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

Worst of all, it was life with an expiration date. He couldn’t keep doing it forever, and he was nearly there. He could feel the downward pull as surely as he felt it during a dive, after entering the Doorway to the Deep.

Gail, though, went on as ever, bringing up trinkets as though she were being wooed by the sea. The same sea that she claimed to love, but wouldn’t go out on, not even with him.

As she began to spend more hours in her workshop than ever, he wondered if it was karmic payback. If this was what it had been like for her over two decades, forced to share him with a passion that consumed him, sent him around the world to wherever the waves were at their biggest and baddest: from Mavericks to Waimea Bay, from Tavarua to Padang Padang. Maybe that was the part that hadn’t come easily for her.

But by the time the fifth one turned up, even Gail seemed past taking any joy in it. Something about this was not right. It had never been quite right.

“This feels like a cat sometimes, bringing you its kills,” she confessed in the workshop one evening. At the bank of windows, the sun dropped boiling red into the cauldron of the sea. “It loves you. But it’s love on a whole different wavelength.”

He had no idea what to say to that. Along the north wall, the carvings seemed to be daring him to try. He was beginning to hate them. Whatever secret they knew, they weren’t telling.

At the center of the shop, a rectangular worktable, as stout and sturdy as a stage, held half a dozen pieces of driftwood in various stages of transformation—sculptures and a bonsai planter—none of which had progressed in three days. All Gail did now was come out and sit with them, seemingly stymied by the new arrivals that were piling up. As if they’d come to tell her that her work was at an end.

Her methods hadn’t changed in all the time he’d loved her, across nineteen years of being together, seventeen of marriage. Each piece of driftwood she harvested merited its own staring context, a still, silent interrogation during which she divined what it wanted to be, needed to be, in its new and resurrected life.

But these? These unblinking humanoids? Gail was treating them as if they were complete already, in no need of refinement. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Like her, they were home.

“You know, we’ve done the seaside thing for more than half our lives,” he said. “If I’ll be retiring soon anyway, maybe we should give mountains a try.”

She almost laughed. “Lie awake at night listening for elk? I don’t know if that would work or not.”

She turned at the window and faced the rolling waters. He followed her gaze in case there was something to see, but if there was, only Gail could see it.

“Did you ever hear about the 52-Hertz Whale?” she said.

He hadn’t.

“It’s the saddest thing ever. Researchers have been picking it up on hydrophones for years. It’s only ever been heard, never seen.” She was still facing the window, as if telling the ocean, and he was just around to eavesdrop. “This whale, this one single whale, that sings at a higher frequency than all the others. Fifty-two Hertz. All the usual suspects—blue whales, fin whales, like that—they’re down around fifteen or twenty or thirty. So nobody even knows what kind of whale this is. All they know is that it just keeps roaming the Pacific, calling out, singing its song, and nothing else is answering.”

She turned her back to the window, facing him again.

“Better keep your mountains. I don’t think I could handle that with an elk. They’ll come right up in your front yard.”

He left her to it—all of it, the worm-eaten pieces of wood and the stalled magic she wielded over them—and traded the workshop for twilight. Out here on the grass, the fifth refugee carving remained wedged in its drying rack. Horizontal, it looked helpless. As he stepped closer, Danny wondered how she would react if he dragged it toward the setting sun and threw it off the cliff.

He hadn’t given this one a second look since it was cleaned off, and mostly dry. What would’ve been the point? They were all the same, more or less.

Except this one… wasn’t.

He dared to touch it, to run his hand over what had been obscured before, and was still barely visible: a faint impression scored around it, near the bottom end, like the groove on a finger after taking off a wedding ring, tattooed with a trace of rust.

No way , he thought. This whole time, assuming these had started out as ordinary logs, when they were nothing of the sort. No way.

The great thing about Kimo was that there was almost nothing he wouldn’t drop at a moment’s notice to take his boat out. He’d saved the GPS coordinates of the sunken yacht, so even after three weeks it was easy to find again. Once Danny was in the water, Kimo waved the coil of rope before tossing it over the side.

“I’m giving you a longer leash, so leave it on. If you touch the lanyard this time I’m going to break your arm.”

“Yes, Mom.” Danny huffed wind to saturate himself, filled up, locked it in, then ducked and plunged.

By now he’d traded his frogman flippers for a monofin. Kimo called it his mermaid ass. It fit over both feet and forced his legs to move together, scything the water like a whale’s flukes to turbocharge each kick. It made the hardest part of the dive easier, if no faster; he could equalize the pressure in his head only so quickly. But it took less energy to power downward, dolphin-kicking, and to maneuver around once he got below neutral buoyancy, and that was what mattered.

Seventy-six feet down, the wreck waited in the hushed indigo haze, still tipped onto its starboard side with its mast jutting down into the ooze. And if the boat still unnerved him, helpless, disintegrating in a grave of silt and mud, it was at least familiar now. He knew it was pointless to check the prow for a figurehead but felt compelled to do it anyway, and of course there was no evidence of one ever having been there.

He turned onto his side and swam parallel to the sea floor, really mermaiding it now, cruising the length of the deck from bow to stern, inspecting the damage and the rot. He was gliding back the opposite way when it struck him: He’d been so focused on the small details that he had missed the big obvious one right in front of him.

He’d been looking for a hole ripped in the deck, or a broken stump, evidence of a missing mast. He’d been looking over what remained for signs of mast hoops, iron reinforcements especially, that might have chafed a groove of rust and wear around the bottom of its mast in the push and pull of the currents.

And they were there.

It was only when he took in the big picture that he realized: Three weeks ago the wreck had two masts, angled down toward the sediment. Now there was only one, the foremast.

There appeared to have been three, total. Masts detached from wrecked ships, sure, it happened. But where were they now? No telling how long the rearward mizzen had been gone. But within the past twenty-two days, the main mast shouldn’t have gotten far.

Shouldn’t. But had.

He feared he could guess where thirty-plus feet of them might have ended up. Where, but not how. There was no how he could imagine. There was no how he wanted to imagine. There was only his quickening heart and the hunger to breathe and the air above the waves.

He surfaced and plunged, surfaced and plunged again, like a pearl diver looking for a prize too big to be misplaced. He widened his search to the limits of his safety line, and still it wasn’t enough. Looking out toward deeper waters, beyond the spot where he’d caught that glimpse of the whale emerging through the dim blue, he saw how the sea floor sloped away, and that down the incline, some indistinct patch of shadow waited. A trick of light would waver. This didn’t waver.