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

When they let me leave, my father was waiting with warm clothes taken from my room at home, ready to push my insurance-mandated wheelchair to the door and lead me to the car. Maya wasn’t with him. That, too, was no real surprise. Maya didn’t know how I had survived, or what her carefully hoarded drugs would have allowed me to remember. She would be making plans and setting up contingencies. She would be getting ready for a fight.

The eels in my chest throbbed as I pulled my seatbelt across them. I rubbed my sternum with one hand, trying to quiet them back to sleep, and smiled at my father when he looked at me with concern.

Maya was going to get a fight. It just wasn’t the fight that she expected.

We pulled out of the parking lot, my father sneaking anxious glances at me as he drove. Finally, he asked, “You really don’t remember anything about what happened?”

I shook my head, putting on my best regretful expression. Let him think I was still lost at sea. Let him think I had no memory of pain. It might be kinder, given what I thought was coming.

When drowned girls come out of the water, they go back. Usually sooner rather than later. It didn’t matter that I’d never believed in fairy tales before I found myself bound and drugged and dropped into the lap of one; I had spent enough of my life absorbing them to know that this wasn’t the ending. Someone was going to have to pay. Maya was going to have to pay. When she did…

The night before, I would have given anything not to die. That’s the sort of bargain that shouldn’t even be thought aloud. Not unless you want to pay for every breath.

“It’s okay, baby.” Dad patted my knee, as much to reassure himself as to comfort me. “We’ll get through this. Your sister’s waiting for us at home.”

I nodded, forcing a smile through my stitched and aching lips. We had so much to catch up on, Maya and I. Silent as I was, I thought I still might have a lot to say to her.

Everything I could, before the tide came in.

The house was lit up like Christmas. The day had come and gone while I was at the hospital, and now every window blazed from within, like Maya had decided I was some kind of ghost to be kept at bay with twinkling lights. Dad shook his head as he pulled into the garage, but he didn’t say anything. She was supposedly traumatized too, shaken to the core by the news that her beloved big sister had been found wandering and wounded by the highway. Lectures about the electric bill could wait until later.

Then the garage door closed behind us, and we were home. Really home, like I hadn’t quite believed I would ever be again. Dad helped me out of the car, into the house, and to the stairs. Maya was nowhere to be seen.

“Do you want dinner?” he asked.

I shook my head, miming folding my hands and tucking them against my pillow. He nodded.

“Sleep makes sense,” he said. “Rest well, sweetheart. The police are going to find the person who did this to you. You’ll see. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I forced a smile. He deserved so much more. He deserved decades with his adoring daughters, a family as bright and perfect as the light shining through the windows, as nostalgic as a pink princess fantasy. But he’d lost his wife to illness, and now he was going to lose us both to the sea, and there was nothing I could do to change that. The tide goes out, leaving things like me lying stranded on the beach. It always comes back to collect us.

“I love you,” he said, and I mouthed the words back to him, and that was it: that was all there was left for either one of us to say.

I drifted up the stairs as in a dream, feeling the eels in my chest writhe and resettle themselves. They stilled as I walked along the hall to my bedroom and let myself silently inside. The police had been here while I was at the hospital: maybe that explained the long delays while I waited to see another specialist, to receive another round of shots. Out of kindness to the traumatized girl, they had kept me away until my room could be analyzed and recorded, written down on little pieces of paper like they meant anything. They were looking for a culprit, a kidnapper, someone it was safe to accuse of hurting a sweet, innocent girl like me. They weren’t looking for someone even sweeter, even more innocent.

They could look forever, and they’d never find Maya. Not unless I accused her, and I wasn’t going to do that. This was a fairy tale now. Prison was both more and less than she deserved.

I walked to the bed, the perfect, pink bed, and sat on the edge, looking at the gauzy curtains around it and thinking about my mother, who had been the best of us. Out of everyone in this house, she had been the best of us. I didn’t think she would be proud of me now, or of what I felt I had to do… but maybe I was wrong. If anyone could have understood what it was to rail against death as their air ran out, it would have been her. We’re all mermaids in the end. We all die when we stop breathing.

The eels stirred under my breastbone. I put a hand to my chest, quieting them, calming them. Soon , I thought, and that seemed to soothe them a bit. The night was young. All we had to do was wait. So we waited, and I looked at the bedroom that had been mine for as long as I remembered, and I hated my sister for taking it away from me. This was my last night here. No matter how this ended, this was my last night here.

Seconds became minutes; minutes became hours. I heard my father’s heavy footsteps in the hall, weary with the weight of everything he’d been through. Funny , I thought, I’m the one who drowned , and was immediately sorry. Just because he hadn’t gone into the water with me didn’t mean I wouldn’t be taking him with me when I went back to the sea.

All around me, the house settled into sleep as I waited, the eels in my chest slithering in silent anticipation. Finally, just as the tide outside the house was beginning to roll in, my door opened, and Maya slipped into the room. The look she gave me was fear mingled with undisguised hatred.

“How?” she asked.

My tongue was shredded meat and useless tissue, but I had other tongues now, other voices. I opened my mouth as the eels hissed, in ragged harmony, “I found another way.”

Maya took a step toward me. Run, fool , I thought, and closed my mouth before the eels could echo it. She had given up her right to a warning when she had drugged me and dragged me from my bed.

“This is impossible,” she said. “You can’t be here. You’re not real .” She stomped her foot. In that moment, that movement, I saw the petulant toddler she had been, the little girl who had wanted nothing more than her mother’s arms around her.

“I’ll show you,” the eels said, with my mouth, and I spread my lips wide, and they boiled forth, all teeth and slick, cartilaginous bodies and slicing fins, and when they struck Maya in the throat, she had no time to scream. One of them bit her nose away. Another pulled off that pretty, pouting mouth, while the last two ripped her throat open like a flower. My pink princess fantasy became red in an instant, painted by the blood jetting from my sister’s flesh.

The air turned to ashes in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe . I dropped to my knees amidst the blood that should have been inside my sister, clutching at my throat and gasping. Something touched my hand. I turned, vision going gray, and beheld one of the eels, wrapping itself loosely around my wrist.

“Please,” I wheezed, the word shaped more of silence than of sound.

The eel seemed to nod. This time, when it dove for my mouth, I opened my lips to welcome it inside. This time, there was no pain. There was only the feeling of inevitability; of coming home.