“And what about Mullen?” The consultant paused. “He’ll receive treatment and proper care. That will be seen to.”
“Will he recover?” “I don’t know,” the consultant said. “I hope so.” But there was no hope in his voice.
Vance and Carter returned to naval service. They resumed ordinary duty. They never spoke of the incident to anyone.
They did not even discuss it with each other. They simply worked: going down, bringing things up, doing the job. They lived their lives.
But sometimes at night Vance would wake suddenly. He would lie still and listen to the silence around him. He would try to tell whether, just beyond hearing, there was faint singing.
He never heard anything. Or maybe he simply did not want to. Seaman Mullen remained in the hospital.
Years passed, but his condition never changed. He was always calm, fully functional in daily life, and never dangerous. But he kept saying he heard singing.
He spoke of an endless service and of those still waiting under the water. Before long, the doctors stopped trying to argue with him. They simply observed and wrote everything down.
His file was preserved in the archives. The last note in it was dated 1972. It read: “Patient continues to report constant church singing from the submerged sanctuary.”
“Logical structure remains intact, but insight into his condition is absent. Prognosis unchanged.” Below that was a short handwritten note from the attending physician.
“On quiet nights, when I’m on duty here alone, I sometimes think I hear it too.” The classified case itself was closed in 1955. All materials were sealed and marked TOP SECRET.
Orders were given to preserve them permanently. The file was thick. It contained the divers’ reports, the doctors’ conclusions, and the commission’s memoranda.
It also contained the film, the sound recording, and the strange waterlogged book from the church. All of it went into the central archive. A dark basement. A high shelf.
It sat there among thousands of other classified and equally strange files. The official explanation for what happened was straightforward. A shared hallucination caused by the specific conditions of difficult underwater work.
Depth, darkness, cold, pressure, fatigue, and severe psychological stress. Under those conditions, the human mind can create images and fill in the unknown. It interprets what it cannot understand through familiar forms.
The three divers, working under the same conditions, simply experienced similar hallucinations. Rare, but possible. It was a tidy, scientific explanation.
It was fully materialist. The only problem was the film. Film does not hallucinate.
It records light reflected from real objects. And on that film, there were clearly burning candles, moving figures, and a closing door. Those things had been there.
The second official explanation was fraud. Someone had supposedly switched the film or exposed new footage over old stock. Or the whole thing had been shot somewhere else and passed off as underwater footage.
Technically, that was possible. The motive was unclear, but the theory was considered. Experts at the government film lab examined the footage frame by frame.
They looked for splices, overlays, or chemical tampering. They found nothing. The film was genuine, and the footage was continuous.
The third explanation was a coordinated hoax. The divers had supposedly conspired and staged the whole thing. Why they would do that was unclear, but the possibility was examined…
