"the hollow earth between the devil and the deep blue sea"

"the hollow earth between the devil and the deep blue sea"



today i fell into the icy water. i 'm just not cut out to be a fisherman. hell, i don't even like the sea. it was one 

of those days when you can feel the change in the season, a good day for fishing i suppose. everyone was 

right about me. i needed a change, and i thought i would be happy at sea. after my year in medical school the 

sea seemed only a small torture. the weather was kicking up fast and i was reeling just as fast. i thought i was 

chocked  to the deck but that did not matter to the sea god. what a feeling to float off the deck of a boat one 

minute and the next to be in the trough of a thirty foot wave. i feel lucky they got me back on board. 

everyone thought i was lost. they thought i had drowned. it was over fifteen minutes in the rough waters 

before the captain caught sight of me. no one can survive much longer, but something had happened when i 

was in the water. i felt like i had been caught in a whirlpool and sucked to the bottom. the last thing i heard 

was, "man over, man overboard".  the guys screaming from that godforsaken ship.  i felt nothing but heard 

everything. the water was icy and rough and i was ripped into the dark seas in  thirty foot swells. the waves 

would eventually spit me out of the trough back at the very ship it had sucked me off of.   the darkness that 

drew fast that day would burn a permanent hole in my soul.


"we thought you were a goner", i heard jolly exclaim, he was one of the old timers. he gazed into my eyes 

with an understanding that made me shiver. "you will freeze to death get below", he howled. the weather was 

kicking up again and i went below to steady my nerves and warm my body. the ships doctor had worked on 

me for nearly an hour.

the storm was raging and had come at us from nowhere, pummeling the ship like an unwanted predator. i had 

never seen clouds so dark. a derecho that pushed great waves to a turbulent chasm. i had been sucked 

down and had what must have been a vision. a dystopian dream! had that place really existed? was it real 

or just the trauma of nearly drowning?!  like a lucid dream it had felt so real, but the time, the timing did not 

add up. it could not have been real, unless i was caught in a time warp. i thought deeply as my body warmed 

up lying in the ships infirmary. i had been caught in a water spout and sent to the bottom and popped up in a 

cave. as i was coming back to my senses on the boat a curious phrase kept running through my head it 

seems i had been caught "between the devil and the deep blue sea". the walls of the underwater cave were 

visible as if sound waves were causing a constant sonoluminescence.  the glow was blinding  but as my 

eyes adjusted i could see the world. this was not just an underwater cave this was a large chasm. moments 

before i had been in the freezing bering straits and now i was in a tropical jungle. the ground shook and i 

heard the roar of a great beast. i turned to see a T-rex finishing his meal. there were a few other large beast 

grazing, also. my first primitive instinct was to hide and i found cover in the underbrush. then i heard, "There 

he is! there, under that tree" pointing at me i was quickly surrounded by what appeared to be hybrid humans.

"quickly get him behind the rock wall" shouted one of the men dressed in suits that made me think of futurist 

sci-fi movies. once inside all i vaguely remember was being examined and hearing talk of dna sampling and 

how they needed to get rid of me quickly. i forced my mind to alert and waited for my opportunity to run. all 

of a sudden i heard the most harmonic mesmerizing sound i had ever heard. an octave never played.  it was 

on a loop that played continuously like on a mobius strip. everyone immediately started heading off in the 

same direction, and i knew this was my time. i ran in what i thought was the way i had come. stumbling and 

feeling the effects of some drug. i came from behind the wall out in the open chasm again. i noticed the most 

curious thing even the animals seemed under the influence of the music that reverberated through the hollow 

earth. i glanced directly into the eyes of one of the terrible lizards and it came to defensive stance and started 

to chase me. running, running through the dense jungle it must have chased me back to the frigid waters 

where again i was sucked to the surface and spit back to that ship they called the tyrant,  floating somewhere 

between the devil and the deep blue sea.