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

The walls of the ship were weeping, rivulets oozing down the seams and gathering in depthless pools below. The air smothered him in the stench of decay.

A narrow ladder dropped into an even darker place—there was no light, no reflection. She made him trade positions and when he hesitated she nipped his cheek with teeth like ice. The blood ran down his face and when he tried to wipe it off she darted forward as if to kiss or bite but licked him instead. Her tongue felt expansive. “You need to go first,” she whispered. She let go of his hand as he took the first step down, but when he hesitated— What am I doing? —she placed her bare foot on his shoulder— When did she take off her shoes? —and forced him down several more rungs. He surrendered and led the way into the jet-black mist.

At the bottom he couldn’t see his feet on the floor, if it was a floor. It was something solid, but it felt less than stable. Before he could figure it out she jerked him off his feet. The blackness fragmented into hundreds of glistening bits, resembling butterflies or birds, but which might have been fish. They disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.

Lee felt the damp on his face but it didn’t feel like sweat. Maybe he was crying. Certainly he felt barely controlled, fear and incredible sadness welling up with no words for any of it. He tried to think of his daughters and how sorry he was to leave them but their faces broke down into incoherency. He sobbed, and glistening air bubbles propelled in front of him. He was deep underwater and should have been dead, drowning in excruciatingly slow motion.

She wrapped her arms around him, arms so flexible they might have been boneless. She wrapped those long tubes of skin around his head, her moist whispers ordering him to turn, rocking his head painfully.

A translucent shape came forward out of the nothing: huge eyes and skeletal head, teeth so long and sharp it couldn’t close its mouth. Floating around it was an expanse of insubstantial rags, great sheets of peeled flesh unfolding, their bioluminescent edges pulsing slowly. They suddenly darted in Lee’s direction. He screamed with no sound. Something caught in his mouth. He reached up and felt his teeth, several inches long and razor sharp. Something blurry went into one of his eyes. He reached up and slowly pulled it out. His eyes were cavernous holes where anything could enter.

He shook his head vigorously. All the loose skin of him, the torn flesh and ragged filaments of him, floated around his face. He looked down at his body and could find neither his arms nor his legs.

He turned to her then, her mouth so wide, her lips so swollen, so dark. Saudade , she said, Saudade , until she had him completely in her mouth.

Lee was suddenly awake, lying on his bed in the cabin. Water drained off him and onto the sheets, then onto the floor. Everything was wet and everything stank. The housekeepers were always so eager for something to do—he had plenty for them to clean today.

He glanced up at that terrible, banal artwork, and thought of those Chagall prints hidden away in the back of a closet at home. He could send a letter from the ship telling his daughters where the prints were, and that they could have them. Ann would have wanted them to have them. His message would get there before the ship returned to home port.

The intercom came alive and a lovely voice announced that all passengers were welcome to go ashore and identifyed the day’s exit points. Lee hadn’t ventured off the ship at any of the ports of call so far, but he needed to, didn’t he, if only to buy souvenirs for his girls? When they were little they’d loved souvenirs from his business trips. He’d arrive home and after all the hugs and kisses they’d gather around his giant suitcase on the bed as he opened it to reveal what he’d brought them—usually a little T-shirt or a stuffed animal with the city’s name embroidered across the front. It had been this simple ritual that had always made such perfect sense and it had been wondrous.

He climbed out of the wet bed and stripped off his soggy clothing, leaving it on the floor for the staff. Brisk use of a couple of towels left him moderately dry. He found his best shirt and pants in the closet, a pair of dress shoes, clean socks and underwear. Nothing terribly fancy, but still, the best he had brought. Every bit of the carpet was damp and he had no dry place to sit. Water was even dripping off his desk chair. So he stood and balanced himself carefully against the wall, pulling on his clothes and trying not to let them touch the carpet for more than a second or two. It took a while but finally he was dressed. At the last moment he grabbed his good sports jacket off the hanger and left the room.

The water in these Caribbean ports was so clear you could see schools of fish travelling beneath the crystalline surfaces. But so far their perfection had not persuaded him. Lee felt there had to be something terribly wrong behind such movie-magical sets, and he had no interest in discovering exactly what.

But today’s excursion was for his daughters. A crewmember swiped his ID card and he walked down the gangway at a brisk clip, eager to get his errands done and then get back on board. His pace fell awkwardly into step with the cacophonous melodies of the ubiquitous steel drums. It was quite the production—the musicians wore non-identical but similar yellow and orange tropical suits. Two dark-skinned dancers performed in complementing colors. The music wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but there was too much of it and too much the same. Lee felt as if everyone was looking at him, but doubted that anyone had actually noticed at all.

The beach here was white enough to hurt the eyes. He wondered if the sand was hot to the touch, and remained on the wooden walk just in case. He felt as if he had stepped into a rich oil painting whose colors were almost too intense to bear. What was that style called? He wished he knew more of the proper names for things. Ann certainly had.

But for Lee this was like the worst kind of dreaming, the kind that came when you were running a high fever and you felt as if you were rotting from the inside out, as so many of these islands probably were, what with the fruit, the jungle, their heightened cycle of birth and death. Or had he imagined it all? He knew very little about these places. He didn’t even know what island he was on. He hadn’t bothered to check.

It didn’t take long to find the shop he wanted, one offering native wood carvings—animals mostly, but a few religious icons, and some doll-sized figures with extraordinarily ugly faces, the kind of eccentric gift both his daughters loved. The figures looked more Polynesian than Latin American but that didn’t matter. The clerk offered to box them up ready to mail—a shipping center was only a few doors away. Lee mailed them and headed back to the ship.

He chose not to tour the island. Maybe that was a mistake, but what could a casual visitor see anyway? He couldn’t imagine an excursion that wouldn’t depress him. He’d want to know what was on the other side of the barbed wire or behind the huts. He’d want to know what the tourists weren’t allowed to see. He’d want to ask them how you lived on an island in the middle of the ocean. If you wanted to go somewhere, where could you go? And none of this would answer the question of his aching.

He was tempted to find the woman again but knew he shouldn’t. Instead he returned to his cabin to write long letters to both his daughters. He wasn’t surprised to find his cabin in pristine condition. That was what they did here—they cleaned up all your messes as if they’d never been. They erased your mistakes. It was a complete escape from life. Some people welcomed that.