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

The other three eels were still tearing at Maya’s body. She wasn’t dead yet; one eye was open, watching me with horror and, oddly, hope. She was hoping I was going to kill her, I realized. She was hoping I would let her go.

“Let’s go for a drive, okay?” I said, and smiled.

If she had still possessed a mouth, I think she would have screamed.

There was no one at the beach when I parked the car and made my way down to the tide pools, eels curled in my lungs and the still-twitching body of my sister cradled in my arms. She should have been dead by now. One more gift, I supposed, from a sea that had proven to be surprisingly full of them.

Gingerly, I walked to the tide pool where she had left me to die and lowered her into the water. She made a soft gurgling sound.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

Maya looked at me imploringly. It was good that the eels had left her eyes. She should be able to see the waves rolling in before they carried her away.

Little mermaid , whispered a voice. Little mermaid, come home.

I turned to look at the rippling black sheet of the sea. It was a far cry from my pink princess fantasy. But it sounded, all the same, like home; like a mother’s voice, not prisoned in a hazel tree, but set free to ripple, shore to shore, forever.

The eels in my lungs breathed in salt and surrender as I walked, arms spread, into the waves. Behind me, Maya struggled to scream, and everything was right, everything was true, everything was ever after, and I was going home.

If she hadn’t argued with the man, Susan thinks, they could have been in a first-class cabin, instead of down here, at the bottom of the bloody ferry. The floor tilts forward. There’s a great swooshing sound, the sensation of plunging down a steep slope, the briefest of pauses, and a tremendous BANG rattles the ship’s hull. Slowly, the floor levels, then tilts backward. The swooshing returns, accompanied now by the feeling of being on a roller coaster as it climbs a sheer set of tracks. Somewhere near, somewhere inside the ferry, Susan hears the steady drone of a motor. The sweet stink of fuel (diesel?) swirls near the floor, below her bunk. On the bunk above, her husband snores intermittently. The Dramamine they took an hour ago knocked Alan out, the lucky bastard—whereas all it did for Susan was sand the edges off the dizziness and nausea, freeing her mind to run through every disaster-at-sea movie she’s seen, from Titanic to The Poseidon Adventure to a cheesy horror film, what was it called, Leviathan ? Something like that.

The sail up from Aberdeen wasn’t this bad, not nearly. She’d never been on an ocean-going ferry before. The nearest thing had been the ship they’d taken out to Martha’s Vineyard on their honeymoon, which was maybe half the size of this one? Less? The Shetland ferry was built to cross the roughly two hundred nautical miles between the northeast of Scotland and the Shetlands, which, as Alan delighted in saying, lay closer to Norway than they did to the UK. There was something romantic about traveling by ship, she’d thought, a notion of taking your time, enjoying the journey as well as the destination. They spent much of their time in bed, trying to work out the mechanics of sex on a surface rising and falling with the sea. She was Sexy Susan, the sailor’s friend; he was Able Alan, always up for adventure.

That was in the first-class cabin to which they’d been upgraded after she passed one of the ship’s crew a twenty-pound note. She’d been quite pleased with the luxury—which consisted primarily of a room done in seventies-era paneling and set high enough in the ship to have its own window—but less so once they’d been in Lerwick for a day and Alan’s university friend, Giorgio, informed her that, as long as there were cabins available, the ferry staff were supposed to upgrade passengers free of charge. “They pocket the money, you know,” Giorgio said, letting the air out of her self-satisfaction, and leaving her determined not to be taken advantage of again. In turn, this led to her challenging the crew member who requested twenty quid for a boost to first-class lodgings on the return voyage. (Possibly, it was the same man: several of the staff appeared related, cousins or even brothers, short, broad fellows wearing gray sweater vests under their blue blazers and over their shirt-and-ties, their faces red, their curly hair black yielding to gray.) “You know,” Susan said, “one of my friends in Lerwick told me an upgrade to first class is supposed to be no charge.”

“Did they?” the man said, raising his bushy eyebrows as if to indicate his surprise at such a statement.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding.

“Well…” The man smiled, shrugging and spreading his hands.

“My friend said you guys keep the money.”

Whatever warmth was in the man’s performance chilled. “It’s twenty pounds,” he said.

Which was how they descended she isn’t certain how many flights of stairs to the corridor that brought them here, to a narrow room with bare white walls and a pair of economy-sized bunkbeds in it. “Think of it this way,” Alan said, “we’re experiencing the full range of travel options.”

Those options included a mid-winter storm, whose center lay somewhere to the east, but which had stirred the North Sea to a tumult. They climbed to the dining area, but already, Alan was queasy and opted for a cup of tea and a packet of digestive biscuits, leaving Susan to order a Coke and the fish and chips, which she ate half of before a sudden squall of nausea caused her to set down her knife and fork and not pick them up again. The two of them tried sitting in the large padded chairs positioned in front of the wall of windows looking out over the ferry’s stern, but night had fallen hours ago, with the heavy blackness of early January at a northern latitude. All that was visible was an expanse of blackness with a cluster of orange lights twinkling in the far distance, which Alan thought was an oil rig. Although the sea was more sound than sight, the rise and fall of those lights added a visual dimension to the ferry’s see-sawing movement. “Next time Giorgio wants to see us,” Alan said, “we’ll fly.” It was an extravagant promise: the tickets from Edinburgh weren’t too far shy of what it had cost them to cross the Atlantic from Newark.

“Or he can take the ferry,” Susan said.

Not long after, they descended the stairs to their cabin a second time. Gazing out the windows wasn’t doing anything for him, Alan said, and Susan agreed. The more she stared at it, the more uneasy the dark outside—its sheer thoroughness—made her, until she could feel panic nipping at the edges of her mind. “It’s as if we’re already at the bottom of the sea,” she said.

“Whoa,” Alan said, “touch wood,” knocking the chair’s armrest. “Although,” he added, “it’s pretty deep, here. I imagine it’s calm, down there.”

“You just have to go through the whole drowning thing,” Susan said.

“Will you stop ?” Alan said, rapping the armrest again.

“You and your superstitions.”

“The middle of the ocean is not the place to test them.”

She supposed he had a point.

In the cabin, they dry-swallowed the Dramamine tablets Susan had in her bag, changed into their pajamas, and climbed into their bunks. Alan sang, “Yo-ho, blow the man down / Yo-ho, blow the man down.”