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

Wake up, Emma , commands a voice that isn’t mine or Gina’s, or even my mom’s. It’s something older than that. Its myriad voices, joined together as one. An image of a pod of strange, animal bodies moving in a single sinuous shape jolts through my mind.

When I open my eyes, Gina’s arms are wrapped around my chest from behind, hauling me toward the shore. My body feels raw. I can’t feel my legs. Something wet slaps my face; when I look up, I find myself staring into my own eyeless face, the bloody backside of my skin showing through its open mouth.

No, I think frantically, trying to struggle. My skin face looks back at me, empty. No, no, no—

My mom rears up out of the water, lashing out at Gina with a giant, flat tail. It knocks us over, and Gina and I sprawl in different directions. The bottom half of Mom’s body is like a giant fish’s, half-transformed; the rest of her body is slowly morphing to match it. It still looks flat, wrong, like there’s no meat inside of it.

I end up on my stomach, a few yards from Gina. My skin lies at the water’s edge and I drag myself on my elbows toward it. As the tide washes in, a skinned fish bumps into my mouth. I spit it out and crawl through the surf, dragging my body over the rows of fine bones. My fingers brush my skin.

Yes , says the voice in my head, exultant.

I tug it over my head, and it settles over my face like a mask. The eyeholes are crooked, and I yank with all of my waning strength. Mom’s hands, paper-thin and incongruously strong, latch onto my skin’s flapping legs. Acrylic nails scrape my raw body as they guide my legs back into the skin.

Once, when I was very young, Mom and I snuck out of the beach house while Dad was asleep. That night, she taught me how to swim. She held me up in the shallows, letting me practice kicking and different ways to pull my body through the waves. Her movements in the ocean felt natural the way they never did on land. And then, when she thought I was ready, she pushed gently on my back, releasing me into the water.

Mom’s hollow hand presses on my raw, naked back, and this time, I feel a rush of power. The open flaps of skin fold gently over my spine, sealing me inside.

Now swim.

My fingers and legs snap together, and my body explodes into a giant shape, arcing out of the water. My neck arcs in a column of thick muscle, and my face pushes outward, mouth stretching wide. I see my reflection in the surf, all rough gray skin and rows of serrated teeth. I’m monstrous, beautiful.

For the first time in my life, I feel whole.

Gina’s staggering to her feet, the hunting knife still clutched in her hand. She looks up as I lunge for her, just in time for me to catch the look of terror and awe on her face. I snap my jaws closed around her, and her body slides under my teeth, small and strangely soft. Blood blossoms on my tongue, and I swallow around her body. She must be screaming, but the roar of the ocean around me, the roar of my own blood in my ears, is so loud I can barely hear.

Maybe she’s calling my name. But so is something beneath the waves, that dark and lovely expanse that neither light nor human beings can touch. It thrills me, ringing through my body from teeth to tail. I see visions of a pod of creatures like us, a new family.

Mom’s skin flashes bright and swims away from shore, fast and beautiful. I turn and dive into the deep after her, bearing us down into the crushing cold.

What Jaden remembered of the wreck was screaming and water drops hanging in the air and the thin white mast at a diagonal and then breathing cold water deep into his chest, shrieky regret about too much stuff at once, and now he was here.

A desert island.

It was the kind people in single-panel cartoons are always living on. The only difference for Jaden was that there was no tall coconut tree drooping over him, casting a puddle of shadow for him to move with all day. The rest was the same, though: his vision failing before the flatness over the water did. In every direction.

Jaden sat back into the sand and chuckled. It wasn’t that he was amused to be alive. It was that he amused to be alive like this , with no cell, no watch, wearing the shorty-short jean shorts he’d packed as a joke, to swim in.

He rubbed his jaw, imagining the epic beard he was going to grow. Except he’d never been able to even get a goatee to come in full. His dad had always told him to wait until he was thirty-five, then he’d miss these babyface days, but, unless some tuna started beaching themselves for him every day or two, he was going to come in nine years short of that mountain man look, he guessed.

Not that this was going to go that long.

Maybe a century ago you could get marooned for months or years or ever, but not in the modern world, right? Not with satellites watching, not with ships crossing back and forth every hour. Not with there not being any more undiscovered islands. Not with Margo looking for him.

Surely she would be.

Jaden had felt guilty for going on the trip without her. Now, having left her there to call in the Coast Guard was going to be what saved him.

“Hello?” Jaden called up into the sky.

It would have been cool if a gull had wheeled around overhead, screeched a response.

There were no birds at all, though.

It was just Jaden.

Jaden woke the same as he had the day before: all at once, gasping on the beach. There was gritty white sand clinging to the right side of his face, and all over his chest.

He was hungry.

He stood, wobbled to what he was calling the down-water side of the little island, and peed into the ocean.

This wasn’t so bad, he told himself. He had about the same floorspace as he’d had in his efficiency apartment, the year he’d crapped out of grad school. Nearly four hundred square feet? He walked it off. It was eighteen heel-to-toe steps across one way, seventeen and a half the other. And the plumbing worked about the same as it had in his efficiency. The air conditioner was maybe even better.

He could do this. Maybe some sunburn, sure. But he was going to look rugged when he got rescued, wasn’t he? All tan and windblown and scraggly.

Well, tan and windblown and scraggly if a ship pulled up in the next two or three days, he figured.

That was about how long he figured he could go without water. Probably he should have dug a pit or something to pee in. Maybe the sand would filter it into water. Jaden didn’t really know how nature worked—he’d never watched the survival shows—but he remembered that from somewhere.

So, in serious lieu of anything else at all to do, he sat at the exact center of the island. It was maybe six inches higher than the rest of the island. He scraped a trench around him, just doing nothing, and then decided this circle he’d traced was the outline of a target. So he dug the bullseye out—the exact center of the island. This was where the coconut tree was supposed to have been.

About half of every scoop of sand sifted back in, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have time.

What he pictured uncovering was either a coconut or a skull. The skull would be the island’s former resident, and would fill him with despair and all that, but the coconut would just mean he’d washed up too early. If in fact a coconut was actually a seed. Jaden wasn’t really sure about that.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t find a skull, and he didn’t find a coconut.

He found water.

It was such a surprise that he pushed back, fell away. Looked around.

Still three hundred sixty degrees of unending ocean.

And, at the bottom of the little hole that was a little deeper than his forearm, a few handfuls of cold, mostly clean water.