Rapture of the Deep

"Rapture of the Deep" is a short story by Cody Goodfellow that first appeared in Dark Discoveries #15 (Fall 2009). It tells the story of a corporate intelligence agency using a psychic operative to investigate a mysterious phenomenon in the Marianas Trench.
==Characters==
Ingrid: An employee of a corporation based in Hong Kong, Moscow, and San Francisco. A psychic sensitive, she has the ability to see through the another's eyes--especially someone she's slept with. She has a doctorate in psychology. Her good looks are striking, but she grew up an unpopular fat girl.
Roger Mankiw: Ingrid's boss, a vested partner in the corporation. He is skeptical of psychic abilities, but demands that they get results.
Sergei Vasilievich Lyubyenko: A Russian psychic with the ability to project his mind for remote viewing. He can also psychically control those he touches, to the point of inducing suicide. An independent contractor, he formerly worked for the KGB, but defected after they forced him to view Opaque Zone 38A; his wife and two sons were subsequently killed by the Soviet government. A bald, moustachioed old man, Lyubyenko has three fingers on one hand, the others lost to wolves in a gulag. 
==Setting==
The story takes place above and in the Marianas Trench, "the deepest hole in the earth." The trench is the source of "a steady warming trend with trace radioactivity that’s sweeping the whole South Pacific." 
The anomaly is centered on an area in the trench called Opaque Zone 38a. The Soviet Union sent the submarine Rybinsk to the zone to drop a tactical nuclear weapon on it (to "end the nightmares"); the sub did not return--nor did the submersible drones the corporation later sent to investigate. 
When Lyubyenko and Ingrid investigate psychically, they find a "plain of basalt slabs fragmented into disturbingly tessellated geometrical patterns." It's dotted with hundreds of towering hydrothermal vents, the smaller ones twelve stories tall, arranged "in a uniform field. A farm." The chimneys are "festooned with giant tubeworms and anemones," surrounded by "enormous shrimp," and tended by "monstrous arachnids" that "farmed globules of cooling heavy metals, and bore them off across the plain, like leaf cutter ants harvesting fungi."
Beyond the plain are "dozens of octagonal pits, each hundreds of yards across, and seemingly bottomless." Their walls are honeycombed with wormholes whose "hypnotic complexity suggested that they were inhabited by something utterly alien."
Creatures found in Opaque Zone 38a include a lava-dwelling monster "at least as large as the biggest submersible in the company fleet" that "resembled a fusion of trilobite and salamander with snarls of segmented tentacles for a head"; a "mountainous isopod" the "size of a city" that "crawled across the murky plain, gouging open the earth’s brittle crust with thousands of armored claws," whose "colossal, chitinous shell hid all but the countless antennae and eyestalks that emerged from seams, fissures, and faults in the Cyclopean exoskeleton"; and a "gargantuan humanoid form" with "vast black wings or outsized dorsal fins," whose head is a "rugose, boneless sac bearded with restless coiling tentacles."
==Connection to the Mythos==
Though never mentioned by name, the "One older and more terrible than all its kind beneath the sea, the One who slept until the world was perfect," is clearly intended to be Cthulhu: He "came down from the stars," once ruled the earth and now sends nightmares in his sleep below the Pacific, and will resume dominion with his awakening. The connection is made explicit when Lyubyenko suggests calling Opaque Zone 38a "what it was, and what it will be again--R'lyeh."
==Publication History==
The story was reprinted in Goodfellow's collection Rapture of the Deep and Other Lovecraftian Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2016), where it serves as the title story. It also appeared in The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books, 2012).
Category:Cody Goodfellow works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works