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

But he had her cremated , whispers a part of me. Didn’t he?

But which parts? asks another.

My skin aches, strangely tender.

I ease out of Gina’s grip, and when she blinks up at me sleepily, I tell her to go back to sleep. “I’m just going to pee,” I say. She nods and her head droops.

Lightning crackles overhead, and the wind is fiercer than ever. I have to fight my way into the house. The master bedroom is quiet again, and I sit on her side of the mattress, my back to the wall. I look at the carnage on Dad’s side of the bed, and I wonder if she did that on purpose. Beside me, the skin creature scrapes at the closed closet door.

“Mom?” I whisper. “I want to talk to you. I need to know—what did Dad do to you?”

Mom’s skin moves behind the door, making a whispering sound against the wood. I slide past her ruined favorite bedspread and kneel on the damp carpet, pressing my forehead against the closet door.

“I miss you,” I tell her. “I wish I’d known. I wish I could have helped you.”

There’s a gentle rasp, like she’s drawing her nails in circles beside my cheek. It makes me smile, and tears well up in my eyes. When I cried as a kid, my mom used to cradle my face in her hands and trace shapes on my cheeks. Could that have been what she was trying to do when I walked into the bedroom that first time?

“I’m sorry I let Gina hit you with the chair,” I tell her. “She didn’t know. I didn’t know it was you, either.”

Thunder rumbles outside the window, and it begins to rain hard. I glance out at the ocean below. The waves are rough, high. I remember the dream, and the image of her family crying and thrashing in the water.

She used to look at the waves with such longing. When I was little, she’d hold me on her lap and sing to me in a language I didn’t know. It was a song, she told me, about where she’d come from. The flowers that grew beneath the water, the volcanoes, the canyons she’d grown up exploring. Whenever Dad walked into the room, though, she would stop singing. He told me he didn’t want her speaking Korean, which he couldn’t understand, around me. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that her ocean songs hadn’t been in Korean at all. I couldn’t find a language for them, and when I asked her, she refused to let me record them for my professors to hear.

“I’m going to bring you home,” I say, and she stills behind the door. “Just stay still and trust me.”

The door handle is cold, and when I open it, a sliver of moonlight falls into the closet. Mom’s skin crouches with her knees drawn up against her chest, gazing up at me. Her flat body and eyeless face make me shiver, even though I’ve braced myself. She smells awful. I hold my hand out, and she places one of hers, delicate, red-tipped, in mine.

There’s a sudden banging on the downstairs door, and we both freeze. “Emma!” shouts a man’s voice. It’s Clayton. “Emma, it’s me! Let me in!”

Mom’s skin swivels her head toward the sound, and her back arches. Her hands twist into claws. I glance at the window, thinking fast.

There’s a back door on the ground floor, but it’s a sliding glass door and Clayton might be heading there right now. And—Gina, fuck. Hopefully she’s safe, hiding in the car, and he missed her entirely.

“Come on,” I say in a low voice and drag Mom to the window. It’s not hard because she’s so light. I crank it open and crawl out onto the lower segment of the roof, helping her out. The beach stretches out before us, and the wind whips the sea grass violently. No sign of Clayton.

I pull Mom onto my back and ease down the edge of the roof, sliding my legs over the edge and hanging on with my arms. Luckily, the stories aren’t too high, and it’s not too bad of a drop. Steep, but doable.

“Emma!”

Clayton’s voice startles me and I let go too early. The fall knocks the wind out of me, and sand gets in my mouth. Clayton’s footsteps hurry close, and I fight to catch my breath, my heart beating so fast that I can feel my pulse hammering in my hands. Where’s Mom?

“There you are,” he says. He looks just like I remember, but in my dazed state, he’s overlaid with the dream image of my young father. “I couldn’t get ahold of you, but your dad said I’d find you here. Why aren’t you picking up your phone?”

A glint of light in his hand makes me realize he’s holding a knife. Dread curls in my stomach. “Clayton,” I wheeze. “Put that down.”

“Emma,” he says, and I recognize the wild look in his eyes. It’s the same look he wore when I told him I was breaking up with him before I left. “I love you. I’ve been talking with your dad, and he said that there was a way to keep you with me forever. A way to make you understand.”

I struggle up on my forearms and knees. My ankle’s fucked. I don’t have a weapon; I scan the area for a rock, or a stick, but there’s nothing.

“Your dad told me,” he says hoarsely, “that I have to cut you out of your skin. I don’t know if I can do it. But I will.” He steps toward me, his hands shaking. “For you, Emma. For our future together.”

A flesh-colored blur darts past me and tears at his face. He screams, slashing at Mom with the knife. I cry out as he stabs several new holes in Mom’s skin.

And then there’s an awful crunching sound, and Clayton crumples onto the sand, dark blood spreading beneath his head. Gina stands over him with the tire iron from my Rover, a look of madness on her face.

“Run, Emma!” screams Gina. She swings the tire iron again, bashing Clayton’s skull. Down, again and again, her shoulders and chest heaving.

I run, seizing Mom and stumbling down the beach as fast as I can on my messed-up ankle. The rain pelts us, making it hard to see. The water approaches, and as it does, the stench grows. The tide is out, and it’s left behind lines of fish bones, running along the beach like veins of quartz. The sand is slippery, sticky with clear, smelly residue. Peeled, deboned fish float to the water’s surface in the hundreds, staring up, unseeing, at the stormy sky. Their bodies bump against my legs as I wade into the surf.

The image of Clayton on the ground, blood leaking from his head, flashes through my mind. I struggle through it, biting my lip so hard that it begins to bleed, too.

Clayton—

Gina—

I have to stay focused. I wade into the water up to my waist, cradling Mom so she doesn’t get swept away. She rests in my arms, like the stingrays I’ve seen in those big fish hunting shows, gathering their strength before swimming away. Overhead, thunder roars, deafening.

“It’s time to go,” I say. A lump rises in my throat, and I don’t know if it’s fear or despair. I don’t want her to leave me again. But I know I have to let her go.

Bright pain stabs through my back, and I gasp, lurching forward and dropping Mom. With a quick twist, Mom’s skin slithers out of my grip, darting into the water. The ocean floods into my mouth, and I choke.

The pain drags down my spine, sawing an uneven path down my body. It’s excruciating, and I want to scream, but I can’t breathe. Agony curls my body in half. I claw at the water, fighting for air.

“Stay still,” says Gina. I know what’s buried in my back; it’s my dad’s old hunting knife. Gina sounds like she’s crying. “Em, please. I had the dream too. I know what we have to do.”

She cuts me open, and I can’t stop her. The waves batter me and my arms and legs ache, flooded with adrenaline and panic. I can feel everything, and I can’t feel anything; my mind’s shutting down, pushing me out of my own body.

Then she begins to peel me, and I black out.