Sailors have overactive imaginations. They can’t help it. They’re bored, they’re overworked, and for months at a time, the only view they have is the ocean blue.

But boredom does make for good legends, and in a way, it turns every sailor into a storyteller. It’s part of the job.

After a lifetime of midnight watches there’s no seasoned seaman that hasn’t seen something he can’t quite explain. Lights in the distance, orbs in the sky, or strange beasts propelling through the water.

I’ve heard it all and after nine years of sailing, I was still waiting on my story. It came when they all do, 2am, not enough caffeine. I was aboard The Gold Maris, but there was nothing gold about it.

It was a beat-to-shit bulk-carrier that had seen nearly thirty years of salt water. We were underway, with a load of 35,000 tons of scrap metal we’d picked up in Peru and were taking to China.

It was September, and a storm that brewed in the Solomon Sea was gathering strength as it headed east, into the South Pacific. It was no hurricane, just a simple tropical storm. But still, waves of thirty-five-feet were reported by passing vessels.

Our crew did what the crews of all junk boats do when they hear that a storm is coming; we got quiet. Real quiet.

At dinner time, there was nothing but the sound of silverware clinking on plates. No conversation, not so much as a “pass the ketchup.” This is the time we took to reevaluate our lives. Big black letters were written on the white board in the galley. A warning in English and Filipino:

ROUGH WEATHER. SECURE ALL ITEMS IN YOUR ROOMS. DO NOT GO ON DECK.

The “do not go on deck” part was for those looking to have a smoke. Doing deck rounds was part of my job.

I was on the bridge as wheelsman that night and every four hours when I traded shifts, I had to walk the length of the ship to make sure everything was secure for the storm.

2am rolled around and Johnny came to replace me. One of the most redeemable things about work is that it forces you to be friends with people you’d never imagine you’d get along with. Johnny was a Filipino sailor, 62 years-old, in a perpetually good mood, and loved to eat all the best cereal before I could get my hands on it.

“Sup, Johnny.” I said, as he came up the stairs to take watch.

“Hey, man!” Johnny walked carefully, balancing a bowl of cereal in his hands.

“You save me some Cookie Crisp?”

“It’s in the stash. Still about two boxes.”

I groaned in pleasure. I’d recently traded smoking for sweets. “Alright, I gotta do my walk around first.”

“Wow,” said Johnny, turning to face the windows. “Light show.” We stood in silence, watching the violet lighting in the distance strike the sea. “Beautiful.”

“I better go before it starts pouring.” I threw on my orange rain jacket and went out the starboard door to the deck. The warm Pacific wind was my favorite part of doing these routes. Peru to China is four boring weeks but that tropical breeze was my balm.

But now the wind was icy. At least to my summer skin it was. I bunched my shoulders up against the cold. “Fuck, fucking, fuck.” I’d fully embraced sailor as my second language, and I muttered more curses as I walked down the metal stairs.

I was supposed to check on a few things. The Jacobs ladder, the midships depth reader, and I had to make sure the clamps on all the cargo doors were secure.

It was hard to keep my attention on anything but the flash of lightning. The world would illuminate purple and I’d pause, a little stunned by how there still wasn’t so much as a rumble on the wind. The only sound was the ever-present hum of the diesel engines.

The hatches were secure; they always were. The depth reader was all chained up and the Jacob’s ladder could’ve used another knot to secure it to the railing, but the second I bent to fix it, the sky opened. Pounding, pouring rain. It punched loudly on my waxed hood.

I decided the ladder was good enough and that I was going to get out of this shit and have some cereal. But for some reason I stayed standing at the railing. The sea was finally beginning to look like a storm was coming. The wind blew the rain harder and horizontal, but I didn’t shield my eyes. I widened them in horror.

I could only see it when the lightening flashed, but that was plenty enough. There was something beneath the waves. A great moving mass. It was about a hundred yards off the port-side railing and traveling at the same speed of the ship.

I kept staring at it, expecting it to disappear or suddenly make sense. But the longer I looked, the more disturbed I became. I blinked, wiped my face, did every one of those clichés that those who can’t believe their eyes do.

It was too big to be a whale at several hundred feet long. Not to mention it was moving too fast, its speed too steady.

There was a crash of thunder and I dropped my flashlight. It rolled quickly on the slick deck and fell into the ocean, vanishing the moment it hit the water.

I stumbled and started running back to the bridge. I raced up the stairs and threw open the door to the pilothouse. “Johnny! Johnny, you gotta come see this. I need to know if I’m losing my mind or not.”

“What is it?”

“There’s something in the water.”

He raised his brow and stood. It was against the rules to leave the pilothouse empty while we were underway, but our captain wasn’t big on maritime rules nor was there much to worry about hitting. Even if we spotted a rogue wave it wasn’t like there’d be enough time to steer our slow, clunky ship so the wave didn’t roll us.

“Ok, I’ll come see. But quickly.”

The two of us clomped down the metal staircase and practically jogged down the deck. “There!” The dark mass was just where I had last seen it. Johnny squinted. He was older and with his wet glasses, I realized he might not be able to see much past the railing.

I turned to look at him, expecting to see a smile that said what a fool. Instead, the color had left his face. He stared slack-jawed into the water.

“Johnny?!” The rain was coming down so hard I had to yell and the length between lightning strikes was getting longer.

“Itim Pating.” Johnny whispered, with his eyes still fixed on the water.

“What?!” I didn’t often see him without a grin. I bounced on my toes, cold and anxious.

“Black shark.”

“What’s that?”

Suddenly, Johnny extended his finger, suggesting I follow his gaze. I looked back to the water to see the black shadow was slowing. It was going to be behind the ship soon.

“We have to go,” said Johnny.

“Go?!” I shouted. “The fuck does that mean? Go where?”

Johnny didn’t answer, he started speed-walking back toward the pilothouse. “We need to disable the radar. The radio.” He shouted.

Then something hit the ship. It struck the bow and the whole ship lurched. We both fell and it wasn’t until I felt my stomach drop from a lack of gravity that I realized we’d hit a wave. A giant one. The ship was pointed down now, we were in a racing descent into the trough of the wave. Johnny and I rolled down the deck. I was able to grab onto the railing, but Johnny kept tumbling.

The ship leveled out at the bottom of the wave and I suddenly didn’t have to hold on for dear life, but there’d be waves just like it.

“Johnny!” I shouted. I’d lost track of him. I heard a distant murmur and then I saw him. The Jacob’s ladder had unfurled overboard. It was still attached to the railing and Johnny clung to a rung as the ladder dangled against the side of the ship.

I ran to where he was. “Hey!” I dropped to my stomach and reached my hand down, but he didn’t react. If another wave hit now, I was a dead man. I wasn’t bracing myself or anything. I just wanted to save Johnny.

His glasses were bent and broken on his face. The lens from one had shattered against his cheek and blood streaked down to drip off his chin.

“Come on. Give me your hand.” He was reluctant but he gave in. I pulled him back up and over the railing, but he immediately fell clutching his leg. “Ah!” He screamed in pain.

“What?! What is it?”

“My leg, I think it’s broken.”

“If we wait for a stretcher, we die.”

Johnny bit his lip and nodded. I threw my arm across his shoulders and we hobbled our way back to the bridge.

The wave was big enough to warrant a muster alarm. The entire crew was gathering in the galley to assess potential damage to the ship and themselves. Me and a couple of the engineers took Johnny the rest of the way to his room. We laid him on his bed and did our best to keep his leg braced but this was a junk boat. Even if we were carrying a load of gold our parent company still wouldn’t pay to have a doctor aboard.

We applied basic first aid in the form of a pint of brandy.

I stayed by Johnny’s side while one of the engineers went back to their duties. Thomas stayed. He was my second favorite person on the ship behind Johnny. We were both from the Midwest and bonded over being landlocked sailors. He was a good kid, kind to everyone and the youngest on board at 22 years old. Maritime was an aging profession, and it was lucky to have a young bright boy in Thomas.

Most of the crew came to check on Johnny over the next hour, but when the weather got rougher everyone stayed in their rooms. After Thomas left, too, we were quiet for several minutes. I sat on a milkcrate next to his bed and clung to steam pipe to keep from sliding across the floor as we were tossed by the sea.

The adrenaline rush from the wave and Johnny’s injury almost made me forget about what we’d seen in the water. I give him another sip of brandy and then spoke. “Now are you going to tell me what the hell that was out there?”

Johnny stared at the ceiling for a moment. “There was a ship 20 years ago. It was a traveling a route similar to ours. It went down in a storm, supposedly. But the last message it’s captain ever sent out was that they were being followed. When he was asked by what, he said was itim pating, black shark. Something dark, just beneath the surface, hundreds of feet long was watching them. Waiting.”

I had heard so many legends of strange things at sea I couldn’t exactly remember if I had heard of this before, but it sounded familiar. “Those are just stories, Johnny.”

He shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “I had a cousin who was on permanent route pretty much the same as that one. Not too different from ours now. Chile to China. Loading copper and coming back for more every month. One day, there’s a storm approaching and from the stern deck the whole crew gathered to watch this thing that followed them in the distance. He wasn’t a superstitious guy. He joked about it to his wife on a satellite call. He said it was the Black Shark. That was the last contact anyone had with a crew member of that ship.”

“It sunk?”

“A three-year-old Panamax. A brand-new ship, and it sinks in a little cyclone. Every ship that’s ever seen the Black Shark, that has had crew that actually reported it, has sunk just days later.”

I had to brace myself and Johnny’s trash can went racing across the floor as a wave tilted us sideways. “Except for one.”

The lights suddenly turned off and the weak yellow glow of the emergency bulbs took their place. I felt my heart racing in my chest. Every ten seconds a wave would boom against the bow and its echo would ring through the entire ship. I pictured that thing out there, just beneath the surface, preparing to sink us to the bottom of the sea.

“What did they do? How’d they get away?”

“It was a fishing vessel, but no small ship. 250 feet long, 10,000 tons of storage. A beast for its class. One day, they saw the Black Shark and there wasn’t a single non-believing man on that boat. They knew legends and they thought they were dead men, so they did what they could to try and save themselves.

They destroyed their radar, their radio. They threw their EPIRB overboard and even set the lifeboat loose as a diversion so the Black Shark would think they were in it. They sailed as a ghost ship for two weeks before reaching port, but they reached land, alive.”

“So, I’d need to commit international felonies to save us? I’d go to prison even if we made it to port in one piece.”

“I know. But it’s worth a try, otherwise this metal piece of shit will be our tomb.” The word “tomb” coincided with a massive wave that threw me against the wall. Johnny grimaced as he braced himself in bed. “And of course,” he caught he breath and continued. “The lights are off. They might not even catch you.”

I tapped my foot anxiously. “This thing, it sinks ships, but why? What’s the reason? Are there any legends that answers that?”

Johnny pursed his lips and swallowed. “Well... yes. All the sightings have been near here. The South Pacific and not all that far from Point Nemo.”

If you haven’t heard of it, Point Nemo is the furthest place you can be from dry land on planet earth. 1670 miles until land-ho. The exact location sits somewhere in the southwestern Pacific, although there’s no actual marker.

There are no shipping routes nearby and there sure as shit isn’t any fishing.

If you’re there, it’s just you and the ocean blue. Or so sailors have always thought…

“Why Point Nemo?”

“It brings the boats there and once the sailors are drowned… They come back. There’s been reports of sailors lost at sea returning to their home ports. But something has taken them over. Like a creature, using their bodies as a human host.”

Scary stories are told at campfires because of the frightful setting—woods, darkness, sleeping with a thin layer of plastic between you and the world—it all amplifies the terror. But here, in this doomed boat, a thousand miles from anything, Johnny’s story hit a nerve a campfire tale couldn’t hope to touch. I was beginning to sweat with nervous fear.

I got up to leave, and Johnny took my hand. “Do what you think is best but make up your mind. We don’t have much time.”

I left his room and stood in the dark hall. I wasn’t scheduled for a watch shift in the pilothouse until the afternoon and by then the captain would be there too, surveying our passage through the storm. I needed to destroy the radio in there, but there were other things on Johnny’s list I could do, but I needed to act quick.

I went to the windlass room where we kept our cold weather and rain gear and swapped rain jackets. The crew would recognize me in my orange coat, but in the forest green one I donned I’d be invisible in the dark and the rain. Before I left, I paused. Sitting above a coil of hose was a fire axe. I snatched it and made my way outside.

I raced up the outside stairs that ran up the side of the bridge. It was slow going, from the waves and the wind I was being tossed back and forth against the railings. When I got to the landing that faced the windows to the pilothouse, I could see the captain and 2nd mate inside. I ducked quickly but realized I didn’t have to; with how hard it was raining they probably couldn’t see anything outside.

The emergency positioning device was secured by our life vessel. The EPIRB was meant to be taken if we abandoned ship so rescuers would know where to find us.

Our lifeboat was not an inflatable raft, nor an oar boat. It was a large cylinder that launched from a slide on the stern of the ship. I took the EPIRB off the wall and hurled it into the ocean.

Then I devised a plan. Disabling the radar, radio, and lifeboat would all alert attention. But I’d start with the radar. When they came out of the pilothouse to look at the dish, I’d smash the radio inside and when they were busy wondering what the hell happened to the radio, I’d launch the lifeboat.

Simple enough. I climbed the ladder to the very top of the bridge. The radar dish was sturdy, but the fire ax was sturdier. I quickly severed it from its stand. I double-timed it down the ladder. Without radar, we were dead in the water, and both the captain and 2nd mate burst out of the pilothouse to inspect what was going. I took the opportunity to sneak inside, and with just a dozen swings of the ax, I made the entire bridge of the ship useless.

Sparks shot up from the control panels and the cheap radio exploded into a million pieces. Now, I just had the lifeboat.

Down the steps, around the bend and I was there. I lifted the ax above my head. Instead of undoing the ropes and pulling the cord I was just going to cut it. But something caught my eye before I swung; Thomas was staring at me in horror.

“Jake, is that you?”

I brought the ax down, gently. Thomas was halfway out the stern door that led towards the cabins. He held one of the ship’s satellite phones in his hand. I frowned at him and for some reason he acted like he was the guilty one.

“I know it looks hopeless and it is,” he gestured at the sat phone. “I was just trying to get reception out here to call my dad, this storm has me a little spooked.” He came to his senses and pointed at me. “But what’re you doing with that thing?”

We both looked up as we heard shouting coming from outside the pilothouse, suddenly, an alarm began to blare.

“Thomas, there’s no time to explain. But if I don’t deploy the lifeboat, we could all die.”

He took a step toward me. “Jake, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s why I said I have no time to explain!” People were moving around now, and any second someone would spot me with the ax. I was sure to be bound and gagged by the crew.

“Let me do this!” I hefted the ax up again to slice the rope but flinched as Thomas lunged at me.

“We could need the lifeboat, Jake! What the hell are you doing?!” He grunted as he wrestled over the ax. I swept his legs out from under him and he hit the deck hard. “Thomas, listen—”

But suddenly he opened his mouth to scream. I didn’t know what I was doing, a part of my brain thought it would just shut him up, that’s all. The ax slid from my hands toward his mouth.

I didn’t think it would be a fatal blow, but fire axes are razor sharp and weighted. The blade sliced through his face like butter and dinged against the deck.

Thomas was still looking at me, the ax head sticking out where his mouth should be. I still can’t unsee it. I turned away and tossed the ax overboard, when I looked back to Thomas I leaned over the railing and vomited. Thankfully the life had already left his eyes. The blade must’ve gone all the way to his spinal cord.

I had to get rid of his body. The rain would wash away the blood and luckily, he was light. I scooped him in my arms and with a gentle toss his body cleared the rail. With the rain and the wind, I didn’t even hear the splash.

I ducked back into the bridge before I could be seen.

I lost the green raincoat and put on my regular one and went to the galley where the rest of the crew was gathering in alarm. Luckily, I wasn’t the last man there and suspicion for the sabotage would likely fall on whatever poor soul was late.

We were still missing some crew when the captain and 2nd mate came storming in. The crew all straightened up when they realized our stocky captain was leveling a pistol in front of his belly.

“Someone’s sabotaged the ship.” He walked slowly, his boots echoing on the linoleum. “Now, we’ll be doing rollcall—”

“Captain!” Every head spun to the look at the speaker. It was Louis, the 2nd cook. “It might have something to do with what’s been following us off the port side for the last two days…”

The crew began to mutter. “Quiet!” said the captain. “What’re you talking about?”

Beads of sweat appeared on Louis’s upper lip and brow, it looked like he was trying not to tremble. “I didn’t want to scare everyone. I didn’t want to believe it. But on watch, I saw an object, dark and giant cruising beneath the water.”

I heard some men mutter, “Black Shark.” Some stared ahead in horror while other’s squinted, confused.

“Itim pating?” said the captain with a laugh. “What’s that have to do with someone destroying the fucking bridge?! We’re dead in the water. We have no bearing but a compass. Do you not get that?!” He thundered at the room. “Now, who are we missing?”

The crew looked at each other. “Thomas,” said the chief engineer suddenly. “We’re missing Thomas.”

Hearing his name made my stomach drop. What have I done?

The captain pointed. “Go check his room. In the meantime, we’re going to see about those legends, Louis.”

I watched Louis gulp nervously and we followed the captain, shuffling out towards the stern deck as silent as a funeral procession.

Outside, the rain was still pounding down. “Fire up the spotlights!” shouted the captain. A few crew members went forward to the deck lights that were attached to the stern railing. They cranked them to full blast and began sweeping the beams of light across the sea.

Thirty seconds passed in silence as they searched. Then a minute. “It’s too dark! The water’s too rough to see, sir!”

The captain looked towards the eastern horizon. “Then we’ll wait until dawn.” The crew started making their way back inside, but the captain shouted. “Out here!”

For the next hour we stood silent in the pouring rain. We were freezing and soaked, tired as all hell but we had to keep our bodies flexed and alert to keep from toppling over when we were rocked by waves.

It felt like an eternity until the sun rose behind the storm clouds. The water went from black to gunmetal grey and we could see more by the minute.

Suddenly, one of the men on the spotlights raised his arm in a point. He didn’t shout or call out. We were still silent, jostling over one another to see what he was pointing to.

There, not far off the port side was a long black shadow, just like I had seen earlier in the night.

“What the hell is that?”

“Shh,” said the captain as he went to the railing. We watched it for several minutes, no one daring to speak. It was like the first time I saw it; we were hoping the shadow under the waves would suddenly make sense, or simply disappear. But we had so luck, in fact we gasped as the mass began to breach.

“It’s coming up,” said Louis. “Oh my god, it’s coming up.”

It broke the surface of the water and white suds splashed off its sides as it came to rest.

The crew started smiling and laughing. I found myself jeering too. The black mass was a submarine, at least it looked like one. All this time our minds were on sea monsters and aliens. But this appeared to be man-made, but only for a moment.

We got quiet again as we noticed it was missing a bridge. The classic fin that juts up on the top of every submarine was missing. It was one complete tube with no markings. No ship numbers. Nothing.

Then we flinched back as we saw its black steel shimmer. Something was wrong. It wasn’t like any submarine I’d ever seen. The crew started to shout in fear and in the commotion, I grabbed Louis and whispered close.

“Louis, it was me. I destroyed the bridge and launched the lifeboat. Johnny told me the story of the only ship that got away from this thing. It’s done. I already did all we could.”

Louis stared up at me in disbelief. “You did what?!”

“The fishing vessel, maybe you haven’t heard of it, but a ship once got away from the Black Shark. They destroyed their radar. They went dark.”

“No,” Louis swatted my hand off him. “You fucking idiot. The only crew to ever escape from the Black Shark abandoned ship in the life raft and radioed the U.S. military. You… you killed us. We’re dead in the water. Who told you to destroy this ship?”

I didn’t answer him. I turned and started running toward Johnny’s room. I flung open his door and at first, I didn’t think he was on his bed. It was looked empty.

But as I approached, I noticed a stench. Organic iron; blood. And there on the bed was Johnny, but he was…empty. There was nothing left but his skin, and his back was a gory mess, something had burst out of him and left his flesh grotesque and deflated. His eyelids and cheeks were empty like a Halloween mask. It was as if something had been wearing him as a human suit.

Then his words came back to me. He’d been telling me the truth about the Black Shark. How sailors that it killed come back with something living inside them. Human hosts, he had said. And he was one of them. I had listened to his lies about disabling the ship, launching the lifeboat and now, we were doomed.

I’m sending this message out in hopes a satellite can pick it up. There’s a chance that one comes in range for a brief time. Just long enough for my story to be sent out from this damned ship.

When I walked back to the stern deck, most the crew were still there. The submarine however, had gone beneath the waves again.

The captain swung a compass. “We’re back tracking,” he said. “The ship can’t be steered and we’re heading southeast.” But I didn’t need to hear his reading to know exactly where we were going.

We were headed right toward Point Nemo.