Titanic 2012

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