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

The magician was a liar.

She challenged him to make something new, something never seen under the waves before to prove his power, baring rows of ghost-pale teeth as she did.

So the King rose up in veins of lightning and became a storm. He screamed rain down on a ship, smashed it to splinters and took its wheel. Upon the wheel he hung the bones of drowned men, and the flesh of creatures born in the lightless deep. In his vanity and pride, the King made a creature caught between land and sea. He made a child, a prince, an heir. He made me.

Weird purple-blue light seeps beneath her lids, thick like the blood inside a bruise. Her lids are still sticky, but this time, Ana can open her eyes. She’s lying on her back, her arms and legs strapped down. She turns her head as much as she can. Everywhere she’s able to look there are glass tanks lining the walls, glowing softly in the dark.

She remembers a voice in the dark, telling her stories. Ana blinks. The motion makes her eyes sting. Why isn’t her mama here? Where is she?

Her skin still feels raw, worse than the worst sunburn. To distract herself, she focuses on the tank at the foot of her bed, taking up nearly the whole wall. Something sloshes within the cloudy, blue-lit water. She can’t make sense of the shape, then it gets worse, a tangled knot of darkness unfolding too many limbs.

A memory, like a blade driven through her skull. Underwater, she lived underwater, and there were things like the thing in the tank, things with needle teeth, hissing at her, hurting her. There are too many people inside her skin. A sob, bigger than a tidal wave, threatens to overwhelm her. Her entire body shakes—a cage, rattled from within.

Ana wakes for the third time. Calloused fingers press against her wrist. Her first instinct is to jerk away, but the voice, the one inside her head, whispers, Be still. Hide. Don’t let them find you. Fear tastes like brine at the back of her throat, and she fights not to gag, not to do anything that will let them know she’s awake.

“Her pulse is normal.”

A man’s voice. He runs a finger over her forearm, and her skin crackles like static electricity. The voice inside her flinches, an almost physical shape she can feel moving inside her. The man lowers her arm and replaces the restraint.

“The ritual worked. The prince is contained. Let’s dump the others.”

Footsteps move around the room, then retreat. When she’s certain she’s alone, Ana opens her eyes. She turns her head to look at her restraints, and her breath catches. Her skin shines, and it isn’t just an echo of the tanks’ blue-purple light. Her cousin showed her a video on the internet once of bioluminescent jellyfish, the tide lit up at night with thousands of tendrils. It looks just like that, whorls and swooping lines needle-marked onto her skin. When she tries to make sense of the pattern, her head hurts. There are plants and underwater animals, but it’s also a language that tastes like wrong-colored stars and brine and the black depths of the ocean.

A hot, stinging pressure builds behind her eyes. She has to get out. She has to find her mother.

Her wrists are small, and the cuff the man reattached isn’t as tight as it should be. She twists her arm. The leather chafes, breaking already raw skin. The tattoos glow brighter, and she swears one of them moves.

Her wrist slips free, smeared in blood. With shaking fingers, she fumbles the other cuffs open. Cloudy water sloshes in the tanks, and she catches a glimpse of something impossibly large pressed against the glass. She scrambles up, ignoring the pain, and runs to the door.

Footsteps from the far end of the hall, the men returning. Ana bolts in the opposite direction. The papery gown covering her newly glowing flesh crinkles and rustles. She ducks through an open door, flattening herself against the wall.

She scans the room, searching for another way out. It’s like the one she left, lined with tanks, dimly seen things moving within. And on three cots, three blanket-draped bodies, which makes Ana think of the crying boy on the ship.

The light flicks on. Ana freezes. The men enter the room, heading straight for the cots, and not looking to where she hides.

“You grab that one, I’ll take this one, and we’ll come back for the third.”

The thing inside her coils and uncoils, a pulsing knot of tension. Hatred seethes through her like molasses, thick and dark. The thing inside her hates these men. The men who hurt her. Who held her down. Who marked her skin. Ana hates them, too.

She launches herself forward. Startled, the man closest to her drops the blanket he’s carrying and the body slips free. It’s not the boy from the cabin, but still. His skin is partially tattooed, angry-looking and red. Whatever they did to her, they tried to do to him, too. Now he’s dead.

Ana latches onto the man’s arm, biting down.

“Son of a bitch!” He kicks her, and Ana folds.

She tastes blood on her teeth, and licks it clean. The second man speaks a word in a language she doesn’t understand. It crawls, twisting through her, making the marks on her skin shudder. Ana gasps. She can’t breathe. She’s drowning in the air. The word isn’t for her, it’s for the thing inside of her. They’re hurting it, hurting her.

“No,” Ana says, but the sound that comes out is something else entirely. It is ships torn asunder and the tide thundering against the shore.

The glass tanks shatter. The things inside surge forth in a rush of foul-smelling water, weak and half dead. As they do, Ana changes. Dark limbs snatch up the men. She is no longer a girl made of skin and bone. She is cartilage and rage and teeth in rows and her body is so much bigger than it should be, filling the room. She tears and tears, not just the men, but the things from the tanks as well.

She bites and swallows and chews. When she is done, chunks of flesh, human and not, and splinters of bone cover the floor. Ana is shaking. She is soaking wet. She is alone. The room stinks of seawater. She looks at her hands and they are hands again. Her stomach roils. What did she bite? What did she swallow? The tattoos pulse. Sated, the thing inside of her rolls over to sleep.

Ana runs.

Rain pounds the overhang, just deep enough to keep her dry. The alleyway smells like garbage. Ana wedges her back against the wall, a stack of jumbled crates hiding her. Yesterday, she stole clothes from a Laundromat. They mostly fit. This morning, she watched the back door of a bakery until a man emerged with a bulging plastic sack of trash, then gorged herself on three-day-old bread and pastries, thick and crusty and sugary sweet.

She has no idea where she is, how far the boat sailed, or where she was taken afterward. She doesn’t know how much time has passed. She doesn’t know anything.

She’s heard people around her speaking English, and other languages, too. She can read some of the signs from what her auntie taught her. The thought that she made it to America, without her mother, makes her heart ache.

She needs a plan. Somewhere to live. She cannot survive on old bread alone. Her mama is gone. Her mama’s bag with the papers saying she belongs here is gone. She can’t ask anyone for help: she killed two people. Or the thing inside her did, but she wanted them dead, too. She draws her knees up and wraps her arms around them.

“Tell me a story?” Ana’s teeth chatter, her stolen clothes inadequate against the cold.