We Lowered a Man Into a 300-Year-Old Ship — He Never Came Back | SCP-1734

0:00The Cordelia didn't move. Granite, she was a ground. Canted, gently to port. Keel buried in white sand 100 meters up from the water line. The sea had been closer once, but it had gone on without her. Grounded ships don't go anywhere, but they'll still move a bit. They'll sway some. Ringing will tick. Canvas will swell with air. The Cordelia did none of it. Her sails hung motionless, as though they'd been carved out of some heavy stone or plaster. In the afternoons, when the wind came off the water strong enough to take a man's hat off his head, the sails never stirred, not a ripple or a flutter. Adler had stood at her rail once, rather, very close to her rail, for a full hour with his hand out flat. Everybody had outposted 1734, did the same at one point or another. There was no force against his hand.

1:00Nothing pushed. His palm stopped just to fingers width from the wood and wouldn't go any further. When he shoved, nothing shoved back. The distance was small, and it was right there, but he could not cross it. He held his hand out until his shoulder was sore. Then he walked back to the outpost. Anyone could walk the Cordelia. You could climb aboard, make your way across the deck, go through the hatch, and head down the ladder. The fingers width of empty space would separate you from her the whole way, no matter where you were. She was holding you up while keeping you back. The frigate Cordelia was a fine ship, British 18th century, but she hadn't aged a day. Whatever spell the Cordelia was under held her together. She should have rotted away by now. The tool marks and the deck planking were so crisp, you could tell which direction they'd been made. Oddly enough, though. When they'd pulled out of her, a chart, a boot, a tin box of fish hooks corroded into

2:01one rusted lump just to name a few, had aged some 300 years. The tests were convincing, but Adler still didn't trust them completely. And there was also a hole just forward of the main mast. It was about a meter across. It hadn't been cut. The edges splintered upward. Something had pushed through it. Looking down into the hole, you could see the water. Maybe a meter down, sloshing around in the hole below. Closer investigation revealed the ship's hold was dry. The team had seen it themselves. They had been down there and walked at four times. Through the hatch and down the ladder, the hold was dusty, empty, and completely dry. Stand beneath the spot where the hole should have been and look up, and there was no opening at all. Just darkness. So Adler had a unique situation at hand. The water scene in the hole from above and the dry hold beneath it were, as far as anyone could tell, the same space. But it didn't stop there.

3:03A tentacle would emerge from the outside view of the hole. Seven meters of it lay on the deck. The mass was a sickly muted tone, like the color of a bruise going yellow. It would emerge and rest on the deck. Sometimes it moved, slow and searching, curling and uncurling, gently thudding on the deck like a finger drumming on a table. It had been drumming for 300 years. 300 years, the briefing said. Adler was the one who decided somebody should go down and find out what the tentacle was attached to. Centuries before anyone called the Cordelia an anomaly, Captain Cal had been running the ship. Cal had known fear before, but he'd always been able to master it. Fear was a tool. You used it on the men, on yourself, and then you set it back on the shelf when you no longer needed the motivation. This time was different. The fear had come aboard from somewhere else and was living in his chest now.

4:04The Cordelia had barely escaped the island, though Cal wasn't sure escaped was the right word. That implied whatever was behind them had stopped pursuing them. 41 men, not counting Cal, had sailed out to the island. 19 never came back, and perhaps one or two more, depending on how you counted. Hollis, for example, had returned in body, but Cal wasn't sure in his mind, or his spirit had come back with him. An hour after the calamity in chaos, the Cordelia sailed into a patch of dead water and stopped. The sails came down empty against the masts. The island sat eight or nine miles away looking back at them. They drifted for three days. The first night was silent. On the second night, one man started weeping and couldn't be made to stop. On the third night, Cal finally snapped and struck the man with the end of a rope. Blame it on the doldrums, the captain told himself. The wind found them again and three days later, the Cordelia limped south, southeast until

5:08she ran aground on another island, an ordinary, boring, and blessedly, unremarkable lump of sand and rocks. The crew went over the side into the shallows and got up onto the beach and lay down on it. Grown men, privateeers men, half of them murderers by trade, and the other half by inclination. They lay on their faces in the sand and one of them. Cal never committed their name to memory, was actually kissing it. He gave them ten minutes, then got them up. In the water, he said, fruit if there's any. Wood we can use, if it's wet, leave it, we're gone before dark. There was no question of staying any longer than necessary. They had food for a week, but only four days of water, with the nearest, safe port six days away. They needed supplies, but more than anything, Cal wanted them gone before nightfall. What mattered was that the sun was going down. Cal had been at sea since he was nine years old, and he had never in his life been this weary of the dark coming over the water.

6:09We go before evening, Cal wrote in his journal, sitting on a rock with the book on his knee. He looked at the sentency wrote, we go before evening. The hard suit Adler ordered arrived at outpost 1734 in a large foundation approved crate. It came out of that crate in pieces. D-7569 solemnly watched them bolt and welded together like a man watching the gallows go up. D-7569 was not a good man. He'd been convicted of a number of things, one of which Adler read twice in quiet disbelief before closing the file. Adler had made a point of establishing distance early. He had no interest in the man's name. Just D-7569, maybe D for short. Is that a driving suit? D-7569 asked, only seen those in old cartoons. It's a hard suit. He's not the correct one. You won't be diving. You'll be wearing it and walking around with a lamp in the hose.

7:10It's probably the most comfortable thing anybody's worn around here in a year. D-7569 scrunched his face. So there's no water then. Oh, there's water. D-7569 nodded slowly. His expression caught between frustration and resignation. He gestured to the cordelia. So I'm going to go swimming in that thing. And a big old boat that's been sitting in the sand since before my great-great-granddaddy's granddaddy. Yup. Adler said, that made Agent Why laugh. She'd been standing nearby checking things over and hadn't set a word in 20 minutes. Adler's blunt delivery broke her. Adler turned back toward the cordelia and ran through what they knew. Whatever the anomaly was, it seemed passive. It didn't hunt or give chase. Or strangely, it ignored anything that wasn't alive. That was the part Adler couldn't make sense of. How could something like the tentacle tell the difference? During their first year at the outpost, they had lowered a camera through the hole and

8:13recorded 11 minutes of the ship's dry hole. They had dropped a stone through as well and heard it strike the floor some 40 feet away. Objects simply passed through the hole as though nothing unusual were there. Living things appeared to be different. Like a built-up platform beside the ship, with the boom extending over the deck. Nothing touched the cordelia itself. D-7569 was strapped into a canvas harness and swung out over the hole, ready to be lowered inside. The tentacle lay sprawled across the deck like a loose cable, barely reacting to anything around it. Every so often, it would shift and gently thump against the wood. Adler had seen plenty of strange things with the foundation. But something about that slow, mindless movement unsettled him. Left alone, he imagined it would keep doing the same thing for another 300 years. Bligh kept a rise on the tentacle. It's strange that it doesn't make any sound. It probably does. Adler said, we just can't hear it.

9:15I call the movement, drumming. Bligh nodded. Right. Hey. D-7569's voice came muffled through the hard suits faceplate. I've just wandered on the record that I said this was a stupid idea. Noted. Adler said before pulling his radio close to his mouth. Drop team, let's get him in there. Inside the darkness of the captain's quarters, Jones brought the item from the sea chest and said it proudly on Cal's table. The chest had come off that island, where they'd left 19 men behind. The object was about the size of two fists pressed together. Pale and faintly translucent. There was something in it, a mass of some kind. The item looked more like an egg than anything else. It had a haunting beauty to it, sublime in the truest sense. Its presence nodded Cal though. His body seemed to understand it before his mind did, and what his body was telling him was to dump it in the ocean. Sir. Jones faked a laugh.

10:16There's not a curator or scientist in the world who wouldn't empty their house for this. There are naturalists who'd pay a fortune for something like this. Sir, we lost 19 men. 19. Are we really supposed to go home with nothing to show for it? That was Jones' argument. It wasn't a stupid one. It was the same exact argument the crew had been making for three days. 19 men is an intolerable price for nothing at all. Cal looked from Jones to the egg, considering his argument. Then, without warning, he drew his pistol and shot Jones through the chest. The blast thundered through the captain's quarters. Jones collapsed onto his side, staring up at Cal and shock. The doldrums, Cal told himself. That had to be it. Every man aboard heard the shot. The deck came apart with a noise of them, men coming to see what the commotion was. Cal set the pistol on the table, picked up the egg in his hands, and went out through the growing crowd. They all stepped away from him as he approached. All but Hollis.

11:17He didn't move and didn't look up when Cal went by. He was looking at the deck between his boots. His gaze had been boring through the deck below him since the boats came back with the chest. Cal looked at the egg in his hands, examining it from all sides. In the night, it reminded Cal of a giant pearl. Then a thought dawned on him. This precious thing in his hands, and whatever was inside of it, had no reason to be on the Cordelia, especially given where it came from. Cal made his decision. He stepped toward the rail and threw the thing as far as his arm would send it. It went into the sea without much of a splash. The water quickly settled, and Cal stood with his heart racing, looking at the place where it had been. He'd only tossed it into ten feet of water off the beach, but the current would carry it out to sea. By morning, Cal told himself, it would be a thousand fathoms down. There. Done. Away from them all. Back below deck, Cal wrote that he'd sooner face all of Napoleon's armies than carry

12:19one of those things in his hold. He meant it. He read it back, and it struck him as a decent, hard, correct sentence. Exactly what a man writes when he's done the necessary thing. Cal was proud of it, and of the decision. He sat there in his cabin with Jones' blood still on the deck two feet away, and he was proud. It's getting dark, he wrote. We need to get underway. Cal looked up, and listened to the world around him for a moment. There was no wind coming off the ocean. He felt nervous. He felt afraid. The doldrums. It must be. Adler watched on the monitor, and then, because he frankly couldn't help himself, Adler walked over to peer into the hole. There was the top of the yellow helmet, about a meter down. There was the water. It moved. It had a little slop and chop to it. He was doing all of this without a sound. Forty feet after one deck lower, the cordelius hold was dry as chalk, confirmed by a walkthrough

13:20before they sent D-7569 down there. A camera was attached to the hard suit, and its feet appeared on Adler's monitor. Adler had one eye on D-7569's point of view, and another on the superimposed depth counter to the side of the screen. Described to me what you're seeing, D, he said. It's a room. It's a room inside a ship. There's beams. There's a fucking, I don't know. There's a barrel thing over there, to my right. How much room is over your head? Just guess. Like two feet, maybe. There's a beam right there. What are your feet doing right now? Adler asked. Huh? Your feet. What are they doing right now? Just kind of like touching the ground. Adler wrote that down. Tell me about the water. How deep are you? Up to my hips. It's cold. I kind of thought it'd be warm. Smells like a basement in here. He shouldn't have been able to smell anything. He was inside a sealed suit, breathing air from a compressor 40 meters away on the beach.

14:23That was the first thing Adler couldn't explain. Take a look please. Look at where the tentacle is coming out from. D-7569 struggled, grunted, and ground, trying to maneuver in the heavy suit. It's a hole. D-7569 said. Another one. It's like, I don't know, two yards across. Same as the one up top. It's just like black. I've got my light right on it, and it's just black. The light doesn't. How far down does it go into the dark? The tentacle thing? Shit. A couple feet, maybe. I can't see much from here because of the water in shit. He paused. You're not going to make me go in there, right? Adler looked at another monitor showing the inside of the hold. The camera was pointed at the exact spot where, from D-7569's perspective, the tentacle emerged. On this screen, there was nothing there. Please make your way into the opening. Adler said. Nope.

15:23Nope. No way. Continue down through the opening. You're not listening to... I am listening. I'd understand what you're getting at. Adler was losing his patience now. The descent dragged on for 11 minutes. As D-7569 argued and cursed through the headset, Adler felt his patience wearing thin, strangely thin. He wasn't normally a cruel man, but something about the situation was getting under his skin. D, but, he said, struggling to stay composed. Listen, it's been down there for 300 years. I don't give a fuck how long. Shut the fuck up and do it before I shove your ass in there myself. You worthless pedophile. Adler heard himself say that and was surprised. He didn't know he had it in himself. Blie's head came up from her clipboard. She looked at him for a good while. Then she looked back down. Nobody else said anything about it. Later, Adler would write the daily report. There was plenty of space to transcribe any verbal instructions.

16:26Adler left the pedophile bit out. D-7569 was quiet for a long while after hearing what Adler called him. And finally, at minute 11, D-7569 went down the hole. The picture on the monitor went dark, then grainy, then dark again, and the numbers on the depth counter kept climbing past anything the cordelia had room for. Hey, hey, wait, there, there's people down here. Adler pushed his headphones against his ears. Say again. There's fucking people down here. The image on the monitor was a shaky mess, and then it's deadied. Blie looked over at Adler, 20 meters below, at the bottom of a cavernous shaft that impossibly existed inside the cordelia, was a mess. They were bodies. They had been people once. They were tangled together in a knot the size of a small house, like a colossal rat king and the tentacle. The one they'd been observing slowly came out of the center of it. There's like 18, 19, fucking 20 of them.

17:29D-7569 was stuttering. There's like 20 at least. It's just bodies. It's a pile of bodies. Adler reached for the clipboard. Tell me that count again. Wait! D-7569 screamed, pull me up, pull me up, pull me the fuck up! Adler leaned closer to the monitor. If only this little shit would keep still for two seconds. He mused calmly. He'd get asked about that sentence a lot over the next few years, by the board, by a woman from site 19, eventually by himself, had fore in the morning, lying in the dark. He had his reasons and his answers, and all of them were true. This was research. He was D-class. This was what anyone would have done. D-7569 stopped bleeding and started screaming, and Adler started to see why. The mass began to move. The bodies twisted toward D-7569 in unison. The entire tangled heap, lurching in his direction. Their arms lifted and reached for him as though, after centuries of stillness, they had

18:31finally noticed something alive. The tentacle began making its way toward D-7569. The monitor's picture cut to static moments later. The audio held on longer than the video did. Adler, Bly, and the rest of the team heard all of it. Adler realized he probably should have pulled the man out. Bly had heard enough and stormed off to haul the line in herself. Hand over hand, boots braced in the sand. It came up empty. No hard suit. No D-class. It was quiet for a while. Everyone pretended like nothing happened. Twenty-six minutes later, the tentacle came slowly out of the hole and began patiently tapping on the deck. The night after Cal sent Jones' body overboard, the wind around the Cordelia died completely, none in the morning either, and none through the long hot day that followed. The Cordelia lay against the beach with her sails hanging like laundry. The men stood around and no one wanted to say anything. After a while, Cal walked to the deck and looked out at the water.

19:33He decided the weather was the issue, nothing to be concerned about. Cal hadn't been sleeping. The doldrums, he'd think. When sleep did come, it was in short bursts. The egg must have hatched some hour of that night while he was actually asleep. He'd thrown it far, but it wasn't as though he'd launched the thing into eternity. He woke to screaming from his men. He came up on deck with a lantern, cutless drawn, and found the deck was wet, soaked like a wave had washed across it moments before, and the crew was in chaos. These were men who had boarded Spanish merchant men with knives in their teeth and a thirst for blood. When they were running like a pack of wolves toward, Cal wasn't sure. Something near the main mast. We're taking on water! Someone yelled, we're being boarded. Another shouted, what guy's name is that thing? One exclaimed, a man named Barrow sprinted past Cal. Their shoulders touched. Barrow looked back at his captain, and Cal saw no fear in the man's face at no rage either. Only an absence, as though whatever had made him a man had left him.

20:37Well turned, and finally saw what the men were running toward. There was a hole in the deck, just forward of the main mast. It hadn't been there at sundown, when Cal had retired to his quarters. The edges splintered upward, and Cal understood, standing there holding his little lantern in the enormous dark, that something had burst through his ship from below. Cal never saw what took them. Something enormous moved near the main mast, swaying through the darkness, but he couldn't make out its shape. He didn't dare raise the lantern for a better look. Maybe it was fear, maybe the doldrums. Not seeing the thing was almost a mercy, because he could hear everything. Hardened sailors screamed in the dark, and he'd scream and did the same way. Suddenly, as the window had slammed shut. Realizing the lantern made him visible, Cal hurled it into the sea. He looked around, and when his eyes adjusted, Cal saw one man who wasn't moving. Paulus stood apart from the madness, perfectly still. He noticed Cal across the deck, and gave him a small, knowing nod.

21:39Then he cracked his neck, pushed his shoulders back, and slipped his hands into his pockets. He strolled toward the main mast, and, without hesitation, stepped into the hole. By the early hours of mourning, Cal was alone. He had slipped away from the chaos, and hidden near the mismast, hoping it would end without finding him. With his cutlass across his knees, he sat against the mast, and waited for dawn. While Cal waited, whatever had come aboard the Cordelia began talking to him. It didn't have a voice. Cal tried to explain it later in his journal, but couldn't. The things simply appeared beside his own thoughts, placing complete ideas into his mind, as though they had always been there. And whatever was inside Cal's head was amused. It found Cal funny, and the crew's reaction to its appearance even funnier. It had spent only a day and a night in the sea. Cal had thrown it there himself, believing he was rid of it. And now the things seemed amused by the thought. It had simply come back to him, like a dog he'd tried to drown.

22:41But the ship wasn't its home. Somehow the hole was, and it showed Cal what lay inside. When he looked deep into the opening, there was no sea down there. No hold, either. Not the hold he knew, at least. It was another place. And in that place, nothing moved, and nothing spoiled, and nothing came to an end. His men were down there. His men were down there now, and they'd be down there tomorrow. And they'd be down there when the star they called the sun burned out. And the men were not dead. Death takes time. There was no time in there. Cal wrote his last entry at noon the following day. The sun burning overhead, and the world holding its breath. It hatched, he wrote. And everything is gone. He looked at the sentence with contempt. They weren't gone. They were just somewhere else, somewhere out of time, where the world didn't spin and everything was kept still. What it stilled, for lack of a better word, it owned. Cal thought about writing what he'd done to Jones, a sort of confession, so someone

23:44could know what happened. He couldn't bring himself to put it on the page. Such permanence got him to the core. Maybe it was cowardice. Maybe it was envy. Perhaps the doldrums. Jones was dead, bobbing in the water beside the ship, and the thing didn't take him. It never wanted Jones. It only ever wanted the living. Forty-one men. Jones would be the only one who actually got out. Cal looked up from the journal and eyed the hole from a distance. It held his attention so long that he wasn't aware of what was happening to the Cordelia. The tentacle had been sprawled across the deck, inviting the stillness to begin spreading over the ship like frost on a window. First, the sails, then the rigging. Then the ship itself went quiet. The grinding of the hull against the sand simply stopped. He looked around and nothing appeared any different. He reached out to touch the wood and couldn't make contact. A small space, no wider than his finger, stood between his hand and the ship. His feet weren't touching the deck either.

24:46They were hovering above it, the same distance, exactly. Cal understood then that it wasn't just an opening. Something was leaking through. Cal thought about getting off the ship and just swimming somewhere. He thought about it seriously for maybe half an hour. There was fruit on an island somewhere. There'd be water, too, and a man could live. He could bring himself to do it. Blame it on the doldrums. Cal looked at the water, then the sky, inside. His thoughts returned to Hollis. He entered down the shore, a gall cried. Cal stepped into his quarters just long enough to leave the journal on his desk. When he came out, he could barely see in the afternoon glare. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Then Cal stood up straight, walked across the deck, a fingers width above it, the whole way, and stepped into the hull. The recovery team didn't pull anything else from the captain's quarters at first, just the journal. Adler read it more times than he could count. Captain Ambrose Cal's reference to Napoleon meant the journal couldn't have been written

25:50before the end of the 18th century. Yet the dating tests insisted the journal, the chart, and the other artifacts recovered from the Cordelia were nearly 300 years old. It was another contradiction Adler couldn't explain. It took Adler another year at the outpost beside the Cordelia before he finally put his thoughts into a report. He finished it alone in his quarters at four in the morning. Adler felt that it was a good report. The review board convened in the spring. He answered every question they had, and all of his answers were true. A woman from Site 19 came out in July and asked the same questions in a different order, and he gave her the same answers, and they were still true. Nobody raised their voice. At the end of it, they thanked him for his time, revised the approach procedure, and Adler kept his post. Adler replied, transferred out in August. Before leaving, she asked Adler if he was satisfied with what happened to D-7569. Adler told her he wasn't satisfied.

26:51He was still curious. The outpost lived on. New personnel arrived and were briefed, and were told not to approach the hull. Every one of them approached the hull anyway, within the first month, and stood there with a hand out flat until their shoulders ached. Then they stopped talking about it. Adler watched the old footage of D-7569 again and again. Before long, Adler knew the recording by heart. He remembered the moment the image turned grainy, the instant the tangled mass began to move, and the screams that continued after the video went dark. The wet season came and brought the rain with it. Rain hammered the roof of Adler's quarters as he stood at the window, staring out at the cordelia. Out past the lights, the cordelia sat where she'd sat, holding her sails flat in a wind that couldn't touch them. Somewhere, under all that sand, in a room the size of a cottage where time had no meaning, the massive men were still alive. For years, Adler had wondered how the tentacle knew what was alive. Then, one night, the answer came to him.

27:53The tentacle didn't know. The cordelia did. Every living person who approached the ship was held of fingers with the way. You could walk her decks, climb her ladders, and move through the corridors. But you could never actually touch her. She'd hop a stone through the opening, and it simply landed in the hold below. But living things were different. There was exactly one place on the entire ship where they were allowed to pass through. The whole. It wasn't really a hole at all. It was a door. And the invisible barrier surrounding the cordelia wasn't keeping people out. It was keeping them from going anywhere else. The realization should have terrified Adler. Instead, he felt strangely calm. Adler had written about that feeling again and again in his journal. The doldrums. Adler looked away from the window. Before long, he was outside, crossing the rain soaked sand toward the cordelia. He thought of D7569 of Kel, of the men still trapped somewhere beneath the ship, in a

28:55place where nothing aged and nothing died. He could still turn back. He didn't. Adler climbed onto the platform and stood above the opening. The rain stung his face. For one brief moment, the wind whipped through his hair. Then he stepped into the hole. He kept his eyes closed. SCP-1734 is a grounded 18th century full rigged British frigate, with considerable damage to the structure, but relatively little evidence of deterioration. The nature of this anomaly is poorly understood, extending from the exterior side of the anomaly is a tentacle. The entire vessel appears to be isolated from all surrounding matter. Direct contact with the structure of the vessel appears to be impossible. Matter cannot come closer than one centimeter of the walls, floor, ceiling, and supports. This phenomenon does not appear to be hazardous to the material it repels. Artifacts recovered from the ship, however, demonstrate decay and contain material which

30:00suggest that it has been grounded for almost 300 years. Due to this, it is impossible to move or alter any portion of the ship, but items unattached to the structure are unaffected by the phenomenon and exhibit no anomalous properties. Thanks for listening. Be sure to click that follow button with all notifications on to get notified every time a new episode is released.