I'm a deep-sea diver, and my colleage got radiation…
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I'm a deep-sea diver, and my colleage got radiation poisoning
Are you afraid of space? It seems common amongst man to desire the experience of weightlessness. Or to see the world as an insignificant little sphere out the window, small enough to be covered by your hand. To know what it’s like to leave your home and step far beyond the means that God ever intended for man. I wonder if you want to experience maintenance on the ISS? I wonder if you think about floating free in the black abyss of nothingness without so much as a tether to hold you down to mankind. I wonder if you consider floating free into the void, without the means to so much as steer, let alone get home.
It’s such a cliche fact that people toss around, “we actually know more about space than we do our own ocean”. And yet, it seems to me, no one ever questions that. Does that not concern anyone? That we know what’s going on 11 billion light-years away, but by proxy, don’t know what’s going on in our own house. Thousands of people get all spooked out by the thought of aliens, in a space that we know far more about, and yet *sea monsters* are more or less scoffed at. I’m not, of course, claiming to believe in either, but rather the conceptual hypocrisy irks me. In comparison, we assume the seas have been conquered, and repeat that back to guys like me when working at sea goes awry.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think about it much till recently, other than how much it fucking sucks. Saturation diving, it’s a bitch. Living days on end in a room just about the same volume as a medium-sized tent. Just to get down to depth, they have to slowly pressurise the entire room, ready for descent. You can feel all the muscles in your body getting squeezed as the gases in your blood get forced into dissolving. The room begins to turn hot as more and more air is pumped into the chamber and forced into your body; the crushing weight of the space around you imposes itself on your entire being. Point is, it sucks ass.
I’m usually in good company, though, often with the same guys. Most of the time, it’s three of us, sometimes four. We’ll sit around and play cards for a few hours, kick around and banter till the pain fades. It’s boring, uncomfortable and dangerous, but I can’t say I’d be worthwhile at anything else, so I doubted for a long time I’d ever tap out and move on to something different. At least the pay is good.
The purpose is to raise the pressure of the chamber to be equal to that of the oceanic depth you’ll be working in. You take the diving bell (room) with you so you can work at depth and then sleep off the clock in the chamber. Pressurisation takes hours, decompression can take days; it’s just not efficient to resurface at the end of every day when you clock off. So you sleep down there, in that little room, getting handed your food through the antisocial *medical hatch*.
Normally, we’re working stuff like internet cables or miscellaneous pipes running across the ocean floor, but this time we got something new. Something about continuous maintenance on an offshore oil rig.
Supposedly, they’d sent down tech divers multiple times since the chains holding the thing in place kept moving. Swaying and tensioning as though they were being hit by something solid. Though they are built to withstand the pull of both currents and the winds exerted on the rig, the strain that each chain experienced was isolated to individual moments acting on one chain at a time. Praying it wasn’t oceanic debris drifting along the seabed, the team of divers were sent down to survey the damage and make sure that the drill and drill tube weren’t damaged. They were meant to run down to the depths, have a look, and resurface. After the third team were sent for maintenance, they told us they set up equipment to monitor for another recurrence, but apparently, hours after they got it working, everything went offline. Team four went down to retrieve the stuff, only to find a small portion missing, and the rest they retrieved was all out of action, with burnt-out sensors and a decade’s worth of undersea ageing and decay. Most of the time, those guys are down there for a few hours to a day, but their trips are few and far between, without needing to stay down for too long. So with no more ideas or solutions, *we* got shipped out and sent down.
The rig that was intended to be moved sometime in the future had now been changed to a permanent fixture, at which point a lattice truss cage had been built around the drill tube extending down about 4,000 feet for protection. A lucky call that had been made only a year earlier had seemingly saved the drill tube. I can’t say I was a fan. The diving bell we were to be living inside once deployed had to be secured to the truss next to the drill tube, and so it was the first thing I saw. That dim, grimy, grey cage extending down into murky blackness, like looking up at a radio tower in complete fog. From where we were attached, around 1500 feet down, I could just about see to the other side of the cage. Technically, we were not *legally* allowed to be stationed that deep, but both we and the team on the rig had agreed to keep it a secret since it is *technically speaking* safe. We were therefore willing to bend the rules a little further when our pay got handily increased if we were willing to go deeper.
We dropped a line down from the diving bell so that we had something to hold on to during the trip. Despite decompression becoming a necessary step at the end of our mission, we would still need to normalise in the ascent back to the diving bell, which involved rising slowly and stopping often. At least with the line we could clip on and float while we decompressed, rather than having to tread water during our ascent.
We were lucky on this mission, since we got a team of four. Three guys I’ve worked with previously, the man in charge being my friend Jake. We’d worked countless jobs together, and he’d recommended me for the job, as well as two other guys, Ben and Dave. I’d worked with them both before. Nice lads, we worked well together. We were anticipating a lot of sitting around, so it helped to be on a team of people who all got along pretty well. It made the compression process that much more tolerable, and by the time we were ready to leave the bell to start our work, the job was far more relaxed with everyone chatting over the radio.
The first two days were mostly surveillance, going between the anchor ties and checking for signs of damage before doing the same for the cage and the drill tube. The anchor chains are far apart, around 150-200 meters above sea level, but they get wider as they go down in order to hold the rig in place, so a lot of the time on the first two days was spent swimming either between the chains or slowly ascending or descending along them to check they were all in shape. We had to go in teams of two, if not all together in case of emergency, so it was slow going. Checking the chains took forever, since in the dim fog of the ocean at depth, we couldn’t see more than 20-30 feet in front of us at any moment. The only way to be sure of our work was to get as close as possible, for inspection. And we were told specifically that we had to be as meticulous as possible. Those anchors were built to withstand anything, but with impacts strong enough to rock the entire rig, our higher-ups didn’t want to take any chances.
It was day 2 when, as a group, we made a slow descent down the lattice to check it out for damage. It was a little way down where we found some evidence of what might have been causing issues upstairs. One of the three vertical bars of the lattice, each of which was about 2-3 feet wide, was bent inwards and crumpled like a used paper straw. We radioed in to control upstairs and confirmed their suspicions. Looked like a shipwreck, or something equally heavy could’ve been drifting along and collided with the frame. But, though the currents do pick up rather violently at times, we saw it hardly likely that they would ever be strong enough to do that. Not to mention the seabed was another 3500m below us, and none of us could imagine how any sort of drifting debris would be raised that high off the sea floor. Control, on the rig, was not too excited about it, and having already done our anchor checks for them, they requested we go deeper immediately the next morning.
Woke up to the same cramped, sterile white walls. A quick meal and we were out again. Descent was slow, next to the drill cage. We weren’t allowed to go fast for health and safety, but I have to say, even with Ben cracking jokes and helping to pass the time over the radio for the whole descent, I still wish the process could be a lot quicker. In theory, we should have been safe to dive up to 1000m, which Control repeated to us multiple times, but presently aware of our own mortality, we took it slow and didn’t plan on going any further than necessary.
So, we’re descending, slow. Me in the middle, Jake below and Dave and Ben just above me. All of us gripping the cross bars between the lattice, waiting for our ears to normalise before letting go, dropping a few feet and grabbing the next bar in turn. It’s hard to look up or down in the suit without kicking my legs out to reorient my whole body to face a direction, so listening to the guys banter over the radio was about all I could do to know they were still there. Though it wouldn’t help much, as I would only be able to see a little way above me or below me before all my vision faded off into the same misty blackness. So I heard it before I felt it, when Jakes voiced jittered over the radio, “holy fuck”.
I’d let go of the bar I was on and dropped down ready for the next one, when, as I drifted through the deep blue fog, the next bar never appeared. I soon found myself plummeting down in an uncontrolled fall, kicking, flailing and praying to God to find my balance. Though we are able to move freely in the water, with a 20kg oxygen tank strapped to your back, slowing down is less than easy, and other than kick as hard as I could and wait for my momentum to change, there wasn’t much else I could do.
I felt him collide with my back before I saw him, Jake, kicking his legs hard enough to keep us both at level as he gripped my arm to hold me steady
“The cage is gone,” Jake’s voice crackled over the radio, “Descend with caution, boys.”
“The fuck you mean the cage is gone?” Ben appeared next to us, treading water as he cast his eyes towards the abyss in front of us. “That’s… that’s not possible.”
The three of us turned our heads up, into the obscured blue above us, where the wrinkled claw of what used to be the cage twisted and bent into a crumpled mess, in the fog. Like a children’s toy that had been torn apart, the near 10,000-ton metal cage that was supposed to extend for another 2000 feet below us had completely disappeared. Now, all that was left for us in the void below was the drill tube drifting idly in the currents, beckoning us down into the deep.
“What do you mean the cage is gone? That’s not possible.” Even over the little radio, we could tell Control did not sound happy.
“That’s what I said.” Ben chirped up, standing from his bunk to hover next to Jake, who had been trying to explain the situation for the past half an hour.
The voice sighed over the radio, composing itself before continuing. “This is a big issue, obviously. If true, then we have to assume that the cage has fallen to the ocean floor. You understand, the drill extends to the seabed, correct?” They didn’t wait for a reply. “The cage was built around the drill tube. If it has, as you say, *detached,* then we risk it falling onto the sea floor and pulling the drill with it. We can’t exactly remove the drill tube from inside it, not easily anyway. We’d have to lift the drill a couple thousand feet; it’s just not practical.”
“How the hell does the drill still work then. Shouldn’t it have been crushed when the cage hit the floor?” Ben cut in before Jake had a chance to respond.
“Theoretically, yes. But it’s possible that the cage has fallen straight and landed upright. But if the currents pick up on the sea floor, it could tip, and we’d be fu… it’d be a problem.”
Ben went to reply, but Jake lifted his hand, requesting silence as he turned the situation over in his head.
“That’s fine. What do you need from us?”
“Before we do anything else, we need to know what’s happened. Can your team find the other end of the cage?”
“You’re talking us going a relative depth of 8 to 9 thousand feet, that’s not possible. You’ll have to send drones down. We can’t.”
Another measured sigh of exasperation from the voice over the radio, “We tried before you got here. Anything too deep, and the drones failed. We lost one already, it’s too high-risk. Look, can you guys go back down tomorrow, as deep as you can, and just see if you find anything? We’re willing to pay accordingly.”
“Deal.”
Up early next day. Jake wanted as much time as he could get to be out just to give us as much time to ascend and descend as possible. No longer trusting the cage, we all kept a gloved hand wrapped tightly around the rope we’d dropped on day one, slowly sliding down as fast as our ears and equilibrium would allow us. It was uncanny, watching the cage disappear before my eyes as we reached the bottom. Despite having spent a good half an hour the day before circling it, inspecting the broken ends and so on, it still didn’t sit right with me. Something about looking at something so big, broken and suspended in the middle of the misty black just looked unnatural.
I was not dealing well with the descent, for the first time in years. My body just refused to equalise normally, and so after a little bit of descending, I told the team over the radio I was struggling and moved myself to the back of the group. The plan was supposed to be simple. Don’t push it, but descend as far as Jake told us to; keep one of us waiting at the rope and let the others sweep out a little to see if anything funny showed up, not that any of us were expecting it to.
Still feeling shit, I volunteered to stay at the rope. I clipped on and just floated there, watching as the other three disappeared into the shroud of darkness in front of us, their head torches slowly swallowed by the same shadows they were swimming into. I was half asleep when Jake told Dave over the radio to head back, reconvene with me and have a look in the opposite direction. We weren’t supposed to be splitting up, but as things were getting later, I think the time was concerning him. Dave reappeared after another half an hour from the blackness, stopping by the rope to see how I was doing before disappearing off behind me.
“Stay on the radio,” I told him as I watched him swim off into the distance.
“Yeah, I know.”
An hour later, Jake and Ben reappeared and clipped on to the rope next to me.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Boring as shit,” Ben said, “it’s all empty space all the way out. Must be nothing around us for miles. I don’t know what the fuck we’re meant to find.”
I shrugged.
“Where’s Dave? Have you heard from him? I think he was out of range from us.”
“Yeah, I… No, actually, I’ve not heard from him in like an hour.”
“Not funny, man.” Ben turned to face me.
“I’m not… no, I’m serious.”
“Dave, do you copy? Dave, can you hear me? Do you copy?” Jake said, repeating the words over and over into the radio. No response.
“For fuck’s sake. I’ll find him.” Ben huffed, unclipping from the rope.
“I’ll come,” I said, moving to follow suit.
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be a sec, his radio’s probably died, he’s probably on his way back. He knows protocol. I’ll stay on the radio and just go out a little to see,”
Before either of us had time to respond, he was off. Much like I did, Jake moved to unclip, but as the youngest and fittest of us, Ben was a much faster swimmer than either of us, and by the time we had unclipped, he’d already disappeared.
“Idiot.” Jake cursed, “Stay on the radio, I swear to-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Liar. 20 minutes later, we’d had nothing but radio silence till the frantic silhouette of something came bolting towards us from beyond the mist. Ben, swimming frantically as his life depended upon it, before colliding shoulder-first with Jake and me, and clutching the rope tightly in his shaking hand like a lifeline.
“We gotta go, man, we gotta fucking go.”
“What, where’s Dave? Did you-”
“Dave’s gone, dude. We gotta go right fucking now, dude!” He yelled, before grabbing the rope in his free hand and beginning to climb as fast as he could. The motion was clunky, and within seconds, he’d let go to swim as fast as he could directly up.
“Ben, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jake demanded over the radio, but Ben didn’t care. Both he and I soon followed, swimming after him as fast as we could, though he was still too fast for us.
“Ben? Ben, you’re gonna hurt yourself.” I could feel my ears beginning to throb as I raced vertically to catch him, my head splitting as the pressure built up in my skull. I swallowed, desperate to release the pressure, but I was too determined to slow now, till suddenly Ben went still. His violent thrashing ceased as he blacked out, his limbs curling up above him as the nearly empty oxygen tank on his back began to drag him back down. Slowly at first, but picking up speed as he began to plummet towards the hungry depths beneath him. I leapt out from the rope so as to catch him, but his unexpectedly limp hand slipped from my grasp. falling ever faster. Picking up speed, like a lead balloon, Jake turned tail and raced down the rope after him. Both of them disappeared, swallowed by the missing light as Jake outstretched his hand to catch his falling comrade.
The rope moved first, a wave whipping up the length of the line to my hand, reflecting off my grip before racing back down from whence it came. Something gripping the rope, and swinging it back and forth, I could feel my pulse spike as I turned over in my head what to do, till I saw Jake, pulling himself up the rope with his free hand, the other gripping tightly under Ben’s shoulder. I dropped down to grab Ben and help Jake hoist him up as we slowed down, checking him over before nodding to each other and making the slow ascension back to the diving bell.
Ben was in a bad way when we got back to the bell. When we’d got back, we undressed him and helped him into the sleeping quarters. Somehow, in the time between when Jake had caught him and when we had got back to the bell, Ben’s oxygen had completely depleted. When he didn’t awake for the rest of the night or the next morning, Jake and I were beginning to feel concerned that he might have suffered greatly. Brain damage, oxygen starvation, or barotrauma from his, frankly, reckless ascent. I don’t know about Jake, but a little piece of me was hoping we’d get back to the bell and see Dave waiting patiently for us to return, but he wasn’t. As far as I know, he hasn’t been seen again. It was a quiet night that night, and the morning after. Neither Jake nor I felt much like talking, and other than Jake updating control on the situation, not a word was said between us over the night. Control let up after that, thanking us for our service and telling us we’d be sent transport for decom in a few days.
Ben woke up that evening as Jake and I were sitting down for dinner. He awoke with a start, rolling off the side of his bunk and landing on the cold metal floor with a sickening crack. He began to convulse violently, his spine arching as he began to wretch, spewing some lumpy mucous like red bile across the floor. I could hear him groaning with pain as his stomach pumped as hard as it could to expel this black substance, far too sticky to leave his body with any ease, his breath now wheezy and sickly sounding as every sucking breath he took bubbled past the remaining globs that lodged themselves in his oesophagus. He began looking around the bell frantically like a caged animal, as Jake and I tried to calm him down and explain the situation. He wouldn’t listen, or didn’t care, and soon we found ourselves having to pin him to his bunk and tie him down as he went from confusion to fear to anger and began threatening to fight before jumping for the air lock and threatening to break the pressure flood the bell. We had to bind his arms and ankles tight as he kicked and screamed and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog, writhing violently against his binds till his muscles were physically too tired to move any more.
We radioed control for some sort of medical assistance, but they said they had no medical staff qualified to dive or to meet us at 1500 feet below sea level, so the best they could do was get the chief medical officer on the radio to talk us through what to do. Oddly enough, she was on board with our solution of tying our colleague down and didn’t see it as being in any way questionable, given the circumstances. And as Ben had begun to tire and to calm down, his focus turned from finding his escape to finding help, as he began to gasp and writhe with his own pain.
Jake and I had undressed him from his wetsuit and put him into his own clothes when we had re-entered the bell, without any signs of issue. But now, as he began to groan and cry out in pain, telling us his skin was on fire, we were about to find, upon lifting his shirt, that his skin was beginning to peel and flake off like red leaves in autumn. I had to hold him down as he still weakly struggled against his binds, while Jake lifted his shirt to find the dark red and blistered skin that covered every inch of his body. For fear of him injuring himself from his violent movements, I held his head still, gently but firmly, only for clumps of his hair to come away in my hands like cotton candy. The medical officer had one theory, though, foolish as it sounded, she seemed hesitant to propose it. Ben was suffering from Acute Radiation Syndrome.
Ever the team leader, Jake sat on the radio with the medical officer for the rest of the night, both trying to work out how it could have happened, and trying to learn to the best of his ability what he had to do to help. Meanwhile, I had been ordered to somehow fix the puddle of lumpy red fluid that was still splattered across our little room’s floor. I needed something to soak it up, and I suppose my solution was, in a way, heartless when I raided Dave’s items and used his various sets of clothes to soak up the majority of the foul-smelling slime and scoop it into the air lock. Next day, all I’d have to do was open the hatch and kick them out into the open ocean, and let the ocean floor a mile and a half below me hold onto them for the rest of our lifetimes.
Jake and I both had to pretend we couldn’t hear Ben the rest of the night, as the medical officer retired to her bedchambers and we attempted to do the same. He spent the rest of the night groaning intermittently as blisters across his body grew and wept into a warm, sticky puddle that his bonds wouldn’t let him escape. I don’t think either Jake or I slept a second that night, but I guess it worked out in our favour, as in the small hours of the morning, we heard Ben’s ability to form sentences found him once more. He was mumbling to himself over and over again, though I can’t say I understood a word of it. I think both Jake and I were too unsure to say anything and let him know we were awake till our alarm hit at 7am, and we couldn’t avoid it any more.
“Morning, bud.” Jake said, swinging his legs off his bunk and jumping off to approach Ben, still tied down to his bed, “How you feeling?”
“It hurts.” He groaned, flexing a little against the ropes that held him down.
“Mmm, I know it does.” He continued. I’d never heard him act so motherly. “I don’t really know what to tell you, but… HQ thinks you might have radiation sickness.”
Ben closed his eyes, slumping back on the table in exasperation and nodding sadly.
“If we let you off the table, you promise you won’t try and do anything crazy like yesterday?”
Ben nodded again.
“Alright, let’s get him moving then.” Jake turned to me, gesturing for me to help him with the rope. I slid off my bunk and moved to Ben’s ankles, letting the rope fall free for him to bend his legs and stretch his limbs a little. He rolled onto his side with a sickly sucking sound as his weepy flaked skin tore from his back to stay stuck in sticky beige clumps to his bed from where his shirt had ridden up.
We managed to get him out of his soaked clothes and into a fresh set, and helped him sit up on the edge of his bed as he massaged his head and groaned about a pounding headache before wobbling his way to the bathroom to expel another burst of red-tinted fluid from his stomach.
9am, the medical officer was back on the radio to us. We’d managed to get a little bit of info out of Ben, but nothing of substance, and she wanted to talk to him personally. Jake had asked if someone could have been dumping toxic waste at the bottom of the sea. She assured him that it couldn’t be the case, as water protects extremely well from radiation. At the depth and pressure we were at, it was not physically possible to receive anything like a lethal dosage unless we were within a few inches of supposed toxic waste. Though this was an answer that none of us, including her, were satisfied with, since we therefore had no clue as to what could have caused Ben’s current state.
“Listen, Ben.” The medical officer started, her demeanour far more practised in comfort than either Jake or I, “If we’re going to work out how to help you, we have to know what we’re dealing with. We need to know what happened, or what you found, or anything.”
“I don’t know, it was… a *thing*. Down there it’s…” he closed his eyes, tight as his hands resting at his knees began to shake violently. “A face, an eye, in the black. Darker than the sea, darker than anything, I- I saw it, I… so big. My eyes couldn’t fit; it was there, but it wasn’t.
Jake turned to me, his brow furrowed in confusion as Ben stuttered half-sentences, brought to tears.
“It was watching me, us… It was there, but it wasn’t. I- it was too big, my eyes couldn’t, it didn’t fit” he stopped, turning to look frantically between Jake and I as if either of us might understand what the hell he was talking about. “Dave fell, he fell! Fuck, he was swallowed by the black, it took him, and stretched him thin, too thin! The black! The Darkness! It watches, god, don’t you fucking understand! Vael thaervok! Vael koru’neth! Morath kel ushen!” Tears in his eyes as he began to gag on his own words, choking as he began to seize on his bed. Before either Jake or I had found the impulse to restrain him, he’d writhed and kicked so hard he launched himself off the bunk. An uncontrolled tumble through the cramped room, landing with his temple on the cold white metal bar of Dave’s bed opposite him. A bell-like ping followed by a muffled thud as he hit the ground hard.
I reached Ben first, pressing my shaking fingers to his throat in search of a pulse.
“He’s still with us.” I breathed.
A tired nod of approval from Jake before he turned back to the radio, “We need emergency evac. I don’t give two shits what you have to do, push the decom date up. We’re leaving the bell tomorrow, copy?”
“I’ll speak to my advisors.” Her voice was restrained and unreadable over the little speaker. Then a click as she closed the line.
“Ready to go?” Jake asked, stepping out of the cramped confines of our chemical toilet and grabbing his bag off the bed. After another heated argument with control the night prior, they had finally agreed to eat the overhead and offer emergency evac once Jake threatened to let slip publicly that we had been told repeatedly to work outside legal limits throughout our time diving. The decompression chamber was hooked up to the bell and would soon be taking us away from the depths. Jake opened the little porthole and squeezed through first for me to pass our bags through to the decom chamber. Next up was Ben. The *medical hatch* was finally living up to its name, as usually its purpose was to pass food to us during our time in the bell, but as of the last night control had provided heavy sleeping pills and the strongest pain meds available on the rig, to help Ben in the meantime. This meant, luckily for us, he was asleep and relatively easy to move as we passed him through the tiny, circular door and into the decompression chamber. We would be stuck in the chamber for the next few days at least, but supposedly a qualified medical professional would be able to join us within the first few days, though they neglected to tell us how they were going to manage that.
In the last 24 hours between his outburst and entering the chamber, it seemed as though Ben’s condition had worsened. I feel bad saying it, as one of the very few people who were there to help him, but just the mere sight of him disgusted me. Most of his skin had long since flaked off, and what hadn’t was all a deep, inflamed red. He had a habit of scratching at his skin, which would often fracture the fragile barrier that remained. It would soon tear and begin seeping out or sometimes spewing some awful-smelling, yellowish liquid. His face had turned puffy and swollen, his eyes sunken into his overgrown forehead and cheeks. Since his recent proclivity to expelling his own bloody fluids from one of two ends, we had him permanently seated on the toilet, and he was only permitted to leave for Jake’s increasingly frequent trips to the bathroom.
Ben would begin to point out Jake’s trips to the bathroom as often as they occurred, telling him how he’d *caught it*. Whether out of concern or cynicism, it was hard to tell, as Ben’s vocal cords had long since tired and turned hoarse like an age-old smoker on the brink of death. Jake would continue to deny these accusations till, on the second day, Ben decided to lock himself in the bathroom to prove his point. Furious, Jake pounded on the cold steel door, but it was no use. Much like the rest of the chamber, the door to the toilet was made of equally impenetrable steel. Ben refused to open the door till, unable to control himself any longer, Jake doubled over, spine folded as he gagged, spilling a familiar, lumpy, red mucous across the floor of the chamber.
“You bastard!” Roared Jake, returning to pound against the bathroom door till Ben swung it open with a sickly smile painted across his puffy red cheeks.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Ben Grinned.
“I didn’t see shit. You’re contagious.” Jake said, grabbing Ben by the hair so as to lift him to eye level, only for another oversized clump of Ben’s hair to come away in his hands like it was never attached at all. I had to grab Jake and pull him back as he lunged to punch Ben, narrowly missing and cracking his knuckles on the unforgiving steel of the door frame. He cried out as he stumbled back in my arms before spitting on the floor and climbing onto his bed, clutching his hand to his chest and muttering, “Why did I help you?”
Day three, Jake’s hand had swollen massively, which he blamed on his presumably broken knuckles, as he would go on to ignore the beginning signs of his now peeling skin. He now refused to speak to Ben, despite him now allowing Jake access to the bathroom since he’d successfully proven his point. Ben soon got the message and stopped talking to Jake as well. By day four, we were all existing in parallel, and not a word was spoken between any of us. Jake had taken to using Ben’s medication for himself, but other than his tendency to spasm and scratch at the sticky red mess that was his skin, Ben seemed content enough in watching his colleague suffer the same. Somehow now, only 30 metres from the surface of the ocean, and I’d never felt more isolated.
Day five, Jake looked like shit. Whether or not I agreed with his actions, there was no doubt Ben was right. Jake’s entire body, by now, had turned dark red and began to crack like soil in a drought. His bedsheets were soaked, much like Ben’s, in the foul stench of his body’s fluids. A stench that clung around him even now as he pulled me aside for a quiet, private conversation.
“I’m not feeling good. I don’t think we should go up to the surface.” He said, glancing back in Ben’s direction.
“The fuck are you talking about? We can’t stay in here forever.”
“He’s contagious. I’m telling you, he’s fucking contagious. Whatever this is, it’s contained in here with us.” He placed a crusty hand on my shoulder, pleading for me to agree.
I recoiled a little, stepping back from him, “It’s radiation sickness, you know this. It’s not contagious.”
“Then how the fuck did I get it?” He raised his voice a little before glancing behind his shoulder.
“I don’t know, man. I ain’t got it. Maybe you guys went near something when you left the line to look around, I don’t know.”
“Whatever.” He spat, clearly not pleased as he turned and slumped back down onto his bed.
Next morning, Jake was dead. His pocket knife plunged into his chest, with such force that it had wedged itself between two of his ribs. His lung collapsed, and he suffocated. Ben denied having anything to do with it, and considering the amount of blood smudged across Jake’s hands and on the handle of the knife, I was inclined to trust Ben’s word.
One day left till we would be let out. Not a word from the outside world and not a *promised* medical professional in sight. Ben’s whole body had bloated at this point, stretching the fabric of his clothes at every seam. The room stank of rotted flesh, as I was caught between a dead man and a dead man walking. Ben had begun telling me we should break out. That we needed to be free and that he was sure they never intended to let us out. I told him we had one day to go, which he brushed off in his own doubt. Instead, after that, he chose to talk to himself. Muttering in hushed tones like an old man rambling.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, when that night, lying in my bed, I heard Ben move. I assumed on one of his trips to shed some blood in the bathroom, but I had long since learnt not to trust him. I watched as he slumped out of his bed onto the floor, his withered and malnourished legs struggling to carry the balloon that had become his body aloft. Two unsteady steps, and the third found its purpose as he began to move in the opposite direction from the toilet. I followed him with my eyes as he made his way, as silently as his laboured and wheezing breaths would allow him, right towards the door. The decompression chamber was, even a day away from normalisation, at a high pressure difference from the world outside. The door was always free to open from the inside, *in case of an emergency*. A *safety* feature designed by people who didn’t understand the physics and had never heard of explosive decompression.
“Ben? What you doing?” Much more silent than he, I had slipped out of my bed and was now standing in the dim doorway to the airlock.
“You weren’t meant to wake. It’s time, I have to…” he didn’t turn to face me, instead reaching with both his hands to grip the bulkhead wheel.
Before he had a chance to turn it, I leapt at him, hands outstretched for his shoulders as I forced him into the door, both of us colliding and falling to the floor. I felt the crack as his skull collided with the bulkhead wheel, no longer concerned for his safety.
I punched him, hard, his soft, pudgy cheek slapping with the impact and leaving his sticky body residue drizzled across my knuckles. He grabbed me by the collar, head-butting me, hard. I could feel the dried-out sticky mess of his skin crumble like a candy wrapper under the impact as I stumbled back, landing on my ass with a bruising thud. I went to stand, but Ben moved faster, pinning my shoulders to the ground as he half mumbled, maybe to me, maybe to himself.
“I had to, it’s time, I had to do it.” He stammered, leering over me before he wretched, spewing chunky red sludge across my face.
I turned my head away, gagging, gasping, spitting, sputtering at every odorous pulpy hunk of flesh that landed on my face. Stank like shit and tasted like rotted flesh as I gagged at every vile drop that landed on my tongue.
A solid knee to his crotch in retaliation. He gasped, choking on his own chyme, his grip loosening enough for me to shake my arms free and kick him to the wall. My turn now as I pinned him to the ground and landed a solid fist to his temple. He didn’t resist, rather, talked calmly and requested that I desist, though I ignored him, my hand colliding repeatedly with his temple, reforming the overgrown tissue around my fist and waiting till I felt bone. We both heard a crunch under the impact of my fist. I couldn’t tell whether it was my knuckle or his temple, but I was too afraid of what would happen when I stopped to even consider letting up.
His time was wearing thin as his tongue, like an old radio sliding through frequencies, suddenly shifted with the crushing impact.
“Vael thaervok. Vael koru’neth. Morath kel ushen.” He’d repeat, hypnotic in nature, till a loud crunch emanated from under my fist and his head folded in pieces under the pressure.
Ben was dead, and I had killed him. Good riddance, I told myself, it was self-defence. But I couldn’t help the tremors that found me afterwards as I sat back on my bunk staring at the puffy, half-formed face of the man who used to be a friend. *A sick man, I didn’t have a choice. I was doing him a favour.* Was I? Only I remained to ask the question.
Several hours later, the bulkhead opened to a team of strong-armed men pulling me free from the decompression chamber. They found me, slumped against the cold metal framing of my bunk bed, staring into the white abyss of Ben’s bed opposite mine. Four men had entered, and only one lived to tell the tale. I was paid handsomely not to. In fact, all three of my comrades’ pay was rolled into mine as an incentive to keep my silence. We’d broken our contract, we had broken the law, we had broken diving protocol, and I had broken Ben. The rescue team cleaned me up, wiping Ben’s dried vomit and blood from my face and telling me I would be ok, as if that would make a difference.
I was sent home and promised I’d never venture near the sea again as long as I lived. But I’m sure it doesn’t matter now. Did I trust the words of those more qualified than myself? It’s a possibility. Did I live in denial because the truth was too far-fetched for me to admit to? Also likely. I can’t claim to believe or disbelieve any part of the story now.
But as I sit here years later, in my house that was paid for by my silence. As I lived my comfy life, bathed in the money bled by those who used to be my friends. As I toss and turn each night, haunted by shadows as my skin begins to turn red and peel and flake away from me like red leaves in autumn. And now, as I stare at the toilet bowl in the dim morning light, painted red by the sticky remains of my insides. All I can say is that through some sick and twisted mutation. Some warping madness in my mind, I understand every word Ben told me many years ago.
Vael thaervok
Vael koru’neth
Morath kel ushen
I am nothing
I become nothing
The darkness becomes me
#entertainment
source
Are you afraid of space? It seems common amongst man to desire the experience of weightlessness. Or to see the world as an insignificant little sphere out the window, small enough to be covered by your hand. To know what it’s like to leave your home and step far beyond the means that God ever intended for man. I wonder if you want to experience maintenance on the ISS? I wonder if you think about floating free in the black abyss of nothingness without so much as a tether to hold you down to mankind. I wonder if you consider floating free into the void, without the means to so much as steer, let alone get home.
It’s such a cliche fact that people toss around, “we actually know more about space than we do our own ocean”. And yet, it seems to me, no one ever questions that. Does that not concern anyone? That we know what’s going on 11 billion light-years away, but by proxy, don’t know what’s going on in our own house. Thousands of people get all spooked out by the thought of aliens, in a space that we know far more about, and yet *sea monsters* are more or less scoffed at. I’m not, of course, claiming to believe in either, but rather the conceptual hypocrisy irks me. In comparison, we assume the seas have been conquered, and repeat that back to guys like me when working at sea goes awry.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think about it much till recently, other than how much it fucking sucks. Saturation diving, it’s a bitch. Living days on end in a room just about the same volume as a medium-sized tent. Just to get down to depth, they have to slowly pressurise the entire room, ready for descent. You can feel all the muscles in your body getting squeezed as the gases in your blood get forced into dissolving. The room begins to turn hot as more and more air is pumped into the chamber and forced into your body; the crushing weight of the space around you imposes itself on your entire being. Point is, it sucks ass.
I’m usually in good company, though, often with the same guys. Most of the time, it’s three of us, sometimes four. We’ll sit around and play cards for a few hours, kick around and banter till the pain fades. It’s boring, uncomfortable and dangerous, but I can’t say I’d be worthwhile at anything else, so I doubted for a long time I’d ever tap out and move on to something different. At least the pay is good.
The purpose is to raise the pressure of the chamber to be equal to that of the oceanic depth you’ll be working in. You take the diving bell (room) with you so you can work at depth and then sleep off the clock in the chamber. Pressurisation takes hours, decompression can take days; it’s just not efficient to resurface at the end of every day when you clock off. So you sleep down there, in that little room, getting handed your food through the antisocial *medical hatch*.
Normally, we’re working stuff like internet cables or miscellaneous pipes running across the ocean floor, but this time we got something new. Something about continuous maintenance on an offshore oil rig.
Supposedly, they’d sent down tech divers multiple times since the chains holding the thing in place kept moving. Swaying and tensioning as though they were being hit by something solid. Though they are built to withstand the pull of both currents and the winds exerted on the rig, the strain that each chain experienced was isolated to individual moments acting on one chain at a time. Praying it wasn’t oceanic debris drifting along the seabed, the team of divers were sent down to survey the damage and make sure that the drill and drill tube weren’t damaged. They were meant to run down to the depths, have a look, and resurface. After the third team were sent for maintenance, they told us they set up equipment to monitor for another recurrence, but apparently, hours after they got it working, everything went offline. Team four went down to retrieve the stuff, only to find a small portion missing, and the rest they retrieved was all out of action, with burnt-out sensors and a decade’s worth of undersea ageing and decay. Most of the time, those guys are down there for a few hours to a day, but their trips are few and far between, without needing to stay down for too long. So with no more ideas or solutions, *we* got shipped out and sent down.
The rig that was intended to be moved sometime in the future had now been changed to a permanent fixture, at which point a lattice truss cage had been built around the drill tube extending down about 4,000 feet for protection. A lucky call that had been made only a year earlier had seemingly saved the drill tube. I can’t say I was a fan. The diving bell we were to be living inside once deployed had to be secured to the truss next to the drill tube, and so it was the first thing I saw. That dim, grimy, grey cage extending down into murky blackness, like looking up at a radio tower in complete fog. From where we were attached, around 1500 feet down, I could just about see to the other side of the cage. Technically, we were not *legally* allowed to be stationed that deep, but both we and the team on the rig had agreed to keep it a secret since it is *technically speaking* safe. We were therefore willing to bend the rules a little further when our pay got handily increased if we were willing to go deeper.
We dropped a line down from the diving bell so that we had something to hold on to during the trip. Despite decompression becoming a necessary step at the end of our mission, we would still need to normalise in the ascent back to the diving bell, which involved rising slowly and stopping often. At least with the line we could clip on and float while we decompressed, rather than having to tread water during our ascent.
We were lucky on this mission, since we got a team of four. Three guys I’ve worked with previously, the man in charge being my friend Jake. We’d worked countless jobs together, and he’d recommended me for the job, as well as two other guys, Ben and Dave. I’d worked with them both before. Nice lads, we worked well together. We were anticipating a lot of sitting around, so it helped to be on a team of people who all got along pretty well. It made the compression process that much more tolerable, and by the time we were ready to leave the bell to start our work, the job was far more relaxed with everyone chatting over the radio.
The first two days were mostly surveillance, going between the anchor ties and checking for signs of damage before doing the same for the cage and the drill tube. The anchor chains are far apart, around 150-200 meters above sea level, but they get wider as they go down in order to hold the rig in place, so a lot of the time on the first two days was spent swimming either between the chains or slowly ascending or descending along them to check they were all in shape. We had to go in teams of two, if not all together in case of emergency, so it was slow going. Checking the chains took forever, since in the dim fog of the ocean at depth, we couldn’t see more than 20-30 feet in front of us at any moment. The only way to be sure of our work was to get as close as possible, for inspection. And we were told specifically that we had to be as meticulous as possible. Those anchors were built to withstand anything, but with impacts strong enough to rock the entire rig, our higher-ups didn’t want to take any chances.
It was day 2 when, as a group, we made a slow descent down the lattice to check it out for damage. It was a little way down where we found some evidence of what might have been causing issues upstairs. One of the three vertical bars of the lattice, each of which was about 2-3 feet wide, was bent inwards and crumpled like a used paper straw. We radioed in to control upstairs and confirmed their suspicions. Looked like a shipwreck, or something equally heavy could’ve been drifting along and collided with the frame. But, though the currents do pick up rather violently at times, we saw it hardly likely that they would ever be strong enough to do that. Not to mention the seabed was another 3500m below us, and none of us could imagine how any sort of drifting debris would be raised that high off the sea floor. Control, on the rig, was not too excited about it, and having already done our anchor checks for them, they requested we go deeper immediately the next morning.
Woke up to the same cramped, sterile white walls. A quick meal and we were out again. Descent was slow, next to the drill cage. We weren’t allowed to go fast for health and safety, but I have to say, even with Ben cracking jokes and helping to pass the time over the radio for the whole descent, I still wish the process could be a lot quicker. In theory, we should have been safe to dive up to 1000m, which Control repeated to us multiple times, but presently aware of our own mortality, we took it slow and didn’t plan on going any further than necessary.
So, we’re descending, slow. Me in the middle, Jake below and Dave and Ben just above me. All of us gripping the cross bars between the lattice, waiting for our ears to normalise before letting go, dropping a few feet and grabbing the next bar in turn. It’s hard to look up or down in the suit without kicking my legs out to reorient my whole body to face a direction, so listening to the guys banter over the radio was about all I could do to know they were still there. Though it wouldn’t help much, as I would only be able to see a little way above me or below me before all my vision faded off into the same misty blackness. So I heard it before I felt it, when Jakes voiced jittered over the radio, “holy fuck”.
I’d let go of the bar I was on and dropped down ready for the next one, when, as I drifted through the deep blue fog, the next bar never appeared. I soon found myself plummeting down in an uncontrolled fall, kicking, flailing and praying to God to find my balance. Though we are able to move freely in the water, with a 20kg oxygen tank strapped to your back, slowing down is less than easy, and other than kick as hard as I could and wait for my momentum to change, there wasn’t much else I could do.
I felt him collide with my back before I saw him, Jake, kicking his legs hard enough to keep us both at level as he gripped my arm to hold me steady
“The cage is gone,” Jake’s voice crackled over the radio, “Descend with caution, boys.”
“The fuck you mean the cage is gone?” Ben appeared next to us, treading water as he cast his eyes towards the abyss in front of us. “That’s… that’s not possible.”
The three of us turned our heads up, into the obscured blue above us, where the wrinkled claw of what used to be the cage twisted and bent into a crumpled mess, in the fog. Like a children’s toy that had been torn apart, the near 10,000-ton metal cage that was supposed to extend for another 2000 feet below us had completely disappeared. Now, all that was left for us in the void below was the drill tube drifting idly in the currents, beckoning us down into the deep.
“What do you mean the cage is gone? That’s not possible.” Even over the little radio, we could tell Control did not sound happy.
“That’s what I said.” Ben chirped up, standing from his bunk to hover next to Jake, who had been trying to explain the situation for the past half an hour.
The voice sighed over the radio, composing itself before continuing. “This is a big issue, obviously. If true, then we have to assume that the cage has fallen to the ocean floor. You understand, the drill extends to the seabed, correct?” They didn’t wait for a reply. “The cage was built around the drill tube. If it has, as you say, *detached,* then we risk it falling onto the sea floor and pulling the drill with it. We can’t exactly remove the drill tube from inside it, not easily anyway. We’d have to lift the drill a couple thousand feet; it’s just not practical.”
“How the hell does the drill still work then. Shouldn’t it have been crushed when the cage hit the floor?” Ben cut in before Jake had a chance to respond.
“Theoretically, yes. But it’s possible that the cage has fallen straight and landed upright. But if the currents pick up on the sea floor, it could tip, and we’d be fu… it’d be a problem.”
Ben went to reply, but Jake lifted his hand, requesting silence as he turned the situation over in his head.
“That’s fine. What do you need from us?”
“Before we do anything else, we need to know what’s happened. Can your team find the other end of the cage?”
“You’re talking us going a relative depth of 8 to 9 thousand feet, that’s not possible. You’ll have to send drones down. We can’t.”
Another measured sigh of exasperation from the voice over the radio, “We tried before you got here. Anything too deep, and the drones failed. We lost one already, it’s too high-risk. Look, can you guys go back down tomorrow, as deep as you can, and just see if you find anything? We’re willing to pay accordingly.”
“Deal.”
Up early next day. Jake wanted as much time as he could get to be out just to give us as much time to ascend and descend as possible. No longer trusting the cage, we all kept a gloved hand wrapped tightly around the rope we’d dropped on day one, slowly sliding down as fast as our ears and equilibrium would allow us. It was uncanny, watching the cage disappear before my eyes as we reached the bottom. Despite having spent a good half an hour the day before circling it, inspecting the broken ends and so on, it still didn’t sit right with me. Something about looking at something so big, broken and suspended in the middle of the misty black just looked unnatural.
I was not dealing well with the descent, for the first time in years. My body just refused to equalise normally, and so after a little bit of descending, I told the team over the radio I was struggling and moved myself to the back of the group. The plan was supposed to be simple. Don’t push it, but descend as far as Jake told us to; keep one of us waiting at the rope and let the others sweep out a little to see if anything funny showed up, not that any of us were expecting it to.
Still feeling shit, I volunteered to stay at the rope. I clipped on and just floated there, watching as the other three disappeared into the shroud of darkness in front of us, their head torches slowly swallowed by the same shadows they were swimming into. I was half asleep when Jake told Dave over the radio to head back, reconvene with me and have a look in the opposite direction. We weren’t supposed to be splitting up, but as things were getting later, I think the time was concerning him. Dave reappeared after another half an hour from the blackness, stopping by the rope to see how I was doing before disappearing off behind me.
“Stay on the radio,” I told him as I watched him swim off into the distance.
“Yeah, I know.”
An hour later, Jake and Ben reappeared and clipped on to the rope next to me.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Boring as shit,” Ben said, “it’s all empty space all the way out. Must be nothing around us for miles. I don’t know what the fuck we’re meant to find.”
I shrugged.
“Where’s Dave? Have you heard from him? I think he was out of range from us.”
“Yeah, I… No, actually, I’ve not heard from him in like an hour.”
“Not funny, man.” Ben turned to face me.
“I’m not… no, I’m serious.”
“Dave, do you copy? Dave, can you hear me? Do you copy?” Jake said, repeating the words over and over into the radio. No response.
“For fuck’s sake. I’ll find him.” Ben huffed, unclipping from the rope.
“I’ll come,” I said, moving to follow suit.
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be a sec, his radio’s probably died, he’s probably on his way back. He knows protocol. I’ll stay on the radio and just go out a little to see,”
Before either of us had time to respond, he was off. Much like I did, Jake moved to unclip, but as the youngest and fittest of us, Ben was a much faster swimmer than either of us, and by the time we had unclipped, he’d already disappeared.
“Idiot.” Jake cursed, “Stay on the radio, I swear to-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Liar. 20 minutes later, we’d had nothing but radio silence till the frantic silhouette of something came bolting towards us from beyond the mist. Ben, swimming frantically as his life depended upon it, before colliding shoulder-first with Jake and me, and clutching the rope tightly in his shaking hand like a lifeline.
“We gotta go, man, we gotta fucking go.”
“What, where’s Dave? Did you-”
“Dave’s gone, dude. We gotta go right fucking now, dude!” He yelled, before grabbing the rope in his free hand and beginning to climb as fast as he could. The motion was clunky, and within seconds, he’d let go to swim as fast as he could directly up.
“Ben, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jake demanded over the radio, but Ben didn’t care. Both he and I soon followed, swimming after him as fast as we could, though he was still too fast for us.
“Ben? Ben, you’re gonna hurt yourself.” I could feel my ears beginning to throb as I raced vertically to catch him, my head splitting as the pressure built up in my skull. I swallowed, desperate to release the pressure, but I was too determined to slow now, till suddenly Ben went still. His violent thrashing ceased as he blacked out, his limbs curling up above him as the nearly empty oxygen tank on his back began to drag him back down. Slowly at first, but picking up speed as he began to plummet towards the hungry depths beneath him. I leapt out from the rope so as to catch him, but his unexpectedly limp hand slipped from my grasp. falling ever faster. Picking up speed, like a lead balloon, Jake turned tail and raced down the rope after him. Both of them disappeared, swallowed by the missing light as Jake outstretched his hand to catch his falling comrade.
The rope moved first, a wave whipping up the length of the line to my hand, reflecting off my grip before racing back down from whence it came. Something gripping the rope, and swinging it back and forth, I could feel my pulse spike as I turned over in my head what to do, till I saw Jake, pulling himself up the rope with his free hand, the other gripping tightly under Ben’s shoulder. I dropped down to grab Ben and help Jake hoist him up as we slowed down, checking him over before nodding to each other and making the slow ascension back to the diving bell.
Ben was in a bad way when we got back to the bell. When we’d got back, we undressed him and helped him into the sleeping quarters. Somehow, in the time between when Jake had caught him and when we had got back to the bell, Ben’s oxygen had completely depleted. When he didn’t awake for the rest of the night or the next morning, Jake and I were beginning to feel concerned that he might have suffered greatly. Brain damage, oxygen starvation, or barotrauma from his, frankly, reckless ascent. I don’t know about Jake, but a little piece of me was hoping we’d get back to the bell and see Dave waiting patiently for us to return, but he wasn’t. As far as I know, he hasn’t been seen again. It was a quiet night that night, and the morning after. Neither Jake nor I felt much like talking, and other than Jake updating control on the situation, not a word was said between us over the night. Control let up after that, thanking us for our service and telling us we’d be sent transport for decom in a few days.
Ben woke up that evening as Jake and I were sitting down for dinner. He awoke with a start, rolling off the side of his bunk and landing on the cold metal floor with a sickening crack. He began to convulse violently, his spine arching as he began to wretch, spewing some lumpy mucous like red bile across the floor. I could hear him groaning with pain as his stomach pumped as hard as it could to expel this black substance, far too sticky to leave his body with any ease, his breath now wheezy and sickly sounding as every sucking breath he took bubbled past the remaining globs that lodged themselves in his oesophagus. He began looking around the bell frantically like a caged animal, as Jake and I tried to calm him down and explain the situation. He wouldn’t listen, or didn’t care, and soon we found ourselves having to pin him to his bunk and tie him down as he went from confusion to fear to anger and began threatening to fight before jumping for the air lock and threatening to break the pressure flood the bell. We had to bind his arms and ankles tight as he kicked and screamed and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog, writhing violently against his binds till his muscles were physically too tired to move any more.
We radioed control for some sort of medical assistance, but they said they had no medical staff qualified to dive or to meet us at 1500 feet below sea level, so the best they could do was get the chief medical officer on the radio to talk us through what to do. Oddly enough, she was on board with our solution of tying our colleague down and didn’t see it as being in any way questionable, given the circumstances. And as Ben had begun to tire and to calm down, his focus turned from finding his escape to finding help, as he began to gasp and writhe with his own pain.
Jake and I had undressed him from his wetsuit and put him into his own clothes when we had re-entered the bell, without any signs of issue. But now, as he began to groan and cry out in pain, telling us his skin was on fire, we were about to find, upon lifting his shirt, that his skin was beginning to peel and flake off like red leaves in autumn. I had to hold him down as he still weakly struggled against his binds, while Jake lifted his shirt to find the dark red and blistered skin that covered every inch of his body. For fear of him injuring himself from his violent movements, I held his head still, gently but firmly, only for clumps of his hair to come away in my hands like cotton candy. The medical officer had one theory, though, foolish as it sounded, she seemed hesitant to propose it. Ben was suffering from Acute Radiation Syndrome.
Ever the team leader, Jake sat on the radio with the medical officer for the rest of the night, both trying to work out how it could have happened, and trying to learn to the best of his ability what he had to do to help. Meanwhile, I had been ordered to somehow fix the puddle of lumpy red fluid that was still splattered across our little room’s floor. I needed something to soak it up, and I suppose my solution was, in a way, heartless when I raided Dave’s items and used his various sets of clothes to soak up the majority of the foul-smelling slime and scoop it into the air lock. Next day, all I’d have to do was open the hatch and kick them out into the open ocean, and let the ocean floor a mile and a half below me hold onto them for the rest of our lifetimes.
Jake and I both had to pretend we couldn’t hear Ben the rest of the night, as the medical officer retired to her bedchambers and we attempted to do the same. He spent the rest of the night groaning intermittently as blisters across his body grew and wept into a warm, sticky puddle that his bonds wouldn’t let him escape. I don’t think either Jake or I slept a second that night, but I guess it worked out in our favour, as in the small hours of the morning, we heard Ben’s ability to form sentences found him once more. He was mumbling to himself over and over again, though I can’t say I understood a word of it. I think both Jake and I were too unsure to say anything and let him know we were awake till our alarm hit at 7am, and we couldn’t avoid it any more.
“Morning, bud.” Jake said, swinging his legs off his bunk and jumping off to approach Ben, still tied down to his bed, “How you feeling?”
“It hurts.” He groaned, flexing a little against the ropes that held him down.
“Mmm, I know it does.” He continued. I’d never heard him act so motherly. “I don’t really know what to tell you, but… HQ thinks you might have radiation sickness.”
Ben closed his eyes, slumping back on the table in exasperation and nodding sadly.
“If we let you off the table, you promise you won’t try and do anything crazy like yesterday?”
Ben nodded again.
“Alright, let’s get him moving then.” Jake turned to me, gesturing for me to help him with the rope. I slid off my bunk and moved to Ben’s ankles, letting the rope fall free for him to bend his legs and stretch his limbs a little. He rolled onto his side with a sickly sucking sound as his weepy flaked skin tore from his back to stay stuck in sticky beige clumps to his bed from where his shirt had ridden up.
We managed to get him out of his soaked clothes and into a fresh set, and helped him sit up on the edge of his bed as he massaged his head and groaned about a pounding headache before wobbling his way to the bathroom to expel another burst of red-tinted fluid from his stomach.
9am, the medical officer was back on the radio to us. We’d managed to get a little bit of info out of Ben, but nothing of substance, and she wanted to talk to him personally. Jake had asked if someone could have been dumping toxic waste at the bottom of the sea. She assured him that it couldn’t be the case, as water protects extremely well from radiation. At the depth and pressure we were at, it was not physically possible to receive anything like a lethal dosage unless we were within a few inches of supposed toxic waste. Though this was an answer that none of us, including her, were satisfied with, since we therefore had no clue as to what could have caused Ben’s current state.
“Listen, Ben.” The medical officer started, her demeanour far more practised in comfort than either Jake or I, “If we’re going to work out how to help you, we have to know what we’re dealing with. We need to know what happened, or what you found, or anything.”
“I don’t know, it was… a *thing*. Down there it’s…” he closed his eyes, tight as his hands resting at his knees began to shake violently. “A face, an eye, in the black. Darker than the sea, darker than anything, I- I saw it, I… so big. My eyes couldn’t fit; it was there, but it wasn’t.
Jake turned to me, his brow furrowed in confusion as Ben stuttered half-sentences, brought to tears.
“It was watching me, us… It was there, but it wasn’t. I- it was too big, my eyes couldn’t, it didn’t fit” he stopped, turning to look frantically between Jake and I as if either of us might understand what the hell he was talking about. “Dave fell, he fell! Fuck, he was swallowed by the black, it took him, and stretched him thin, too thin! The black! The Darkness! It watches, god, don’t you fucking understand! Vael thaervok! Vael koru’neth! Morath kel ushen!” Tears in his eyes as he began to gag on his own words, choking as he began to seize on his bed. Before either Jake or I had found the impulse to restrain him, he’d writhed and kicked so hard he launched himself off the bunk. An uncontrolled tumble through the cramped room, landing with his temple on the cold white metal bar of Dave’s bed opposite him. A bell-like ping followed by a muffled thud as he hit the ground hard.
I reached Ben first, pressing my shaking fingers to his throat in search of a pulse.
“He’s still with us.” I breathed.
A tired nod of approval from Jake before he turned back to the radio, “We need emergency evac. I don’t give two shits what you have to do, push the decom date up. We’re leaving the bell tomorrow, copy?”
“I’ll speak to my advisors.” Her voice was restrained and unreadable over the little speaker. Then a click as she closed the line.
“Ready to go?” Jake asked, stepping out of the cramped confines of our chemical toilet and grabbing his bag off the bed. After another heated argument with control the night prior, they had finally agreed to eat the overhead and offer emergency evac once Jake threatened to let slip publicly that we had been told repeatedly to work outside legal limits throughout our time diving. The decompression chamber was hooked up to the bell and would soon be taking us away from the depths. Jake opened the little porthole and squeezed through first for me to pass our bags through to the decom chamber. Next up was Ben. The *medical hatch* was finally living up to its name, as usually its purpose was to pass food to us during our time in the bell, but as of the last night control had provided heavy sleeping pills and the strongest pain meds available on the rig, to help Ben in the meantime. This meant, luckily for us, he was asleep and relatively easy to move as we passed him through the tiny, circular door and into the decompression chamber. We would be stuck in the chamber for the next few days at least, but supposedly a qualified medical professional would be able to join us within the first few days, though they neglected to tell us how they were going to manage that.
In the last 24 hours between his outburst and entering the chamber, it seemed as though Ben’s condition had worsened. I feel bad saying it, as one of the very few people who were there to help him, but just the mere sight of him disgusted me. Most of his skin had long since flaked off, and what hadn’t was all a deep, inflamed red. He had a habit of scratching at his skin, which would often fracture the fragile barrier that remained. It would soon tear and begin seeping out or sometimes spewing some awful-smelling, yellowish liquid. His face had turned puffy and swollen, his eyes sunken into his overgrown forehead and cheeks. Since his recent proclivity to expelling his own bloody fluids from one of two ends, we had him permanently seated on the toilet, and he was only permitted to leave for Jake’s increasingly frequent trips to the bathroom.
Ben would begin to point out Jake’s trips to the bathroom as often as they occurred, telling him how he’d *caught it*. Whether out of concern or cynicism, it was hard to tell, as Ben’s vocal cords had long since tired and turned hoarse like an age-old smoker on the brink of death. Jake would continue to deny these accusations till, on the second day, Ben decided to lock himself in the bathroom to prove his point. Furious, Jake pounded on the cold steel door, but it was no use. Much like the rest of the chamber, the door to the toilet was made of equally impenetrable steel. Ben refused to open the door till, unable to control himself any longer, Jake doubled over, spine folded as he gagged, spilling a familiar, lumpy, red mucous across the floor of the chamber.
“You bastard!” Roared Jake, returning to pound against the bathroom door till Ben swung it open with a sickly smile painted across his puffy red cheeks.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Ben Grinned.
“I didn’t see shit. You’re contagious.” Jake said, grabbing Ben by the hair so as to lift him to eye level, only for another oversized clump of Ben’s hair to come away in his hands like it was never attached at all. I had to grab Jake and pull him back as he lunged to punch Ben, narrowly missing and cracking his knuckles on the unforgiving steel of the door frame. He cried out as he stumbled back in my arms before spitting on the floor and climbing onto his bed, clutching his hand to his chest and muttering, “Why did I help you?”
Day three, Jake’s hand had swollen massively, which he blamed on his presumably broken knuckles, as he would go on to ignore the beginning signs of his now peeling skin. He now refused to speak to Ben, despite him now allowing Jake access to the bathroom since he’d successfully proven his point. Ben soon got the message and stopped talking to Jake as well. By day four, we were all existing in parallel, and not a word was spoken between any of us. Jake had taken to using Ben’s medication for himself, but other than his tendency to spasm and scratch at the sticky red mess that was his skin, Ben seemed content enough in watching his colleague suffer the same. Somehow now, only 30 metres from the surface of the ocean, and I’d never felt more isolated.
Day five, Jake looked like shit. Whether or not I agreed with his actions, there was no doubt Ben was right. Jake’s entire body, by now, had turned dark red and began to crack like soil in a drought. His bedsheets were soaked, much like Ben’s, in the foul stench of his body’s fluids. A stench that clung around him even now as he pulled me aside for a quiet, private conversation.
“I’m not feeling good. I don’t think we should go up to the surface.” He said, glancing back in Ben’s direction.
“The fuck are you talking about? We can’t stay in here forever.”
“He’s contagious. I’m telling you, he’s fucking contagious. Whatever this is, it’s contained in here with us.” He placed a crusty hand on my shoulder, pleading for me to agree.
I recoiled a little, stepping back from him, “It’s radiation sickness, you know this. It’s not contagious.”
“Then how the fuck did I get it?” He raised his voice a little before glancing behind his shoulder.
“I don’t know, man. I ain’t got it. Maybe you guys went near something when you left the line to look around, I don’t know.”
“Whatever.” He spat, clearly not pleased as he turned and slumped back down onto his bed.
Next morning, Jake was dead. His pocket knife plunged into his chest, with such force that it had wedged itself between two of his ribs. His lung collapsed, and he suffocated. Ben denied having anything to do with it, and considering the amount of blood smudged across Jake’s hands and on the handle of the knife, I was inclined to trust Ben’s word.
One day left till we would be let out. Not a word from the outside world and not a *promised* medical professional in sight. Ben’s whole body had bloated at this point, stretching the fabric of his clothes at every seam. The room stank of rotted flesh, as I was caught between a dead man and a dead man walking. Ben had begun telling me we should break out. That we needed to be free and that he was sure they never intended to let us out. I told him we had one day to go, which he brushed off in his own doubt. Instead, after that, he chose to talk to himself. Muttering in hushed tones like an old man rambling.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, therefore, when that night, lying in my bed, I heard Ben move. I assumed on one of his trips to shed some blood in the bathroom, but I had long since learnt not to trust him. I watched as he slumped out of his bed onto the floor, his withered and malnourished legs struggling to carry the balloon that had become his body aloft. Two unsteady steps, and the third found its purpose as he began to move in the opposite direction from the toilet. I followed him with my eyes as he made his way, as silently as his laboured and wheezing breaths would allow him, right towards the door. The decompression chamber was, even a day away from normalisation, at a high pressure difference from the world outside. The door was always free to open from the inside, *in case of an emergency*. A *safety* feature designed by people who didn’t understand the physics and had never heard of explosive decompression.
“Ben? What you doing?” Much more silent than he, I had slipped out of my bed and was now standing in the dim doorway to the airlock.
“You weren’t meant to wake. It’s time, I have to…” he didn’t turn to face me, instead reaching with both his hands to grip the bulkhead wheel.
Before he had a chance to turn it, I leapt at him, hands outstretched for his shoulders as I forced him into the door, both of us colliding and falling to the floor. I felt the crack as his skull collided with the bulkhead wheel, no longer concerned for his safety.
I punched him, hard, his soft, pudgy cheek slapping with the impact and leaving his sticky body residue drizzled across my knuckles. He grabbed me by the collar, head-butting me, hard. I could feel the dried-out sticky mess of his skin crumble like a candy wrapper under the impact as I stumbled back, landing on my ass with a bruising thud. I went to stand, but Ben moved faster, pinning my shoulders to the ground as he half mumbled, maybe to me, maybe to himself.
“I had to, it’s time, I had to do it.” He stammered, leering over me before he wretched, spewing chunky red sludge across my face.
I turned my head away, gagging, gasping, spitting, sputtering at every odorous pulpy hunk of flesh that landed on my face. Stank like shit and tasted like rotted flesh as I gagged at every vile drop that landed on my tongue.
A solid knee to his crotch in retaliation. He gasped, choking on his own chyme, his grip loosening enough for me to shake my arms free and kick him to the wall. My turn now as I pinned him to the ground and landed a solid fist to his temple. He didn’t resist, rather, talked calmly and requested that I desist, though I ignored him, my hand colliding repeatedly with his temple, reforming the overgrown tissue around my fist and waiting till I felt bone. We both heard a crunch under the impact of my fist. I couldn’t tell whether it was my knuckle or his temple, but I was too afraid of what would happen when I stopped to even consider letting up.
His time was wearing thin as his tongue, like an old radio sliding through frequencies, suddenly shifted with the crushing impact.
“Vael thaervok. Vael koru’neth. Morath kel ushen.” He’d repeat, hypnotic in nature, till a loud crunch emanated from under my fist and his head folded in pieces under the pressure.
Ben was dead, and I had killed him. Good riddance, I told myself, it was self-defence. But I couldn’t help the tremors that found me afterwards as I sat back on my bunk staring at the puffy, half-formed face of the man who used to be a friend. *A sick man, I didn’t have a choice. I was doing him a favour.* Was I? Only I remained to ask the question.
Several hours later, the bulkhead opened to a team of strong-armed men pulling me free from the decompression chamber. They found me, slumped against the cold metal framing of my bunk bed, staring into the white abyss of Ben’s bed opposite mine. Four men had entered, and only one lived to tell the tale. I was paid handsomely not to. In fact, all three of my comrades’ pay was rolled into mine as an incentive to keep my silence. We’d broken our contract, we had broken the law, we had broken diving protocol, and I had broken Ben. The rescue team cleaned me up, wiping Ben’s dried vomit and blood from my face and telling me I would be ok, as if that would make a difference.
I was sent home and promised I’d never venture near the sea again as long as I lived. But I’m sure it doesn’t matter now. Did I trust the words of those more qualified than myself? It’s a possibility. Did I live in denial because the truth was too far-fetched for me to admit to? Also likely. I can’t claim to believe or disbelieve any part of the story now.
But as I sit here years later, in my house that was paid for by my silence. As I lived my comfy life, bathed in the money bled by those who used to be my friends. As I toss and turn each night, haunted by shadows as my skin begins to turn red and peel and flake away from me like red leaves in autumn. And now, as I stare at the toilet bowl in the dim morning light, painted red by the sticky remains of my insides. All I can say is that through some sick and twisted mutation. Some warping madness in my mind, I understand every word Ben told me many years ago.
Vael thaervok
Vael koru’neth
Morath kel ushen
I am nothing
I become nothing
The darkness becomes me
#entertainment
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