Day 2,415

I was about 550 feet below sea level in a river that the locals reported to have a great man-eating serpent in it. I was the lead diver of a team that was sent in to investigate these claims, to see if we might discover a new species or if the alleged Big Foot was just another bear with mange.

I hung around the 550 feet mark, clinging onto the chain tethering me to the boat above and waiting to see if anything would swim by aside from the usual local fauna. I must have been hanging there for about thirty minutes before I began to notice the water in front of me darkening as something began its approach.

As the murky shape before me drew closer I began to grasp the sheer scale of it, the absolute vastness that had probably lived here for hundreds of not thousands of years already. The eyes were the first thing I noticed and how unsettlingly human they were - front facing and such a piercing blue that I almost had to shield my eyes.

The rest of its reminded me of a moray eel, complete with glass-like teeth that glistened in the dim light as it began to turn and circle me. The locals never mentioned it eating people but with a mouth like that I couldn't rule it out. I couldn't make any sudden movements either, spooking something of that size would no doubt be my last act.

The further along it went, the more awed I felt. Just the head alone was around 30 feet high and I couldn't even see its long serpentine body tapering off to an end even after a further half hour of waiting and watching it slowly pass me by as if it only chose to appear to show me that it was real.

When its gills came into view is when I felt my heart jolt and my breath start to stagger. Anyone who's ever been on a dive before knows how important it is to control your breathing and not exhaust all your oxygen before you can surface but I couldn't stop myself.

There between its filaments, what I originally mistook to be parasitical fish at first, were hands. Stark white human hands waving frantically at me and using diver's sign language to signal for help. I didn't move - I couldn't. Not with the head slowly turning so it could look back at me, to check if I was falling for its trap.

Instead I waited for it to face forwards again and I sent my own signal back to the boat so they'd pull me back up. What I didn't expect was for the serpent to rise with me, slowly circling and rising until all I could see was its gargantuan scaled body a few dozen feet from me and those damned white hands shooting out from its gills, trying to grab me.

It stopped at about 100 feet from the surface and began to sink again, body dropping like a coiled rope while the head stared resolutely at me. Its expression was unreadable for the most part but something in those human-like eyes seemed sad.

If it hadn't been for my headcam the others wouldn't have believed me. They might have called me mad and sent someone 'saner' down there to check it out. They might not have been to calm and still - they might not have come back and instead joined the legions trapped within those damned gills.

I quit as soon as I could and picked up an office job deep inland but I know it's still down there in the dark.

I wonder if it'sever started to surface again to look for me.

I wonder if they ever sent anyone else down to meet it.