by Ellen Datlow
The corridor outside the room is empty, the rest of the cabin doors shut. No sign of the little girl and her mother, the laughing passer-by. Susan isn’t so distracted she can’t think, Well, good for them. One hand on the wall, she turns left, toward the stairs. The ferry levels, tips, lunges. The wool socks she’s wearing slide on the floor. She flattens on the wall. BANG. The impact shudders through her. While the ship tilts to climb the next swell, she scuttles along the wall as fast as her feet and hands will move her, which isn’t as fast as she’d like, but it occupies her while the ferry slides up and then down. BANG. By the time the ship has summited the following waves, Susan has reached the doorway to the stairs. Alan, a distant part of her mind objects, what about Alan? She plunges into the stairwell.
It’s like trying to play some demented fun-house game, climbing the stairs as they rock this way, then that. Although each stair is covered in studs to aid traction, they benefit her socks little, and she clings to the guard rail with both hands. The acoustics of the space make it sound as if the water streaming past the ship is filling the stairwell, while each BANG shivers all the stairs at once. She manages four flights, two decks, before she has to abandon the stairwell.
As she emerges into a corridor more or less the same as the one she left, the lights dim, then brighten, then go out. “Oh, come on,” she says. With a click, emergency lights pop on at either end of the corridor. “Thank you.” She backs against the wall to her left and slides down it until she’s sitting. Her heart is still racing, but the short excursion she’s taken has left her exhausted. Maybe it’s the Dramamine having more effect, too. If it weren’t for her pulse jackhammering, she’d swear she would pass out right here. She places her hands on the floor to either side of her to help with the ferry’s relentless rocking, which feels as if it’s grown worse. We must be close to Fair Isle, she thinks. Isn’t that the place Giorgio said the sea was especially rough?
Another BANG and a horrible smell floods her nostrils. She claps her hand over her mouth. For an instant, she wonders if a sewage pipe has broken under the waves’ pounding, only to reject the idea. What assaults her nostrils is not the pungent stink of shit. It’s the reek of a beach—of a North Atlantic beach at low tide, a medley of decaying flesh and baking plant matter. Tears blur her eyes. At the same time, the temperature in the corridor drops, heat escaping as if out of a hole in the ferry’s side. The cold that swirls into its place is thick, gelid. There’s something else, a note in the atmosphere that reminds her of nothing so much as the worst arguments she and Alan have had, when hostility foams and froths between them. Malice washes over her. She swallows, shakes her head.
To her left, movement on the floor draws her eye. An eel, long and skinny, slithers away from her. She starts. It isn’t an eel: it’s a length of hose, dun-colored, the end closest to her ragged, vomiting water as it moves. That’s the source of the awful smell, the cracked and peeling hose being dragged towards and through the doorway at the far end of the corridor, making a sound halfway between a hiss and a breath. She can’t see what’s on the other side of the threshold; the emergency lights cast a veil of brightness her vision cannot pierce.
Even were she not schooled in hundreds of horror films, Susan would know that following the foul-smelling hose to whatever is dragging it would be a bad idea. In fact, she has no intention of hanging around here one second longer than is necessary. She pushes to her feet, and staggers up the corridor to the exit to the stairs.
Up or down? She opts to climb. It’s slow going. The stairs are like an enormous metronome. She loses her footing twice, has to clutch the railing to keep from tumbling down. Her heart is still pounding, her skin burning, but she isn’t sure if it’s from the panic attack continuing or her brush with what was standing beyond the lights at the other end of the corridor. Or both, she thinks, one of her favorite rhetorical sayings returning to haunt her: Why does it have to be either/or? Why can’t it be both/and? When the water smacks the hull, the BANG echoes through the stairwell like thunder. The best Susan can do is two flights of stairs, and then she stumbles out the doorway to the next deck. The motion of the ship combines with her slick footing to send her into the wall opposite; she catches most of the impact with her arms, but the force drops her to one knee.
At least the lights are working properly on this level. The revelation, however, is accompanied by another: the terrible smell permeates the air here, too, and with it are the same cold and the same impression of overwhelming malevolence. A noise equal parts a breath and a hiss jerks her head up, to watch a peeling and cracked hose snaking along the floor. How … ? The thing drawing the hose toward it halts the thought. Susan has the impression of a figure the approximate size and shape of a man, its hide studded with barnacles, strung with seaweed, a single round eye staring out of its misshapen head. Hatred rolls off it in waves. Before her mind can process what she’s looking at, she’s back in the stairwell, her legs propelled not so much by fear as by some deeper impulse, something preceding and pre-empting rational thought. (How … ?) The same response sends her down the stairs, flight after flight, until she’s back where she started, at the deck where Alan lies slumbering on his bunk in their cabin. Alan: for the first time in what feels an eternity, she thinks of her husband as more than a name. What if he woke to find her missing? What if he went in search of her, and encountered whatever is stalking the hallways? Fear for him runs down her spine like ice water. She staggers across the tilting floor into the corridor.
The monster is waiting for her. It swipes at her with oversized hands, and would probably have her if her feet didn’t slip and dump her on her ass. The pain registers dimly; she’s already scooting backward, her attempted escape hindered by the floor tilting her toward the monster. It leans to grab her legs, spilling a rain of tiny green crabs onto them. Susan jerks her legs toward her, avoiding the thing’s grasp, and slaps at the crabs scrambling over her pajamas. She twists onto her stomach, crawls for the stairwell. The ferry levels, and she pushes to her feet. Stiff-legged as Frankenstein’s monster, the thing lurches after her. The floor slopes forward. Struggling not to lose control of her balance, she slides on the soles of her socks, as if ice-skating. The monster’s feet clatter behind her. She’s almost at the stairwell. The sea pounds the ferry, BANG. The monster reaches, catches her left arm, and swings her in a long arc all the way around it into the wall. She tries to get her right arm up to protect her head, but she still sees a brilliant flash of white, feels the impact rattle her teeth. The monster releases her arm, steps in close, catches her by the shoulders. She’s spun to face it, pressed against the wall by heavy hands.
This close, the stench brings her to the verge of fainting. Arctic cold envelops her, extinguishing the heat the panic attack kindled in her skin. She twists from side to side, trying to loosen the thing’s hold on her, but its grip is unbreakable. Its eye flashes. Malice batters her, its ferocity utter, unrelenting. She turns her head from the thing, closes her eyes—
—and she is somewhere else, a place mostly dark, here and there dim, an expanse of bare mud ornamented with rocks. Slender, shadowy forms, each the size of a large dog, float languidly in the air, and she sees that they’re fish, which means she’s underwater, from the look of things, somewhere deep. In front of her and to the right, maybe twenty yards away, a light spreads a yellow cone through the murk. It’s a large flashlight, carried in one hand by a figure wearing a diving suit, rounded helmet and all. Its air hose rising behind it, its heavy boots raising clouds of mud, it trudges toward a low heap of rocks. Long, rectangular, the rocks have a consistency of size and shape, which gives them the appearance of having been carved into their present forms. When the flashlight’s beam illuminates designs grooved into their surfaces, Susan understands that she’s looking at an archeological site, that she’s watching the protagonist of Giorgio’s Fair Isle diver story as he sees the object of his expedition. (Which means …) His flashlight ranges over the stones, picking out symbo
ls she doesn’t recognize, concentric circles, a triangle with rounded corners, a crescent like a smile. Other characters are obscured by mud and algae. The arrangement of the stones suggests they’ve fallen over onto one another. Before one of them, the diver stops, directs the flashlight to a spot immediately in front of him. Something flashes in the mud. Slowly, ponderously, the diver kneels, reaching down with his free hand. He brushes away a layer of mud, and as he does, sends a small white object tumbling up from its resting place. It’s a wonder that he’s able to catch it, but catch it he does, and holds it up for view. Susan is too far away to see his discovery in much detail. It’s circular, the diameter of a saucer, composed of a white material that shines in the flashlight beam. The diver turns it over, examines the other side, then slides it into a bag hung down his chest. He rises and continues toward the piled stones. As he draws closer to them, his flashlight seeks out the gaps between the rectangles. What it reveals quickens his pace. At the pile, he bends forward, bringing his helmet as close as he can manage to one of the larger spaces between them, holding the flashlight beside his helmet. He slides his other hand into the gap. Whatever he’s after resists his efforts. He withdraws the flashlight and turns to the side, to extend his reach. He doesn’t see the slender white hand shoot out from the space and grab his arm. By the time he’s aware of the contact, the hand has pressed his arm further down into the gap, where the space narrows, wedging it there. The diver pulls back, but his arm is stuck fast. The hand retreats amidst the stones. The diver releases his flashlight, which is looped to his wrist, and attempts to use his free hand to pull the other free. It’s no use. He pulls; he pushes. He shakes his trapped hand with such fury, Susan can imagine his screams ringing in his helmet. He stops, lets go of his hand and turns as best he can to look behind him. Undulating like a sea serpent, the air hose to his suit descends the water, bubbles venting from its torn end as it falls. Frantically, the diver flails at the back of his suit, where the hose attaches, but he can’t maneuver his arm to it. Even if he could grab hold of the hose, it’s hard to see what good it would do him. The same thought appears to occur to the diver, who surrenders his attempt. As the hose snakes across the mud, he turns again to the stone heap, sagging against it, his helmet coming to rest above the space that has trapped him. If he isn’t dead already, he will be soon. The white hand steals from between the stones and trails its fingers across his faceplate, almost lovingly—
Susan recoils from the sight, and confronts the monster holding her, which, she sees, is no monster, but the diving suit in which Giorgio’s professor met his watery end. The barnacles, the seaweed, the tiny green crabs scuttling across it, are the yield of decades beneath the water, as are the dents that have misshapen the helmet, the cracks spider-webbing the faceplate’s glass. It has looped the hose around itself like a bandolier. She can’t say if there’s anything left of the suit’s former inhabitant, though she doubts it. What has remained is his anger, his rage at having made the find of his career, of his life, and then been abandoned to death. Contained in the suit, his fury, burning with the blinding flame of an underwater welder’s torch, has sustained it, has maintained its integrity long after time, salt water, and the ministrations of a thousand ocean creatures should have dissolved the garment.
It is terrifying; she has to escape it. She drives the heel of her right palm into the faceplate, hears a chorus of snaps. The helmet draws back, as if surprised. She strikes again, missing the faceplate, hitting the metal beside it with a hollow bong. A surge of hatred blasts her. When she tries a third blow, the thing releases her left shoulder to swat her hand away. It catches her by the throat and squeezes. Never mind that she was years from birth when the professor drowned, that she hasn’t the slightest connection to this tragedy. She is here now, the accident of her presence as good a reason for the thing’s hostility as any. Fingers thick and cold dig into her neck. She grabs its hand, searching to pry open its grip. It is inhumanly strong. She cannot breathe. Her vision contracts. Somewhere distant, the sea strikes the ferry’s hull, BANG. She lets go of the hand, opts for another round of blows, punching the suit’s shoulders, chest, striking the hose wound around it, searching for a last-second vulnerability. Her knuckles tear on barnacles, slip on seaweed, rebound from the hose wrapping it. Oh, Alan, she thinks. Her arms feel incredibly heavy. She can’t have much time left. Goddamn it, she thinks, Goddamn it, the curse summoning a last surge of strength. Muscles screaming for oxygen, she punches as hard and fast as she can, one two three four.
With a crack, her right fist connects with an object that breaks under its impact. There’s a burst of something between them, a soundless explosion. The hands at her neck and shoulder fall away. Gasping for air, Susan collapses into the wall, her fists still out in a trembling attempt at a guard. The diver steps away from her, its hands pushing aside the hose, searching through the seaweed decorating its chest, to a woven bag hung from its neck. Within the bag, the shards of a white disk slide against one another. The damage to the bag’s contents confirmed, the diver’s hands drop to its sides. The cold is bleeding from the air, taking with it the awful smell. The figure retreats another pace. Its malevolence gutters and puffs out. Susan has the impression of something behind the suit, retreating at great speed through the wall, out of the ship, an impossible distance. On slightly unsteady legs, it lumbers to the exit and proceeds into the stairwell. Its heavy boots clank on the metal stairs.
She feels no desire to follow. With a kind of visionary certainty, she knows that the diver is going to continue its climb until it reaches a level that admits to the ferry’s exterior. If enough of its animating force remains, it will walk to a bulwark, lean forward, and allow the weight of its helmet to carry it over into the heaving waves. If not, one or the other of the crew members will come across an astonishing discovery, the remains of an old diving suit, apparently washed onto the ferry by the storm. Perhaps they’ll examine the contents of the bag around its neck, perhaps the professor will receive his recognition yet. Or perhaps not.
For the moment, all Susan wants to do is to return to the cabin where she hopes she will find her husband fast asleep. There’s still a long way to go and the storm has not abated. In the morning, Alan will ask her why she’s wearing gloves and a scarf. She’ll say that she’ll tell him once they’re back at his parents’, safely removed from the sea, and all its marvels and horrors.
For Fiona
HE SINGS OF SALT AND WORMWOOD
BRIAN HODGE
It was everything about the sea that had always unnerved him, waiting at the bottom in one cold, disintegrating hulk.
Not two minutes earlier, Danny was in another world, the world above the waves, the world of air and land and the hot, dry feel of the summer sun. His wetsuit snug as a second skin, he sat on the cuddy boat’s transom long enough to Velcro a lanyard around his ankle, binding him to a safety line with ninety feet of slack. He cinched tight his goggles, round and insectoid, then slipped over the stern. Bobbing in sync with the hull, he sucked wind and huffed it out, cycling a few times before filling from the bottom up: belly, lower chest, upper chest, like trying to cram a stuffed suitcase with more, and a little more on top of that.
In the boat, against the lone cloud in the sky, Kimo held a stopwatch with his thumb on the trigger. “Ready.”
Danny squeezed in one last sip of air and plunged headfirst, like a seal, full-body undulations propelling him down, with the safety line trailing after. The swim fins helped. He’d not been blessed with big feet. They never made fun in Hawaii, but guys always made fun here on the mainland. Hey Danny, with those dainty little Asian paws of yours, how do you manage to even stay up on a surfboard? Maybe they didn’t mean anything by it. Or maybe they did, trying to get inside his head, psyche him out. Small feet, small … yeah. He converted it to fuel, that much more drive to bring home a trophy, another sponsorship.
But all that was a world away. He was in the blue world now, a gradient of cerulean to
indigo yawning beneath him, where the farther down you went, the more the topside laws unraveled.
Until he’d first experienced the shift for himself back in the spring, he had always believed the same as everyone else he brought it up with: that freediving was a nonstop struggle against your own buoyancy, fighting the lift of the air heaved into your lungs.
Another misconception dies hard. It was like that for only the first forty or so feet down.
Make it that far, to what they called the Doorway to the Deep, and there came a transition he had yet to stop regarding with wonder. Buoyancy was neutralized, the weight of the water bearing down nullifying your tendency to rise to the surface. No more struggle, the fight was won. The sea had you then, a downward pull he could feel tugging on his skull and shoulders.
He held his arms along his sides, aquadynamic, and continued to descend, effortlessly now, like a skydiver bulleting in freefall. The trickiest part had been learning how to equalize the pressure on his ears, in his sinuses, and turn back the pain.
The deeper he sank, the more the pressure became like the slow tightening of a fist that would never relax. It had taken some reframing of the changes it made, seeing them as comforting rather than distressing. This is what happens down here. This is normal, another version of normal. No big deal, just the mammalian dive reflex: shifts of physiology so distinct, so foreign out of the water, so automatic in it, they could recalibrate a lifetime of thinking after a dive or two. Maybe we really do belong here.
