I’m going to tell you about the town at the bottom of our reservoir, and the time I ignored common sense and scuba-dived to its bottom to explore. This all happened the summer before my junior year in college.
I am not going to share where, exactly, as I do not want curiosity to get the better of you, as it did me.
The first thing I found was a crumbling village of blue and green. A valley without grass, bones without meat, the sense of the past eroding.
Scuba diving alone is always creepy, but this was something else entirely. But I noticed it was a town like any other, only with streets paved by sediment. There were still visible structures: half-standing apothecaries, jaundiced schools, homes all designed to be the same.
Yes, a town like any other.Just, you know, under water, and dead…
Eventually, I came across a bloated church swamping the sand, cracked as a plated crab leg. Its bronzed bell the last element withstanding the elements. A chapel about to rot and splinter away.
I had heard rumors about this church, and the dead woman who haunted it, but had chalked them up to local urban legends.
It’s common knowledge where I live that this reservoir is the final resting place of twenty or thirty bodies. The place just has a knack for stealing souls. It’s too cold to swim, but the water above looks so inviting. As though the dead are looking for company.
I was scared that if I stayed too long, I might soon join them. Yet something, namely my own foolishness, pushed me forward.
As I floated to deeper depths, I wondered if maybe someday every town will wind up like this one. Desolate and desecrated. Maybe they already are, and we’re just the last to grasp it.
I decided to enter the submerged church through its fissured roof and float down, headfirst.
In the church I found it: the oft-mentioned corpse of a young woman. Her body snagged in a snail-infested cross.
I don’t know the church’s denomination, nor how she came to rest here. But I got this odd sense, like she wanted me to loosen and set her free. But also that if I did, I would live to regret it.
She wore a tattered picnic dress.Greenish-brown hair floated above her, covering her soft head like a crown of tendrils. She didn’t seem much older than me, a thought that sent another chill down my spine.
The water’s so heavy in the reservoir, nothing wants to properly float. All the pressure pushes you down, down, down.
Made it hard to think. It was hard to find bodies in the water, and risky, so the authorities had given up. Yet, here I was.
The body danced with the current, and then its eyes opened and floated out toward me, filling me with dread.It was dark at this depth, almost too dark to see despite the persistent LED of my dive light.
My vision focused solely on Her. My hand grasping onto a floating pew, suddenly unable to find my way out of that underground church.
And I tell you, it appeared as though her body was fully preserved.
The beach here is thickened with the shells of freshwater muscles and fingernail clams. There are crayfish in these waters. The other bodies I saw were all just skeletal remains. Crayfish food.
Here’s what I’d heard about the woman in the church: That anyone who came upon her would never again rise to the surface.
Her body started to float, or was it swim?–toward me. She placed her slippery hands upon my scuba suit, the eyes now floating back into its skull.
Crayfish and carp snapped and swam through her ribcage.I plead with her, told her I was sorry, sorry that she was dead, sorry that I was breaking her peace.”You must join the others,” she hissed.
She started to claw at my body suit, to tear at my goggles.
But at that moment some rays of sun made their way to the depths, and I could once again see my way out of the church.
I kicked away from her claws, and returned to the surface just as my SPG count clicked down to empty.
My father doesn’t believe any of this, and maybe you won’t either. Or rather, he admits there are bodies in the Reservoir, even acknowledges an underwater village, but doubts the existence of some zombie mermaid preserved in an underwater church.
Mother just shakes her head when I mention it, regrets buying me the scuba equipment. “You have such a great imagination,” she says.But I’m serious. If you ever happen upon a reservoir with a town beneath it, never enter the water.
Not even in a boat.