Cuddles

Most of the fish in the Seaside Aquarium and Rescue Center don’t look at people once, never mind twice. To them, the aquarists who feed them and care for them and occasionally dive down to check on things are simply new obstacles to be swum around and then ignored.

Not Cuddles. Cuddles watches people.

Guests find him delightful. They stand at the glass windows of his exhibit, pointing and waving and pressing fingertips against the smooth acrylic, all smiles and laughs as their attention is returned with due gravity. To them, it’s an interaction, man reaching out to nature and nature reaching back.

Cuddles isn’t something I’d want reaching for me. I can’t even say why.

I remember how Cuddles came to us. He’d been injured in some sort of run-in with a deep sea survey crew. He defied classification – like some sort of cross between squid and octopus, with hallmarks of both but belonging to neither. They brought him to us for study and recuperation, and he’d groaned on his way into the tank – my teeth ache every time I think about it. He never groaned again, thank god, but that’s when he started watching.

His eyes are the worst. I’ve seen some ugly eyes on fish, let me tell you, but Cuddles…they’re huge, bulbous, blacker than anything I’ve ever seen. They should be shiny. You’d swear they’re supposed to be shiny. But they’re not – not because they’re actually dull or matte, but because…it’s like they eat light. Like nothing escapes them.

Those eyes are what follow anyone in view. Most of us don’t want to turn our backs on him. We’ve talked about it, but nobody can think of a single reason.

He’s just creepy as hell.

Lucky for him Dr. Wickham isn’t so easily unsettled. Maybe he recognized a kindred spirit, my friend David joked once. I laughed.

I didn’t feel like laughing.

Once I walked into the room behind Cuddles’ exhibit and found the vet leaning close to the observation glass, muttering something to Cuddles, who floated just on the other side. They saw me before I could leave – Cuddles first, his awful eyes fixing on mine before Dr. Wickham noticed and turned around himself.

“Ah, Sarita,” the doctor had said, nodding towards the squidling – two weeks with us and he had already gone from the size of a man’s head to about the size of his torso – “I was just looking at Cuddles’ mantle. Unusual shape, but it almost hearkens back to a giant squid – what do you think the chances are of a relation?”

I’d made an excuse – I specialize in things far closer to shore, so it wasn’t too hard – dropped off the papers I had been bringing him, and escaped. I don’t think it had been English he was muttering in, and I doubt he was making notes on Cuddles’ physiology for a species comparison. But then, what was he doing in that case? Talking to the squid thing?

I was being ridiculous. I dismissed the notion and went about my day.

This time I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by those void-dark eyes, though. Not when I was across the aquarium. Not when I took my lunch. Not when I finished my shift, drove home, and tried to relax with a movie and an easy frozen meal.

Not when I lay down to sleep.

Not even in my dreams, darker than the space behind my own eyes, full of things that brushed against my legs and face, soft and fleeting and leaving trails of slime that I couldn’t wipe off. Swipe, touch, tap, and whatever it was, whatever they were, had me surrounded in the sightless dark, ready to close in, an inescapable net in the water – water, I had no diving gear, I couldn’t breathe--!

I woke gasping for air, half-smothered by my own pillow.

Returning to the Aquarium wasn’t a conscious decision. I was dressed and driving before I could think clearly, code typed into the employee door around the back, giving the night watchman a reason for being there which I can’t even remember now.

Now.

Standing in front of Cuddles’ exhibit, the observation room dark and abandoned and as empty as the void beyond space.

Cuddles floats in the water before me, pale in the darkness, his eyes darker still. He stares at me, tentacles swirling beneath him, filaments dancing above. I feel as though I am floating in the water too, for all that I stand firmly on hard carpet, surrounded by air. I can breathe. I don’t.

He’s staring, and for the first time, I stare back.

Stars are in my skull, supernovas collapse, blowing a hole in the fabric of the universe, sucking at the light and the matter and the everything that makes it something and me as well, and that hole is the eye of GODS and the eye is its mouth and it is HUNGRY, SO HUNGRY and that is all I know before I

slip

and

fall