In the summer of 1931, a salvage diver named Absalom Vardsted took a contract that would end his career and shape the rest of his life. He was 37 years old, a Norwegian-born hard hat diver with more than a decade of experience working in the black, murky depths of the North Atlantic. He had cut apart torpedoed ships, walked the mud floors of rivers in total darkness, and spent eleven hours on an invisible bottom freeing a tugboat’s propeller. He was not a man who frightened easily.
But after that summer, he never stepped into water above his ankles again. Not the sea, not a river, not a bathtub. He washed at a sink for the rest of his life, standing up with a cloth and a bowl, until he died in 1968. The job came from a small salvage outfit out of Rockland, Maine, owned by a former merchant captain named Renard Cornish.
Cornish had lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1929 and had become the sort of man who took work other companies refused. That July, he accepted a commission from an insurance concern in Hartford to recover a strongbox from a sunken freighter called the SS Amberley. The ship, a 280-foot iron-hulled coastal freighter built in England in 1906, had gone down in a squall off Petronel Ledges in late November 1929, three weeks after the market crashed. She lay in about 32 fathoms, roughly 190 feet down.
Twelve of her crew of nineteen made it into the boats. Seven did not. The strongbox, which had been in the purser’s office, was said to contain about $60,000 in bearer bonds. For a man in 1931, that was a lifetime’s comfort.
Cornish hired Vardsted, a tender named Bertram Kohlstedt, and a young compressor man named Emrick Palgrave, who was Cornish’s nephew by marriage and the most expendable man on the deck. On the 7th of August, they steamed out of Rockland into an overcast dawn. Vardsted later said the sea smelled of iron, a smell he had never noticed before. They reached the buoy marking the wreck near noon.
Vardsted suited up in the Mark V standard dress: the heavy canvas suit, the lead-soled boots weighing eighteen pounds apiece, the brass breastplate, and the copper helmet bolted on with a quarter-turn locking ring. Once inside, everything came to him through a hose running to the surface compressor. His survival depended entirely on men he could not see doing their jobs correctly. He went over the side at 12 minutes past one in the afternoon.
The descent took about six minutes. The water changed color four times as he dropped, from green to a dusty paler green, then a strange yellow-brown, then a green so dark it was almost black. Near the bottom, the blackness ate the beam of his lamp before it could travel more than a few feet. He landed on the Amberley’s boat deck, amidships.
The plan was simple: find a companionway, descend one deck, cut through the purser’s door, locate the strongbox, attach a line, and send it up. But what he found surprised him. The deck was preserved to an unnatural degree. The paint on the funnel was faded but intact.
The lifeboat davits stood upright. The deck planking was tight in its seams. And the silt lay in neat, even drifts along the corners, as if someone had swept the deck clean and left the sweepings in careful lines against the walls. He turned toward the port side, where a companionway should open onto a passage.
The door was already open, held open by a small dark object wedged under its lower edge. It was a man’s shoe, black leather, the sort an officer might have worn to dinner. It was placed neatly, upright, toe pointing inward. Beside it, at the base of the bulkhead, a second shoe sat in exactly the same manner.
Both were clean of silt, the leather still visibly polished, as though somebody had set them out that morning. He called the surface. He reported that there was evidence of prior entry. The tender told him that no other outfit was down there and that Cornish wanted him to come up.
Vardsted asked for five minutes to make one look. He stepped inside. He moved down the passage, past closed doors, until he came to the purser’s office. The door was open.
Inside, the office looked like the office of a man who had stepped out for lunch. There was a desk, a chair tucked in, an oil lamp on the desk, and a ledger open on the desk, the ink long gone but the marks of writing still visible. The safe against the far bulkhead was open. The strongbox was not in it.
He found the strongbox in the passageway behind him, sitting upright about eight feet outside the purser’s door. He had walked past it without seeing it. On top of it was a folded piece of oilcloth tied with a black ribbon. He knelt down as best he could in the heavy suit.
He knew he should not untie it. He untied it anyway. Inside was a photograph on a stiff paper card, sepia-toned, in perfect condition after twenty months in the cold North Atlantic. It showed a man standing in a Mark V diving suit on the deck of a small salvage vessel, his helmet tucked under his arm.
The man was tall and gaunt, with hair the color of wet rope and a small piece missing from the top of his left ear. It was Absalom Vardsted, older, perhaps ten years older, with deeper lines and grayer hair. In the corner of the photograph, in pencil, was a date: August the 7th, 1941. Ten years to the day in his future.
He understood two things at once. The photograph had been left for him. And the person who left it was in the ship and knew what his face looked like. He put the photograph back on top of the box.
He turned and shone his lamp down the passage. At the far end, where the beam faded into the black, he thought he saw the outline of a man in a diving suit, helmet on, facing him, not moving. He did not shine the lamp directly on it. He tied the line to the strongbox and signaled the surface.
He watched the box rise past him, the oilcloth tipping off and drifting to the floor. He followed it back to the boat deck and up the shot line. He broke the surface at four in the afternoon. The bearer bonds were inside the strongbox in a sealed leather pouch, dry.
Cornish was smiling. Vardsted was not. That evening, at anchor over the wreck, Cornish opened a bottle of rye whiskey and told Vardsted he had been holding information back. A Portuguese family in Boston had contacted him privately.
Their patriarch, the Amberley’s second officer, had been one of the seven who drowned. He had been carrying a small metal case in his cabin containing three items: a silver crucifix that had belonged to his mother, a leather-bound book of prayers, and a lock of hair wrapped in wax paper. The family had offered Cornish $250 to recover it. The clerk who came to see Cornish said that since his father went down with those items, the peace had not been kept in the family house.
His mother, a rational woman of sixty-eight, heard his father calling to her from under the floor of the parlor. The clerk also said his father had told him, before he died, of a dream he had on that last voyage. He dreamed of a diver walking on the deck of the ship, who came to his cabin door and knocked. When he opened the door, the diver stood there with his helmet under his arm and said one thing.
“I’m coming for the case. ”
Vardsted said he would go down tomorrow. He did not tell Cornish about the photograph, or the shoes, or the shape he thought he had seen at the end of the passage. He did not sleep that night.
He lay in his bunk and felt, at some point near four in the morning, that a long, cold, wet thread ran down from him through the deck of the tug into the water and down into the wreck. And along that thread, occasionally, he felt a small, deliberate tug, as if something on the other end wanted to be sure he was still there. At first light, he suited up. He went over the side at nine minutes past seven.
The descent felt different. He had the sensation that he was descending into a large, dark room with walls he could not see, and that something in the room was calmly watching him come. He landed on the boat deck. The two shoes were still there, exactly as before.
He stepped over them. He went down the passage, past the purser’s office, to the far end, to the place where he had thought he saw the diver. There was no diver. There was a door, closed.
It opened onto the second officer’s cabin. He put his hand on the handle. He turned it. The door opened easily, as if it had been ready for him.
His lamp swept inside. On the bunk lay a man in a diving suit, not a body. A man in the Mark V standard dress, lying on his back, helmet on, hose running from the back of the helmet along the bulkhead and out through a crack in the porthole. His breastplate was rising and falling slowly, as if he were breathing.
The man turned his head. The copper helmet turned so that the face plate was aimed directly at Vardsted. The glass was dark. Vardsted was not afraid and said later it was less like fear than like being recognized.
The diver on the bunk slowly sat up, his movements smooth and fluid, as if the suit weighed nothing. He stood. He was taller than Vardsted. He raised his right hand and pointed past Vardsted’s shoulder into the passageway.
Vardsted turned his head to look. There was nothing there. When he turned back, the diver was two steps closer. He raised the same hand, palm up, and made a small, deliberate motion, as if inviting him to step inside.
In that instant, Vardsted understood. The diver in front of him was him, Absalom Vardsted at the age of forty-seven, on the 7th of August 1941. The diver had come down from that later date to invite him in. If he stepped through the door, he would take the diver’s place, and the diver would rise, take his hose, go up the shot line, and live his life for ten years until the pattern began again.
The diver took a third step forward. Vardsted found his voice and keyed the mic. “Bertram, pull me up now. ” The tender on the surface later said Vardsted’s voice was not his own, but the voice of a man giving a last instruction, very steady, very cold.
Kohlstedt gave the signal for emergency haul and began pulling him up. Vardsted stepped backward into the passageway. The diver did not follow. He stopped, raised his hand again in the same inviting gesture.
Then he tilted his helmet very slowly to one side, the way a person tilts their head when asking a question. Vardsted said to himself in the copper helmet, “I’m certain. ” He turned and walked as fast as a man in lead boots can walk back down the passage, over the two shoes, out onto the boat deck, toward the shot line. He was pulled up too fast.
The three men on the surface had panicked and skipped proper decompression stops. When they got him out of the suit, he could not stand. His joints were locking. He was bleeding faintly from his nose and one ear.
There was a hyperbaric chamber at a naval yard in Portland. Cornish drove him there through the night. Vardsted went into the chamber on the morning of the 9th of August and came out alive two days later. He was 37 years old when he went down.
He was 37 when he came up. But the man his wife met at the Rockland train station on the 14th of August had aged fifteen years in one week. His hair had gone gray at the temples. His hands shook slightly and never stopped.
He would not look at the sea. He kept a hat pulled down over his eyes on the drive home. He never went into water again. He never fished, never rowed, never boarded a boat, never owned a bathing suit.
He took work in a hardware store in a small inland town called Ashcombe, where he sold nails and rope and stove parts. If a customer asked for a boat cleat or a bilge pump, he politely told them the store did not carry it, even when it did. His wife, Astrid, said he spoke of the Amberley only three times in thirty-seven years of marriage. The first time was in 1933, when a photograph fell out of a book he was moving.
It was the photograph from the ship. He had hidden it in the pages of a Bible he never opened. Astrid picked it up and asked when it was taken. He said, “It hasn’t been.
” He took it from her and burned it in the stove. The second time was in 1941. On the 6th of August, he stopped eating. On the 7th, he asked his wife to keep him away from mirrors for the day.
She covered every mirror in the house with bedsheets and sat with him in the parlor all day and night. On the 8th, he asked her to uncover them. He looked at himself in the mirror over the mantel for a long time and said quietly, “It wasn’t me then. Good.
”
The third time was in 1968, near the end, when he was dying of cancer. A priest named Father Cyprian Halverson was there and wrote down what Vardsted told him. Vardsted said there was a man in a copper helmet standing in a cabin in the black at the bottom of the North Atlantic off the coast of Maine. He had been standing there for thirty-seven years.
Every seven years, Vardsted felt him tilt his head. He said, “I stepped back, but I don’t know if I stepped back far enough. ”
He died on the 12th of November 1968. At his funeral, the weather was strange.
A light, salt-smelling mist rolled up over the town from the south, from the direction of the coast seventy miles away, and hung over the churchyard for the entire service. The old-timers called it sea fog inland and shook their heads. Astrid walked home from the cemetery alone. Near a small pond at the edge of a farmer’s field, she stopped because she thought she heard the sound of a slow, deep, mechanical breath, like a man breathing through a copper helmet.
She did not go closer. She turned her back on the pond and said out loud, “He kept his side. Now you keep yours. ” She never spoke of it again.
She lived until 1981. The wreck of the Amberley still sits in the current off the coast of Maine, in about 32 fathoms of cold black water. No salvage outfit has gone down to her a second time.
According to the account of the man who once looked in through the doorway, there is a diver in a copper helmet standing very quietly in a small cabin along the port side, his helmet tilted very slightly, waiting.