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

This was from Jaden’s mom, before she left and got sick and died three states away, not telling Jaden or his father.

But don’t think about her.

Start thinking about sad things on a desert island, and there’s no one to pull you out of that spiral.

Jaden licked his popsicle until he was full and drank from his hole in the ground and peed in the ocean and buried himself in the sand again.

Soon his hair would grow long enough to shade his face. Until then, he would keep arranging his jean shorts over his head.

Survival was pretty stupid, really.

Well, night. And maybe it was kind of still day six—Jaden wasn’t super sure anymore.

If he was going to turn into a creature of the night in order to preserve his skin, though, then he had to start doing it like this: pinching himself awake all night, burrowing down into the sand during the day.

The sky was a big blue bowl turned over him, it felt like. And he’d been living here for ten thousand years, and had an endless supply of BBs for his rifle, had been pumping it up and taking aim up at that bowl forever, making stars.

“This one’s for you, Margo,” he said, and aimed his imaginary rifle up, poked another hole in the sky.

He was spelling her name, connecting the dots. He was drawing pictures. Squares and triangles at first, but then he’d leveled up, was on to Dr. Seuss versions of tall, spindly buildings. He couldn’t do animals yet, couldn’t imagine how the Greeks or Egyptians or Inca or whoever had done all that. Buildings, though, those he could do.

His plan was to get enough going to have a real city up there. Except the stars kept moving. All together, but on their own, too, some of them.

It was only because he’d poked so many holes in the night sky—because he’d let this much light into his upside-down bowl—that he saw the shimmer out in the water. It was different from the white that surged at the top of the waves.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it,” Jaden told himself, but he already was: running out to that shimmer, falling into the water, dog-paddling out to it.

It was flat and hard—another magazine?—but he couldn’t look, had to get back to the island.

Out in the ocean, he had the sudden certainty he wasn’t going to find shore again in the dark. That some current was going to grab him, swish him around the side of the island, push him out farther than he could swim back. That a whale was going to nibble at his feet, take his whole leg into his mouth to see if he was a big plankton. Even a vine of seaweed brushing him would probably stop his heart.

The island was still there.

Jaden clambered back up, panicking and scrambling when it was more like swinging up onto a roof than walking up a slope—what kind of beach was this?—then tried to angle whatever he’d found up to see it.

He had to wait until morning to be sure. Until sunup.

No trumpets played in glory when he could finally make out the picture: a man in a tasteful suit, leaning to his right.

An album, a record.

Vinyl.

MC Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em .

Jaden was buried in the sand with his popsicle in his mouth.

Just staring. At nothing. He wasn’t super sure it was the ninth day, but he was pretty sure he’d skipped the eighth day. Hadn’t eaten, hadn’t drank. Had just laid there. With Peggy.

Her turn-ons were white roses and children and animals, and her turnoffs were cigarettes and traffic. To be honest, Jaden was confusing her with Margo, some.

His plan was, when he was rescued, to leave the Playboy buried in the sand, for the next tenant.

Without meaning to, his tongue worrying over that cold chocolate, he bit into the meat of the popsicle. Into the fudge. The cold hurt his teeth and the popsicle tumbled down into the sand on his chest, but he still had a big chunk of it in his mouth.

He chewed it, swallowed it.

He kind of wanted to look down, see what might or might not be happening with the popsicle, but he also kind of didn’t want to watch the goose do its golden egg thing.

But then he remembered: there’d been words on the popsicle sticks that summer with his aunt, hadn’t there?

He sat up, sand caking off him, covering the popsicle even more. He dug it up, shook the sand off, rolled over to wash it clean and then bit in again, deeper, faster, more and more, all on one side, enough to free up the stick on what he was calling the right.

He licked it clean, squinted to read the scrolly red font.

TRY AGAIN .

And now he just had half a popsicle.

Night again.

Jaden didn’t quite have a city in the night sky yet, but he had picked out three kind-of columns of stars he could build three different-height buildings from, and those stars all stayed together, mostly.

Now he was making up a story for why this light on the seventeenth floor was off, why that one was migrating sideways, or to a lower floor. The stories mostly had to do with candles and a blackout. He called the wandering stars elevators.

Jaden wondered what if he bit off a piece of his calf and ate it.

The popsicle stick he’d denuded—had never got its fudge iciness back. Jaden wore the naked popsicle stick behind his ear now. His first impulse had been to chew it, but that was the kind of indulgence you allowed yourself when there were more than two popsicle sticks in the whole entire world. Or, the world Jaden had access to.

The MC Hammer record was useless. The sleeve was just a sleeve, the record just a record, the tiny print on the label just what Jaden would have expected, had he ever got that record.

And, related: why that record? More to the point, why that Playboy ? He’d never even owned a single issue, had only ever sneak-looked at his uncle’s, that one summer.

He threaded the popsicle stick from behind his ear and set it under his nose like a mustache and pooched his lips up to keep it there.

It was the current contest: how long until his lips cramped, and the coach—it was either a coach or a drill sergeant, Jaden wasn’t completely committed yet—how long until that coach or drill sergeant would pull him from the game or the battle, and Jaden would say no, no, he could do it, just give him time.

One of the lights of his buildings in the sky winked out and Jaden blew it a kiss, letting the popsicle stick tumble down his chest.

Game over.

Bright, bright sun. The only kind anymore.

But there were a lot of kinds of island, evidently.

Until the other night, getting the MC Hammer record, when he’d had to lunge up onto the island instead of just walk, he’d assumed all islands were the crowns of vast majestic never-seen underwater mountains. But mountains have slopes, don’t they? Even unmajestic ones? They don’t have walls or cliffs leading straight up to the tip-top.

Jaden was no geology major or island-ologist, but this island wasn’t quite tracking.

He’d been pondering it all morning, like figuring out the nature of the island might give him, the clue he needed to escape. Finally he planted the popsicle stick straight up and down by the water hole, made sure the Playboy and the record were buried together, checked the wrapper on the half a popsicle he had left, and, like a flag he was leaving behind to tell somebody he’d been here, he stripped out of his shorts, laid them out by the upright popsicle stick.

They wouldn’t blow away. No clouds, no wind.

And then he walked to the non-urinal side of the island, sat on the edge, and slipped into the… not exactly the cold, more like the great empty lukewarm.

Still touching—holding on—he treaded water with his legs, he heavy-breathed, getting his lungs to capacity, and then he ducked under, keeping his hand in constant contact, but going down, and down.