The Ocean Dark

by Christopher Golden

  When they wanted to escape, they would drive south to the Keys, find a place on the water, and drink margaritas, and listen to Bob Marley. Hell, sometimes he and Maya would even listen to Jimmy Buffett, the hero to middle-aged white stoners everywhere. Buffett knew something about relaxing. Like margaritas, that music made him feel like he was on vacation.

  At home, Maya relished the days when neither of them had to work. She always had some project for him to do—putting up a floral border in the spare bedroom or repainting the bathroom or reorganizing the furniture in the living room just so she’d have the perfect place to hang the new painting she’d bought. Gabe had bitched about it, but he had loved it, too, turning up the radio and singing along as they created and recreated their home together.

  The home he spent most of his time leaving, out of fear that one day he would become too comfortable and become trapped there.

  For that half minute, Gabe lost himself in thoughts and memories and regrets.

  “Captain!” Kevonne shouted. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Sweat beaded on his forehead and he gesticulated wildly, pointing out at the reef of sunken ships and at the Antoinette in the distance, then at their lifeboat and at Bone and Pang and Tori. He kept shouting, but Gabe found himself unable to focus. Shock, he thought. It’s shock.

  It occurred to him that they were in paradise. Perfect blue sky. Sun moving lower, throwing the long shadows of palm trees across the sand. All the ingredients were there. If he had a margarita, Maya, and Bob Marley, it would have been like heaven.

  A small sound--half-chuckle and half-grunt--came from this throat and he shook his head in disbelief.

  “Gabriel-fucking-Rio!” Tori shouted.

  She gave him a shove with both hands and he staggered back, then narrowed his eyes, glaring at her. Tori stood in front of him, somehow managing to look more angry than afraid. With her hair back in a ponytail and her bronzed skin and tight tank top, she only added to the illusion of some tropical vacation. But Gabe had woken from that dream.

  Bone had dropped to the sand twenty feet from the water and hugged his knees to his chest, muttering “what the fuck” over and over again. Pang strode along the shore, alternately staring out at the place where the other lifeboat had just gone down and peering into the shallow surf for some sign of anything that might threaten them.

  Kevonne still shouted at Gabe. “Captain. Come on, man! What do we do?”

  Gabe locked eyes with Tori. “Sorry. I was just thinking. I’m okay, now.”

  Tori barked a dry laugh. “Are you? Me, I’m not so much okay as scared out of my mind. We’ve got to get off this island and back to the Antoinette, and I’m pretty sure it’s got to be now, Gabe. Before nightfall.”

  That woke Bone from his shock-coma. The boy looked dreadfully old as he turned toward them. “Are you nuts? I’m not going out there, Tori. Something’s under the water. You see all those bones? It’s what killed them. That’s why all those boats are sunk out there. People came ashore, do a little fishing or take a swim or whatever. Tiny little island in the Caribbean, right? But once they’re here, they can’t leave. That was the mistake they made, don’t you get it? Trying to leave! We’re safe here. Here is good.”

  Kevonne rounded on him. “And what are we gonna eat, dumbass? Or drink? I didn’t see any water fountains, did you?”

  Gabe put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s enough.” He glanced at Tori. “What do you mean ‘before nightfall?’ Where do you get that?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We know they can come on land or there’d be survivors here on the island. So why aren’t they on us right now? Something’s keeping them in the water at the moment, and it’s gotta be the sun. They let us get to the island. Now they want to keep us here until sundown.”

  Gabe turned to Bone and Pang. “She’s right. Sorry, Bone, but it does make sense. Whatever just happened—whatever’s in the water—it won’t stay in the water.”

  “How can you be sure?” Bone asked frantically, determined to be right.

  “Look around you. You see anyone else? You think you’re the only one who’s ever assumed that being on land is safe? Tori thinks it doesn’t like the sun, and if it spends most of its time underwater, maybe that’s true. But it means that, at best, we’ve got until dark to get back to the Antoinette.”

  “Captain,” Tori said, stepping up close beside him, diminishing the space between them almost to the point of intimacy. “The other boats—they were scuttled. They had to be. The people on board wouldn’t have put holes in the hulls. Which means that whatever’s out there is doing it.”

  Pang started pacing along the water’s edge. “Oh, that’s just beautiful.”

  “No, no,” Kevonne said, waving him silent. “The Antoinette’s a beast, man. It isn’t some rich boy’s toy or a damn fishing boat. She’ll be okay. We just have to get out there.”

  Gabe nodded. “Right. So put your heads together, and let’s figure out how.”

  They all fell silent. Tori’s eyes lowered, the weight of gravity pressing down on her. Gabe looked out at the graveyard of ships and saw it anew. The stretched netting, the ropes, the way some of them seemed to have crashed into others—it wasn’t the result of pirates building some kind of village out of the wrecks, any more than that the ships themselves had been sunk by hurricanes. The tethers between ships had been previous attempts to escape. He tried to tell himself that some of those escapes must have been successful, but the logic didn’t hold up. If anyone had gotten out of here alive, would the graveyard of ships still be there?

  There were thirty years or more of derelict vessels, whose captains had come across the island and been drawn into its trap. And if they managed to radio for help, then whoever came looking either didn’t find the island or were also drawn in. Maybe he was wrong and others had survived, and for whatever reason had never spoken of their ordeal. After all, the Mariposa had managed to get away from the island. Granted, only one man had been aboard, and he had been wounded so badly he died. The fishing boat’s captain must have assumed they were trapped, that they would be better able to defend themselves with their cargo of guns if they brought them ashore. Like Bone, he must have assumed the creature or creatures in the water couldn’t reach them there. Perhaps he had even thought they could kill them all, and then they would be able to get away.

  He’d been a fool. Which raised a dreadful question in Gabe’s mind—how, exactly, had the Mariposa managed to escape? It made no sense, unless whatever lurked out there, under the water, had allowed the dying sailor to take the Mariposa back out onto the open sea. The idea suggested two awful conclusions: first, that the Mariposa had been cast out into the Caribbean as a lure, to draw more victims to the island, and second, that whatever had killed its crew was intelligent enough to use the fishing boat to lure others into its grasp.

  Not thoughts you want to share, he told himself, looking at the fear in the eyes of those still on the island with him.

  “Kevonne, Bone, unload the gun cases from the lifeboat. We’re gonna match ammo with weapons, load every gun we’ve got ammunition for. That way, we don’t have to take the time to reload. When a gun is empty, you discard it, right over the side, and grab another one.”

  “Viscaya—“ Tori started to say.

  “Fuck Viscaya,” Gabe said.

  “So we’re just going to make a break for it? That’s it?” Bone asked. He looked like he might be about to cry.

  “You got a better idea?” Kevonne asked.

  “I’m not going,” Bone said.

  Pang laughed--an edgy, disturbing sound. “Yeah, good plan. Stay here and die.”

  Bone buried his face in his hands, pushed his fingers through his shaggy blond hair, and started to rock back and forth.

  “Come on,” Tori said softly. “You get one chance to live, Bone, and this is it. We’ve got a few hours before it gets dark. After that…”

  The surfer started to nod, d
rew a long, shuddering breath, and pushed himself up off the sand. He went to help Kevonne start unloading the guns, both of them wary about stepping into the water.

  “Captain, what about Chief Boggs?” Pang asked, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  Gabe hadn’t thought that far ahead. “We’ll try to reach him on our way out.”

  Pang seemed satisfied with that, and went to help with the guns. They were falling back on habit, now, taking orders from their captain. In some ways, it would be easier that way for all of them, but it weighed on Gabe. Their lives were in his hands. If he screwed up, they were all dead.

  Don’t flatter yourself, he thought. You’re probably all dead anyway.

  Tori moved closer as the guys move off, and Gabe gave her a sidelong glance. The guys might fall apart, but Tori seemed to be holding it together better than any of them.

  “Where do you think they came from?” she asked. “Whatever they are, out there?”

  He thought of ocean storms and shattered walls and glass-smooth black stone engraved with strange writing.

  “You’re thinking the grotto,” Gabe said.

  Tori returned the intensity of his gaze. “Aren’t you?”

  He looked to the west, saw the sun had sunken further than he had thought. Gabe strode away from her, kicking up sand as he hurried to help unpack the guns. He knew that whatever awaited them just offshore, it would only wait until sunset.

  Again he thought of Maya. Would it have been so bad to have given her the life she wanted, with a baby and a husband who spent more time at home than at sea? Would it have been so difficult for him to be content with that fate? The questions lingered, but the answers didn’t matter unless he managed to keep himself alive long enough to get back to Miami.

  ~44~

  Two Months Ago…

  Streetlights strafed the windshield as Gabe drove his aging BMW through Miami traffic. Gleaming neon and pastels flashed across the hood in a blurred reflection of the shops and bars and restaurants. Night had fallen a couple of hours ago, but the streets were still busy for a Tuesday night, and the traffic clogged the center lanes thanks to vehicles parked and double-parked on either side.

  He gripped the steering wheel tightly, somehow both muddled and focused by the four bottles of hard iced-tea he’d had at Jamie’s Reel Life--a divey little fish joint a few miles from his apartment building. Jamie’s had a streetside patio, where exhaust fumes mixed with the flavor of the mojitos and fried lobster tails that had made the place a local favorite. No one seemed to care.

  Gabe had eaten dinner—popcorn shrimp and fries, just something to soak up the alcohol—but his stomach felt all twisted up anyway. He tried to tell himself it was the hard iced-tea, but knew better. Nearly a month had gone by since that night Maya had caught him at Cinco, the night she hadn’t come home. Ever since, he’d been on edge, flush with anger and resentment which was directed just as much at himself as at his wife. It had been difficult enough the morning after, when she’d told him she had slept at a friend’s, her eyes like flint and that challenge in her voice daring him to ask for more details. Gabe had bit his tongue. He’d been the one cheating, after all. She had every right to be furious, and the truth was that if she had gone out to even the score and had sex with some guy, he really didn’t want to know.

  Or so he’d thought.

  For the first few days, they had barely spoken to one another, the air between them thick with bitterness. Gabe had swung wildly back and forth between rage and guilt, between jealousy and self-loathing. Then, the night before he was headed out on a voyage for Viscaya, he had tried to talk to her, only to have it degenerate into a tirade in which he blamed her for having driven him to stray with the weight of her expectations.

  Maya had smiled for the first time in days, but it was all teeth and cruel eyes. “Oh, no. You don’t get to put it on me, Gabriel. You changed the rules, Papi. Make sure you remember that.”

  His heart had sunk and he’d tried to get her to elaborate on what she’d meant. Why did he need to remember? What had she done? But Maya had said all she would say. When he woke early the next morning, he tried to talk to her before the Antoinette sailed—a short jaunt before the South American trip that was coming up—but Maya pretended to be sleeping. Even when he called her on it, and whispered to her, and tried to apologize, she kept her eyes firmly closed and her breathing even.

  Half-drunk, Gabe pulled the BMW onto the side road—little more than an alley—that led to the back of his building. The car slid through darkness and then into the splash of light from the lampposts that lined the drive. He slowed at the entrance to the underground parking garage, steadying his breathing, fingers still tight on the wheel.

  You didn’t want to know, he thought.

  But he needed to know—want had nothing to do with it—because the rules had changed again. In the ten days since he had returned from that brief voyage, Maya had transformed. The night he had come home, she had been quiet and depressed and had slept on the sofa, breathing softly, only half covered by a thin cotton sheet, the bronze curve of her exposed calf making his heart ache.

  “You did this,” he had whispered into the darkened room, the new carpet crushed under his bare feet, the wall clock ticking loudly and impatiently. “You expected me to give up everything for you.”

  But Maya had slept on, her expression peaceful. If she dreamed, there were only pleasant things in her subconscious that night, and he had envied her that peace. Speaking those words aloud, Gabe felt a storm of conflicting emotions raging inside him. He blamed her—damn right he did. But how could he hate her when the worst thing she had done was want him home with her more often?

  The following evening, when she had stayed out all night for the second time, all his guilt and hesitation vanished. When she finally showed up at the apartment looking freshly showered but still in her clothes from the night before, he had flown into a rage. Instead of fighting with him, she had apologized, smiled sweetly, and lied smoothly.

  Gabe had been sleeping with other women. Now, Maya was either cheating on him in return, or she wanted him to think she was. And all he’d been able to think was, you fucking started it, you bitch.

  Since then, she had been in their bed every night, but there were long periods during the day—while he was at the Viscaya offices or out after work—when she didn’t answer her cell phone. He had come back to the apartment at six or seven o’clock to find her not yet home. Gabe had inquired at first, but she brushed off all of his questions with that same smile, the same denials.

  Tonight, that would end.

  Gabe had told her he had a meeting with Frank Esper down at the Viscaya offices. More than likely, Maya would not believe him. Many times before he had claimed to be at meetings and found his way to Cinco instead. Thoughts of Cinco made him think of Serafina, the woman he had been flirting with when Maya had caught him, a month ago. Serafina had been exquisite. He became wistful whenever he thought about that lost opportunity, remembering her seductive smile and the delicious scent of her. But there would be no Cinco for Gabe tonight.

  On Friday night, the last time he’d gone out, he had come home to find Maya in the shower, singing quietly to herself, a private moment of bliss. The bedclothes had been a mess. She had stepped out of the shower, toweling off her hair, still singing. It had been at least a couple of months since he had seen her naked and a wave of desire swept through him.

  Maya had turned and seen him standing there, watching her, and she had mustered that infuriating smile. But there had been an instant between her solitude and that smile, a fraction of a moment when she had been startled by his presence, during which he had seen a different emotion flicker across her features. Fear.

  And then his suspicions had turned to certainty. Until then it had been possible that she might only be pretending to have an affair to torment him, out of vengeance. But that glimpse of fear in her eyes had given her away. Gabe had not asked her why she was showering so l
ate, or why the bed was a mess—she would only have made up some story about a migraine and a nap. But he had heard it all before.

  That night, while she slept beside him, he lay awake, convinced he could smell the stink of another man in his bed.

  The BMW idled at the top of the ramp that led down into the garage. Light washed across his rearview mirror and he glanced up to see a mini-SUV pulling up the drive behind him. It wouldn’t do to have horns blowing out here. If he got into some kind of argument, he might draw attention and give himself away.

  “No more,” he whispered, hands wrapped around the wheel.

  The alcohol rode quietly along at the back of his thoughts, now, urging him on, comforting and antagonizing him in equal measure. Gabe lifted his foot off the brake and drove down the ramp. The gate opened for him and he let the BMW roll, purring, into the garage, then pulled the car into his spot, right next to Maya’s Corvette. His wife was home, just as he had known she would be. But she wasn’t home alone.

  Who the fuck is he, Maya? Gabe thought. Who’d fucking dare?

  A cold numbness filled him, now, and he moved as though he no longer had any control over his body. In the back of his mind, somewhere behind the alcohol, a small voice still warned him not to go home in this condition. As long as he didn’t know the truth, he wouldn’t have to do anything about it. Maya might forgive him someday. They might be able to go back to the way things had been when they had been able to laugh together, and the days seemed longer and the sky bluer. Romantic bullshit, he chided himself, and wondered which of his urges was more fueled by the drinks—the need to confront her, or the temptation to turn away.

  He rode up the elevator, the keys gripped tightly in his hand.

  The corridor smelled like disinfectant, and he heard the DeSimones’ baby crying as he passed their door. The smell of frying fajitas drifted from one of the apartments. Mixed with the stink of the disinfectant the maintenance staff used, it made his stomach roil. Outside his own apartment door, he gripped his keys. His breathing sounded very loud, though he tried to be quiet.