Murphy saw an immense, writhing shadow moving in his direction. It seemed to shimmer and sparkle, swimming side-to-side like a sea snake. But it was no snake and it was no worm. Just something worm-shaped that was composed of hundreds, thousands, of prismatic bubbles. Some were tiny, others bigger than softballs. They were indigo and orange and scarlet and deep green, purple and fiery red. Like the threads of a fiber-optic lamp, they kept changing color, lighting up like Christmas bulbs. Great bright bands of color ran lengthwise down the beast.

It was weird.

It was beautiful.

It was terrifying.

And then it stopped. The entire thing went a pulsing orange-red…and broke apart into separate bubbles that spread out in every direction.

“Jellies,” Bell said over the comm from some distant place. “Hydrozoans. Some kind of strange colony.”

Murphy knew about colonies of jellies. He’d been diving since he was sixteen-years-old. Colonies formed for a reason, but they did not mimic some huge creature. At least, not the kind he was familiar with. These had been acting in concert, pretending to be something else. Something big. Animals, both marine and terrestrial, often mimicked predators, but not in this way. This was amazing, alien, freakish even. Maybe a biologist who was particularly creative could have couched this in jargon that somehow made sense, toned it down and gave it a good whitewashing of logic…but Murphy was no biologist. He was a sailor. A diver. And he trusted his instincts. And they told him this was not just strange, but absolutely abnormal.

Hovering up there, the jellies certainly looked like your average jellyfish: they pulsed and oscillated, there were fine combs at their outer edges that jellies generally propelled themselves with. They did not look dangerous. They just hung there, perhaps attracted by the lights. They wouldn’t have eyes as such, Murphy knew, but many jellies had photophores. The same light shows that attracted them to one another were attracting them to the divers.

“Just jellies,” Bell said, as if he was trying to convince himself of the fact.

Murphy stared up at them. He couldn’t seem to stop. There was something mesmerizing about them, captivating. It was almost like they wanted him to look at them and that was ridiculous, but the feeling persisted. Grew stronger, even.

“They’re…they’re dropping down now,” Bell said, concerned, but certainly not frightened.

Not like Murphy was now.