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

“Wait a second.”

Still watching Carl—he’d managed to lever himself up halfway to his feet again, but was still trapped behind the cistern, one eye open, the other closed—I flipped to the other line on my phone. “Shannon?”

“I’m still here,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Carl Hammick is trying to kill me.”

“Because of the delay on the RX350i?”

“ No , Shann. Because he’s lost his fucking mind .”

“Get out of there. I’ll be as fast as I can.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m coming to get you.”

“You’re… Shannon, it will take days to drive here from Boston.”

“You don’t listen to a single word I say, do you?”

“I do, but…”

“If you had , you’d have heard me saying earlier in the week that because you were going to be out of town, I’d decided to visit my mother in Las Vegas.”

“You’re in Vegas ?”

“Not anymore. I’m… oh, gosh.”

“What?”

“Another accident. It’s… God, that’s horrible. There’s dead… and people are… Eurgh. Everyone’s driving like maniacs. Mainly going the other way.”

“But you’re…”

“Coming as fast as I can.”

“But why would you even do that?”

“Because I’m your PA, you dick. It’s my job.”

“It’s really not , Shannon. And Las Vegas is a very long way from Long Beach. I mean, like, hours and hours.”

“Unless it gets much worse than this I think I can do it in five, and I’ve been on the road nearly two hours already and I’m driving as fast as I can. I’m going to hang up now so I can focus on the road, okay? I’ll call back in a while.”

“But what about your mom? Will she be safe?”

“Nobody’s affected in Vegas. It’s a long way from the ocean. As a precaution they’ve made everyone stay indoors wherever they were when the news broke. My mom’s locked inside the Flamingo Casino with a hundred bucks in change and a long line of margaritas and literally could not be happier. Just get off the boat, Rick.”

And then she was gone.

I turned just in time to see Carl had managed to haul himself to his feet again and was shambling in my direction, grasping hands outstretched toward me.

I braced myself against the wall and kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. I didn’t land my foot squarely, though, and so he spun lop-sidedly away, crashing into the urinal I’d used, slipping and smacking his face really hard into the metal fixture at the top.

The sound this made was bad and the way he crashed onto the ground looked extremely final, and I realized with incredulous bafflement both that he’d looked exactly the way they made these things look on television and also that I’d just killed Carl Hammick from the Wisconsin office.

Except I hadn’t. After maybe three seconds of stillness, his fingers started to twitch, and his shoulders bunched as some impulse deep inside pushed him toward movement again.

I remembered I’d left Peter hanging. I kept a close eye on Carl and flipped to the other line. “You still there?”

“Look, I’ll meet you halfway,” Pete said. “You’re right. I can’t expect you to come all the way up here, and anyway that’s not how we’re going to get off the boat.”

“Deal.”

“I’ll meet you at reception. Where I saw you when you first arrived. That’s where the main walkway is. Be as quick as you can, Rick. I’m not going to wait forever.”

“Understood.”

I ended the call, stowed my phone in my pocket. Carl was pushing himself up from the floor, slowly but irrevocably. I tried to think of something to say but couldn’t imagine what it would be, and doubted he’d even understand it any more.

So I put my ear against the cabin door and listened. I could hear noises out there, but they seemed distant and I couldn’t tell what they were. The one lesson I learned from years of video games as a teenager is when you reach a new level you don’t screw around. You get going immediately, before the situation has a chance to get worse.

I opened the door and stuck my head out.

The first thing I noticed was a long splash of blood on the opposite wall of the hallway. It was still dripping. There was another splash of something much darker and brown below it. It smelled bad and was still dripping too.

I glanced left, back toward the bar. Some of the sounds were coming from there. They weren’t good sounds, and some of them were to do with the fact the place looked like it was on fire. An orange glow, crackling noises, the smell of smoke.

Nonetheless I started cautiously in that direction, as I recalled there was a lateral sub-corridor that would take me to the outer and much wider walkway, which I figured would be a faster and safer way to the stairs that’d take me down the single flight to the reception level.

I’d barely gone three yards before someone came lurching out of the sub-corridor. A waiter. One I’d been dealing with earlier, in fact—who’d put my personal Amex by the register so I could run a room tab. The card was still in there but I decided it was going to stay that way. The left side of the barman’s face was raw and burned and he was missing an eye and most of one check and I could see his teeth through the hole. He was dragging one leg behind as he stumbled toward me, too, and leaving an unpleasant brown trail, but nonetheless closing in fast.

I swept my foot to hook out his good leg, and as he crashed to the ground I turned and ran back the other way.

The door to the toilets flew open as I got level, smacking me into the wall. Carl came staggering out, still with his pants around his ankles, still intent on getting his hands around my neck.

He managed it, too, but some instinctive memory triggered me to use the single piece of useful advice my mother ever gave me. I grabbed him by both ears and head-butted him on the bridge of the nose. It’s because of the implications of nuggets of maternal wisdom like this that I’ve never blamed my father for leaving home when I was nine.

Carl collapsed to the ground and I ran.

It was plain sailing down to the open area where the expensive little wine and cosmetics concessions were. As I hurtled toward the grand staircase, however, jumping over the prone body of someone I’d been drinking with earlier, I saw a woman coming up to my level. She was completely naked and liberally splattered with blood and it was clear both that none of it was hers and that she was keen to add to her collection.

She saw me and came running, and I didn’t know for sure what language she was screaming in but I thought it was probably German, which would imply the Dusseldorf office. She was fast, and gleeful, and next thing I knew I was smashing backward into a curved glass cabinet that was probably eighty years old and quite valuable. Thankfully I hit it at an angle and the shattered glass didn’t sever anything important, but then the woman was straddling me and trying to stuff a thumb deep into each of my eyes.

Her breath smelt awful, the kind of stench Carl had been producing in the toilet, but coming up the other way, out of her mouth. My eyes started to sparkle and meanwhile she was feverishly trying to knee me in the balls, so I gathered all the strength I could muster and planted both feet firmly on the ground and thrust upward, trying to buck her off.

It didn’t work but for a moment she was off-balance at least, and so I twisted sideways instead, managing to roll on top of her. I banged her head down onto the parquet flooring—very hard—and scrabbled to my feet. She was snarling and I could barely see anything because of the stars in my eyes, but as she started to get up I sent a swinging kick at her head and managed to catch her in the jaw.