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

Ana pulls on the wetsuit hanging in the miniscule shower. The neoprene smothers the faint light so she can almost forget about her tattoos. At the door to her cabin, she pauses, touching the twenty-year-old framed newspaper page hanging there.

The grainy photograph shows the prow of a ship, jutting from the water, rescue crews surrounding it. The story underneath relates how the ship ran into an unexpected reef, tearing open its hull. How all sixty-seven passengers—mostly refugees—were killed, along with the crew. The story doesn’t mention the way the metal sounded, screaming, or the chanting she’d heard that had summoned the reef from the depths. It doesn’t mention the children that were stolen. It doesn’t say anything about Ana, or her mother.

Ana emerges onto the deck, where the wind picks strands from her hastily gathered ponytail. Theo turns from the rail with a grin.

“What’s the word, cuz?”

Ana manages a wave, feeling the weight of her uneasy sleep.

“The word is good, cuz. The wreck is right where you said it would be.”

Ana peers over Theo’s shoulder at the image on his tablet showing the ocean floor in bright blots of thermal color.

“Private vessel. Probably scuttled for the insurance payout. How did you know? Is it the, you know…”

Theo wiggles his fingers and makes a woooo sound.

“Shut up.” She snaps the words out harder than she means to, then shakes her head. They’ve been through so much together, from the streets to this boat, to saving each other’s lives more than once. It’s been years since she was a stick-thin teenager and Theo threw his arm around her shoulders. They’re not family by blood, but they might as well be.

Theo’s grin is back a moment later. That’s the way it’s always been between them—Ana, surly and afraid of herself, Theo smiling, words sliding right off him.

“It’ll be a good haul,” Ana offers by way of apology, putting up a fist for Theo to bump.

Theo knows more about her than anyone else, other than the prince. More than she wishes he knew, and less than he thinks. She hates keeping secrets, but it’s for his own protection. Which is why he doesn’t know about the thing waiting in the wreck beneath them. The one useful scrap she’s been able to glean from the prince’s restless nightmares—a box, dreamed into existence by the King Under the Waves, worked like sand inside an oyster shell to make a pearl.

The man who bought it at auction had no idea what it was. Now that man is dead.

That’s another thing Theo doesn’t know. How Ana drifted in the waves and let the prince unfurl from inside her. How surprisingly easy it was with the prince’s help to convince the man with the yacht to sink his boat for the insurance money. Sink the boat, and himself, and the box, which had been giving him nightmares about things without eyes, without bones, all mouths, crawling dripping out of the sea. Things that flopped and squelched across the deck. Dead and rotted things rising out of the deep.

Overhead, the sky blushes a muddy color between brown, purple, and gray. Ana checks her gear, and Theo hands her the dive computer, which she straps to her wrist.

“I’ve got it all programmed,” Theo says. “Time, depth, everything. You won’t even have to think about it.”

“Thanks.” She manages a smile, pulling up the hood of her dive suit.

“Antonin promised us sixty-forty this time.”

Which means Ana will get fifteen to Theo’s twenty-five—it’s his boat—but she doesn’t care. The box is all she cares about.

Theo’s expression changes, and it’s like watching storm clouds roll in. His eyes, which are normally a color like rich, polished cherry wood, go almost as dark as black coffee. He squeezes her shoulder.

“Be careful down there.”

“I always am.” She tries to sound reassuring.

He knows what she is, knows she could dive without her suit, if she chose. Maybe that’s what worries him. The clouds lift, and Theo flashes brilliant white teeth again.

“Bring back the goods, cuz.”

Ana tugs her mask into place, gives Theo a thumbs up, and tips backward into the water. The visibility is low, the world muted greens and browns. She switches on the light clipped to her shoulder, and the ghostly outline of the downed yacht appears below. The designs on her skin shiver with restless hope.

If this works, maybe she can bring the prince home. She can finally be alone inside her skin. The idea thrills and terrifies her.

She’s only “seen” the prince once. When she first began dreaming of the box, she started diving before the sun rose, staying down longer and longer each time. Unnerved by the dreams, the prince had been silent, sullen. The time when he would tell her fairy tales had long since passed, so it was Ana who reached for him, screaming inside her own mind while her lungs burned and ached for breath, demanding an explanation and a way to make the dreams stop.

And he’d appeared. A skull, furred with algae and barnacles. It looked something like a goat’s skull, and something like an ichthyosaur, rolling loosely atop a body that made no sense. A ribcage, an impossible coil of blue-gray limbs unfurling and unfolding in constant restless motion. A voice like crashed ships, and eyes burning blue flame even underwater. Her prince.

WE ARE ::::

It was the first time she’d heard him speak aloud. She hadn’t understood the word, but she’d known it for a name, grinding against her like splintered bone. She didn’t understand how he could be inside and outside her body at the same time, but he was.

WE ARE :::: OUR FATHER IS :::: WE ARE LOST.

Ana had wanted to laugh and weep all at once. Part of her still does as she kicks her way to the wreck. If she stops for just a moment to think about her life—the ship, her mother, the thing inside her, the marks on her skin—she will start screaming and never stop.

She pulls herself through the yacht’s open hatchway. A startled fish darts away as she enters the main cabin. There’s a bed built into the floor, cabinets above it, drawers beneath it, and a desk built into the wall. Ana starts with the desk. The prince is awake, shivering, and his movements make her clumsy. The bottom drawer is the only one that’s locked. Ana unsnaps the dive knife from her belt and wedges the point into the gap between drawers. She wiggles the blade as deep as it will go, then smacks the hilt. The lock pops open.

Whorls and twists and coils move across her skin as she lifts the box free. The outside is carved with intricate designs both achingly familiar and utterly strange. Home. Ana flips the lid open. Inside the box is a labyrinth, not carved, but grown. It glows faintly, the same sick-bright shade of blue-green as the marks on her skin.

Home. Home. Home.

Ana sits cross-legged on her narrow bed. Outside, waves slap the hull. Theo is off with Antonin. She is alone with the prince, and the water, and the box. She traces the raised pattern on the lid, following coiled ways doubling back on themselves. The box is a map. Beneath her skin, the prince twitches a multitude of limbs.

“Do you want to go home?”

A jumble of longing and fear answers her; the words traitor , weakling , and flaw hammer at her from the inside. Snatches of fairy tales, the story of a prince driven from his home, imprisoned within a human body; the story of a girl, torn from her mother, made into a cage for a monster.

Unmake me.

The words echo inside her skull. Whatever the prince wants, it’s not this half existence. Ana opens the box. In the dim room, it no longer glows, but draws light into itself. A maze within a maze, haunted by tiny flickers of motion.