From Below

by Darcy Coates

That didn’t mean the depths wouldn’t be hell for their bodies. The added pressure had become noticeable at only ten feet down. At a hundred feet, they would be breathing harder just to compensate against the squeeze. Anything over a hundred and fifty feet required even more specialized qualifications and prolonged training to withstand. By two hundred and twenty feet, even the oxygen in their canisters would begin to turn toxic. Cove and her team were traveling down three hundred and twelve feet.

When the ship left port on 6 April, twelve days before its last contact, it was under the command of Captain William Virgil and was manned by two hundred and sixty-five crew, along with four hundred and nine passengers. No bodies were ever recovered.

The ship was crusted with something. Rustacles, Hestie had called them. A ragged coating where the ship’s hull and the water merged. Many decades of sediment had settled on top, giving it an unsettlingly alien appearance.

“Arcadia,” she said, a ferocious smile filling her voice. “We found her.”

He could feel the crunch of the crumbling material through his gloves. It was accompanied by a flash of terror. He let go, allowing himself to float back from the ship, his heart skittering too fast. The awe and anxiety were being replaced with something darker. Dread. In the brief moment he’d touched the metal, he’d felt the danger of the place. This ship wasn’t a gem on the ocean floor, waiting to be found. It was a trap. A monstrous, hideous trap. Unfeeling, unyielding.

I would lie down with you, put my arms around you, feel how cold you are as you roll, rigid with death, on the ocean floor. “Ah.” He pushed the journal away as though it had burned his fingers. There was something deeply upsetting about how melodic and gentle the words were when paired with something as hideous as drowning.

Images had been scrawled in the margins. The black ballpoint pen had scored the pages so deeply in some places that it had torn through. Not all of the tight, urgent images were clear, but the ones that were made Sean sick to his stomach.

The book fell open to the final entry, dated that morning. Vanna must have penned it while Hestie was in the shower. It was short and to the point, surrounded by scribbles that reminded Sean of rust and barnacles. I’ll watch you drown.

The image of those seven letters floating out of the darkness and speckled sediment was more than iconic; it bordered on a religious experience.

It’s an illusion. Something shaped vaguely like a human but not. The thing’s hands moved, reaching toward her, and Cove’s body turned to ice. “What is it?” Roy had closed the distance behind her and strained to see around her as she blocked the doorway. “What’s in there?” “A mirror.” Cove closed her eyes for a second, her heart pounding out of control, even as she laughed. “I’ll be damned, but I spooked myself with a mirror.”

Then she drew a sharp breath. “They came through here. That’s what it says.”

“I’m saying maybe those lost souls are wanting retribution.” Fitz rose, jaw working as he shambled toward the exit. He had to raise his voice for his final words to reach Harland, and every other head in the room turned in response. “I’m saying maybe the ship isn’t done eating.”

One step at a time. Cove kept her hands clenched at her sides, her body shimmying with each kick of her feet. Tired muscles ached from being pushed a second time in one day, but she ignored them. Find Aidan first. Then worry about everything else.

heart. She used the tightened nerves to make herself faster, pushing her muscles and burning through her own oxygen at a reckless rate.

it was going to be a knife’s edge gamble.