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

Good girl , whispered the voice, and the eels attacked.

They moved so fast that my eyes couldn’t follow them, and my one, disconnected thought was of the squirrels that sometimes came to raid Dad’s bird feeders. They always looked fat and furry and slow, but when something surprised them, they could be out of the yard and up a tree in an instant.

The eel at my throat bit down while the other three swirled around me, kicking up a froth born of bubbles and blood. I screamed soundlessly, in shock and pain and terror, and kept screaming as the first eel forced itself into my mouth, squirming wildly. Its sides were slick with mucus, but its fins were sharp as razors, slicing my tongue and the inside of my cheeks. My body still refused to respond to my commands, and so I couldn’t even thrash as the eel squirmed down and deeper, leaving my mouth empty and bleeding. I felt its long, alien body moving inside me, coming to rest in one side of my chest, heavy and immutable.

Before I could close my mouth, the next eel was there, forcing itself down, following the first. Then came the third, and finally, the eel at my throat let go and rose to hover, bloody-toothed and terrible, in front of my eyes.

It is done , said the voice.

I blacked out before the fourth eel dove into my mouth. Of everything that had happened since I’d woken up in the tide pool, that felt like the first and only mercy.

I woke when the tide flowed out, leaving me sitting in water to my waist, the remains of the gauze Maya had used to tie my wrists and ankles fluttering around me like a mummy’s wrappings. It had been a good choice on her part: since I hadn’t been able to struggle, it hadn’t left any marks to show that I’d been tied up, and it would have dissolved or been washed away if I had been swept out to sea as she’d been intending.

My body felt like it had been wrapped in a thousand layers of that gauze, rendered heavy and slow and strange by my night in the water. I sat up, working my hands free of their wrappings before raising them to my face, feeling it unsteadily.

There was a cut on my lip. It burned when I touched it, filled with salt, filled with poison.

So: I was in the water, in the tide pools, bound, my body still recovering from the drugs I had never voluntarily taken.

So: there was no possible way I had survived, not with the ocean closing over my head for so many hours. The inside of my mouth burned like my lip, and I knew that if I tried to speak, I would only be able to whisper the language of scar and scab. My tongue was a battlefield, my throat a graveyard, and there were eels curled in the space where my lungs belonged. I was not a dead girl. I was not a drowned girl. But I was of their kin and kind, and whatever had seen me through to morning was unlikely to let me keep their gifts for free.

I leaned forward, picking at the gauze on my ankles until my numb fingers caught its edge and I was able to peel it away layer by layer, involuntary mermaid regaining the use of her legs. Still numb and shaky I stood, bracing my hands on the tide pool wall, not caring when the rocks cut into my skin. I was drenched but I wasn’t drowned; my fingers weren’t pruney, my skin wasn’t loose. Except for the cuts on my lip and the cold that seemed to run all the way to my bones, there was nothing to indicate that I had spent my night submerged. But I knew. Oh, I knew.

Inch by inch, I pulled myself out of the tide pool, water running off my hair, my skin, my ruined nightgown. Inch by inch, I shuffled barefoot toward the parking lot, barely noticing and not caring at all when I stepped on the bits of glass and broken shell that littered the pathway. It was early enough that there were no cars, and so I continued onward, not hurrying. There didn’t seem to be anything left in the world that was worth hurrying for.

I made it as far as the freeway, making my slow, waterlogged way along the shoulder, before someone saw me and called the police. Everything started moving very quickly after that, although none of it was my doing. First there were sirens, and then there were ambulances, and men in uniforms, and my father, pushing his way through the crowd, shouting my name over and over again, rushing to take me into his arms and hold me close, my cheek against his shoulder, my eyes searching the faces of the gathered onlookers.

Maya was there. She watched from behind the front rank of the crowd, her eyes burning with hatred and with something stranger, rarer, at least from her. It took me a moment to identify it for what it was: fear. She knew that I could end her with a word, or thought I could. The cuts in my mouth burned and stung, making speech impossible.

Maybe this was the secret at the center of the story, the secret Hans Christian Andersen heard and spun into a fairy tale, sugar and morality and seafoam. There was no mermaid, only a girl afraid of drowning who made a bargain with something deeper and older and wilder than herself. A girl with a ribcage full of eels and a tongue sliced to ribbons, who walked out of the surf and couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to her or where she’d gone.

I hoped that girl got to marry her prince and be happy. Watching my sister do her best to blend with the crowd, I didn’t think it was very likely.

“Honey, can you look at me?”

I turned obediently toward the sound of my father’s voice. He was flanked by police officers, their expressions schooled into calm, non-threatening inquisitiveness. They thought I had been traumatized. They were trying not to frighten me before they knew what had really happened.

They were never going to know what really happened.

My father, familiar face drawn in anxious lines, touched my cheek and asked, “Who did this to you?”

I shook my head.

“Honey, if you don’t—”

There was no way around it. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, refusing to witness the moment when he saw the raw meat of my cheeks and tongue. I heard his sharply indrawn breath. I knew him too well to spare myself completely. Even without seeing the horror I had become reflected back at me, I knew what it would look like, and it burned, like salt on a sliced lip. Oh, how it burned.

“Can we get an EMT over here?” shouted an unfamiliar voice—one of the police officers speaking briskly, quickly, getting me away before I became more of a curiosity than I was already damned to be.

My father kissed me on the forehead before they loaded me into the ambulance. The sound of sirens carried me away from the sea.

Eighty-seven stitches inside my mouth before they let me go; eighty-seven stitches and what felt like almost as many shots, as they fought to lock me up like an abandoned house, slamming all my doors against the possibility of infection. Eighty-seven stitches and whispers behind their hands as they questioned whether I was ever going to speak again, whether my tongue would heal into the shape it had always had or become something new, a lump of dead meat and scar tissue filling my mouth and stopping my voice.

They didn’t mean for me to hear, but when you can’t speak, it’s difficult to stop listening. It was something to distract from the soft sound of slithering within my ribs, as the eels shifted their positions. I didn’t know how they were breathing. I didn’t know how the hospital, with its gleaming machines and its well-trained doctors, could miss them. I didn’t know a lot of things, but I knew something the doctors didn’t:

I knew I was never going to speak again, not unless the woman in the water willed it. It was a strange, sad thing to know, but it helped to keep me from flinching away when they looked at the inside of my mouth, when they whispered things they didn’t think I’d hear. They were discussing the inevitable. That was easier to live with than a “maybe” would have been. At least I was alive to hear it.