The Shadow Beneath the Waves

The ocean has always called to me. As a marine biologist, I’ve spent years exploring its depths, uncovering its mysteries. But nothing could have prepared me for what I found that day.

It started with a sonar anomaly—a strange shape on the ocean floor, about 200 feet below the surface. My team and I were mapping a remote part of the Pacific, and the readings didn’t match any known geological formations. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to dive down to investigate.

The water was cold and dark, the sunlight barely piercing the depths. As I descended, the shape began to take form. It was a shipwreck, its hull broken and covered in barnacles. The name on the side was barely legible: "The Celestial Dawn." I had never heard of it, but something about it felt... wrong.

I swam closer, my flashlight cutting through the murky water. The ship’s deck was eerily intact, as if it had been frozen in time. I entered through a gaping hole in the side, my heart pounding. Inside, the air bubbles from my tank echoed like whispers, and the shadows seemed to move on their own.

In the captain’s quarters, I found a journal. The pages were waterlogged, but I could still make out the words. The ship had vanished in 1923, its crew reporting strange occurrences before it went down. The final entry was chilling: "It’s here. It’s beneath us. God help us all."

I took the journal with me, eager to study it further. But as I swam back to the surface, I felt something brush against my leg. I turned, but there was nothing there. Just the endless, dark water.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The journal’s words haunted me, and I kept hearing faint whispers in the silence. I decided to research The Celestial Dawn, but there was no record of it—no news articles, no ship registries. It was as if it had never existed.

The next day, I returned to the wreck with my team. We brought cameras and equipment, determined to document everything. But as we approached the ship, the water grew colder, and our equipment began to malfunction. The cameras flickered, and the sonar showed strange, moving shapes around us.

Inside the ship, we found something we hadn’t noticed before—a locked door, its surface covered in strange carvings. Using a crowbar, we pried it open. Inside was a small room, filled with bones. Human bones. And in the center of the room was a massive, blackened chest, its surface pulsating as if alive.

We didn’t stay long enough to open it. Something about the chest filled us with dread, and we swam back to the surface as fast as we could. But the chest stayed with me, haunting my dreams.

A week later, I woke up to find the journal open on my desk, its pages filled with new writing. The words were in my handwriting, but I didn’t remember writing them: "It’s here. It’s beneath us. God help us all