Around the boat, the sea is getting lighter, like the sun is rising from below. The camera continues to roll. The cameraman continues to run.
A thin-fingered hand slaps across the lens, and the video stops. The screaming takes longer to end, but in time, it does.
Everything ends.
Western Pacific Ocean, east of the Mariana Islands: September 3, 2018
The yacht drifted on the endless blue, flags fluttering from its mast and engine purring like a kitten, the man at the helm making small adjustments to their position as he worked to keep them exactly where they were. On any other vessel, he would have been considered the captain. On any other vessel, he wouldn’t have been subject to the whims of a reality television personality and his bevy of hand-selected bikini models, all of whom had been chosen more for their appearance than for their ability to handle being on a yacht in the middle of nowhere. They weren’t just miles from shore; they were days from shore, so far out that if something went wrong, no one would be in a position to rescue them.
That was what Daniel Butcher had been aiming for. The married star of three reality cooking shows just wanted to “escape” and “unwind,” far from the prying eyes of the paparazzi and their long-range telephoto lenses. He had the resources to take his entourage to the ends of the earth, and enough of a passion for fresh-caught seafood that this was his idea of paradise. He had the waves. He had the sun. He had a wide array of beautiful women happy to tell him how smart and handsome and witty he was, without his even needing to prompt them.
“Dinner’s at sunset, ladies,” Daniel called, checking the lines hanging off the side. This far from the commercial fishing lanes, they should be drifting in fertile waters. He’d even gone to the trouble of buying data on the known dead zones manifesting in the west Pacific, just to be sure he wasn’t being steered away from where the fish were. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth? Pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a top-of-the-line yacht, stock it, crew it, sail it away from civilization for three days straight, and wind up someplace where nothing was biting. But no. They’d eat well tonight.
(The actual gutting and cleaning of the fish would be left to his sous-chefs, two of whom had been brought on this voyage for just that reason. Daniel Butcher believed in roughing it, but he was still a star, and stars didn’t get fish guts on their hands unless there was a camera rolling to capture the rugged masculinity of the moment.)
The bikini models giggled and preened, their oiled skins shining in the tropical sun. This was the life. This was the way things were meant to be: just him, and the sea, and people who actually appreciated his brilliance.
He didn’t notice that they stopped preening as soon as he walked past them, or that some of them directed looks of frank disgust at his retreating back. He stopped to check one of the lines. A pretty black-haired girl in a green bikini withdrew a camera the size of a flash drive from under the skimpy fabric covering one breast and snapped a quick series of pictures, making sure her shots included as many of the other women as possible.
The redhead next to her gave her a quizzical look before asking, voice low, “Wife?”
The black-haired girl’s fingers tightened on her camera. “Yes.”
“Network,” said the redhead. “I set my cameras when we came aboard.”
“Nice,” said the first girl. She tucked the camera back into her bikini before offering her hand. “Elena.”
“Suzanne.”
“We looking at cancellation, or …?”
“Not yet.” Suzanne turned a predatory eye on Daniel, who had stopped again, this time to flirt with two actual bikini models. “The network’s concerned about reports of debauchery. They wanted someone to come on this trip and see how accurate they were. They hired me.”
“How did they know Daniel would pick you?”
“How did his wife know Daniel would pick you?”
“You saw the man behind the wheel when we boarded?” Elena nodded toward the cabin. Sunlight glinted off the windows, making it impossible to see inside. “He’s my brother. Technically I’m along because I wanted the ride, not because Daniel wanted access to my sea chest.”
“Clever,” said Suzanne approvingly. “We’re not going to make problems for each other, are we?”
“Why should we?” Elena’s smile was quick and predatory, a shark cutting through calm waters. “We’re both getting paid. Your pictures don’t change mine. And the man’s an ass. Let’s take him down from every angle at once.”
Suzanne laughed. So did Elena. They were still laughing when there was a commotion from the side of the boat, a splash and a scream and the sound of bodies rushing toward the rail. Their heads snapped around, Elena half-rising from her deck chair before she realized what had happened.
Daniel was gone.
“Oh my God,” she said, in a tone of fascinated horror. “The narcissistic bastard knocked himself overboard.”
“Come on.” Suzanne grabbed her hand, dragging her toward the chaos. “I want pictures of this, and all my cameras are on the boat.”
There was no sign of Daniel when the pair reached the side. The sea was calm, giving no indication that it had just swallowed a man. Bikini models leaned over the rail, shouting and cursing, eyes scanning the horizon. Elena felt her stomach sink. She’d grown up in the Mariana Islands, been born and raised on Guam, and she’d heard stories about this stretch of ocean.
How could I have been fool enough to take this job? she thought, turning to the cabin. Only fools sail where so many have been lost. She waved her arms frantically, hoping he would see her even though she couldn’t see him. They needed to turn around. They needed to get out of here.
Elena didn’t consider herself a superstitious person, but she would have had to be living under a rock not to have heard people whispering about what happened around the Mariana Trench when the sun was bright and the waters were still, when the fish had moved on and the things in the deeps grew hungry. There had been that mess a few years back, with a research vessel and the television network that showed all the Star Trek reruns. How she’d laughed at the thought of their being foolish enough to sail there, in the open waters where the bad things were.
She wasn’t laughing now.
She wasn’t laughing when the screams started behind her, high and shrill and terrified, or when she felt the touch of a hand—oddly long and spindly, covered in a cool, clammy film, like aloe gel was smeared across the skin—on the back of her ankle. Elena stopped waving her arms. She closed her eyes. If she couldn’t see it, it wouldn’t be real. That was the way the world worked, wasn’t it?
Her scream, when it came, was short and sharp and quickly ended. The boat began to move, her brother finally throwing it into gear, but it was too little, too late; his own scream soon joined the fading chorus.
The yacht rented by Daniel Butcher for his private entertainment was found three days later, drifting some eight hundred miles from its chartered destination. No survivors were ever found.
Neither were the bodies.
ZONE ONE: PELAGIC
Imagine a better future. Imagine a better past. Imagine a better version of you.
—Early Imagine Entertainment slogan
Is it really so bad to want to be famous? Isn’t that what everybody wants?
—Anne Stewart
In a shocking upset, the Imagine Network, its parent company, Imagine Entertainment, and its CEO, James Golden, have been found not guilty of criminal negligence in the disappearance of the SS Atargatis.
“While we remain shocked and saddened by this incident, we are gratified that the court has recognized our lack of culpability,” said Mr. Benjamin Yant, president of the Imagine Network. “The loss of the Atargatis was an unpredictable tragedy. We are doing everything we can to cooperate with authorities and determine what happened to our people.”
John Seghers, father of Jovanie Seghers, captain of the Atargatis, had this to say: “Those bastards at Imagine don’t car
e about my daughter. They don’t care about anything except their damned ratings. They’re still going forward with the documentary. Did you hear that? They’re still going forward.”
Efforts to block public release of the footage recorded on the Atargatis are ongoing, but are not expected to succeed. Interest in the so-called “ghost ship” remains high, and all parties on board had signed releases prior to departure. Imagine has filed several motions to suppress, stating that the footage has no relevance and contains proprietary special effects techniques which have not yet been brought fully to market. “This footage will be taken as a hoax at best, and an insult to the memory of those lost at worst,” said Mr. Yant.
—Taken from the “Entertainment News” subforum of WorldReports.com
Do we have any more questions? Yes, you, there in the back.
Come again?
Ah. I see. You want to know what I think about the Atargatis. Of course you do. That’s all you people want to talk about these days. Yes, I had a berth on that ship, and yes, I turned it down. The contracts they wanted us to sign put too many restrictions on what we could do with our findings. When I make it out to the Mariana Trench, I am going with full ownership of my research.
Do I think they found mermaids?
Yes. Of course I do.
And I think the mermaids ate them all.
—Transcript from the lecture “Mermaids: Myth or Monster,” given by Dr. Jillian Toth
CHAPTER 1
Monterey, California: July 28, 2022
The Monterey Dream pulled away from the dock at a slow, easy pace, drawing gasps of astonished delight from the tourists crowding her decks. The crowd was good for a morning whale-watching expedition: thirty or so on the bottom level, closer to the water, where they’d be able to look into the churning waves and imagine they could see jellyfish tangled in the snowy foam. There were another fifteen on the upper deck, high rollers who’d been willing to shell out an extra twenty dollars for the privilege of sitting in the sun, with no shade or windbreak, for the duration of the trip. They’d have the best view of any whales that deigned to show themselves.
Half of them would probably also have vicious sunburns, if their snowy complexions and lack of hats and windbreakers were anything to go by. The tour company recommended customers wear adequate protective gear and sunscreen at all times, but a lot of them ignored those instructions; between the lack of shade and the windburn that came with sailing for miles, many of those people would be in a world of hurt by bedtime. Tory often thought, privately, that she could make a killing by smuggling personal-size bottles of Coppertone onto the boat and reselling them to tourists once they were far enough out to realize what they’d done. Not that she’d have time, or be allowed to perform that sort of independent action. The people who ran the tour company knew exactly what they wanted from their employees—how they wanted them to act, dress, smile, stand, even look, although they were more lenient about that during the off-season—and they weren’t afraid to enforce those standards with an iron hand. Whale-watching employees who went off script were likely to find themselves in the market for another job.
As one of the company’s four marine biologists on retainer, Tory stood at the front of the boat once they were under way, pointing out and identifying marine animals large and small. It was incredible what people—especially tourists—would get worked up over. They were here to see whales, sure, but some of them had traveled from landlocked states, and would happily flip their lids over sea lions, otters, egg jellies, and other creatures native to Monterey Bay.
Tory knew some of the people she worked with looked down on the tourists, calling them “flyovers” and laughing at their amazement. She thought that was uncharitable and, well, wrong. She’d lived next to the ocean for her entire life, had learned to walk with salt on her lips and learned to swim before she could read. She loved the Pacific as she loved nothing else in the world, and sometimes she worried she would start taking it for granted, letting familiarity wear away the sharp, startling edges love needed in order to stay bright and strong. The tourists were seeing everything for the first time. Through their eyes, she could do the same. She could be amazed by things that might otherwise become less amazing, and she’d never be jaded, and she’d never forget how much she loved the hammered silver shine of the horizon.
One of the deckhands walked over with her microphone. Tory leaned against the rail, trying to look casual, and not like she was bracing for the coming acceleration. That was another trick to working with tourists: everyone on the crew had to seem so comfortable with life at sea that they could never be knocked off balance, no matter how high the waves got or how much the boat rocked. Anything less could reduce passenger confidence, and when the passengers weren’t confident, well …
Tory had been present for one passenger panic attack, a businessman from Ohio who’d been on a long-anticipated vacation with his family and somehow hadn’t realized that going on a whale-watching tour would mean sailing for open waters. He’d been fine until he’d seen a crew member stumble. Then he’d started screaming that he couldn’t breathe, that the boat was sinking, that they were all going to drown. Panic was contagious on any sort of sailing vessel, especially one packed with people who didn’t often leave shore. In the end, they’d been forced to return to the dock, where tour fees had been refunded by a scowling manager. None of the crew for that tour had been paid; since they were technically contractors, rather than hourly employees, they had to go all the way out if they wanted to be compensated for their time and trouble.
Keeping the passengers calm and happy was key if they wanted their paychecks signed. Tory was less worried about that now than she’d been at the start of the summer—the boats would still be going out in a week, but she wouldn’t be going out with them. She’d be safe and snug on the UC Santa Cruz campus, peddling knowledge for wide-eyed undergrads, working on her dissertation, and, by God, finishing her degree.
Most of her fellows in the Marine Biology Department thought she was nuts for taking the summer off to spend on whale-watching boats, seeing children’s eyes light up when they saw their first real dolphin. Her ex-boyfriend, Jason, had been particularly impassioned in his attempts to convince her that she was throwing her future away.
“I know this is a thing you do, and it was cute when you were a freshman, but you’re in grad school now,” he’d said. They’d chosen the campus coffee shop as neutral ground, and Tory had regretted it the moment she’d walked in and seen him sitting there with a cardboard box of her things next to his right hand, a wordless accusation of everything she’d done wrong during their tempestuous attempt at a relationship. She couldn’t say, even now, that they’d ever been particularly successful. In that moment, looking at the compact reminder that she’d been cut from his life as easily as cutting an abalone from its shell, she’d felt like a failure.
“I have to,” had been her reply. “I have a contract, and it’s connected to my research. The tour company owners let us take the boats out when nothing’s scheduled, as long as we pay for fuel, and I’ve gotten some great data.” What she hadn’t been able to say was that the faces of the tourists were also part of her research: the wonder and the horror and the quiet mass delusions that spread through them like ink through water. The official policy of the tour company was that if no one on board saw a whale—not a single sighting—everyone would get a free pass to come back and try again. But that almost never happened. All it took was a murmured suggestion in the right ear and half the boat would swear they’d seen a whale’s shadow passing under the boat, too shy to break the surface, but absolutely there, clear as a picture, what a moment, what a memory.
All those things played into her research. But Jason had never been able to understand that when they were together, and he certainly wasn’t going to make the effort now. “There are research positions open,” he’d said. “There are professors in your field looking for interns. This is when you should be planning f
or your future, not chasing the ghosts of your childhood.”
“Thank you for your thoughts,” she’d said, and taken her things, and walked away, leaving him behind. It had been too little, too late, but it had felt like a victory, and she’d been trying to cling to it all summer long, as one day melted into the next, as good weather kept the tours running and kept her research boxed away. She could make notes on tourists, draw conclusions from their microcosms of mass hysteria, but she couldn’t do deepwater sampling or take the sort of detailed pictures her work required.
The deck bucked and rolled beneath her feet, a sure sign that they were about to start gaining speed. She brought the microphone to her lips and put on her brightest, blithest museum docent voice as she said, “Well, hello, everyone! Welcome to Dream Dives Whale-Watching. You’re currently on board the Monterey Dream …”
She could recite the specs for this ship in her sleep, having done it dozens if not hundreds of times. She let her mind drift as she scanned the horizon, looking for things to point out to the hungry tourists. They’d take sea lions and gulls as things to ooh and aah over, as long as she identified them in an authoritative voice.
The spiel caught up with her contemplation, and she smoothly shifted gears, saying, “If you look to our left, you’ll see a group of sea lions sunning themselves on the rocks at the mouth of our harbor. These majestic, if noisy, neighbors come to Monterey Bay to have their pups and raise them in the relative safety of our waters. They enjoy the sun and fishing, just like we do.”