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

Still a third time, as they were treating Giorgio to dinner at a nice restaurant in a small hotel located on the shore of a slender inlet, he set down his salad fork and said, “There’s a ghost in this hotel, you know, right in this very room. A woman dressed in a long dark green dress and a short jacket, with a little hat. Like the style women wore at the beginning of the last century. She sits at one of the tables over there.” He pointed to an alcove at the other end of the dining area. “It’s always after the last customer has left, and one of the staff is cleaning up. I used to date a lassie had seen her on two separate occasions. The first time, she ran out of the room as if the Devil himself was clutching at her heels with his pointy nails. The second time, Colleen (that was the lassie’s name) stayed put. She said the woman stood, turned around, and walked to the door. Her face was in shadow, that was the way Colleen described it. She couldn’t manage a good look at her. She said the woman passed through the door, the way you hear ghosts doing. Colleen ran to the door and opened it. Although it was late, this was during the summer, so there was plenty of light for her to watch the woman cross the lawn to the water and keep going, out into it until she was gone, submerged, hat and all. No one knows who she is, or was. Another drowning victim, right? Sometimes I wonder, though: what if we have it backwards? What I’m trying to say is, instead of someone who used to live on land returning to it, maybe it’s someone, or something, whose home is the water coming up to have a look and see what all the fuss is about.” “Really?” Susan said. “No,” Giorgio said, “I’m just speaking out my arse. Still, the ocean is deep and dark and full of secrets, right? Isn’t there a saying to the effect that we know more about outer space than we do the bottom of the sea?” “I don’t know,” Alan said, “sounds good, though.” “Aye, so it does,” Giorgio said.

Between Giorgio’s stories, and the omnipresent water rolling to the horizon, Susan found herself revising her opinions of life beside the ocean. Since she and Alan had met at a mutual friend’s house in Bourne, on the mainland side of the Cape Cod Canal, Susan had declared it her fondest wish to return to the area to buy a house overlooking the ocean. It was a favorite fantasy, one she indulged by scrolling through online real-estate listings. If such houses were currently out of their price range (by a factor of several hundred percent), it was of no real concern. Alan was doing well enough at his architecture firm to make the daily commute to Manhattan worthwhile, and the director of Penrose College’s art museum was sufficiently pleased with her performance to hire Susan full-time. They saved what they could, and eventually, they would be in a position to afford a place in Bourne, or further out on the actual Cape, in Orleans or even Wellfleet. In the meantime, they had their friend’s house to return to. Her dream was in part a declaration of loyalty to the place where she and Alan had so improbably found one another. But she also fancied the Cape an appropriate symbol for the relationship they had discovered, a place of fundamentals, land and sea and sky. Not once had it occurred to her that part of the reason she could appreciate the Bay at Scusset Beach was because the entire continent was behind her, thousands of miles of mountains and hills, cities and plains. Even way out on the end of the Cape, in Provincetown, there was the sense of being connected to something larger, a solid mass of land. Five days on Shetland, and she had learned that being on the margin between sand and water was a different thing from being surrounded by the ocean. Giorgio diagnosed what she described to him as island fever. “It’s not for everyone, living up here,” he said. “The sea…” He shrugged, as if the word was explanation enough.

BANG. As if making Giorgio’s point, the water smacks the hull directly outside her bunk, from the sound of it. The metal groans, a loud complaint, which lasts an ominous length of time. Susan stares at the wall next to her. The dread she’s been managing since they sailed into the storm surges within her. Her heart breaks into a full gallop. Should she wake Alan, grab their bags, head for the upper decks, closer to the lifeboats? She doesn’t know. She can’t draw enough air into her lungs. The edges of her vision darken. She’s burning up. The panic attack isn’t the first she’s had, but it’s without doubt the worst. She can’t keep lying down; she’s suffocating. She throws off her blanket, sits up as the ferry begins another slide down down down… She grips the edge of her bunk, braces her feet against the floor. BANG. The ship protests, asking how much more of this abuse it’s expected to take. Susan has to get out of here. She grabs Alan’s bunk, uses it to haul herself to standing. On the other side of the hull, water swooshes as the floor tilts back. She crosses to the door in four lurching steps, opens it, and exits the cabin.

The corridor outside the room is empty, the rest of the cabin doors shut. No sign of the little girl and her mother, the laughing passer-by. Susan isn’t so distracted she can’t think, Well, good for them. One hand on the wall, she turns left, toward the stairs. The ferry levels, tips, lunges. The wool socks she’s wearing slide on the floor. She flattens on the wall. BANG. The impact shudders through her. While the ship tilts to climb the next swell, she scuttles along the wall as fast as her feet and hands will move her, which isn’t as fast as she’d like, but it occupies her while the ferry slides up and then down. BANG. By the time the ship has summited the following waves, Susan has reached the doorway to the stairs. Alan , a distant part of her mind objects, what about Alan? She plunges into the stairwell.

It’s like trying to play some demented fun-house game, climbing the stairs as they rock this way, then that. Although each stair is covered in studs to aid traction, they benefit her socks little, and she clings to the guard rail with both hands. The acoustics of the space make it sound as if the water streaming past the ship is filling the stairwell, while each BANG shivers all the stairs at once. She manages four flights, two decks, before she has to abandon the stairwell.

As she emerges into a corridor more or less the same as the one she left, the lights dim, then brighten, then go out. “Oh, come on,” she says. With a click, emergency lights pop on at either end of the corridor. “Thank you.” She backs against the wall to her left and slides down it until she’s sitting. Her heart is still racing, but the short excursion she’s taken has left her exhausted. Maybe it’s the Dramamine having more effect, too. If it weren’t for her pulse jackhammering, she’d swear she would pass out right here. She places her hands on the floor to either side of her to help with the ferry’s relentless rocking, which feels as if it’s grown worse. We must be close to Fair Isle , she thinks. Isn’t that the place Giorgio said the sea was especially rough?

Another BANG and a horrible smell floods her nostrils. She claps her hand over her mouth. For an instant, she wonders if a sewage pipe has broken under the waves’ pounding, only to reject the idea. What assaults her nostrils is not the pungent stink of shit. It’s the reek of a beach—of a North Atlantic beach at low tide, a medley of decaying flesh and baking plant matter. Tears blur her eyes. At the same time, the temperature in the corridor drops, heat escaping as if out of a hole in the ferry’s side. The cold that swirls into its place is thick, gelid. There’s something else, a note in the atmosphere that reminds her of nothing so much as the worst arguments she and Alan have had, when hostility foams and froths between them. Malice washes over her. She swallows, shakes her head.