By Sadie Lallier
These are the journal entries of Dr. Helena Martin, an accomplished marine biologist and oceanographer. They were recovered from the USS Abyssal, a submarine sent on a 15 day mission to investigate a disturbance along the southeastern side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The crew of five people departed on September 17, 2016, from Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia. All contact with the crew was lost eight days after launch. After two weeks, contact with the crew was not restored, and the vessel did not return. A search party was deployed on October 11. The USS Abyssal was discovered 11 days later, sunken on the ridge about half a mile north of the reported disturbance.
September 18th
James thinks this is all pointless.
He just sits in his bunk, complaining about how we’re always sent to do the stupid shit that no one else wants to do. He’s adamant that we’re going to spend weeks in this “dank shithole” only to get there and have it be an earthquake or volcanic activity “like it always is.” Says he’s sick of doing the same job over and over again.
I suppose things are pretty monotonous when you’re a mechanic. A submarine can only break down in so many ways.
I don’t mind it. I think the experience is fascinating. I’ve spent my whole life studying things like this, but actually getting to go down here never gets old. The living arrangements aren’t the most comfortable, but we’re thousands of feet below the surface. The hell else did you expect?
I think if James is going to complain so much, then he should just get a new damn job and stop making it everyone else’s problem. Captain Wagner does the same thing every mission, but you don’t hear him complaining. Granted, he rarely comes out of the control room, so we don’t hear much of anything from him anyways. He’s a strange man. Keeps to himself.
I see him sometimes, when he comes to the galley for dinner or to his bunk for the night. He’s always got this weird look in his eye, like he’s ready to snap at any given moment. Sounds like he smokes a pack a day when he talks. First time he said something to me, I accidentally froze up like I was scared. I didn’t mean to offend him or anything, the sound just surprised me is all. He hasn’t really spoken to me since.
The other oceanographer, Clint, is a loudmouthed bastard. Always finds fun in picking fights with James. Apparently they’ve known each other for a while, and it’s kind of their thing. Clint told me they were in the navy together.
The only one down here I can really stand is Elizabeth, a skinny little thing of a girl parading as a marine meteorologist. Sleeps little, but makes up for it with how much she talks. Her bunk is the one across from mine, and while I’m drifting off, I always catch her sitting there, wide awake, spine straight like she’s on lookout or something. And when I get up in the morning, she’s doing the same thing. A few days ago, I asked her if she was alright, and she started going on and on about how she’s never been under the water nevermind this far down, and she’s terrified, and the only reason she’s down here is because she was scared she was gonna lose her job if she said no.
As much as she likes to do it herself, she also likes listening to other people talk. I find myself rambling about everything and nothing with her at the table in the mess room over cups of shitty coffee. I can tell that listening to someone else talk helps distract her from her current situation. Her shoulders drop from their normal place by her ears and her eyebrows loosen up a little.
She reminds me of Vicky—or, how she was before Mom died. Could never not be the center of attention. Talked so much she frequently lost track of what she was actually trying to say. Earlier today, I remembered when she accidentally outed me to the entire family at Christmas dinner because she just kept talking and talking, barreling on like a goddamn freight train. Dropping that bomb like it was just another part of the story she was telling. I’ll never forget how Dad looked at me when the word “girlfriend” slipped from her mouth.
Sometimes I wonder if that was one of the reasons he went off the rails. I never asked, obviously, but something tells me it certainly didn’t help. Sometimes I wonder where he might be now, but I quickly realize I don’t give a shit.
I think Mom would approve of what I’m doing now, how far I’ve made it. I remember when Vicky and I were younger and she would show us all of the photos from the different places she’s been. Antarctica, Japan, South Africa, Australia. I think Egypt was my favorite. I think she’d be happy that she passed down her sense of adventure. Better that than her heroin addiction.
So nobody’s really normal down here, I suppose.
Then again, nobody who’s really normal gets on a metal vessel that descends thousands of feet into the ocean.
That’s a given, I think.
September 19th
Lizzy won’t stop talking about her feelings.
She keeps bringing up, unprompted, about how she has a horrible feeling about being down here. How she has a terrible feeling that something bad is going to happen. Then I ask her what, and she can’t even answer me.
There’s something about her voice that gets on my nerves. Some odd…undertone to each word she says that makes my ears ring. As much as the girl is growing on me, I can’t stand it for very long.
I just tell her to go take a nap or drink another coffee. Whatever gets her to stop talking about it. If she thinks we’re gonna die down here, I don’t want to hear about it.
We’re almost there, according to James. I ran into him today outside the head. He asked me—sounding like he was completely serious—what oceanographers do. I know for a fact that he knows what oceanographers do. I think he was just looking for a way to make conversation with me and clearly couldn’t think of anything better.
I explained to him—just to humor him, but in as little words and detail as possible because I really had to pee and I didn’t want to talk to him any longer than I had to—that we study the ocean. He stared at me like he wanted me to keep talking. I tried to step around him, and he blocked my path. Asked me why I was in such a hurry.
Then he gave me this slow up-and-down look. Made my whole body tense up, but I don’t think he noticed.
I told him Clint wanted him in the galley and pushed my way into the head. I wasn’t about to deal with whatever the hell that was.
I spend most of my time staring out the portholes. I’ve seen two great whites, a pod of bottlenose dolphins, and at least 30 different species of fish in the few days we’ve been travelling. I’m trying to keep a list of the ones I can recognize, but I’ve only been able to name around 25 off the top of my head. It really makes you think about how big the ocean is, about how little we know of what’s actually down here. I’ve been an oceanographer for 15 years at this point and there are still things I don’t know.
There’s something about this sub that creeps me out. I don’t think it helps that there’s only five of us. Sometimes it gets so quiet that all you hear is the monotonous hum of the machines over the bubbling of the deep ocean just beyond these metal walls. The hallways are tight and cramped, lined with pipes that you have to step over so you don’t trip and duck under so you don’t hit your head. Some of them leak, creating ominous-looking puddles of oil and water that stain your shoes an ugly shade of brown. If you breathe in too deeply, you can taste the shit in the air, acrid and metallic. Between the puddles and the pipes, you have to navigate the halls carefully, and uncharacteristic claustrophobia takes hold of me every time both my shoulders brush the walls. I’ll be walking between the galley and the berthing compartments and feel like I can’t breathe. The rooms are small, too, with just enough standing room to comfortably fit maybe three people maximum at the same time inside any of them. There’s only six—the rest of the sub is just winding hallways.
This whole place is like a cage, and we’re all animals, far more dangerous than whatever lies out there. The fish of the deep must stare through the portholes and wonder which alien creature will be the first to break.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell when it’s still daytime. Sure, we have clocks, but it’s a different feeling entirely to look out the porthole and not be able to tell whether it’s night or day. Really gives you a sense of how far below we are. Normally, it doesn’t bother me, but something about this trip is unsettling me. Maybe it’s just the strange people I’m trapped down here with.
Actually, I think I’m judging them too harshly. I’m sure they’re just as put off as I am. Lizzy’s young, she’s anxious, and it’s her first time down here. I can’t blame her for reacting so strangely. And I’m sure James didn’t mean any harm. He probably just wanted to talk.
I’m gonna go find Clint soon, see if we can get a better read on what exactly we’re looking for.
September 21st
I finally talked to Clint earlier. We looked at the data from NODC and some of our own sonar and radar scans. We deduced that whatever signals are bringing us down here are likely just underwater volcanic activity—thermal vents, by the looks of it.
But that would be weird, because most of the vents along the ridge are documented.
We’re not thinking too much of it, though, because things like this are missed all the time. And it’s not like he’s inexperienced, either—he’s been doing this for as long as I have, if not longer, so I have no reason to doubt him.
I also encountered the elusive Captain Wagner today. I went to get water in the galley before turning in for the night and he was there, making himself a cup of coffee. I asked him if everything was going alright and he looked at me like I called his mother a whore. Then he said everything was fine, grabbed his coffee, and stormed off.
I really don’t know what’s up with him. I asked Lizzy if she ever tried to talk to him, and she said the one time she did, he yelled at her for bothering him. She was too scared to try and talk to him since.
She didn’t talk about her feelings today. I invited her to sit with me while I did my daily staring-out-the-porthole routine, and I think she found herself enjoying it a little more than she thought she would. She asked me to tell her about the different species of fish I could identify. I told her about the oarfish, how they’re my favorite because of their weird shape and how they swim vertically, which is very entertaining to watch. Then the telescope fish, which are aptly named for their eyes, as they might take the cake for the nastiest-looking fish I’ve ever seen. She asked me if those ugly blobfish were real, and I told her they were, but I had to break the news that they are not scientifically known as blobfish but rather fathead sculpins, part of the Psychrolutidae family. She was slightly crushed.
There was even one species I didn’t know that she did. It was a viperfish. She said she knew because she saw a picture of it once and was so horrified that she never forgot it. She showed me a picture of it from a marine encyclopedia she had with her, and it was an ugly thing, that’s for sure.
I got her to tell me a little bit about herself. She’s 25 years old, has two older brothers, and likes to garden. When she was younger, she wanted to be an artist, but that didn’t work out. She became a meteorologist instead because she likes rainbows. She’s terrified of the ocean, but her work has been on the decline lately and taking this job was a last-ditch effort to prove she’s still capable.
I asked her to weigh in, to give me her opinion on what she thinks we’re down here to investigate. She says that, from the change in localized temperatures and the ways surrounding currents have altered, we’re likely right, and it’s probably just undocumented thermal vent activity. Though she also thinks it’s strange that it’s undocumented in the first place. That these changes happened so suddenly. But it could also just be one that’s been dormant for a while and only recently became active again. She says it’s rare, but not impossible.
I feel bad for her. She seems like she’s a smart girl. I hope that when we get back, things start going better for her.
James cornered me today in the mess room. Said he felt like I had been avoiding him. He had the audacity to put his hand on my waist and I decided then and there that I’d had enough. I told him to fuck off, that I wasn’t interested. He laughed in my face, but it was the kind of laugh that was harsh, something skeptical and biting. Then he told me that I’d warm up to him eventually.
I just left.
Something weird has been going on. It started a few hours ago. I first noticed it in a quiet moment while Lizzy and I were staring out that porthole. A faint, constant high-pitched whine, like the sound a fork makes when it scrapes against a plate except it’s continuous, the kind of shit that makes you grit your teeth together until one of them cracks. It was quiet, but not quiet enough to go unnoticed. Then Lizzy started talking, and I couldn’t hear it anymore.
But now, sitting in the near-complete darkness of my bunk, the rest of the crew having fallen asleep, I can hear it again. It’s louder now. I keep digging my nails into my palms like that’ll help anything. I think I’m starting to bleed.
I wonder if I’m the only one who can hear it. I must be, because I don’t know how everyone is sleeping through it. It’s all I can focus on.
I’m probably sleep-deprived. And anxious. This has been a really bizarre trip. Truthfully, I kind of wish I hadn’t agreed to it.
September 22nd
Clint asked me to help him do logs this morning. Temperature, current speed, current direction, salinity, the usual stuff. Discovered he’s actually a pretty good guy. I guess he’s only a bastard when James is around.
I endured him complaining about having to do this every morning. Talking about how he’s tired of it, of how monotonous he feels his job has become. The same shit every day, on every mission. I can tell he and James have been friends for a while. He almost pissed his own pants after cracking a joke about how that’s what marriage is like. Told him I didn’t see a ring on his finger. Turns out they divorced a couple years ago—he said it was messy, but didn’t care to elaborate. They were together for 23 years, have a daughter in college out in California.
Then he got all quiet, but it was the weighted kind of quiet. Told me that I reminded him of his daughter. It took me off guard at first, but I realized he didn’t mean it in any sort of weird way. He said that even though he hadn’t known me very long, he could see her smarts in me. I was surprised at how suddenly he was…I don’t know. Different. Soft, I guess? Said he was scared she was gonna turn out like him, that all he wants is for her to be better than he was. That even though she was already in college, even though she was doing great, he felt like he let her go too quickly.
It got to me, honestly. Tugged at something I didn’t know was still sore.
I told him about Vicky, about how I had to basically raise her after our mom died. How angry she’d get whenever I didn’t let her go to parties or I demanded that she give me her location. How we’d get into fights every night over the dumbest shit. I told him about the time she outed me, too, and how my sexuality is probably what made my dad cut ties with his daughters, and how I hated her for a long time, after that. We weren’t talking when she left for college, but she came back when she was ready. She was sorry, and I was sorry, too. She graduated from nursing school summa cum laude. She has a husband and kids now. I told him that she still calls me, and I know without a doubt that she’s happy.
I told him that sometimes the only thing we can do is push them in what we hope is the right direction and let them take the reins. Pray we did our best.
He got all quiet again. I thought he was going to cry. But he just thanked me, and we finished the logs in silence.
Not complete silence, though. That noise is back again, but it’s even louder now. I know for sure I’m not hallucinating. It got worse throughout the day, too. I was in the galley earlier, making myself a sandwich, and it sounded like it was coming from right where I stood.
Lizzy walked in and asked me why I was gripping the knife so tight. My knuckles were white. I didn’t even realize I was doing it.
I asked her if she’s been hearing a weird noise lately and she said she has. Brushed it off as shitty adjustment to the change in pressure and left.
I don’t know how much I believe her, but I don’t have a better explanation.
September 23rd
I was on my way to the head earlier and ran into Captain Wagner.
He was lingering just outside the control room bulkhead, one hand on the handle like he was expecting someone to come by. He swung his head towards me as soon as I got close, and he looked manic. Just absolutely bat-shit fucking crazy. His eyes were all red and wide, and the sides of his head and ears were red, too, and covered in lines, like he had been scratching at them. I noticed the hand on the bulkhead had specks of blood under the fingernails.
He asked me if I heard it, too.
I assumed he was talking about the noise. It’s only gotten louder since yesterday.
I nodded, too afraid to say anything in case he reacted like he did the last time I talked to him. But he just leaned back into the control room for a second, like he was looking for something. I saw him squint his eyes, presumably at one of the displays on the control panel. Then he just told me to “tell Clint to fix the goddamn thing,” stepped back through the door, and slammed it shut behind him. The definitive click of the lock told me I wasn’t gonna get anything else.
I wonder what he was looking at.
I caught Lizzy sitting at one of the tables in the mess hall, staring out the porthole. She usually doesn’t do it without me, and when I told her as much, she turned to me and asked if I thought we were gonna die down here.
I didn’t register what she had asked, at first. I stuttered out a bewildered what the fuck? because that was the only response that seemed sensible at the time, and then immediately felt bad, because the poor girl was on edge and likely didn’t need that when she tried to confide in me.
But she wasn’t affected by my words. She just repeated herself like I hadn’t said anything at all.
It took a couple seconds of me staring at her for me to formulate a coherent response. Decided to keep it light, to joke that I had a hot woman waiting for a second date when we got done with this and that I didn’t intend to leave her hanging. Lizzy didn’t laugh or even crack a smile, just gave me a single nod and went back to staring out the porthole.
I asked her if she had seen any more viperfish since the other day.
She didn’t respond.
September 24th
James is a fucking madman.
I collided with him—I don’t think our encounters are coincidental anymore—a few hours ago on my way to the sonar room to conduct more tests with Clint. The noise is getting louder, so I didn’t hear him rounding the corner and ran straight into his chest. He grabbed me by the shoulders so I didn’t fall backwards and muttered something about how we can’t seem to escape each other. He looked so fucking smug that I almost decked him. Choosing self-control, I just tried to get around him instead, but those hallways are so goddamn small that I had nowhere to go.
He asked me where I was going in such a hurry.
I didn’t entertain him. I told him to get his hands off me and get the fuck out of my way.
He laughed at me.
I warned him if he didn’t get out of my way, I was going to punch him in the face.
He didn’t need to do anything else. Just looked me in the eye, smiled, and said that he’d love to see me try.
There’s this thing men love to do, where they don’t take women seriously.
The crunch of his nasal bone beneath my knuckles was genuinely more gratifying than anything I’ve ever achieved.
But it was short lived. He went staggering backwards, and when I went to cut around him, he grabbed me by the neck and slammed me against the wall. I hit my head on one of the pipes so hard that my vision was fuzzy when I opened my eyes. He was saying something, I could feel his spittle hitting my face, but everything sounded like it was underwater—no pun intended. One of his hands was tight around my throat, and the other was tearing at the buttons of my shirt.
I should have done something. Should have taken another swing at him, should have tried to rip his nose off with my teeth, should have kicked him in the fucking balls. Should have screamed. But I was frozen. I was terrified. He is a six-foot-something, muscular man, and I am a five-foot-five 29 year-old, and we are in a submarine thousands of feet below the surface. In my mind, there was no way to stop what he was going to do to me, and there would be no way to prove that he had done it.
My vision was going. I couldn’t breathe. He had ripped open the top of my shirt. I could feel his hand on my skin, cold and clammy.
This man was going to kill me. I was going to die.
Then he was gone. His hands were gone. Gradually, I could see, I could breathe—or I could at least hack up a fucking lung while I tried to get air back into my system. My legs were too weak to hold me up, so I was collapsed in a heap on the ground, but he wasn’t touching me anymore, and that’s all I cared about.
I looked up to find James and Clint screaming at each other. Clint was gripping James by the front of his shirt and shaking him hard. James shoved him back, and my ears were ringing, but I could make out James saying that Clint was “a fuckin’ feminist pussy!” I almost laughed aloud, but I didn’t have the energy for it.
James gestured to me a couple times, said something about me punching him, but Clint just shouted back that he fucking deserved it, told him to get lost before he did the same himself. James went to go say something, but thought better of it and hauled his bleeding ass back down the hallway.
Clint helped me up and rebuttoned my shirt. Told me that if James ever touches me again, he’ll break his fucking fingers.
September 25th
The noise is fucking unbearable.
It’s so loud I feel like my brain is going to explode. Clint flipped out on James earlier, told him to get in the engine room and fix whatever it was before Clint “bashed his fucking brains in with his own goddamn wrench.” James started screaming that he had already been in the engine room three times, that the noise wasn’t coming from anywhere inside the damn sub.
We tried to get to Captain Wagner in the control room, but he wouldn’t come out. He wouldn’t even answer us, and the door’s locked, so there’s no way for any of us to get to him from out here.
We’ve arrived at the coordinates, and what do you know, it’s a thermal vent. A perfectly goddamn normal thermal vent. They needed to send us down here for something they could have proven in five fucking minutes had they just tried a little harder. Clint says they must have missed it because of how deep we are, but I don’t entirely buy that. They had to have known enough to at least make an educated guess.
Lizzy’s losing it. She won’t leave her bunk, mumbling over and over about how we’re going to die, how “it’s gonna kill us.” I don’t know what “it” is, but I’m not just gonna let the girl starve, so I’ve been going into the galley to get her food, even if she never does anything more than pick at it for a while. I’m sitting across from her now, watching her rock back and forth with her hands pressed over her ears. She’s muttering something I can’t hear.
I’m worried about her.
Clint says we’ll start running tests later today. He wants to give James more time to figure out where the hell this noise is coming from.
I tried to put my pillow over my head so I could take a nap, but it was useless.
I feel like it’s coming from inside my skull.
September 26th
Captain Wagner’s dead.
Drove a screwdriver through his own eardrums. Bled out on the console. James got the door open with a crowbar when Wagner never came out. We don’t know how long he’s been dead. At least a day, Clint thinks, but could be less, could be more.
I went to go radio for help, only to discover our comms system had been cut. Completely mangled. It was fucking useless.
James did it. Said that fuckers like us deserve to die down here.
I almost strangled him. I almost strangled him with my bare goddamn hands. Settled for calling him a stupid motherfucking cunt instead.
He came at me screaming some dumb bullshit. Didn’t get two words out of his mouth before Clint shoved his ass to the ground. Told him to walk away, set his damn head straight, or Clint will do it for him.
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else, so I just stood there in silence, wondering what to do with his body.
His eyes were still open—wide and blue and haunted. There was blood all over his face, trailing down his nose and into his eyes. Made it look like he had been crying. Maybe he had. His mouth was open, too, but if he had screamed, we would have heard it. There was blood in his teeth, and I thought it was just more from his ears, but then I realized it was because he had bitten clean through his tongue.
The smell was horrendous. I finally understand what they mean when they say something smells like death—this putrid, rotting thing that suffocates you, makes you feel like you’re rotting, too. You can’t get rid of it. It settles on you like a second skin. I scrubbed myself with a towel and soap until parts of me were red and raw. It’s still all I can smell.
Lizzy was crying. Clint and James were arguing again. I wasn’t listening. All I could think about was how our captain is dead, we’re ten thousand feet below the surface, and nobody here knows how to get us back up.
In the end, we just left him there.
The noise is even louder now. There’s no escaping it. It’s like it follows you.
Clint and I conducted some more testing yesterday, before everything went to shit, and almost everything about the vent looks normal, but there’s traces of a strange mineral in the plumes. He said it doesn’t match anything in our database. I told him that there could be contaminants on the grabbers we use to collect samples that are interfering with the system’s readings. Alternatively, it could be an error with the actual system itself.
Tried to lighten the mood a little by suggesting we might have even discovered a new source of an isotope, like they did with Actinium-277. The attempt didn’t land.
Truthfully, I don’t give a damn about thermal vents anymore, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
September 27th
We’re stuck. It’s official.
James said he never learned how to pilot these things, only how to fix them. The comms are dead. We have no connection with the surface whatsoever.
I haven’t slept in three days. That noise is too goddamn loud. We still haven’t figured out where it’s coming from. We’ve given up trying.
The only creatures that ever crossed my mind as a potential source are sperm whales. I know that they live in the area and occasionally venture this far down to hunt. And they emit these near-deafening clicking and whining noises to both echolocate and communicate. They’re the loudest animals on earth. 230-236 decibels. Louder than a jet engine.
But this isn’t that. I’ve heard sperm whales before, and this isn’t them. It’s too high-pitched. It’s louder. It physically hurts.
Everyone is silent. Nobody talks to one another anymore. Lizzy and I spend our time in our bunks. Clint comes in here sometimes, but he never stays for long. I don’t give enough of a fuck about James to care where the asshole is. I feel like I catch glimpses of him here and there, but who knows. I’m exhausted.
Honestly, I hope he’s dead, too.
I want to go home.
September 28th
The entire submarine has gone still, like the thing itself is waiting for someone else to snap.
Except for that fucking noise. It’s so loud. I can’t tell if it keeps getting louder or I’m just imagining things. It’s strange, because the submarine is quiet except for the noise. It’s silence without the silence. Sort of like when you’re standing in a quiet room and you can hear the sound of your blood in your ears, except magnified by a million and absolutely agonizing.
We still aren’t moving. Clint’s been wasting away in the engine room trying to get the thing fixed, but he told me that it’s not looking good. I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t want to know.
I was in the galley this morning grabbing coffee for me and water for a still-hysterical Lizzy when I ran into him. He had this desolate look in his eye, like he knew something terrible. He smiled at me when I came in, then just went back to sipping his coffee. I couldn’t see any steam coming from the cup, and the pot was days old at that point, so it must have been freezing.
I was about to leave when he stopped me, said that Lizzy and I are good people, that he hopes she and I find something better to do when we get out of this. He was sorry the two of us ended up here with him and James of all people. I told him it was alright, that I didn’t mind him so much, even though I thought James was a fuck. He laughed, but it was half-hearted and hollow.
I knew then and there that this sub wasn’t moving anytime soon. It hit me like a gut-punch, that feeling of all of your organs dropping to the lowest pits of your body. But I didn’t get the chance to say anything before he was off towards the engine room and I was left alone in the strange silence-not-silence of the galley.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
I turned the corner into the hallway that leads to the berthing compartments and there was James, back to me, standing just outside the bulkhead. I ducked back around the corner before I could make any noise, peeking out just enough to try and parse what he was doing. I could see the harsh rise and fall of his shoulders with his breathing, but other than that, he wasn’t moving. He had something in his hand, but I couldn’t see what it was from such a distance. Looked metallic, but it could have just been the shitty lighting. It seemed like he was waiting for something—for me, maybe, which is a terrifying thought. He must have stood there for at least five minutes before turning down the hallway in the opposite direction, which, if I’m not mistaken, leads to the engine room.
I slipped into the compartments when I was certain he was gone and made sure the bulkhead was locked extra fucking tight.
I’m not taking any chances with him.
September 29th
I killed that motherfucker. I stabbed him in the fucking throat.
This afternoon, while I was in the galley, James came at me with a goddamn kitchen knife, screaming that I was a “fucking brainless slut,” that I’d be more useful to him if I was a corpse.
He shoved me onto the floor and landed on top of me. He swung for my face but I caught his wrist, and then he tried to pin my hands down with his other hand but I leaned up and I bit that fucker’s nose clean off. The knife cut my cheek when I did it but it didn’t matter because he dropped the knife and flew back, grabbing for his face, and I picked the knife up and didn’t even hesitate. Just drove it right into his jugular before he knew I even moved.
But he saw my face when I pulled the knife out of him. He saw my face as he coughed and sputtered and bled out slowly and painfully on the floor.
My face was the last goddamn thing he ever saw.
September 30th
James got to Clint before I killed him. I didn’t even know.
I realized earlier I hadn’t seen him in a while, so I went looking. I found him in the engine room, sprawled across the floor, his skull all dented and bloody. There were parts of his head that were split open, and you could see little white shards of broken bone stuck in the crevices of his exposed brain. There was a wrench on the floor beside him.
I suppose Clint did give him the idea. Sorry bastard.
I couldn’t stand looking at him any longer than I had to. I just left him there.
Lizzy’s starving. She won’t eat. She just sits there, completely still, dead silent. She cries sometimes, but even then, it’s those quiet little sobs that make your lungs hurt and shoulders shake.
I told her that if she doesn’t eat or drink anything, she’ll die.
She said that we’re gonna die anyways, so there was no point.
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I couldn’t.
The entire submarine reeks of death.
October 1st
That noise is deafening now. I can’t even fucking hear myself think.
I talked to Lizzy a few times, just a few words here and there to make sure she was still with me, and I could barely hear myself speak.
My head has never hurt more in my life. If we do make it out of this, I’m fairly confident we’ll actually be deaf.
I understand Captain Wagner. I wish I could stab out my eardrums, too. But I’m afraid of the pain, afraid of how long it’ll take me to die.
Lizzy laid down last night and hasn’t moved since. I called her name once or twice, and she hasn’t responded.
I’m too scared to go check if she’s alright.
Seeing her there makes me feel like I’m not the only one left, even if I’m lying to myself.
October 5th?
I am going to die down here.
October ???
There’s something on the fucking sub.
I can hear it, something big hitting the walls, knocking things over. I know it’s not because we’re moving, because we’re not—we haven’t moved in almost a week. I don’t know how it got in. I don’t know how long it’s been aboard, or how long I have before it finds a way through that bulkhead.
I locked it. That’s all I can do. All that stands between me and death is a fucking lock, but I am too exhausted to do anything else. We made our choice when we boarded this thing, and there’s nothing left to do now but wait.
Hopefully it occupies itself with the rest of the bodies before it gets to me.
I think that thing is what’s making that noise. If it was deafening then, there’s no word I can use to describe it now. It’s in my fucking head. It’s rattling off the walls of my skull. It is me.
I think of Vicky, with her perfect family and rich husband and bitchy kids and big house and expensive fucking dog. I wonder if I would have fared better had I turned out like her. Or if I’d have just ended up like Mom. I think I’d rather turn out like Mom than like Dad.
Actually, I already turned out like Mom. What I devoted my life to is what kills me. The ocean was my drug. Stupid poetic bullshit. I think I’m losing it.
I wish I still believed in God. That way I’d have something even a little concrete to grab onto. Something to give me hope that there’s a way out of this.
But for now, I stare at Lizzy where she lies motionless across from me and keep one hand on the kitchen knife beside me, because I’ll be damned if I don’t look death in the eye when it comes for me.
Upon recovery of the SS Abyssal, the search party’s Remote Operated Vehicle discovered signs of struggle aboard the ship. Video feedback from the ROV showed external hatches torn open, with significant damage sustained to the frames and rims of the covers. Large scratches and tears were seen on hatches, bulkheads, and several walls. After further inspection, the markings were deemed too large and erratic to be connected to any of the region’s life forms. The galley and engine room were both found in an extreme state of disarray. The bulkhead to the berthing compartments had been forced open. Testing of the waters found traces of a foreign mineral not previously recorded in the area. Attempts to identify its makeup were futile.
A continuous feedback was received on hydrophones. The sound was so loud that operators had to lower the volume of the feedback by 75% in order for it to be played back. A source of the sound has yet to be identified, but researchers are being led to believe that it is coming from somewhere inside the thermal vent located half a mile to the south of the wreckage.
There were no bodies found aboard the vessel. The fate of the crew remains unknown.
Author Bio
Sadie Lallier is a sophomore at Emerson College pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. Originally from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, she came to Boston in pursuit of a career as an author. She strives to construct her own enchanting, fantastical worlds—much like those from the books she fell in love with as a child—with a focus on queer characters and stories. Along with short stories, nonfiction pieces, and poems, she is working on her debut fantasy novel. Her published works can be found in Emerson College’s Generic Magazine and Page Turner Magazine. Discover more about Sadie and her writing on her Instagram, @sadielallier.
