The Case of the Trinity Cruise Liner

The Case of Trinity Cruise Liner

Melbourne Post

09/10/2022

The writings, audio recordings and video logs published exclusively here in the Melbourne Post belong to Hunter Eyre, who, at the time of the incident, was traveling in South East Asia on holiday. His disappearance, along with the cruise liner he was last seen boarding, is still being investigated by the U.S. State Department and whispered about in the snow-swept streets of his native Rocky Mountains and across the globe. The following transcripts were found encased in a barnacled bottle that surfed the waves from an unknown location onto Australia's Melbourne shores.

It is either a hoax or the only documentation of what happened to some 8,000 souls that vanished along with their ship somewhere in the South China Sea.

Vitality, a faceless multinational conglomerate worth billions and the creator of Trinity Cruise, has its hands in a diverse portfolio of ventures ranging from candy manufacturing to space travel. And, they seem to have an inexplicable case of the Midas touch.

Their last project, the Bright Star Mine, saw record-breaking profits before claiming hundreds of their employees in what was reported as a cave-in. Their brief tryst with biomedical was cut short after witnesses, now deceased, reported gangly figures escaping from laboratory vents--lab apes, according to their lawyers.

The Trinity Cruise Line isn’t an isolated case of oddity, made all the more evident by their back-catalog and annual PR, lobbying, and legal budgets.

To date, Vitality has declined to make any statement regarding the nature of this, or any other mishap, simply claiming them as accidents or acts of god.

Below you will find the unedited transcripts of Hunter Eyre.

Date Unknown—Diary Entry 385

I live on a haunted cemetery on the waves where voices follow me.

They’re everywhere. They chant horrid melodies I try to scratch out of my head, with this paint scraper but they burrow themselves in deep. They play like records on repeat and reveal things, terrible things that should be buried, hidden in the chasms below the swells.

Do you know how long I’ve been on this ship? Months? Years? Days? It’s hard to tell. Time is connected to the ocean currents out here and whenever we pass a new one, it shifts.

The things I’ve seen on this ship; the things I’ve heard…

You won’t believe me, even if you find this letter. But I have to try to warn you not to come to this place. Not to venture into black and warped ocean trenches off the coast of Vietnam that show up on no topographical maps - not to meet those phantoms that dwell below.

This 90,000-ton luxury cruise liner’s sprawling metropolis of bowling alleys, spas, water parks, Broadway-style theaters, gyms, clubs, casinos, bars, restaurants and convenience stores are silent save for the creaking of the boat, the wind and the dripping crimson that hangs from every banister and themed ride.

AND THE SUN!

It’s eternal and hangs on the horizon casting the sky a nuclear orange. It’s a god distorted by an odd atmosphere far removed from our own.

The other survivors stalk this ship carrying improvised knives, speaking gibberish and seeking their next meal or a glass of unsalted water. The ship stopped working ages ago. But it’s the things under the ship that scare me the most. They’re calling for me and I can hear them getting louder. I see them in my dreams, drilling their whispering songs deeper into my skull. I can see them when I close my eyes! God save me.

If you find this, don’t send help. I’m not even there anymore.

06.03.2022—Bangkok, Thailand--Diary Entry 1

The Trinity Cruise Liner departed Bangkok on October 27th. It was meant to be the first luxury cruise liner to span all of Southeast Asia, from Thailand all the way to Japan. It was advertised as the largest ship ever built, and so luxurious that it would “Put Caligula’s Lake Nemi to shame.”

The economically privileged who booked for its maiden voyage draped themselves in sparkling evening gowns and freshly pressed tuxes. Their drivers unloaded trollies of designer baggage from cars that cost beach houses. Thai staff struggled them into ornate suites that they could never afford. They brought their 200-thousand-dollar purebred show dogs and their unwanted and unloved children raised by Latin nannies.

In the red velvet line up to the boarding ramp, security guards protected such household names as John Patterson (eccentric billionaire and owner of Space Team), Daniella Volkov (a Russian oligarch’s only daughter and Instagram influencer by trade), Harold Tusk (Silicon Valley’s golden boy; founder of Look Up), and Verónica Vazquez (a well-known Colombian drug queen-pin and acting puppet president) to name a few.

Others were less known one percenters who hid behind government contracts, back door deals and their board of directors. But, regardless of where they were from, what business they were in or what their exact net worth was, all of them exuded an air of pompous elitism and an assurance that their wealth made them more untouchable than the Vatican. To them, the paparazzi and helicopters buzzing above were annoying in the way a swarm of gnats might be to a frog.

I was here by chance after being involved in a nasty 12-car pile-up caused by a very wealthy man’s son. Apparently, Richard Hammond - father and indiscriminate capitalist billionaire - didn’t care for a court case or the press learning of an embarrassing DUI hit and run. In return, his lawyer slammed a Trinity ticket, a heavy check and an NDA on the table as part of the settlement and an apology for the tinnitus and rib fractures rendered.

06.04.2022—Gulf of Thailand—Diary Entry 2

The first few days on the Trinity were what you might expect from a cruise that cost 500k per head plus room and board, food, and all the extra amenities. The staff were caliber and courteous even to the most snobbish residents of the ship who complained about invisible stains on dining room carpets and “dust mites” so small CERN couldn’t detect them.

Excellent musicians, dancers and magicians performed flawless acts to the scoffs of an overly minted audience with ridiculous expectations. The advertisements I had seen on television had held up. There was no expense spared on the creation of this behemoth city on the waves and everywhere you looked there were gaudy reminders of excess.

From outside, the ship was the length of a small island. It was so extensive that they had to include roads inside to shuttle guests and staff, complete with a fire brigade and a police force. The pearl exterior was garnished by gold leafing with Thai architecture, rising into a crescendo of chedis, prangs and temple flourishes.

In a ribbon around the ship, there was inlaid Thai artistry depicting Buddhist teachings and Indian epics in vivid colors. Even the windows were impressive, each a unique handcrafted gold sphere populated by individual Thai poets’ poems chiseled in spirals around the glass.

The reception room was the Palace of Versailles on crack. Thirty-foot ceilings with immaculate murals and low-hanging chandeliers smacked you in the face. Hand-woven carpets, mahogany reception desks, memory foam seating, elegant spiral staircases and gold popping from every surface erased any doubt that I wasn’t meant to be here.

The main thoroughfare was an expensive but immediately fake façade of restaurants and shops. Rooms with balconies towered above, shading the boardwalk. There were waterslides that extended down in curling patterns from the top deck with names like “the Abyss.” Near the front, 20 feet in the air hung “Trinity” in giant glittering letters attached to one of the many bridges connecting either side of the ship.

The Trinity Cruise Liner was indeed an impressive ship, as Mr. Eyre explained. WBC Construction-the largest building company in the world- and a myriad of other contractors worked on the project for over eleven years before its completion. It cost the company a fortune in what experts in the field quote as a miracle. Its construction was haunted by regular strikes and layoffs owing to strange figures noted in the water and a “bad feeling” among the workers.

A sky-scraping accident rate was also reported, as some of the workers inexplicably seemed to harm themselves, something Vitality cites as, “employee wage theft by way of workers’ comp.”

In total, there were exactly five days recorded without an incident during this period. It got so bad, WBC was forced to fly in laborers from Cambodia and Laos for the last four years of the mammoth project, despite significant wage hikes.

The accident reports from this period have been lost by local authorities.

06-07-2022-Waters Unknown

I spent the first few days on the Trinity getting accustomed to the optional schedule laid out in the graphically well-designed but horribly programmed optional app, that you needed if you wanted any hope of learning what was happening. This had, apparently, eclipsed traditional paper brochures.

In between an obnoxious welcome message and an insane section titled ‘Casino Lessons’ was what I had been looking for: ‘Beverage Package.’

“Quench your thirst onboard with the Ultimate Beverage package. Enjoy virtually unlimited cocktails, wines and beers, all cruise long for endless refreshment! Get yours today on the Trinity Promenade or see any of your Friendly Bar staff.” After a few minutes of trying to locate the map, I found that the closest ‘friendly bar staff’ was a service bus away at The Louis.

From the outside, The Louis was an Irish pub with men you could picture comfortable inside a gorilla enclosure hired as bouncers. Past the saloon swinging doors were old men with Thai “girlfriends” half their age, laughing with exploratory hands, rotting livers and snow-dusted noses. The women all had numbers hanging off their waists suspended by clothes pins. Pool tables sectioned off the middle of the room in parallel eight-foot intervals accented by red leather booths. In the back, you could spot a VIP area concealed by heavy velvet curtains that blocked the dim lights. This seemed to be a go-go bar, dive bar hybrid – common enough in Thailand but something I thought impossible on this gold everywhere ship.

I approached a bartender dressed in tats and signed up for the package.

Screams pierced through the trance music. From the VIP area, a woman in what was once an outfit rocketed out with one of her breasts exposed, thong around her knees and a black eye. The bouncers from outside sauntered in and began dragging out a slim man of about 20 as he berated them and kicked at the floor.

He said something like, “Do you know who my father is?! That’s right, CTO of Intella-Bank, you fucks!” He was screaming, “The bitch asked for it! That’s all she’s fucking good for! Slut!”

“When my father finds out about this you’re going to lose your fucking jobs, you monkeys! Get The fuck off of me!!” He was sobbing, red-faced with tears streaming out of his eyes like miniature fountains.

He carried on like this until the bouncers threw him out and the next time I visited the Louis they had been replaced.

After that enlightening display of cash-injected debauchery, entitlement and unrestrained Id, I needed to relax. So, I made my way to the spa, through the spinning doors and up through the escalators to the elevators. I pressed the button and waited. The light fixtures were acting up, dimming and surging in odd intervals. I boarded the elevator and was hoisted up, slowly to the spa floor when it stopped abruptly with a jerk and the lights shut off. A red security beam came on as I frantically clicked the “call help” button which didn’t seem to do anything. Over the intercom, I thought I could hear an announcement, but it was quiet. It was almost whispering.

I couldn’t hear what it was broadcasting. I placed my head next to the speaker in an attempt to make it out. It didn’t sound like English and the voice didn’t sound natural, like someone was speaking from the back of their throat and then a surge ran through the shaft and I was rocketed up to the spa so fast that the inertia sent me to the floor.

06-13-2022-Waters Unknown

I haven’t written in a while but I can’t explain away what I’ve just witnessed. It started early this morning as I was practicing yoga with a group of overly fit model types and a yogi who looked like Charles Manson if he had a six-pack and was wearing a Gucci t-shirt. It was really peaceful until I heard the splash.

“Code Oscar!” A couple minutes later, a woman mopping the deck was screaming into her radio, “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar! Man overboard. Portside!” She took off running.

The class and I abandoned the downward dog and were all now frantically looking for the man who was yelling and thrashing in the water below us. And, in an instant, he was gone – dragged by some invisible force beneath the wake, only to pop up again gasping with fresh cuts around his face. He was screaming now, panic had set in, but these weren’t the screams of a man that had merely fallen off the side of a ship. He was desperate-fighting something.

“W-what the fuck is that thing?!” He screamed as he attempted to swim away.

Every few seconds he would be sucked back down only to resurface with more of his face missing, screaming more ferociously until with a last terror-ridden shriek, he went under for the last time and a massive blood trail swirled in the foam eddies left by the wake of the cruise liner.

Our ship dropped anchor while rescue teams drew nets and sectioned off parts of the ocean for what felt like days. Helicopters and EMTs were dispatched but all they ever found of him was his right foot, or so say the rumors around the ship.

According to accident reports signed by the captain, Ricky Alverese was intoxicated before the incident and fell due to a misstep caused by “poor balance.” Trinity's coroner report states the cause of death was dismemberment when the body hit the massive propellers at the stern of the ship, which clearly doesn't match Mr. Eyre’s account, as the yoga class was taking place near the bow on the second floor.

Multiple subreddits and 4chan communities looking into the disappearance have proposed varying hypotheses ranging from a shark attack to underwater aliens but nothing concrete has ever been shown to support any of them.

06-19-2022-Waters Unknown

A week later, I sat in a lawn chair burning in the tropical sun, drinking a Mai Tai and reading the brochure “This 30-deck cruise ship is currently the largest passenger ship in the world, measuring 22,965 feet. It hosts eighty-five elevators, fifty pools, eight water parks, two hundred-eighty-four restaurants, four amphitheaters, three casinos...” and on and on like that with pages of gloating statistics, maps and loving couples kissing at the bow.

A little girl in a pink flower dress was standing on her tip-toes looking overboard.

“What’s that in the water, mama?”

A scream leaped from her pearl-eared mother and all at once a crowd of people peered over the side of the ship with horrified faces. There were thousands of them bobbing up and running from horizon line to horizon line like a giant carpet. Rotten abominations from some deep-sea strata choked the air with a miasma that made onlookers hide their faces in their collars and towels. Soon seabirds were swooping down and screeching in delight as they feasted on the pale bodies of things never meant to see the light of day.

Off in the distance, out of nowhere, dark rolling thunder clouds began blotting out the sun and marched quickly to the horizon. Claps of echoing thunder tore through the sky, rattling nearby handrails.

Rain began to trickle in folding sheets as shocked onlookers dipped inside. An alarm blared out of the loudspeaker as the rain started to pour and the seas began to tremble beneath the boat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your cabins and secure your belongings. There’s a storm ahead.” A voice, the captain’s, boomed from the loudspeakers.

Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) around this date seem to support Mr. Eyre’s story, in that there was a storm. However, NOAA also states that the environmental conditions needed to create a thunderstorm of this size and immediacy seemed absent based on their satellite images.

As far as the claim that there was a mass die-off of deep-sea life, there is no evidence to support it. A senior analyst at the NOAA commented, “An Armageddon of creatures, as described here, would have been visible in the images around that time. I’ve looked and there’s simply nothing. There’s not even an algae bloom, just blue ocean. It’s absurd.” Additionally, the waters in the area the Trinity was sailing at this time aren’t deep enough to support a photic zone or the existence of creatures described in this passage.

In the transcripts, however, was a bag of teeth that biologists at the University of Tokyo verified as belonging to a Lanternfish. Why it was included and how it got there are still unexplained. There are also images on Mr. Eyre’s Razor flip phone that, while grainy, seems to support his story. One features a blue whale floating upside-down surrounded by pale bodies that are harder to make out.

06-22-2022-Waters Unknown

The rain continued for days and the seas got increasingly rough. Outside you could catch glimpses of strange spider-vein lightning in a color that was hard to explain in words. It was as if a new color had been invented. The thunder was deafening on the top decks and shook you when it hit. All around the ship, you could see worry plastered on the faces of previously carefree rich folk struggling to keep their footing on the seesawing floors.

But the staff, they seemed the most unsettled. I could see them huddling around each other speaking in hushed tones and making gestures toward their ears and toward the waves and outside and the sky.

I made my way to the Louis. Inside patrons slouched in booths looking for answers to their worries in beer mugs while the lights above flickered and the waves sloshed wildly out the pane glass wall. The staff were arguing in Thai. I pulled out Google Translate.

“This boat is horse shit! The pay isn’t worth this! It-it’s just like the stories.” A heavy-set man said, leaning white-knuckled on the bar.

“Those are just folk tales, Somchai… It’s just a storm, there’s nothing out there. Calm down.”

“THEY AREN’T JUST FOLK TALES! I know you can hear them. The monks warned us! We didn’t listen!”

He was waving his index finger wildly, inches from his coworkers' faces.

Another chimed in, “It’s just the wind.”

“They are down there I know YOU know they are. They’re dragging us out into their world. We are lost. I heard the captain, you know? We’re off course.” Somchai ranted, before taking a hefty drink. “It’s just a matter of time, now. It’s these rich farangs and the things they’ve done. They’re hungry…”

No one spoke for a moment. I listened for the sounds they had been speaking of but all I heard was the ringing in my ears and the thunderclaps outside the windows.

“If the Pretas…”

“Don’t!” Somchai snapped, exploding his bottle on the carpet. “Don’t you fuckin’ speak their names!”

Somchai was drunk and the rest of the Thai staff dragged him off the floor before one of the white managers caught wind of it and booted him out on a life raft for disturbing the guests. Looking around the bar I could see wait staff and patrons alike listening to something soft and jerking their heads as if something had spoken directly into their ears.

What’s a Petra? I thought. It’s nothing. That’s just how Thai people are. There’s nothing out there. Superstition.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it made me nervous.

06-23-2022-Waters Unknown

The next day, the storm began to break but the fears of the staff and uneasiness of the guests remained. I made my way through the labyrinth of passageways to Café de Flore near the stern of the ship. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds as the rain turned to mist.

What had begun as a cheery joyride through the Far East had become a somber affair and the residents of the Trinity seemed to be dazed, wandering about the ship with no real intention of going anywhere in particular. I passed the daycare and through the windows I could see children drawing strange spiral designs on the whiteboard in silence and the teacher sitting in the corner of the room staring blankly out the window at the waves. A little girl in a pink flower dress turned to look at me and stuck out her tongue. She stared directly into my eyes.

“Whisper. Whisper. Whisper!” She chanted while pressing three fingers to her mouth.

Shivers ran up my arms and into my neck and I walked faster toward my destination.

I got to the upper deck and outside, where the staff was quietly cleaning up bits of debris left from the storm. I ordered a latte and sat at a table near the ocean. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted things moving, wriggling in the water. They looked like eyes. Like millions of blue luminescent eyes staring up at me from the sea. And, in unison, they blinked.

“Are you enjoying the jellyfish, sir?”

I jumped, knocking my coffee onto my book. It was the barista.

“Fuck! Jesus.” I yelled, “You scared me. Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Those can’t possibly all be jellyfish can they?” I asked, leaning over the ship. “They’re everywhere.”

“You’d be surprised what you see out here, sir. Beautiful aren’t they?”

“Yeah… I just thought, n-never mind.” I gave up. Looking at my watch it was 7:10 and there was supposed to be a play taking place nearby at half past nine. I looked overboard again.

Were they jellyfish?

I couldn’t stop staring at them. They didn’t look like jellyfish. A typhoon of dread was beginning to swell in my stomach and a strange panic was pulsing through my heart. I wanted to run, to blink, to do anything but look at the ocean’s eyes but I couldn’t pull myself away.

It was like I had been stung by the flock of them. The corners of my vision were clouding and drops of sweat were rolling down my skin in an avalanche. I was being reeled into a vast black abyss where time and space were no longer concepts with any meaning at all; where frigid waters and lonely horror swallowed men’s hearts and the shades of long forgotten eons chanted to solitary obelisks in front of blood moon skies. And, I thought I could hear something, something else -something singing in a language I’d never heard and then in quiet English.

Whisper. Whisper. Whisper…

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The alarm on my phone was going off. I was late for the performance, but where had all that time gone?

I must have fallen asleep; I lied to myself.

Was it Jellyfish? That's a question that seems to perplex a Defense Department staffer familiar with the case who refused to go on record about the incident. He seems to think that Mr. Eyre is telling the truth and that something odd did happen that day - what exactly, he wouldn’t elaborate due to a fear that Vitality may take legal action. His response was short, “There was something down there and they weren’t from here.”

The playbill read “Hamlet” but what I was actually watching was a bizarre adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The actors seemed to have missed rehearsal and were dropping their cues and their spots. The music was a Vietnamese funeral playlist. The lights were an odd mismatch of hues, waving and focusing on silent characters. People watching seemed ill and I couldn’t decide whether it was due to the performance or sea legs from the storm.

The set design was hideous. Paint was splashed around like children with epilepsy were the artists. But in the center, a spiral symbol - much like the one I saw in the preschool - was neatly assembled in the center of the sun.

Homer is turning in his grave. I thought.

“Then I anointed…with this the ears of my comrades and they… uhh, umm bound me in the ship hand and foot, upright in the step of the mast, and… and made the ropes fast at the ends to the mast itself...” Odysseus fumbled, tripping over his lines. He seemed drunk.

They were almost to the point where the sirens began to sing and as I watched I noticed something strange. The two sirens were looking at me. They were staring at me with their white out contacts and fidgeting gills. They were pointing with their mouths so wide I thought their jaws might snap.

“Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus,” I could hear them in my head hissing, “great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to our voice. Let us show you what’s underneath the orange sun.”

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes…

Had I just seen that? Had I just heard that?

They were again looking at Odysseus. Then all at once, I could hear the song from before but this time it was louder, clearer and Odysseus and his crew could hear it too. They paused for a second in stark white terror. Looked to the spiral sun, they dropped to their knees bashing their heads into the stage screaming. Harder and harder, increasing in speed and violence until the song faded and all you could hear was the raw thumping of meat on wet wood. Over and over the actors dented the hardwood with bloodied skulls until with a final, vicious crack they slumped. A lake of sticky blood formed at the siren's feet as they began to giggle and dance. They were looking at me again. The curtains unfurled and snapped closed.

Whisper…

From the back, I could hear someone clapping, slowly at first and then feverishly. The virus took over the audience until everyone was out of their seats generating thunderous applause with grim smiles from ear to ear.

I took off running, past the café and the jellyfish, through smiling people, and down endless hallways of whispering madness to my cabin. I checked and rechecked the locks and listened for sounds of singing until I faded off into petrifying nightmares of eyes, spirals and an orange sun.

06-27-2022- Unknown Waters

On-board psychiatrists were busy for the next couple of days. Apparently, the audience had thought that what had happened was a well-staged, avant-garde retelling of the Odyssey and that the fractured skulls of the actors were clever prop tricks. The Trinity was more than happy to oblige the narrative, satisfied that rich folk have horrible taste. Still, the psych ward was flooded with people reporting voices on the wind, strange visions and lost time. Trinity’s staff were putting in overtime to explain it away.

Meanwhile, the jellyfish (or whatever the hell they were) were growing brighter and more numerous. The whole ocean looked like a Bunsen burner at night. The sky was losing its familiar blue to burnt orange. Warm snow began falling from absent clouds and an all too familiar spiral symbol was being graffitied all over the ship by some unseen vandal. If you stopped and listened, you could hear the songs and the voices rising above the surf and the waves and the clattering of drinks being delivered to the myriad of tables on board the ship.

As the days drew on, the staff began delivering Mai Thais with trembling hands and passengers searched in vain for any cell service to reach their families. Something was happening in the Trinity that couldn’t be explained by its HR department or science or by God herself.

The toll was showing. Women clutched their children on lawn chairs sobbing while gasping through tears, “It’s gonna be okay, honey. Just don’t listen.” Comforting themselves, most of all. Men in the bar were drinking wordlessly like the liquor in the bottle was the only liquid left on the planet.

In the halls, you heard people screaming in their rooms and assaulting the walls. People crouched in corners, rocking and murmuring while clasping their ears. Trash was strewn everywhere as the staff had stopped caring about paychecks ages ago. Whatever was whispering and singing wasn’t trying to hide anymore. It sounded like a concert on the deck that muffled only slightly inside.

Multiple 911 calls and reach-outs to family members were recorded that day but few, if any, seemed to get through. There is no way to fact-check the rest of this account other than the black box on the Trinity, which was found far off course. It curiously does have a recording of an influx of mental health appointments and seemingly nothing else odd on the whole voyage.

Except for one passage:

“Ummm… Hi. This is crew mate #1806 and… the fuck? I don't know. There's something going on. People are acting weird and the whole vibe is just off, ya’ know? I just heard something… I keep hearing these things.”

“I don't feel good. I really don’t feel good… I want to - I want to do something bad and I don’t want to do it, but they’re telling me to do it. God, get me off this ship!”

____________________________________________________

Things were getting really bad and the song's volume had hit its zenith. The air began to pulse and move with the melody, warping the surroundings.

I was standing on the bow next to one of the waterparks. The sun had begun to change. At its center was what looked like a faint outline of the spiral symbol that slowly rotated above ocean eyes. People seemed entranced, looking toward it, frozen by some unseen force.

Behind me, a figure on the captain’s deck above, stood balancing on the railing. Without a word, she swan-dived downward and landed headfirst, splattering like a ripe tomato chucked at a wall.

Arterial spray was sent across the hardwood and chucks of human were spat into the pool and all over my clothes. The people around me hardly reacted. As if on cue, they lead their children by the hand, calmly into the water to drown. Others fashioned rope from their towels, separating their vertebrae from the tops of waterslide stairwells. The staff took fruit knives from behind the bar and sat before slicing their jugulars. There were men breaking windows and mashing the glass into their eyeballs and excavating flesh towards their brains. No one screamed but their eyes were pupils of primal terror and their faces, death masks of dread, racing to get it over with.

I sprinted through an obstacle course of blood-globed floors and over corpse hurdles and down winding staircases trying to escape to the bottom of the ship where the songs and whispers and mass suicide might be absent.

Every corridor and open door brought fresh horrors.

The gym was full of men with barbell snapped esophagi, heads crushed sandwich-style between lifting machine weights that Jackson-Pollocked the mirrors. In the Louis, people drank bottles of spirits like water and collapsed, drowning in vomit. People in the halls were ripping at their faces and ears, jamming pens into their chests and sticking metal into open outlets. From the kitchen, you could smell burning flesh and see rivers of blood seeping from the back of house mixed with thousand island sauce. The spa’s saunas were packed and turned to high, the steam escaping doing nothing for those melting inside.

Strange characters were written everywhere in blood and by the time I reached the lowest deck, The Trinity had transformed into a museum gallery of masochism and gore.

Whisper…

“UNDERWATER OBSERVATORY” read the sign on the door ahead. Inside, a room of four-walled pane glass windows echoed songs and whispers even louder. I dropped to my knees and clasped at my ears. From all directions, I saw the neon eyes blinking in the ink-black water.

The air flexed and rippled. The angles of the room began to stretch and morph until they resembled shapes that don’t exist.

In the darkness, I could see them. They weren’t jellyfish. Colossal blobs of eyes with translucent tentacles -thousands of them- floated about and watched me in the glass prison, whispering and singing. They looked like Glass Octopi or something like them. I could see their anatomy in orange through their frosted glass skin as they sent light cyan tentacles to suck at the glass.

They showed me horrors of a world not my own that far surpassed what I had witnessed on the top floors. Beneath them, I could make out what looked like a city. It had winding passageways and concave triangle-topped buildings in white pristine stone.

I don’t remember anything else. I must have run screaming from the observation deck and hid somewhere. I’m not sure where I am, but it’s dark here and I’m encased in something smooth. The whispers are muffled. I feel safe, I guess.

I think I’m in an isolation tank in the spa. I’m afraid to leave but I’m getting hungry. It’s driving me a bit crazy. It’s been days. I don’t think I can stand the smell of my own feces much longer, or is it the corpses?

Wait. I can hear something slimming up and tapping on the pod and…

Oh my god.

It's speaking in English. It’s talking to me.

To date, there has been no other wreckage found of the Trinity and curiously, the barnacles discovered on the bottle are “Non-terrestrial” as the Defense Department puts it. Scientists at the University of Tokyo, where the samples were sent, have no answer as of yet as to how or where the barnacles appeared, or even what family of genus they belong to.

More unsettling, still, is the persistent storm off the coast of Vietnam that’s raged since May 6th in what meteorologists call a “freak weather occurrence.”