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

As deep down as he went, and all the way around, the rocky underwater part of the island was the same width as the overwater part of the island, as near as he could tell. Like it was a column thrusting up from the ocean floor, thousands of feet below. Not some conglomeration or stack of rocks, but… a lava tube? Craggy but not cracked.

It was stupid. This wasn’t a mountain. It was a post. It was a column.

And there was a hand-sized, irregular piece of thin plastic bobbing against the underwater cliff.

Jaden started to put it down the front of his pants, but he wasn’t wearing any, so he clamped it in his teeth, let himself float up.

The plastic he’d found on his brave and useless dive was a blister pack. The cardboard still attached showed what had been in the blister pack: a werewolf action figure.

Jaden had all his items laid out by the water hole: popsicle, popsicle stick, album, magazine, action figure. Well, action figure case.

Counting the popsicle and the popsicle stick as one, that was four things. Four things from what Jaden knew was a list of ten. What Ten Things Would You Have on Your Desert Island?

It had been a contest in a magazine, that summer he spent with Aunt Jolie.

Up in the treehouse his older cousins had built years ago, before they grew up and moved out, Jaden had carefully written down what ten things he would have on his desert island.

He would need food, so why not have the best food ever?

He would definitely want his uncle’s magazine.

MC Hammer was amazing.

And he’d always wanted to see a werewolf.

Only, he must have been sleeping when the werewolf bobbed up against shore. So the glue keeping the blister pack to the cardboard had given way, and the action figure had tumbled down to the ocean floor.

Jaden stood, walked over to the edge.

“ What about the record player! ” he screamed out over the water.

It had been the next item on his list. Followed, he was pretty sure, by a power outlet, with power. He’d underlined “with power” three or four times, to be sure.

All so he could sit on his island and listen to MC Hammer. Maybe practice some dance moves.

Slurping water up from the hole like a sunburned caveman, it hit Jaden that the record player had probably been there, but, like the werewolf’s blister pack, it had sunk. The popsicle and magazine had floated, because they were wood and paper. The record had floated because it was still in its cellophane, or because it was grooved plastic and cardboard.

But the record player had just gulp-gulped straight down.

Along with the power outlet.

That made seven, then. Seven down.

And, he was pretty sure, in the same order he’d filled them in on the magazine’s form, to mail in.

Whoever’s list was chosen was supposed to win a year’s subscription, plus publication. Not this , having to subsist on the actual list you’d written down.

Had that been in the fine print?

Jaden couldn’t even remember what the magazine had been. It was just one he’d stole from the convenience store.

What was next on the list, though? That was the real question.

Hopefully not any more records. The one he had was already melted and warped. And, he hadn’t asked for a werewolf action figure, he was pretty sure. He’d said what he’d want would be a werewolf , the actual monster. Because werewolves are cool.

“Oh yeah,” he said then, when he saw the scum of notebook pages floating in on the surface of the water, the blurry words made of large looping letters in purple ink.

That was next.

Sandra Peterman from homeroom’s secret journal.

Number eight.

No sleep the night before, or the night before that, or the day between. Just remembering. Trying to remember.

That trip to the convenience store had to be where this all started, didn’t it? When he’d got that stupid magazine? Though “trip” wasn’t really the word. More like the power was out for the whole block, and his aunt had hustled him out into the sunshine she said would be good for him.

Walking past the convenience store, Jaden had seen its lights were off as well. He’d wandered in, the door not dinging like usual. No clerk behind the counter. The store was murky grey, like a ghost of itself, and it was cool inside, like the cooler door had been left open to fog the place up.

Jaden hadn’t taken the magazine because he wanted it. He’d taken it because he was mad at his aunt, and his mom, and his dad, and the world. He’d taken it because no one was watching. He’d taken it because it was the closest one to the door. Only, somebody’d spilled a coke behind the magazine: when he pulled it, it stuck to the shelf with coke syrup, just, more the color of mucous or saliva. Like the world had heard that he hated it, so was trying to keep him there long enough for the power to come back on, or for the clerk to be walking back from her cigarette. He pulled harder, got away with the torn-out insides, not the cover, then kept the rolled-up magazine pages in the treehouse so he wouldn’t have to explain where they’d come from.

Doing the magazine’s desert island contest had just been a way to kill another afternoon.

Sneaking that torn-out form into the mail, Jaden had pretended he was rolling up a secret message in a bottle, throwing it out into the water.

Only, it had come back, hadn’t it?

Jaden, sitting in the sand of his island with his action-figure blister pack and his Playboy and his popsicle that wouldn’t melt and his record that would, cringed.

It had come back, hadn’t it? Years later, when someone moved their desk, when they cleaned up the mailroom, when that messy postal jeep was retired—when whatever happened that got Jaden’s contest entry back into the mail, years too late.

Shit.

Jaden stood, paced the perimeter of the island, looking for a coffin bobbing in the water.

Jaden was still walking around and around the island. No coffin yet. The sand of his path was compacted. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it under the soles of his bare feet.

He was thinking what if a wave came, pushed too hard on the stalk of rock he was sitting on, crumbled it down into the depths.

He was thinking what about scurvy. He was thinking about chocolate poisoning. He was thinking there was a code hidden in Peggy’s turn-ons and turnoffs in the Playboy , that maybe each turn-on was a 1, each turn off a 0, for some binary message.

He’d broken the record into shards to use as a weapon. He’d tried wearing the record sleeve as a folded-open paper hat but it kept popping off, so he’d used the bare-wood popsicle stick to carve out two eyes.

The ocean looked the same through his mask.

Jaden screamed, whipped the album sleeve out into the darkness then immediately ran to the edge of the island after it.

Maybe it would come back, he told himself.

Please let it come back.

Like the desert island list he’d mailed off.

Running on automatic all those years ago, he’d put his return address down not as his aunt’s, where he was mailing from, but his actual home, his usual address.

Three years later, the letter had come back.

It was waiting in the mailbox when Jaden and his dad came back from… not his mom’s funeral, they hadn’t been in time for that. But her grave, anyway. Their own service of standing there with their heads down.

Jaden had loosened his tie and opened the letter, left it on the kitchen table like a joke he wasn’t in the mood for.

A week later, he was in the mood.