Beneath – A Short Story – Part 1

Dec92025

Chapter 1

Gearing Up

The mid-day sun shimmered off the flat-calm surface of the sea, a heat haze rising in the distance, surrounding the panorama. The ocean was silent. The hull of their lightweight dive boat, a lonely vessel on an empty sea, slapped quietly against the few small ripples – lazily riding over them.

A weathervane chimed overhead in the gentle breeze, stopping the summer sun from baking them in their shorty wetsuits. Kelly Matheson perched on the side of the hull; her suit pulled up over her waist with only the top half of her turquoise swimsuit on show – it was too hot to gear up dressed until the last minute. A man sat opposite her on the central wooden bench, similarly dressed and snapping flippers into place. Dive gear surrounded him like a crowd of small children – cylinders and buoyancy jackets, cameras, fins, dive computers and spear guns (not for use this trip). His mask was propped on his head in familiar style – if it wasn’t reading glasses it was a pair of Oakley’s balanced on there. Darren Jacobs was putting his gear on with the smooth, confident expertise of someone who had been diving since a teenager and one who’d done it professionally for ten years in the Navy. It might’ve put some people off the sport for life but not Crackers, nor his mates. They’d spent their downtime researching and investigating, looking for the best dive-sites that there were. Places where there were no tourists with their shark cages in the search of great whites and a Jaws experience, no queue of boats to get an hour on a wreck in Egypt, no audience watching you take your turn to see Nemo on a reef before they did. They put together the ultimate dive bucket list.

They were ten miles off a tiny island in the Indonesian archipelago. Eddie, their boat captain, was fussing around Darren’s gear, securing that which he didn’t need for the dive. Wind-blown and grizzled, ‘Eddie’ wasn’t his real name, a local and the most knowledgeable dive boat operator around by all accounts, it was the only name that anyone called him – except perhaps his mum. Darren had heard about this unspoilt reef, teeming with life and corals, with energy, where schools of fish would buzz overhead, untroubled by anything other than the odd spear fisherman, where the sport fish could speed by off the beaten track of the wealthy holidaymakers. And where green sea turtles could stop over on their way to spawn. Kelly had seen a spreadsheet on his computer of over a hundred dive sites – some were only vague map references – a suggestion that the fabled reef or wreck of something was down there and had been the subject of dive folklore for decades. Who would be the first to dive on it and report back to the dive-web? There were details of map references, nearest travel hubs and local contacts if they were known (Eddie was on there), details of the dive, the depth, what was to be seen, issues for concern. The Titanic was on there, but with some laughter emojis next to it as if they’d researched a potential drive trip just as a bit of fun – but with Darren, you were never quite sure. This was the one that had really caught her eye – a site simply marked ‘turtle reef’. That was why they were here.

‘Pass me my stabbie would you, please love?’ She pointed to the purple trimmed stabilising jacket and cylinder by Darren’s left foot and finished strapping the knife scabbard to her leg. She’d been going out with Crackers for two years and they’d always talked about going on a big tropical island trip, but it had evolved into a diving holiday when she’d discovered a love for the sport in Zante the previous year.

When they’d first met, she’d been almost embarrassed to tell a muscular ex-navy diver about her phobia of the sea. She could recall being on a caravan holiday in Llangrannog age seven or eight, swimming in the shallows on the beach, not even out of her depth, but being fearful that something would come up and get her from beneath. Twenty-five years on she still remembered being wrapped in a beach towel, walking along the tarmac with sandy feet, crying inconsolably despite the offerings of ice cream, chips, and warm pubs with slot machines. The fear hadn’t changed over the years, she’d just never really been out on open water – swimming pools on holiday were enough for her. But Darren had decided to change all that – she’d become his project – and he’d taught her to snorkel, to dive and shown her the beauty of what lay beneath the surface. But despite that, as she was getting ready to get wet, she could feel the paranoia scratching away at the veneer of her more confident self, ready to expose her worst fears again.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, discarding his fins and reaching down to pick up her gear. ‘Turn around.’ He zipped up her wetsuit and lifted the jacket up so she could slip her arms through the straps, clipping the fastening at her chest in front and tightening her weight belt. She clicked a button on the shoulder strap twice to add a couple of bursts of air to the jacket – wouldn’t do to fall over the side without her mask or demand-valve in her mouth and start to sink.

‘Sorted, thanks,’ she smiled at him, sitting back down on the side of the hull and spitting in her mask.

‘So, I can finish getting ready, can I?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Sor-ry,’ she pouted back.

‘It’s just that, you know, you’re all ready and here’s me with one fin and one flipflop,’ he grumbled playfully pointing at his tanned feet.

‘You should try that.’ She nodded with the most serious expression she could muster. ‘And swim around in circles?’

‘Navigation your strong point now is it?’ She gave him a wry smile.

‘If you weren’t all ready to go, I’d push you in.’ She stuck her tongue out at him playfully and finished adjusting her mask. Darren bent forward to his cylinder, sliding his arms through the straps and stood up, lifting the jacket over his head so the rig slowly slid into place on his back.

In no time at all he was sat next to Kelly on the side of the boat, ready to go. He held up his hand in the ‘okay’ sign, which she repeated and he checked her pressure gauge. Satisfied, they exchanged okay signals again and, in unison, tipped backwards off the side. Her world filled with bright blue for a second and she noticed the vapour trails of aircraft cutting across the sky, before she hit the surface with a splash and was surrounded by bubbles. Bobbing to the surface like a cork thanks to the air in her jacket, Darren appeared at her side. He took his regulator out of his mouth. ‘Same as usual, nice and steady, clear your ears on the way down. Remember it’s thirty metres, so we’ll need a couple of decompression stops on the way up but I’ve got them in the computer.’ He tapped the dive computer strapped to his forearm. Replacing the valve in his mouth he gave her a final okay sign and put his face in the water.

Chapter 2

Monsters of the Deep

She deflated her jacket and slowly started her descent, Darren doing likewise next to her. The deep was a shimmering blue – sunbeams passing through the water like laser beams penetrating as far as they could reach before being swallowed up, they danced and rolled over each other like playful puppies as the surface ripples disrupted their course. Then they disappeared, a shadow passing above shutting out the light. It could only be one thing. Darren hadn’t said anything about bigger animals on this dive, hadn’t said anything about sharks as the shadow descended. Fear gripped her chest and her breathing rate increased, gulping air, becoming engulfed by bubbles. Rolling her body, she turned to look back to the surface above, expecting to see something coming – a monster that had been waiting for her, had always been waiting in the shadow of her fear – and saw the dive boat gently floating in the current, breaking up the sunlight, its shadow slowly moving away, and the light returning like a glitterball at an old school disco.

The brightness of the shallow water faded and took on a deeper blue as they descended. She didn’t check her depth gauge but it seemed that they’d been going down for some time with no sign of the reef they were diving off. But then, a school of Jacks appeared, turned as one, like a giant fish made up of hundreds of others, and shot away, startled by the strange intruders. The reef was there in front of them. Bright corals reached up in welcome, whilst also filtering microorganisms from the water column. Small crabs and feather dusters waved angrily at them as if they had upset the flow of food over their filters, or disappeared suddenly into themselves when they were spooked. Groups of Niger triggerfish patrolled the walls of the reef, darting back and forth at the drop off, and pairs of clownfish hosted anemones whose tentacles drifted lazily in the current.

And in the distance was a shadow. Beyond the corals and rock, beyond the school of pink and orange anthias, and the occasional solitary grouper, was a much bigger shape off in the distance. Kelly looked at Crackers and pointed, and he replied with a wave in that direction and an ‘ok’ sign. She swam out from the reef with confidence and excitement, scattering the immediate wildlife as she kicked hard with her flippers. Climbing up underneath the shape, she could now see the turtle up close for the first time. It crossed over the top of her – the shell almost a metre in diameter – with no fear or concern, and she ran her hand along its belly. In the distance, in the gloom, at the edge of her visibility was another shape – another turtle – and she turned away from it as it closed to follow this one. They swam side by side for a moment but the animal started to accelerate and head toward a rocky outcropping where Darren was filming. Losing her companion, she looked back at the shape behind her, which was gaining fast, and now it wasn’t an amorphous shape that could be a turtle. It was long and sleek, with a powerful tail that was speeding it toward her. With eyes only for the turtle, the shark brushed past Kelly, the shockwave from its tail tumbling her over in the water. She noticed the darker striations on the side of the fish – a tiger shark – and it was huge. As it swam past she estimated that it was nearly twenty feet long with a fearsome girth. Helpless to do anything but watch, she willed the turtle to safety, saw it bank ninety degrees at the rock wall, swimming up to the top and flipping over to disappear down the other side – right where Darren was. At attack speed and frenzied with its chase of the turtle, for a split second the shark had lost its prey. But then directly in front was another option. Not a turtle but something different and big enough to be of interest. With a slight change of course, it was speeding toward Darren, just ten feet away. With only a second to anticipate the danger he had very few options at that speed. He tried to fill his stab jacket with air, to make him rise in the water like a cork. It was dangerous and he’d have to stop his quick ascent in five or ten metres to prevent decompression sickness, but it would be enough to–

***

As its prey started to ascend, the shark only had to deviate course slightly, to raise its snout a few feet and hit Darren hard and fast in the middle, it’s massive jaws already agape, closed around him and bit down. The combination of the power and speed of the attack and the sheer size of the monster meant Darren’s body had no chance. The beast veered away from the rock wall, turning ninety degrees so it was side on to Kelly’s view, Darren desperately striking at its nose, a blood trail leaving a red cloud behind it, mixing with the bubbles from his airline. Then, with a shake of the head, the monstrous fish bit him clean in two.