From below, p.7
From Below, page 7
“Yes.”
Cove couldn’t see the woman through the haze, but the comms system made her sound incredibly close, and the coolness in that single word sent a strange lurch through her stomach. “Okay, Vanna, move up front with me. The dive line will be coming inside the ship with us, so worst-case scenario, we can use it to make our way back out as well. In the meantime, let’s get out of this room. Move carefully. We don’t want to drag up any more of this stuff than we need to.”
As she finished speaking, she heard Roy mumble, almost as though he thought he could whisper to Aidan through the comms, “Stay calm, man.”
Cove moved gently as she pulled herself into the hallway. Silt-outs were a diver’s nightmare. Even the lightest kind impeded vision. When they became thick enough, a diver was as good as blind.
She tried to imagine herself swimming through the Arcadia’s maze of hallways when she couldn’t see more than an inch ahead of her mask. Her outstretched arms would disappear into the hazy, sandy, gray blur that flooded the world like static. Blinded that badly, even just this short distance into the ship, would she be able to find her way out again?
It was a key reason for why dive lines were so vital. The silt was extraordinarily fine and would hang in the water indefinitely. A bad silt-out could take days to settle. The limited air in Cove’s tanks meant she had, at most, an hour to find her way out. Even with zero visibility, she could use the dive line instead of her eyes, running one gloved hand along the cord as it brought her back into the outside world.
Cove stopped in the hallway, watching the haze spread through the cabin and spill from the open doorway. She couldn’t see the opposite wall, but she could make out two of the closest figures as they hung, suspended, waiting.
Vanna emerged through the fog, the dive line unspooling from her belt as she joined Cove in the hall. Cove sent her a smile, though she knew it would be unreadable in the low light.
“Follow us through,” she said. “Move carefully. Let’s keep most of it contained in that room, yeah?”
Faint noises of assent reached her as, one by one, the remaining three divers carefully floated through the narrow doorway. Each body brought a wash of the dust with them, but no currents flowed inside the ship, and the sediment barely spread.
It wasn’t as though the deeper parts of the ship hadn’t been corrupted by the sediment though. Over years, dust and debris had filtered down from the gulf’s surface and gradually flowed into the ship, coating the floor and clinging to the fixtures.
This was definitely the third-class level, Cove decided. The hall was narrow enough that she couldn’t spread her arms as she swam. 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.
Cove led her team right, toward where the halls became swallowed by the endless dark. They passed many other doors, most to the right, facing the ship’s external side. Those would be more cabins. Some doors hung open still, and Cove paused to send her light and camera’s view into each space.
Most were replicas of the room they’d entered through. The sediment was less all-consuming but instead looked like a pale coat of dust across the surfaces. It collected in the corners where the ship listed, giving the impression of an off-color snowbank.
Many of the porthole windows were still intact, but Cove found two that had been broken by water pressure as the ship sank. One still had part of a pane, leaving an age-dulled sliver of glass.
“Kind of weird.”
Cove’s world had been reduced to the sounds of breathing for so long that Roy’s voice came as a shock. Cove glanced over her shoulder. Hestie’s slim form hung suspended immediately behind her, and beyond, she could barely make out Roy’s broad shoulders. “How do you mean?”
“So many of the doors are open. Which would make sense if the Arcadia hit something in the middle of the night and the crew had to rush out of bed to reach their lifeboats, except none of these rooms have any, like, suitcases or anything.”
He was right. She’d seen mattresses and old, discolored sheets, but no personal possessions.
“They weren’t sleeping here,” Cove realized. “The Arcadia was less than half-full when it set sail. No passengers were assigned to this hall.”
“Yeah. And ships liked to keep stuff locked up when it wasn’t in use. So why are all the doors open?”
The question hung in silence for a second. Ahead of Cove, Vanna had halted her progress and turned to look back at them. Her face was invisible behind the head-mounted light. The safety line floated from her belt, a white cord that ran along the left-hand side of the group, vanishing into the dark behind Roy.
Hestie disturbed the silence. “It could be the water pressure as the ship sank. These doors were getting old even before the ship went down; their latches could have given out.”
“Could have,” Roy conceded. “But I still think it’s weird.”
Cove didn’t want her opinion captured in the audio, but she had to agree. Hestie’s theory was a good one, depending on how quickly the ship sank. But she couldn’t shake the idea of the Arcadia’s crew racing through the lower decks and throwing open doors as they…searched for something? Or tried to hide from something?
She pulled her thoughts back before they could travel too far. The darkness and claustrophobia were making her too tense and too quick to imagine monsters on her periphery.
They’d traveled at least forty feet into the ship. Mentally, Cove knew that wasn’t much. But realistically, in the cramped hallway and surrounded by heavy water that wanted to smother their lights and turn the very air they breathed toxic, it seemed an insurmountable distance.
The Arcadia had two main hallways running the ship’s length like dual spines, with rooms and smokestack channels filling the space between them. Crosswise passages would connect the two main paths at regular intervals, and usually contained stairs to get to higher and lower floors as well.
While the doors to their right were mostly open, the doors to their left were still closed. Cove brought herself to a halt beside one of them. The dull metal handle was barely visible against the wood. “Hold up a second, Vanna. I want to see what’s inside.”
She reached for the handle. Hestie’s voice sounded like it was being whispered directly into her ear. “Careful. The water salinity is low, but it might still be rusted closed.”
The handle ground as she tried to turn it, then wanted to seize up. Cove put the tip of her tongue between her teeth. They needed to be careful of the ship’s remains; the ocean floor was doing its fair share of damage, but they didn’t want to inflict much extra on top.
But she wanted to know. The interior doors were spaced less frequently than those leading to the cabins. They could be simple storage or passageways to staff-only areas or anything, but the closed door felt almost more ominous than the open ones.
Cove gave a hard wrench to the door, trying to knock the jam free. She had to kick her feet to counterbalance and immediately regretted it as flecks of silt rose from the floor. There was less to disturb than there had been in the entry room, but in an environment this tenuous, any amount of silt was a problem.
The latch scraped and opened though. Cove pushed the door inward. The hinges didn’t want to respond, but she wasn’t about to be beaten and pushed harder. Even through the full mask, she could hear the groan of swollen wood scraping its frame as it moved.
Immediately ahead was a square window. Something large and dark was suspended just beyond. It was shaped like a human, its long body seemingly hung in the water, facing her.
Cove’s light hit the glass at just the wrong angle to obscure its face, but she had the impression of something flat and blank and emotionless. No eyes. No mouth.
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.”
The window wasn’t actually a window but the frame of a rectangular mirror hung above a sink. She’d seen her own blank, helmeted face, and her own hands sweeping in slow arcs to keep her stable. For a brief second, she really had thought she’d come in contact with something horrendously inhuman living inside the sunken ship, and her pulse was pumping like she’d just run a marathon. That wasn’t going to be great for her oxygen situation. She took a long, slow breath as she tried to coax her heart back to a steady beat.
Her light flashed across tiles and porcelain. They’d found a bathroom. Many tiles were cracked or had even come out of the wall wholesale, and the grouting was crumbling. The destruction was so bad that not all of it could be attributed to the sinking either. Someone must have damaged the room before the Arcadia went down.
Cove tried to ignore the way her dark, shadowed reflection mirrored every movement as she leaned farther into the room to ensure the camera caught as much as possible.
There was no sign of habitation in that room. A scrap of foil floated near her feet—probably a wrapper that had become stuck behind the toilet or under the sink and come free—but there were no towels or soap containers, confirming her suspicion that this level had been left empty.
“Try the taps, there might still be water,” Roy suggested, then laughed at his own joke.
“I wouldn’t want to make the sink overflow.” Cove used the doorframe to gently push back into the hallway. It was easy to keep her grin in place, not so easy to slow her heart rate or reduce the sweat seeping into her wool layers. “Lead us on, Vanna.”
Their formation resumed. They passed more doorways: cabins to their right, closed doors to their left. Cove knew she could spend a week just exploring that one slice of the ship, but if they could reach one of the inhabited areas, the payoff would be so much greater.
Cove glanced over her shoulder again. She could see Hestie and make out just the edges of Roy. She knew Aidan had to be following, but the beams of light—one facing ahead, one to the rear, to keep things visible for the dual cameras—overlapped and made counting the sources of light difficult. She couldn’t see Aidan. And she realized, she hadn’t heard from him for a while either.
“Aidan, you still with us?”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded distant. That shouldn’t happen with the comms units. He was speaking quietly, almost as though there was something nearby he didn’t want hearing. As though he was trying to creep past a monster.
The thought, created by the paranoia of three hundred feet of water pressing on them, unnerved her. But as always, her voice remained calm. “Oxygen check. I’m at 81 percent.”
“Seventy-nine.” That was Roy.
“Eighty.” Hestie.
Then Vanna: “Eighty-four.”
Silence hung for another beat before Aidan’s voice returned, even fainter than before. “Seventy…seventy-eight.”
“Okay. We’re good for a bit more.” Cove couldn’t see much ahead except for the canisters attached to Vanna’s back. They flashed in her circle of light, shining unnaturally in this world of dullness and cloudy water and tattered, grasping fingers of paper. “If we keep straight, we’ll be surrounded by more cabins. But we could try to find the stairs to reach one of the higher floors and explore the living areas—or move downward, to the cargo hold. Knowing whether the crew jettisoned any of their supplies might give us some clues as to what happened.”
Then Vanna spoke, her voice utterly devoid of inflection. “There’s writing on the wall.”
11
“Writing?” Cove kept the sweep of her fins slow to avoid disturbing the water more than necessary as she caught up to Vanna. The woman had come to a halt near an intersection. The main hallway continued forward, likely leading to more rooms. The branch to their left was wider though. That meant it had to connect with the stairs, though the visibility was too poor to see them from that distance.
Vanna faced the patch of hallway right before the corner. Like the rest of that level, it had paneling on its lower half—the wood swollen and dulled by the sediment, like everything else—and the awful patchy wallpaper on the upper half. Shreds of the paper had come free, but what remained bore some kind of dark paint.
The hallways were narrow, and their head-mounted lights had tight beams. At close quarters, the illuminated circles were uncomfortably small. Cove put her back against the opposite wall to widen the light as much as she could. She knew it wasn’t possible to sense the undulating shreds of paper through her dry suit and air canisters, but she swore she could feel them running across her back regardless.
Her light slid across the wall, trying to pick out the lines of paint between the broken surface. There wasn’t enough light. She felt in her belt, where she always stored a backup light in case the main one failed, and flicked it on. The second beam helped a little but not enough.
“I can make out a here,” Roy said. He’d come up to Cove’s side, his shoulder bumping hers. One hand swept in a motion to trace what appeared to be the final word. It had been drawn half over the wallpaper and half over the paneling, making it the best preserved. Cove squinted, nodding slowly. The h was fairly clear. After it came something like an e, then an r, and the beginning of several straight strokes that had to be another e.
There were at least two words preceding it though, and possibly a third.
“I can try lifting the paper back into place,” Hestie said. “I don’t want to tear it, but…”
“Yes, try that.” Cove’s back bumped against the wall. She, Vanna, Roy, and Aidan were now lined up, all of them bringing both their headlights and secondary lights onto the message. The beams fought for dominance, passing over each other like searchlights, often leaving blocks of darkness between them as they struggled to cover all of the painted section.
Hestie gingerly slid her glove underneath a strip of paper that had come almost entirely free. She lifted it slowly, and as it slid into place, part of the first word reappeared.
The letters were painted in large strokes. The lines were ragged, as though made with a thick-bristled brush, and they became streaky at their ends as the drawing implement was abruptly pulled away from the wall. They had a manic kind of energy to them. As best as she could tell, the words covered a length of wall wider than Cove could reach with both arms outstretched.
“The,” Roy read. “The what? Try the next bit, Hestie.”
She gently lowered the paper back into its original position, then moved forward, alternating her attention between the wall and the watching audience. Cove was struck by how much her movements were like the hostess on an old episode of Wheel of Fortune: pick a letter, and if it’s on the board, Hestie will turn it over. Even her motions were graceful and gentle. Only instead of letters lighting up, they were trying to read wild scribbles, and instead of a luxury gown, Hestie’s form was distorted by her dive gear and her face was only partially visible behind the mask.
“That’s a y,” Cove said. “And…an o?”
“You?” Roy suggested.
“I can’t see the u though. The next letter looks more like an a.” Cove blinked furiously. The lights were playing tricks on her eyes, catching on every flake of grime their disturbance sent up, making the message harder to read than it already was. “No, wait. It’s not an o; it’s a c. And it’s the beginning of the next word. The first word isn’t the, it’s they.”
“Keep going,” Aidan urged.
Hestie’s rebreather let out a gush of bubbles as she slid along the wall. The next scrap of paper was gone entirely, but she lifted the one after that. It bore an unmistakable e.
Cove let her lips twitch, spelling out words, her eyes darting back down to the second set of letters beneath. Then she drew a sharp breath. “They came through here. That’s what it says.”
The others were silent for a moment as they traced the words themselves, then Aidan said, “Yeah, I see it.”
Hestie released the paper she was holding up and leaned away from the message as though she no longer felt safe that close to it. She moved to her companions, placing herself between Cove and Vanna, and in the glancing light, Cove saw the whites of her eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean though?” Roy’s voice had lost some of its joviality. Out of nowhere, he sounded irritable.
“There’s another line,” Aidan said. He cleared his throat. “There. Going around the corner.”
Cove saw it too: a horizontal line marred the lower paneling. At first glance it looked like an underscore, except it continued past where the words ended, to the edge of that wall.
She swam forward, taking the corner, and saw it kept going. It ran on for another five feet before tilting downward and stopping near the floor. At its tip was a wedge. It wasn’t an underscore; it was an arrow. A path to trace.
“They came through here,” Roy repeated. “And…went into the floor?”
The arrow’s tip did seem to indicate toward the lower level. Whether the unknown they had taken the still-unseen stairs or whether the line-drawer had made a mistake, Cove couldn’t guess.
A deep, sonorous groan passed through the ship. Cove jerked back, her tanks hitting the wall, her heart in her throat. The sound moved around them, running through the floors above and below, as the massive metal structure flexed. Spots of paint dropped free from the ceiling, spiraling past them like snow and further dampening visibility.
