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

“I was fine. Really.” He took Kimo’s hand and clambered over the side into the boat, then tapped the sonar. “How about the whale? Did you see the whale?”

For a moment, Kimo could only blink. Translation: Good going, asshole. Now you made me miss an entire whale, too. “You saw a whale?”

“Just for a second or two. My vision was going, so…”

“Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”

“I felt him check me out. I didn’t hallucinate that.” He turned a clumsy 360 to scan the waves for a breach but saw nothing. “How long was I down?”

“I think you were around two-forty-five, two-fifty when I went for the line. I don’t even know where the watch landed.”

Danny plopped onto the transom and wriggled out of his fins. “So I had to break three minutes, easy.” Nothing impressive by competition standards. Competitive freedivers could rack up depths and times that were off the chain. But those people were all about the numbers, the endurance, not about merging with the sea. “A new personal best and I don’t even know what it is.”

He tossed his fins aside, then spotted the stopwatch beside their cooler of water bottles. He snatched it up and held it toward Kimo’s face, back to normal brown after all that furious brick red.

“Check it,” Danny said. “Six-thirty-four and counting.”

Kimo rolled his eyes. “That’ll look good on your tombstone. ‘ Still holding my breath, bitches. ’”

“Shipworms. That’s all you saw when the wood came apart,” Gail told him that afternoon. “They’re called shipworms.”

Danny didn’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled. A whale, he could wrap his brain around that. Those aquatic grubs were something new.

“Shipworms. That’s actually a thing?”

“For someone who’s eaten as many waves as you have, your sense of maritime history really is lacking.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, as if to say she loved him anyway. “Yeah, they’re a thing. In the age of sailing ships, before steel hulls, they were a big, bad, serious thing. Termites of the sea, is the best way to describe them. If they weren’t busy eating shipwrecks, they were causing them. Or chewing through wharves, piers, anything like that. Waiting for a nice juicy log to drift by, to turn into a floating condo.”

Your home is your food—pretty much the definition of a parasite. Like taking a gander around this cliff-top cottage and thinking, hey, break me off a piece of that wall, I’m feeling peckish. What am I in the mood for? The green room, the blue room? Something in the line of a honey-gold breakfast nook? Yum.

“But they’re not actually worms. They’re mollusks. Like long, skinny oysters. They’ve got little shells on the front, that’s how they burrow in.” She perked up. “If you dive that wreck again, bring up a few. They’re supposed to taste like clams.”

“That’s a bucket of nope, right there.” His stomach did barrel rolls at the thought. “How do you know this? You don’t even sail.”

This was the distinction between them. For all her astonishing symbiosis with the sea, Gail hardly ever got out on it. That was his department. Gail was perfectly happy being its next-door neighbor.

She crossed her arms and, with a cockeyed grin, withered him with a glance. He knew how to translate that look: Come with me, you fool.

With a swirl of her skirt, she led him out of the cottage and across the stone path to the outbuilding—her workshop, bright and airy and open to clear out the smell of varnish. Its walls were the color of sea foam, its windows faced a panoramic view of the Pacific, and it was always, always, full of driftwood. Most of the pieces were still raw, just as they had been harvested from the beach. The rest were in various stages of processing and transformation.

Every chunk she brought in was its own starter kit, anything from simple projects like necklace racks to elaborate constructions like lamp stands and chandeliers that she sold through galleries from Portland to Santa Barbara. Last year, she’d taken hundreds of seemingly useless fragments and, where anyone else might have seen only kindling, turned them into a mosaic of a whimsical octopus, with spiral seashells for eyes.

Gail snatched up a sun-bleached branch the length of his arm, peppered with perforations as if someone had used it for target practice.

“After almost twenty years of seeing me do this, you’ve never wondered where these holes come from?”

“I guess I thought it was weathering.” By her skeptical look, she wasn’t buying it. “Okay, I guess I never thought about it at all.”

She gave him one of those shakes of her head, playful but dismissive, that left him feeling she had so much more wisdom that he did, baked in from birth. “If it doesn’t eat the surfboard out from under you, it doesn’t exist, right?”

“Pretty much,” he conceded.

As a rule, ignorance was no virtue, but if you gave too much thought to the sea, and everything with teeth that called it home, you’d never venture out to meet it.

Maybe that was why she stayed on shore.

They grilled on the patio that evening, marinated tempeh and vegetables, and as they usually did unless the rain had other ideas, carried their plates out to the wrought iron table on the little redwood deck, so they could eat beneath the sky, facing the sea. The cottage was one of a haphazard nest of six, perched near the edge of a two hundred-foot cliff overlooking the beach and breakers below.

Bellies full, they kicked their feet up on the brick retaining wall around the firepit and passed the evening’s joint back and forth.

Danny wanted to say he liked it better living at the condo in Santa Monica and Gail liked it better here, but that wasn’t true. Santa Monica was only more convenient. He liked it better here, too. Time passed differently here, the days longer, the seasons more pronounced. On the luckiest nights he might awaken to the faraway squeal of a passing whale—humpback, he supposed, the only kind he was aware of whose songs carried above water. He would roll over to find that Gail was already up, her silhouette framed by the bedroom window, where she sat as still as stone and listened for as long as it would last. They never got that in Santa Monica.

Although she was never farther away from him than she was in those minutes, lost inside a trance, and there was little he could do to get her back but wait.

Anyway. Out with it. He’d been meaning to bring it up for months. Now felt as right as ever.

“I’m going to have to find a business to go into. Or invent.” Telling the water but for Gail’s ears. “Got any suggestions?”

She looked more concerned with diagnosing causes. “Is it the…?”

Fear? That wasn’t it, but it made sense she would go there. They’d had to give the topic a couple of airings after his wipeout this spring at Prevelly Park.

The bigger the wave, the more ways a ride could go wrong. Miscalculations, human error, the never predictable hydraulics of any given wave—however it happened, things went wrong. While you went shooting through the tube, the board got sucked up the wall of water curling over behind you. Or the wave rose up while the bottom dropped out, and you got slammed into the impact zone. You were no longer riding the wave. It was riding you, maybe grinding you into the sand and rocks to really teach you a lesson.

He knew of no greater helplessness than that. Being held under by the first wave was terror enough. It you were still down when the next one came crashing in, you felt exponentially worse, battered and exhausted and desperate to breathe. Still hadn’t surfaced before a third one came along? That was when it seemed as though the ocean had made up its unfathomable mind: It wasn’t letting go.