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

In that way of sounds, unusual enough to penetrate, familiar enough to not alarm, it worked its way into his dreams before teasing him awake. The dream dissolved at once, so he lay in the dark with the only thing left: the far, reverberant squeal of a whale rolling in across the water and floating up through the open window.

“Listen,” he whispered, and reached over to give Gail a gentle shake. But her side of the bed was empty, a sure sign she was listening already.

She wasn’t at the window, wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in the bathroom or front room. He knew the feel of a house emptied of any other heartbeat than his own. Danny yanked on enough clothing to call himself decent, a T-shirt and shorts that felt backwards, then stumbled outside, but she wasn’t on the deck, either.

The night was as bright as nights got… all moon and no clouds, and the sea a glittering expanse of silver-white and blue-black. It was the world. It was their entire world.

Braced against the redwood deck, he peered down at the beach. After a moment, his fingers gripped the rail with the same steadying ferocity as his toes gripped a surfboard. He felt every bit as much in motion, shooting through a rolling barrel that collapsed behind him.

From up here, he was so accustomed to the sight of Neptune’s Throne that the high-backed platform was as familiar a fixture of the landscape as the ridge on which they lived. But now… now its shape was different, wrong. He couldn’t see what, exactly, only that some hulking form occupied it, bulbous and enormous, wet enough and slick enough to catch the moonlight with an iridescent gleam.

To his left, a form no bigger than a person traversed toward it, small and dark against the pale sands.

He heard it again, rebounding from the cliffs—the same high, rolling squall that had brought him awake, the forlorn cry he’d always taken for a passing whale, roaming the endless waters and calling out for what or who might answer.

Danny sprinted for the beach stairs, the zigzag flights up which he’d helped lug a lifetime’s worth of the sea’s gifts, clueless, never imagining what it might have wanted, or expected in return.

Pounding down the steps he was as good as blind, the moonlight trapped above the canopy of leaves that crowded up and over. Although he held the rail, heedless of the splinters he picked up along the way, he went tumbling before he knew what happened, something damp and slick skidding beneath his bare foot.

His leg torqued one way while the rest of him torqued another. If pain glowed, his knee could have lit the night. No wave had ever flung him more violently than this, than gravity and his own momentum. He juddered down the stairs, sometimes on his hip, sometimes on his rump, every hardwood step another bruise. When he thudded to a stop he had two flights left to go, and scooted the rest of the way on his ass.

Down on the beach he tried to stand but his knee wasn’t having it. He tumbled to the sand, still warm from the day’s sun. He crawled, striving to see through the pink haze of pain, first making out the moon-etched lines of the cliffs ahead, then below them, the suggestion of some lesser mountain that rose up and slouched back toward the sea.

Danny crawled until he found a line of dimples in the sand, footprints, unbroken and resolute. He followed them, dragging his useless leg behind him, hearing nothing but the wheeze of his breath and the crash and retreat of the waves.

He crawled until the pillars and planks of Neptune’s Throne loomed above him, empty now, but darkened with water and draped with robes of seaweed, the air around it rich with a heavy musk of brine. The sand before it was churned to wet clumps and crooked furrows, as if between here and the water’s edge the beach had been plowed by some dragging thing, bristling with appendages, that had tried to walk but was never meant to move on land.

Alongside the disturbance, the line of her steps turned, veering toward the water. He followed these too, scrambling on both elbows and one good knee, until they were no longer dimples but true footprints pressed into the wet sand, heel and arch and five small toes. He scurried ahead, frantic now, as step by step the prints began to change, the impression left by each toe deepening, as though dug by a hooked and spiny claw, with a growth of webbing in between. He followed them to the foaming lip of the sea, where he lost them, her last footprints erased as the water washed across and smoothed the sand blank again.

Still, he floundered onward as the waves battered him head-on, stopping only when he was slapped across the face and shoulder by something solid, heavy as a wet blanket, that clung like a caul. Sputtering, he peeled it away, and when after the longest moments of his life he accepted what the tattered thing was, he had no idea what to do with it. He couldn’t bring himself to pitch it away, couldn’t think of any reason to keep holding on.

If Gail didn’t need her skin anymore, then where on land or sea was it supposed to go?

Out past the breakers, beneath the moon, a gleaming bulbous dome submerged with an elephantine skronk that he felt ripple through the waves and shudder through the sand.

Then he was alone.

He knew the feel of a shore emptied of any other heartbeat than his own.

He retreated far enough to keep from choking, then rolled onto his back to face the stars, exhausted and sweating from the pain. The water surged in and out for a thousand cycles, and a thousand more.

In time he wondered which of the ligaments in his knee were in shreds. ACL, PCL, LCL, MCL… any and all. He surely had a motherfucker of a hamstring tear, as well. Whatever the damage, his career was done even sooner than expected.

By the time he was ready to move again, the sky had lightened to a formless gray. Fog had crept in across the waters, and with it a stinging drizzle of rain. His knee was swollen double and he couldn’t bend his leg, but nothing much hurt by default anymore.

There was dawn enough for him to spy a familiar shape stranded in the channels where the sea met the freshwater stream from the cliffs. He made for it, mocking thing that it was… as complete a carving as he’d seen, even farther along than the ones sunk amid the kelp beds. Or maybe this was one of them, finished along the way.

He knew its shape, knew the face, the hands folded as if in prayer. But he knew nothing of the changes wrought upon the rest of her: the thin, frilled slits at either side of her throat; the fins along each forearm and lower leg. But he did know, and had all along, that she’d smelled of the sea, and tasted of it, too, and that the ocean and its gods knew their own.

She must have known, as well, somewhere inside. Must have cherished the sea even while living in fear that if she ever went out on it, she might not come back. It would never stop wanting her.

He had to admit that this carving—all of them—appeared to have been made with love. But love, as Gail had said, on a whole different wavelength.

He rolled the effigy back out into the surf, fighting the wishes of the waves, the most grueling thing he’d ever done. But it was still a log at heart. It floated. The first twenty yards from shore were the hardest, the next hundred a little easier. He clung to this new Gail until he could no longer push off the sandy bottom, then threw his good leg over and across, straddling it like a surfboard and paddling out to sea.

In time, the roar of the breakers faded behind him, until he was left with the quieter slop and splash of a calm sea, as the dim sun rose over his shoulders and began to burn the fog away.

He paddled as far as he could, until he thought he might have just five more good, strong minutes left inside. The ocean yawned deep and dark beneath. He could still breathe, but with one leg, could he kick hard enough to overcome the air in his lungs? Could he reach that threshold that changed everything? He had to believe he could. Forty feet. He only had to make it another forty feet.