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

For a moment, the lie achieved its goal. Steel shards of panic jabbed my neck and abdomen. But the deceit held only a transient power. I’d been thorough in my research.

“And it’s not like you’d know you were sick unless someone told you,” he continued. “The victims never remember their seizures.”

He eyed me with a blatant fabrication of concern and stepped closer to the fireplace. I allowed him a moment to enjoy his petty jab, seeing the remarks for what they were. A tormentor’s lies. A fiction he hoped would infect and linger and sting. It was the shitty move of a bested bully.

When he turned to face me, he was smirking. Perhaps he was attempting a sympathetic smile. Perhaps not. Wolves often looked as if they were grinning as they circled prey.

“Thank you for your concern,” I said. “But your father and I fucked a lot, Barry. I didn’t catch anything.”

Barry’s taunting smile disappeared. His eyes clouded as his mind attempted to process information I imagine it had struggled to deny, or at least disregard as an irrelevant abstraction. Unfortunately, his befuddlement and my satisfaction were both momentary.

“It’s funny, right?” Barry asked, the grim smile returned to his lips. “How they were all synched up?”

“Excuse me?”

“The way they all danced at the exact same time, even though they were spread out all over the city? Hell, all along the Gulf, as far as anyone knows. It’s like someone pushed a button and bang , all these people dropped what they were doing and got their grooves on. You have to admit, it’s kind of funny.”

No, I didn’t have to admit that. There was nothing funny in the primal choreography, not even when it was set to the Benny Hill theme song.

“You know, one guy went missing. Disappeared. Everyone thought he was dead but he showed up a couple days later,” Barry continued. “He wanted attention. He was a lonely old guy. Real lonely. Pathetic. And he figured he could climb on the bandwagon and suck some sympathy out of his family. Cruel thing to do. Nasty thing.”

“George didn’t need anyone’s sympathy.”

“No,” Barry admitted, “but maybe he needed something else.”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, but if you have doubts, you can speak to the police. I provided all of the information on George’s behavior and his recent medical history to them.”

“Yeah, his medical history,” Barry says. “Well that’s a funny thing. I spoke to his doctor. He hadn’t seen Dad in months.”

The window is open, allowing a salt-scented breeze to wash over our bodies. I’m on the bed, and my heart still races from exertion. George’s head rests on my belly, facing away from me. He gets his hair cut once a week and the horizon of silver drawing along the deeply tanned neck fascinates me with its precision. His stubble pokes agreeably on my skin as he turns his head to kiss my stomach.

He draws a finger from my navel to my cock. “You’re sticky,” he says. This makes him chuckle.

“Don’t forget the neurologist tomorrow.”

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” he says. “I was sleepwalking.”

“You were doing more than walking. And stop that.”

“No,” George mutters, now drawing patterns in the semen on my belly. “I’m playing.”

“You’re a strange man, George Caldwell.”

“Probably.”

“This is serious.”

“Maybe.”

“You could be sick.”

“I’m not.” He stops tracing circles in the fluid on my skin.

“Look, I know it’s frightening. No one knows exactly what this illness does long term, but you have to accept this. We need to explore treatments. You can’t hide behind denial.”

“This isn’t denial,” George whispers. “This is fucking survival.”

“You think you have a better chance without medical attention?”

“Sweetheart, if Eugie finds out about this, it’s over,” George says. “This isn’t some crap like West Nile. This affects the mind. It affects my behavior . I’m not actually divorced yet, which makes Eugie my next of kin. She would be able to have me declared incompetent and then take over my life. And even if I lucked out and found a judge who took the divorce into account, Eugie would just recruit my kid. The doctors don’t know enough right now. Yes, maybe it started with those things on the beach, but if there’s any doubt, they could attribute all of my actions for the past year or years to this.”

“The courts would never…”

“One judge, sweetheart,” George says emphatically. “All it would take is one bible-clutching judge to make the decision, and believe me, this town is swimming in them. They could take everything. They could take me , and I am not going to spend the last years of my life playing with crayons in an institution. I want to be with you. I want our life.”

“I had no idea.”

“You’ve been spared the barbarity of the privileged. Why do you think I asked to see your doctor and not mine?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“My doctor is part of Eugie’s circle. My lawyer is part of her circle. These people play dirty, and nothing brings them together faster than the opportunity to destroy a life. So, I am not sick. I do not have the Gibbet Virus. I’m of perfectly sound body and mind.”

“George asked to see my doctor.”

“Interesting,” Barry said, as if he were a detective whose suspicions were being realized.

“He had it,” I told Barry. “After his first seizure, I insisted he see a doctor. He asked to see mine. I have the paperwork. I had to file it with the police. This was before the CDC even had a webpage about it, though by this time, they had a less ridiculous name for the sickness: Gibbet Virus.”

“Because of that island.”

“Yes. But no one knew anything. They don’t know much now.”

“They’ve connected the virus to the unidentified masses that have been washing up along the coast,” Barry said. “Mosquitoes are feeding on the things and spreading the disease like they do with West Nile and Zika.”

I didn’t correct him, not even his mispronunciation of Zika. Barry’s information was old.

In the weeks following George’s first seizure, I’d used research as a shelter from concern and ultimately grief. I had pages and pages of information about the virus, the globsters, and the Emergence in manila folders packed into my suitcase. Video clips and online articles choked my laptop’s hard drive.

The CDC had tracked the virus’s path from the globsters to the gulls that fed on them. The virus was metabolized by the gulls, where it incubated in their blood streams. Then mosquitoes entered the vector, transmitting the virus from birds to human beings. But while they could trace the virus’s path, they had no idea how it worked.

What kind of infection created spontaneous spasms that looked more like tribal choreography than epileptic fit? What kind of disease caused the afflicted to chant an ugly and indecipherable language at the top of their lungs? What sickness summoned thirty-seven people to the water’s edge, where they waited to die?

The earliest visual evidence of the Gibbet Virus I can find precedes the Bermuda incident by a month. I sit at the dining room table, gathering information, staring at the screen of my laptop.

The video clip was shot in Cuba. Two men sit on the hood of a vintage ’62 Plymouth, smoking cigarettes and smiling. One looks into the sky and says something in Spanish. The other breaks up laughing and slaps him on the shoulder. In the background and far to the left of these men, a woman in a pale blue dress stomps the concrete of a recessed doorway. Shadow engulfs her, washing out the specifics of her face, but the familiar, violent jig is apparent through the gloom.