It was Ange who saw the ship first. We were swimming underwater at 30 feet, making our leisurely way through the sapphire blue and green miasma, all those jutting outcroppings and ridges.
Swimming ahead of me, Ange pivoted and stopped mid stroke. A second later, she was waving frantically at me. Underwater, a frantic wave is still pretty slow but I could tell she was excited. I swam forward, the rock tunnel overhead slipping above and out of my field of view until a murky shape emerged in front of me.
In the sudden descent away into clear blue, I could see beneath me a long, grey object, clearly some sort of scuttled vessel. It listed slightly to starboard, as though it had settled awkwardly upon a sandbank when coming to rest.
“What do you think it is?” Ange said through the two way radio attached to both our face masks.
“God,” I said, “I dunno. It looks like some kind of aircraft carrier or cargo ship.”
The gunmetal grey of the hull loomed out at us like a sullen giantess, coiled and silent in the gloom of the deep, daring us to make our approach.
“Weird. I didn’t hear about any wrecks out here.”
“Probably the locals don’t want to draw attention to it. There’s already too many shitty tourist divers in Zakynthos.”
“Present company excluded, of course,” she chuckled.
“We don’t count,” I said tartly. “We’re professionals.”
We were scuba diving off the coast of Greece. One time professional divers both of us, it was a holiday Ange and I had been looking forward to for countless months since lockdown. I am a retired military rescue diver back in Sydney and back then Ange still worked maintenance diving. You could say we were obsessed. There’s just a rush you get from going down somewhere new and unexplored. I do mean that literally. At a certain depth and duration of a dive, the nitrogen levels in your blood start giving you a buzz. If you let it go too long, you can become disoriented or even pass out. And if that happens 50 feet or more under the water, well…
But this was just a fun little jaunt off the coast. The diving in Thailand and Sydney is great but you just can’t beat the Mediterranean for maritime history. A sunken trireme or submerged city is never far off. We’d already been on a few dives as we made our way down the peninsular and we had seen some wrecks already. Even as experienced divers, this one caught our attention. What was its story? Why had nobody told us about it? Surely, a sly word from a fellow expat or a fellow diver would have given us the nudge. This was a true mystery.
I watched my wife nod slowly in wonder, her thoughts clearly tracking with mine. She turned to me. I’ll never get over the strangeness of seeing her lovely long blond hair billowing out behind that alien mask.
“It’s probably another 50 feet down,” she said. “That gives us another 30 minutes. We can at least suss it out?”
With my tentative agreement – I always prefer to do things exactly by the book – we began our descent. As we got closer I could see that the light was having a hard time penetrating down there. Now, at 80 feet on a good day, you have pretty decent visibility on a dive. Sure, you lose a little light but not much. Down there, it was murky as hell and, believe me, the sun was out. It looked almost as though a blackish jet-stream or a current was cutting through the otherwise idyllic blue of the Great Med. I’d never seen anything quite like it and I wondered if maybe it had been polluted by an oil spill or something. The ship was right in the middle, as though the thing had been swallowed by a giant wormhole. I gotta tell you, I didn’t like it much at all.
“Ange, something about this seems funky. See the darkness of that channel? Maybe we should report this to the PADI school back in town, come back with some experts. I mean, we don’t really know what’s down there.”
She turned to me with what I could only assume through the face mask was distain.
“Is this the man I married?” she asked, “What happened to wanting to dive the Samaesan hole?”
“That’s different,” I baulked, “That would be well planned with plenty of appropriate gear and trained experts. We have no idea whats down here.”
“Dan, its just an old ship, and this is hardly the Mariana Trench.”
She had a point. By rights, this was little more than a puddle compared to some of the crazier stuff we’d done and had planned to do. Still, it gave me a bad feeling.
I shrugged. “Lead on, babe.”
We paddled down to the ship. Entering into that dark stream, I got the shivers. I swore I could feel something strange as I moved through it. It’s hard to describe: it felt less like passing through something than that something was passing through me. I know that sounds crazy but it was just the feeling I got.
Once we were in there, it was a different world. Almost like passing from day to night from outside to inside the current, as though a veil closed over you the moment you descended into it.
Something else was off too. Usually when you see a downed ship like this, even a recent one there’s a fair degree of wildlife that has already made its home in amongst the wreck. Octopodes, cuttlefish, maybe some coral if it’s been a minute. There was none of that here. The wreck was completely barren, not a whisper of sea life. And yet, it was clearly an old, ship. At least a dozen years out of commission and likely more based on the tech. Rust had almost decimated some of the surfaces. Strange and stranger.
On the side of the vessel the words ‘U.S.S. HADES’ were printed in fading but clearly legible block letters. I was wary but Ange was excited. “C’mon, Dan,” she said, “there’s gotta be some treasure or something in here!”
“Alright,” I said, “Get your light out.”
I could see the door hanging open, at the top of the vessel, near where the bridge should be. I really should have stopped it there. I knew better than to go into an unexplored vessel without a guideline but Ange’s excitement was infectious and it did seem pretty harmless. We had explored plenty of old ships before. Sometimes we had even taken point on the first expedition.
We made our way into interior of the ship, Ange leading, her lithe body and long legs disappearing through the doorway first. I followed behind.
It was pitch black in there so we turned on our lights and she led us around a series of narrow hallways until we came onto the bridge. I could see out the broken windows into the Mediterranean Sea. Even with that dark, reduced visibility it was still a spectacular sight. All those blues and greens, the little fish swimming lazily at the top near the surface. I scanned across the broken glass that represented what had once been the bridge’s window, looking out and drinking in the sight like a thirsty sailor puts a shot of rum away.
My eye snagged on a slumped form near the middle of the room. I squinted. It looked like something hunched over. I looked back for my wife. “Hey Ange, what do you think that is?” I pointed to the object.
She looked at it then back at me. “Pretty sure they call that the ship’s wheel, honey.” My gaze returned to it. The slumped form had disappeared. In it’s place was indeed that iconic eight-verticied shape that the captain steers the ship with.
“No, but it was…” I stopped, dumbfounded.
“What were you expecting on an old ship’s bridge? A joystick maybe?” she said and giggled, swimming past me into the next room, leaving me speechless and red-faced.
I kept staring at the ship’s wheel. There had been something on there, I would have sworn to it. It had almost looked like a body. Well, what the hell? Maybe the nitrogen narcosis was setting in. That thought made me uneasy. I checked my watch. No, we had only been down here for a total of seventeen minutes. Just seeing things, I guess.
I followed down the stairway into the room on the deck below. The sign demarcated it as ‘MESS HALL’. It sure looked messy. Plates and spoons dashed all over the place. Light fixtures shattered and anything not bolted down (and to be fair was most it was) strewn about the area. That checked out, I guess. This ship had sunk and that is a pretty chaotic experience for silverware.
As a diver, you tend to think of a shipwreck as a more or less inert thing, like a building. Most haven’t moved for decades and anything organic has rotted away. Even inorganic material has generally been cleared away by previous divers. But the state of this one struck me as odd. After all, if it had been explored by divers before, shouldn’t it be more or less cleaned up by previous expeditions? And if it hadn’t… well then, where were the bodies?
The idea that I was unsettled because there weren’t bodies around made me chuckle to myself. Ange turned to me.
“What so funny, Dan?” she said grinning. I was about to tell her when I noticed something behind her. Something huge and shadowy. It rose up behind her, hulking and ominous.
“Ange, your six!” I yelled into the transistor. With a dolphin’s grace, she kicked with her flippers and turned around mid-stroke to view what I had been looking at. We both stared at the empty grey wall that was now just behind her.
“Dan,” she said, turning to me, hands on hips, “What the fuck? Are you ok?”
“There was… a thing!” I said, “There was a thing, right there. Swear to God!”
“Probably just a squid or something. Geez, you’re so jumpy today!”
“Look can we just get out of here?” I pleaded, “Something about this place is giving me the willies. There’s something in here, Ange.”
“Yeah, us!” she teased. My scowl intensified.
“Ok, ok,” she said, holding her hands up in front of her, “We can go if the big scaredy cat is afraid of the dark.”
“Good,” I said, not taking the bait, “Thank you.”
“Can we please just look at this one little room in here first though, please?” She put her hands together and pouted her lips in supplication. I never could resist that.
After a long pause of deliberation I said, “Ok, one more room and then we’re out.”
“YES!” in underwater slow-motion, she pumped her fist and elbow down into her stomach. I couldn’t help but smile at her. If only I had known…
We made our way down into the next room, Ange still leading.
“Oh-hoh-hoh-ho!” she said as we got there.
“What?” I said, struggling to get past her, “What is it?”
We had come to an area that clearly led to the bottom of the ship, or where it would have been. Instead of the gantries and various layers that would have ultimately led to the hull there was only massive, torn hole. Ragged chunks of steel bent up in resistance to whatever huge force had crashed through it. Bent up? Something huge, had clearly ripped right through the ship. But then why wasn’t there a hole in the roof above us? And why were the steel fragments bent up?
“Holy shit,” I said.
“This is what must have sunk it,” Ange breathed.
“But not from above,” I said, “From below.”
She looked at me not following.
“Ange,” I said, calmly but very firmly. “We have to leave. Now. Right now.”
“But we’re so close. And we have so much time. At least another five minutes!”
“No,” I said, “We’re going now before whatever sunk this thing comes back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed.
There was no way I was going down that hole. I didn’t know where it led, but I knew it wasn’t good. I don’t know why but even at the time but I got the impression that it went all the way down. Down to…
Before Ange had a chance to say anything there was another movement. As we looked around, shapes, translucent and writhing began to swim into vision.
That’s all I can tell you for now…