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

But then his mom’s mouth elongated into a canine muzzle, the muscle under the skin bubbling and tearing and creaking.

A werewolf.

He’d asked for a werewolf.

Or maybe it was still day twenty-two. Was it midnight yet? Jaden couldn’t tell.

All his buildings had toppled over.

He was treading water five yards out from the island. It was far enough that his mom couldn’t slash out, reach him with her claws, and close enough that he didn’t panic that he wasn’t going to get back.

Evidently werewolves are afraid of the ocean.

His mom’s transformation had been brutal. He’d watched her turn inside out, and inside her had been a snarly wolf-thing.

No, she hadn’t been able to call him at the end of her sickness fifteen years ago.

She couldn’t physically hold a phone.

She’d barked and screamed and growled at him all night—she could smell him—but she’d stayed on the island.

In frustration, she turned on the toilet paper, shredded it into confetti. For a minute or two the island had been a unicorn daydream, all fluff and whiteness.

She didn’t eat the popsicle, though. Dogs aren’t supposed to have chocolate, Jaden knew. Maybe that went for wolves too?

Jaden wasn’t crying anymore. He didn’t have the energy.

“Mom,” he said for the ten-thousandth time.

His mom’s large ears rotated to catch his words. Her whole body stilled, stiffened.

“Mom,” he said again, and let himself go under again, told himself this was the last time, that he wasn’t coming back up.

Jaden was hanging onto the island with one hand and throwing up into the water.

It was dawn.

He had stayed in the water for two nights, and the day between. Every part of him was shaking and spent. For a few hours he’d been certain he was being punished for sneaking eleven items from a ten-item list, but then, if his mom was a werewolf—and she was—he figured he’d really only gotten his original ten.

His whole time out in the ocean, no sharks had come. No gulls had drifted down for a closer look. No werewolves had come running across the surface of the ocean, from all his mom’s plaintive howling.

She was starving. She was crying with her mouth, with her voice.

She’d finally found the fresh water, slurped and slurped at it, then splashed her pee down onto the sand. An hour or two or three after that, she padded around in a circle, made enough of a bed to curl up in, her tail curling up over her nose. Behind that tail, she shifted back to the mom Jaden knew.

Jaden had waited what felt like an hour after that, being sure, then pulled himself onto the island. He crawled gingerly to the water hole, drank until he threw up again. He threw up as quietly as he could manage.

He sat down in the sand then, staring at his mom. She was lightly snoring.

He flicked grains of sand at her face. Her lips, her eyelids. Nothing.

“Mom,” he said, not really that loud. She didn’t twitch.

He extended a foot, pushed on her thigh. She rolled with it, stayed there.

He turned away from her and licked the popsicle in what he considered a mournful way.

It tasted the same.

Jaden hadn’t meant to sleep, but he guessed he had.

His mom hadn’t eaten him in the night.

Did all werewolves sleep this long when they came back to human?

She’d said it was best he didn’t see her at the end, and she’d been right. He couldn’t get that image out of his head, now. That pacing, that growling. That hunger.

“I can’t do it again, Mom,” he said.

No way could he spend another thirty-six hours treading water.

He considered his options. He didn’t have any.

The only thing he could do was scratch her name off the list. Either hers, or his own.

And, if she was a good mom, if she really loved him, if she was really her, she wouldn’t want it to be him, would she? He wasn’t the monster. He wasn’t the one who had left. He wasn’t the one who was, technically, already dead.

What he’d considered the worst hell before—living with a broken record and a never-ending popsicle—was his dream, now. It was what he had to fight his way back to.

No more werewolves. No more mothers. Nobody eating anybody.

Jaden should have asked for a boat in that contest. A raft. A raft and a compass. No, a shark cage up here on dry land, to keep his mom in.

But there was no shark cage. There was no going back. There was just him, and what he had to do.

He sat down behind his sleeping mom, told her he was sorry, and, pushing hard with both legs, launched her out into the water.

She woke instantly, and fought to get back, but Jaden repelled her, apologizing the whole time, and then he repelled her some more.

She didn’t fight so hard, once she understood.

“I’m sorry,” she said, treading barely enough water to keep her mouth above the surface.

“I wrote your name,” Jaden said.

They were both crying.

“You grew up perfect,” she said, butterflying backward into the open sea, and Jaden closed his eyes.

Night. No city in the sky. Not quite midnight yet, Jaden guessed.

It was quieter now than it had been.

Jaden had been holding his tongue to the popsicle for long enough that it had kind of dried to the chocolate.

The splash to his left turned him around, the popsicle hanging from his mouth.

It was his mom.

She was half her, half not.

Jaden screamed, ran for her, butted her back into the water before she could get steady on the island.

She fought back to the ledge, the shore, and she was panicked—she knew what was water, what wasn’t water, and she wasn’t going to stay in the water anymore.

Jaden kicked her back, kicked her back again, but he wasn’t winning.

She was wolfing out more and more. Because she wanted to stay alive.

Jaden shook his head no, yelled to her to stop, and, when she didn’t, he drove the sharp end of the straw down into the hand she’d clawed into the sand.

The straw went through. They both looked down to it. The skin of her hand and the light werewolf fuzz coming in sent tendrils of smoke up.

Silver.

That’s what he’d written on the list, right? Silver straw, for coconuts. He’d asked for silver because it was antimicrobial, a thing he knew from his aunt explaining her earrings to him when she hadn’t been able to answer any questions about where his parents were.

His mom jerked her hand back from the island, from the straw. Her hand—her paw—split down the middle, left the straw standing there in the sand, the werewolf blood on it sizzling away.

“Stop, stop!” Jaden said to her.

She couldn’t, though. She couldn’t help it.

And, the silver, it was making her go back from wolf.

It was his mom again.

“Jaden, please, just let me come up for a—”

Jaden drove the straw into her right eye, and, when the blunt, hollow end was sticking out, was just blinding her not killing her, when it was just pumping blood and eye juice, he thumped it once, hard, with the heel of his hand, pushing it deep enough that a slow plug of greyish pink came out the straw, drooped down into the water.

His mom stopped fighting.

Jaden leaned forward, held her forearm in his hand, then her hand in his, then her fingers. Then nothing.

Jaden should have kept the record sleeve. The one with the eyeholes.

And the action figure blisterpack.

He could have fashioned the blisterpack’s plastic into lenses for the eyeholes of the record sleeve, improvised… not sunglasses exactly—there was no tint—but something to wear when he was buried in the sand, anyway.