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

Jaden licked the side of his finger.

Fresh water.

So he wasn’t going to have to drink his own urine.

Things were looking up.

Jaden was writing H-E-L-P not in the sand—there were no branches, no rocks—but on the sunburned skin of his thigh. Over and over. Each time he got to L, the H was fading away.

Passing the hours was turning out to be the hardest part.

His feet were in the water, hanging off into the sharp drop-off all round the edge of the island. His toes were wiggly bait for anything down there.

“Teach a man to fish,” he said, and then couldn’t find the end of it. It had been going to be funny, though. Killer funny. Something about a mermaid. But, had a mermaid beached herself right then, Jaden would have bitten into her tail, he knew, even eaten the fin.

All the hunger he’d felt before in his life, it had just been mild discomfort. An inconvenience.

What he was feeling now, it was real, and it hurt. He’d already pulled all the frayed strings off his shorts, chewed them to paste, swallowed them. Could you eat your own hair? It was some sort of protein, wasn’t it?

Then, like he’d been hoping for, something brushed his shin.

He stabbed his hand down what he considered to be ninja-fast, and what he pulled up was… what? It was cold, and solid, and kind of square.

He crawled back from the water, in case he dropped it.

He’d been expecting debris from the wreck to wash up. That always happens in the movies. You get a rope, a trunk of goodies, and, if it was a plane you’d gone down in, maybe some flotation seats or mini-bottles of vodka.

What Jaden got was a double-stick popsicle.

He ceremoniously peeled the waxy wrapper and buried it under the sand near his water hole.

The popsicle was chocolate.

And… was it familiar? Had there been any of these on-board?

Probably there had been. Popsicles are great. Especially fudge ones.

Jaden applied his tongue to a top corner delicately, like he was worried the ice cream might have gone past its expiration date.

It was delicious. His first food in three days.

He made himself go slow, to savor it.

Who knew when the next one might come floating in.

Jaden’s tongue was sore. He was still licking the popsicle.

It wouldn’t go away. It was more rounded on the corners, but he was pretty sure the rounding was only because he’d moved some of the cold fudge over to the side, with all his licking.

Still? He was full.

He’d gone to sleep with the magic popsicle still in his hand, then woke frantic and panicked. It had been right there in the sand, though. No crabs stealing away with it, no sand bugs crawling all over it. The sun didn’t even seem to touch it.

The popsicle couldn’t be cold, either, but it was.

Jaden started to dip it into the ocean, but saw himself dropping it, or a shark surging up to steal it. So, even though it clouded up his drinking water, he swirled it around in there, holding each stick with a different hand, and pulled it back up, clean again

He closed his eyes, applied tongue to chocolate.

Just as delicious as before. Just as good as the ones his aunt—

That was it! The summer he’d spent with Aunt Jolie, when his mom and dad were doing their figuring out their relationship thing, a Schwann’s truck or something had lumbered down her street every two weeks, and—“special for her favorite nephew”—she would buy a case of double-barreled Fudgsicles.

It didn’t make up for his parents acting like children, but they had been good popsicles.

When Jaden couldn’t possibly lick one lick more of this one, he dug up the paper, wishing pretty hard he’d unwrapped it more carefully, and rewrapped the popsicle, buried it under more sand than was strictly necessary. If you have a magic popsicle, though, you take good care of it, don’t you?

Jaden drank his cloudy chocolate water until his stomach hurt.

For the rest of the afternoon he tried to keep to what he called his fake-n-bake schedule, even though there was nothing fake about it: fifteen minutes lying on his left side, giving his right side up to the hot-hot sun, then fifteen minutes on his back, his front, his other side.

It made the hours go by.

Just before dark he renamed it, too. Not fake-n-bake, but rotisserie. He was the Rotisserie Man.

It was the best reality show ever. It had magic popsicles and everything.

Rotisserie Man was officially dead. Well, “cooked,” Jaden corrected.

He woke with not just his frontside burned, like it had already been, but his whole body.

Nocturnal Man lumbered into being.

Jaden scooped out a sand-angel near shore and snuggled down into it as deep as he could, buried himself as best he could manage. It didn’t cover him completely—he’d imagined himself as a head propped up on the sand, which was going to freak somebody out when he smiled—but it was a lot better than nothing.

He’d wanted to dig up in the middle of the island, lie back into that cool fresh water, but he didn’t want to mess that situation up.

Near shore, it was white sand for as far down as he dug.

And, of course, as soon as he was dozing off, prepping for his long night of watching for passing ships’ lights or beacons or whatever, he had to pee again.

He could go right here in the sand, he figured, in his jean shorts, but just because there’s no civilization doesn’t mean you can’t be civilized. That was something Margo had said once, camping.

She would think this was funny.

Jaden smiled, and then he was crying, and then he was clambering up from the sand, throwing handfuls of it out into the water, kicking it even.

At which point he realized the sand was a limited resource too.

He was living at sea-level, wasn’t he? If he threw enough of his island out into the ocean, then the water would seep up over everything he had.

Not that he even halfway understood why or how there was sand in the first place.

Did the rinse-wash-repeat action of a thousand years of waves pulverize cooled lava into sand like this? But wouldn’t it be black, then?

But maybe this wasn’t volcanic, Jaden figured.

It was igneous. That was a word he remembered from junior high. And another: “Sedimentary!” he screamed out over the water, and then ran to what he considered the other three sides of the island, screamed it out from them as well.

Then, peeing off the down-water side of the island, there was a magazine bobbing on the surface.

It was a Playboy .

Jaden was taking stock. Serious, serious stock: one cistern or aquifer or hand-well or something, one magic popsicle— Fudg sicle—one pair of jean shorts, and one gentleman’s magazine.

It made him shiver in the hundred-plus heat.

How does a magazine survive the open waters of the ocean long enough to end up way out here in the middle? And, had this one been lost eighteen years ago? Either that or the same storm that had wrecked Jaden had dumped somebody’s vintage collection overboard.

Porn. Exactly what he needed, yes.

The centerfold’s name was Peggy.

Jaden read the issue from cover to cover, twice. There was an interview with Tom Cruise about a Vietnam movie Jaden had never seen, there was an excerpt of a Vietnam novel he couldn’t imagine the rest of, there was a Vietnam short story about a river that was in Canada, there was another pictorial of an actress Jaden had never heard of. And there were all the columns. All the stupid, stupid columns.

“Thank you!” Jaden called out to the world anyway.

If you’re not grateful, you don’t get any more.