I don’t know where I am.

Something impacted Hubie very hard, I think it was yesterday. I hit a wall while about to compose an entry and I black out.

When I woke up, I was on the floor of a cold, stone room, and Hubie’s interior was nowhere to be found. My companions are still out cold next to me, and won’t wake up, though they are still alive. They are lying on the floor, much like I was when I awoke.

I still have this journal, miraculously. Whoever – or whatever – moved us didn’t think it was worth taking. All of my scientific tools are gone, however.

I see no exit from this room. It looks almost completely natural, save for odd carvings on the stone walls and floors of this place that hurt my eyes. It is a small room, about three meters on all sides. It looks like a cave, with no visible entrances or exits.

Al-Kitaabi is waking up! Thank god! I will write again after discussing some things with him. I hope this is still working…

[Z. M. Wilmot Note: Goodman failed to include a date in the title. It was added by me.]

We’ve stopped moving again. Our food and water supplies are vanishing at a rather alarming rate. It’s dark outside; I can’t see anything when the lights aren’t on. The darkness is almost a substance in and of itself down here, and seems to gobble up even the light we shine into it.

We’re not sure why we’ve stopped moving, only that we have. There was a bump that shook all of Hubie, and then the sense of motion stopped. Our lights aren’t working. Maybe we hit a wall.

Now we’re really all going to die.

He did it! Al-Kitaabi got us moving again! We’re not moving very quickly, and he says he thinks something’s wrong with the engine, but we’re moving! Horizontally, not vertically, though. He says he’ll work on the vertical bit soon. Still, our movement – of our own free will – has done wonders for my spirits! We may live yet!

Halloween. That’s today, right? Celebrating the spooky on the surface world? I hope it all goes well.

It’s a nightmare here, worse than any Halloween. I don’t even know if this thing is still working, and I’ve been too discouraged to use it for the last week, but I think it might be all I have left to preserve my sanity. If this is still working, please send for help. If it’s possible… the secrecy around this mission has probably killed us now.

The pipe connecting us to the surface broke. Water poured in through the open tubes into the ship. Myself and three others – al-Kitaabi, the chemist Judith Lawrence, and the geologist/oceanographer Michael Martinelli – managed to get into one of our bunks and seal the door before the water drowned us. It was less than a minute before Hubie was full… my god… we had to shut everyone else out. They tried to reach us, but the water just kept pouring in… They’re dead now, without a doubt.

Then our sub fell, rolling over the edge of the abyss. We watched through the viewport of our room. It went on forever.

We fell for two days. We were dying of thirst and hunger before Martinelli snapped and opened the door we had sealed shut against the water. We were immediately inundated with a blast of the brackish stuff, but the pressure had decreased significantly, and we could step outside into the submarine. The water had drained out of Hubie somehow. We had also stopped falling.

We gathered what supplies we could, and drank ourselves sick. Without al-Kitaabi’s advice, we would still be retching up water. He helped us slowly nurse ourselves back to health – or what health we could gain. We have another two weeks of supplies if we eat sparingly. Most of our equipment is destroyed, but we salvaged what we could; a few portable water measurement devices, supplies, my samples of plankton and flesh, and two flashlights.

I don’t know what happened. Was our mission sabotaged by a rival? Did something down here get us? At least the possibly living corpse didn’t follow us. But we’re still trapped in the submarine. I don’t know why the engines stopped working, and we lost all of our mechanically-inclined people. Kitaabi has been looking at it, though, without success. Myself and the other two tried to figure out why the water had stopped spurting in through the open piping, and we found it had melded itself shut somehow near where it joins Hubie. Presumably we have a trail of piping following us. Our air won’t last long. It should have run out a while ago.

We’re going to die down here.

It all happened so fast. My god… where are we? What happened? Is this even getting through?

We ran into some problems over the past few days. Our piping got stuck on something. It took about two days to sort out. Meanwhile, we were stuck. I had already done the necessary work on the enormous corpse. I would have written, but couldn’t think of what could be said. Nothing of interest happened.

Until two days ago. The corpse moved. No one else believes me; me and one of the chemists were the only two people up. He was half-asleep. I was too busy being disturbed by it to sleep.

Then it twitched. Just a mass of flesh. Twitching. It made air bubbles around it. It might have been an eye that twitched.

They all said I just needed more sleep though. I hope they’re right. We’ve moved on now, though the towering mass of the corpse is still visible behind us, through the murky water. We’ve reached the edge of the abyss now, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. That thing behind us, if it really is alive, could kill us all in an instant. But it was probably just decomposing. That corpse. That’s why it twitched. The decomposing bacteria must just be hiding, which is why we didn’t find any in the water.

I don’t even convince myself. We haven’t seen any other lifeforms approach the corpse. I have a bad feeling about this. But it’s too late to turn back.

The abyss is even darker than the rest of the water. We’re parked only a dozen or so meters from the edge, where the ocean floor drops off suddenly in a sheer cliff extending God only knows how far down. We can’t see the other side of it from here. We can’t see anything down there. Last night the oceanographer went out and collected water samples, descending a little bit into the abyss, and found that the water is thicker. It seems to be laced with some sort of actual black, viscous fluid, like oil, but thicker. We’re reluctant to advance further until we figure out what it is. The chemists are working on it now. Until then, all we can do is wait.

My deepest apologies for such a late update, but I misplaced my digital journal tablet, and only just found it, hiding under the stove in the galley. I’m not entirely sure how it got there, but this is now remaining on my person at almost all times.

Aside from that, it’s been a most exciting week. We touched the bottom of the ocean on Saturday the 13th, about a mile from where the abyss begins. The strangely intelligent and odd jellyfish remained a constant factor in our descent, and the large thing that had appeared on our sonar has not returned.

I went out in the mini-sub a few times during our descent, but never managed to collect any samples; the occasional deep-sea fish and all of the jellyfish were able to easily evade my clumsy maneuvering. Oh well.

The water, though, is most interesting. While the green glow of the plankton is still visible above us – stretching out as far as I can see – there appear to be absolutely no plankton below them. I haven’t found even the smallest planktonic cell! I’ve found a few dead cells shrugged off of fish and other denizens, but no independent microbial organisms at all. This baffles me beyond my words; I don’t understand how any ecosystem, particularly one in which food is so scarce, can survive without a healthy population of microscopic organisms. No one else really seems to understand my bafflement, save the oceanographer, who is worried by this.

The water pressure has also eased up a considerable amount. By no means is it safe to go outside unprotected, but the water pressure was actually greater above the bed of plankton than it is down here. It seems as if the plankton are somehow able to actually hold back the water, keeping it suspended somehow. I took out one of my samples of the plankton and examined them, and found them to actually be astonishing hydrophobic – sometimes. It appeared to come and go. It is most odd.

On Monday night, we began to move out, sufficiently disturbed by our readings. The boat above us moved with us as we slowly and cautiously approached the abyss. We should arrive there sometime in a day or two, or maybe three.

What has slowed us down now – otherwise we would have been at the abyss’ edge already – is our discovery of a gargantuan corpse. Because of the lack of any form of microbial organism here, its body is perfectly preserved. I took a mini-sub out when we came across it, and it appears to stretch miles and miles, beyond my vision. It is enormous beyond belief.

What exactly it is is anyone’s guess. It possessed what appear to some form of gelatinous body, with what may be pseudopods all over the place. It also has a wide array of tentacles, and at least two mouths lined with razor-sharp fangs. Its highly-porous skin is embedded with countless eyes and other structures I believe to be sensory organs. I went out in the mini-sub and have dissected parts of it. It appears to have a nervous system similar to ours, but everything else is completely alien. It is enormously disturbing, and I have had to avoid looking out of the viewports when I can; it is much easier to work on bite-sized sampled in the lab than to look out at the mountain of flesh, easily stretching forty or fifty meters high.

Its body is long and thing; while its length is several miles, as I said, and its height is between forty and fifty meters, its width is about a hundred meters. When we had descended, we had originally mistaken it for a rock formation. Were that it were. I fear now that there might be others like it out there; thank God it is dead. I hope. I can’t really be sure. I wish to move on, but our expedition leader insists I glean everything that I can from it. If it’s sleeping, I hope it does not wake up.

I will return to my work now, so we can get moving away from it. It is a shame I cannot send pictures; the world would be astonished by what I can see even now. I will write to you soon, I hope, assuming I am not eaten by the monster or its brethren. Wish me luck!