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

Waiting for his cereal to get less crunchy before school, he’d scratched out what had been the tenth item, wrote in instead, Mom .

Which was why he couldn’t sleep.

The ninth item from his list was a six-pack of toilet paper.

It bobbed up in its plastic, knocked on the side of the island.

Jaden waited half the day before he finally fished it up. What he was waiting to see was if the water would deliver it around the side, let it go on past.

It wouldn’t.

“You’re for guests,” Jaden said to the toilet paper, and nestled it upright into the sand, but it was a lie. He didn’t need the toilet paper for what he’d figured he’d need it for—there was the down-water side of the island just a dunk away, and, as it turned out, subsisting on popsicles and water was pretty light on the bowels—but he did need a pillow, as it turned out.

He slept better than he had in two weeks.

Jaden woke this time to the sand being gently cleared from the side of his face. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep exactly, but he’d peeked out twice in daylight and peed once in the night, he thought.

He opened his eyes to a figure above him.

“Mom,” he said.

She smiled.

He closed his eyes and the delicate scraping of her palm on his cheek continued. He was crying now. His throat was full.

She’d woken on the beach, she told him after all the hugging and the rest of the crying.

“Beach?” Jaden said, looking all around.

They smiled.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he told her.

“This was poking me in the hip,” she said. It was a silver straw, sharp on one end. Still in a plastic sleeve.

“Number ten,” Jaden said, in wonder, because he thought he’d crossed that one out, to write Mom in.

“A straw?” she asked.

“It’s for the coconuts,” he told her.

His mom looked around for the coconut tree.

“I should have wished better,” Jaden explained.

“This is my wish,” she said. “Being here with you.”

“I only have popsicles,” Jaden said.

“I like popsicles,” his mom said.

It would have been nice to have a fire to sit by, but there were no matches, and only one popsicle stick for firewood, and one record sleeve, and one straw that was more of telescope, now. Jaden talked his mom through the city he was building in the sky, and, like moms do, she looked where he was pointing, and nodded that she saw it, yes. Right there, and there.

Jaden gave her the pillow, then waited until she was asleep, crept over to where the Playboy was buried.

Still crawling—he didn’t want to be a menacing silhouette with a handful of porn should she wake—he dropped the magazine over the down-water side of the island.

The glue at the spine, which had already been crackly-dry, gave up altogether, and the pages spread out over the water, bobbed cheerfully right by the island.

Frantic, Jaden scooped precious handfuls of sand onto each of them, until they sunk.

The next day they spent digging.

Jaden’s reasoning was two-fold: in one place he’d dug, there’d been water, right? Other holes might have even better treasure. It was videogame thinking, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

And then there was the issue of the coconut straw that his mom had washed up on. It had been there all along, hadn’t it? Or, in the right order, anyway. Other items might be buried as well.

The outlet for the record player turned up after an hour or two. The cord snaking down from it plunged down into the island’s rock stalk, which he now guessed had to be hollow—even more fragile than he’d thought. More impossible.

It had power, too, just like he’d said with his underlining. Jaden scooped a handful of salty water over to it, dribbled enough in that the twin slits spit sparks back up.

The record player showed up in pieces. An arm under the sand here, a piece of wood laminate there, from the cabinet. The needle, who knew.

It didn’t matter.

The record was in shards anyway.

Jaden explained about the down-water side of the island—their self-cleaning latrine—and the water hole, and about burying yourself for the sunlight hours.

His mom didn’t care about any of that.

She wanted to know what he’d been doing all those years she’d been gone.

They passed the popsicle back and forth—one rule: no bites—and, with all the buildings in the sky leaning over them, Jaden told her about the girlfriends and the jobs he’d had, about Dad and his hilarious dating life, and when he didn’t say anything about Margo, it felt like he was doing that because he would explain her by saying she liked white roses and children, and wasn’t into cigarettes. And she deserved better than that.

The coconut straw turned out to be perfect for the water hole.

“Technology,” Jaden said to his mom. He was out of breath from drinking.

She was still cupping her water in her hands to drink.

“And look,” he said, blowing into the straw at different depths: it would whistle, too.

“How are we going to cut our hair, do you think?” Jaden’s mom asked, threading some out of her face.

“Why did you leave?” Jaden said back, watching her from under his bangs.

The ocean murmured its watery murmur.

“You know,” she said, averting her eyes. “I got sick.”

“Of Dad?”

“I didn’t want to get you sick too.”

“And then you died from it.”

“I couldn’t call at the end. I wanted to. I’m sorry. But it’s best you didn’t see me. I didn’t want you to have to remember me like that.”

Jaden stared out at the unbroken blue.

“I stole a magazine,” he said. “I think it was a genie magazine, a magic magazine.”

She was just watching him.

“I wrote your name on a list,” he said. “It was… I had to cross the straw out to do it. It was a stupid contest. But I shouldn’t have stolen it, I know.” Jaden looked out to the open water, called out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry !”

“You crossed the straw out?” his mom asked, looking at it stuck in the sand by the water hole.

“I didn’t cross it out enough, I guess,” Jaden said. “But you came anyway. I got eleven, not ten.”

“Thank you,” his mom said. “This has—It’s been a gift.”

“You’re well now, right?” Jaden said.

“I think I am, yes.”

“And you’re here.”

They didn’t push it any farther.

“Why that album?” his mom asked, after the appropriate length of time.

“Because I was a stupid kid,” Jaden said.

Jaden was playing his game of one of his fingers burying itself and the others going into a minor panic from it when there was a flurry of motion and a hard, fast cough from the other side of the island.

He let his ring finger stay buried and looked over slow and indirectly. In the tight confines of the island, it was polite to give each other privacy on the down-water side, where privacy would be most appreciated.

But this wasn’t that.

His mom was lying sideways on the sand. Her back was arched like from being electrocuted, and her fingers were stretched back the wrong way. The tendons in her neck were steel cables, and chocolate foam was coming from her mouth, since she’d had the popsicle last.

“Run,” she said, her voice deeper. Dangerous.

Jaden ran to her.

“What can I do?” he said, feeling in the sand under her, in case she was somehow on the outlet and getting electrocuted. “What do you need?”

The popsicle stick , he thought. He could depress her tongue, keep her from choking. Or—or he could do a field tracheotomy with the coconut straw. He’d seen that on television at least twice, and knew roughly where to stab.