Deep Blue had been successful… mostly. It had made it 800 meters before showing any strain, and 850 before they’d had to pull out. They had samples galore; frill sharks, dumbo octopuses, krill and plankton that somehow managed to get by down there. All of it instantly cryogenically frozen so they could actually get a look at it before it exploded on the way back up.
All that, and one odd thing. A relic of some kind. They’d found it at the midpoint of the dive, something metallic being piked up by the sensors. With a careful robotic arm, they’d retrieved it, kept it in storage with the rest, though it hadn’t needed the cryogenics to survive the trip.
It had turned out to be a small statue, not quite a meter tall, made of something the eggheads couldn’t identify. Some kind of metal alloy, they said, but nothing they could pinpoint. Probably some kind of siderite or a chunk of a meteor, or both, they said.
It depicted something that had a vaguely human shape, but instead of arms there were long tentacles, wrapped around the figure’s body like a straightjacket. The face, if you could call it that, was also obscured by tentacles, seeming to emerge from the lower jaw and raise upwards to cover the head.
Some of the researchers had joked that they’d found Cthulhu. Until they started dying. Then they weren’t joking.
Insomniac Nightmares 
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