Marzipan 2 II-4

Around about now the chapters got really short, this one because I think i was planning on writing a huge long passage where the dead captain treks across the bottom of the sea, but I just couldn't get it right. This is really bad writing, even by my standards.

Formula

Clouds of plankton shifted mystically, twisting in the heat currents like living silt. Their density in the already soupy water showed them up to the things that hunted them in the dark, a sonar block in the lightless depths.

The captain trekked the fathomless waste indefatigably. He moved slowly but surely through plains of pre-chalk, a Golgotha of tiny skeletons that filtered down from the teeming leagues above. He left these behind and traversed untiringly a vast jungle of tube worms and urchins that clustered around a thousand trickling vents which leaked out the warmth locked up in the Earth. The captain passed through the spawning grounds of the giant squid. He wandered the lonely territories of sharks, who sometimes followed him in silent companionship and waited for the small offerings of thanks that might fall from his suppurating back.
But by the time he set foot upon the lowest elevations of that place that he was searching for he was alone again. For no fish, no great shark or tiny pilot, no scuttling crab or bright mackerel dared to risk discovery by Scylla or by the vicious pets that she kept at her side. The captain was different, though. He had never been a man for the ladies, and it was a secret that he knew had kept him safe in these sea lanes in the past. He felt no fear for himself. Around him the sea changed.
The taste of blood and meat filled the water that surrounded him. As he walked the chains that he dragged drew a furrow behind him, digging up human bones and teeth from the shattered skeletons and dislodging their rich kelp covering. As he ploughed he called out into the cold.
‘Scylla,’ he shouted. ‘In the name of the great lord of the deep, I demand that you grant me an audience.’
A great rush of bubble erupted from the rock ahead and with it came the sound of an ancient, unpractised laughter. The captain had known that Scylla was terrible in her aspect, but he had not been prepared for what he saw next.