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

“Do you think he’ll come back?” Nils asks. Adding, “Brage,” because he could have meant somebody else. Anybody else but Aaron.

Sebjørn has no answer for him. He returns to staring out to sea. It has retreated further still, the shore expanding as the waterline recedes, and recedes, and recedes. And everywhere, all he sees is bones. Pale prisons curving from and on the dark sand. Giant skulls, scoured smooth by the sea, grinning their wide lines of baleen. Tails of spine behind pointing to where the sea retreats, retreats. And carried to him from between them, over and through them, comes that watery, drawn-out sound of low notes.

Whale-song.

Sebjørn smiles. Of course it’s watery. Water transmits sound far better than air. And then he thinks, we are 80 percent water. Something like that.

He slaps at his ears. Head bowed, he strikes himself a flurry of blows, as if he can knock the noise from his head. Muffle it with the singing sting of pain. Yet it is a smell that distracts him.

Smoke.

Beside the shelter of the overturned boat, a thick column of dark smoke rises from a fire where men warm themselves.

“Hey!”

Sebjørn scrambles in the sand to get up, clumsy with his injured ankle. He lopes towards the men in a limping stagger, dimly aware of Nils moving with him.

“ Hey! ”

The wind tears the smoke ragged, throws it around. Twists the black stink of it into a greasy coil that clings to the skin of the men gathered around the fire. They are not simply warming their hands by the flames. They are working with them.

“What are you doing?”

One of them holds something. He makes downward strokes with a blade.

“Captain? What are you doing?”

The man glances at Sebjørn through the smoke. His face is bloody. His forehead is dark with it. Hair sticks up in oily clumps. His beard is grimed. It isn’t Osvald. It isn’t anyone Sebjørn knows. None of them are. Each is filthy with the grime of their work, blood-streaked and soot-stained. They are dressed in simple clothes, all cloth and leather. One wears a coil of rope across his chest like a bandolier. Another carves at a slab of blubber with a rusted blade. He cuts it into sections like pages, each of them an inch or so thick. As Sebjørn watches, he fans them out and drops them into a pot that boils over the black fire. A glut of bubbling blubber, dense and popping, belching the heavy stench of melting meat juices. One of the men reaches into the pot, his gloves thick with grease. He retrieves crisp pieces from the oil, skims them from where they float, and casts them underneath into the flames. Fuel for the fire that renders the rest into something new.

“Sebjørn?”

We are looking at history.

Who said that?

As if suddenly aware that Sebjørn watches, each of the men looks up from their work. Together, they open their mouths wide.

Sebjørn slams his hands to his ears and crouches, turning away. He expects that drawn, hollow vowel sound, the two-note chorus of whale-song, to come from the mouths of those who once hunted them, and he turns from it quickly. Strikes the pot suspended over the fire. Nothing spills, though it falls to where there was once a fire and is gone, dispersed into absence like the wind-driven smoke. Like the men, too, gone with the song that retreats, retreats. Summoned away by the sounds of its own diminishing echo as it retreats. Retreats.

And repeats.

Sebjørn scoops up snow and sand with each hand and clutches them to his head. Packs ice coarse with grit into his ears to silence what he can’t not hear. Handful after handful of sand, snow, stones. Forcing it in tight. But the song remains inside his head. He fights the pull of it, the rise and fall of its siren call, and shudders. Shivers. Spasms with the cold forever in his bones. And all the while his hands are at his ears, pressing them flat. Forcing a hush of blood that sounds like an empty ocean.

The hand on his shoulder startles him. He makes fists in reflex and so has no choice but to hear:

“What are you doing out here?”

He is crouching at the shoreline, Nils standing beside him. A wave laps over their feet. Sebjørn stands slowly and looks back at the long, long expanse of beach behind. It stretches far away from him…

… away…

… away…

Right back to where an old boat leans out of the sand like a rotten loose tooth.

Nils reaches for Sebjørn—

“Come on, come with me.”

—but Sebjørn steps away. He faces the darkening sea as a wave comes in, bringing with it more of the same music, and when it recedes it takes it away again. Leaves more shore behind. There are prints in the sand, impossible prints that have not been washed away. That lead into the sea and its music.

Nils positions himself in front of Sebjørn, holding his arms out as if to embrace him. Block him. He is speaking, but Sebjørn can’t hear more than a muffle of noise because he has covered his ears as he walks with the receding tide. He does not stop walking, treading wet sand into gurgling puddles. A drowned man’s splutter. Every step he takes is the sound of a throat closing with water as the sea draws back, and back still, and shows him the Höðr . The Lofotofangst . The Bjørn . Others. All of them beached and leaning vacant.

We are looking at history.

Sebjørn limps towards them, hands at his head like a marched prisoner. He thinks of the taut rope that tethers whalers to the whale. The tight line that tows one behind the other across the tops of white waves.

It’s not just whales we’re chasing, Sebjørn realises. It has never just been whales.

Suddenly the sea retreats from him no more. Where once there had been a growing expanse of shore comes a final surge and swell of surf as the ocean rushes in to meet him. It engulfs his knees, his thighs, climbs high up his vestless chest, and turns him about in its violent tide to show him a beach in illusory movement, the bones of whales rushing back into the swift encroaching sea.

And here are the whales now. Two of them. Three. Four of them. Five. They swim with him amongst them and draw him away, out to sea. Arcing slow curves as they appear, then submerge. Raising tails that make wide Vs in descent. Waves that haunt the minds of men in their beckoning.

On the diminishing shore, Nils struggles to free the raft that will save him, surrounded by whaling men. Sebjørn opens his mouth to call a warning but the water hushes him, rushing in with the roar of a whale exhaling as the island that had been slowly rising to heave itself free of the sea dives once more with a mountainous flip of its tail.

Uncle JoJim slid his shotgun into its scabbard behind Calico Girl’s saddle, then walked into the shin-high tallgrass to retrieve his sixth prairie chicken of the day. Charley, perched atop his chestnut stallion, Bird King, waited alongside Calico Girl. As he did, he looked past Uncle JoJim and saw a narrow plume of smoke a mile to the south. It was too small to be from a grass fire. But it was a definite line of gray against the treeless green hills and cloudless sky. It smudged into the blue as the wind caught it.

“Who would have a fire out here?” Charley asked as Uncle JoJim returned. He pointed at the smoke. “Grandmother says no one lives in these hills except ghosts. Ghosts wouldn’t need a fire.”

Uncle JoJim paused, looked toward the line of gray, and tilted his head upward. He sniffed, and then he frowned.

“It’s no one who will bother us,” Uncle JoJim said, stepping up to Calico Girl. He used his teeth to help tie one of the chicken’s legs to a rawhide string hanging from the saddle. Charley knew better than to offer to help. Uncle JoJim got along fine without a right arm.