I'm A Deep Sea Diver, And I Brought Something Horrible Back From The Depths
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"Listen kid, if you're willing to go where other people are afraid to, you'll never be out of a job." Those words, spoken by my dad's ex-Navy pal Cliff when I was only 9 years old, were what set everything into motion. Or maybe, after everything that's happened, I just want somebody else to blame.

Cliff had everything I thought was cool back in 1989. Short jean shorts, a mustache, aviator sunglasses, a girlfriend with big hair, even a Camaro. I could tell that Ma didn't approve of the Iron Maiden that his stereos blared while he took Dad and I for a tour of the coastal town where he lived. But that only made him seem cooler to me.

See, Cliff was a wreck diver. When a ship sank, he and his crew would hunt down the site of the loss, sometimes going hundreds of feet underwater to investigate what had gone wrong. Insurance companies paid top dollar for the information Cliff's crew provided. None of them had more than a high school education, but they made thousands by working just a few days per month.

It was only later, after it was too late, that I realized how much Cliff had left out of the rosy picture he'd painted for us that day. There was cutthroat competition for the best jobs, and the rare but enormous paychecks meant a lot of debt and a tendency to blow everything on booze and cheap thrills each time you returned from sea.

That reckless attitude was also fueled by the raw, brutal danger of the job, by the knowledge that every dive might be your last. "There's only one way to look at this thing and stay sane," Cliff told me a dozen years later, when he was already retired, and I was just beginning to follow in his footsteps. "The minute the coastline disappears from the horizon, you gotta tell yourself that you're a dead man already."

Making it to my age in this job is the exception, not the rule. And you'd better not forget it. These days, most of the work is done by robots and deep-sea drones. Divers are only on call for when something unexpected happens. And on the open sea, the unexpected happens a lot. Cameras get clogged by gunk. Hulls can split in narrow cracks that drones can't enter.

There are even objects that need to be recovered from the bottom. Sometimes, those objects used to be people. After the insurance gigs dried up, I found myself working for Cyrene Solutions, a company that specialized in those sorts of unusual recoveries. Unlike Cliff and a lot of other divers, I didn't get my start in the military. When it came up in interviews, I always told the truth. I had issues with authority and hated how I looked with a buzzed haircut.

Cyrene were the first to appreciate my honesty. They wanted divers with an unorthodox attitude, they said. People who weren't afraid to break the rules and think outside the box. What that really meant, it turned out, was dangerous, legally murky work for anonymous clients whose motives were suspicious at best.

We recovered sunken trade secrets for rival corporations, took photos designed to make collisions look like accidents, even pulled jewelry off of dead men's fingers. It was desperate work for desperate people, and my crew reflected it. Jean-Luc was a bald, muscly Frenchman with a mean coke habit. Theo, a skinny Greek guy who pushed himself and his equipment so hard I suspected he had a death wish.

Annabelle was our tech person, and God only knows what brought her out here. The only time she ever talked about it, she said that she just hated people, and this job was the furthest she could get from them without being an astronaut. The three of us weren't a dream team by any means, but we scraped by.

when i was down there so deep that the endless water had begun to dim the daylight i trusted annabelle's voice to guide me back to the surface i trusted that jean-luc had prepared our air tanks correctly i trusted that theo would find whatever we were looking for on the ocean floor below the contract for this job wasn't that much different than the others we'd been getting lately dive a sunken yacht on some nameless shoal and bring something back from a box at the bottom

As for what it was, the client's description was vague. "You'll know it when you see it," they said. "I wondered what we were talking about here. Nazi gold? A hard drive full of incriminating information? Something they didn't want to put into writing? The client wanted something else too. Something that we never would have allowed if we hadn't been so in need of work. They wanted to send a representative to oversee the operation."

we didn't take passengers for a variety of reasons. For one, they were a liability, an extra variable that we didn't have the spare energy and time to worry about. Secondly, between the four of us and our equipment, the ship was already full to bursting. Lastly and most importantly, we all understood that if our employers spent any meaningful amount of time with us and saw how we lived, they would dissolve our contract immediately. Our unwanted guest's name was Dr. Harlow.

He was a middle-aged, dark-skinned guy with trimmed hair, a goatee, and black framed glasses. I would have taken him for a college professor if it wasn't for his gear and how he carried himself. The man had come prepared. His clothing could stand up to the brutal North Atlantic weather, and he clearly knew his way around a ship. Dr. Harlow didn't get seasick. He didn't even spill his coffee when we hit rough water on our first morning out of port.

He tied off knots like he'd been doing it all his life, and even helped Jean-Luc with the problematic air pressure valve. He was orderly, polite, and gave us absolutely zero information about who he was or why he'd been sent with us. It was maddening. We arrived at the dive site on our third day out. While I was prepping the drone, Annabelle pulled me aside.

She had been going through Dr. Harlow's things, she admitted. She had only been trying to get a feel for who the guy really was, but in the process, she'd found a pistol case. It had cutouts for a silencer and a magazine, all empty. Which meant that Dr. Harlow, for some reason, was armed. I had no idea what that might mean, but I figured the rest of the crew deserved to know. When I told Jean-Luc, he just shrugged and spat into the choppy grey water.

The guy had a few unlicensed guns himself, so I hadn't expected much of a reaction out of him. But Theo was different. He took a long slow sip of water and looked up at the sky, already gray with storm clouds. "It's a gun," he said. "You don't have to wonder about what it's for. You have to wonder about who it's for." Those words stayed with me, an unsettling splinter in the back of my mind as we prepared to send down the drone.

Technical difficulty stretched the minutes into hours, until Annabelle finally realized that a critical piece of the drone's hardware was damaged. We didn't have a replacement on board, so we wouldn't be able to scout the wreck site before making our dive. Annabelle and I exchanged a glance, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Had Dr. Harlow sabotaged our equipment? And if so, why?

We didn't usually dive so late in the afternoon, especially not with unpredictable weather on the horizon. But I think that all of us were in a hurry to get this eerie job over with, Dr. Harlow included. As Theo, Jean-Luc and I prepared to go under, I could see him growing more tense. His eyes were glued to Annabelle's comms set up, as though his life depended on the feeds coming through clearly. The three of us went over backwards into the water,

No matter how many times I dived, I never completely got used to the feeling of those first moments underwater. All that blue emptiness, stretching as far as the eye could see. Endless, unbroken, unforgiving, and fading slowly into darkness down below. Theo, Jean-Luc, and I confirmed that our comms worked, then began kicking our way downward. As always, I took one last look back at the black hulk of the ship, floating above us like some ancient sea monster.

Whenever I saw that view, I always found myself wondering whether I'd make it back to the surface. But this time was different. I could feel it. Whatever awaited us down there, there was nothing normal about this dive. It wasn't long before I noticed anomalies between the data that the client had given us and the sight before our eyes. For one thing, the wreck was deeper than we'd been warned. A lot deeper.

We had enough oxygen in our tanks to do what needed doing, but it was odd that the geolocation from a ship's data recorder could be so inaccurate. Unless it had been tampered with. Things only got stranger from there. Once we had the wreck and the seafloor in sight, we noticed several things above it, floating as though tethered to the ruined ship. We had seen human corpses during our recovery operations before,

and these ones were about what we had come to expect. Their clothes stripped away by the current, their bloated, grayish-white flesh half eaten by deep-sea scavengers. The eyes were always the first to go. What was unusual, however, was the way that the four seemed to have died.

It was like each of them had tied themselves to something heavy, then jumped over the edge, with the wreck coming to rest near their remains a short while later. The four of them could just as easily have been Annabelle, Jean-Luc, Theo and I in some other life, I remember thinking. Then I pushed that disquieting idea out of my mind and kept swimming. We usually exchanged some dark jokes or gallows humor when we encountered bodies, but this time, no one spoke.

We all just wanted to get in and out of the wreck as quickly as possible. The sunken vessel was burnt black, ruptured, and upside down, as though it had been sunk by fire or an explosion. As it turned out, it wouldn't have mattered if we had sent the drone anyway. It never would have been able to maneuver through the gash in the hull. Theo, however, was able to slip through easily. Jean-Luc waited outside while I switched on my light and followed him.

so much could go wrong inside a wreck. You could cut yourself on jagged metal, or worse, damage your air tanks. You could blind yourself with debris by touching the wrong thing, or even cause a collapse that would leave you buried, helpless to do anything except wait in the pitch blackness until your air ran out. After so many dives, I wasn't afraid of being hundreds of feet underwater. But being inside a wreck still gave me claustrophobia.

Those tiny rust-colored particles floating in the water, the short range of the lights, and the knowledge that you never knew what was waiting for you around the corner. I'd heard of experienced divers who had completely lost it inside of such tight spaces, who'd wound up clawing their way through the hull like a rat scratching its way out of the guts of an anaconda. The purpose of the ships we investigated was usually obvious, even if it wasn't specified by the client.

But I couldn't tell what we were dealing with in those narrow, upside-down hallways. The wood paneling and carpet made it seem like a pleasure cruiser, but some of the gear I saw floating around had a sinister, baromilitary feel that gave me goosebumps, even underneath my wetsuit. There was a symbol on some of the equipment, but it wasn't the logo of any organization that I recognized. Just what had these people been doing out here in the middle of nowhere?

The only specifics the client had given us about our objective was that it would be found inside of a 7x3 foot rectangular box, probably located in the captain's quarters. The closer Theo and I got to it, the more that sense of dread deepened. Not all of the damage had been caused by whatever had sunk the vessel. There were impact marks in the walls, like something had bashed and cut at it. Further on were burn marks and even bullet holes.

Theo, single-minded as always, swam right past all of it. But the door to the captain's cabin presented a problem that the two of us would have to confront together. Here, the damage from the explosion was at its worst, warping the interior of the ship. To make matters worse, the upside-down door had been partially barricaded with desks, chairs, and whatever the room's occupants had been able to find.

The only way through, I realized, was for one of us to pull back the junk while the other swam through. I would have loved to let Theo go first, but truthfully, he was a more skilled diver. If anything went wrong, he would be more able to swim free of the wreckage and get help. In his usual silent way, he nodded to me and pulled back the battered metal. I had to stretch out and twist to avoid getting caught on the debris, but I made it through.

In the short-range beams of my lights, I could see that I had been right. Most of the damage to the ship had been done before it had been sunk. The cabin looked like a war zone.

and the captain herself hadn't left it. She had handcuffed herself to the side of that 7 by 3 foot rectangular box that perfectly matched the client's description, although they could have just said coffin and been done with it, because there was no doubt that was what it was, a fancy, old-fashioned coffin. The captain's free hand was jammed inside of it, as though that had been her final act. Her face and abdomen were lacerated with horrible wounds.

but there was a grim expression of triumph on her face. Her short blonde hair shifted in the current. It almost seemed like she was about to speak to me, to warn me. And as I swam closer, I saw that it was no illusion. Her throat and jaw were moving. I recoiled with a shudder as a moray eel swam out of her open mouth. And then I looked over her shoulder and saw what she had been doing in her final moments. There was a dead man in the coffin, but he wasn't like the others.

He was neither handsome nor ugly, neither old nor young. His simple dark clothing and hairstyle might have been 200 years old, or they could have been purchased a few days before. His body was perfectly preserved, as though the sea life had been unwilling to touch him. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn he was just asleep. He bore no wounds from whatever had happened here, apart from one.

the ancient steak that the captain had stabbed into his chest that's it the comm system crackled to life nearly giving me a heart attack I'd forgotten that all of this was being live streamed to Annabelle hundreds of feet above that's what our client wants with its jewel encrusted silver handle the thing was definitely valuable but still I asked Annabelle if she was sure that was a good idea and she hesitated I don't think we have much choice see he says if you don't bring it

"You'll kill me and leave you guys down there." There was a muffled bang and a cry of pain. "Bastard!" Dr. Harlow had shot Annabelle in the leg just to prove he was serious. I had no doubt that he would do what he'd promised. Then, in a few weeks, maybe another crew would be diving this wreck, asking themselves what our bodies were doing here. I reached inside the coffin and wrapped my hands around the stake. It wouldn't budge. It didn't matter how hard I pulled or how I braced myself.

It was embedded too deeply in the man's chest. My lights whirled wildly around the pitch-dark room as I struggled, and then the comms crackled back to life again. Jean-Luc grunted. There was another broken rule. The whole crew never went into a wreck altogether. But here we were, bound by the knowledge that if we didn't do as our client asked, we would be left out here to the mercy of the sea. After barely squeezing through the door, Jean-Luc waved me aside and gripped the stake.

There was barely room for me to watch over his shoulder as he tugged with all his might, and finally the stake came free. He held it in his hand for a second, as though marveling that our lives were being risked over such a simple thing, then passed it to me. We were about to leave when the bright golden eyes of the man in the coffin snapped open. He moved faster than we could react, faster than I thought possible.

His long white fingers held Jean-Luc in place, and his jaw dropped down to his chest, revealing a mouth full of inhumanly long, razor-sharp teeth. A crimson cloud filled the water as he bit down on Jean-Luc's neck. There was a word for what that man was, but I didn't dare to say it. Didn't dare to even think it.

All that mattered now was getting out of the wreck as quickly as possible. It was all happening so fast that I could do nothing but wave incoherently at Theo as I swam by, but he didn't need any warning from me. He released the door, slamming it right into that golden-eyed monstrosity's face. If only that would have stopped it. Looking over my shoulder, I watched as the man from the coffin pushed aside the broken barricade as though it weighed nothing at all, and kept coming.

We had almost reached the gash in the hull when he gripped Theo's leg and distended his jaw for a second time. Looking into that black, tooth-lined pit was like looking into the maw of hell. He bit down, severing Theo's foot at the ankle. Unable to swim, Theo flailed helplessly as the water turned red. I slipped out through the gash in the hull and kicked desperately for the surface, knowing all along that it was futile.

Without equipment, without even breathing, whatever was down there could move faster than the best divers I'd ever met. Now I understood those dead crew members floating around the wreck, tying themselves to heavy weights, and jumping overboard must have been preferable to being eaten by that thing. Looking down at the black gash in the sunken vessel, I could see that I wasn't followed. Not yet, anyway.

I wondered whether the thing gave me a head start to make the chase more thrilling, or whether it had just paused for a moment to feed on my friends. If it was after the steak, it wouldn't be long before it realized that neither Theo nor Jean-Luc had it. I swam for sixty feet, paused, glanced downward again. Still nothing. I wished that I could move faster, but a threat just as gruesome as the man from the coffin awaited me if I did.

Decompression sickness. The bends, we called it. And I had seen it make men flail around like puppets with their strings cut. Tortured by the air bubbles beneath their skin. Another 60 feet. Another pause. I could hear Annabelle sobbing quietly into her microphone. She had probably seen everything through the video feed. But with Dr. Harlow's gun to her head, she didn't dare to speak unless ordered to.

Who was he anyway? Did he work for the same organization as the dead crew floating beneath me? The water around me darkened. We had started our dive in the afternoon, and it was already evening. Soon, night would fall. Of course, that was the thing the wreck was waiting for. It was waiting for the dark.

I checked my instruments and did some quick calculations. If all went well, I would have just enough time to ascend safely. But then what? I had a sneaking suspicion that as soon as Dr. Harlow had the stake in his hands, he would shoot us both and sail off anyway. Of course, considering what was lurking in the water below, maybe that was the most merciful thing he could do. Another 60 feet, another pause. I had to think a way out of this, and the water was getting gloomier by the minute.

Each time I looked down, I expected to see a pair of golden eyes rising, impossibly fast, through the twilight water. When I finally surfaced, it was raining heavily. Our ship rocked between the great gray waves like a toy boat in a bathtub, and the storm was just getting started. Dr. Harlow and Annabelle were waiting for me. Both had on thick rain gear and were clipped into the safety line to protect themselves from the weather. Annabelle leaned against the railing, clutching her injured leg.

Dr. Harlow's eyes widened when he saw what I held in my hand. I heaved myself aboard, trembling from the chill and the effort I'd just made. Dr. Harlow jabbed the gun in Annabelle's direction and gestured at me. He wanted me to toss him this steak.

That gave me an idea. If I missed on purpose just a little, making him stoop down to pick it up, we could strike while he was distracted. I made eye contact with Annabelle, hoping she was picking up the message that I was trying to send. Then reared my arm back and threw. I had miscalculated. Badly. I'd meant for the stake to land at Dr. Harlow's feet. Instead, it flew over his shoulder and skidded to a halt at the edge of the deck. A wave hit the bow and swept it into the sea.

Dr. Harlow didn't scream, cry out, or die for it as I imagined he would. He just smirked slightly as it disappeared beneath the waves. A horrible realization dawned on me. Dr. Harlow's employer wasn't the mysterious organization that had crewed the drowned ship below. His employer was that thing from the coffin. Thank you for disposing of that, Dr. Harlow told me as he waved the gun toward the cabin. It would have been awkward to have it laying around when my client shows up.

This had never been a salvage operation. The purpose had just been to release the stake, so that thing in the coffin could go free. None of us were ever meant to have made it back alive to the surface. Once inside the cabin, I changed out my wetsuit and into the warmest clothing I could find. I was still shaking. The sun had truly set by now, turning the sky a dark iron gray. Rain hammered down in sheets. The ship creaked and groaned. No one spoke.

and then a searchlight appeared on the horizon. At first I thought that Annabelle had somehow managed to send out an SOS, but my hopes faded when I saw the purposeful way the ship approached us. Dr. Harlow had arranged this too. The plan was probably to kill Annabelle and I, scuttle our ship, then sail off with a crew of strangers who had no idea about what his client really was. Dr. Harlow ordered us to unclip from the lifeline and stand by the railing. Annabelle and I looked at each other, not moving.

I couldn't have said whether we were planning to resist, or whether we'd both just wanted to make eye contact with another human being during our final moments. Another wave, the largest yet, crashed down upon the deck. All three of us were knocked off balance, and Dr. Harlow lost his grip on the pistol. It skidded to a halt between us, and while I knew I wouldn't have time to grab it, I did have time to knock it into the sea with a blow from a lifeboat oar.

Gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg, Annabelle dragged herself along the line to Dr. Harlow and tore his clip free. As he turned to attack her, I brought the orb back around and struck his head, careening him overboard. Annabelle had always said that she hated people, and Dr. Harlow had shot her. But even so, she hobbled to the railing to throw him a life preserver. The doctor, however, was nowhere to be seen. There was only rain, rough, dark seas, and the fast-approaching searchlight of his hired ship.

Then, a few moments later, a shape even blacker than the water bobbed to the surface. There were only a few ragged strands of flesh holding Dr. Harlow's head onto his lifeless body. Something had torn his throat out. Annabelle opened her mouth to ask a question, but before she could, we heard the clang of heavy footsteps on the sea ladder. True night had fallen, and I knew what was climbing aboard.

The man from the coffin didn't seem bothered by his several hundred feet of ascent, even though I could see the pockets of compressed air writhing like worms beneath his pale skin. A mix of blood and seawater ran down his face, but his golden eyes simply looked bored. There was no doubt in my mind that he was going to kill me, but it dawned on me that maybe, before he did, I could buy Annabelle some time. "Hey, asshole!" I shouted. "Over here!" I swung the oar with all my might.

The man from the coffin caught it effortlessly, then jammed it backward against my chest. I went over the side, gasping for air. My life preserver kept me afloat, and with every passing second I drifted further away from my ship. A spotlight swept over me. I was closer to Dr. Harlow's hired vessel than I was to my own, and I waved desperately to its crew. If Dr. Harlow had given them as little information as he'd given us, there was a chance that they might think I needed to be rescued.

A lifeline crashed into the water beside me. I clung onto it like a drowned rat as the crew of the other ship reeled me in. As soon as they had me aboard, they returned to their mission, eager to rendezvous with Dr. Harlow and get out of the storm. I screamed at them to stop. English wasn't the crew's native language, and even if it had been, I doubt that they would have listened to my rambling story about men with fangs from the bottom of the ocean.

What they did understand, however, was money. When I promised to double whatever Dr. Harlow was paying if they agreed to turn around, I finally got their attention. Their captain watched the waves break over my ship, which was drifting as though abandoned on the stormy sea. There was no sign of Annabelle or the man from the coffin, but the door to my cabin hung open, slamming open and shut in the howling wind. He turned and asked me to repeat my story and my offer.

The burly crew members who had pulled me out of the sea were laughing and elbowing each other in the ribs. They clearly thought I was crazy, or at the very least unstable, but their captain wasn't so sure. When I got to the part about the steak, he shoved a blank sheet of paper across the table to me. He wanted me to draw it, I realized. I barely remembered what those strange symbols had looked like, but I did my best and passed it back to him.

After a long silence, the captain asked whether I was really willing to double his employer's offer. I told him I would give him everything I had, and I meant it. He stroked his black mustache, said something to the crew in their own language, and turned his ship around. In the report I filed with my company when we got back to port, I claimed that I had been swept overboard in a storm and that, as far as I knew, my vessel and crew had been lost at sea.

It was close enough to the truth that I was almost able to believe it myself until I received the official response. "I would be pleased to know," the letter stated, "that my ship had arrived safely at another port almost 50 miles down the coast. It had arrived several hours before dawn and had docked without following the official procedures."

When security staff investigated, the ship appeared to be abandoned, although one guard did claim to have seen a man in black walking alone along the pier.

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