips of a dripping, undead city. As quickly as it had started, the tide reversed, throwing me backwards and I was once again pulled off course. It was in this dizzying limbo that I found myself trapped in, I was pulled towards the dark island then expelled from it, all while struggling to get away but unable to paddle far enough from its intense gravity. And as my boat and I gradually got nearer and nearer to that hideous place, my nostrils flared from a disgusting sweet stench that seemed to emanate from it, the smell of the fallen; for underneath these foul waves, I knew, the decay of graveyards gathered for the sea worms and the eels to feast and glut upon.

Under those horrors, the waves trembled even more and ripples took on a more frantic state as worms writhed unto the surface in numbers that would smother the sea. They swam frantically, their teethless mouths agape, and were pulled into the island as I, an infernal troupe dancing in demonic glee. Over this disgusting spectacle, the evil moon shone even brighter as if determined to burn these rotten images into my mind. And I saw that the sea had become mucked and cloudy as fecal substances were scattered to pollute and desecrate it.

And in the throes of those nauseating motions, the island seemed to grow even higher, more monstrous, and as it did, it glowed a sickly green colour that made its towers look like coagulated slime. As it rose, the waters around it had retreated very low, showing a vast reef abundant with petrified corpses of sea creatures I dare not give form half-concealed and fused into the dead corals.

Only when I realized that those spires and towers were but the gunky glutinous crown of an enormous unseen creature; the reef, a monstrous protruding forehead arrayed with barnacles like giant clams; the waves, the breath of this evil leviathan; and whose gross monstrous body must still be in the depths of this disgusting bottomless sea that it had disquieted, I screamed and howled beneath that grinning moon until my voice grew hoarse. And before I could behold the hidden eyes still submerged in the slime, I plunged into the dirty wormful ocean and hysterically I swam with those eels and those disgusting critters lest the creature turn its unholy gaze upon me, my disgust replaced with sheer terror at the nausea-inducing immenseness of the creature whose face I could feel was now fully raised from the sea. And in that panic-driven state I no longer had any other thought then than to get away… away from that thing… that thing in the sea.