About a week and a half ago my grandfather died of throat cancer. His tumor had gotten so big he was no longer able to speak for his final days. When no one else was around he would write in a notebook that he would let no one around him read. As to my grandfather’s wishes, his last will and testament were read at his funeral. He was wealthy, being a master chief petty officer upon retirement from the navy and having several contracts with them later in life, so dollars by the hundreds of thousands were being given out to my family every which way.
This was all until I realized that my name had not been read, the executor let me know that my grandfather wanted me to receive my bequests in private. I was with my grandfather the most for his last few years while he fought cancer. I lived with him, to be fair he lived in an actual mansion so that wasn’t much of a downside, but he hated having hired help so I sort of acted as an all-purpose house staff. I cooked and cleaned for him as well as did some of the items on his bucket list with him, I wasn’t too close to my parents, he was more like a dad to me than anything.
The day after the funeral the executor came by the mansion while I was packing up my stuff.
“I’m here with your grandfather’s will,” he said, holding up an envelope with a fancy wax red seal, my grandfather was an eccentric in the best way possible so the over-the-top presentation wasn’t a surprise.
There was also a fairly large truck in the driveway, I had called a moving company but they said they’d be a couple of weeks before they came so I’d have to sort that out after the will.
The executor came in and we sat in the smoking room as he opened the envelope. The envelope was fairly thick, the reason for this was evident when the paper he pulled out from it turned out to be the length of three to four normal papers.
He began, “To my favorite grandson Donny, I leave my entire estate, altogether worth about forty-five million dollars, with a caveat of being unsellable until married with children.”
“Motherfucker,” I whispered and chuckled to myself, “I told him he should’ve put it up for auction and donated the proceeds, lovely fool,” the executor laughed quietly to himself at my remarks before continuing.
“I as well leave the rights to handle and renew all fifteen of my contracts with the United States Navy Corps, all together being worth upwards of fifty million dollars.” I stumbled backward for a second at the hearing of the price. “Holy shit,” I said to myself while putting my hand on my face in disbelief.
“Don’t pass out now son,” he said “I’ve still got more reading to do.”
He pulled a small velvet box out of his pocket and handed it to me. I opened it and there were two rings, they were shiny silver with white diamonds sprinkling one and the other being a simple white gold band. “I also leave to him both me and my late wife’s wedding rings, to finally propose to that girl he’s been sneaking into the mansion with for the past three years, tell him to love her well and with all your heart, love her as if you could lose her at any second because you very well might.” I started tearing up a little, my grandmother died in a car accident around a decade before my grandfather’s cancer, and he said her ring was the great possession he held, and now he gave it to me.
“I’ve got one more thing for you,” the executor pulled out another thing from his pocket, a small leather notebook. “And finally, I leave to Donny, my final memoir,” the executor handed me the book, I noticed it was the same that my grandfather had been writing in during his hospital time.
“That truck outside has everything he left you being marked under ‘his entire estate,’ we will move it in at once if that is convenient for you.”
“Y-y-y-yeah, no w-w-w-worries, let me pop the garage and you can put it all in there.” I stumbled over my words, in shock at everything, I hadn’t expected to receive much, especially not all of this, but this book intrigued me.
I spent the rest of that day filling out paperwork to fully transfer ownership of everything given to me in the will, then the rest of the next day unloading boxes upon boxes of the stuff that was left to me. During this time my attention was drawn to that book, but until about two days after I had received it, I didn’t actually have a chance to read it.
Two days after I had received the bequest I was finally able to sit down and open the notebook. I began to read.
“My name is Master Chief Petty Officer Derek Lumony of the American Naval Corps. For the past six or so decades I have lived with a bribe by the US government to not speak about what will come to fill this notebook and if the information within is ever released then my family will come to lose the privileged life they have found for themselves. I am aware of these risks, but I have to write down my experience so that what I know won’t die with me.
It was 1962, I had been in the naval corps for a few years at that point, and worked a few submarines at that. I had just gotten my top-secret security clearance and had been assigned to work on a nuclear submarine, the USS Thresher. It was a new craft, having just been finished a few months earlier and it was approved to go into its official testing period. She needed an experienced crew to man her and I was to be on that crew.
The first couple of trips were simple, just testing some of the equipment underwater and getting a feel for the test depth, setting it at about twelve hundred feet or so. I worked reactor in the back with my buddy Thomas, we met in boot camp and ended up getting the same assignments so we had been good friends. He was small, olive-skinned, with an inner-city accent, he had a sharp wit and acted as the main entertainer in the back of the boat.
There was also Marrin, he was a floater, a sort of master of none, just to help when somebody needed him, he mostly stuck to the back and shot the shit with Thomas and me. Working the reactor was actually kind of a boring job, not what you’d expect from being in the same room as a nuclear reactor, but accurate still. Thomas and I would sit back there, check some dials, flip some switches, and move some boxes. That would pretty much be our lives for about a year of test launches, until 1963.
With the test depth determined and all the valves, dials, buttons, and graphs proved to be accurate there was to be one more open water test before she was sent off for duty, a dive test a bit off Cape Cod.
We were to go with a dragger ship just in case something bad happened while we went under, with a new brief and a slight celebration since this would be the last test we headed off. Thomas, Marrin, and I did our job in the back for a while while the sub went toward the location from which it would dive.
Everything was normal when the waypoint was reached, so the order was given and we dove. We heard some creaking and it freaked Marrin out a little, he hadn’t been on board during the dive tests so he wasn’t used to pressuring creaks.
‘What the hell was that,’ Marrin said while moving away from the wall. Thomas and I started busting out laughing at his sudden jolt and he turned red and sat back down.
‘No worries man,’ Thomas said, ‘that’s just the pressure creaks, that happens when you dive deep, just the air leaving the cracks, nothing to worry about.’
It was a few minutes before I noticed a slight but sharp dip in the power the reactor was producing.
I radioed into the front, ‘Ah, uh, ship front, what depth are we at now, over,’ I got a quick response ‘Reactor, we are at about seven hundred feet under, anything wrong back there, over.’
‘No ship front, just a little dip in power, shouldn’t be happening this shallow but shouldn’t be anything to worry about, over,’ ‘roger that reactor, com us in if it dips more, over,’ ‘Will do ship front, over.’
‘Something wrong?’ Thomas asked, ‘Nah,’ I said pointing at the output gauge, ‘dials just a bit short for this depth.’ Thomas replied quickly with ‘yeah, pressures probably just messing up the bubbles,’ and we left it there for now.
We sat in relative silence until we hit test depth and the ship front radioed in. ‘Reactor, we have reached test depth, everything clear back there, over,’ I radioed back ‘Yes ship front everything’s good, the output is still going strong,’ ‘good to hear it reactor, over’ then it was silence once more.
For a moment the order was to return to the surface but all work was stopped momentarily by a sound that shook the very depths of the metal beast. It was loud and unnatural, like an out-of-tune electric guitar being played in its lowest, most guttural notes, so loud it shook your bones.
I was distracted by my work by it, the sound itself sounded alien, unalive, but its pattern sounded all too organic. When my head re-met my work board everything was out of wack, switches were thrown every which way, dials had their hands flashing up and down, emergency lights began to flicker and warning sirens throughout the sub started blaring.
Ship front radioed again, panicked ‘Reactor, what the fuck is that, what was that sound, why are the emergency lights on, over.’ My eyes jumped from spot to spot, the reactor had ceased, with no reactions, no energy, and no output. ‘Ship front, reactor output has ceased, it is recommended we blow ballasts or else we sink, over,’ ship front radioed again ‘understood.’
A sub-wide intercom went off, ‘warning, ballasts are about to be realized, brace for the sudden increase of elevation.’ We all ran from the reactor to the ship front to avoid pressure sickness in such a small room. A massive opening noise could be heard and the release of air was almost deafening from within.
Despite this, the sub did not move. As a quick effort to see what blocked us one of the navigators attempted to look through the periscope. He looked around for a moment before it seemed his eyes locked at the back of the ship, he froze, then he fell backward.
‘The reactor, it’s got the reactor,’ he said, pointing down to the end of the sub. I quickly ran over, the sub was no longer flat, tilting so the reactor was at the bottom, and it was beginning to flood. I made it to the back and opened the reactor room door, and what I saw confused me. A massive white, shape, the size of a man, had punctured the hull, I stood confused for a moment before my eyes widened and I realized, oh my god, IT had the reactor. I tried to go to the front and explain but no one would focus on me, they were all concerned with trying to fix whatever boring issue was causing this.
They put me in one of the burst pods, and the man who looked through the periscope in the other, to calm us down. They thought we were crazy until I heard the tearing sound. In a sudden moment the entire hull depressurized except for the pods, the sub exploded and in an instant, the men I had known for over a year had disappeared.
The explosion pushed mine and the other pod away, and mine began its quick ascension with the use of a balloon. The floating gave me a forced perspective looking down, I could see the beast. It was large, its body was miles long as it stretched and coiled around itself and finally slinked forward into the dark blueness of the sea. It had ink-black skin but a thousand white, glowing eyes at its head. It swam not as it moved through the water, but like it forced the very ocean around it into submission. My eyes deceived themselves several times, trying to make it seem smaller, lighter, safer, and fake, but reality always crept in and pried my eyes open to see this god of the oceans in front of me.
The other pod’s balloon didn’t deploy so it floundered somewhat near the creature, then it swallowed the pod with less than a gulp. I made it to the surface, I saw the beast coiled itself and began a forceful push to the surface as the dragger boat brought me on board.
One of the sailors began ‘what happened to the s-’ his words were interrupted by the beast leaping out of the water, just missing the boat. It went up into the air easily a hundred feet. When gravity forced the beast back down it seemed to take almost a minute for the tail of the creature to reach the surface. When the end of the eternal god came above the surface, its area above blocked out the sun and the boat became dark for the moment it was out of the water, then it caused a mini tidal wave when its massive back fin hit the surface.
The sailor looked at me, and I shook my head.
Men in black came to my hospital room a few weeks later while I was trying to recover, they began a speech but one of the said this to cut it short.
‘We know you saw, something, that doesn’t exist, we can either bribe you or threaten you, which would you rather,’ and thus I made my fortune.”
I turned to the final written-on page of the book, it was a pen drawing, exactly the creature he had described, long and alien-like, incomprehensible.
I felt as though my life had been broken before me, could this be true, a sea god of proportions incomprehensible to us, killing hundreds with the move of a muscle?
I placed the book on the end table for a moment and sat in my favorite armchair. I stared at it for a good moment and picked it up, standing once more.
I looked up at a picture of my grandfather, then back down at the book. Then I threw the book into the fireplace and watched that beast die with it.