First of all, happy Halloween! 🎃
On the occasion of such a day, I want to tell you a little about my horror story, which I wrote three years ago and which, perhaps, I will publish in printed form in the future. I’m not going to retell the entire plot here for fear of plagiarism, and also because I described a couple of bloody scenes, and, for this reason, the story is rated R. But I will tell you some details of the plot and what inspired me.
The title of the story is "The Diving into Abyss." In the story, diver Andrew dives with friends into a large reservoir to find a village that was previously located on this site. He finds one house, but also discovers a tunnel at the bottom that leads somewhere down. Andrew and his friend swim there and find a rock ledge at a depth of about 50 m. And underneath it they see emptiness. No supports for the strata of rock on which the dam and the nearest town are located, only dark water. A real underground sea. There, the characters encounter several unusual and scary animals, but the greatest danger comes from those who look like both fishes and salamanders. These animals attack the divers in a pack, Andrew's friend is killed, and Andrew ends up in the hospital, partially eaten. Discussing what happened with his wife and friend, he realizes that he has found living Ichthyostega and other Devonian relics, and now these animals will probably try to get out of the underground sea.
My close friends who read the story say that I made a thriller because I paid a lot of attention to suspense and murder. While writing, I remembered photographs of eaten whale carcasses and people who were bitten by sharks. And I tried to convey in words what sensations arise from such bites in the water.
But why did I choose Ichthyostega for the story? First of all, I should say that I really love water. I also love the Devonian period and in particular Ichthyostega, the our ancestor, which is rarely mentioned outside of encyclopedias and school books. However, I thought about a horror story involving it thanks to... cryptozoology. A friend once gave me a book about monsters like the Yeti, and there I read that European tales of encounters with Tatzelwurm and similar monsters may have been inspired by encounters with surviving ichthyostegalians that had fish scales similar to those of reptiles. Of course, such claims are unscientific, but I wondered if our amphibian ancestors might actually have been such aggressive predators? Could they kill a human? Another reason to think was one article about Devonian chondrichthyans. The author assumed that the spikes on their heads were intended to protect them from larger carnivores, including the first stegocephalians. And there was another source of my inspiration. Several years ago, I read on the Internet a controversial but interesting assumption that, despite having paws with toes, Ichthyostega could not walk and even crawl on land. They could breathe air, but they could also breathe underwater and spend their entire lives there without surfacing. Summing it all up, I imagined not a defenseless fugitive from water to land, but a dangerous predator. It attacked prey by rising from the bottom, and moved to neighboring lakes through muddy shallows only in search of new victims.
Characters in the story suggest that Ichthyostega and other Devonian animals were transported to continental underground reservoirs by strong tides that occurred before the mass extinction. It's ironic that I wrote the story before I learned that geologists actually report short but significant changes in sea level during the Late Devonian.
Well, now I'm waiting for your comments. Would you watch a film with such a plot and what do you think about the lifestyle of Ichthyostega? While I was writing this post, I thought that I should probably partially rewrite my story and add even more suspense and attack scenes. I also plan to write horror stories in the future with little-known prehistoric animals: Megaraptor, Omnidens, Praelepas and conodonts.
