Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

THIRTY

Captain Forbes remained unhappy with them and with Lou Swigart’s last minute decisions. He was ranting about Swigart’s being silent too long, along with Kelly; this worried David even more, creating a powerful anxiety that had begun to register with those above who were monitoring his vital signs. He called out to them, “Are you saying you have lost vital signs for Irvin and Swigart as well as coms?”

“That’s affirmative!” shouted Forbes. “And as for you two, we cannot see you. Our best technology and all we can see is silt—thick as snow on a TV screen.”

“For the moment, we’re enveloped in micro-organisms! Nothing we can do to improve your picture.”

“We’re all right, Captain,” Mendenhall assured those monitoring from above. “Everything you touch down here creates a cloud.”

“Go cautiously, you two. We’re monitoring your vital signs. So far, so good—but Ingles, you’re getting erratic. Calm down; go easy but go fast toward where Irvin and Swigart entered the ship. I fear Lou’s last decision was ill conceived—and I hope you are getting this, Lou!”

“Lou’s the boss!” shouted Mendenhall.

“That’s right, Captain,” added David, giving thought to his earlier suspicions of Swigart.

Forbes ordered, “Clear your cameras of debris when you get out of the spore fog, please.” Captain Forbes’ voice came over like a robot due to the electronic filters.

As quickly as that, they were inside Titanic’s gymnasium and what was once the adjacent pool area. Turning through a blown open doorway, moving as gracefully as a pair of swordfish, they found themselves in an elevator, its once ornate filigree rusted with age.

“This doesn’t look too promising,” muttered Mendenhall, his voice masked by the metallic signal.

“There’s got to be one, maybe two dead-zone areas at the bottom of Titanic, Ingles,” Mendenhall said as if to convince himself of it. A dead zone would insure that anything within its influence will not have deteriorated as no life existed in such and area.”

“All the literature says so,” David replied.

“Shall we take the elevator?” joked Mendenhall, something David had never encountered before now. A lot of firsts going on fast down here, he thought, even as the rush of excitement of at last being here filled his mind.

Instead of the ease of riding a working elevator car down, they instead had to take the elevator apart, bending back the ornate door far enough so they could get through without ripping their suits.

Mendenhall lowered himself through the blinding snowstorm of spores and pulled his lanky body through the surrounding darkness, the only light source here emanating from their Cryo-suited bodies as David followed.

“This route of yours is getting more dangerous as we go, Jacob.”

“It’s a damn labyrinth down here for sure.”

“Yeah, all we need is a ball of string and the Minotaur.”

Jacob made no response to this, and while David watched for the slightest flinch, there simply was none.

“We’ve got to get to the cargo hold,” Mendenhall said to David. “That’s our fastest way to connect back up with Lou and Kelly. Best way to follow Captain’s orders.”

It made sense as they’d come so far. Turning back and swimming up and out of the ship would take twice as long, so far as they found no obstacles ahead.

“Agreed, fastest way to find Lou and Kelly, let them know their comlink’s been cut, and their vitals are not registering upstairs.”

“Besides, our goal’s to inspect the cargo holds for anything salvageable.”

“Right. Got it.” But even as David nodded his agreement, he feared Mendenhall’s anxious voice and his impatience as an indication of his lack of duplicity at getting to the real prize he’d come for. Just what might that prize be? Artifacts and ornaments from Titanic like the elevator doors or might it be the creature’s spawn, its progeny? Had he—or it—held onto life for the past hundred years precisely for this moment? This chance for a full-blown spawning, a resurgence and regeneration of its kind?

According to Declan Irvin’s journal, the numbers of infected and killed aboard Titanic looked as if it had multiplied exponentially, and the fear that it would devastate the population on board and do the same to the entire population of New York—never mind that of the entire continent of America—had been the arguments put forth by Constable Ransom and the young interns as they had desperately worked to prove these facts to Captain Edward Smith.

If either Mendenhall or Lou Swigart was in fact the demon of Titanic, the cursed thing that brought Titanic down, then he—or it—was back. Back to unleash its deadly spawn onto an unsuspecting and skeptical world with plans to devastate the entire population.

Looking back, David realized that Mendenhall had watched as Swigart and Kelly had separated from them, effectively cutting the team in two. Mendenhall now said to David and thus Forbes above, “Watching Lou and your girlfriend go off as they did unsettled me, too.”

“What’re you talking about?” David countered.

“To… to witness the sudden, last minute changes Lou made. It smells of something, I don’t know… ominous. What do you think upstairs, Captain Forbes?”

“Lou’s in charge for good reason.” Forbes’ tone lacked conviction.

“Did he give you a reason for the changes?” asked David, curious now.

“Look, if he makes last minute decisions, well, damn it, that’s why he’s in charge—to go with the flow, so to speak.”

“We’re descending deeper into Titanic,” David informed Forbes as he continued to follow Mendenhall. “Just seems like odd behavior,” Jacob continued speaking to Forbes. “I mean, he wasn’t even going to leave the submersible in all the protocols I saw up till the moment we got down here.”

David added, “Yeah, what’s up with that, Captain?”

“I’m puzzled as well,” replied Forbes over the link. “Ingles, have you any idea?”

“Dunno—took it to mean passion, excitement.”

“It’s like changing orders on a battlefield in the midst of an attack if you ask me,” Forbes said, his voice trailing off.

“Nothing we can do about it now,” said David. “I think we just do our jobs and concentrate on the here and now.” Even as he said it, he realized his entire mind was on Kelly, and that made him vulnerable to error, and error here meant death. The ocean even at her surface was unforgiving of even the slightest mistake. This far down, any misstep could be fatal.

“Right… right,” muttered Mendenhall.

Forbes added, “I suppose.”

They found yet another stairwell, or else it was the one they’d begun down in the first place. However, it felt like they were below the debris and obstacles that had earlier stood in their way; in fact things down this far were surprisingly intact. The two divers pulled themselves along in the waterlogged, devastated environment, feeling a sense of wonder at the numbers who likely died down here, trapped in the ship when suddenly out of the darkness beyond their lights came a gruesome skeletal body in period dress—a woman who hadn’t made it off the ship, the remains lying in their path.

Their movement created just enough flutter to the dress to make the dead appear interested in them. Their lights soon displayed not one but many skeletal bodies here. With their passing, they could hear the rattling of bones. The skeletal souls startled David and Jacob, so far as David could tell. “We prepared for this—to encounter skeletal remains,” David reminded Jacob.

“Even so… even knowing they’d be coming… it’s a shocker when they show up.”

Both men had done dives to recover bodies; David knew what Jacob’s remarks truly meant.

They’d also been cautioned to be aware that if any humans had sealed themselves into the airtight compartments here, that their bodies might well be preserved, given the sheer cold that these depths enjoyed.

As they continued down the stairwell, pulling along hand over hand, going from upper to lower decks, the passageways grew larger, roomier—just the opposite before Titanic’s dive to the ocean floor—as the larger staterooms and roomier decks above were now crushed.

As David glided through the corridors, careful to keep Jacob ahead of him, he recalled additional information from Declan Irvin’s journal the night the Titanic went down—after Ransom, Declan, and Thomas were able to convince the captain and officers that their duty did not begin and end with Titanic but extended to the human race. He recalled some of the exacting entries now, even as he worked to locate the treasures and the horrors lurking within Titanic. His thoughts were abruptly halted when Jacob suddenly stopped ahead of him before an enormous green wall—a cargo bay door, but not just any cargo door. It was the entryway to the much ballyhooed, sought-after turn of the Century automobiles housed within.

David knew that 1911 seals could not hold up to the punishing pressures brought on by Titanic’s plunge to here. So on the way down, with seals compromised, water would have flooded the compartment, drowning anyone who may’ve taken refuge there, thinking it a sealed compartment and safe to support life that much longer. But when the enormous ship struck bottom with such force as it had, the door itself should have exploded outward. As it was, the door appeared in this watery world to be considerably warped instead. Warped in such a manner as to have re-sealed itself, thus creating a dead zone wherein the water would become toxic and couldn’t support life. Over time, the microorganisms in the water would have exhausted all oxygen in the water, or die off from inability to adapt to the temperature of the trapped water or the higher pressure or both. There’d be nothing alive in the room, yet it’d be filled with water. He knew that dead zones in free-standing water were due to temperature gradients, causing salinity to increase in a ground-floor area that didn’t get swirled with eddies and tides, locked in as it were, no support for life whatsoever. Only toxic water, deadly in and of itself, denying any sort of life the requirements to flourish. Life in all its myriad forms required a formula—a combination of elements—proper temperature, depth, and oxygen—in order to survive. To deny any single element meant death prevailed even on a microscopic level. And in Titanic’s dead zones, not a single such element existed.

the deadzones in free standing water are usually due to temperature gradients causing salinity to increase, and being in a depression in the 'ground' so it doesn't get swirled up.

Mendenhall and David quickly determined that the warped-shut door had once moved easily for workmen on a track, requiring only a human hand to throw a switch for it to slide to one side, but no more. Now it was covered in the work of viable organisms on this side of the door, organisms that left the same sort of rusticles as they’d observed on the outer hull.

The mild current that flowed through the corridors here gained no entry into the hold, and neither did the divers. The door blocked them as well as the would-be migration of any organisms. Stymied, Jacob began burning away at the rusticles with his laser knife, seeking a handle or hold on the door.

Jacob even shouted obscenities at the rusticles and at the door as he worked on them with his laser knife, cutting away at the section around the area he knew from his studies where a manual door handle must be. He shouted at David as he did so, “Help me! Cut along the warped edges where the seams are!”

As David watched, the sight of Jacob laser-cutting about all the edges of the door formed the image of a man trying to break into a bank vault.

“Help me out here!” Jacob shouted again at David, who’d held back. “If we can loosen the door just enough to squeeze through, then—”

“Then we run the risk of ripping our suits and implosion, Jacob. You’ve gotta calm down!”

Jacob’s excitement over the find was mirrored in the cheers from Scorpio above, but also tempered with warnings from Dr. Entebbe about Jacob’s vital signs, which were clearly over the top by now.

“We can make another dive tomorrow, Jacob—return with the right tools needed to do the job properly!” David’s plea went unheeded as Mendenhall was in a frenzy to have a look inside, to see what was behind the enormous green door.

In fact, David realized that the other man’s sudden frenzy belied the notion he was some sort of monster. Jacob was treading water before the cargo hold door diligently working to weaken its ‘hold’ on the secrets awaiting them.

There was no doubt this was the place as the number 1-1748 loomed above the giant door framed in their lights. David recognized the digits as the same as those in their training material and Titanic’s manifest.

All this shimmered in the water before them, and behind the huge sliding door to the cargo area awaited Dr. William O’Laughlin’s Renault Town Car among dozens of other sports models and touring cars. What kind of condition might the submerged automobiles of 1912 be in? There remained the question, even so, would the motor cars of that era be museum quality or smashed to pieces with the dive? Or will they have been spared—anchored as they had been during the plunge.

“You realize where we are?” asked Jacob, burning through the jammed door, his impatience somehow showing through his dive suit. As his laser knife worked at amazing speed to destroy any remaining integrity to the door, Mendenhall was paying no heed to anyone. “It’s coming!” he shouted. “We’ll be inside soon, Captain Forbes!”

Forbes came over, “all right but just a cursory look at this point, gentlemen.”

David, who’d been working with his own laser knife, had destroyed any hold the door had on his side. He replaced the laser in its holster as it was apparent that the big green door was done for. They barely had to push inward with their combined weight to have it not simply open but to topple slowly in the dead zone water, shakily, eerily at first before giving way and striking the bottom of the cargo hold itself. This gave the men a first glimpse of the shadowy, dark outline of a row of anchored automobiles in this, their hundred-year-old prison.

“Careful, Jacob!” David shouted, seeing a ragged section of the green door bob up at the other man as if retaliating. But Mendenhall didn’t slow his rush toward the prize, oblivious to the danger inches below him.

“Leave it for tomorrow’s dive, man!” David said in his most commanding voice. “Captain, Dr. Entebbe, will you please order Mendenhall off!”

But Jacob Mendenhall appeared as a man possessed at this point as he struggled through the brackish water with its limited visibility. There was no slowing or stopping him and the orders coming from above fell on deaf ears.

David realized that what they had seen of the cars before was merely the tip of the show here beneath the dark waters. He also felt terribly small here in this huge dead zone area, while just ahead of him Jacob continued to rush toward the prized items he so wanted to claim for the expedition—dangerously so. More horrid thoughts of how easily their space-age suits might be compromised filled David’s mind, returning him to that damnable sub in the Sea of Japan. Still, all seemed well enough before the sight of not one row but four or five rows of anchored vehicles here with them. All were rather miraculously preserved. The moment recalled to David the time he’d visited China to see the terra cotta warriors unearthed after thousands of years and now the archeological find of the last century. He thought the cars aboard Titanic, once tidied up and placed in the Smithsonian would be the find of this century—and his name would be among those who’d recovered them. Pride filled him at this moment. He certainly understood Mendenhall’s insistence on gaining access and the other man’s boyish excitement now.

His reverie was broken when Jacob, beside him and staring at their find, said in dry humor, “Not even that mummy and its sarcophagus over at the aft section can compare to this, eh, David?” Jacob slapped him on.

“You have no idea just how close that damned door came to wreaking havoc on you, my friend!” David informed Jacob.

But Jacob’s and David’ combined lights and cameras illuminated almost the entire square of twenty automobiles in fixed rows, very much anchored to the floor with chains that’d held them in place for the horrendous dive a hundred years ago.

Only miniscule eddies caused by their own movement could be seen in the dead water about them. They were inside this cavernous area with all manner of loose debris and cargo floating about like plastic film props on a set. They must maintain focus and keep their bodies firmly in control so as to not be snagged on any protrusions either at their feet or along the walls where any normally safe item could become deadly in an instant if a man let his guard down. Jacob had been lucky earlier—lucky by a hair’s breadth. All concerns that now seemed pedestrian on locating the treasures they’d found, ostensibly to raise from the depths.

Those aboard Scorpio had fallen silent on seeing the feed sent up by Jacob and David. As he’d gotten closer in on the underwater garage before them, David’s own heart rate had gone up several notches according to Dr. Entebbe. The chrome and brass was as shiny and reflective as the day these motor cars had left the manufacturer’s hands.

“Good as new, Captain!” Jacob shouted the words to Juris Forbes and the others above. “We’ll need to remove four sections of the hull… take these beauties straight up on the lift. Going to take days, maybe a week.”

“How many do you count in good condition?” Forbes asked. “Any snap their moorings?”

“Hard to tell until we swim entirely around the collection,” replied Jacob.

“This is a religious experience down here, Captain,” David added, bringing on some laughter from above.

No longer fearing for his dive partner’s life, feeling a good deal more in control, David calmed and laughed at Jacob’s form now going about the cars—not remaining on the outer perimeter but swimming in among the rows like a big kid, excited, rattling off the names of each car. Obviously, he had studied the records involving the autos with great concern as he darted from an Austin-Healey to a pair of Renaults until he gasped at leaping onto the running board of one auto. He kiddingly pretended to be taking a ride bobbing in the wind on the running board, shaking the entire car with his weight when a sudden jolt against the driver’s side interior window displayed the intact features of a dead man against the glass—the dead driver at the wheel, his wife on his shoulder, followed by his children looking out at them from the rear window.

Jacob responded as anyone might, shoving off the running board, sending the ghosts of Titanic back into the gloom of an interior filled with brackish water, but as he recoiled from the sight, his back skimmed over the hood of the Renault which may well have been Dr. O’Laughlin’s car to become suddenly snagged at the spine by the hood ornament.

David now gasped, a hand raised as he shouted, “Jacob! Don’t move!”

But Jacob’s earlier momentum sent him scraping across the sharp ornament. It was a sudden end to Jacob’s partying and antics. Jacob hadn’t seen this coming, nor had David. Some poor souls had obviously decided to die with their investments, dragging family along for the ‘ride’ so to speak as now David thought he saw one of the children in the rear seat wink at him, while hearing the outcry from Scorpio, several voices at once pleading for an answer as to what happened—their camera eyes having gone completely cart-wheeling away with Jacob’s implosion, and David’s being hurled about with fragments of Jacob’s suit and body.

As he tumbled back toward the entryway to this strange place, David crazily thought of the poor children inside the car that, for so long, had been their undisturbed coffin. He could only imagine how slowly they had died if indeed they had survived the impact, which likely sent them into the roof of the Town Car—likely crushing skulls and breaking necks. Those inside were perfectly preserved, faces intact since the day of their demise. Seeing them come out of the gloom—even had they been expecting these permanent residents to be on hand—simply startled a man. Little wonder it’d sent Jacob back-peddling across the hood of the car behind him, and David had seen it happening in slow motion as Jacob’s backside slid across what would normally be a harmless item on the hood of a car transformed into a deadly weapon, wielded it seemed by the spirits here.

Jacob had swam on his back, kicking fins high, rending a long scar along his spine as he backed over the hood ornament, and David helplessly watched in the same instant as Jacob Mendenhall imploded, his suit fragmented from the force of the implosion. Compressed pieces of his flesh rained around David like blood-red flakes of fish food.

The autos and the ghosts within them, a fatherly figure at the wheel, wife beside him, children in the rear, were by now filling screens topside, fueling the imaginations of some, the greed of others. Books and films were inevitable deals in the works, for sure, thought David. Scorpio’s monitors would create the first glimpse mankind would have of these buried treasures—thanks to Mendenhall’s rash action when in fact their orders had been to locate Kelly and Swigart, and to reunite with them. But the allure of seeing up close and personal Dr. William O’Laughlin’s Renault touring car had taken a sudden deadly turn.

The impact of the implosion spawned had a shock wave that hurtled David end over end, and as David righted himself, he saw a number of eerily preserved tumbling in ragdoll fashion across the floor, tossed out of the shadows by the shockwave. A normal-appearing dead man in the water was enough to shock a man, even black-water divers working for police departments, but these hundred-year-old perfectly preserved mannequins in the dead zone, flesh turned to a kind of Jell-O, their clothes like sheets— moving with the eddies. These ghosts of Titanic proved even more disturbing as parts of them stretched out to David as if drawn to the only living being in the water now.

These were bodies that had lain hidden behind cars and in the shadowy reaches of the cargo hold. Some of these grim figures still sported hair and nails. One in particular cascaded into him as a drunk might stumble from a bar—this one without shoes.

It was as if the dead wanted both of them to join them here for eternity.

Almost perfect in their preserved bodies, the disturbed dead now seemed everywhere. Bodies preserved due to the pressures and containment within the once sealed cargo hold sported intact exaggerated features, their mouths open like so many banshees. Men, women, and children staring out of glassy eyes that made them appear as grisly wax figures. Their equally preserved period clothing only added to the surreal nature of this place.

David pushed away the growing number of bodies that came at him, or rather the exit behind him—each one more surreal than the one before it, and all of them like so many mannequins in appearance. He thought of what he, Jacob, and Scorpio had just accomplished, for no one had visited or seen these people for a hundred years. These were first class passengers aboard Titanic who sought refuge not in drink or music or prayer but in their latest acquisition. Those who, in a last ditch hope to die rich, David imagined, wanted to cross over with their most valued possessions firmly in hand—their motorcars.

Captain Forbes was shouting for David to report what had happened. He’d moments before been saying something about the hydraulic tools and jacks available to the divers just outside now as they’d moved the work-station just outside the hull where they believed the two men had located the autos. “Welding tools to cut large enough holes into Titanic’s side to remove each vehicle one by one,” the captain was saying at the moment of Mendenhall’s terrible passing.

“He’s dead!” shouted David in return. “Jacob’s dead—imploded! Killed by one of those damnable cars! Check my feed! I saw the whole bloody thing.”

In point of fact, David realized that miniscule pieces of Mendenhall floated before his eyes as he spoke. Topside, the cheers and laughter had long since subsided as no doubt someone upstairs had a clue as to what’d just happened—Entebbe, no doubt as he could see that Mendenhall was registering a zero across the board made up of red, green, and blue lights. Entebbe now pronounced the time of death.

“Damn it!” David shouted. “There’s nothing left of Jacob; nothing to even bring up! He’s been reduced to nothing, I tell you!”

In David’s ear via the com-link, Forbes, too was screaming Mendenhall’s name. David wondered how many of the other divers could hear this, and he wondered most if Kelly was hearing this. He only now realized that nothing black or sinister had come spewing forth out of the implosion, further proof that Jacob was never the thing Kelly hunted—and this left Lou Swigart.

“David, David! Step back! Get out of there. Nothing more you can do there now.” It was mix of Entebbe’s concerned voice and Captain Forbes’ orders coming over his com-link. “Locate Swigart and Kelly, David. Do it now.”

They knew how horrible it was to watch a man implode before one’s eyes, and they had witnessed it via David’s camera lens via replay. It’d happened so fast and unexpectedly that no one, even those monitoring had seen precisely what had caused the implosion.

David turned to leave, feeling terribly alone inside Titanic at this moment, and he thought of the last time he’d broken bread with Mendenhall, late the other evening in the galley. Jacob had gotten excited then when the subject had turned to the lost Renaults and other motorcars aboard Titanic. He heard Jacob’s voice in his head as he made his way from what was now Mendenhall’s eternity.

“Of course, we must find them!” Jacob had said. “Think of the salvage dividends for those perfectly preserved vintage babies!”

“That’s the big question—what kind of condition are the cars in after a hundred years under such pressure?” Will had asked.

“They may be the size of matchbox cars by now!” David agreed.

“You’ll all be singing a different tune when we get the first one aboard,” Jacob had replied.

“Think we can crank one of ’em up?” Will said, laughing.

“Laugh and make jokes, Bowman,” Mendenhall then said, his eyes turning morose. He had brought a book with him, and he shoved it to Will. Bowman passed the open pages around—shots of cars from that era, one after another. Jacob then said, “If the cars remained sealed or even in one of those dead zones where nothing can live, you know like the areas where they’ve found 2000-year-old wooden boats intact? Then why not these cars?”

“Yeah sure… your cars and not so much as a tinge of rust on ’em,” Will Bowman continued to tease.

“As the ship plunged, the seals to any air-tight compartments would have compressed and leaked, Jacob,” David said now, “a true dead zone might exist but it’s a big if because of all the elements that would have to converge.”

“But suppose the door held. It is a monster of a door.”

“It must’ve been like a battering ram hitting the door, the impact when she hit bottom,” David said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.”

“But we don’t know; the door may’ve just been torn from its track, perhaps warping but still intact, which would mean—”

“Which means you’ve given this a hell of a lot of thought,” said David, and at the time it’d made him even more suspicious that Mendenhall was Kelly and Declan’s creature, and that the man cared not a whit about the autos but was in fact brooding and surmising about his—or its—spawn, those damnable eggs also dead for certain if not in a dead zone where they might lie dormant.

“If the door’s blown, Jacob, it’s left the compartment open to wood-eating and rusticle-forming organisms—even microscopic organisms—which if in this area—” but his words fell on deaf ears as Jacob talked over him.

“A true dead zone. An absolute rarity—on the way down, the water coming in is full of organisms not suited for life at two and a half miles down… so they die off before they can do much damage.”

Now David knew that even with the seals imploding when Titanic took her dive, that the door hadn’t blown. That through some quirk of fate it’d managed remain on its track, although warped. This explained why the family of four in the one auto still had fleshy faces with eyes intact, looking like so many zombies. No organisms could get at them. Furthermore, to add to the trauma of seeing Jacob implode before him, David feared the same fate, and perhaps an even more sinister fate awaited Kelly if Lou was indeed being controlled by the monster.

David realized only now that his entire body was shaking like a leaf in the wind, so traumatized had he been on seeing Jacob die as he had. At the same time, he worked to force himself toward his next destination—the freezer unit down here somewhere, and hopefully to locate, as Captain Forbes had ordered, the two remaining dive partners he had left alive.

David must find Kelly, now. He swam as fast as he could, leaving all thought of any treasures in his wake. As he did so, he muttered, “Damn you, Mendenhall! Why couldn’t you have been patient! They had a hydraulic jack down here for us already! Right tool for the right job!”

But David was talking to himself; Jacob and his impatience, obliterated now along with his humanity, appeared all too human. Besides, if Jacob had been controlled by the creature, he would not have gone crazy over a cargo hold of shiny antiques, and so Kelly was alone with the monster somewhere inside this ship that seemed bent on killing them all, what with Lou and Kelly cut off, missing, and Jacob dead.

Meanwhile, David felt as if all the pressure around him was about to turn his head and body into so small a piece of remains as to fill a sandwich baggy. He felt horribly alone now inside Titanic. He gave a thought to the divers at the aft section of the derelict ship. There were freezer compartments there, too. In the original design of the ship, there had only been freezer holds at the aft section and not here below the stokers’ and crew’s berths; some 860 crew from maids to firemen lived on board. Below their quarters at the very bottom were the huge cargo holds—as with the automobiles. The final design placed additional freezer compartments for perishable supplies below at both ends of Titanic, the freezers ironically separated along her hull by successive stores of coal working boilers, and reciprocating engines, turbine engines, and below all this at the keel line, three shaft tunnels for the propellers and rudder.

He and Kelly might well have landed on the wrong part of Titanic; it could be that the creature and its eggs were in the aft section’s smaller freezer compartments, and if so, they’d been wrong about Swigart and of course, now it was clear that Mendenhall was entirely too human to have been the monster. The creature would not have gotten itself killed over a stash of motorcars, no matter the make, model, or vintage.

David tried desperately to raise Kelly, so wanting to hear her voice; he shouted for Forbes to locate her even as he wondered now about Gambio, Bowman, Fiske, and Jens. Might one of them be the creature incognito with plans of getting to the bow section on a second dive, tomorrow?

David called up to those on the surface, “Tell me I’m not the only one left down here alive, Captain!”

“No… no, you’re not alone. Swigart’s vital signs are still giving us a reading—weak but something.”

“What about Kelly?”

“Unsure what’s going on there, but her vital signs went dead with her com-link. We suspect it’s only technical difficulties, magnetic interference. We’re doing all we can to get her back online.”

“Well damn it, Forbes! Do it! She’s in danger every second you don’t have her in your sights! What about the others at the aft section?”

“There’s been no drama with them, Ingles; drama seems to follow you!” Forbes did not sound happy to have David blast him with demands, and he was understandably upset. Now he had three deaths to explain to authorities whenever they got back to Woods Hole.

“I did all in my power to get Jacob to pay heed to his surroundings; the man got himself killed. I don’t own that one.”

“I wasn’t suggesting—”

“The hell you weren’t.”

“You’re breaking up, Ingles… only getting static. Check your equipment.”

“Is it the depths, the equipment, what?”

Everything went silent again. David, spinning about in the water, looked around on all sides of himself. He had become somewhat disoriented and for good reason. It was not every day you saw a man implode before your eyes or were showered with corpses. Aside from his stomach-wrenching worry over Kelly, David kept coming back to the fact that there was not enough left of Jacob Mendenhall to fill a pocket, or to hold a ceremony over.