After about two years of work without any considerable time off, me and my girlfriend finally got a two weeks vacation . Since we both needed to rest and get our minds off work, we decided to take a trip by the sea so we can have some fun, take some late night walks on the beach, enjoy some good seafood, but mostly to get tanned while relaxing with a bunch of cocktails on the beach.
I was born in this city where the beaches are located, but moved a few years back in her city which is about 300 KM away, not too far not to close I would say. Because of that I am familiar with the sea and a pretty decent swimmer. I almost drowned once during an unexpected storm that caught me off guard in the water, but that’s a story for another time. Thanks to that experience however I am not easily scared of the water, and unless there are really big waves, I enjoy swimming and diving underwater especialy if the sea is rough and poses a bit of a challange.
For the first week and a half of our vacation the sea was unusually calm though, but that was a good thing because my girlfriend which can swim but not to well could enjoy the water as well. So we had a great time, I challanged her to swim for longer diatances by swimming farther and farther from her and calling her over, encouraging her to come to me. I noticed she developed better stamina in the process as well, which is great.
Yesterday however I had an unsettling experience while swimming and here is how it happened. I got into the water with my girl and we both swam for a bit, since she gets scared if the water is too deep and she can’t touch the sand anymore, we didn’t venture too far. She’s shorter than me so now and then I like to go a bit more into deeper waters and turn back to her. This doesen’t take more than a few minutes because I don’t want to leave her back there by herself of course.
During one of those short trips of mine I also dived underwater for about a minute trying to search for a nice shell for her as a gift, so I had my eyes open scanning the bottom for shells while struggling to keep myself from floating to the surface. That was quite difficult because the waves were a bit rougher than what we got used to in the previous days. After failing my first attempt, since the bottom seemed to be devoid of any shells in that particular area, I tought of resurfacing and switching the spot for a second attempt.
Just before raising my sight from the bottom however I felt something grabbing my wrist and squeezing it. My imediate response to that was to look right in front of me of course and to my horror what I saw was a pale female hand, holding my wrist. This whole thing lasted for about two seconds and the hand let loose of me after that, and slowly sank towards the bottom where I coulnd’t see it anymore.
I resurfaced visibly shaken about what happened and now I was trying to find logical explanations for what I witnessed. It could not be a drowning person because the closest person to me was my girl, and she was about 5 meters back, apart from her there was another girl to my right but she was even further away. To be honest I believed for a second that she got close to me while I was checking the bottom and maybe she was in trouble so she tried to hold on to me for help. But no, I could see her, the girl was about at the same distance from me as before.
There was nobody in front of me before I dived, and there was nobody in front of me now either. I turned towards my girlfriend and she could tell I was troubled, now she was coming towards me and wanted to swim around me in that same area. Not willing to scare her or sound like a crazy person I told her to go back and that I was probably stung or touched by a jellyfish. I took that into consideration as well, but I can still see those five pale fingers drifting away from me if I close my eyes. So was it a ghost of a drowned woman? Maybe. Was it something else? Maybe, but it sure sent chills down my spine when that thing grabbed my hand.