The Devil and the Deep

by Ellen Datlow

  The eels in my lungs breathed in salt and surrender as I walked, arms spread, into the waves. Behind me, Maya struggled to scream, and everything was right, everything was true, everything was ever after, and I was going home.

  THE DEEP SEA SWELL

  JOHN LANGAN

  “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down”

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

  If she hadn’t argued with the man, Susan thinks, they could have been in a first-class cabin, instead of down here, at the bottom of the bloody ferry. The floor tilts forward. There’s a great swooshing sound, the sensation of plunging down a steep slope, the briefest of pauses, and a tremendous BANG rattles the ship’s hull. Slowly, the floor levels, then tilts backward. The swooshing returns, accompanied now by the feeling of being on a roller coaster as it climbs a sheer set of tracks. Somewhere near, somewhere inside the ferry, Susan hears the steady drone of a motor. The sweet stink of fuel (diesel?) swirls near the floor, below her bunk. On the bunk above, her husband snores intermittently. The Dramamine they took an hour ago knocked Alan out, the lucky bastard—whereas all it did for Susan was sand the edges off the dizziness and nausea, freeing her mind to run through every disaster-at-sea movie she’s seen, from Titanic to The Poseidon Adventure to a cheesy horror film, what was it called, Leviathan? Something like that.

  The sail up from Aberdeen wasn’t this bad, not nearly. She’d never been on an ocean-going ferry before. The nearest thing had been the ship they’d taken out to Martha’s Vineyard on their honeymoon, which was maybe half the size of this one? Less? The Shetland ferry was built to cross the roughly two hundred nautical miles between the northeast of Scotland and the Shetlands, which, as Alan delighted in saying, lay closer to Norway than they did to the UK. There was something romantic about traveling by ship, she’d thought, a notion of taking your time, enjoying the journey as well as the destination. They spent much of their time in bed, trying to work out the mechanics of sex on a surface rising and falling with the sea. She was Sexy Susan, the sailor’s friend; he was Able Alan, always up for adventure.

  That was in the first-class cabin to which they’d been upgraded after she passed one of the ship’s crew a twenty-pound note. She’d been quite pleased with the luxury—which consisted primarily of a room done in seventies-era paneling and set high enough in the ship to have its own window—but less so once they’d been in Lerwick for a day and Alan’s university friend, Giorgio, informed her that, as long as there were cabins available, the ferry staff were supposed to upgrade passengers free of charge. “They pocket the money, you know,” Giorgio said, letting the air out of her self-satisfaction, and leaving her determined not to be taken advantage of again. In turn, this led to her challenging the crew member who requested twenty quid for a boost to first-class lodgings on the return voyage. (Possibly, it was the same man: several of the staff appeared related, cousins or even brothers, short, broad fellows wearing gray sweater vests under their blue blazers and over their shirt-and-ties, their faces red, their curly hair black yielding to gray.) “You know,” Susan said, “one of my friends in Lerwick told me an upgrade to first class is supposed to be no charge.”

  “Did they?” the man said, raising his bushy eyebrows as if to indicate his surprise at such a statement.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding.

  “Well …” The man smiled, shrugging and spreading his hands.

  “My friend said you guys keep the money.”

  Whatever warmth was in the man’s performance chilled. “It’s twenty pounds,” he said.

  Which was how they descended she isn’t certain how many flights of stairs to the corridor that brought them here, to a narrow room with bare white walls and a pair of economy-sized bunkbeds in it. “Think of it this way,” Alan said, “we’re experiencing the full range of travel options.”

  Those options included a mid-winter storm, whose center lay somewhere to the east, but which had stirred the North Sea to a tumult. They climbed to the dining area, but already, Alan was queasy and opted for a cup of tea and a packet of digestive biscuits, leaving Susan to order a Coke and the fish and chips, which she ate half of before a sudden squall of nausea caused her to set down her knife and fork and not pick them up again. The two of them tried sitting in the large padded chairs positioned in front of the wall of windows looking out over the ferry’s stern, but night had fallen hours ago, with the heavy blackness of early January at a northern latitude. All that was visible was an expanse of blackness with a cluster of orange lights twinkling in the far distance, which Alan thought was an oil rig. Although the sea was more sound than sight, the rise and fall of those lights added a visual dimension to the ferry’s see-sawing movement. “Next time Giorgio wants to see us,” Alan said, “we’ll fly.” It was an extravagant promise: the tickets from Edinburgh weren’t too far shy of what it had cost them to cross the Atlantic from Newark.

  “Or he can take the ferry,” Susan said.

  Not long after, they descended the stairs to their cabin a second time. Gazing out the windows wasn’t doing anything for him, Alan said, and Susan agreed. The more she stared at it, the more uneasy the dark outside—its sheer thoroughness—made her, until she could feel panic nipping at the edges of her mind. “It’s as if we’re already at the bottom of the sea,” she said.

  “Whoa,” Alan said, “touch wood,” knocking the chair’s armrest. “Although,” he added, “it’s pretty deep, here. I imagine it’s calm, down there.”

  “You just have to go through the whole drowning thing,” Susan said.

  “Will you stop?” Alan said, rapping the armrest again.

  “You and your superstitions.”

  “The middle of the ocean is not the place to test them.”

  She supposed he had a point.

  In the cabin, they dry-swallowed the Dramamine tablets Susan had in her bag, changed into their pajamas, and climbed into their bunks. Alan sang, “Yo-ho, blow the man down / Yo-ho, blow the man down.”

  “Now who’s tempting fate?” she said.

  “It’s only a song,” he said, his words slurring as the pill tugged him into unconsciousness.

  “Remember that when we’re saying hi to King Neptune.”

  “Hey,” he began. The rest of his reply disappeared into a mumble.

  Despite herself, Susan knocked on the cabin wall. It wasn’t wood, but it was the best she had.

  The next hour passed with stomach-churning monotony. The ferry rose and fell, rose and fell. Alan snored, snorted, went back to snoring. The distant engine churned steadily. In the corridor outside the cabin, a little girl’s voice asked a question Susan couldn’t decipher. The ocean rushed along the hull. A woman, likely the girl’s mother, said they were just going for a wee lie down. The smell of fuel made Susan’s nostrils bristle. Someone laughed as they passed the cabin. The ship slid down into a pause that lasted a second too long, as if the waves were weighing whether to let the vessel continue its descent, all the way down. A woman, the same one from before, said she was just going to the toilet. The sea smacked the ship like a giant’s hand, BANG.

  In an odd sort of way, Susan has thought, the trip has been all about the ocean, salt water threading its way through her and Alan’s winter vacation like a recurring theme in a longer piece of music. The flight across the north Atlantic was only the second time she had traversed the ocean, and she spent the daylit hours of the voyage gazing out the scuffed and scratched window beside her seat at the corrugated gray expanse visible through the gaps in the clouds below. Alan’s parents’ house in North Queensferry was one of a half-dozen on a cul-de-sac set on a high bluff overlooking the stretch where the Forth River merged with the North Sea. The sea was a constant companion as they drove their tiny rental up Scotland’s east coast, stopping for an early lunch at an Indian place outside St. Andrew’s, a wander around the ruins at Stonehaven, and then a couple of days in Aberdeen, revisiting Alan’s university haunts and a few of his friends who had settl
ed in the city. With one of those friends and his partner, they walked a rocky beach washed by the waves they would ride to Shetland, where Alan’s friend Giorgio ran a small chip shop overlooking Lerwick harbor. (“Giorgio?” Susan said. “What kind of Scottish name is that?” “His dad’s from Florence,” Alan said.)

  Once they were ashore on Shetland, however, something about the sea changed—or, to be more accurate, something about her perception of it shifted. The afternoon of their arrival, Giorgio took them for a quick jaunt to a spot where the land on either side of them shrank toward the road, until they were between a pair of narrow beaches onto which water splashed in long foaming rolls. “On that side,” Giorgio said, pointing right, “is the North Sea. On this side,” pointing left, “is the Atlantic.” No matter where they went, it seemed, salt water was visible. When she mentioned this to Giorgio, trying to keep her tone light, care free, he nodded and said, “Aye, someone told me once you’re never more than three miles from open water on Shetland.” No doubt the landscape of the island, low hills bare of trees, contributed to the sensation, but she began to feel horribly exposed, surrounded by the ocean, which, if you thought about it, could rise and wash over the place without much effort at all.

  Nor did the stories Giorgio liked to tell help matters. An amateur historian of the Shetlands and their surrounds, he possessed a seemingly endless supply of narratives about the islands. In the majority of them, the sea figured prominently. They would begin with a bold, almost ridiculous assertion. “You know,” he would say over drinks at one of the pubs, “Shetland was part of the actual Atlantis.” Then, as she and Alan coughed their beers, he would raise his hands and say, “No, I’m not talking about that Disney rubbish. I mean Doggerland. You’ve heard of it, yeah? No? Ten, eleven thousand years ago, during the last ice age, all the seas were lower. The water was bound up in the glaciers, right? From Shetland down to Orkney and Scotland, over to Europe, was dry land. You could walk across the North Sea, the English Channel, and folk did. There was a whole civilization spread across the place. As the ice started to melt, though, the sea crept closer. Some of the archeologists think it was a process of years, decades, and the people living there had plenty of time to pack their things and leave. I’ve heard others say it was more catastrophic, an ice dam broke and sent hundreds of millions of gallons of water rushing through all this low-lying land. That’s where your story of Atlantis comes from.”

  Another afternoon, as they were sitting in Giorgio’s car on a local (smaller) ferry from the main island to the neighboring island of Yell, Giorgio said, “When you were coming up, did you notice there was a point the sea went all choppy—I mean, worse than what you’d been used to?” Susan and Alan exchanged glances. Had they? “Maybe,” Alan said. “Aye, that was you passing Fair Isle,” Giorgio said. “The sea behaves funny there, has to do with currents or some such. You know there was a fellow drowned out there? It was during my granddad’s time, a man from down in Edinburgh, a professor—from Edinburgh University, must have been. He was an anthropologist, studied the prehistoric sites in the north of Scotland, the Orkneys, up in Shetland. The chap took an interest in Fair Isle—in the ocean floor off the island. Something had washed up on one of the island’s beaches, and it found its way into the professor’s hands. I’m not sure what it was, but it got the man all worked up. He decided he needed to have a look under the water next to the island. This was none of your scuba diving; this was one of those suits with the big round helmet and the hose up to a boat on the surface. Fellow hired a couple of locals out of Aberdeen to man the boat and mind the air pump, and another pair of lads from Fair Isle to help them. The lot of them took the boat to the spot the professor had calculated was the best bet to search for more of whatever it was brought him there in the first place. Over the side he went. The rig was what you’d call low-tech, no diver’s telephone. Well. Maybe an hour into the professor’s dive, a storm blew in. The sky went dark, the wind rose, and the next anyone knew, the rain was bucketing down, the waves spilling over the sides. It’s no fun to be in a big ship when the weather turns against you, and this boat was far from big. At first, the lads thought they could ride out the storm. I gather they gave it their best, but it wasn’t long before they realized theirs was not a workable plan. The sea was heaving, and none of them had the experience to maintain the ship’s position in these conditions. They tried to contact the professor—there was no telephone, right, but they had this system of bells he’d set up for basic communication. One bell on the boat, and a tiny one in the helmet. I’m not sure exactly how it worked. Morse Code, I’m guessing—had to be. Anyway, as things went from bad to worse topside, the crew were signaling the professor, SOS, COME BACK. If he heard them, he didn’t answer. Now the boat was riding waves halfway to vertical. Water was foaming onto the deck from every side. It was all the lads could do to keep from being swept overboard. And still no response from the professor. Funny, the things you’ll do in a crisis. One of the crew grabbed a hatchet and, chop, cut the diving suit’s air hose. It was the end for the professor. You have to hope he found whatever he was looking for.” Susan said, “That’s terrible. What happened to the crew?” “Oh,” Giorgio said, “they made it back safely. Went straight to the police and confessed everything. Only problem was, each man said he was the one had picked up the hatchet, and nothing anyone could threaten or promise would persuade any of them to change his story. In the end, none of them was charged, and the professor’s death was ruled an accident. The body was never recovered.”

  Still a third time, as they were treating Giorgio to dinner at a nice restaurant in a small hotel located on the shore of a slender inlet, he set down his salad fork and said, “There’s a ghost in this hotel, you know, right in this very room. A woman dressed in a long dark green dress and a short jacket, with a little hat. Like the style women wore at the beginning of the last century. She sits at one of the tables over there.” He pointed to an alcove at the other end of the dining area. “It’s always after the last customer has left, and one of the staff is cleaning up. I used to date a lassie had seen her on two separate occasions. The first time, she ran out of the room as if the Devil himself was clutching at her heels with his pointy nails. The second time, Colleen (that was the lassie’s name) stayed put. She said the woman stood, turned around, and walked to the door. Her face was in shadow, that was the way Colleen described it. She couldn’t manage a good look at her. She said the woman passed through the door, the way you hear ghosts doing. Colleen ran to the door and opened it. Although it was late, this was during the summer, so there was plenty of light for her to watch the woman cross the lawn to the water and keep going, out into it until she was gone, submerged, hat and all. No one knows who she is, or was. Another drowning victim, right? Sometimes I wonder, though: what if we have it backwards? What I’m trying to say is, instead of someone who used to live on land returning to it, maybe it’s someone, or something, whose home is the water coming up to have a look and see what all the fuss is about.” “Really?” Susan said. “No,” Giorgio said, “I’m just speaking out my arse. Still, the ocean is deep and dark and full of secrets, right? Isn’t there a saying to the effect that we know more about outer space than we do the bottom of the sea?” “I don’t know,” Alan said, “sounds good, though.” “Aye, so it does,” Giorgio said.

  Between Giorgio’s stories, and the omnipresent water rolling to the horizon, Susan found herself revising her opinions of life beside the ocean. Since she and Alan had met at a mutual friend’s house in Bourne, on the mainland side of the Cape Cod Canal, Susan had declared it her fondest wish to return to the area to buy a house overlooking the ocean. It was a favorite fantasy, one she indulged by scrolling through online real-estate listings. If such houses were currently out of their price range (by a factor of several hundred percent), it was of no real concern. Alan was doing well enough at his architecture firm to make the daily commute to Manhattan worthwhile, and the director of Penrose College’s art mu
seum was sufficiently pleased with her performance to hire Susan full-time. They saved what they could, and eventually, they would be in a position to afford a place in Bourne, or further out on the actual Cape, in Orleans or even Wellfleet. In the meantime, they had their friend’s house to return to. Her dream was in part a declaration of loyalty to the place where she and Alan had so improbably found one another. But she also fancied the Cape an appropriate symbol for the relationship they had discovered, a place of fundamentals, land and sea and sky. Not once had it occurred to her that part of the reason she could appreciate the Bay at Scusset Beach was because the entire continent was behind her, thousands of miles of mountains and hills, cities and plains. Even way out on the end of the Cape, in Provincetown, there was the sense of being connected to something larger, a solid mass of land. Five days on Shetland, and she had learned that being on the margin between sand and water was a different thing from being surrounded by the ocean. Giorgio diagnosed what she described to him as island fever. “It’s not for everyone, living up here,” he said. “The sea …” He shrugged, as if the word was explanation enough.

  BANG. As if making Giorgio’s point, the water smacks the hull directly outside her bunk, from the sound of it. The metal groans, a loud complaint, which lasts an ominous length of time. Susan stares at the wall next to her. The dread she’s been managing since they sailed into the storm surges within her. Her heart breaks into a full gallop. Should she wake Alan, grab their bags, head for the upper decks, closer to the lifeboats? She doesn’t know. She can’t draw enough air into her lungs. The edges of her vision darken. She’s burning up. The panic attack isn’t the first she’s had, but it’s without doubt the worst. She can’t keep lying down; she’s suffocating. She throws off her blanket, sits up as the ferry begins another slide down down down … She grips the edge of her bunk, braces her feet against the floor. BANG. The ship protests, asking how much more of this abuse it’s expected to take. Susan has to get out of here. She grabs Alan’s bunk, uses it to haul herself to standing. On the other side of the hull, water swooshes as the floor tilts back. She crosses to the door in four lurching steps, opens it, and exits the cabin.