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

“Yeah, I am,” I say.

“A bitch, or sorry?”

“Both,” I say. When I lean in to bump her shoulder with mine, she laughs.

“That’s for sure.”

“You don’t have to worry about him,” I tell her quietly. “I love you. So don’t be insecure, okay?”

Clayton would have dragged the fight out for days, guilt-tripping and giving me the cold shoulder. And maybe it’s what I deserve. But Gina nods. She forgives me more than she should, and when I’m around her, I want to do better. I want to be a better person than I am, for her.

I’m leaning in to kiss her when she stops walking abruptly, and I miss her face by a full inch. “What the hell is that?”

A few feet away, a dead fish lies on the damp sand, stranded by the receding tide. Sandflies swirl around it in wild clouds. Its bottom half looks normal, but something has split its top half all the way down its spine. White bones poke out of its back, fanning out like a house centipede’s legs.

Then the fish gives a weak twitch, and I realize it’s not dead. Its gills flap as it strains for air. As it moves, its flesh catches and bubbles. Its exposed bones dig into the sand.

The tide rushes back in and swirls around it. But instead of bearing the fish back into the ocean, the water tugs gently at its body, and then, in one fluid moment, the fish’s skin rips like a soggy piece of toilet paper, parting along the dorsal fin and peeling away in a single ugly, awful curl. Its scales flash and then it’s gone, dragged away by the waves, leaving the fish’s raw, naked body flopping weakly on the sand.

“What the fuck,” breathes Gina. Her hold is so tight that my fingers hurt. The fish’s sides flutter frantically, and its eyes roll in its head. The white spines poking out of its flesh shiver delicately. “Em, there are a bunch of them, look!”

She points up the beach. The sand is littered with bodies, half-decomposed fish being dragged in and out by the tide. Some have lost their skin, and others are having theirs torn off in messy segments. All of them have spines peeling out of their bodies.

The rotten smell is so strong that it makes my eyes water. It smells, I realize, like my mother in the weeks before she died. I take a step back from the water, and then another. “We should go,” I say.

We run, stumbling through the sand. We don’t let go of each other until the beach house is in sight and we’re stumbling through the door.

The first thing we do when we get back is Google “silver fish peeling,” “ocean fish dissolving,” and “coastal fish of nag’s head.” We learn it’s a butterfish, and that no, that isn’t something butterfish are supposed to do.

“Please tell me there’s a liquor cabinet here,” says Gina. When I point it out, she raids it and scours the kitchen for shot glasses.

Even with the AC running while we were out, the salty, rotten smell lingers. This time, it seems to be coming from a specific direction. “Hey, Gina?”

“What?” Gina raises her head, emerging with a hidden bottle of Fireball whiskey.

“I’m gonna go check upstairs,” I say. “I wanna know where that smell is coming from.” The rotten scent grows stronger the further I go into the house. Sure enough, I find that the window in the water-damaged bedroom has creaked open again. But as I turn toward the master bedroom, the scent becomes suffocating again. When I open the door, a tidal wave of rot-sea-stink hits me in the face. I choke, eyes watering.

The room is completely fucked up. The wallpaper has long rents in it, and Mom’s pink duvet lies in a shredded heap at the foot of the bed. The mattress on Dad’s side is gutted, from the headboard down. Pieces of foam spill out of its carcass. The pillows are an explosion of feathers. Even the seagull painting is a mess, peeling out of its broken frame. The carpet is soaked in seawater. It squelches underfoot as I tread inside, my heart sinking to my feet.

“No,” I whisper. Mom’s room. It’s ruined. But who could have—

There’s a dry skittering noise behind me. I whip around just in time to see a thin, flesh-colored thing launch itself at me. I shriek and stumble back, caught off guard. The creature—not a person, no, some alien thing —is light, but when it slams into my chest, it does so with enough force to knock me to the carpet. It raises its humanoid head, its eyeless face swiveling to meet me.

It’s a fucking skin. An empty human skin. Its body is floppy and it lurches forward, dragging its empty flaps across me. It’s tough, grayed, and scrapes like sandpaper. Almost like there are endless rows of tiny teeth trying to slough off my skin. As it paws at my face, I catch a glimpse of the way its awful, hollow hands are fused partway into fins, each finger tipped with a crumbling acrylic nail.

“Gina!” I scream, beating at it. It wraps its flat legs around me and opens its mouth, its awful empty mouth. I can see all the way down its dry, ragged throat. “Help! Gina!”

The skin bends its face toward mine, and its non-breath ghosts over my mouth. Its curly black hair tumbles around us.

Gina bursts in, bottle of Fireball in hand. She screams when she sees the creature, and immediately smashes the bottle into its head like she’s hitting a home run. The bottle doesn’t break, but it does send the skin spinning into the wall with a soft whump . I stagger upright as Gina seizes the wicker chair parked in front of the vanity and beats the skin until one of the chair’s legs splinters.

“It was behind the door,” I wheeze.

She pants, red with exertion. The skin lies still, and I don’t know if it’s stunned or dead, but I’m taking no chances. Together we use the broken chair to prod the skin into the walk-in closet. It scrapes against the chair, but it rolls obediently and lifelessly across the carpet. There are some minor tears here and there from Gina’s beating, but it looks mostly intact.

Before I close the door, I poke the skin until it’s lying flat on its back. It’s the shape of a small woman, with small, sagging breasts. Long, withered gills run down each side of its ribs. Its black curls sprawl on the floor, lit by the flickering closet overhead light. Swallowing, I crouch over it, ignoring Gina’s hiss.

There’s a familiar birthmark on its right forearm.

“Gina,” I say hoarsely. “It’s my mom.”

The skin twitches as if it’s heard me, and I leap back and slam the closet door shut so hard that my ears ring.

After Gina pukes—after we both do, if I’m being honest—we regroup in the kitchen and polish off a third of the Fireball. It helps a little, but neither of us can shake what we saw in the bedroom.

“Your dad had her cremated,” says Gina. She wipes her mouth, and I smell the sharp scent of vomit on her jacket. “We saw that. We fucking saw it.”

“I know!” Back at my parents’ house, I’d placed her urn on the mantle myself, and then gone upstairs and cried for hours. “I don’t know what that thing is. But it looks exactly like her. It’s even got her birthmark.”

My earliest memories of my mom involve sitting on the beach house porch, watching her whittle sandpipers out of driftwood. I remember watching that birthmark rise and fall with each deft movement of her knife. I’d recognize it anywhere.

“We need to get the fuck out of here,” says Gina. She heads into the living room and throws her clothes and iPhone charger into her duffel bag. “Did you leave anything upstairs?”

My phone pings from where it’s charging on the kitchen table. It’s a text from my dad that reads: CLAYTON SAYS YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM?