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

The thing inside her turns over, waking up, unfurling like the things in the tank. Maybe it’s a monster, but maybe she is, too. And all they have is each other.

Once upon a time…

“What are you?” Ana asks softly.

Once … Something about the voice makes her think of whales singing to each other, a resonating sound she feels in her breastbone. The same cousin who showed her the video of the jellyfish played a clip of whale songs for her once. Tony. He wanted to be a marine biologist. Ana suddenly misses him fiercely.

Once upon a time, there was a weakling prince.

There is sorrow in the voice, shame.

While the King Under the Waves slept, the court magician gathered followers. She called the prince a traitor, a creature half-made for the land and so unable to fully love the sea. Her words passed among her followers, from needle-toothed mouth to needle-toothed mouth.

The King has abandoned us, she said. While he slumbers, we must take matters into our own hands.

So the King’s courtiers, with their strong limbs and rending beaks, bright lures and endless hunger, sought out the prince. They hunted him. They threatened him and beat him, hissed traitor at every turn, and drove him from the palace until he couldn’t find his way home.

The magician rose out of the waves and caught a man fishing alone. She coiled her body around him, and held her dripping face over his. Her words were sibilant, water gurgling through ancient channels cut in stone. With her teeth inches from his flesh, she poured instructions into his ears.

She told the man where to find the prince, and taught him secret ways to bind the prince in human flesh. She swore him to be her priest, to pass her word onto the next generation, and the next. When the prince’s human body failed, rotting and dying around him, the priest’s descendants would find another body, and another. She promised her priest power, a weapon—the immortal prince driven mad by dying over and over again with each fragile human body he inhabited.

She promised that when the time came, the priest and his followers would turn the prince against his father and take the kingdom under the waves for their own.

She lied.

Though the man who would be her priest suspected she would kill those who served her once the kingdom was in her hands, it would be a problem for his children, or his children’s children in days to come. By the time the magician’s plan came to fruition, he would be long dead, but if he did not agree to serve her now, he would not even live to see another day.

“This is less than half what you promised to pay.” Ana bristles.

The man is a head taller than her, and almost twice as wide. She isn’t a child anymore, but she’s a collection of scrawny twig-limbs compared to his solid bulk. He grins, showing glints of gold among the ivory.

“I changed my mind. Take it or leave it. You wanna be stuck with a handful of stolen goods when those new ICE agents come sniffing around?”

“Why would they—” She stops, every bone of her spine going rigid. The man’s grin widens.

Underneath her clothing, her tattoos squirm. The prince remembers bared teeth, not glinting gold, but translucent-pale like fish bones. He remembers hisses of traitor and being told he doesn’t belong. He wants to burst through her skin at the man, and she fights him down.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Ana mumbles.

It’s a lie. She wants to demand the money she’s owed. She wants to rip this man apart. A thick finger goes under her chin, tilting it up. The man leans close; his breath stinks of beer and garlic.

“You’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”

There’s a knife in her pocket, a small blade she could open with a flick of her wrist. It would be kinder than letting the creature inside her unfold. She imagines driving it into the man’s gut, the side of his neck, his eye. Sometimes she remembers the prince’s other deaths, the bodies he inhabited before hers. The memory of dying over and over makes it hard to care about the small life in front of her. Ana’s hand creeps toward her pocket.

“Hey!” The man grabs her wrist, and she lets out a yelp.

She stomps on his foot as he tries to pin her against the wall. Doesn’t he understand she’s being kind? She’s sparing him? She uses his momentum to pull him off balance, making a run for it when he stumbles. He’s surprisingly fast, bouncing off the wall and catching her by the collar, yanking her off her feet.

A shadow falls over her as Ana wheezes, the air driven from her lungs. Her skin burns, the prince pushing at her from inside. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

“There you are, cuz. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

A young man grins down at her. He can’t be much older than her, but he carries himself like he knows a hundred times more about the ways of the world. He holds out a hand; Ana is so stunned she lets him help her up. The coiled knot inside her calms. The young man turns his attention to the big man with garlic breath.

“This here is my cousin,” he says. “I’ve been looking all over for her. I hope there isn’t any trouble.”

Ana has never seen the young man before, and he’s certainly not her cousin, but she keeps her mouth shut. He wears an easy smile. His stance is loose, but there’s a threat implied, only this time, the threat isn’t directed at her. A white man with buzz-cut hair and tattoos covering half his face stands behind the man calling himself her cousin. He cracks his knuckles and watches the man with garlic breath.

“No trouble.” The man with garlic breath holds his hands up, eyes on the tattooed giant.

“I’m Theo.” The young man turns his attention back to Ana. “This is Antonin. You’re with us now.”

“That man owes me money,” Ana says, jerking her chin at the man scuttling away.

Theo and Antonin exchange a look, and Antonin turns to follow the man. Ana feels a moment of guilt, but whatever Antonin has in mind is still kinder than what she would have done. Theo throws an arm around Ana’s shoulders, not possessive, not threatening. She can’t say why, but something about him feels like family, like home, like they really could be cousins. If Ana squints, she can almost see the resemblance.

“You like pizza?” he asks. “I’m starving.”

Once upon a time, the King Under the Waves dreamed a box into existence. The box was also a map, and a city, and a palace. A way to find what is lost. A way for the prince to find his way home.

The alarm beeps and Ana snakes an arm out from beneath the covers. A chalky after-taste coats her tongue, like she’s been devouring powdered bones in her sleep. She takes a moment to remind herself she is no longer the child in the room with the tanks. No longer the stick-thin girl on the streets.

She pushes the covers back, listening to the slosh of the water outside and feeling the world bob up and down. Ana sits, stretching her arms until her muscles loosen and her joints pop. Her tattoos glow, luminescent against her brown skin. Sometimes the prince forgets himself and her skin becomes a wave-born undulation of seaweed fronds and coils of limbs, spirals, and nautilus chambers, infinitely unfolding and keeping him caged. It’s been happening more frequently lately, the prince suffering nightmares Ana only remembers in fragments on waking.

She wonders if it means the magician’s cult is hunting her again. Or if the King Under the Waves is waking. Or both.