You can’t breathe underwater.

The octopus can strangle you eight times before you even pull your knife.  Though all it has to do is stop your air.  You can’t prevent death then.  Eight times it calls you.  You’ll see the bubbles surge up from your mouth carrying the last of you to the surface.

Or life could be suctioned from you.

I think of The Princess Bride and the Pit of Despair in this moment and the threat seems irretrievably amusing suddenly.  Underwater I can still laugh.

Or scream.

Or drown.

And the other side tugs my mind back to the ominous.  Why must you torment me with thoughts of doom?  “I am the darkness inside you.  The hole you won’t look into.  The thoughts you push away.  The terror you wake from to forget.  Yet I live.”

This is a morality play.  About humanity.  Everything else is just a metaphor.  Or blunt cliché.