The Devil and the Deep

by Ellen Datlow

  But the record player had just gulp-gulped straight down.

  Along with the power outlet.

  That made seven, then. Seven down.

  And, he was pretty sure, in the same order he’d filled them in on the magazine’s form, to mail in.

  Whoever’s list was chosen was supposed to win a year’s subscription, plus publication. Not this, having to subsist on the actual list you’d written down.

  Had that been in the fine print?

  Jaden couldn’t even remember what the magazine had been. It was just one he’d stole from the convenience store.

  What was next on the list, though? That was the real question.

  Hopefully not any more records. The one he had was already melted and warped. And, he hadn’t asked for a werewolf action figure, he was pretty sure. He’d said what he’d want would be a werewolf, the actual monster. Because werewolves are cool.

  “Oh yeah,” he said then, when he saw the scum of notebook pages floating in on the surface of the water, the blurry words made of large looping letters in purple ink.

  That was next.

  Sandra Peterman from homeroom’s secret journal.

  Number eight.

  DAY 15

  No sleep the night before, or the night before that, or the day between. Just remembering. Trying to remember.

  That trip to the convenience store had to be where this all started, didn’t it? When he’d got that stupid magazine? Though “trip” wasn’t really the word. More like the power was out for the whole block, and his aunt had hustled him out into the sunshine she said would be good for him.

  Walking past the convenience store, Jaden had seen its lights were off as well. He’d wandered in, the door not dinging like usual. No clerk behind the counter. The store was murky grey, like a ghost of itself, and it was cool inside, like the cooler door had been left open to fog the place up.

  Jaden hadn’t taken the magazine because he wanted it. He’d taken it because he was mad at his aunt, and his mom, and his dad, and the world. He’d taken it because no one was watching. He’d taken it because it was the closest one to the door. Only, somebody’d spilled a coke behind the magazine: when he pulled it, it stuck to the shelf with coke syrup, just, more the color of mucous or saliva. Like the world had heard that he hated it, so was trying to keep him there long enough for the power to come back on, or for the clerk to be walking back from her cigarette. He pulled harder, got away with the torn-out insides, not the cover, then kept the rolled-up magazine pages in the treehouse so he wouldn’t have to explain where they’d come from.

  Doing the magazine’s desert island contest had just been a way to kill another afternoon.

  Sneaking that torn-out form into the mail, Jaden had pretended he was rolling up a secret message in a bottle, throwing it out into the water.

  Only, it had come back, hadn’t it?

  Jaden, sitting in the sand of his island with his action-figure blister pack and his Playboy and his popsicle that wouldn’t melt and his record that would, cringed.

  It had come back, hadn’t it? Years later, when someone moved their desk, when they cleaned up the mailroom, when that messy postal jeep was retired—when whatever happened that got Jaden’s contest entry back into the mail, years too late.

  Shit.

  Jaden stood, paced the perimeter of the island, looking for a coffin bobbing in the water.

  DAY 16

  Jaden was still walking around and around the island. No coffin yet. The sand of his path was compacted. He couldn’t see it in the dark, but he could feel it under the soles of his bare feet.

  He was thinking what if a wave came, pushed too hard on the stalk of rock he was sitting on, crumbled it down into the depths.

  He was thinking what about scurvy. He was thinking about chocolate poisoning. He was thinking there was a code hidden in Peggy’s turn-ons and turnoffs in the Playboy, that maybe each turn-on was a 1, each turnoff a 0, for some binary message.

  He’d broken the record into shards to use as a weapon. He’d tried wearing the record sleeve as a folded-open paper hat but it kept popping off, so he’d used the bare-wood popsicle stick to carve out two eyes.

  The ocean looked the same through his mask.

  Jaden screamed, whipped the album sleeve out into the darkness then immediately ran to the edge of the island after it.

  Maybe it would come back, he told himself.

  Please let it come back.

  Like the desert island list he’d mailed off.

  Running on automatic all those years ago, he’d put his return address down not as his aunt’s, where he was mailing from, but his actual home, his usual address.

  Three years later, the letter had come back.

  It was waiting in the mailbox when Jaden and his dad came back from … not his mom’s funeral, they hadn’t been in time for that. But her grave, anyway. Their own service of standing there with their heads down.

  Jaden had loosened his tie and opened the letter, left it on the kitchen table like a joke he wasn’t in the mood for.

  A week later, he was in the mood.

  Waiting for his cereal to get less crunchy before school, he’d scratched out what had been the tenth item, wrote in instead, Mom.

  Which was why he couldn’t sleep.

  DAY 17

  The ninth item from his list was a six-pack of toilet paper.

  It bobbed up in its plastic, knocked on the side of the island.

  Jaden waited half the day before he finally fished it up. What he was waiting to see was if the water would deliver it around the side, let it go on past.

  It wouldn’t.

  “You’re for guests,” Jaden said to the toilet paper, and nestled it upright into the sand, but it was a lie. He didn’t need the toilet paper for what he’d figured he’d need it for—there was the down-water side of the island just a dunk away, and, as it turned out, subsisting on popsicles and water was pretty light on the bowels—but he did need a pillow, as it turned out.

  He slept better than he had in two weeks.

  DAY 19

  Jaden woke this time to the sand being gently cleared from the side of his face. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep exactly, but he’d peeked out twice in daylight and peed once in the night, he thought.

  He opened his eyes to a figure above him.

  “Mom,” he said.

  She smiled.

  He closed his eyes and the delicate scraping of her palm on his cheek continued. He was crying now. His throat was full.

  She’d woken on the beach, she told him after all the hugging and the rest of the crying.

  “Beach?” Jaden said, looking all around.

  They smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he told her.

  “This was poking me in the hip,” she said. It was a silver straw, sharp on one end. Still in a plastic sleeve.

  “Number ten,” Jaden said, in wonder, because he thought he’d crossed that one out, to write Mom in.

  “A straw?” she asked.

  “It’s for the coconuts,” he told her.

  His mom looked around for the coconut tree.

  “I should have wished better,” Jaden explained.

  “This is my wish,” she said. “Being here with you.”

  “I only have popsicles,” Jaden said.

  “I like popsicles,” his mom said.

  It would have been nice to have a fire to sit by, but there were no matches, and only one popsicle stick for firewood, and one record sleeve, and one straw that was more of telescope, now. Jaden talked his mom through the city he was building in the sky, and, like moms do, she looked where he was pointing, and nodded that she saw it, yes. Right there, and there.

  Jaden gave her the pillow, then waited until she was asleep, crept over to where the Playboy was buried.

  Still crawling—he didn’t want to be a menacing silhouette with a handful of porn should she wake—he dropped the magazine over the down-wat
er side of the island.

  The glue at the spine, which had already been crackly-dry, gave up altogether, and the pages spread out over the water, bobbed cheerfully right by the island.

  Frantic, Jaden scooped precious handfuls of sand onto each of them, until they sunk.

  DAY 20

  The next day they spent digging.

  Jaden’s reasoning was two-fold: in one place he’d dug, there’d been water, right? Other holes might have even better treasure. It was videogame thinking, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

  And then there was the issue of the coconut straw that his mom had washed up on. It had been there all along, hadn’t it? Or, in the right order, anyway. Other items might be buried as well.

  The outlet for the record player turned up after an hour or two. The cord snaking down from it plunged down into the island’s rock stalk, which he now guessed had to be hollow—even more fragile than he’d thought. More impossible.

  It had power, too, just like he’d said with his underlining. Jaden scooped a handful of salty water over to it, dribbled enough in that the twin slits spit sparks back up.

  The record player showed up in pieces. An arm under the sand here, a piece of wood laminate there, from the cabinet. The needle, who knew.

  It didn’t matter.

  The record was in shards anyway.

  Jaden explained about the down-water side of the island—their self-cleaning latrine—and the water hole, and about burying yourself for the sunlight hours.

  His mom didn’t care about any of that.

  She wanted to know what he’d been doing all those years she’d been gone.

  They passed the popsicle back and forth—one rule: no bites—and, with all the buildings in the sky leaning over them, Jaden told her about the girlfriends and the jobs he’d had, about Dad and his hilarious dating life, and when he didn’t say anything about Margo, it felt like he was doing that because he would explain her by saying she liked white roses and children, and wasn’t into cigarettes. And she deserved better than that.

  DAY 21

  The coconut straw turned out to be perfect for the water hole.

  “Technology,” Jaden said to his mom. He was out of breath from drinking.

  She was still cupping her water in her hands to drink.

  “And look,” he said, blowing into the straw at different depths: it would whistle, too.

  “How are we going to cut our hair, do you think?” Jaden’s mom asked, threading some out of her face.

  “Why did you leave?” Jaden said back, watching her from under his bangs.

  The ocean murmured its watery murmur.

  “You know,” she said, averting her eyes. “I got sick.”

  “Of Dad?”

  “I didn’t want to get you sick too.”

  “And then you died from it.”

  “I couldn’t call at the end. I wanted to. I’m sorry. But it’s best you didn’t see me. I didn’t want you to have to remember me like that.”

  Jaden stared out at the unbroken blue.

  “I stole a magazine,” he said. “I think it was a genie magazine, a magic magazine.”

  She was just watching him.

  “I wrote your name on a list,” he said. “It was … I had to cross the straw out to do it. It was a stupid contest. But I shouldn’t have stolen it, I know.” Jaden looked out to the open water, called out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

  “You crossed the straw out?” his mom asked, looking at it stuck in the sand by the water hole.

  “I didn’t cross it out enough, I guess,” Jaden said. “But you came anyway. I got eleven, not ten.”

  “Thank you,” his mom said. “This has—It’s been a gift.”

  “You’re well now, right?” Jaden said.

  “I think I am, yes.”

  “And you’re here.”

  They didn’t push it any farther.

  “Why that album?” his mom asked, after the appropriate length of time.

  “Because I was a stupid kid,” Jaden said.

  DAY 22

  Jaden was playing his game of one of his fingers burying itself and the others going into a minor panic from it when there was a flurry of motion and a hard, fast cough from the other side of the island.

  He let his ring finger stay buried and looked over slow and indirectly. In the tight confines of the island, it was polite to give each other privacy on the down-water side, where privacy would be most appreciated.

  But this wasn’t that.

  His mom was lying sideways on the sand. Her back was arched like from being electrocuted, and her fingers were stretched back the wrong way. The tendons in her neck were steel cables, and chocolate foam was coming from her mouth, since she’d had the popsicle last.

  “Run,” she said, her voice deeper. Dangerous.

  Jaden ran to her.

  “What can I do?” he said, feeling in the sand under her, in case she was somehow on the outlet and getting electrocuted. “What do you need?”

  The popsicle stick, he thought. He could depress her tongue, keep her from choking. Or—or he could do a field tracheotomy with the coconut straw. He’d seen that on television at least twice, and knew roughly where to stab.

  But then his mom’s mouth elongated into a canine muzzle, the muscle under the skin bubbling and tearing and creaking.

  A werewolf.

  He’d asked for a werewolf.

  DAY 23

  Or maybe it was still day twenty-two. Was it midnight yet? Jaden couldn’t tell.

  All his buildings had toppled over.

  He was treading water five yards out from the island. It was far enough that his mom couldn’t slash out, reach him with her claws, and close enough that he didn’t panic that he wasn’t going to get back.

  Evidently werewolves are afraid of the ocean.

  His mom’s transformation had been brutal. He’d watched her turn inside out, and inside her had been a snarly wolf-thing.

  No, she hadn’t been able to call him at the end of her sickness fifteen years ago.

  She couldn’t physically hold a phone.

  She’d barked and screamed and growled at him all night—she could smell him—but she’d stayed on the island.

  In frustration, she turned on the toilet paper, shredded it into confetti. For a minute or two the island had been a unicorn daydream, all fluff and whiteness.

  She didn’t eat the popsicle, though. Dogs aren’t supposed to have chocolate, Jaden knew. Maybe that went for wolves too?

  Jaden wasn’t crying anymore. He didn’t have the energy.

  “Mom,” he said for the ten-thousandth time.

  His mom’s large ears rotated to catch his words. Her whole body stilled, stiffened.

  “Mom,” he said again, and let himself go under again, told himself this was the last time, that he wasn’t coming back up.

  DAY 24

  Jaden was hanging onto the island with one hand and throwing up into the water.

  It was dawn.

  He had stayed in the water for two nights, and the day between. Every part of him was shaking and spent. For a few hours he’d been certain he was being punished for sneaking eleven items from a ten-item list, but then, if his mom was a werewolf—and she was—he figured he’d really only gotten his original ten.

  His whole time out in the ocean, no sharks had come. No gulls had drifted down for a closer look. No werewolves had come running across the surface of the ocean, from all his mom’s plaintive howling.

  She was starving. She was crying with her mouth, with her voice.

  She’d finally found the fresh water, slurped and slurped at it, then splashed her pee down onto the sand. An hour or two or three after that, she padded around in a circle, made enough of a bed to curl up in, her tail curling up over her nose. Behind that tail, she shifted back to the mom Jaden knew.

  Jaden had waited what felt like an hour after that, being sure, then pulled himself onto the island
. He crawled gingerly to the water hole, drank until he threw up again. He threw up as quietly as he could manage.

  He sat down in the sand then, staring at his mom. She was lightly snoring.

  He flicked grains of sand at her face. Her lips, her eyelids. Nothing.

  “Mom,” he said, not really that loud. She didn’t twitch.

  He extended a foot, pushed on her thigh. She rolled with it, stayed there.

  He turned away from her and licked the popsicle in what he considered a mournful way.

  It tasted the same.

  DAY 25

  Jaden hadn’t meant to sleep, but he guessed he had.

  His mom hadn’t eaten him in the night.

  Did all werewolves sleep this long when they came back to human?

  She’d said it was best he didn’t see her at the end, and she’d been right. He couldn’t get that image out of his head, now. That pacing, that growling. That hunger.

  “I can’t do it again, Mom,” he said.

  No way could he spend another thirty-six hours treading water.

  He considered his options. He didn’t have any.

  The only thing he could do was scratch her name off the list. Either hers, or his own.

  And, if she was a good mom, if she really loved him, if she was really her, she wouldn’t want it to be him, would she? He wasn’t the monster. He wasn’t the one who had left. He wasn’t the one who was, technically, already dead.

  What he’d considered the worst hell before—living with a broken record and a never-ending popsicle—was his dream, now. It was what he had to fight his way back to.

  No more werewolves. No more mothers. Nobody eating anybody.

  Jaden should have asked for a boat in that contest. A raft. A raft and a compass. No, a shark cage up here on dry land, to keep his mom in.

  But there was no shark cage. There was no going back. There was just him, and what he had to do.

  He sat down behind his sleeping mom, told her he was sorry, and, pushing hard with both legs, launched her out into the water.

  She woke instantly, and fought to get back, but Jaden repelled her, apologizing the whole time, and then he repelled her some more.

  She didn’t fight so hard, once she understood.