Саймон Бествик - The Devil and the Deep - Horror Stories of the Sea

In the car, Matt shut off the crackling voices on the radio. She was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do that, but the silence helped.

“They found the Rose ?” she asked.

Hands tight on the wheel, Matt nodded. The wipers swished the rain off the glass and the engine hummed, and it took him a moment or two before he spoke.

“He wasn’t on it.”

“No sign of him at all?”

In answer, Matt reached out and took her hand, holding it there on the seat between them as the police car carried her out to the dock. When they’d parked and gotten out and were walking the rest of the way, and she saw the dark figures milling about in the gray storm light, and the Coast Guard ship, and the Black Rose bobbing against the dock beyond it, she wished Matt could take her hand again, almost reached for him but thought better of it. He was married now, and didn’t belong to her anymore.

Cops murmured words she barely heard. Three strutting seagulls had landed on the boat’s bow railing and were squawking at each other in some kind of territorial dispute. When a fourth tried to land, they banded together to chase it off.

A Coastie put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder, trying to prevent her from boarding the Rose , but a cop intervened and the hand vanished. Her heart broke with the force of her gratitude. She had to see for herself. Her father had always known the sea would take his life, but he’d always said it gave him life, too, so that would only be fair.

It didn’t feel fair.

The boat creaked under foot as she stepped down onto the deck. She glanced around, saw an abandoned life vest and some long black Guinness cans, empty of course. This was the debris of her daddy’s idea of fishing. His catch would be in the coolers, no doubt, though one would have several more of those black cans. The life vest made her brow furrow, though. Why had he dragged that out from its usual resting place? There hadn’t even been a storm.

A couple of the gulls hopped to the deck and started making their way back toward her, angry at her intrusion. Lost in the worst of dreams, Jenny noticed the oddness of their behavior, but only barely. Ignoring the birds, she stepped into the wheelhouse.

It felt haunted, but it took a moment for her to realize it was the silence that gave it that ghostly atmosphere. The boat was too dark. Too quiet.

A creak behind her caused her to turn, but it was only Matt and another cop.

“The engine?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“How does that happen?”

The cops shifted uncomfortably. “It’s being investigated.”

“He still had his cell phone, Matt. Radio or not, he could’ve called. And he would have, unless he thought he didn’t need to. Could he have flagged down another boat? Maybe someone…”

She didn’t want to think about it. About violence toward her father.

“Anything’s possible,” the other cop said. “The weird thing is there’s no damn fish.”

Jenny frowned, glanced past the cops toward the deck. “He drank at least three beers, which meant he was out for a while before… whatever happened. No way did he spend that kind of time and not catch anything. This is Tom Leary we’re talking about.”

Matt shot a dark look at the other officer, then shrugged. “No fish. No sign he’d even been fishing. Equipment all put away, nice and neat.”

Her frown deepened. She hung her head, pondering what her father had been up to on that morning two days past. The emptiness of the wheelhouse began to feel suffocating, the air too close despite the side windows being open. She took a deep breath and felt a tingle at her back, as if someone might be in there with them, watching from a shadowed corner. Jenny turned, but saw no one. Instead, she felt her gaze drawn to the hook to the right of the throttle, where her dad had often hung his hat. In its place was a grimy silver necklace upon which dangled a flat rectangular stone about two inches in height.

Jenny bent to study that stone, reached out to lift it into her palm, chain still looped around the hook. The stone had been carved with three spirals, all connected at the center so they seemed to flow one toward the other in a never-ending circle.

Waves , she thought. They look like —

“Hey, Jen, don’t do that,” Matt said, taking a step toward her. “You know you’re not supposed to touch anything.”

Jenny let the stone talisman slip from her fingers and it swung for a moment below that hook. She took out her cell phone, opened the camera, made sure the flash was on and snapped a shot. Her fingers felt warm where she’d touched the stone and the urge to reach out for it again grew powerful. An unfamiliar regret ignited inside her, and for just a moment the loss of that stone, the wish to return it to her grasp, seemed more important than the mystery of what had happened to her father.

“Looks pretty old,” the other cop said, crouching to peer at the stone. Jenny fought the urge to keep it from him.

“Your father’s?” Matt asked.

Jenny pulled herself away, skin crawling with unease at the way the presence of that stone tugged at her insides. “I guess it might’ve been. I don’t remember seeing it before.”

Matt bagged it for evidence while she stood out on the deck in the rain. Jenny felt the eyes on her as she waited for him to drive her home, knew they were wondering just as she was what happened to Tom Leary, whether he’d gotten drunk and fallen overboard or if there’d been some kind of foul play, or if—as happened from time to time with those men who spent most of their lives alone out on the water—he had just given himself over to the sea.

“The Coast Guard’ll keep looking,” Matt promised later, as he was driving her home, the shush of the windshield wipers and the drum of the rain on the cruiser’s roof making her sleepy. The words sounded hollow coming out of his mouth. Jenny barely heard them and certainly didn’t believe them. “We’ll find him.”

But of course they didn’t.

Someone stole the spiral-carved stone out of evidence on that first night. Jenny couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop looking at the photo she’d taken with her phone.

The morning after the Coast Guard called off the search, she had that ocean symbol tattooed on the inside of her right forearm. Three days later, she went back to the same shop and had the friendly, bearded artist tattoo her father’s name in the same spot on the opposite arm. She mourned, of course. Grief cut into her in moments quiet and loud, sometimes out of nowhere. Sorrow welled up like blood in a wound, spilling over and staining whatever it touched. And yet there were good moments as well, and anytime she looked at the tattoo, the ocean rolling on forever in that circle of waves, the infinite sea, a kind of peace filled her. Healed her. Though she’d never been much for fishing, Jenny had inherited her father’s love for the sea, felt its allure just as he always had. With that tattoo, it felt like the sea remained with her wherever she went.

And her father, of course. Tom was with her as well.

As much as it hurt to lose him, she felt as if somehow they were still together, out on the water, sharing that serenity. But it was the skin on the inside of her right arm that drew her gaze most often. Sometimes she would trace the three spirals with her fingertip. It relaxed her completely, made her feel as if she might float away. The thought did not trouble her at all.

All would be well. She felt sure of it.

On the third day after her second tattoo, she noticed the behavior of the gulls. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Jenny had put off her real estate clients the best she could and spent her time cleaning up after him. The funeral had brought with it a maelstrom of emotions. She’d listened to a hundred stories about her dad, some of them new to her and others comfortingly familiar. There’d been tears and laughter, and the unwelcome presence of her Aunt Eleanor, who’d spent the wake and funeral with her lips in a constant twist of disapproval. She’d come with her son Forrest, this woman who’d never understood the way the sea had called to her brother and always believed it had been laziness that caused him not to make “more” of himself, as if a man who earned his living out on the water could ever be conceived of as lazy.