I made a comment not long ago that for me being a writer is 10% remembering my dreams and 90% turning the volume down on reality so that I can get the words out. Here’s one such dream, still fresh on the edges of my memory, written down with just enough fiat prose to be coherent, as I wait for the coffee to brew and chase away the cobwebs…

I had finished a work contract of one sort or another, and decided to take a solo vacation to Reykjavik, Iceland. I’ve always wanted to go there, and given that it is a frosty remote island with not much to look at other than rugged nature and cold water, it makes sense that if I was ever going to see it I’d have to go it alone. I had been in the city for a few days, treating myself to pubs, restaurants, and local company when I eventually decided it was time to venture away from civilization and start to explore the landscape.

I spent the next few days in a rented SUV wandering around the coastlines, photographing anything that looked cool, and otherwise just enjoying myself. At one point I was on the eastern edge of the island and got that special tickle in the back of my mind when something is worth paying attention to, but I was at the cliff’s edge. After some hunting around I found a barely perceptible footpath that wound down around the jagged field of volcanic stones and down towards the shore. Once I got down there, I saw some formations that didn’t look quite right, and upon further investigation realized they were massive steel support structures of some kind. Amongst the forest of pylons I saw a crew of around eight people in cold weather gear, like myself, who had set up some kind of work area in the pylons. They had crates stacked here and there, computers, what looked like radio equipment, and several cable spools clamped on to the pylons, feeding cable down the shore and into the sea.

I approached casually, but with respect, and called out to a young lady who was closest to me, interrupting some work she was doing on a tablet. I announced myself and was well received. I introduced myself, inquired about their activity, and asked if I could help. I pitched myself as an adventurer who had pretty much exhausted what the island had to offer, but still had a good two weeks left before my flight out. As it turned out the group was a privately funded research expedition out of two sister universities, one in the UK and one in the USA, though no matter how many times they said the school names I couldn’t hold them in my mind. It was like the words themselves were slippery, and didn’t want to be remembered.

The group was there conducting archeological research into a mostly unknown ‘floating railroad’ that had existed between Greenland and Iceland. These pylons ran pretty far out into the sea, and all supported a now dismantled ferry system that allowed wenches on the Iceland side and the Greenland side to essentially pull shipping containers across the sea, submerged several meters below the surface so that no ship or plane overhead would be any wiser. Apparently the smaller cable I saw was attached to an ‘autonomous nautical tool’ they called the ANT that was basically a self-sustaining deep dive suit that could stay down for several hours at a time. Apparently the team lead had managed to secure a few favors from an oil tycoon and there were five of these suits on loan from an offshore operation.

We didn’t get much deeper into it after that because the cable went crazy, as did the radio, as apparently the diver they had down in the water measuring where the pylons stopped had started to have a panic attack. I helped the group scramble to pull the guy out of the water, and get him out of the suit. I distinctly remember him talking to me, in earnest, but the words had that slipperiness to them that made them impossible to hold onto. In the end myself, the crew’s dive master, and the young lady whom I first met took him back to Reykjavik in my SUV, since the crew really needed their vehicles to pack up their gear before the tide came in.

Late that night, after we had the guy secured at the hospital, I went out with the young lady and the dive master for some drinks. I was hooked, beyond interested in helping out, and pretty much wasn’t taking no for an answer. As they informed me, at some point near the end of World War 2 a lost city of unknown age and size was discovered by German soldiers operating clandestine weather stations and U-Boat communication arrays. The city was hotly contested between US forces and the occupying Germans, and though the Nazis were driven off the island, the city itself was destroyed in the process.

Naturally by this point I was almost thinking that these folks were pulling my leg as a rejection of my easy charm and blind interest in helping out, but as the night wore on, lips got looser, and the raw earnestness in the team started to rope me in. According to the team leader’s theory, the Germans had excavated the site before the Americans stormed the place, and multitudes of shipping containers filled with whatever they found in the city were being ferried across the sea to Iceland. The team leader was convinced that there had been U-Boats waiting in the open ocean to intercept and empty the crates. Obviously something didn’t go according to plan, because so little of this is known history. No U-Boats with treasure ever appeared, nothing emerged from the sea on the Icelandic side, and nothing was recovered by the Americans. The military destroyed the city, cut down the pylons in Greenland, and the handful of local fishermen who knew about the pylons had all died of old age, and it was pure luck that the team leader was able to interview one of the men before he died to get the location of the pylons, as they aren’t visible from the sea or from the cliff, you have to be right on top of them.

I begged to participate, and thankfully even the next morning when everyone was hungover and looking for a much needed breakfast, they agreed to talk to the team leader. I gave them a ride back to the pylon area, and a few miles from there the team had rented a small cottage. It didn’t take nearly as much convincing as I thought, and the team leader told the dive master that I was his responsibility, but that with the storms coming in the next 24 hours, anything we wanted to get done it had to be now. Maybe I lied a bit about my diving experience, but from what they told me about the suits, it wasn’t so much being an accomplished scuba diver as much as it was controlling your breathing and not losing your damn mind. That was apparently the trick, the suits were so easy to use that your body acclimatized to the alien undersea environment quickly, but your brain knows that that comfort is an illusion, so your body and mind are at war with one another as you are trying to get your work done. At least, that’s what they said happened to their guy.

Within a few hours I was in the suit along with two others, being sent on my first dive to make sure I could handle it before we did the big one. The first dive was to follow the pylon forest all the way to it’s terminus, counting and measuring as we went. Apparently last year before the storm season the team had done this in Greenland. Once we had the measurements from this side the team leader claimed he could determined the most likely sink point of the shipping containers and any leftover artifacts from the city in Greenland.

It was beautiful down there, scary as hell, but beautiful. I’d never been scuba diving in my life, and I realized I was taking a big risk, but I didn’t care. Moving through that forest of pylons was like walking on the surface of an alien world. The suits were incredibly articulate, and reminded me of medieval plate armor. A few hundred bounds in weight, but articulated in all the right places, so if you were deliberate in your movements, it wasn’t difficult at all. The transparent dome helmets freaked me out a little, but the field of vision was incredible. It was when we got to the edge of the pylons that I started to get maybe why the other guy had a panic attack.

At the edge of the pylon forest there was a sheer drop off, and from there the sea was just cold and dark. The thing is, even though I couldn’t see anything, it didn’t feel like that darkness was empty at all.

I took some deep breaths and reminded myself that this was that whole body vs mind thing, and that I could handle it. I calmed down finally and we called it a day. I’ll admit though, I made the hike back out of the pylon forest pretty quick like. For some reason, in that place of all places, I started thinking about how unofficial this one outfit seemed to be. Like how we dropped that guy at the hospital but didn’t sign anything, and how the cottage, now that I was thinking about it, seemed like it might have been abandoned before this team took over. Maybe it was just me. Or this cold water.

Nobody slept much at the cottage, too much excitement about tomorrow’s trip out to sea. The team leader was pleased with the measurements, and it didn’t take him long to figure out the spot where we should start the dive. I kept having trouble falling asleep because I kept thinking I was hearing a horn blowing outside, but every time I’d think I heard it there would be nothing. It seemed to go on like that until morning, and so I was a bit ragged, but still excited to make some history.

We took a trawler out to the spot, which was actually much closer to the Icelandic shore than I expected, just a few miles. Apparently the Germans got alot closer to pulling off their extraction that I thought. Five of us got into the suits, including myself, the dive master, and the young woman I’d first met. Again, it was strange that I couldn’t remember their names, so was reduced to calling them “hey you” or “sir” or “ma’am” and though I’ve never been good with names, it was still a little off-putting.

It was already a dark and cold day, with the storms not long from hitting, so we had to move pretty quickly. Unlike wading into the water and gradually getting deeper like I had in my first time in the suit, this time we had the cables attached to our backs and then we just dropped into the sea. It was like falling into the abyss, the lights from the boat above getting further and further away as the black beneath my boots just seemed to go on and on forever. The dive master started popping flares as we went, and they were apparently fancy ones too, as some seemed to be weighted and sank faster than we did while others seemed to float just where he struck them. Pretty soon it was like being inside a giant Christmas tree, with lights above and below.

As we continued to go down I started to see rock formations take shape below and around us, the flares finally starting to reflect against surfaces and illuminate the environment. We started to see the outlines of dozens of forty and sixty foot shipping containers, the cables attaching them slack and broken. Moments before I landed on the top of one I saw what looked like a German U-Boat in the distance, and called it out. As everyone else started to land, the dive master invited me to go look at it, and the young lady went along with me. The rest of the team unfolded these huge collapsable sled looking devices, which were no doubt designed to hold all the loot.

Now that we were down there, marching along the tops of these forgotten containers, I started to notice how much bioluminescent life there was down there. There were these clusters of barnacles or muscles of some kind that seemed to attach only to the containers themselves, not any of the rock formations, and they pulsed with radiant colors. As we moved we saw a translucent octopus emerge from a crevice somewhere in the rocks and pry apart one of the muscles, and it almost looked like it melted the shell instead of drilling into it or opening it with sheer strength. It was a little disconcerting, but we soon forgot about all of that once we reached the U-Boat.

It was just outside the direct light of the flares, so was bathed in shadow, but once we got closer it was obvious that it had been destroyed in combat. We could see where a torpedo or some other projectile had punched through the hull, and then the crush of decompression. As we investigated that, several of the other divers pointed out more U-Boats amongst the wreckage of the containers. Many of the containers had holes in them as well, from explosive impacts, as if the U-Boats fired on one another and the containers, or some other force fired on both of them.

The young lady and I started making our way back as other team members began to exclaim that they’d found artifacts. We reached one container with another diver, and as we crept down inside, through one of the blasted holes, I could see that the hold was full of what appeared to be precious metals. Nothing like press bars, but more like statues, cups, plates, weapons, rods, shields, and crafted items. It felt more like a treasure hunt at that point than archeology, but there was just something so alluring about it that I gave into the fever of it all. We worked tirelessly to fill the sleds, even as the weather above us got worse and worse. Sled after sled we sent up on self-inflating bouys for the team above to pick up, and we kept at it.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I suddenly realized I was hearing screaming in my headset, and we all started looking around, and realized that there were only three of us working. Two divers were missing. We spread out to search, and quickly I found one, a man who was struggling with one of the translucent octopi, and I watched in horror as the creature’s corrosive secretions melted through the man’s helmet. I braced for the explosive decompression, but apparently the octopus had used its body to create a seal, and was venting the pressure in a steady stream of bubbles from some ventricle in it’s body.

I heard more shouting, and turned to see that the other diver who had gone missing was now grappling with the dive master. I didn’t realize it until I saw it, but the dive suits were equipped with mounted drills, welding muzzles, and what appeared to be some kind of pipe saw. It made sense, given that these were oil rig suits, but watching the dive master and the other diver going at it with saws and drills was mind numbing. Between them, each with his hand on one end, was one of the sleds, and the diver was trying to stop the dive master from launching it upwards.

I started to move to help when the young lady started screaming, and I saw her being attacked by another octopus. I closed in as fast as I could, ignoring the fight behind me, and managed to get the drill bit to fire up. I jabbed the creature a few times ineffectually before I could really get the drill going, and finally pulped the thing. It looked like the corrosive stuff was still doing its thing even though the creature was dead, so we knew it was time to bug out.

We turned around just in time to see the sled rising on the self-inflating bouy, and holding onto the bottom of the sled was the dive master, only his body ended at the waist. As the bouy rose it blanketed the area with clouds of blood, and through that cloud the other diver came charging. The young lady and I ran as fast as we could to the last sled. We were screaming at the boat to haul us up by our cables, but nobody was responding, all we could hear was some garbled static that hurt my mind to even listen to. We got to the sled, but that damn diver caught up to us.

I still couldn’t figure out how to make the saw in my other hand work, so all I had was the drill, which wasn’t the best, since I had to pin the guy to really make it count. Thankfully the young woman knew what she was doing, and at point blank range got the welder under the diver’s arm and slagged it. As he was coping with that I pressed the drill bit against his helmet dome and pushed as hard as I could as I squeezed the trigger. The four seconds it took to punch the drill bit through were the longest four seconds of my life, as the diver and I just looked at each other while it happened. His eyes were just, I don’t know, wrong. All wrong. I don’t know what he’d seen, or what had happened, but I knew if I was going to get out of this alive, he had to die. Finally the bit got through, and his helmet instantly ballooned up with blood and water. The young lady and I both shoved him out of the way, and I released the drill. Thankfully enough pressure had been released over time that it didn’t explode so much as pop.

We got to the sled, and a shadow passed over us, which should have been impossible in this icy darkness. We looked up, and the horror of it all became clear. The trawler had been capsized, presumably by the storm, and broken apart. The ship was in two huge pieces, discernible only by the lights of the flares as it plowed down towards us. All of those sleds we had sent up, so many heaps of metal goods and artifacts, were like a glittering rain storm as they fell back towards us. It was a deluge of metal and wreckage.

The young lady and I tried to run, but as everything came down on us she was knocked down by a piece of the trawler’s metal rigging, and impaled by a spear of some kind, one of the artifacts we had sent up earlier. She was done for, and not a word was spoken, one moment alive and running, the other, prone and dead. The question of how the spear could gain enough force to pierce the armor of the suit was screaming at me in the back of my mind, but at that point all I could think of was survival. I remembered from the dive suit orientation that the respirator cores were interchangeable and self-contained, so before I realized what I was doing I ripped the core from her suit.

I managed to take cover in one of the nearby containers, and huddled there for several minutes as the rest of the debris crashed down. As it was raining down, I noticed a small artifact, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was a stamp of some kind, with a symbol in it, that if hammered on one side would press the symbol into leather, metal, clay, or wax. I couldn’t look at it for very long without feeling, I don’t know, itchy in my brain, so I tucked it into my cargo netting. When I emerged, the whole place was a shimmering wasteland of flares, strewn treasure, and the wreckage of our trawler, the containers, and the U-Boats. My cable was severed, and there was no ship to get to anyway, and the last thing I wanted to do was be in the storm on the surface, so I decided to make a run for shore. Thankfully I still had my bearings.

I don’t know how long I had been running, it was very difficult once I left the light of the flares and the reflective treasures. My suit lights weren’t very powerful compared to the deep gloom of the sea floor. Eventually I had to swap out the respirator cores, and that’s when I knew it had been at least several hours. We had been only a few miles from shore, but at this depth, at this slow speed, I knew if I wasn’t lucky I’d be dying down here. My hope was renewed when I reached the base of a massive rock formation. I knew it must be the beginning of the coastline, so I’d have to climb.

Just as I started to climb my headset suddenly went off, filling my ears with a weird static, but inside that static, there was a voice. I don’t know what it was saying, but I knew that I didn’t want to know. I turned it off, and as I did I took one look back into the darkness. I swear I thought I saw a glint of light out there, and all I could think about was that spear that had impaled the young woman. I turned back to the climb, and moved like the devil was behind me, and honestly I am sure that was the case.

I was aching from the exertion and the stress, but finally, I crested the top. From there it was a steady incline, but at a manageable rate, and soon I reached the pylon forest. I was finally on familiar ground. There was sunlight now sliding through the water. Apparently I’d been down there long enough for the storm to end and the sun to rise. I risked a look behind me, and wish that I hadn’t. Again I caught a glint of golden light in the shadows, amongst the pylons. I shouted with fear and determination not to die as I surged forward.

As soon as I broke the surface of the water I tore the helmet off and gulped down air. I had been intentionally avoiding looking at the respirator and could see it redlining. Who knows how long I had been coping with bad air. I turned and saw a disturbance in the water, something depressurizing and expending bubbles as it rose to the surface. I don’t know if it was a result of my oxygen starved brain or my own instincts, but I frantically reached into my cargo net and grasped the metal stamp. I hurled it directly at whatever it was coming out of the water, and then tried to turn and run, not wanting to see what was even now breaking the surface.

I screamed with impatience as I tore myself out of the now cumbersome suit and sprinted away from the shore and up the trail. I leapt into my SUV and didn’t stop driving until I woke up.