From Below

by Darcy Coates

Vanna, entering to take Sean’s place, carried a dry suit draped over her forearm. Dark, heavy-lidded eyes scanned the occupants. She was a few years older than Cove, crease lines forming around her lips and between her eyebrows, and her short-cropped hair was swept back from large eyes and a broad jaw. She failed to return any of the smiles directed at her. “We should begin preparing.” “I love your timing. We were just about climbing the walls up here.” Cove pushed away from the desk she’d been resting against. Hestie took a short, rasping breath as she put her book down and joined Aidan in trailing behind the camera as the crew followed Vanna into the deeper parts of the ship. Outside, the ocean swelled, heavy with dark promises.

Phillip flicked a switch to put himself online as he leaned over his desk. “This is the RMS Margaret, Communications Officer Bowden. What’s your situation?” It was only after he spoke that Phillip realized there had been something…off about the voice. Communications personnel were known for being forthright to the point of bluntness. They spoke clearly and quickly, relaying messages with minimal excess words. They had to. Every ship shared the same handful of frequencies; to spend excess time hemming and hawing over your message meant you were potentially blocking other more important communications from getting through. But that voice—the pan-pan voice—had been slow. Breathy. As though it had been starved of oxygen. As though the speaker was fighting to stay awake. Phillip had an awful squeezing moment of terror. How long had he been asleep? How long had the unknown caller been breathing into his ear, waiting for an answer? Hours? It came again, and this time, there was a real undercurrent of terror to the words. “Pan-pan.” “I hear you. This is the RMS Margaret. Please state your name and position.” There was a very long pause. Second Officer Forster had turned from his post at the bow to watch with dark eyes. Phillip didn’t like the tilt to the officer’s jaw. It was as

though Forster felt the same sticky, heavy dread that had infected Phillip. As though they had both been sucked into a nightmare they didn’t yet fully comprehend. The voice swallowed. A smacking noise came as lips were wet. Then, “I’m aboard the SS Arcadia. Things are going bad, old boy.” Phillip had his pencil poised at the ready. “What are your coordinates?” “51.43 N, -19.26 W. Or 45.42 N, -14.17 W. Or…hell. I don’t know any longer. I don’t know where we are. How long has it been? There are too many. Too, too many…too many…” Phillip’s stomach churned. He knew the Arcadia. It was a regular on the transatlantic crossing. He’d taken calls from it before—not distress calls, just messages to be passed along, warnings of unfavorable weather ahead, the usual—and had passed back just as many. At no point had he received anything of this nature. He knew the Arcadia’s main communications officer too: Drummer. A good man. Steady, reliable. This voice was not Drummer’s. “It’s 56.43 N, 2.87 W, I think,” the awful voice continued. “Osman is dead, and Baines and Boswell and Rudd are dead, and I think Wilton may be gone as well. There are just too many—” Phillip had written down all coordinates but underlined the last set. He hated the voice’s gasping quality. The way every breath seemed to pain it. The phlegmy gurgle at the back of its throat. “What’s your situation? What happened?”

“Up ahead,” Vanna said into the communication unit. Cove leaned forward. Rocky formations rose around her. They’d reached it: the ocean’s floor, three hundred and twelve feet from breathable air. The angle of their descent altered. Instead of traveling straight down, Vanna led them forward at an angle. The mountainous rocks, softened by layers of snow-like sediment, rose on either side of them. Then, ahead, she saw it. Cove drew a slow breath as the bow of an immense metal ship surged out of the darkness.

Matthew Rostow from the Institute of Maritime Research, an expert in the ocean’s currents, believes the location of the wreckage suggests the oar first entered the water inside the Baltic Sea. If this is true, it would place the Arcadia more than a hundred miles from any of the coordinates given during the emergency broadcasts and at least three hundred miles from its intended route. 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. It’s unknown yet whether this discovery signifies that the mythical ship was truly sunk at sea or whether the oar was jettisoned or simply lost during a storm. However, this is certain to add new fuel to the heated debate surrounding one of the British Navy’s most infamous lost ships.

three days. The plan had always been for his ROVs to handle the bulk of the exploration and for Cove and the others to get just enough footage to round out his work. Instead, the ROVs had failed. All three of them. All at the same time. Devereaux had posited some rambling, half-baked idea about solar flares damaging the equipment. The others thought that was a reasonable suggestion. His ROVs were a thing of beauty: Alicia, the crawler; Hannah, the heavy-duty swimmer; and Judes, the tethered orb that could self-propel and responded to his joystick like a dream. Judes was his preferred vehicle, always. He could sit in the bridge, everyone gathered around him with bated breath as Judes relayed the first images of the Arcadia to his laptop. They would ask to look left or turn right with eager, hushed voices. They would gasp and jab fingers at his laptop screen—leaving prints on it, probably, but no one would care in the moment because the euphoria would be so great—as they found the ship’s landmarks. They would clap him on the back and exhale in relief as the ROV finished its mission and returned to the surface. It was a routine he’d done plenty of times before. Instead, he was alone in the mess hall while the rest of them got to view the Arcadia. The rub of it was that he could dive. He was damned good at it too. He’d been near the Arcadia’s depths before. Those dives hadn’t exactly been aboveboard, to be fair, but if you paid admission to a popular diving site and brought yo...