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

It was the biggest “if” in the world.

Lips close to my ear, she murmured, “I don’t remember what our mother smelled like.”

Then she was gone again, retreating to a safe distance as the next wave hit home.

It took longer to catch my breath after that one, longer to come back into the moment. I barely had time to close my eyes before the next wave was hitting me, driving my head into the rock wall once again. This wave felt higher, colder, and my chest grew tight with more than just asphyxia.

The tide was coming in.

“Man, dental drugs are amazing ,” caroled Maya. “Maybe I should rethink my career plans. Now that I’m about to be an only child, I bet darling Daddy would be happy to pay for me to go to dental school. Let me get established in my career, and hey, maybe I can kill people on the side. Wouldn’t that be fun? People think dentists are monsters, but they never think of them as monstrous .”

Another wave hit me. I spat salt water back into the sea and hissed, “You’re not going to go through with it. Stop playing around right now and get me out of here.”

“Aw. Pretty Tracy, always got everything she wanted. Got the perfect looks and the perfect social life and the perfect smile, got to remember our mother as a living, breathing person, not a skeleton strangling in her own skin, got everything, everything , and now it’s like you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’re going to die tonight. I’m thirty pounds lighter than you are. I couldn’t pull you out of that tide pool if I wanted to. You’re dead weight , sister mine, and soon you’re just going to be dead.”

Waves kept hitting me while she spoke, slapping me further down into the water, until it felt like everything she said was being filtered through a screen, distorted by the cutting cold.

“I tried. Never think I didn’t try to learn to love you. There’s just one problem.” For the first time, she moved so I could see her. She was smiling, bright and brilliant as if she’d just won a beauty pageant, and that smile didn’t waver as she leaned in and spat her final words at me.

“You’re unlovable,” she said, and the water closed over my head, and the world I’d known was washed coldly and cleanly away.

I am not unlovable. No one is unlovable. Many people say that I’m a good and valuable human being, the sort of person they’d like to have on their team when they need to get something done. I’m not unlovable, I’m not .

But Maya was only three years old when Mom died. She was barely more than a toddler, all chubby cheeks and grasping hands, while I was the older sister wrapped in grief, drowning in my own sorrow. The gap between three and seven may not seem like very much when viewed through the jaundiced eye of adulthood. At the time, it was a chasm bigger than the world.

By the time she had been able to find a way to the side where I was standing, the Big Girl side, I was still four years ahead, and more, our father and I had formed an unwanted, inescapable society of two. The Remembering Mom Society. We would have given up our membership cards in a second if it would bring her back to us, but that wasn’t going to happen, and more, I had enough resentment for Maya to burn down any bridges she tried to build between us. She was the reason Mom hadn’t been diagnosed sooner, as pregnancy had masked certain symptoms, making them seem like business as usual. She was the reason Mom’s time had been divided during the last years of her life, instead of focused entirely on Dad and me.

It hadn’t been fair. It could never have been fair. Maya had been a little girl, and it had never been her fault, and I had taken it out on her anyway, and I had told her a hundred times that I was sorry, tried to make it up to her in a thousand little ways, but…

But sometimes damage done is damage done, and it can’t be repaired. We had been circling each other in a slow détente ever since. I’d assumed that we’d graduate from high school, go to college, and only see each other on family holidays, where we could play nicely for Dad’s sake.

I had certainly never thought that she’d kill me.

As the waters closed over my head and the weight of the ocean dragged me downward, lungs emptying and bound limbs numb from the cold, it was easy to regret, and to resent, how wrong I’d been.

The water was dark and fathomless around me. I knew the beach was only a few yards away from where I had been deposited; the tide pools came almost up to the breaker wall, missing the parking lot by a stone’s throw. Maya wasn’t that strong. She would have dragged me to the first tide pool where she was sure I’d be secure, where she was certain that I’d drown.

Drown. God. Was I drowning? Was this what dying felt like? Floating in the endless dark while safety, while freedom waited only a few yards away, as unreachable as the moon?

Dying sucked.

Something moved in the water ahead of me, something long and pale as a silver ribbon slicing through the black. I tried to struggle, and once again, I failed. My limbs were as dead as the rest of me was about to become. Drowning suddenly seemed like the better option, when compared to being eaten by a shark.

No. Not a shark. An eel, a silver razor of fins and scales and gaping jaws, which swam closer and closer, finally wrapping itself around my shoulders, its mouth pressed to the tender line of my jaw. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the moment when the water grew even darker with my blood. At least it would be quick. At least I wouldn’t have time to suffer.

Hello, little mermaid , whispered a voice in my ear. It was the sound of the undertow rolling through the halls of a sunken ship, the sound of bones rattling in the deep. It was the sound that seashells echoed in their oceanic screams, when held up to the ears of children a hundred miles from the shore. It was the voice of a goddess, of a sea witch, of the cruel and timeless tide.

You seem to have found yourself in a pickle , it continued. There was amusement there, yes, and a strange, cold delight, like my predicament was a gift that only came around once in a hundred years. Would my little mermaid like to live?

The thought of my own survival seemed ridiculous, unachievable… and I had never wanted anything more. I had no breath. I couldn’t speak. So I nodded as hard as I could, my chin touching the top of the eel’s head, and waited for the moment when it would bite down, or—more likely—when the hallucinations would be too much for my oxygen-starved brain to maintain.

They always want to live , purred the voice, as three more eels slithered out of the deep darkness and began to circle me. I couldn’t see the source of the voice, the one who was speaking so sweetly, from so far away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Any voice that could speak to me with such calm unconcern while the water pulled me deeper down probably didn’t belong to anything I wanted to look in the eye.

You will owe me , it said. You will be mine forever, but you will live. Do we have an accord?

I thought of Maya laughing as she drove herself home. Maya slipping into her bed, stretching her legs beneath her sheets, and relaxing into her new, perfect life as the only child she had always wanted to be. She wouldn’t be on the outside, not anymore. Dad would grieve, and she would grieve with him, and if her grieving was false, well… it wouldn’t be like anyone would know.

I nodded harder this time, hard enough that the eel at my throat bit down a little, teeth breaking the skin with a short, sharp pain. Blood billowed up in front of my eyes, somehow still red despite the blackness of the sea.