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

Sebjørn cut away one of the fins, let it drop to the deck, and kicked it overboard. The sea had fed the whale, the whale would feed the sea. He cut into the sagging swell of whale belly and reached inside, pushing bones aside to locate the stomach. Cut it loose. He hefted it overboard like a shot-put, startling the birds with its heavy splash. For a moment it rose again, buoyant, but it wouldn’t float for long. The birds were already pulling it to pieces, screeching their excitement, fighting. Tossing their heads back to swallow whatever chunks they managed to scavenge while smaller scraps sank for the fishes.

Behind Sebjørn, somebody swore. Somebody yelled. He turned to see Sigved throwing a punch at Nils, who sprawled across the whale carcass. Nils lashed out in return. Sigved turned the blow aside with an open hand but hissed in pain. Sebjørn yelled at both of them. One held the curved blade of a flensing knife, the other a metal hook for dragging slabs of butchered meat, but he stepped between them and shoved them apart. He didn’t ask what the fight had been about because it didn’t matter. Men would always fight.

Sigved snatched up one of the hoses and washed blood from his palm. A smile gaped there, filling with more blood as he flexed his fingers.

“Get it bandaged,” Sebjørn said.

Sigved gestured with a quick jab of his head to where the meat was piling up beside Nils. “He’s clumsy,” he said. “And he’s slow.”

Nils was new. He had worked a couple of other boats previously but there was some truth to what Sigved said, Sebjørn had to admit.

“If we don’t find another whale for a while you can take it out on each other then.”

Sigved twisted a bandage around his hand. He nodded.

Sebjørn looked at Nils. The man was working his jaw, probing his cheek for loose teeth. “Fine by me.”

“There’s at least one more out there,” Aaron said. “I saw it.”

“Good,” said Sigved, “because I’ve got more meat hanging between my legs than we’ll get off of this one.”

Aaron laughed. Sebjørn too, after a moment. Nils slammed his hook into another steak and dragged it away.

The radio at Sebjørn’s belt crackle-spat to life and Osvald told him that the next man to strike another would be thrown overboard. Sebjørn acknowledged the statement and showed the men his radio as if the captain’s words were still coming from it. The captain of a vessel was its law. Sebjørn looked to the wheelhouse but Osvald had already put them out of mind.

The Höðr carried them further north.

The men ate together in the cramped galley, bunched around a scarred table, hunched over their meals like hungry convicts. The room was warm and thick with the smell of whale meat fried in garlic and butter. The briny smell of drying clothes. The smell of hard work. And there was beer. They carried very little on board, but there was always something for celebrating the first catch. The men were loud with good humour. Laughing, shoving each other with boisterous banter. Drumming on the table. Around them, on the walls, on cupboard doors, were pages torn from magazines. Centrefolds. Celebrities in varying states of undress. The women had been renamed several times over. They had each been girlfriends, had each been wives. Many of them had been graffitied from boredom. Tattooed in pen, enhanced, made monstrous. Aaron, leaning in his chair, added a geyser gush to one of the ladies, swearing and shaking at the pen dying in his hand, but laughing with Brage’s encouragement. Old men being boys. The captain always ate separately from the rest of the crew. It allowed them such freedoms.

Sebjørn shoved his plate aside as soon as his meal was done and grabbed for cigarettes that hadn’t been in his shirt pocket for over a year. What he found there instead was the postcard he had replaced them with. He knew all of the words but he read them again anyway, faded though they were. On the other side, a familiar picture. The image cracked, white lines like scars where the card had folded. It was the Snøhuit facility where his son worked, flames spouting hundreds of feet into the air from the gas plant’s chimney, higher than any of the mountains behind and casting a fiery glow over the town below. “There she blows!” his son had written across it. A joke, but also a sharp reminder of how times had changed.

“Hammerfest,” Nils said, looking over from beside him.

Sebjørn nodded.

“Who do you know there?”

“My son,” Sebjørn said, though he didn’t really know the boy any more. Didn’t know the man. As a father he had always been more elusive than any whale.

“It is a good place,” Nils said. He took another mouthful of beer.

It probably was. Anna had always said so, back when she used to try to make Sebjørn feel better. Hammerfest had been a dying town before the gas plant. Now it was not only rejuvenated but expanding. Yet it had been a fishing town once. Sebjørn couldn’t help wishing it was still.

“He works there,” Sebjørn told Nils, though the man had not asked. “My son.”

He had gone away to school, and though he had returned he did not stay long. The young never did. They took work in the cities. Tourist jobs, and the oil industry. They left the island communities behind them. The fishing, the whaling. The winter seas and the challenging summers. When Sebjørn was a boy there were nearly two hundred whaling vessels working the waters off the north of Norway. He worked those same waters now on one of maybe twenty.

“Your son works at Snøhuit?” Nils asked. “Good! That’s good!” He slapped at Sebjørn’s arm a few times in celebration. “The world’s cleanest petroleum project.” Nils tried to explain how the company owning the plant separated carbon dioxide from the natural gas. How the carbon dioxide would be injected into the seabed. Some way of helping with global warming. Sebjørn barely listened. He had heard it before.

“Why do you not work in the city?” he asked Nils. “You’re young.”

“My father.”

It was answer enough. Nils’s father had been on the Lofotofangst , lost last year. Sebjørn had already assumed it must have been something to do with that. Assumed that was why Osvald had hired someone so green. Only last month, the Bjørn had gone down with all hands, too. There had been experienced men on both of those vessels but it hadn’t made any difference. The sea was like that sometimes.

“We never really got on,” Nils said. Sebjørn thought that was probably true of most of the men here. Their own fathers. Their own sons. Nils grinned and said, “I never really liked whaling,” and raised his bottle to toast the apology. The challenge.

Yes, he was like other sons.

“It is the same as farming,” said Sigved. “They are like cows. It’s like slaughtering cows.”

Nils nodded. “Like cows, of course. Yes. Except people still eat beef.”

“People still eat whale meat.”

“People buy whale meat. It is tradition. They respect the tradition.”

“ You just ate whale meat,” Sebjørn noted. In amusement, not to encourage argument. His own view depended on his mood. He was a fisherman, and whales drove the fish closer to shore. Made fishing easier. It was good to have them around. But they also ate the fish, and so he wasn’t against culling them either. Sebjørn was a fisherman, but he was also a whaler. It only depended on the time of year. They were all of them hunters. Only the prey changed.

Aaron, who had been blowing a melody over the tops of beer bottles, joined in to say, “Sustainable.” It was a word he liked to use.