Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Mira Grant, author of the renowned Newsflesh series, returns with a novel that takes us to a new world of ancient mysteries and mythological dangers come to life.

The ocean is home to many myths,

But some are deadly...

Seven years ago the Atargatis set off on a voyage to the Mariana Trench to film a mockumentary bringing to life ancient sea creatures of legend. It was lost at sea with all hands. Some have called it a hoax; others have called it a tragedy.

Now a new crew has been assembled. But this time they're not out to entertain. Some seek to validate their life's work. Some seek the greatest hunt of all. Some seek the truth. But for the ambitious young scientist Victoria Stewart this is a voyage to uncover the fate of the sister she lost.

Whatever the truth may be, it will only be found below the waves.

But the secrets of the deep come with a price.

More from Mira Grant

Newsflesh
Feed
Deadline
Blackout
Feedback
Rise: A Newsflesh Collection

Parasitology
Parasite
Symbiont
Chimera

Release date: November 14, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 448

Sample

Founded by James Golden in 1972, Imagine Entertainment was intended to “restore the fun” to the entertainment industry. Golden—an aspiring media mogul who felt movies and television had become “too serious”—proceeded to make his name producing a string of B-grade horror movies, latter-day grindhouse films, and remarkably ambitious science fiction epics. Called the King of Schlock by his detractors and Monster Midas by his fans, there was no question the name Golden carried substantial weight by 1993, when he announced the establishment of the Imagine Network.

Originally envisioned as a home for Golden’s prodigious backlist, many dismissed the Imagine Network as the final vanity project of an aging man, noting that the Sci-Fi Channel, launched the previous year, had a larger and more robust stable of original programs. Still, the Imagine Network endured and, by 2008, was providing a reasonable return on Golden’s investment.

The first Imagine “mockumentary” was conceived and scripted by the Imagine Network’s then president, Benjamin Yant. Loch Ness: A Historical Review brought in high ratings, renewed advertiser interest, and strong DVD sales, sparking a wave of similar programming. The Search for the Chupacabra aired in 2009, followed by Expedition Yeti in 2010, The Last Dinosaur in 2012, and Unicorn Road in 2014. It seemed the public’s thirst for cryptozoological fiction thinly veiled as fact was insatiable.

Then came 2015. The filming of Lovely Ladies of the Sea: The True Story of the Mariana Mermaids should have been routine. Imagine filled a ship with scientists, actors, and camera crews, and sent it out into the Pacific Ocean.

Communications were lost on May 17. The ship was found six weeks later, adrift and abandoned.

No bodies have ever been recovered.

—From Monster Midas: An Unauthorized Biography of James Golden, by Alexis Bowman, originally published 2018

People like to pretend that what happened to the Atargatis was a normal maritime disaster: the people on board got too wrapped up in filming their little “mockumentary” and forgot to steer the damn thing. They ran afoul of a storm, or pirates, or some other totally mundane threat, and they all died, and it was very sad, but it’s no reason to be scared of the ocean, or start wondering what else might be out there. The Atargatis was what they call an “isolated incident,” the recovered footage was and is a hoax, and there’s nothing to worry about.

Those people never explain how the camera crews on the Atargatis did their special effects in real time: no amount of prosthetic work in the world could turn a human being into one of the creatures seen swarming the ship during the most violent of the leaked footage.

Those people never explain why, if what happened was weather related, not a single scrap of data supporting that theory has ever been released by either Imagine or the National Weather Service. The loss of the Atargatis was a public relations nightmare for the company: if Imagine had a way of reducing their liability, they would certainly have offered it by now.

Those people never explain a lot of things.

The Atargatis sailed off the map, into a section of the sea that should have been labeled “Here be monsters.” What happened to them there may never be perfectly understood, but this much seems to be clear: the footage was not faked.

Mermaids are real.

—Taken from a forum post made at CryptidChase.net by user BioNerd, originally posted March 2020

Monterey, California: June 26, 2015

The sky was a deep and perfect blue, as long as Victoria—Vicky to her parents, Vic to her friends, Tory to herself, when she was thinking about the future, where she’d be a scientist and her sister Anne would be her official biographer, documenting all her amazing discoveries for the world to admire—kept her eyes above the horizon. Any lower and the smoke from the wildfires that had ravaged California all summer would appear, tinting the air a poisonous-looking gray. Skies weren’t supposed to look like that. Skies were supposed to be wide and blue and welcoming, like a mirror of the wild and waiting sea.

Tory had been born in the Monterey City Hospital. According to her parents, her first smile had been directed not at her mother, but at the Pacific Ocean. She had learned to swim in safe municipal pools by the age of eighteen months, and been in the ocean—closely supervised—by the time she was three, reveling in the taste of salt water on her lips and the sting of the sea spray in her eyes.

(She’d been grabbed by a riptide when she was seven, yanked away from her parents and pushed twenty yards from shore in the time it took to blink. She didn’t remember the incident when she was awake, but it surfaced often in her dreams: the suddenly hostile water reaching up to grab her and drag her down. Most children would have hated the ocean after something like that, letting well-earned fear keep their feet on the shore. Not Tory. The riptide had just been doing what it was made to do; she was the one who’d been in the wrong place. She had to learn to be in a better place when the next riptide came along.)

Her big sister, Anne, had watched Tory’s maritime adventures from the safety of the shore, slathered in SPF 120 and clutching her latest stack of gossip magazines. They’d been so different, even then. It would have been easy for them to detest each other, to let the gap in their ages and interests become a chasm. Anne had seven years on her baby sister. She could have walked away. Instead, somehow, they’d come out of their barely shared childhood as the best of friends. They had the same parents; they had the same wheat-blonde hair, although Anne’s had started darkening toward brown by the time she turned seventeen, prompting an endless succession of experimental dye jobs and highlighting processes. They both sunburned fast, and freckled even faster. They even had the same eyes, dark blue, like the waters of the Monterey Bay.

That was where the similarities ended. Tory was going to be a marine biologist, was doing a summer internship at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and starting at UC Santa Cruz in the fall on a full scholarship. Anne was a special interest reporter—read “talking head for geek news”—and well on her way to a solid career as a professional media personality.

The last time they’d seen each other in person had been three days prior to the launch of the SS Atargatis, a research vessel heading to the Mariana Trench to look for mermaids.

“We’re not going to find them,” Anne had admitted, sitting on the porch next to Tory and throwing bits of bread to the seagulls thronging the yard. “Mermaids don’t exist. Everyone at Imagine knows it. But it’s a chance for the scientists they’ve hired to do real research on someone else’s dime, and it’s a great opportunity for me personally.”

“You really want to be the face of the cryptid mockumentary?” Tory had asked.

Anne had answered with a shrug. “I want to be the face of something. This is as good a place to start as any. I just wish you could come with us. We could use some more camera-ready scientists.”

“Give me ten years and I’ll come on the anniversary tour.” Tory had grinned, impish, and leaned over to tug on a lock of her sister’s sunset-red hair. It was a dye job, but it was a good one, years and miles and a lot of money away from the Clairol specials Anne used to do in the downstairs bathroom. “I’ll make you look old.”

“By then, I’ll be so established that they’ll let me,” Anne had said, and they’d laughed, and the rest of the afternoon had passed the way the good ones always did: too fast to be fair.

Anne had promised to send Tory a video every day. She’d kept that promise from the time the ship launched, sending clips of her smiling face under an endless ocean sky, with scientists and crewmen laboring in the background.

The last clip had come on May seventeenth. In it, Anne had looked … harried, unsettled, like she no longer knew quite what to make of things. Tory had watched the short video so many times she could recite it from memory. That didn’t stop her from sitting down on the porch—so empty now, without Anne beside her—and pressing “play” again.

Anne’s face flickered into life on the screen, hair tousled by the wind, eyes haunted. “Tory,” she said, voice tight. “Okay, I … I’m scared. I don’t know what it is I saw, and I don’t know how it’s possible, but it’s real, Tory, it’s really real. It’s really out there. You’ll understand when you see the footage. Maybe you can … maybe you can be the one who figures it out. I love you. I love Mom and Dad. I … I hope I’ll be home soon.” She put her hand over her eyes. She had always done that, ever since she was a little girl, when she didn’t want anyone to see her crying.

“Turn off the camera, Kevin,” she said, and Tory whispered the words along with her. “I’m done.”

The video ended.

Six weeks had passed since that video’s arrival. There hadn’t been another.

Tory had tried to find out what had happened—what could have upset her sister so much, what could have made her stop sending her videos—but she’d gotten nowhere. Contacting Imagine led to a maze of phone trees and receptionists who became less helpful the moment she told them why she was calling. Every day, she sent another wave of e-mails, looking for information. Every day, she got nothing back.

She was starting to think nothing was all she was ever going to get again.

She was sitting on the porch six weeks and three days later, about to press “play” one more time, when the sound of footsteps caught her attention. She turned. Her mother was in the doorway, white faced and shaking, tears streaking her cheeks.

Tory felt the world turn to ashes around her, like the smoke staining the sky had finally won dominion over all. She staggered to her feet, unable to bear the thought of sitting when she heard the words her mother didn’t yet have the breath to say. Her laptop crashed to the steps, unheeded, unimportant. Nothing was important anymore.

Katherine Stewart put her arms around her surviving daughter and held fast, like she was an anchor, like she could somehow, through her sheer unwillingness to let go, keep this child from the sea.

Footage recovered from the Atargatis mission, aired for the board of the Imagine Network, July 1, 2015

The camera swings as the cameraman runs. The deck of the Atargatis lurches in the frame, slick with a grayish mucosal substance. Splashes of shockingly red blood mark the slime. There has been no time for it to dry. There has been no time for anything. The cameraman is out of breath. He stumbles, dropping to one knee. As he does, the camera tilts downward. For a few brief seconds, we are treated to a glimpse of the creature climbing, hand over hand, up the side of the Atargatis:

The face is more simian than human, with a flat “nose” defined by two long slits for nostrils, and a surprisingly sensual mouth brimming with needled teeth. It is a horror of the deep, gray skinned and feminine in the broadest sense of the term, an impression lent by the delicate structure of its bones and the tilt of its wide, liquid eyes. When it blinks, a nictitating membrane precedes the eyelid. It has “hair” of a sort—a writhing mass of glittering, filament-thin strands that cast their bioluminescent light on the hull.

It has no legs. Its lower body is the muscular curl of an eel’s tail, tapering to tattered looking but highly functional fins. This is a creature constructed along brutally efficient lines, designed to survive, whatever the cost. Nature abhors a form that cannot be repeated. Perhaps that’s why the creature has hands, thumbs moving in opposable counterpoint to its three long, slim fingers. The webbing extends to the second knuckle; the fingers extend past that, with four joints in place of the human two. They must be incredibly flexible, those fingers, no matter how fragile they seem.

The creature hisses, showing bloody teeth. Then, in a perfectly human, perfectly chilling voice, it says, “Come on, Kevin, don’t you have the shot yet?” It is the voice of Anne Stewart, Imagine Entertainment news personality. Anne herself is nowhere to be seen. But there is so much blood …

The cameraman staggers to his feet and runs. His camera captures everything in fragmentary pieces as he flees, taking snapshots of an apocalypse. There is a man who has been unzipped from crotch to throat, organs falling onto the deck in a heap; three of the creatures are clustered around the resulting mess, their faces buried in the offal, eating. There is a woman whose arms have been ripped from her shoulders, whose eyes stare into nothingness, glazed over and cold; two more of the creatures are dragging her toward the rail. The cameraman runs. There is a splash behind him. The creatures have returned to the sea with their prey.

Some of the faces of the dead are familiar: employees of Imagine, camera operators, makeup technicians, all sent out to sea with the Atargatis in order to record a documentary on the reality of mermaids. They weren’t supposed to find anything. Mermaids aren’t real. Other faces are new to the silent executives who watch the film play back, their mouths set into thin lines and their eyes betraying nothing of their feelings on the matter. A dark-haired woman beats a mermaid with an oar. A man runs for the rail, only to be attacked by three of the creatures, which move surprisingly swiftly out of the water, propelled by their powerful tails.

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.

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 care 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

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 sw