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

Susan recoils from the sight, and confronts the monster holding her, which, she sees, is no monster, but the diving suit in which Giorgio’s professor met his watery end. The barnacles, the seaweed, the tiny green crabs scuttling across it, are the yield of decades beneath the water, as are the dents that have misshapen the helmet, the cracks spider-webbing the faceplate’s glass. It has looped the hose around itself like a bandolier. She can’t say if there’s anything left of the suit’s former inhabitant, though she doubts it. What has remained is his anger, his rage at having made the find of his career, of his life, and then been abandoned to death. Contained in the suit, his fury, burning with the blinding flame of an underwater welder’s torch, has sustained it, has maintained its integrity long after time, salt water, and the ministrations of a thousand ocean creatures should have dissolved the garment.

It is terrifying; she has to escape it. She drives the heel of her right palm into the faceplate, hears a chorus of snaps. The helmet draws back, as if surprised. She strikes again, missing the faceplate, hitting the metal beside it with a hollow bong. A surge of hatred blasts her. When she tries a third blow, the thing releases her left shoulder to swat her hand away. It catches her by the throat and squeezes. Never mind that she was years from birth when the professor drowned, that she hasn’t the slightest connection to this tragedy. She is here now, the accident of her presence as good a reason for the thing’s hostility as any. Fingers thick and cold dig into her neck. She grabs its hand, searching to pry open its grip. It is inhumanly strong. She cannot breathe. Her vision contracts. Somewhere distant, the sea strikes the ferry’s hull, BANG. She lets go of the hand, opts for another round of blows, punching the suit’s shoulders, chest, striking the hose wound around it, searching for a last-second vulnerability. Her knuckles tear on barnacles, slip on seaweed, rebound from the hose wrapping it. Oh, Alan , she thinks. Her arms feel incredibly heavy. She can’t have much time left. Goddamn it , she thinks, Goddamn it , the curse summoning a last surge of strength. Muscles screaming for oxygen, she punches as hard and fast as she can, one two three four .

With a crack, her right fist connects with an object that breaks under its impact. There’s a burst of something between them, a soundless explosion. The hands at her neck and shoulder fall away. Gasping for air, Susan collapses into the wall, her fists still out in a trembling attempt at a guard. The diver steps away from her, its hands pushing aside the hose, searching through the seaweed decorating its chest, to a woven bag hung from its neck. Within the bag, the shards of a white disk slide against one another. The damage to the bag’s contents confirmed, the diver’s hands drop to its sides. The cold is bleeding from the air, taking with it the awful smell. The figure retreats another pace. Its malevolence gutters and puffs out. Susan has the impression of something behind the suit, retreating at great speed through the wall, out of the ship, an impossible distance. On slightly unsteady legs, it lumbers to the exit and proceeds into the stairwell. Its heavy boots clank on the metal stairs.

She feels no desire to follow. With a kind of visionary certainty, she knows that the diver is going to continue its climb until it reaches a level that admits to the ferry’s exterior. If enough of its animating force remains, it will walk to a bulwark, lean forward, and allow the weight of its helmet to carry it over into the heaving waves. If not, one or the other of the crew members will come across an astonishing discovery, the remains of an old diving suit, apparently washed onto the ferry by the storm. Perhaps they’ll examine the contents of the bag around its neck, perhaps the professor will receive his recognition yet. Or perhaps not.

For the moment, all Susan wants to do is to return to the cabin where she hopes she will find her husband fast asleep. There’s still a long way to go and the storm has not abated. In the morning, Alan will ask her why she’s wearing gloves and a scarf. She’ll say that she’ll tell him once they’re back at his parents’, safely removed from the sea, and all its marvels and horrors.

For Fiona

It was everything about the sea that had always unnerved him, waiting at the bottom in one cold, disintegrating hulk.

Not two minutes earlier, Danny was in another world, the world above the waves, the world of air and land and the hot, dry feel of the summer sun. His wetsuit snug as a second skin, he sat on the cuddy boat’s transom long enough to Velcro a lanyard around his ankle, binding him to a safety line with ninety feet of slack. He cinched tight his goggles, round and insectoid, then slipped over the stern. Bobbing in sync with the hull, he sucked wind and huffed it out, cycling a few times before filling from the bottom up: belly, lower chest, upper chest, like trying to cram a stuffed suitcase with more, and a little more on top of that.

In the boat, against the lone cloud in the sky, Kimo held a stopwatch with his thumb on the trigger. “Ready.”

Danny squeezed in one last sip of air and plunged headfirst, like a seal, full-body undulations propelling him down, with the safety line trailing after. The swim fins helped. He’d not been blessed with big feet. They never made fun in Hawaii, but guys always made fun here on the mainland. Hey Danny, with those dainty little Asian paws of yours, how do you manage to even stay up on a surfboard? Maybe they didn’t mean anything by it. Or maybe they did, trying to get inside his head, psyche him out. Small feet, small… yeah. He converted it to fuel, that much more drive to bring home a trophy, another sponsorship.

But all that was a world away. He was in the blue world now, a gradient of cerulean to indigo yawning beneath him, where the farther down you went, the more the topside laws unraveled.

Until he’d first experienced the shift for himself back in the spring, he had always believed the same as everyone else he brought it up with: that freediving was a nonstop struggle against your own buoyancy, fighting the lift of the air heaved into your lungs.

Another misconception dies hard. It was like that for only the first forty or so feet down.

Make it that far, to what they called the Doorway to the Deep, and there came a transition he had yet to stop regarding with wonder. Buoyancy was neutralized, the weight of the water bearing down nullifying your tendency to rise to the surface. No more struggle, the fight was won. The sea had you then, a downward pull he could feel tugging on his skull and shoulders.

He held his arms along his sides, aquadynamic, and continued to descend, effortlessly now, like a skydiver bulleting in freefall. The trickiest part had been learning how to equalize the pressure on his ears, in his sinuses, and turn back the pain.

The deeper he sank, the more the pressure became like the slow tightening of a fist that would never relax. It had taken some reframing of the changes it made, seeing them as comforting rather than distressing. This is what happens down here. This is normal, another version of normal. No big deal, just the mammalian dive reflex: shifts of physiology so distinct, so foreign out of the water, so automatic in it, they could recalibrate a lifetime of thinking after a dive or two. Maybe we really do belong here.

Despite the exertion, his heart rate slowed. Even before the threshold forty feet down, his lungs were already compressed to half their normal size. At sixty, they were reduced to a third. If he were acclimated enough to go that far, at three hundred feet his lungs would be no bigger than baseballs.