MAG 51: High Pressure

Statement of Antonia Hayley, regarding a deep dive that took place near Sable Island, Nova Scotia.
==Statement==
Antonia Hayley had been a professional and quite enthusiastic diver, who eventually started working at a marine salvage company by the coast of Nova Scotia. While she refused to give their name based on the hope to resume working there again one day and not wanting to slander, she admitted that they would not be hard to identify.
The job in question took place at one of the two places commonly referred to as the "Atlantic Graveyard," in this case by Sable Island, littered with wrecks that sank due to the meeting of two current streams. Usually, the company wouldn't have accepted work in a location this dangerous, but the employer, soon revealed to be Simon Fairchild, seems to have bribed or charmed the captain, a man by the name of Morten Kemp. He wanted them to recover heirlooms or curiosities from his great-grandfather's sailing yacht, the Maria Fairchild, that sank about 120 years ago, and was willing to pay a very generous amount of money. In addition, he insisted on accompanying the Captain, Hayley, and her coworker Julio Hernandez on their journey.
Fairchild is described as pushing 100 years and a "tiny, pink skeleton of a man," who refused to talk about anything but the job or the ship itself. He however shows genuine excitement at the discovery of the surprisingly well-preserved ship. At 160 ft, the divers would be in a high pressure environment, which they had prepared for with appropriate suits. Hayley remembers Fairchild shouting after them just as they jumped into the water, but could not make out the words.
Hayley noted the complete lifelessness in the sea. While Hernandez started in the bedroom to check for the requested objects, Hayley discovered a hole in the engine room, which appears to have been made from the inside out. As she put her head through it, the pressure increased on her entire body, almost killing her. She could see that there was no seafloor beyond the hole, only empty water, and that it was too dark, comparing it to the twilight zone, the deepest point underwater that humans can survive and where only the faintest light from the sun penetrates. However, she spotted a huge shadow, stretching so long that she could see no ends to what she believed might have been a slowly approaching hand.
She eventually snapped out of the shock that held her immobile and pushed herself out of the hole, but in her rush to get out of the water she ignored all decompression procedures, which made her black out and eventually landed her in a hospital bed. She questions Kemp about the job and Fairchild, but he doesn't tell her anything besides, "The sea is a dangerous place."
== Post-Statement ==
As everything took place in Canadian Territory no real follow-up can be made. The only person who could be tracked down was the former Captain Morten Kemp, who now runs boat tours in Winnipeg and who declined giving his own statement.
Simon Fairchild, however, already came up in MAG 21: Freefall. John also states that at the beginning of his career as a researcher in 2012, he looked into a minor haunting in Hackney, where somebody reported their jewelry cases cracking during the night, as if something heavy had been dropped on them, without anything going missing. 
In the 1930s, the jewelry had belonged to a con artist and fence, who was thrown out of a 4th floor window but on the other side of it, on a crowded street at midday, no one saw him fall. While John could never discover the con artist's original name, he does remember one of his aliases, especially for use in business listings, to be Simon Fairchild. The Fairchild family is also a very wealthy family in Cornwall, who invested in aerospace technology, shipping logistics, and underwater drilling and construction.
== Supplemental ==
John relays the recording of a strange conversation he'd had with Sasha that morning, whom he found staring at the table which has been in the artefact storage since MAG 35. She tells him that she feels like she can't pull away from it and decidedly disagrees with the design being a fractal, describing it more like a web. She believes Graham to have been caught in it. When John suggests that this had been due to the thing that crawled through his window, or it and the table were linked somehow, she denies this and comments the creature doesn't sound like it would want to be bound to an object. John means to discuss restricting her access to the table with Elias. He also found out that during her extra-long lunch breaks, she regularly visits Madame Tussaud's wax museum.
He counts three new acquisitions: a wardrobe which light cannot penetrate, a carved rock eye in a velvet bag which causes interference with CCTV, and a disease-ridden scalpel which cannot be disinfected.
== Continuity ==
* The actions above attributed to Sasha James are actually Not-Sasha, who replaced Sasha in MAG 39, though her colleagues are not aware of her deception at this point, though John has growing suspicions about her.
* Related Entity: The Vast and The Buried
** Simon Fairchild is an avatar of the Vast
** The intense water pressure is most likely connected to The Buried
Category:The Magnus Archives Episodes