In an Octopus's Garden

Joshua and Victoria Matisse are a young couple who, after five years of connubial bliss, remain childless, though not for lack of trying. Their doctor believes their failure is due to stress, so on his advice they decide to take an extended vacation cruise through the island chains of the South Pacific. As an added bonus, they rent a deserted atoll for a month, so they can spend time alone, wearing nothing but suntan lotion and doing nothing except have sex and dive the lagoon's reef.

However, soon after their arrival, Josh and Vicki begin to have vivid erotic dreams involving the octopi that inhabit the lagoon. In time they learn they have been selected to conceive and bear the avatar of the atoll's cephalopod god, slumbering imprisoned in a tomb at the bottom of an abyssal pit. Their dreams climax in a ceremony in which Vicki is impregnated with an egg that Josh fertilizes. Afterwards, they cannot shake the feeling it had all been real, even as they hope it wasn't.

But there is one way they can discover the truth: find the tomb and see if it was occupied.

This story contains foul language, sexual situations, and scenes of intense violence. Reader discretion is advised.