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

He’d known a couple guys who hadn’t come up alive. But he had. No idea how, but after a three-wave hold-down at Prevelly Park, he had. The ocean doesn’t want me today… It was as good an explanation as any.

But one day, it might. It was the reason he’d taken up freediving. To extend his breath-holding duration. To get comfortable with being under the water a long time, because as a surfer, under was the last place anyone wanted to be. And it had helped. He felt recalibrated, more at peace with under than ever.

So no. This had nothing to do with fear.

“It’s worse,” he said. “It’s the calendar. And the numbers.”

Gail had been holding back a toke, and lost it with a hacking laugh. “I thought it would be at least another twenty years before maybe I’d hear you make a concession there.” She fixed him with a hazy leer. “Who are you, foul thing that crawled from the sea, and give me back my Danny.”

Which version? He was developing a nostalgic longing for the Danny Yukimura who seemed incapable of thinking about consequences.

Gail rubbed his arm. “It’s just another birthday, but with a zero. Don’t you know? Forty is the new eighteen, I think is what it’s down to.”

“That only helps if eighteen is the new as-yet-unborn.” He took the joint, made it smolder, handed it back. “It’s the rankings. In the top thirty in the world, I’ve had a good run, but I’ve never gotten higher than twenty-two, and now I’m right back on that edge. The only place to go is down. That’s how this goes. Especially now.”

It was the times—thrilling to be around to witness them, but shitty when you were a casualty because you couldn’t keep up. People were out there doing amazing things, unthinkable things, feats that had been considered impossible.

“There’s something changing in the world…”

He traced it back to when Laird Hamilton had caught the Millennium Wave, in Teahup’po. Until then, nobody had ridden a sixty-foot wave. Nobody. It wasn’t merely the height; it was the length, the girth, the colossal magnitude. Even Hamilton hadn’t been planning on it. He got towed into the wave, then it rose a behemoth. As the tube collapsed behind him, everybody watching thought he was dead, until he came shooting up out of the spray.

A thing like that did something magical. It opened a doorway to unknown realms of potential. Eighty footers? Ninety? Guys were riding them now.

It wasn’t only surfers, either. Skateboarders, skiers, snowboarders—superhumans were popping up everywhere. Somebody does something that blows minds around the globe and everyone says, damn, dude, that record’s gonna stand for years, then it doesn’t even stand a season.

Something in the air, maybe. Something in the water.

He loved seeing it unfold in the world. It was a beautiful time to be alive. But it wasn’t his arena anymore. He couldn’t compete with that. Go big or go home? He was home. He just had no idea what to do next.

“So you launch your own line of boards. Or gear. Or both,” Gail said. “Or you open up the Danny Yukimura School of Surfing, and turn into one of those cute old guys with the long white hair and wispy beard, but still a badass, and wait for people to come to you. Because they will.”

He wanted to believe. She made it easy to believe.

Even if he still ached for more, and had no idea what it was.

Before the dawn, even before coffee, they made their way along the stairs that zigzagged down a cleft in the land from cliff top to sea level. The wooden steps were perpetually damp, even in summer, crowded over by trees so that the sun never reached them.

They nearly always had the shore to themselves when beach walking this early, sharing it with at most a neighbor from above, out with a dog and a stick.

He knew of no place where dawn was more different from dusk than here, with the sun on the other side of the continent behind a two hundred-foot wall of rock and earth. Here, dawns were gradual and gray, a time of mist and fog. This morning the wind was up, sending ribbons of fine, dry sand skimming over the damp-packed plains of the beach. The surf rolled and pounded behind a veil, as if the sand were of one world and the water of another, and every sunrise it took the proper spell to bring them back together.

They wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. They never did. The only variable was what Gail would find, and how long it would take after she shucked his hand and went on the hunt.

He’d never met anyone more suited to spend her life seaside. Not merely to live here, but thrive. She smelled of the sea, tasted of it. Even the ocean knew its own. The sea had recognized this about her as soon as Gail arrived for good, a couple years before they’d met.

She had grown up Midwestern, landlocked in every direction, but the farthest shores had always called her, from as early a time as she could remember. A week after her eighteenth birthday she made the 1500-mile trek west, one-way this time. A week after that, one morning’s beach walk set her up for years, when she came upon what appeared to be a peculiar yellowish rock, stonelike yet waxy, embedded in the sand.

Right away, she’d known it for what it really was: ambergris, a solidified lump of secretions from the belly of a sperm whale, nearly three pounds of it. No substance on earth was more prized by the makers of perfume, especially in France. It was illegal to sell in the States, though, so one impromptu trip to Canada later, she returned three pounds lighter, $140,000 heavier, and after making the down payment on the cottage, had hardly left the ocean’s side ever since.

Such a find had to be more than dumb luck. Gail had taken it not merely as a welcome, but as a blessing. You’re where you belong now. This is your home. It’s always been your home. You just had to find your way back.

The sea never stopped giving to her. Danny had never seen anything like it, the sheer reliability of it. Some days the swells didn’t want to be surfed, and you had to accept that. But Gail and her walks along the shore, harvesting the ocean’s castoffs? She always came back with something, and the desire to see what she could make of it. Send her out beachcombing with ten other people, and there was a good chance she’d come back with more treasure than everyone else combined. He imagined salt-encrusted nymphs out in the surf, working on her behalf: Look alive, mateys, it’s her again! Heave to!

This morning, the farther north they walked, the lighter the dawn became, as ahead of them, Neptune’s Throne took shape out of the gray haze.

Neptune’s Throne was all he’d ever heard anyone call it. It was an observation platform for surfers to watch the incoming, but whoever had built it hadn’t made it particularly convenient. It was four solid tree trunk pillars driven deep into the sand, braced with crossbeams and supporting a planked deck just above head height. No steps. If you wanted to clamber onto it, you had to have either the upper body strength to pull yourself up, or friends to push you from below.

It had a back, like a gargantuan chair—a windbreak, he assumed, blocking what the cliffs didn’t—two of the trunks joined above the platform with an X, which in turn supported a row of ragged planks that were shortest on the outside and rose to an imperial peak in the middle.

The deck was usually thatched, and at first glance the bristly edges gave it the look of something that belonged somewhere tropical. Kimo recalled more of Hawaii than he did, and said the thing reminded him of rough-hewn structures he’d seen in places tourists didn’t get to: burial platforms, and shrines where fishermen laid offerings to the gods of the sea before heading out, or after rowing back in with their catch.