From Below

by Darcy Coates

Cove had always found it fascinating that humans could have so much good, healthy land to live upon, but they still persisted in suffocating in search of a new summit or freezing as they struck out to find a pole or drowning as they sought the depths of the ocean.

“Remind me, how far are we taking this dive?” “Full penetration,” Cove replied, and Roy broke into his signature clenched-teeth laughter. Cove, a smile in her voice, added, “For the viewers at home, no penetration is where you look at the vessel from the outside but don’t try to interact with it. Partial penetration is where you explore the ship, but only as far as the natural light will take you. Full penetration means going into the parts where the only things standing between us and blindness will be our headlights.”

This is so creepy omg no

The wallpaper, once covering the walls with intricate red and gold overlays, had lost most of its color. Now, submerged, most of the glue had given way and the paper hung in tatters. It twisted and danced with every small eddy and gave the illusion that the hallway was alive with writhing life-forms.

The knowledge that water enveloped every inch of her, that the only way she could get oxygen was through a narrow tube and a small metal container strapped to her back made her abruptly nauseated.

The following night, the starboard guard watched Mrs. Carraway cross the deck in slow, measured steps, climb the railing, lift her head toward the heavens, and tip overboard, following in her husband’s wake. The ship did not turn around for her. It didn’t even slow.

“Well, no oxygen means no life of any kind. Including no bacteria. It’s as close to a naturally sterile environment as is possible to get.” “The mattresses didn’t decay,” Cove noted. “The tablecloths didn’t decay…” “The bodies won’t decay,” Hestie finished.

We’ll just stick to the parts of the boat that don’t have hundred-year-old corpse soup.”

He watched as long fingers drifted into view. The footage was too hazy with silt to be certain, but to Devereaux’s eyes, the fingertips had been stained crimson in the same shade as what marred the wall. Unbeknownst to the dive team, they had uncovered at least one other body inside the Arcadia.

Harland wondered how many of the others had gone overboard to be embraced by the chilled ocean and how many of them had found more creative hiding places, whose decomposing remains might be uncovered inside cupboards or under machinery weeks later.

Harland wanted to look away from the macabre sight but found it impossible to turn aside as the crowbar was wedged behind the body. It had been fused to the external walls, and the skin made an awful sticking, ripping noise as it came away in increments.

A tearing noise echoed through the room. The body dropped down, hitting one of the walls as it was hurriedly shoved into the bag. But not the entire body. Part of it had been left behind: a layer of skin, still affixed to the wall, a black scar in the approximate shape of a coiled-up human.

She hadn’t expected she would miss life quite so much that she would grow nostalgic for algae, the bane of almost every marine biologist’s career…excluding, of course, the weirdos who studied it.

This room smelled of blood and metal and fleshy corruption. They were not going to find the Whites alive.

Hestie moved past the doorway, careful not to kick her legs too hard as she passed over the delicate layers of sediment covering the fallen curtains. As she moved, she darted her eyes from bed to bed, driven by the slow, creeping fear that there might be presences in the room. The closest bed was empty. And the one after that. The one beyond that though…

He wasn’t the only body, she realized. The beds closest to the door had been empty, but most others—at least twenty of them—had been filled. Each passenger wearing the same blue hospital pajamas, each held down with three thick leather straps.

She imagined lying in the bed, possibly sick, possibly delirious, as the nursing staff raced from the room. Waiting for someone to come back and free her. Waiting, even as the gushing, pounding water burst underneath the doors. Feeling the mattress growing wet beneath her back. Then water lapping at her arms but still waiting, believing that someone would return for her. And then the water was up to her face, slipping over her lips—

Reach your hand inside. See if anything reaches back.

“It seems to me that the body in the walls served a vital purpose.” The captain’s skin might have turned papery and pale, but his voice still held the rigid quality that made the dull-eyed onlookers turn toward him. “It was required there to block the flow of water. In removing it, we created a weakness in our ship.” Every face in the room focused on the captain, save for Fitz’s. Salt water dripped from his whiskers as he stared into the hole he’d formed, manic, utterly possessed. He showed no reaction to the words as the captain continued speaking. “The body shall be replaced,” Virgil said. “Stock master Fitzwilliam has offered himself.”

He tried to move, even to raise his hands, but it was as though his free will had been stolen. He could do nothing except stand there, his jaw slack and his eyes staring, as his friend was forced into the jagged hole he’d carved.

The bodies around them were rising.

The first figure, the one closest to them, moved. Horrible clicking, cracking noises echoed along the hallway as the body rotated to face them, its head slowly lowering to fix them with heavy-lidded, sightless eyes.

She shoved Roy’s shoulder, pushing him toward the door. Outside, coming from the hallway, she could faintly make out the clicking sound of long-dead corpses.

There were too many. More than he’d thought when they’d first entered the maze. He could no longer see Vanna. Just the off-white cocoons, layers of them, twitching in strange motions as their contents awoke.

She refused to let herself look, but her mind supplied the images regardless. It would be a giant black maw, endlessly deep, the layers of shadow going farther and farther and pressing all light out of existence. Those long, pale fingers would extend from long, pale hands. Spreading, reaching out, welcoming Cove in.

They would continue tapping and scraping and skittering through the dark, even when the ship lay fathoms down, in the deepest parts of the world. It was where they belonged.

Aidan’s outstretched hand dug into something bony. He didn’t think but simply pulled on it, using it to aid his speed as he clambered toward freedom. It was only when bony plates shifted and his fingertips sank into something soft that he realized what he was touching: the insides of the half-headed man’s skull.

The ship’s waking up. She’d had that thought once before, but it seemed so much more possible at that moment. They’d brought the oxygen back into the Arcadia. They’d fed the bodies that had been dormant for so many decades. They hadn’t risen from their resting places at once; the first dive, they’d been in hibernation, still and silent and reluctant to be roused.

They don’t want to eat us. They don’t even want to hurt us. They just want us to stay here, with them, inside the ship forever.

“Why would he go back? Why would anyone?” Hestie’s breathing was audible “Because the ship wants him.”