2018? That’s just last year. Winter—given the leafless branches and big coat and scarf.
Hands trembling, Carter grabs his phone and snaps his own photos of the images.
It’s Criminal:
The Mystery of theBlack Orchid
A Trinity Scott & Gio Rossi True Crime Production
EXT. Underwater Santorini Caldera—September 2025
Two divers glide across the ship’s funnel, their flashlights sweeping over its surface. TheBlack Orchidlogo outline is still faintly visible beneath a fur of weed, sponges, barnacles.
The divers move eerily toward the upper decks, long fins stirring motes that drift up into the dim shafts of light coming from far up on the surface. Behind them, the cameraman pans his camera slowly across the haunting scene, taking in windows—some broken—and portholes fringed with soft growth. In one porthole we see the mouth of an eel.
A school of damselfish darts across the structure, and jellyfish hover and pulse over it. TheBlack Orchidhas become a reef herself, a home,an undersea organism. It’s almost as though she is living, breathing in and out in her new life.
The divers descend further, being filmed from behind as they slip inside the listing wreck. Fish scatter in surprise.
We hear a soft hiss of regulators. Slow. Steady. Bubbles rise.
Inside the wreck, the atmosphere is ominous, surreal, as the divers move through a bar area. The room has been turned on its side—stools and tables almost horizontal. We see bottles of alcohol, glasses, bits of floating debris. Small items with trapped air bubbles are disturbed and drift and bob as the divers’ large fins move slowly by. Another eel watches from a bar shelf, mouth open, teeth showing, guarding its lair.
The divers glide down through a doorway, surprising an octopus that slithers and swims out of the way, shifting color as it goes. They enter a dining area with tables, broken plates, scattered mugs, cutlery, a coffee urn turned on its side. A faded “Ice Cream” sign now hosts fingers of coral.
They descend deeper into the body of the ship, moving through a stairwell where more rust mushrooms on walls in vivid ochers and greens and yellows. Barnacles blister the stairs. The divers’ tunnels of light grow more narrow. It’s darker in here.
They enter a shadowed void. Their flashlight beams illuminate doors at the far end, canted sideways now. The divers pan their lights down the sides of the doors. Lettering readsThe Orpheion. If the ship were upright, the sign would be above the entrance doors to the auditorium.
The camera moves to the left.
Foyer—Orpheion Auditorium
An overturned easel lies on its side. Attached to it is a laminated poster shrouded in waving seaweed. Behind overturned tables—taking up most of the wall—are the remains of a varnished, oil-based mural. The camera pans slowly across layers of peeling paint and varnish that lift from the surface and sway gently in the currents created by the divers and the underwater photographer. Colors are faded and the image mottled below sea sponges and a fuzz of algae.
The camera and lights move across to a metal plaque. One of the divers wipes it with a gloved hand. A cloud of vegetation erupts, then slowly begins to settle and drift. The plaque is still legible. The camera and lights come closer. It reads:
The Fatal Curiosity. Opening Aeolus’s Bag of Winds.
VO—Trinity Scott
“Aeolus—keeper of the winds—was not a full Olympian god. He was a mere mortal, but he’d been given divine power to control winds—every gale, storm, or soft breeze.
“In Homer’sOdyssey, Aeolus gifted Odysseus a bag that contained all the winds of chaos, leaving only the gentle west wind free to guide Odysseus’s ship and crew safely on their last leg home, to Ithaca. Odysseus guarded the bag very closely, refusing even to sleep as he captained his ship. He feared his crew would open it. Finally, with Ithaca in sight on the horizon, he succumbed to sleep.
“But as he slept, the crew—believing that the bag hid untold treasures that Odysseus was keeping from them—untied the bag. All the winds of chaos burst at once from the bag, unleashing a whirling, wild, ferocious storm that blew the ship far, far from home.
“The mural on the wall in the Orpheion foyer depicts this moment when mistrust and a ‘fatal curiosity’ freed the terrifying winds. And once released, no one could control them, or put them back, or decree how they interacted with one another.
“It’s a fitting metaphor for that first night with Dr. Marsh in the Midnight Salon. Tensions had been brewing among the guests and some crew since the launch. And on that night of his talk, it was as though the bag was finally opened. The storm that exploded from the bag would prove, for many, deadly.”
Poppy
Wineglass in one hand, her bag of Dr. Marsh hardbacks that she brought from home in the other, Poppy scans the dim auditorium. Most of the seats are taken. No sign of Patrick or Arrabella anywhere, but she catches sight of Lillith’s white chignon near the front. The seat beside her is empty.
Poppy hurries down the aisle, then shuffles along the row of already-seated guests, sidestepping knees and muttering apologies, trying not to spill her wine. For a brief moment she hesitates, wondering if Lillith is reserving the seat for Hendrick.
A dark mood leaks into her chest as she thinks about Hendrick, and the initials A.G., and what Maxine said about a man traveling with their “group.” But she shoves the unease aside. She won’t allow this night to be spoiled. As a die-hard Dr. Marsh fan, Poppy has been excited for this talk since she first spied his name on the entertainment lineup.
