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

When she’d given the baby back, the infant had loosed a piercing wail, shrieking as he tried to hold on, his face turning purplish-red. Emma apologized, trying to soothe the baby. Jenny whispered her own apology, promised to talk to Emma soon, and started off again on her run, sneakers crunching on the sand and grit in the road. The baby shrieked on, inconsolable, and even when Jenny had outrun the sound, the wind would gust and carry it to her in small, lonely snatches, as if the baby would scream forever.

Gulls cawed and circled in the sky. As she ran along a narrow path just a few hundred yards from the ocean, small crabs scuttled out from the high grass and scrub. At first she ran over them, careful not to step on and crush them, but after half a minute she noticed they all seemed to be moving in the same direction—toward her—and she paused to look back the way she’d come. There were dozens of the little things, and more emerging from the grass. All of them were moving in her direction. The ones she’d passed had changed course to follow her.

A tremor of fear went through her. Jenny sneered at the emotion, angry with herself, and she started running again, part of her convinced she could still hear Emma Brill’s baby screaming for the loss of her. Her heart pounded and the tattoo on her right forearm went colder than ever before, as if the ice had slid deeper inside her, right along the tracks of her veins. She put a hand on it as she ran, taking peace from the contact, drawing comfort from the symbol there. For a little while it seemed like her thoughts became softer, and her feet carried her forward in a sort of trance.

The path branched to the right, toward the street that led to her neighborhood. A dozen steps toward home, gulls cawing above, twenty of them circling now, she staggered to a halt.

Three people waited along the path, the high sea grass waving on either side of them. One she didn’t know, but the other two were fisherman. Men who’d spent their lives at sea, who felt the call of it in their hearts the same way Tom Leary did.

Jenny backed away. At the split in the path, she took the other fork, picking up her pace. A gull darted past her head close enough that she had to duck, but she only ran faster, kept running without really thinking about where she might go, although in the back of her mind she’d known all along. She fled to the place she’d always run to when she was in trouble.

Home.

The cottage she’d been renting was only a few miles from the old Federal Colonial where she’d grown up, and now her run brought her onto a path that emerged two houses down from her childhood home. All the houses along Dunphy Road sat on a bluff, facing the ocean, with nothing but the street and a pile of enormous rocks separating them from the steep drop off the bluff into the water. Jenny sprinted along the road toward the front steps, heart already lightening.

A car rolled up beside her, slowing to match her speed, and then the tires skidded to a halt. Jenny turned, startled, to see Matt climbing out in that familiar uniform. She saw the pain and regret on his face as he walked up to her and her only thought was of her father.

“Did they… did they find his body?” she asked.

Tears welled in Matt’s eyes. One slid down his left cheek, and others followed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Seagulls fluttered down to alight on his police car and on the front porch of her house. Across the street, a woman had been photographing the ocean. A professional, with a camera strapped around her neck that looked as if it cost more than Jenny made in the average home sale commission. Now the photographer turned and gazed at her like Dorothy at the gates of the Emerald City.

“Where did you find him?” Jenny asked. Horror swept through her as she imagined having to identify her dad after his body had been in the water for weeks.

Matt grabbed her by the arms, held her tightly, and leaned in to breathe in the scent of her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She started to protest and he nuzzled her throat, pressed his cheek against hers, kissed her forehead lightly.

“I can’t…” Matt said. “I can’t keep away. I just needed to come to you. Get lost in you.”

The words might have been romantic if not for his grip on her arms. If not for the hopeless look in his eyes and the fearful, desperate tone of his voice.

“Matt, no.” She tried to extricate herself from his grip. Took a step back, drawing him with her instead.

She saw the expectant look in his eyes, as if he felt certain she would understand. And the truth was that she did. Jenny said his name, looked down in frustration at the grip he had on her arms and saw that his hand covered half of the triple-spiral tattoo.

“No!”

She twisted her arms down and outward, breaking his grip, then stepped in and shoved him with both hands. Matt staggered backward, arms pinwheeling, and fell on his ass at the edge of the road. The gulls on his car took flight, darting toward her. Jenny spun and raced for the porch, took the stairs two at a time, lifted her arms to protect her face as the gulls there flapped up from the railing and came at her. She batted at them, heart pounding, fighting the scream that had been building inside of her.

Tom Leary’s wicker chair sat on the porch. Jenny picked it up with both hands and used it to shield herself, keeping it aloft with one hand while she plucked the spare key from on top of the lantern to the right of the door. Gulls cawed and pecked at the wicker.

Matt cried out her name and the plaintive tone in his voice made her own tears begin to fall.

The key scratched around the lock and she wanted to scream, but then it slipped in. She turned it, then grabbed the knob and gave it a twist. The door swung inward but the wicker chair caught on the frame and she released it. The gulls scrabbled away from the chair as it fell, just long enough for her to spin around and slam the door, locking it from the inside.

Trying to catch her breath, she glanced at the tattoo inside her left forearm, taking comfort from her father’s name inked there. But she felt her gaze pulled toward that other tattoo, and only when she let her eyes shift to it did she find real peace.

A sound broke through her reverie, gulls clawing at the door. She looked up at the peeling paint, and the door shook in its frame.

“Jenny, please!” Matt called.

“Go away!”

“I can’t. God help me, I can’t.”

She turned and bolted up the stairs to the second story, then all the way to the third. At the front of the house, a bay window looked out at the sea, but Jenny had more interest in the yard below. With her left hand, she covered the spiral tattoo, soothing herself. From the vantage point at the window she couldn’t see the front porch, where Matt still pounded on the wood and gulls still roosted.

But she could see the road. She could see the cars and pickups that had pulled up there, and the men and women who had begun to gather, gazing up at her home with the sad eyes and heartfelt longing of people who knew the thing that so fascinated them would be forever out of their reach, that the thing they most loved could never love them back. Fishermen and tourists, the photographer and several small children who seemed to belong to no one, who seemed to have wandered away from their parents to follow the allure of something they would never understand, whether as children or as adults… they all wore that same look.

Jenny had her hand on the tattoo, knew she could take that peace with her wherever she went, but there would always be those who felt the same allure. She wondered about the talisman, where her father had acquired it, how deeply it had affected him. If it had killed him.