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

“Sylvie! You’re terrible !” her companion exclaimed, blushing and glancing his way. Suddenly he was in high school again, not understanding what his classmates were getting at. He was unable to speak the rest of the meal. He embarrassed too easily. Had he ever been able to do this? There had been moments, surely, otherwise he could never have married Ann and raised those two beautiful daughters.

After dinner Lee took an elevator to an upper deck for some air. The motion of the ship was more pronounced at this level, sometimes with a roll that forced him to shift his weight from one leg to the other, or a pitch that almost made him fall, or float off into the air. He knew suicides were sometimes a problem on these voyages, but perhaps some were hapless victims of unintentional flight. He wondered if the onboard shops sold heavier shoes.

At this height the ocean was a boundless expanse of black, borderless width and bottomless depth. There should have been more reflections—the ship was brightly lit. It made a shushing sound cutting through the liquid dark, and the troublesome whispers underneath.

Tonight’s moon was low on the horizon, its gleaming reflection painting a path across the water into its very heart. He felt a desire he had no words for.

If he stared into the water long enough he could distinguish blacker areas within the black, moving independently. As the clouds drifted rapidly away and the waves began to rise he saw another cruise ship in the distance, all lit up like an upside-down chandelier. Then an arm of the ocean covered it and it disappeared. He waited for it to reappear, unsure of what he had just seen. Finally he turned away, thinking he had misapprehended.

He heard a broken cackle from the deck below, followed by sobs, reassurances. That woman Sylvia and her friend. Lee took a few steps back in case they looked up. He saw a woman a few feet away in a pale yellow gown leaning on the rail. There was something about the set of her shoulders, a certain absorption. From this angle her face looked wet. It alarmed him enough that he was willing to risk embarrassment. He walked over and stood beside her.

The sky was now remarkably clear—a field of stars extended over hundreds of square miles. “You never see this many stars from land,” he said. He should have followed that with something, but he had no idea what. The stars ended in a region near the horizon line where lightning rhythmically fractured the emptiness.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” She turned her face slightly and she didn’t appear to have been crying. Her eyes were large and outlined in black—make-up or not, he couldn’t tell. She smelled of some exotic spice, not perfume, but perhaps something she’d eaten. The rest of her was in shadow. He thought she must be both beautiful and unusual. Still, she seemed untroubled. He had misunderstood everything.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted you.”

“You thought, perhaps, I was going to jump.”

“Oh no, I was just…”

“Attempting to measure my mental state. Do not be embarrassed for a kind urge. People do end their lives on these… frenetic vacations. They insist that you enjoy yourself. And when you do not respond as programmed, a certain desperation ensues.”

“I was thinking that very thing earlier. I didn’t want to come, but my daughters gave me this trip.”

“And you do not wish to disappoint them. You are part of the seniors group, the ‘cruisers’ I believe they call themselves.”

“Terrible, isn’t it?” Then she wasn’t part of the group. In this light he couldn’t tell how old she was—maybe he was making a fool of himself.

“Loneliness is terrible. Loneliness deadens the spirit. A man who has lost his wife knows much about loneliness, I think.”

“How did you…”

“A band of discoloration on your ring finger. You might have removed the ring as part of some ruse, but you do not seem the type. So either a divorce, or a passing, and I see no signs of divorce in your face.”

Lee looked down at his hand. He couldn’t see anything—it was too dark for her to have seen. He had taken his ring off over a year ago. “As I’ve told my daughters, I’m doing okay. I don’t need some… intervention.”

“We have a word in Brazil. Saudade. Estou com saudades de você. I miss you. But it means much more. It is a profound, melancholic longing for an absent something or someone one loves. However much you attempt to think of other things, it lingers. But you may never have even possessed the thing, or the someone, before. The one you yearn for may be a complete fabrication. We Brazilians are passionate, and we are in love with—how do you say?— tragic frames of mind. Saudade is part of our national character. Saudade , I suspect, is why many of these people are here. They hunger for something, someone. What is it that you long for, Lee?”

“How did you—” But she shut off his question with a kiss. Her lips were damp, and unpleasantly cold, but the sensation pleased him. It had been years since he’d kissed anyone on the lips. He pulled her closer into him, seeking more warmth, and found none. Instead, to his alarm, he could taste bile coming up into his throat. He turned away, gagging. “I’m so sorry!” He’d experienced no seasickness since coming on board. He’d been inordinately proud of himself. To have it come now, at the most inopportune time, made him despair.

It took him some time to recover. At some point he was forced to his knees. When he could finally look up she was gone. Who could blame her? He’d embarrassed her as much as himself.

When he regained his feet he searched for her to apologize. The deck glistened where she had been standing. He heard the shush and scrape. He turned—one of those ubiquitous deckhands was cleaning up after him, avoiding his gaze. “Aren’t you supposed to put out barriers when you mop? Someone might slip and fall!”

The little man looked terrified. “So sorry, so sorry!”

“I… I didn’t mean to snap at you,” Lee said, and walked away.

He wandered around looking for her, having no idea what he would say if he found her. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, but she had kissed him, hadn’t she?

He took the elevator down and walked up to the bow. Balcony after balcony piled up behind him—when he turned he saw a few people watching from above, one shouting drunkenly. With both feet planted Lee could feel the ship’s engines throbbing inside him. He walked around the edge of the deck, paying particular attention to any women standing by the railing, until he’d made his way to the stern. Here he could see the wake of the ship, the furrows of water turned silver by the moon.

An opportune place, if he were so inclined, to leave the cruise and everything else behind. But how horrible to be alone in all this water. After a few hours you would beg to die.

Lee spent the next morning in bed, not quite able to pull himself out of dreams he could not remember. Even with the DO NOT DISTURB sign out there were numerous knocks on his door. Finally he woke himself up enough to yell “Read the sign!” He felt satisfied by the sounds of rapid retreat, but had he missed an opportunity to see the woman from last night? Somehow she had known his name, so it would be no surprise if she could find his door, or had he misunderstood all that?

He needed more sleep to drain any residual sense of unreality, but blasts of the ship’s horn made that impossible. Defeated, he stared at his cabin walls. A series of prints conveyed an attitude of eroticism, while still far from explicit so that no one could complain—curves and blurry flesh-colored swatches of color, some lines hinting at a highly abstracted embrace. Highly abstracted embraces seemed the most he could hope for at this stage of his life.