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

“Whale brains have a section we don’t.”

Sebjørn looks at Nils. He is staring into whalebone. “They have a section we can’t even understand.”

Sebjørn feels like he knew this. Perhaps his son had told him. His unfathomable son.

The raft rests against a skeleton far larger than the others, with a head at one end accounting for almost a third of its length. It does not have the baleen plates of a minke for filtering food. It’s a toothed whale. The largest of its kind.

“Sperm whale,” says Sigved. He is winding the bandage from his hand around his head instead. Over his ears.

Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal, even the giant blue whale, but this fleshless head has been opened and emptied of everything. A man could stand inside the case where once there had been a brain and five hundred gallons of thick, precious fluid. The first men to ever see it had thought of sperm. Sebjørn supposes they had been at sea for a while, without women. He wonders, if he put his ear to the skull, what would he hear? The ocean? Would it roar louder than the eerie whisper that currently hushes in with each wave? Or would it merely be the flush of his own blood, pulsing? His own heartbeat, a years-late echo of something dead.

We’re looking at history , he remembers.

“The raft.”

Between them, they prepare to carry it across the sand and snow. Sebjørn looks over the few supplies the others had thrown in with them. Amongst the plastic boxes and foil-wrapped bricks of food lies one of the rifles. Who had paused long enough on a sinking vessel to grab that? Still, he is glad to have it. Its presence reminds him of what they are, these men. That they are not helpless.

“Ssh!”

The men, reaching for handholds around the raft, rummaging at the few supplies within, pause in their actions. Frozen. Looking at Aaron.

“Did you hear that?” he asks.

The men have nothing for a reply, but they listen.

“The captain,” Sebjørn says. Not because he thinks he heard him, but because he speaks his thoughts aloud and his thoughts are with Osvald.

Aaron nods. He hefts his side of the raft and says, “Let’s go.”

They struggle the raft back to the ancient boat amongst the fishing racks. Back to where the shore station rots amongst the rocks. Of Osvald, though, there is no sign.

The captain is gone.

The photograph flutters in Sebjørn’s hands. There are gaps between the boards of the ancient boat he shelters behind. He has not been reading the postcard, merely holding it while he thinks of Osvald. He is still missing. Tracks they’d found had led only to the sea, nowhere else. They’d followed them to the water’s edge, and further still, into the shallows, as if the receding tide may have left some trace of them. But of course there was nothing.

A quick gust snatches at the place Sebjørn has never been, takes it from his hands, and casts it away down the beach. He grabs for it, stands in a hurry to chase it, but leaves it lost when he sees Sigved.

The man has been acting strange since the captain’s disappearance. Talking to himself. Looking at places only he seems to see. Now he stands distant at the shoreline, waves lapping at his feet. His head is cocked to one side, bandage askew. Ear turned to the sea that hushes in. Hushes away.

Nils steps close to Sebjørn. “What is he doing?”

They watch as the tide washes out over the long skulls of whales. Each hollowed dome fills and empties with the waves, awash with ocean. Sigved stands amongst them. Head tilted, as if they have something to tell him. Some secret to whisper.

Sebjørn opens his mouth to call Sigved but the sound that comes to him on the wind quietens him. A piping noise, long and low. A melancholy melody sent to him through the bones. Whistling over them and through. One note. Two. Mournful, and haunting, beautiful and—

The raised voices of an argument pull Sebjørn back from his thoughts.

“Let me go!”

Brage is dragging at Aaron’s sleeve. Yanking at his jacket. Aaron is pushing back. Shoving at Brage’s chest. Kicking at his legs.

“Sebjørn,” says Brage. “Help me.”

“Help you what?”

But he goes to them. Puts his hands between them, tries to prise them apart. Brage shoves at Sebjørn to get his hands on Aaron again. Grabs the back of his jacket as the man turns away. “Let him go,” Sebjørn warns.

Brage pulls so violently that he and Aaron fall. They topple some of the fishing trestles and the rifle that had been leaning against them. Sebjørn stumbles with them but keeps to his feet. He helps Brage to his then puts his body between him and Aaron. “What the hell are you doing?” He pushes him back a few steps.

But it isn’t Brage who answers. It’s Aaron. He’s standing with the rifle cradled in his arms. “Don’t you hear it?”

“Aaron…”

“Don’t any of you hear it?”

Brage lunges at Aaron but Aaron sees it coming and strikes at him with the rifle. He has it turned, stock first, and he hits Brage in the chest. In the face.

Nils stands wide-eyed. Sebjørn glances for help from Sigved but the man has noticed nothing of this. He stands in the receding sea. Further out now, as if the tide has pulled him with each wave.

Brage grabs for Aaron again, this time for the rifle. Manages to get his large hands on the rifle butt. He pulls it to him, hand over hand, gathering it to him like rope, and Sebjørn sees what is about to happen a moment before it does. Too late to warn them. Too late to do anything. Brage pulls at the stock and Aaron pulls at the barrel and his head is flung back with a sudden spray of blood. A following crack of sound.

Sebjørn turns away from the sight of a man sprawled in the sand and watches Sigved wading deeper out to sea, too stunned to say or do anything to stop him.

“Do you think the captain sent a signal in time?”

Nils is standing, looking down the beach when he asks. There is little to look at. The waves sweep in slowly, barely moving up the shore. Leaving more of it behind.

“Hmm?”

Sebjørn sits in the sand beside Aaron. The wind is making his ears ache. Constantly, now, he hears how it whistles through the bones. How it arcs over the turned boat and cuts between the soft boards of the collapsing shore station. The island is awash with the rise and fall of its music. The keening two-note call that threads through him, low and long.

“A distress signal,” Nils says. “Do you think he got one out in time?”

“It’s automatic.”

The Höðr ’s beacon would have activated as soon as the vessel took on water, broadcasting their position.

“How long before they find us?”

Sebjørn doesn’t answer. After all, the Lofotofangst had the same equipment. The Bjørn , too.

“Sebjørn?”

“I don’t know.”

Aaron lies on his back on the beach, staring at the sky. Blood has pooled around his head, a crimson nimbus that refuses to soak into the wet sand.

“Sebjørn? Where’s the rifle now?”

“Brage took it.”

He can’t remember if he knows that or not. Or if he knows where Brage has taken it, either. Can’t think much of anything with that constant noise. The peep and elongated squeal. Regular enough it seems like song and frustrating in its patterned resounding. But beautiful, too.

Sebjørn looks back at where the raft sits, nestled between the fishless racks. A red light blinks from it. A white. Mostly they pulse out of time with each other but sometimes, briefly, there is synchronicity. A pattern that stretches out and comes back in and repeats.