text: The bodies looked as they always did, and it had been many years since the sight of one frightened me. The Korean War had many horrors, and corpses. The shipwreck lay before me not even a mile from the coast. One of its crew stared at me from a portside window, his eyes dull, skin bloated and white, suspended in the water within the cabin for days. I made my way to the small fishing boat, my weighted feet moved sluggishly along the sea floor. The boat had struck some rocks during a recent storm. While some of the passengers escaped, others had been taken by the sea. I was sent down to assess the damage so retrieval could begin. The world was different down here, the rocky bottom with its swaying seaweed turning into a hazy distortion of shapes after maybe thirty feet in front of me. All I could hear was the tin noise of air bubbles escaping my helmet as fresh oxygen was pumped in from the boat above. My sense of touch went no further than the suit which protected me. The world outside was slow, and silent. I placed my hand against the hull, running my hand along the ruined wood exterior. The boat had been dragged by the current over some rocks. The damage was jagged, the innards of the boat had spilled out of the wound and were gently moving with the current along the sea floor. Peering inside the hole I cast my light and saw books and paper floating in the water, canned goods lay on the floor alongside an overturned pantry shelf. Particles danced in the cone of light as I scanned the room. There he was. In the corner. The other crewmate. He was turned away from me, suspended between the floor and ceiling. Small fish had already begun to claim him. I cut through the darkness inside with my light one more time and told the surface where to find the bodies. There would be no open casket funerals for these men. I glanced back behind me and saw the void. The world over my shoulder simply faded into a blue nothing. I was finished and signaled the boat to prepare to bring me up. Turning back to the wreck I saw that directly above me a cluster of flora danced in front of the beams of light from the sun above. Strange, local plant life shouldn’t have started to overtake the boat so soon. I looked closer at the swaying silhouette. Wait. It wasn’t plant life. It was hair. A startled gasp escaped my throat as I raised my lantern and saw a new body peering down at me. It was a woman, and only her hands and face were visible over the side. The corpse was positioned in a pose of almost macabre curiosity, peeking down at me from the deck. None of the survivors had mentioned a woman on board. But why would they? They were all married men, if it got out that they had a woman on board it wouldn’t take much imagination to predict what would happen to them once they returned to shore. I made a note of it; but couldn’t take my eyes off the motionless face staring down at me. I took one step backward, then another. Two more steps. The brass helmet hissed as air was pumped into it. I pulled myself away from its gaze and faced the void. So many bodies, so much violence has been committed in front of me. It had been many years since I felt shock at the sight of death. What an odd way to die. Even in death she kept her grip on the railing. It wasn’t the strangest way I had seen death take shape, but it was certainly up there with the most memorable. Still... I turned back toward the ship, and my feet planted themselves to the sea floor. The woman was no longer gripping the rail. She was standing. The murky waters had started to take away the details of the ship, but the silhouette was still visible. Her hair flowed and moved with a life of its own, and her slim figure and dancing dress held a strange beauty. We both stood still in a silent eternity. I tried to move towards my extraction point but was beholden to the sight in front of me. A sense of tension had seized my joints. The surface was asking what was wrong. No words would come. With a sense of grace she stepped onto the railing, and then over. The motion broke her spell, and a sound of panic filled my helmet. I turned toward the void once more and pushed forward as quickly as the sea would let me. I told them to prepare for my extraction, and the panic in my voice was evident. They asked what was wrong, but I had no words to give them. This was impossible. Corpses never MOVE. My feet moved as though the sea itself was against me, the point directly beneath the boat seemed so far away. My mind raced with ideas of what lay behind me. Of the woman touching down on the sea floor and racing towards the brown-suited man with his strange breathing apparatus. I could die down here, in this alien environment. I reached the extraction point. “Bring me up!” They started to pull up the tether and hose, but there was so much slack to go through first. The urge to turn around pushed its way into my mind. My breathing was quick, adrenaline coursing through my body. This was impossible. The ship was a murky shape in the ocean fog, and at the edge of it, coming into clear view, was the woman. She walked across the sea floor as slow as I had been, but with no struggle. This was her world, and I was a visitor in it. She reached out with both hands as if to welcome me to it, and a smile spread across her face. My adrenaline turned to fear. Heart pounding, mind killing fear. A scream escaped my lips. I was going to die down here. My atmospheric suit would be my coffin. Death approached me with open arms. Twenty feet. Fifteen. I had escaped death and seen its face for so many years and it had finally come to take me. My cries of terror echoed inside the brass helmet, tears spilled down my face. Her face was thin and grey, one eye a piercing blue. The other eye was a hollow, dark socket. She was on me, I could almost feel her fingertips touching the suit. The slack had become taut and I began to rise toward the ship. The smiling face of death fell away as I started my ascent. Within moments something touched my boot, a pressure clamped down on it. A hand. With a primal wailing I struggled and shook my leg, a tension growing between the harness and the woman as they fought to see who would claim me. Blind, unadulterated fear escaped my lips in shrieks that tore at my throat. I was caught between life on the surface and death on the ocean floor. I cried as I fought to escape her grip, when it suddenly vanished. The boat pulled me free of her grip, and I ascended towards the light of the surface, cries of terror still filling the suit. They unscrewed me from the suit in a hysterical fit, and I was deemed unfit for duty. I quit soon after and found a job on the mainland. So many decades have passed since that moment. I never found a rational explanation for what I saw. Wars would come and go. Worldly terrors filled the headlines and nightly news, but none of it frightened me. I realize now that the greatest fears are those we cannot find answers to. There are worse horrors than those that man can make. On some nights I’d find myself dreaming of the ocean floor. That beautiful, awful face gazing at me with arms outstretched. I never went in the water again. &#x200B; Hey there, reader. If you made it this far I hope you enjoyed the story. This tale was performed on the No Sleep Podcast over a year ago, and while I was thrilled to hear the story be told in all the production values that that podcast brings to their stories, I felt that it also had a place in print. So I've decided to start putting my stories up online for you to enjoy, and I hope that you do enjoy them. Till next time.