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

Brage agreed. “Japan and Iceland do it, too.”

“Last year we caught more whales than Japan and Iceland combined,” Nils said.

“Didn’t feel like it.”

“And it’s not even legal, not really. There are international treaties and—”

Sigved stood abruptly. He knocked the table hard enough that bottles bounced on their bases. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re too young.” He nudged Nils more than was necessary in leaving. Men like Sigved built their arguments on experience. Young men, like Nils, used statistics and what they’d read elsewhere.

Sebjørn looked again at the photo in his calloused hands and relished the day’s ache in his arms, his back. His old bones. There she blows! He looked at that plume of fire. Looked at the buildings of the Snøhuit and the town around it. He tried to imagine working in such a place and was glad when he could not.

Sebjørn woke suddenly, thinking of the harpoon cannon. He could still feel its shudder through the boat.

Across from him, Nils stirred in his bunk. He turned to one elbow and rubbed at his face. He started to say something but there was another vibration, a thrumming through the boat from beneath.

Sebjørn leaned out to see Aaron nursing his head in the bunk below. “What was that? We shooting something?”

It wasn’t the harpoon cannon. The reverberations were stronger.

Osvald appeared in the doorway. He held both sides of the frame for a moment—“Get up.”—and was gone again. Sebjørn called after him but there was no answer to his question. He swung his legs out from the bunk, dropped to the floor, and staggered as the boat suddenly shifted. He fell into Aaron emerging from his own bunk and the two of them grabbed at each other and the bunks to stop from sprawling.

The vessel shifted again. A protracted list to starboard. It righted itself afterwards but was slow doing so.

“Something’s wrong.”

One of them said it. All of them knew it. Sebjørn pulled himself straight and used the momentum to hurry out to the passageway. The Höðr was sitting lower in the water. He could feel it. Could feel the sea pressing in on all sides. They were held in a grip of high water.

Brage was hurrying towards him.

“Where’s the captain?”

But Brage pushed past. “We’re abandoning ship,” he said. Sebjørn grabbed him, caught a bunch of his clothing in his fist as the man pressed between him and the wall, but there was nothing else to say. The clothing in his grip told him everything; Brage was in his waterproofs. He had a life jacket hooked over his head. Sebjørn let him go.

“Come on,” Sigved said, suddenly with them. He had his vest in one hand. Then he was gone, hurrying to the deck.

Aaron, pulling on his boots, asked, “What’s happening?”

Sebjørn grabbed the handheld, but if Osvald had his radio he wasn’t answering.

“All right,” Sebjørn said, tossing the radio. He clapped his hands together once, twice. “Let’s go.”

They fell out of the room as the vessel plunged suddenly under them. The floor dropped away and came up again, pitching them against the wall. They rushed to the deck in a stumble, snatching life vests as they went.

It was bright outside. Calm. Boats could sink in any weather, yet Sebjørn thought there should be winds. High waves. The deck should be getting swamped again and again with crashing water. That was how it happened whenever he dreamed it. Instead, all was still. Brage and Sigved stood prepping the raft between them, taking a final moment to read through the instructions printed on its side. They could have been at the seaside or beside a swimming pool, preparing some novelty inflatable, though they stood to their ankles in seawater. A gentle wave of it washed over Sebjørn’s feet.

He glanced at the wheelhouse.

“Where’s the captain?”

Nobody answered. Brage or Sigved pulled the appropriate cord and together they threw the raft out to sea to inflate. They climbed over the gunwale and leapt one after the other without a backwards glance. There was no need to consider the necessary actions here. The Höðr was already lost.

Sebjørn called to Aaron. The man was patting at his pockets. Looking for something, or performing a mental checklist of all he carried. He looked at Sebjørn long enough to nod then made his way to the raft. Nils was looking around the deck, as amazed as Sebjørn at how it sat almost level with the sea. When it pitched backwards, all of them staggered with it, and then as it leaned to port they ricocheted off each other and fell that way, too. Clutched at the gunwales. Sebjørn hit them just as the boat righted itself again. Flipped over them with the sudden rise of the deck. Span. Grabbed at something, anything, whatever he could. Caught his ankle on something hard that snapped a sharp pain into his brain. Maybe he felt water rushing in over him, but it might have been a moment of unconsciousness. Either way, when he shook the darkness off, he was in the sea. His clothing had ballooned up around him. His vest was high around his neck, too loose on his body and too tight against his throat. He splashed and kicked in a circle to find everyone. A flash of bright pain lit up his ankle again but he saw the raft. Someone, Nils, was being hauled inside.

The Höðr was beside him. A protrusion of winch-arm and a wheelhouse roof and that was all. Strangely level, like a floor he could climb up onto, though it wouldn’t be long before it sank completely, Sebjørn thought. He wanted to get as far away from it as he could before that happened. He wanted to get into the raft. He twisted in the water to begin a strong, short crawl.

He felt the pull of water. Movement on both sides as the sea tugged him back, pulled against him. He sensed something large behind him, displacing the water he moved in, and imagined the Höðr descending. For a moment he thought it moved beneath him, thought he saw its large dark shape in the water, and he grabbed at the air, desperate to pull himself away. His hand came down on the rubber of the raft. Then the others had him around the wrist, the forearm, under the armpit, and they hauled him in from the sea.

Dragging the life-raft ashore is difficult. Awkward. The men are exhausted. They splash through the shallows with their heads down, shoulders hunched against the wind as they stagger towards land. Wavelets froth onto a black shore salted white with ice and snow. Frozen sand cracks and scrunches tight under wet boots as they stumble inland. Raft bumping between them, they make puddles with each footprint they press into the beach. Churn its sand and snow into slush.

Sebjørn has no idea where they are.

Jan Mayen is far west. The Lofoten Islands are east, and closer to land. It is not Svalbard, nor anywhere near it. Osvald has taken the Höðr further out than is usual—he had admitted as much in the raft. They are well north of Norway, into the Arctic Circle. Stuck, now, on a barren spit of land they do not know.

The island is a sloping stretch of rock and black sand, lurching into a short chain of black mountains at the northern end. Sebjørn thinks of trolls and Valkyries and wonders where the hell they are. Remembers something his son told him once: in the last three decades, retreating sea ice has freed over a million square miles of ocean. That, he’d explained, was why whales were proving harder to find; global warming allowed them more space in which to disappear. He called this new space “the meltwaters”. The Arctic was a ghost. A fading place that haunted the very ocean it created in its passing.