An account of the perfect trap;

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”

H.P. Lovecraft

I am a diver, and so I have worked all over the world in all aspects of the diving industry: from teaching my craft and repairing boats, to accompanying teams of speleologists into the most remote regions of the world. My skills have been internationally recognized multiple times, which is why it didn't really surprise me that after deciding to settle down in England for a while, I was soon contacted by the authorities and requested that I offered my help in certain, particularly tricky cases. England is renowned for its humidity, full of rivers, canals, lakes, swamps and whatnot, usually very heavily sedimented and cold and therefore difficult to navigate from down under. I assisted in a few minor cases before stumbling upon the one I'm about to refer to you, the case to end all cases – literally, the case that put my brief career as a consultant diver, as I fancied calling myself, to an abrupt end.

You might have heard the Bolton Strid is one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world, a seemingly innocent, narrow section of the River Wharfe, unassumingly flowing through a forest in Yorkshire. In truth, this alleged stream is no less than the river itself turned on its side, cutting through the land like a knife instead of stretching over it, its banks slippery overhangs that hide unpredictable, violent currents underneath. A family from the south had been having a picnic close to the Strid about a week earlier to me being summoned, when their eight-year-old boy, after excusing himself to go relieve himself in the woods, never came back to the group. At first they thought him kidnapped, which is why I wasn’t contacted earlier, but after talking to locals the family had become convinced that the child, curious by nature, had fallen into the Strid – hypothesis the police had discarded early after not finding his body further down the current. To ease the family's mind and explore all possibilities, I was to look for him inside it.

After asking a fellow diver friend living nearby to spot me from the surface, we drove up to Yorkshire together. I am still not sure whether it was out of naivety or professional arrogance that I didn’t think a place famous locally for having a 100% mortality rate would be quite the challenge, but I had never given much credit to local legends of the sort. People tend to see both their Gods and their worst fears reflected in deep waters, and so working in what I do I had already heard more than my share of stories about damned and deadly waterfalls, lakes and rivers, inhabited by spirits and ghosts at times. Never had I seen any, and I had always come out alive, no matter the perilousness of my profession. Also, the pay they were offering was very good, so I simply didn't give it much thought before I took the job; in my mind, I was simply going on a brief expedition to give a mourning family some peace of mind.

So there I was, getting my kit on at a safe distance from the moss-covered slippery banks of the Strid, with the child's father profusely thanking me for agreeing to help in such an infamous location. I reassured him that it was the least I could do as a professional and that it would all be over in a flash. After attaching myself to the security rope, I made sure once again that I had everything I could possibly need to ensure my safety, including testing my lantern one more time, after which I was ready to go. I carefully made my way to the area we had agreed would be the safest way of entry into the water, put my feet in, then knees and, once I deemed it safe, jumped in.

The water was cold and turbulent and I could feel the current moving strongly in circular patterns and constantly lifting sediment, thus making visibility very low. I felt a single pull on the rope: my spotter wanting to know whether I was okay. I pulled back to signal I was alright, waited a couple of seconds and pulled three more times, indicating I was going deeper and needed some more rope. If the boy was down there, he had probably been dragged downstream before getting tangled or trapped and drowning. I pointed my lantern to the banks and I saw that about three-quarters of a metre of rock had been eroded away on either side, making the Strid almost twice as wide as it appeared from the surface. The depth was hard to measure accurately but I estimated it to be between three and four metres – the perfect trap, I thought. Anyone could easily dismiss the Strid as a regular, knee-deep stream, try to step over it and fall to become trapped in the swirling currents. I descended to about mid-depth and swam downstream as steadily as I could manage, pointing my lantern down at the riverbed, looking out for anything unusual. After about 10 minutes of swimming with difficulty, I spotted a dark shape behind a boulder that I seemed to be led to by the current. Not a body, but perhaps a small cave dug by an animal, or a patch of softer rock eroded away; either way, a possible place for the body to have become stuck. After getting closer to it the push of the water felt very much stronger, and aiming my lantern inside made it clear that whatever formation it was, it was not small.

I pulled on the rope three more times, again to signal for leeway, and examined the opening more closely: the edges had been eroded into a sharp shape somehow, so if I was to get in I would need to be very careful not to cut myself or my equipment. I shimmied into the opening as mindfully as I could and about a metre in I identified it as a tunnel, that led quite deep into the riverside. Unusual circular markings covered the walls of hard rock, which I thought to attribute to the circular motion of the currents. I began to make my way inside, having shamefully forgotten at this point about my true reason to be exploring those downings, and after taking some photographs I noticed my flash illuminated some other very faint, completely irregular markings, particularly gathered around certain narrower sections.

As I began to consider that those markings resembled scratches too much for my liking, I felt the water come up more strongly from behind me, violently pushing me inside. I protected my head with my arms and held tightly onto my lantern as I was propelled, bumping into the walls and tearing my wetsuit around my elbows and knees, stopping only when I came into a much bigger space. Dizzy and disoriented, not quite able to tell up from down, I first made sure that my oxygen tank was intact, and that I had also been able to hold on to my camera. It became obvious that anything that fell into the Strid while the currents were powerful could have easily been sucked in through the tunnel, thus explaining the scratches and impact marks on the walls. Three other automatic realizations at that moment made the sinking feeling in my stomach heavier still: first, that the number of marks I had seen most certainly belonged to multiple beings, as opposed to only a few; second, that had I not been breathing into my oxygen tank, or had it broken, I would have most certainly drowned by now, and therefore anybody else that had ever been dragged through that tunnel had most assuredly died and third, that perhaps the boy’s body had come to be in this same place.

After becoming aware of this last fact I completely awoke to my surroundings once again, the pitch-black inside of what appeared to be a very big cave. Before moving on to any further investigating, I tried to follow the rope attached to my back into the opening I had been propelled through and didn’t feel surprised to see it had been torn, probably by the sharp edge at the entrance to the tunnel. In those circumstances, it was probably for the best: I needed absolute mobility to find my way around that cave. Slightly better oriented now, I pointed my lantern to what I thought must be upwards and felt a warm wave of relief to see what looked like the surface, as a bubble of air had found its way into the enormous cave somehow. That was a good sign, so I swam towards it.

Before going any further, I advise that you seriously consider whether you want to continue. What I am about to relate is graphic and for the sake of truth and accuracy, I will spare no detail.

As my head emerged out of the water I explored the surroundings with my lantern, thinking to myself this was probably the first time those walls had seen light, and thus feeling a slight sense of the explorer’s pride amongst the uneasiness that dominated me. The equally chasm-like roof of the cave loomed roughly two and a half metres over my head and the water looked dark, like asphalt, and felt just as dense; I was feeling increasingly tired just by keeping myself afloat and staying awake got harder by the minute. The air strongly smelled of stagnant water and… wet soil? The overpowering scents and my general malaise were making me feel nauseous; my eyes were now heavy, my eyesight beginning to blur, my mind sluggish. I decided to rely on my ears felt like the safest bet, given the general state of me, and so after focusing for what was probably a minute I thought could hear water dripping to my left and turned to face it. There I found a small platform covered in pebbles and soil standing before another opening in the rock wall, likely a continuation of the cave that may very well have led to the forest above, and was thus probably how air had found its way inside. I felt immensely relieved for a split second. Then, lying on the platform, I noticed a pale figure that glistened with the light of my lantern, contrasting almost cinematically with the dismal background: it took my battered mind a minute to realize it was a body, and a minute more to associate the body to the missing boy. His clothes were ripped to shreds, the skin on his knees and forearms raw where mine would’ve been were it not for my wetsuit. My blood dropped to my feet as he stared into my soul with white, lifeless eyes and a slightly aghast mouth as if still faintly screaming, the veins in his face intensely blue and, before his face… A stump?

“What happened to his hand?”, I thought, my brain deciding to fixate on this for some reason.

I repeated this question obsessively in my head as I swam towards him, making my way through a viscous darkness that didn’t feel like water anymore. No, water I knew. Water was my element but this felt – this felt like passing through that tunnel had deposited me in someone else’s, something else’s, domain. There was no experience anyone could draw upon to make this feel okay. It was so dark and dense that liquid and gas felt like the same thing, like I was either breathing underwater or floating in the air – which one, it didn’t matter. I dragged my body through the space to come to be next to his, I could imagine his terror when coming to be in a place like this, completely unwarned, swallowed up by impenetrable gloom. I reached out to feel his almost translucent, ice-cold cheek and that’s when I first heard it.

A crunch, like stepping on a leaf in autumn, in the sepulchral silence of the cave.

I froze. Every hair on my body stood on end and my mind was forced to sharpen, to push the fog away and come to meet me where I was: next to a dead boy in a cold, dark corner of the world, suddenly without even the consolation of intimacy. The cave didn’t feel empty anymore. I remember shutting my eyes tightly and consciously mustering every ounce of aplomb and courage I could find within myself to hold on tight to my lantern and point it upwards, behind the body. What met me there still defiles my dreams to this day, etched behind my eyelids for eternity. After years of trying, I now know that no amount of describing or rewriting will in any way do justice to the hideousness, the horror of that moment alone, in that place, with that creature. All I can recount accurately is that, not a metre away from my face, I was confronted by too many intensely yellow, widely open eyes, staring at me in fury, in defensiveness, its tentacles or grippers tightly wrapped around the boy’s right arm and in its hairy mouth a hint of bloody slime… A creature that seemed able to take the form of our own worst nightmares, it certainly knew mine. The Strid was indeed the perfect trap – and I evidently wasn’t the only one who had come to this conclusion: this thing had made it into its lair.

I quickly jumped back, screaming in profound agony to get away from such an abomination. Violently writhing, the entity scampered back into the deeper cave. Taken to where he knew he would never return, I could have sworn I saw the boy’s face contract into the deepest anguish, reaching out to me with the stump where he could probably still feel his fingers. Terrified, my limbs failed me and I dropped my lantern, which sank together with my heart four, five, six meters down to the bottom of the cave. I stayed there, completely unable to control or command my body, looking down at my lantern and feeling my own spirit drown. Everything that was not in that cave, everything I had ever known felt a whole dimension away, and rejoining that dimension through the cave connected to the forest was simply not feasible, I had no way of making my way past that thing.

The creature. Remembering it set my body back in motion, I secured my oxygen mask and quickly dove to retrieve my one source of light, my only hope to find my way back through the tunnel, into the Strid, and into the real world, far away from that strange dimension. Being at the bottom of that cave confirmed my earlier suspicions that the tunnel served as a vacuum that dragged inside anything that came close to it. Before me, countless skeletons of all sorts of small animals piled up completely cleaned out, some seemed like recent additions while others were covered in silt, beginning to break down predictably after years of sitting underwater. As I swam above the animal remains something glistened in the corner of my eye. I grabbed my lantern from inside the ribcage of what looked like a fox, and pointed in the direction of the shimmer: an ancient-looking ring stubbornly remained around a skeletal human hand, clearly one of the oldest sets of remains I had so far seen down there. I rushed to examine it, momentarily postponing my reasons to scarper in the foolish name of science and noticed faint, half faded away teeth markings on its skull and next to it, more human remains. I went through the space with my lantern one last time to confirm my latest and most horrifying suspicion: the human remains had been arranged separately from the animal remains.

The creature knew the difference.

Why it didn’t come after me before I could leave, I don’t know. Perhaps because it already had its food for the next few days attained, perhaps because my lantern scared or momentarily blinded it, perhaps because I left no trace of blood for it to follow. What matters is I found my way through the tunnel back into the Strid, retching and wrenching. The sole reason I made it out was, again, because of my diving equipment. It would have otherwise been impossible to hold my breath for long enough or to hold on to the walls of the tunnel. Perhaps the child had been sucked in after falling to the Strid or perhaps he had wandered too close to the thing’s cave in the forest, I also didn’t know. There was no way to know. When I got out of the water I had only a few minutes left of oxygen in my tank and no idea what to say about what I had seen, no idea what I had seen.

It took some time, but I eventually got back in the water and continued to dive, though completely refusing any more speleology or police work. After all, it's all I know. I didn’t speak to a soul about this out of fear of remembering and of being thought insane, and also perhaps out of cowardice. This until that woman went missing close to the Strid a few weeks ago and I felt compelled to. This is the first and only time I will tell this story, and I felt it was only right for you to hear it first. Do with this as you wish, send it to the authorities, publish it, burn it. Just, please, don’t come to me about it.

I’m sorry I couldn’t give you any answers about your son earlier, I hope this helps you understand why.