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

To her left, movement on the floor draws her eye. An eel, long and skinny, slithers away from her. She starts. It isn’t an eel: it’s a length of hose, dun-colored, the end closest to her ragged, vomiting water as it moves. That’s the source of the awful smell, the cracked and peeling hose being dragged towards and through the doorway at the far end of the corridor, making a sound halfway between a hiss and a breath. She can’t see what’s on the other side of the threshold; the emergency lights cast a veil of brightness her vision cannot pierce.

Even were she not schooled in hundreds of horror films, Susan would know that following the foul-smelling hose to whatever is dragging it would be a bad idea. In fact, she has no intention of hanging around here one second longer than is necessary. She pushes to her feet, and staggers up the corridor to the exit to the stairs.

Up or down? She opts to climb. It’s slow going. The stairs are like an enormous metronome. She loses her footing twice, has to clutch the railing to keep from tumbling down. Her heart is still pounding, her skin burning, but she isn’t sure if it’s from the panic attack continuing or her brush with what was standing beyond the lights at the other end of the corridor. Or both , she thinks, one of her favorite rhetorical sayings returning to haunt her: Why does it have to be either/or? Why can’t it be both/and? When the water smacks the hull, the BANG echoes through the stairwell like thunder. The best Susan can do is two flights of stairs, and then she stumbles out the doorway to the next deck. The motion of the ship combines with her slick footing to send her into the wall opposite; she catches most of the impact with her arms, but the force drops her to one knee.

At least the lights are working properly on this level. The revelation, however, is accompanied by another: the terrible smell permeates the air here, too, and with it are the same cold and the same impression of overwhelming malevolence. A noise equal parts a breath and a hiss jerks her head up, to watch a peeling and cracked hose snaking along the floor. How…? The thing drawing the hose toward it halts the thought. Susan has the impression of a figure the approximate size and shape of a man, its hide studded with barnacles, strung with seaweed, a single round eye staring out of its misshapen head. Hatred rolls off it in waves. Before her mind can process what she’s looking at, she’s back in the stairwell, her legs propelled not so much by fear as by some deeper impulse, something preceding and pre-empting rational thought. ( How…? ) The same response sends her down the stairs, flight after flight, until she’s back where she started, at the deck where Alan lies slumbering on his bunk in their cabin. Alan : for the first time in what feels an eternity, she thinks of her husband as more than a name. What if he woke to find her missing? What if he went in search of her, and encountered whatever is stalking the hallways? Fear for him runs down her spine like ice water. She staggers across the tilting floor into the corridor.

The monster is waiting for her. It swipes at her with oversized hands, and would probably have her if her feet didn’t slip and dump her on her ass. The pain registers dimly; she’s already scooting backward, her attempted escape hindered by the floor tilting her toward the monster. It leans to grab her legs, spilling a rain of tiny green crabs onto them. Susan jerks her legs toward her, avoiding the thing’s grasp, and slaps at the crabs scrambling over her pajamas. She twists onto her stomach, crawls for the stairwell. The ferry levels, and she pushes to her feet. Stiff-legged as Frankenstein’s monster, the thing lurches after her. The floor slopes forward. Struggling not to lose control of her balance, she slides on the soles of her socks, as if ice-skating. The monster’s feet clatter behind her. She’s almost at the stairwell. The sea pounds the ferry, BANG. The monster reaches, catches her left arm, and swings her in a long arc all the way around it into the wall. She tries to get her right arm up to protect her head, but she still sees a brilliant flash of white, feels the impact rattle her teeth. The monster releases her arm, steps in close, catches her by the shoulders. She’s spun to face it, pressed against the wall by heavy hands.

This close, the stench brings her to the verge of fainting. Arctic cold envelops her, extinguishing the heat the panic attack kindled in her skin. She twists from side to side, trying to loosen the thing’s hold on her, but its grip is unbreakable. Its eye flashes. Malice batters her, its ferocity utter, unrelenting. She turns her head from the thing, closes her eyes—

— and she is somewhere else, a place mostly dark, here and there dim, an expanse of bare mud ornamented with rocks. Slender, shadowy forms, each the size of a large dog, float languidly in the air, and she sees that they’re fish, which means she’s underwater, from the look of things, somewhere deep. In front of her and to the right, maybe twenty yards away, a light spreads a yellow cone through the murk. It’s a large flashlight, carried in one hand by a figure wearing a diving suit, rounded helmet and all. Its air hose rising behind it, its heavy boots raising clouds of mud, it trudges toward a low heap of rocks. Long, rectangular, the rocks have a consistency of size and shape, which gives them the appearance of having been carved into their present forms. When the flashlight’s beam illuminates designs grooved into their surfaces, Susan understands that she’s looking at an archeological site, that she’s watching the protagonist of Giorgio’s Fair Isle diver story as he sees the object of his expedition. (Which means…) His flashlight ranges over the stones, picking out symbols she doesn’t recognize, concentric circles, a triangle with rounded corners, a crescent like a smile. Other characters are obscured by mud and algae. The arrangement of the stones suggests they’ve fallen over onto one another. Before one of them, the diver stops, directs the flashlight to a spot immediately in front of him. Something flashes in the mud. Slowly, ponderously, the diver kneels, reaching down with his free hand. He brushes away a layer of mud, and as he does, sends a small white object tumbling up from its resting place. It’s a wonder that he’s able to catch it, but catch it he does, and holds it up for view. Susan is too far away to see his discovery in much detail. It’s circular, the diameter of a saucer, composed of a white material that shines in the flashlight beam. The diver turns it over, examines the other side, then slides it into a bag hung down his chest. He rises and continues toward the piled stones. As he draws closer to them, his flashlight seeks out the gaps between the rectangles. What it reveals quickens his pace. At the pile, he bends forward, bringing his helmet as close as he can manage to one of the larger spaces between them, holding the flashlight beside his helmet. He slides his other hand into the gap. Whatever he’s after resists his efforts. He withdraws the flashlight and turns to the side, to extend his reach. He doesn’t see the slender white hand shoot out from the space and grab his arm. By the time he’s aware of the contact, the hand has pressed his arm further down into the gap, where the space narrows, wedging it there. The diver pulls back, but his arm is stuck fast. The hand retreats amidst the stones. The diver releases his flashlight, which is looped to his wrist, and attempts to use his free hand to pull the other free. It’s no use. He pulls; he pushes. He shakes his trapped hand with such fury, Susan can imagine his screams ringing in his helmet. He stops, lets go of his hand and turns as best he can to look behind him. Undulating like a sea serpent, the air hose to his suit descends the water, bubbles venting from its torn end as it falls. Frantically, the diver flails at the back of his suit, where the hose attaches, but he can’t maneuver his arm to it. Even if he could grab hold of the hose, it’s hard to see what good it would do him. The same thought appears to occur to the diver, who surrenders his attempt. As the hose snakes across the mud, he turns again to the stone heap, sagging against it, his helmet coming to rest above the space that has trapped him. If he isn’t dead already, he will be soon. The white hand steals from between the stones and trails its fingers across his faceplate, almost lovingly —