Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  Perhaps it would float out here until the world came to an end and humanity was no more. A lonely voyage lasting forever.

  “Wake up, Stephan!” he shouted. Tried, at least. But his throat was dry and swollen, his lips split from sun and salt spray, and his cry consisted mostly of blood spat into the bottom of the boat, and a groan of pain.

  One of the boat’s four paddles was still clipped to the side, the metal fastenings bent by the force of the coverings being ripped off. He’d tried to loosen it soon after the capsize, found the task difficult, and left it. Now he needed the paddle more than ever. To follow the birds. To find land.

  Perhaps he might even survive.

  “Don’t think about it,” he whispered, and the high and lonesome sound of the constantly moving sea tried to swallow his words.

  His hands were cracked and swollen, but he plucked at the oar’s fastenings for an hour, until his fingernails were split and the tips bleeding. At last the paddle sprung free and he cried out in delight.

  It was cold and heavy in his hands, but it felt like taking action.

  The birds were long gone, but he had taken a bearing from the sun when they flew away. Allowing for the time since they had flown, he took another visual bearing, sat on one of the raised seats at the side of the boat, and started paddling.

  After fifteen days every action hurt, every movement denied the stillness and supplication his body demanded of him. He had never been so hungry and thirsty, and several times over the past few days he thought he was going to die. Sitting there, leaning against one of the seats cast into the structure of the vessel, he’d felt darkness closing in.

  Something always pulled him through. Sometimes it was his wife’s voice, sweet Mandy beseeching him to survive. Once it was a memory of building a bonfire with the man who had adopted him and become his father, a time from his childhood long-since forgotten until now. And once it was something he could not identify. A strange sensation, a feeling of need and craving that reminded him of dreams he used to have when he was sick. He could not adequately describe them then, though they had been terrifying and made him scream himself awake. And he could not explain that feeling now. Only that it had saved him.

  It was as if someone or something else wanted him to survive, and once he had surfaced from the darkness, that someone or something drew back once again, observing rather than intruding.

  He shook his head. Foolish thoughts. He’d run the gamut of emotions since the ship had gone down, but now that he was taking action he promised never to be tempted by death again. Life was too precious. That preciousness had brought him here, in his attempt to discover where he had come from, who his true parents had been. His adoptive father had told him nothing of them, had refused to even speak of family. Only that they had brought him across the sea, abandoned him, and returned to some strange place.

  He slapped the paddle into the water and pulled, slap and pull, and though he could not tell whether he was moving, or even in which direction, it felt like he was doing something positive at last.

  The seascape was vast and unforgiving, the great swell bringing the horizon near and then drawing it out again, as if teasing him. The steady breeze sprayed salt water across his face and exposed arms and hands, making his raw wounds worse and offering a tantalising taste of water that would only make him sick. Sometimes he thought he saw land across the heads of the swells, but the next sight would reveal it to be simply another wave in the distance. He heard the echoing hiss of the waves’ laughter as his hopes were dashed once again.

  He pulled on the paddle. The boat was too big for him to move on his own, he knew that, it would have taken six people rowing to even hope to take charge of the vessel’s direction. But he had to try. Mandy’s voice convinced him of that. His father’s face seen through the haze of bonfire smoke, the spit of knots in wood, the rich, sweet smell of burning branches from the evergreens growing around his grandparents’ garden.

  “The birds came from somewhere,” he said again and again as he paddled. The words formed a chant, a song that the waves and wind sang along with him.

  Something passed beneath the boat.

  Stephan felt a pull on the oar as if a sudden, violent current was attempting to tug it from his hand. He held on tight and hauled the oar back into the boat. The sense of something huge passing beneath him was powerful, and he feared he was about to capsize again. The boat seemed gripped in a strong wake, drawing it up the face of an oncoming wave and down into the trough beyond. Stephan was powerless, and he waited for the moment when the thing below would rise up, break surface, show him secrets that had been hidden since the moment the ship had sunk.

  But nothing happened, and the casual swell of the sea guided the boat once more.

  Nothing had gripped the boat. Just the strange currents swirling here, flows of warm and cold water starting as a splash at the equator and taking on energy beyond measure by the time they made it this far north. Such was the way with the sea. Most people thought it was a silent mass, still and calm but for the waves texturing its surface. In reality the sea was a living thing, clasping the fixed continents in its smooth embrace and curling, twisting, abrading them over eons too vast for the human mind to contemplate.

  Stephan had just gained a glimpse at that vastness. Rather than feeling awed, he was only scared.

  He picked up the paddle to follow the birds once more.

  If a distress signal had been sent, it had not been acted upon quickly enough to save him. If the lifeboat had a homing beacon, it had either failed or been washed overboard. He had seen plane trails several times since the sinking, but they were high in the stratosphere, passenger jets taking people across the wide ocean upon which they could not imagine such a story being played out.

  He could remember little from that awful night, only that he had found himself in the lifeboat, darkness pressing heavy all around and the sea roaring and convulsing in a violence that terrified him to the core. Sea sickness had crippled him, curling him in a ball beneath the boat’s flapping covering. Fear refused to let him go. It grasped him in its wet, salty grip, squeezing hard forcing more puke when there was nothing left to bring up.

  He was only a passenger out here.

  “The birds came from somewhere!” he said again, but already he was doubting his knowledge. Were such birds native to the sea, or the land? Had he really read somewhere that seagulls were land based? Or could the species he had seen cruise above oceans for weeks on end, landing on boats or debris for a brief rest, sleeping on the wing?

  He didn’t know for sure, and such uncertainty angered him. He was an ignorant, thrown into an alien environment with no clue how to survive.

  Yet survive he had, and his wife’s voice called him onward, and his father’s face glimpsed through smoke.

  An hour later, with Stephan still paddling, a shadow passed beneath the boat.

  This time he was sure there was something there. He snatched the oar back on board and the surface of the sea rose, smoothing out as if an unimaginable bulk forced water up from the depths below. The surge was gentle rather than violent, carrying the lifeboat forwards and easing the way.

  Against all instincts, Stephan leaned over the side of the boat and looked down. He saw only water, the surface now so smooth that his reflection looked back up at him, broken by ripples from the boat. He could not see any deeper.

  Heart hammering with fear and a keen excitement, he had to fight against the urge to lean out further and plunge his face beneath the surface.

  The surge ended as quickly as it had begun, dropping the boat into another valley between swelling waves, and he picked up the oar again. Just as he scrambled onto the plastic seat once more, he glimpsed something across the tips of the waves.

  Land?

  He gasped and dug the paddle in, trying to drive the boat towards the faint shadow he had seen. He feared he was hallucinating again, and that next time the boat was picked out of a trough he’d see a bank
of dark clouds low to the horizon. But after splashing for what felt like eternity the boat rose again, bow first, until he was resting atop a giant swell.

  “Yes!” he shouted. It was definitely land, a wide band of hills and beach on the horizon, lit by the afternoon sun and speckled with breakers. He must have been even closer than he realised if he could see breakers!

  Stephan started paddling again, harder than before. He ignored the pain from his damaged hands, gritting his teeth against the sting of split lips and sunburn, and he started to believe he was going in the right direction. He had to believe that. No other outcome would be fair.

  Mandy had died when the ship went down. She had still been in their cabin, miserable from sea sickness, and Stephan had gone on deck to smoke a cigarette. A jarring thud, a series of dull, inexplicable impacts below the waterline, and he had been flung over the handrail and into the sea, swimming frantically as the boat quickly sank beneath the waves. The only survivor.

  Maybe the cabin had remained watertight for a while. Long enough for her to really think about what was happening and believe him dead. He hoped not.

  Keep paddling, she said, her voice soft and imploring, though he could not see her face.

  “I am,” he said, tears blurring his vision. “I’m paddling as hard...”

  From the corner of his eye he saw something break surface to starboard, emerging like the smooth grey remnants of an ancient wave unspent. By the time he’d turned to look it had vanished, leaving behind a curious speckling luminescence that rose and fell with the swell.

  “Keep paddling, keep paddling,” he said, hearing Mandy’s voice whispering the words beneath his own.

  As the sun dipped towards the land in the distance, so he drew closer. The sea’s majestic swell lessened and the waves became rougher, breaking into white-tops and splashing into the boat. He should be baling, but then he would not be able to paddle. But if he kept paddling for too long, and the waves grew even worse, the boat would be swamped.

  He was close enough now to start making out some detail. There was a small seaside town slouched along the dark strip of land, shadows striving for the sea from huddled rooftops, winding roads leading up from the shore and towards the hills much farther back. The hills were low, heavily wooded, seemingly immune to sunlight.

  Something troubled him. Something about the town. He silently berated himself, concentrating on driving the paddle in, pulling, and again.

  But the tide was taking him in anyway, so soon he stopped paddling and took a closer look.

  A few lights had been lit in buildings close to the shore. They looked like beach huts of some kind, perhaps fishermen’s huts, and the lights pulsed like oil lamps. Down the beach, closer to the breaking waves, a dark line of seaweed seemed to mark the dividing line between ocean and land.

  “I’ll cross that line,” Stephan said. He’d been talking to himself for days, keeping himself company, and he suddenly started crying at the uncertainty of his situation. More unfair than his wife, drowning slowly in their cabin. More unfair than his adoptive father, taken by cancer. He did not feel saved.

  A heavy weight passed beneath the boat once again, drawing it more rapidly towards shore. He squinted in the dusky light. There was something strange about the little town. Something darker than the dusk, because although the sun was still in the sky it seemed to avoid the buildings and streets of that place.

  The dark line of seaweed on the sand was moving. It quivered and flexed like a giant snake, but then Stephan made out what it really was. Not seaweed at all. People. Hundreds of people, standing in line along the beach that fronted their little town, not quite far enough forward to let the foaming water touch their feet.

  Hundreds of people, waiting for him.

  You’re going to be saved, Mandy said from somewhere deep in the ocean’s depths, where perhaps even after all this time her cabin had yet to flood. The man who had adopted him, dead for years, nodded in agreement, his old face lost behind a veil of smoke that wasn’t smoke at all, but salty spray thrown up by the strengthening wind blowing Stephan towards shore.

  He reversed the paddle and started pushed it the other way. His lacerated hands bled into the water. His split lips pouted fiery pain at the sky. His paddling became more frantic as the town grew closer, and with that closeness came the unbearable, sickening realisation that after days adrift on the cruel ocean, this was the last place on Earth he wanted to be.

  The sea carried him landward. Another mass passed beneath the boat and it lurched on, and the paddle was suddenly ripped from his hands, disappearing beneath the waves even though it was made of hollow plastic and designed to float.

  Stephan knelt in the middle of the lifeboat, helpless in the face of his own fate. He suddenly had no wish to be saved. As he felt the boat’s hull grinding against the first sandbank that signified the approach of land, he finally made out the staring, strange faces of those who waited. They had been expecting him, and he wondered whether he’d ever been on a ship at all. Perhaps he had always been out here being drawn, steadily and relentlessly, towards this terrible shore. Maybe he was being brought home.

  Lynda E. Rucker

  THE SEVENTH WAVE

  1

  Do you know the story about the girl who walked into the sea?

  Did she drown?

  No, she didn’t drown. They pulled her out.

  That’s good.

  No it’s not. It was the worst thing in the world they could have done.

  I want to begin this story in this way: I have always loved the sea. But then I stop and I think: which sea? There are so many of them. There is the sea of my childhood: the flat blue glass of Florida’s Gulf Coast, the dirty ocean off Galveston Island in Texas. There are the seas of my later years, the freezing Atlantic smashing against the shores of western Ireland, the windswept grey waters of the Oregon coast outside my home right now. And there are the seas of my imagination, the seas I read about in books and never saw, or saw and was disappointed by so that the sea remains forever extant only in my memory. There is the sea of the Greek isles, a sea I somehow always thought would indeed be wine-dark, and it was not. There is what I think of as the Gothic sea: it is somewhere off an English coast, surrounded by cliffs and moors and castles with family secrets and brooding men lurking about. This sea, too, does not exist except in my mind.

  Then we have the metaphorical sea: we can be all at sea, which is bad, or in a sea of love, which is good, I guess.

  But my story is about the sea, and about love, and it is not a good story at all. Or rather, the story itself is a good one, I suppose, if you are not in the story, because the things that happen in it are very bad indeed.

  Because I am old, and because tonight I feel old, and because it is forty years to the day from another, terrible night, I am going to set down here the story of myself and the sea, and all that it took from me.

  Every thing and every person that I ever loved taken from me.

  2

  Do you know the story about the girl who walked into the sea?

  Women and men have been throwing themselves at death on account of love for as long as there have been humans and some concept of love, or maybe for longer: when I was a child, I had a dog who mourned the passing of its mate by refusing food for so long it nearly died itself. Before our not-yet-human ancestors were capable of the kind of planning that hastening death requires, they probably still starved themselves, or lay out in the elements, or let themselves get eaten by sabre-toothed tigers rather than bother trying to carry on.

  Anyone who isn’t terrified of love is either a fool or has no idea what it means. For myself, I’d sooner be flayed alive than fall in love again. You might say there is little chance of either of those things happening. At four score and five I am supposed to be preparing to die, but not from love, and certainly not from la petite mort—just from ordinary decay. At my age, the capacity for that quickening of the heart and the spirit and the loins is suppos
ed to be long gone. And yet it happens. It happens to those my age and even those older than me, the ninety-year-olds, the hundred-year-olds. The human heart is never too old for passion. It is the very young who believe otherwise, but then, the very young believe everything is for them and them alone. There is the old, true adage that every generation believes it has discovered sex for the first time: and yet there is no act, no position, no method of penetration or manner of stimulation or path to ecstasy or perversion that men and women have not been doing to one another in various combinations for at least as long as they have been dying for love.

  I find this extraordinarily heartening. I wonder how different humans might be if we wrote history as a chronicle of significant orgasms rather than political intrigues, poisonings, betrayals, battles won and lost. I take a wicked pleasure in saying this sometimes to people because it shocks them. “Abigail!” they tut, or “Mrs. Brennan!” if they are on less familiar terms with me, clearly believing I am one of those elderly people who has taken leave of my senses and is now just saying any old thing that pops into my head. And none are ever so shocked as the young. For all their posturing, the young really are terribly conservative, because they are so young, and so hopeful, and so they’ve yet to figure out that nothing at all ever really matters much in the end.

  But where was I? I am old, you see, and I digress so readily. Ah, yes. The sea. The ghost story. Lost love. And the girl who walked into the sea, the girl they pulled back out again.

  You may or may not have surmised by now that the girl was me, and if so, you are correct. Had they not pulled me out again, I might have been the ghost in this story. And a terrifying, vengeful ghost I would have been as well. I’d have smashed ships against rocks, rent sailors limb to limb, drowned swimming lovers. I was so consumed with sorrow and pain on that day that I walked into the sea. Those things would have felt almost like an act of mercy to me, as though I were doing those people a favour, showing them the true face of the world, and that at the end of it all there is only suffering and fear. Sparing them one more single agonising second of living.