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

Though she knew the answer. Of course she knew.

She could remove the tattoo, of course, but she felt it just as others did. It called to her, soothed her, satisfied a yearning in her, and Jenny couldn’t surrender that. Not for anyone or anything.

Yet even as she understood that, she also understood they would never stop being drawn to her. She had to get out of there, could make it down the steps and out the back of the house. Her father’s old Harley was there, in the shed he’d used as a workshop forever. She knew where he hung the keys. She’d go. She’d do it right now, leave all these people behind, escape whatever drew them to her.

But she knew what drew them. Knew she’d never leave it behind, even if it weren’t inked into her skin.

Still, she couldn’t stay here.

She bolted. The Harley waited for her.

Beyond that, she didn’t know. Not at first.

The current of her life swept her out to sea.

Jenny had given up her rented house, put a For Sale sign in front of her childhood home, and entered a lease-to-own agreement on this starkly isolated spot on Comeau Island. There were twenty-seven other year-round residences on the island, but the nearest was half a mile through the piney woods from Jenny’s place. They weren’t the drop-by-for-a-welcome sort of neighbors. Nobody came to borrow a cup of sugar. People didn’t live on a remote island off the coast of Maine because they felt like being neighborly. The best she could hope for would be that someone would come to check on her if they saw smoke rising from her property that couldn’t just be the chimney.

These were the only neighbors she could allow herself.

Questions lingered. How long could she last out here? How long would the proceeds from the sale of the family home allow her to live without a real job? The money would be substantial, at least four times what this island cottage would cost to purchase, but it wouldn’t last forever. To many people she’d known, it would be paradise—nothing to do but read, watch movies, and gaze at one of the most beautiful views imaginable. But even heaven could become hell if you were a prisoner there.

The questions haunted her, but not as much as they might have. The tattoo on her right arm would turn cold as ice and she would cover it with her left hand and be suffused with that sense of peace for which she’d yearned her entire life. It soothed her, made the questions withdraw into the recesses of her mind. In those moments, her doubts and regrets seemed small and unimportant. When the gulls landed on the railing of her deck or came too close and she had to chase them off, even fight them off, even kill them when it came to that… she found solace in the infinite ocean inked on her arm.

Four days into her exile, Jenny stood on the deck again in a thick blue sweater she’d owned for years, the sleeves pushed up, her hair tied back in a ponytail. Coffee steamed from the same mug she’d used the previous three days and she cupped her hands around it, enjoying the warmth on that chilly morning. She glanced warily at the sky, watching for the gulls. By now she was familiar with their patterns, the way they would begin to diverge from their natural flight, circling closer and closer until they descended. She had fifteen or twenty minutes to enjoy the deck and the breeze, so she took a deep breath, sipped her coffee, and reminded herself how many people would trade anything to wake to this view every day.

The triple spiral on her arm sent the chill down to her bones and she smiled. Somehow that icy cold made the rest of her warmer.

Her view through the pines had a golden, early-morning glow. She’d walked down to the water on her first two days here, but yesterday she had not ventured out. It wasn’t worth the trouble to bring the baseball bat to deal with the gulls, and the crabs had proliferated between the first and second days. Several sharks had begun to patrol the end of her creaky little dock, and though she knew they could not come after her, still it gave her a shudder to see them gathering like that.

Jenny breathed in the aroma of her coffee, let it fill her head a moment before she took another sip. Gulls circled out over the dock, but there were more of them now, and several looped nearer to the house.

Another sip of coffee. Another pulse of ice from the ink on her arm.

She pressed her eyes closed and inhaled the smell of the ocean. When she opened them, she noticed something moving down by the dock. The rocks and sand seemed to be shifting, but it was too far away to see in detail. Jenny placed her coffee mug on the railing and slid her phone out of the band of her sweatpants, opened the camera function, and zoomed the picture.

The tiniest of sounds escaped her lips. Her hand shook and she almost dropped the phone, but she managed to steady her right arm—left hand over that tattoo, calming her.

The rocks and sand were moving, all right. Shifting and scuttling, covered with crabs large and small. Even horseshoe crabs. There were a few lobsters, dying on the rocks. A small octopus slithered across the sand toward the path, moving almost without moving, as if it glided in her direction by will alone. Down at the water’s edge, fish flopped in the surf like they had tried to come ashore.

Staring through the zoomed camera image, breath caught in her throat, Jenny scanned the path and the water’s edge again, but something at the upper edge of the image drew her attention and she tilted the camera up to see pale hands gripping the weathered boards, and then a dead woman hauled herself up onto the dock.

Jenny cried out. Dropped the phone. Heard it crack but reached for it anyway. Bumped it with her fingers so it skittered out of her reach and she had to follow it and pick it up, opening the camera again. Zooming again.

The woman on the dock wasn’t alone. A bald man in sodden, salt-bleached tatters crawled and rolled in the surf, managed to get onto his knees, and then stood. He turned and looked through the opening in the pines, straight up at Jenny’s house. Or he would have, if he’d had eyes. At this distance, even with the zoom on the phone, it was hard to tell, but they looked like nothing but black pits to her.

Out in the water, something moved. Not a shark fin this time. The top of a head, another man, walking toward shore, his white hair and beard tangled with seaweed.

Three so far, moving in like the crabs. Moving in like the gulls. People who’d been called by the sea and whose lives had ended in its depths, one way or another. Pale things, drawn back by an allure they’d never understood while alive.

Strangely calm, Jenny placed her cracked phone on the railing beside her coffee mug. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She traced her fingers over the triple-spiral tattoo, that infinite wave, then clamped her hand down over it. The ink turned so cold it felt like teeth biting deep.

Tears welled in her eyes as that familiar floating calm lifted her and she took several breaths. If only she could have kept her eyes closed and floated in that peace forever.

Instead, she opened them. The gulls had begun to circle closer. The blanket of crabs scuttled up the path between the pines. The small octopus would be down there, gliding along with them, although she couldn’t make it out. The people, though… she didn’t need the camera zoom to see those figures stumbling in the shadows of the pines.

She wanted to give herself over to the ink. To the infinite sea. But she had been a fool to think that she could stay in one place and not have the lure intensify.