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

Here, though, a couple miles out to sea, over a shelf of land jutting from the central Oregon coast, the bottom cut him off at a depth of seventy-six. Almost there, he tucked into a ball and flipped head over tail, to finish dropping flippers first. He touched down with a gentle bounce that stirred the silt, amid a sparse garden of kelp and seaweed that swayed in the current, and all was so very quiet, like awakening to a dream world of slow time and profound tranquility. The need to breathe remained on some far horizon. The pressure was a cocoon, a presence as welcoming as a hug.

All this time he’d been lying to himself. Thinking he knew something about the ocean, and why—because he’d grown up on an island? Because he’d first stepped onto a surfboard when he was seven and had hardly stepped off since? That was how you fooled yourself into believing you truly understood the sea when all you’d ever done on a board was scratch the water’s surface.

Above, the day was clear, bright and sunny. Down here, the sun still found him but was filtered to a murky twilight, as if the fog of morning and blue of evening had joined, to wrap around and welcome him home.

It took slow moments to take shape: a mass off to his left, a ragged, edgeless hill rising from the sea floor. Danny moved toward it in fin-encumbered hops, a feeling maybe like walking on the moon. He hadn’t gotten close enough to satisfy his curiosity before his tether to the surface ran out of slack.

The dumbest thing in the world would be to strip the lanyard from his ankle. He did it anyway, fearing if he didn’t get close enough for a look now, he might never find this spot again. He left the safety line behind, and was truly diving free.

The mass was no longer edgeless, and no hill. A hill wouldn’t have two masts, jutting down from one side to dig into the sea floor. A hill wouldn’t have rectangular openings, nor broken windows, metal railings, cleats still wrapped with decaying rope. It was somebody’s lost sailing yacht, a fifty-footer at minimum, resting on its starboard side. The build was old school, lots of wood where most buyers would’ve been content with aluminum and fiberglass. Now it was an ecosystem, submerged long enough to have sagged into itself and crusted over with rot and life.

The cold found him through his wetsuit and went for his marrow. Shipwrecks had always bothered him, even from the safety of pictures. Planes lost at sea, too, and sunken cars, and houses and timber groves in valleys flooded to make new lakes.

It was more than the tragedies and calamities they told of. It was their status, things perfectly normal in the topside world, aliens now, lost and alone where they were never meant to be. They were a rebuttal: You’re lying to yourself, you know. It’s the hypoxia talking. You think you belong? This isn’t your element at all.

Regardless, the wreck drew him, until he was close enough to touch it.

Everything down here is so much better suited to belong than you. Here, all you are is a resource.

Breathing? Soon. The pent-up need, he now understood, wasn’t driven by a lack of oxygen. The body had no sensors for that. An amazing oversight. Nobody would ever design an oxygen-powered machine that way on purpose.

Down here, you’re food. All you have to do is wait.

Instead, the clawing need to breathe came from a build-up of carbon dioxide, and you could hack that to a degree. He let a poof of stale air slip his lips and it bought him a little more time. He squatted and gripped the yacht’s tilted gunwale, to shove off it and launch his ascent… but to his surprise, it gave way with a muffled crunch and a cloud of debris, crumbs and shards of rotten wood drifting loose.

It was what was inside that really gave him a jolt.

The cross-section of wood appeared tunneled, the burrows full of soft, pale bodies— worms, they looked like, some as short and thin as matches, others the size of a finger, one as plump as a cigar.

Danny vented more CO 2, this time not meaning to, a sound of disgust burping loose. And he’d been down too long, his vision starting to close around the edges, with the height of a seven-story building left to swim. He pushed off the bottom and kicked toward the beckoning daylight.

If your vision began turning to a haze they called the pink cloud… that was when you really had to worry. What came next was a blackout, and he feared it was moments away— the resetting of the clock to a final countdown. You could drift unconscious for a couple minutes, no harm done, your larynx closed like a valve to keep the water out. Up top, they would know before it opened again, if they were paying attention. You just had to trust your team, they’d realize you were in trouble, haul you up by your safety line…

Oh. Right. Shit.

He kicked harder.

Which came first then—the movement out in front of him, or the movement he felt through him?

Through, probably. Yeah, go with that. His insides felt stirred, quivering as if he’d hugged a vibrator. Right away he knew what it was, he’d felt the same thing from dolphins— echolocation, a ping of sonar developed over millions of years of evolution, so advanced it made the Navy’s best look like a toy.

But this was no dolphin. If a dolphin was a whisper, what he’d felt was a bark.

He lowered his gaze from the beacon of the sun and back to the deep blue haze. Twenty, thirty yards out, it was dimly visible, a darker bulk against the murk, a slick, bulbous head and a body stretching too far back into the gloom to make out. With his vision closing down, Danny could barely see it anyway, and only for a moment before it faded into a wash of pink.

He heard a muffled thump and the sensation enveloped him again.

If you’re lucky and you know it clap your hands… Whatever was out there could’ve obliterated him without trying. Sperm whales? Loudest animals on earth. Their clicks could be so loud they couldn’t even exist in the air as sound. They could blow out your eardrums, maybe kill you as surely as the concussive blast of a bomb.

Lucky. It was only scanning, giving him a sonogram.

Kicking again, with legs starting to feel like tingling rubber, nearly blind now, he rose toward a total eclipse of the sun. A few feet from the surface he spewed a gush of bubbles to empty his aching lungs, then with a titanic whoosh broke through into the glorious air.

“You stupid motherfucker!” Kimo was peering down from the boat as if he were looking at a ghost. Things started going clear again, even the sweat spraying from Kimo’s shaved head as he whipped the lanyard at the end of the rope, like shaking a leash at a naughty dog. “What is this? What the fuck is this!”

My bad…? Didn’t quite cut it under the circumstances, did it?

“What, almost drowning once this year wasn’t enough for you, you thought you’d find another way?”

Treading water, Danny peeled off his goggles and flipped his hair back from his face to splat against his shoulders. “Sorry, man. I needed more than ninety feet.”

“But you stopped moving.” Kimo jabbed a finger toward the sonar screen. “It still makes you dumb as a rock, but if you’d kept moving, you wouldn’t have sent me from zero to panic mode, hauling this up and you’re not on the end of it anymore.” He flung the safety line to the deck. “I was two seconds from going in after you.”

“But I started moving again. Obviously. You didn’t see that?”

“While giving myself ninety feet of rope burns? No! I don’t multitask.”

The man had been looking out for him for years, one displaced Hawaiian to another, and his anger was so pure, so righteous, so Kimo, Danny couldn’t help but laugh. It was the right thing at the right time—same as below, the body knowing what to do, and doing it.