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

“We need to move,” he told Kimo the next time he surfaced. “Forty or fifty yards that way.”

Never thought he’d see Kimo balk at piloting the boat. “Dude. You’ve had a month of downtime since the Corona Open. Is this really how you want to spend your final days of it, instead of getting your mind on the Billabong Pro?”

Treading water, spitting salt: “Yeah. It is. It helps. Everything helps.”

“What’s so special about fifty yards that way?”

“Because I’m ready for it.”

Kimo made the move, grumbling, but insisted on doing a sonar reading of the bottom. Ninety-four feet—Danny had never dived that far. Not a huge leap from last week’s new personal best of eighty-three, but still, it meant more pressure and another twenty-two feet of round-trip. This was not insignificant.

He went anyway. Deeper, bluer, colder, darker. He relaxed into the squeeze, welcoming it like an embrace.

From above and to the side, he couldn’t yet tell what was waiting below. Submerged another eighteen feet lower than the yacht, even less light reached his target zone. But it was more than that. The water looked cloudier here, too. As his vision acclimated to the gloom, he could make out what appeared to be a slab on the sea floor, three times the width of a car, furred with growth and set in the midst of a forest of bull kelp. Their stalks swayed with the currents, their fronds wavering like pennants in a breeze.

The further he sank and the closer he drifted, the less natural the slab looked, like a mound of sand and mud and stones scraped into a heap and packed together with intent. For no reason he wanted to explore, its flatness and order—its look of purpose —reminded him of the worktable in Gail’s shop. Again he was overcome with the uneasy sense of facing something out of place, lost from above and drowned without pity.

Because rising from the mound was a grove of logs, eight of them, seemingly jammed into the muck to hold them in place. Their tops were ragged, splintered, a sight that nearly locked his mind. He could imagine no force in the sea that could take a ship’s mast and break it up this orderly way, or would even want to.

Around each piece, a thrashing cloud of motion churned and blurred the water. By now he knew a shipworm on sight. Even at their most normal they still filled him with loathing, but he didn’t think they were supposed to behave like this, hundreds of them visible, like hagfish burrowed into the side of a decomposing whale. They streamed over the wood with the furious energy of a feeding frenzy.

The dread crept in cold, from the outer dark. This was something no one was meant to see. Ever. A hiker would feel this way, stumbling across the half-eaten carcass of a mule deer, then smelling the musk and carrion scent of the returning grizzly.

Danny flicked his fin to drift close enough to see the hard little shells on the worms’ heads, scouring the wood, shaping it as surely as rasps and chisels and lathes.

He recognized the human form gnawed free from the lengths of mast. Anyone would.

He knew their contours. He’d lugged their predecessors up from the beach five times already.

And among the three that appeared farthest along, he recognized the face taking shape out of the grain. He had loved it for the past nineteen years.

Danny tried to will the sight away as an illusion born of low light and a brain hungry for oxygen. But it wouldn’t resolve into anything else. He pinched off a half-dozen of the worms, fat and lashing, and flung them to the silt so he could caress his hand along the fresh-carved visage. Even blind, in the dark of an infinite abyss, he would know that cheekbone, that nose, that jawline, that hollow at the throat.

Already, the worms he’d dropped were wriggling back up to her face, to dig back in and resume their task. Mindless, they seemed to obey a directive he couldn’t begin to fathom. But if something out here was capable of snapping a ship’s mast into pieces like a pencil, then maybe it followed that it had workers, drones subjugated by the kind of group mind that turned a school of fish in perfect unison.

There was no why he wanted to imagine, either.

Five above, eight down here, and who knew how many more might be drifting unfinished somewhere between. In revulsion, in the grip of something he felt but couldn’t name, he gave the foremost effigy a shove to send it toppling back, pulling free of the muck and thunking into another behind it, then a third gave way, a slow chain reaction that disturbed the silt, but the worms not at all.

Abruptly, his legs were yanked from beneath him and he was upside-down again, moving up and away, something reeling him in like a fish. He nearly panicked and lost the breath locked inside, until the tug on his ankle made sense. Kimo being Kimo again. He couldn’t right himself under the tension, never enough slack to turn around. Rather than flail at the end of the rope, he relaxed and let it happen, until he broke the surface spewing bubbles and foam, and breathed with a violent gasp, once more a creature of land and air.

Kimo peered down from the boat as if expecting to see him floating motionless. Huh. Must have set another personal best without even realizing.

“How long?” Danny said. Normal. He had to act normal.

“Seven minutes.”

Seven? Whoa. He would never have guessed.

“I had to pull the plug. And yet… you’re fine.”

“You sound disappointed about that.”

“No. That part’s good.” Kimo shook his head—never again, never again. “You need to find somebody else to take you out for this. All you do is scare the shit out of me.”

Poor Kimo. Danny felt genuinely bad for him. Bad for them both. Because it wouldn’t have helped one bit to tell Kimo that, no, he wasn’t fine. He hadn’t come up fine at all.

Worse, he couldn’t tell Gail, either. How was he supposed to convey a thing like this? They’re you. They’re supposed to be you. He couldn’t even be sure how she would react—if she’d find it flattering, the best thing since ambergris, or if the balance would tip and this weird synergy between her and the sea would finally leave her spooked.

Once she picked up on the obvious, that something was wrong, his only option was to lie. Had a bad dive. Burst a blood vessel in my nose. It happens.

All he could do was look ahead. Try to get her away for two weeks, inject some time and distance to break this encroaching spell, and leave whatever carvings might wash up next for someone else to find.

“Why don’t you come with me to Tahiti, for the Billabong? It’s been years.”

“I know. But I should stay. I don’t have the kind of work I can take with me.”

She was hardly doing the work now. “It’ll still be here when you get back. You might even get some new ideas there to bring home.”

“Like tiki carvings? I went through my tiki phase years ago.”

Oh. Right. She had.

He packed and planned and tried his best to make it sound enticing: Seeing the Pacific from another side would do them good. This could be the last time he went there as a competitor. None of it seemed to quite get through.

“I know. I just like it here. There’s something about here. Some people go their whole lives looking for the place they should be. I found my here a long time ago.”

Even before she’d found him—Gail was too kind to say so, but it had to have crossed her mind. He was one more thing the sea had given her, the one thing it was most capable of taking back. That worried her. It had all along.

I love you. You’ve always been my anchor , she would tell him. But it scares me what could happen if the anchor chain ever broke.