The Harvester

Horror Thriller

This short was adapted into audio form by The NoSleep Podcast, if you want to check that out - here’s the full episode. It starts around 8:40

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Far off on the western horizon, there are black clouds rolling, portending the nascent storm. Lightning in the distance shows it will be rough. Crouching at the edge of the open door, the ocean below looks like a solid thing, impermeable. The roar of the rotor blades above is deafening without a protective headset, but the man crouching at the door is soon pulling on headgear for diving underwater. Once fully equipped, he looks back at the pilot, who gives him a nod and whose lips say be careful, though the words were impossible to hear. At that, the diver pushes off the edge of the helicopter and plummets down into the rolling blue waves. As he hits the surface, the entire world changes. The tangible roar of the helicopter disappears and is replaced with the impact of water, then a looming silence. The stormy surface of the ocean and the foreboding clouds brooding on the horizon are gone, supplanted by a yawning blue abyss of empty ocean. There is nothing within any directional view, save one. To the west of the diver is a containment fence stretching to the extent of visibility in either direction, and plummeting down to untold depths. As the diver nears this barrier, the water grows noticeably warmer and a slightly greener hue. 

Seeing the imposing barrier disappearing into the hazy blue depths is a disquieting sight he has never become used to. Slowly approaching the barrier, the diver carefully swims through, ensuring his oxygen tank doesn’t make contact with the wall. The barrier emits a high frequency electric pulse to ward off unwanted entrance of aquatic life, causing the divers entire body to thrum slightly. Passing through the wall safely, the diver swims on, only able to see a few hundred feet in any direction. Despite the barrier, he is always wary on the other side. At any given moment, there may be a dozen divers in the farm, but due to the sheer size of it, he never sees them and his suit isn’t fitted for radio communication. The only sound he hears is his own breathing. After swimming a few hundred feet inside the barrier, something can be seen ahead, large and eerie in the blue-green fog of deep water. It is a massive rectangular shape hanging a few dozen feet below the surface. As the diver swims closer, lightning can be seen rolling in the sky overhead, occasionally lighting the depths with a harsh white flash. The large floating rectangle that is looming closer now is redolent of an airplane's fuselage, rolled out flat. It is thousands of feet long, almost stretching to the edge of vision, and hundreds of feet wide, reaching down into the chasm of deep sea below. Behind it, there are rows of them in the cerulean water, each a few dozen feet behind the other. 

Once close enough to make out details, the rectangular mass takes on unsettling textures and color. It is a ghostly white, with undertones of pink. When the lightning strikes overhead, it appears to glow amid the darkness. The length of it appears to have ridges like a topographical map, but the diver knows this is just from prolonged submersion. The entire thing can now be seen to only have a thickness of a few millimeters, a sort of ethereal cloth. Another flash of lightning causes the ridges to have shadows, making the surface of the shape appear to be striped in uneven swathes. For the brief second of illuminating light, there appears to be a large shadow moving behind the spectral sheet, but another flash sets the divers' mind at ease, seeing no moving shadows or shapes. In such an expanse of solitude and dark, the mind plays it’s tricks. The diver swims closer and removes a scalpel from the pack on his waist, revealing the blade with the push of a button and a muffled snick sound. He swims up to the huge thin wall, and begins carefully cutting away a four foot by four foot section of it. As his scalpel slices clean through, a thin red trail of cloudy blood is left in the water. He stores the removed portion of flesh in a sealed bag, and attaches a small ball to it. Twisting the top and bottom half of the ball in opposite directions causes the ball to grow larger and begin to rise. It grows to the size of a beach ball and is already bobbing at the surface. 

Having harvested the first part of the order, the diver swims on. He swims parallel to the ghostly wall of floating skin, passing sections that he has cut away previously, each in a different stage of regrowth and all perfectly square. As he nears the edge however, there is a section of torn away flesh still bleeding slightly. The section appears lacerated and ripped, not the clean cut of a harvester’s blade. The divers heart begins to beat faster as he gazes around and below. A few hundred feet below, he can see a faint white spot of skin receding into the deep. The diver begins to worry that a predator has breached the barrier, and he is much more cautious. Swimming ahead and reaching the edge of the huge rectangular section of skin, he swims further on toward the next farm to collect the rest of his order. He is suddenly aware of how much his vision is blocked by intrusive sections of his diving mask and breathing apparatus. He finds his gaze wandering around, seeing moving blotches of darkness in every corner of his vision. He stops swimming and closes his eyes for a moment, steadying his breathing. Opening his eyes, he feels calmer and begins swimming on.

Behind the diver is the dermal field with its hanging walls of ghostly flesh. Ahead, he can just start to discern the beginning rows of the next farm. It gets darker very suddenly, a rushing line of darkness that swallows him and everything else. The storm has reached him. He is swimming past a large boat chain that descends into the darkness when he clicks on his head mounted flashlight. The spectral spotlight adds to the haunting atmosphere of blue-green darkness. Finally reaching the next farm, the diver’s headlamp illuminates rows and rows of dark organic matter. The innumerable rows recede into the northern ocean, but the diver’s order is for a Mr. Zima, which means that it’ll be on the outermost edge. Swimming up to the organic matter, the diver’s light reveals two kidney bean shaped masses the size of an average shoe. Watching the shapes, they can be seen to fill and empty like a balloon. Following the label system, the diver locates the correct pair of lungs, draws his scalpel and severs the connections. He carefully places the lungs into a new bag, and attaches the small golf ball-sized buoy, twisting it so that it inflates and grows to the bigger, more buoyant size. 

The lightning is flashing more regularly, causing strange shadows to suddenly appear in the rows of organs. Bubbles seep from some of the tubing connected to the lungs, rising up to the dark surface of the water. The diver looks out to the northern ocean, along the length of diminishing rows of lungs. With the storm overhead, the view horizontally almost resembles the view vertically, with black impermeable distance at the zenith of both. It is a sight no harvester ever gets used to. The diver turns around to go back toward the dermal farm and lets out a sort of muffled bubbling scream, despite himself. There in front of him about fifty feet away is another harvester. The other harvester is motionless, seeming to just watch the diver. The diver, recovering himself from shock, attempts to wave with both arms, signaling the harvester. The other harvester doesn’t respond or move in any way. The diver is unsure what to do and why the other harvester is watching him. As the diver is about to swim toward the other harvester, something inexplicable happens that sends shivers up the divers spine.

While the diver watches, the other harvester begins to slowly move north away from him. The terrifying part was the way in which he moved, not turning around and not moving his flippers for thrust: he simply slips away while still facing the diver, slowly receding into the dark, as if drawn in by an unseen phantom. The diver is shaking from fear and is frozen in place. When he finally snaps out of his daze, he frantically swims for the surface of the ocean while removing the emergency flare from his bag. Upon reaching the stormy surface, he is slammed with the noise of pounding rain against his mask and crashing waves. He sets off his flare, then dips back under the surface, breathing heavily, so that he can maintain a visual on the depths below him. There by the thick links of the boat chain, he sees movement. At the deepest point the diver can discern on the chain, long thin shadows seem to be reaching up, climbing the length toward the surface. Frantically, the diver searches for the other harvester and any other trace of movement. Flicking his gaze back to the boat chain, he strains his eyes to see the shadows that were there a moment before, but he sees no movement. Sweating and breathing heavily, he hastily scans every direction looking for shadows. The movement doesn’t come from one place, but seems to come from every place as he looks around in horror. 

The black depths of ocean seem to crawl and ooze upward, reaching for the diver. Tentacles of malice and shadow yearning to grasp at him and pull him down into the unknown darkness beneath. The diver is screaming and flailing in terror at the surface of the ocean, when he is suddenly plucked from the water by some prehensile limb, clasping onto his back. Before he can even realize what is happening, he is being hoisted up above the water by a horrifying black tentacle, being pulled toward a roaring mouth of antediluvian teeth. The sound is deafening, and the diver is screaming and flailing when he is pulled into the massive open jaws of some unknown menace. Suddenly, hands are pulling off his diving mask and shaking by the shoulders. He can barely hear the person yelling, “are you okay?! Hey! Hey, are you alright?!” His breath comes ragged and exasperated, and he can barely understand what the man is saying to him. He catches bits and pieces, “…oxygen tank… brain… calm down… safe… you're safe…”  The diver crawls to the edge of the helicopter, ignoring the man explaining his condition of asphyxia and hallucination. The diver's oxygen tank made contact with the barrier and had sprung a leak, and the diver had been breathing less and less oxygen during his dive, causing hallucinations and delusion. The diver ignores all of this, fixating on a point of the ocean below and staring. As the helicopter pulls up and away from the rough surface of the water, the diver watches a man-sized shape, distorted by the waves and wind, receding into the abyss.