… Far fewer have lived through them...
The monolithic bow of the sunken ship looms ahead of you, blocking out what faint light from the surface has made it to these extreme depths. You’ve finally found it – a Spanish merchant ship, rumored to have been carrying a horde of treasure when it mysteriously disappeared along its journey. At the time, it was thought the crew had deserted their posts – the allure of the riches aboard too much – and escaped with the bounty to a secluded port, never to be seen again. But after charting their path, you suspected they instead had encountered a freak event or storm, and sunk. So you set out to claim the treasure as your own, and secure your name in nautical history.
As you swim to the main deck, you are immediately shocked by the destruction you see. The mast is splintered in two, as if struck by some impossible force, and the ship is nearly split in half along its midsection. The hairs on the back of your neck begin to stand up on edge – something is telling a deep, primordial part of your brain to turn back, that something unnatural caused this damage. But you shake your head and press on. After these months of work, nothing will dissuade you now.
Reaching the gaping hole in the deck, you peer inside. An inky blackness greets you, so deep and thick you half expect it to spill out of the gap in undulating coils like tar to stain the waters around you. But the shadows stay for now, so you turn on your flashlight and press on.
As you swim down, you are comforted by the presence of the light – though it only illuminated a few feet in front of you at a time, it felt like a safety blanket. Nothing can get you in the light, you tell yourself. You swim further into the bowels of the ship, until you see a glint off to the side. There! Your mind insists, and you swim towards it. A single gold coin, untarnished despite hundreds of years under the sea, glimmers into view, and you swim towards it. As you pick it up, however, you realize what exactly was missing from this wreck – sea life. The entire ship should have been teeming with life, thousands of fish using it as a resting place and shelter from predators. But it was eerily empty. And then you felt it – a faint current of moving water over your legs, almost imperceptible through your wetsuit – but enough to tell you that you were not alone down here.
You turn to leave, only to find your way blocked by a tentacle nearly twice as thick as your body, and extending far past the edges of where you could see in the faint light of your flashlight. Hundreds of suckers dotted the appendage, each slightly larger than your hand, ringed with rows of needle-like barbs. You turn back the other way to find yourself face-to-face with an enormous cephalopod eye, taller than your entire body, and are confronted by the uncomfortable thought that luminescence – like the flashlight now in your hand – was used by angler fish not to guide their way, but to attract prey. And you may as well have entered this beast’s lair ringing a dinner bell….