The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

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.

Despite the exertion, his heart rate slowed. Even before the threshold forty feet down, his lungs were already compressed to half their normal size. At sixty, they were reduced to a third. If he were acclimated enough to go that far, at three hundred feet his lungs would be no bigger than baseballs.

Here, though, a couple miles out to sea, over a shelf of land jutting from the central Oregon coast, the bottom cut him off at a depth of seventy-six. Almost there, he tucked into a ball and flipped head over tail, to finish dropping flippers first. He touched down with a gentle bounce that stirred the silt, amid a sparse garden of kelp and seaweed that swayed in the current, and all was so very quiet, like awakening to a dream world of slow time and profound tranquility. The need to breathe remained on some far horizon. The pressure was a cocoon, a presence as welcoming as a hug.

All this time he’d been lying to himself. Thinking he knew something about the ocean, and why—because he’d grown up on an island? Because he’d first stepped onto a surfboard when he was seven and had hardly stepped off since? That was how you fooled yourself into believing you truly understood the sea when all you’d ever done on a board was scratch the water’s surface.

Above, the day was clear, bright and sunny. Down here, the sun still found him but was filtered to a murky twilight, as if the fog of morning and blue of evening had joined, to wrap around and welcome him home.

It took slow moments to take shape: a mass off to his left, a ragged, edgeless hill rising from the sea floor. Danny moved toward it in fin-encumbered hops, a feeling maybe like walking on the moon. He hadn’t gotten close enough to satisfy his curiosity before his tether to the surface ran out of slack.

The dumbest thing in the world would be to strip the lanyard from his ankle. He did it anyway, fearing if he didn’t get close enough for a look now, he might never find this spot again. He left the safety line behind, and was truly diving free.

The mass was no longer edgeless, and no hill. A hill wouldn’t have two masts, jutting down from one side to dig into the sea floor. A hill wouldn’t have rectangular openings, nor broken windows, metal railings, cleats still wrapped with decaying rope. It was somebody’s lost sailing yacht, a fifty-footer at minimum, resting on its starboard side. The build was old school, lots of wood where most buyers would’ve been content with aluminum and fiberglass. Now it was an ecosystem, submerged long enough to have sagged into itself and crusted over with rot and life.

The cold found him through his wetsuit and went for his marrow. Shipwrecks had always bothered him, even from the safety of pictures. Planes lost at sea, too, and sunken cars, and houses and timber groves in valleys flooded to make new lakes.

It was more than the tragedies and calamities they told of. It was their status, things perfectly normal in the topside world, aliens now, lost and alone where they were never meant to be. They were a rebuttal: You’re lying to yourself, you know. It’s the hypoxia talking. You think you belong? This isn’t your element at all.

Regardless, the wreck drew him, until he was close enough to touch it.

Everything down here is so much better suited to belong than you. Here, all you are is a resource.

Breathing? Soon. The pent-up need, he now understood, wasn’t driven by a lack of oxygen. The body had no sensors for that. An amazing oversight. Nobody would ever design an oxygen-powered machine that way on purpose.

Down here, you’re food. All you have to do is wait.

Instead, the clawing need to breathe came from a build-up of carbon dioxide, and you could hack that to a degree. He let a poof of stale air slip his lips and it bought him a little more time. He squatted and gripped the yacht’s tilted gunwale, to shove off it and launch his ascent… but to his surprise, it gave way with a muffled crunch and a cloud of debris, crumbs and shards of rotten wood drifting loose.

It was what was inside that really gave him a jolt.

The cross-section of wood appeared tunneled, the burrows full of soft, pale bodies— worms, they looked like, some as short and thin as matches, others the size of a finger, one as plump as a cigar.

Danny vented more CO₂, this time not meaning to, a sound of disgust burping loose. And he’d been down too long, his vision starting to close around the edges, with the height of a seven-story building left to swim. He pushed off the bottom and kicked toward the beckoning daylight.

If your vision began turning to a haze they called the pink cloud… that was when you really had to worry. What came next was a blackout, and he feared it was moments away— the resetting of the clock to a final countdown. You could drift unconscious for a couple minutes, no harm done, your larynx closed like a valve to keep the water out. Up top, they would know before it opened again, if they were paying attention. You just had to trust your team, they’d realize you were in trouble, haul you up by your safety line…

Oh. Right. Shit.

He kicked harder.

Which came first then—the movement out in front of him, or the movement he felt through him?

Through, probably. Yeah, go with that. His insides felt stirred, quivering as if he’d hugged a vibrator. Right away he knew what it was, he’d felt the same thing from dolphins— echolocation, a ping of sonar developed over millions of years of evolution, so advanced it made the Navy’s best look like a toy.

But this was no dolphin. If a dolphin was a whisper, what he’d felt was a bark.

He lowered his gaze from the beacon of the sun and back to the deep blue haze. Twenty, thirty yards out, it was dimly visible, a darker bulk against the murk, a slick, bulbous head and a body stretching too far back into the gloom to make out. With his vision closing down, Danny could barely see it anyway, and only for a moment before it faded into a wash of pink.

He heard a muffled thump and the sensation enveloped him again.

If you’re lucky and you know it clap your hands… Whatever was out there could’ve obliterated him without trying. Sperm whales? Loudest animals on earth. Their clicks could be so loud they couldn’t even exist in the air as sound. They could blow out your eardrums, maybe kill you as surely as the concussive blast of a bomb.

Lucky. It was only scanning, giving him a sonogram.

Kicking again, with legs starting to feel like tingling rubber, nearly blind now, he rose toward a total eclipse of the sun. A few feet from the surface he spewed a gush of bubbles to empty his aching lungs, then with a titanic whoosh broke through into the glorious air.

“You stupid motherfucker!” Kimo was peering down from the boat as if he were looking at a ghost. Things started going clear again, even the sweat spraying from Kimo’s shaved head as he whipped the lanyard at the end of the rope, like shaking a leash at a naughty dog. “What is this? What the fuck is this!”

My bad…? Didn’t quite cut it under the circumstances, did it?

“What, almost drowning once this year wasn’t enough for you, you thought you’d find another way?”

Treading water, Danny peeled off his goggles and flipped his hair back from his face to splat against his shoulders. “Sorry, man. I needed more than ninety feet.”

“But you stopped moving.” Kimo jabbed a finger toward the sonar screen. “It still makes you dumb as a rock, but if you’d kept moving, you wouldn’t have sent me from zero to panic mode, hauling this up and you’re not on the end of it anymore.” He flung the safety line to the deck. “I was two seconds from going in after you.”

“But I started moving again. Obviously. You didn’t see that?”

“While giving myself ninety feet of rope burns? No! I don’t multitask.”

The man had been looking out for him for years, one displaced Hawaiian to another, and his anger was so pure, so righteous, so Kimo, Danny couldn’t help but laugh. It was the right thing at the right time—same as below, the body knowing what to do, and doing it.

“I was fine. Really.” He took Kimo’s hand and clambered over the side into the boat, then tapped the sonar. “How about the whale? Did you see the whale?”

For a moment, Kimo could only blink. Translation: Good going, asshole. Now you made me miss an entire whale, too. “You saw a whale?”

“Just for a second or two. My vision was going, so…”

“Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”

“I felt him check me out. I didn’t hallucinate that.” He turned a clumsy 360 to scan the waves for a breach but saw nothing. “How long was I down?”

“I think you were around two-forty-five, two-fifty when I went for the line. I don’t even know where the watch landed.”

Danny plopped onto the transom and wriggled out of his fins. “So I had to break three minutes, easy.” Nothing impressive by competition standards. Competitive freedivers could rack up depths and times that were off the chain. But those people were all about the numbers, the endurance, not about merging with the sea. “A new personal best and I don’t even know what it is.”

He tossed his fins aside, then spotted the stopwatch beside their cooler of water bottles. He snatched it up and held it toward Kimo’s face, back to normal brown after all that furious brick red.

“Check it,” Danny said. “Six-thirty-four and counting.”

Kimo rolled his eyes. “That’ll look good on your tombstone. ‘Still holding my breath, bitches.’”

“Shipworms. That’s all you saw when the wood came apart,” Gail told him that afternoon. “They’re called shipworms.”

Danny didn’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled. A whale, he could wrap his brain around that. Those aquatic grubs were something new.

“Shipworms. That’s actually a thing?”

“For someone who’s eaten as many waves as you have, your sense of maritime history really is lacking.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, as if to say she loved him anyway. “Yeah, they’re a thing. In the age of sailing ships, before steel hulls, they were a big, bad, serious thing. Termites of the sea, is the best way to describe them. If they weren’t busy eating shipwrecks, they were causing them. Or chewing through wharves, piers, anything like that. Waiting for a nice juicy log to drift by, to turn into a floating condo.”

Your home is your food—pretty much the definition of a parasite. Like taking a gander around this cliff-top cottage and thinking, hey, break me off a piece of that wall, I’m feeling peckish. What am I in the mood for? The green room, the blue room? Something in the line of a honey-gold breakfast nook? Yum.

“But they’re not actually worms. They’re mollusks. Like long, skinny oysters. They’ve got little shells on the front, that’s how they burrow in.” She perked up. “If you dive that wreck again, bring up a few. They’re supposed to taste like clams.”

“That’s a bucket of nope, right there.” His stomach did barrel rolls at the thought. “How do you know this? You don’t even sail.”

This was the distinction between them. For all her astonishing symbiosis with the sea, Gail hardly ever got out on it. That was his department. Gail was perfectly happy being its next-door neighbor.

She crossed her arms and, with a cockeyed grin, withered him with a glance. He knew how to translate that look: Come with me, you fool.

With a swirl of her skirt, she led him out of the cottage and across the stone path to the outbuilding—her workshop, bright and airy and open to clear out the smell of varnish. Its walls were the color of sea foam, its windows faced a panoramic view of the Pacific, and it was always, always, full of driftwood. Most of the pieces were still raw, just as they had been harvested from the beach. The rest were in various stages of processing and transformation.

Every chunk she brought in was its own starter kit, anything from simple projects like necklace racks to elaborate constructions like lamp stands and chandeliers that she sold through galleries from Portland to Santa Barbara. Last year, she’d taken hundreds of seemingly useless fragments and, where anyone else might have seen only kindling, turned them into a mosaic of a whimsical octopus, with spiral seashells for eyes.

Gail snatched up a sun-bleached branch the length of his arm, peppered with perforations as if someone had used it for target practice.

“After almost twenty years of seeing me do this, you’ve never wondered where these holes come from?”

“I guess I thought it was weathering.” By her skeptical look, she wasn’t buying it. “Okay, I guess I never thought about it at all.”

She gave him one of those shakes of her head, playful but dismissive, that left him feeling she had so much more wisdom that he did, baked in from birth. “If it doesn’t eat the surfboard out from under you, it doesn’t exist, right?”

“Pretty much,” he conceded.

As a rule, ignorance was no virtue, but if you gave too much thought to the sea, and everything with teeth that called it home, you’d never venture out to meet it.

Maybe that was why she stayed on shore.

They grilled on the patio that evening, marinated tempeh and vegetables, and as they usually did unless the rain had other ideas, carried their plates out to the wrought iron table on the little redwood deck, so they could eat beneath the sky, facing the sea. The cottage was one of a haphazard nest of six, perched near the edge of a two hundred-foot cliff overlooking the beach and breakers below.

Bellies full, they kicked their feet up on the brick retaining wall around the firepit and passed the evening’s joint back and forth.

Danny wanted to say he liked it better living at the condo in Santa Monica and Gail liked it better here, but that wasn’t true. Santa Monica was only more convenient. He liked it better here, too. Time passed differently here, the days longer, the seasons more pronounced. On the luckiest nights he might awaken to the faraway squeal of a passing whale—humpback, he supposed, the only kind he was aware of whose songs carried above water. He would roll over to find that Gail was already up, her silhouette framed by the bedroom window, where she sat as still as stone and listened for as long as it would last. They never got that in Santa Monica.

Although she was never farther away from him than she was in those minutes, lost inside a trance, and there was little he could do to get her back but wait.

Anyway. Out with it. He’d been meaning to bring it up for months. Now felt as right as ever.

“I’m going to have to find a business to go into. Or invent.” Telling the water but for Gail’s ears. “Got any suggestions?”

She looked more concerned with diagnosing causes. “Is it the…?”

Fear? That wasn’t it, but it made sense she would go there. They’d had to give the topic a couple of airings after his wipeout this spring at Prevelly Park.

The bigger the wave, the more ways a ride could go wrong. Miscalculations, human error, the never predictable hydraulics of any given wave—however it happened, things went wrong. While you went shooting through the tube, the board got sucked up the wall of water curling over behind you. Or the wave rose up while the bottom dropped out, and you got slammed into the impact zone. You were no longer riding the wave. It was riding you, maybe grinding you into the sand and rocks to really teach you a lesson.

He knew of no greater helplessness than that. Being held under by the first wave was terror enough. It you were still down when the next one came crashing in, you felt exponentially worse, battered and exhausted and desperate to breathe. Still hadn’t surfaced before a third one came along? That was when it seemed as though the ocean had made up its unfathomable mind: It wasn’t letting go.

He’d known a couple guys who hadn’t come up alive. But he had. No idea how, but after a three-wave hold-down at Prevelly Park, he had. The ocean doesn’t want me today… It was as good an explanation as any.

But one day, it might. It was the reason he’d taken up freediving. To extend his breath-holding duration. To get comfortable with being under the water a long time, because as a surfer, under was the last place anyone wanted to be. And it had helped. He felt recalibrated, more at peace with under than ever.

So no. This had nothing to do with fear.

“It’s worse,” he said. “It’s the calendar. And the numbers.”

Gail had been holding back a toke, and lost it with a hacking laugh. “I thought it would be at least another twenty years before maybe I’d hear you make a concession there.” She fixed him with a hazy leer. “Who are you, foul thing that crawled from the sea, and give me back my Danny.”

Which version? He was developing a nostalgic longing for the Danny Yukimura who seemed incapable of thinking about consequences.

Gail rubbed his arm. “It’s just another birthday, but with a zero. Don’t you know? Forty is the new eighteen, I think is what it’s down to.”

“That only helps if eighteen is the new as-yet-unborn.” He took the joint, made it smolder, handed it back. “It’s the rankings. In the top thirty in the world, I’ve had a good run, but I’ve never gotten higher than twenty-two, and now I’m right back on that edge. The only place to go is down. That’s how this goes. Especially now.”

It was the times—thrilling to be around to witness them, but shitty when you were a casualty because you couldn’t keep up. People were out there doing amazing things, unthinkable things, feats that had been considered impossible.

“There’s something changing in the world…”

He traced it back to when Laird Hamilton had caught the Millennium Wave, in Teahup’po. Until then, nobody had ridden a sixty-foot wave. Nobody. It wasn’t merely the height; it was the length, the girth, the colossal magnitude. Even Hamilton hadn’t been planning on it. He got towed into the wave, then it rose a behemoth. As the tube collapsed behind him, everybody watching thought he was dead, until he came shooting up out of the spray.

A thing like that did something magical. It opened a doorway to unknown realms of potential. Eighty footers? Ninety? Guys were riding them now.

It wasn’t only surfers, either. Skateboarders, skiers, snowboarders—superhumans were popping up everywhere. Somebody does something that blows minds around the globe and everyone says, damn, dude, that record’s gonna stand for years, then it doesn’t even stand a season.

Something in the air, maybe. Something in the water.

He loved seeing it unfold in the world. It was a beautiful time to be alive. But it wasn’t his arena anymore. He couldn’t compete with that. Go big or go home? He was home. He just had no idea what to do next.

“So you launch your own line of boards. Or gear. Or both,” Gail said. “Or you open up the Danny Yukimura School of Surfing, and turn into one of those cute old guys with the long white hair and wispy beard, but still a badass, and wait for people to come to you. Because they will.”

He wanted to believe. She made it easy to believe.

Even if he still ached for more, and had no idea what it was.

Before the dawn, even before coffee, they made their way along the stairs that zigzagged down a cleft in the land from cliff top to sea level. The wooden steps were perpetually damp, even in summer, crowded over by trees so that the sun never reached them.

They nearly always had the shore to themselves when beach walking this early, sharing it with at most a neighbor from above, out with a dog and a stick.

He knew of no place where dawn was more different from dusk than here, with the sun on the other side of the continent behind a two hundred-foot wall of rock and earth. Here, dawns were gradual and gray, a time of mist and fog. This morning the wind was up, sending ribbons of fine, dry sand skimming over the damp-packed plains of the beach. The surf rolled and pounded behind a veil, as if the sand were of one world and the water of another, and every sunrise it took the proper spell to bring them back together.

They wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. They never did. The only variable was what Gail would find, and how long it would take after she shucked his hand and went on the hunt.

He’d never met anyone more suited to spend her life seaside. Not merely to live here, but thrive. She smelled of the sea, tasted of it. Even the ocean knew its own. The sea had recognized this about her as soon as Gail arrived for good, a couple years before they’d met.

She had grown up Midwestern, landlocked in every direction, but the farthest shores had always called her, from as early a time as she could remember. A week after her eighteenth birthday she made the 1500-mile trek west, one-way this time. A week after that, one morning’s beach walk set her up for years, when she came upon what appeared to be a peculiar yellowish rock, stonelike yet waxy, embedded in the sand.

Right away, she’d known it for what it really was: ambergris, a solidified lump of secretions from the belly of a sperm whale, nearly three pounds of it. No substance on earth was more prized by the makers of perfume, especially in France. It was illegal to sell in the States, though, so one impromptu trip to Canada later, she returned three pounds lighter, $140,000 heavier, and after making the down payment on the cottage, had hardly left the ocean’s side ever since.

Such a find had to be more than dumb luck. Gail had taken it not merely as a welcome, but as a blessing. You’re where you belong now. This is your home. It’s always been your home. You just had to find your way back.

The sea never stopped giving to her. Danny had never seen anything like it, the sheer reliability of it. Some days the swells didn’t want to be surfed, and you had to accept that. But Gail and her walks along the shore, harvesting the ocean’s castoffs? She always came back with something, and the desire to see what she could make of it. Send her out beachcombing with ten other people, and there was a good chance she’d come back with more treasure than everyone else combined. He imagined salt-encrusted nymphs out in the surf, working on her behalf: Look alive, mateys, it’s her again! Heave to!

This morning, the farther north they walked, the lighter the dawn became, as ahead of them, Neptune’s Throne took shape out of the gray haze.

Neptune’s Throne was all he’d ever heard anyone call it. It was an observation platform for surfers to watch the incoming, but whoever had built it hadn’t made it particularly convenient. It was four solid tree trunk pillars driven deep into the sand, braced with crossbeams and supporting a planked deck just above head height. No steps. If you wanted to clamber onto it, you had to have either the upper body strength to pull yourself up, or friends to push you from below.

It had a back, like a gargantuan chair—a windbreak, he assumed, blocking what the cliffs didn’t—two of the trunks joined above the platform with an X, which in turn supported a row of ragged planks that were shortest on the outside and rose to an imperial peak in the middle.

The deck was usually thatched, and at first glance the bristly edges gave it the look of something that belonged somewhere tropical. Kimo recalled more of Hawaii than he did, and said the thing reminded him of rough-hewn structures he’d seen in places tourists didn’t get to: burial platforms, and shrines where fishermen laid offerings to the gods of the sea before heading out, or after rowing back in with their catch.

Keep looking at it, though, and the tropical impression faded, darkened. Danny wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the way the two front trunks topped out with the flared stumps of long-gone limbs as thick as the trunks themselves. Neither appeared shaped by hand, only weathered, yet each had the look of a skull that faced the sea, like the bones of a pair of malformed whales.

Who had first built the thing, and when—questions no one could answer. If their neighbor Felicia was to be believed, Neptune’s Throne was older than he was, and her as well. Felicia had lived atop the cliff for fifty years, and claimed the structure was there when she and her husband moved in. Claimed, as well, she’d seen a photo dated decades earlier, from the time of the Great Depression, and it was standing then, too. Meaning none of today’s throne could have been the original wood—it was too well maintained to have withstood over eighty years of weathering. But in the years he and Gail had been dividing their time between here and Santa Monica, he’d never seen anyone repair it… only use it.

When they passed by, Gail patted one of the gray-weathered anchor posts as if it were the leg of a friendly elephant. He lingered, fingertips tracing the little holes along the wood. He knew what they were now, but wasn’t pleased about that, as if there were a chance he could probe far enough inside to find a tangle of worms that had learned how to live outside the sea.

In their present direction, north, they were nearing their terminus, where a point of land fit for a lighthouse curved around from the right and speared out into the waves. At the base of the wall ran a stream fed by tributaries that trickled down the hillsides, then joined and cut ever-changing channels in the sand before emptying into the sea.

It was here she found it, a still-wet chunk of driftwood the size of a truncated log, mired in the sand of a delta that might not be there tomorrow morning, erased by the tide and recut somewhere else.

Gail knelt. She scraped off sand and picked away rags of seaweed. “You want to do the honors, my strong guy?”

Danny wrestled it free of the beach’s hold and stood it on end. It was lighter than it looked, would be lighter still after it dried. Regardless, he didn’t relish the thought of lugging it two hundred feet up slick wooden stairs.

“Wow,” she said after she’d had a longer look. “If I didn’t know better, and maybe I don’t, I’d say this was something that had already been carved.”

They traded places, Gail holding it up while he stepped back for a view. She was right. It had a suggestion of form—human, or maybe he was biased that way. Still, working with the contours and curves of what remained, he could discern legs, pressed together and thickening into hips. A waist and sloping shoulders. A head. It would be unrecognizable without a head.

“The figurehead off a ship’s prow, maybe?” He recalled yesterday’s yacht, being gnawed to slivers on the ocean floor. Maybe not that boat in particular; a stray chunk of someone else’s bad luck. The ocean was forever digesting the remains of bad luck and coughing up the pieces.

“A lot of figureheads were big-breasted women. Traditionally speaking.” Beside it, Gail went ramrod-straight and perked up her chest, comparing. “If I squint just right, I can make out a couple of boobs.” She looked him in the eye, squinty. “And if you say, ‘But what about the wood,’ I will murder you in your sleep.”

She had him call heads or tails, then they took their places at either end and began to shuffle the thing home.

Two days later she found another one washed up half a mile to the south, longer by a few inches, but shaped almost identically. Two half-rotted figureheads on the same beach at the same time? Not likely. By now he was leaning toward dismissing it as a case of pareidolia, the tendency to see ships in clouds, the man in the moon, and Jesus on a burnt tortilla. Or making a face out of two holes, a bump, and a line.

Even so, lugging them home felt like carrying corpses, complete with grave worms. The sodden outer wood sloughed and squished in his uncertain grip. Halfway up the cliff with the second one, his fingers broke through as if piercing a crust, and pulped an embedded shipworm as thick as a sausage. He nearly dropped the log and went down with it. The stairs were damp underfoot and slick with wet flora—treacherous for carrying this kind of load.

When Gail found the third one a few days later, he had no idea what to make of it. If pareidolia was simple pattern recognition, okay then, what sort of pattern was this? On the surface it seemed the same old relationship Gail had always had with the sea and the generosity of its tides. But it had never given her the same exact thing time after time. If it was going to do that, why not be really generous, and keep lobbing more lumps of ambergris at her.

She first left her finds outside on heavy racks to dry in the July sun, turning them every few hours like hot dogs on a grill. Then she moved them into her workshop, lined against one wall, standing in a row.

They’d turned pale now that they were dry, bleached by the elements and time. With the muck wiped off and the water-bloat gone, finer details emerged. The pieces all tapered and thickened the same way, with dual concavities that suggested eyes, and a nub that suggested a nose, and a crack against the grain for a mouth. They were just humanoid enough that Danny didn’t like turning his back on them, as if they were shells that would break open and release some worse form gestating inside.

“Gotta be a simple explanation,” Kimo told him on the boat while out on another freediving trip. “Maybe they’re something that fell off a cargo ship, some shipment of carvings that weren’t very good to begin with. Or there’s some asshole out here who lives on a boat, thinks he’s an artist, and dumps his mistakes overboard when nothing turns out the way he wants. Whatever they were, now that they’re washing up, they look that much worse.”

“Incompetent artists,” Danny said. “Really. That’s your explanation.”

“If you had a better one, you wouldn’t have asked me what I thought.”

Point taken. But the wobble in this theory was that nothing about any of these pieces appeared to have been carved. Danny had looked, and closely. No evidence of chisels, rasps, scrapers, drawknives. They showed no obvious signs of hand-tooling at all. Even the ends looked broken, not sawed. What was the likelihood that someone who couldn’t turn out a carving that looked more than vaguely human was, nevertheless, skilled enough to keep everything smooth, free of facets?

“Erosion. Wear,” Kimo said. “You ever see a jagged stone in a riverbed? Not me. Pick any rock, you don’t know how it looked when it went in. You’re just getting what’s left.”

And when Gail found another—number four, but who was counting?—Danny wasn’t even surprised. Well, yes, he was. Not by the find, but by the irritation he felt at the news. How many of these things did she need, anyway? Just because they washed up, did that obligate her to accept every single one, bring them all home?

It wasn’t like him to be resentful. But analyze it anyway. Things hadn’t merely come easily for Gail. They came effortlessly. The ocean gave and never ran out. All she had to do was show up and take possession.

He’d been lucky to be able to make a decent living doing something he loved. But it had never come easily. It had taken thousands of hours of wave time to hone his skills. It had taken near-drownings, lacerations from coral, jellyfish stings, reef rash, a staph infection, various sprains, two separate concussions when the board smacked him in the head… and that was before factoring in every competitor on the tours breathing down his neck, eager to take his ranking and sponsorships for themselves.

Worst of all, it was life with an expiration date. He couldn’t keep doing it forever, and he was nearly there. He could feel the downward pull as surely as he felt it during a dive, after entering the Doorway to the Deep.

Gail, though, went on as ever, bringing up trinkets as though she were being wooed by the sea. The same sea that she claimed to love, but wouldn’t go out on, not even with him.

As she began to spend more hours in her workshop than ever, he wondered if it was karmic payback. If this was what it had been like for her over two decades, forced to share him with a passion that consumed him, sent him around the world to wherever the waves were at their biggest and baddest: from Mavericks to Waimea Bay, from Tavarua to Padang Padang. Maybe that was the part that hadn’t come easily for her.

But by the time the fifth one turned up, even Gail seemed past taking any joy in it. Something about this was not right. It had never been quite right.

“This feels like a cat sometimes, bringing you its kills,” she confessed in the workshop one evening. At the bank of windows, the sun dropped boiling red into the cauldron of the sea. “It loves you. But it’s love on a whole different wavelength.”

He had no idea what to say to that. Along the north wall, the carvings seemed to be daring him to try. He was beginning to hate them. Whatever secret they knew, they weren’t telling.

At the center of the shop, a rectangular worktable, as stout and sturdy as a stage, held half a dozen pieces of driftwood in various stages of transformation—sculptures and a bonsai planter—none of which had progressed in three days. All Gail did now was come out and sit with them, seemingly stymied by the new arrivals that were piling up. As if they’d come to tell her that her work was at an end.

Her methods hadn’t changed in all the time he’d loved her, across nineteen years of being together, seventeen of marriage. Each piece of driftwood she harvested merited its own staring context, a still, silent interrogation during which she divined what it wanted to be, needed to be, in its new and resurrected life.

But these? These unblinking humanoids? Gail was treating them as if they were complete already, in no need of refinement. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Like her, they were home.

“You know, we’ve done the seaside thing for more than half our lives,” he said. “If I’ll be retiring soon anyway, maybe we should give mountains a try.”

She almost laughed. “Lie awake at night listening for elk? I don’t know if that would work or not.”

She turned at the window and faced the rolling waters. He followed her gaze in case there was something to see, but if there was, only Gail could see it.

“Did you ever hear about the 52-Hertz Whale?” she said.

He hadn’t.

“It’s the saddest thing ever. Researchers have been picking it up on hydrophones for years. It’s only ever been heard, never seen.” She was still facing the window, as if telling the ocean, and he was just around to eavesdrop. “This whale, this one single whale, that sings at a higher frequency than all the others. Fifty-two Hertz. All the usual suspects—blue whales, fin whales, like that—they’re down around fifteen or twenty or thirty. So nobody even knows what kind of whale this is. All they know is that it just keeps roaming the Pacific, calling out, singing its song, and nothing else is answering.”

She turned her back to the window, facing him again.

“Better keep your mountains. I don’t think I could handle that with an elk. They’ll come right up in your front yard.”

He left her to it—all of it, the worm-eaten pieces of wood and the stalled magic she wielded over them—and traded the workshop for twilight. Out here on the grass, the fifth refugee carving remained wedged in its drying rack. Horizontal, it looked helpless. As he stepped closer, Danny wondered how she would react if he dragged it toward the setting sun and threw it off the cliff.

He hadn’t given this one a second look since it was cleaned off, and mostly dry. What would’ve been the point? They were all the same, more or less.

Except this one… wasn’t.

He dared to touch it, to run his hand over what had been obscured before, and was still barely visible: a faint impression scored around it, near the bottom end, like the groove on a finger after taking off a wedding ring, tattooed with a trace of rust.

No way, he thought. This whole time, assuming these had started out as ordinary logs, when they were nothing of the sort. No way.

The great thing about Kimo was that there was almost nothing he wouldn’t drop at a moment’s notice to take his boat out. He’d saved the GPS coordinates of the sunken yacht, so even after three weeks it was easy to find again. Once Danny was in the water, Kimo waved the coil of rope before tossing it over the side.

“I’m giving you a longer leash, so leave it on. If you touch the lanyard this time I’m going to break your arm.”

“Yes, Mom.” Danny huffed wind to saturate himself, filled up, locked it in, then ducked and plunged.

By now he’d traded his frogman flippers for a monofin. Kimo called it his mermaid ass. It fit over both feet and forced his legs to move together, scything the water like a whale’s flukes to turbocharge each kick. It made the hardest part of the dive easier, if no faster; he could equalize the pressure in his head only so quickly. But it took less energy to power downward, dolphin-kicking, and to maneuver around once he got below neutral buoyancy, and that was what mattered.

Seventy-six feet down, the wreck waited in the hushed indigo haze, still tipped onto its starboard side with its mast jutting down into the ooze. And if the boat still unnerved him, helpless, disintegrating in a grave of silt and mud, it was at least familiar now. He knew it was pointless to check the prow for a figurehead but felt compelled to do it anyway, and of course there was no evidence of one ever having been there.

He turned onto his side and swam parallel to the sea floor, really mermaiding it now, cruising the length of the deck from bow to stern, inspecting the damage and the rot. He was gliding back the opposite way when it struck him: He’d been so focused on the small details that he had missed the big obvious one right in front of him.

He’d been looking for a hole ripped in the deck, or a broken stump, evidence of a missing mast. He’d been looking over what remained for signs of mast hoops, iron reinforcements especially, that might have chafed a groove of rust and wear around the bottom of its mast in the push and pull of the currents.

And they were there.

It was only when he took in the big picture that he realized: Three weeks ago the wreck had two masts, angled down toward the sediment. Now there was only one, the foremast.

There appeared to have been three, total. Masts detached from wrecked ships, sure, it happened. But where were they now? No telling how long the rearward mizzen had been gone. But within the past twenty-two days, the main mast shouldn’t have gotten far.

Shouldn’t. But had.

He feared he could guess where thirty-plus feet of them might have ended up. Where, but not how. There was no how he could imagine. There was no how he wanted to imagine. There was only his quickening heart and the hunger to breathe and the air above the waves.

He surfaced and plunged, surfaced and plunged again, like a pearl diver looking for a prize too big to be misplaced. He widened his search to the limits of his safety line, and still it wasn’t enough. Looking out toward deeper waters, beyond the spot where he’d caught that glimpse of the whale emerging through the dim blue, he saw how the sea floor sloped away, and that down the incline, some indistinct patch of shadow waited. A trick of light would waver. This didn’t waver.

“We need to move,” he told Kimo the next time he surfaced. “Forty or fifty yards that way.”

Never thought he’d see Kimo balk at piloting the boat. “Dude. You’ve had a month of downtime since the Corona Open. Is this really how you want to spend your final days of it, instead of getting your mind on the Billabong Pro?”

Treading water, spitting salt: “Yeah. It is. It helps. Everything helps.”

“What’s so special about fifty yards that way?”

“Because I’m ready for it.”

Kimo made the move, grumbling, but insisted on doing a sonar reading of the bottom. Ninety-four feet—Danny had never dived that far. Not a huge leap from last week’s new personal best of eighty-three, but still, it meant more pressure and another twenty-two feet of round-trip. This was not insignificant.

He went anyway. Deeper, bluer, colder, darker. He relaxed into the squeeze, welcoming it like an embrace.

From above and to the side, he couldn’t yet tell what was waiting below. Submerged another eighteen feet lower than the yacht, even less light reached his target zone. But it was more than that. The water looked cloudier here, too. As his vision acclimated to the gloom, he could make out what appeared to be a slab on the sea floor, three times the width of a car, furred with growth and set in the midst of a forest of bull kelp. Their stalks swayed with the currents, their fronds wavering like pennants in a breeze.

The further he sank and the closer he drifted, the less natural the slab looked, like a mound of sand and mud and stones scraped into a heap and packed together with intent. For no reason he wanted to explore, its flatness and order—its look of purpose—reminded him of the worktable in Gail’s shop. Again he was overcome with the uneasy sense of facing something out of place, lost from above and drowned without pity.

Because rising from the mound was a grove of logs, eight of them, seemingly jammed into the muck to hold them in place. Their tops were ragged, splintered, a sight that nearly locked his mind. He could imagine no force in the sea that could take a ship’s mast and break it up this orderly way, or would even want to.

Around each piece, a thrashing cloud of motion churned and blurred the water. By now he knew a shipworm on sight. Even at their most normal they still filled him with loathing, but he didn’t think they were supposed to behave like this, hundreds of them visible, like hagfish burrowed into the side of a decomposing whale. They streamed over the wood with the furious energy of a feeding frenzy.

The dread crept in cold, from the outer dark. This was something no one was meant to see. Ever. A hiker would feel this way, stumbling across the half-eaten carcass of a mule deer, then smelling the musk and carrion scent of the returning grizzly.

Danny flicked his fin to drift close enough to see the hard little shells on the worms’ heads, scouring the wood, shaping it as surely as rasps and chisels and lathes.

He recognized the human form gnawed free from the lengths of mast. Anyone would.

He knew their contours. He’d lugged their predecessors up from the beach five times already.

And among the three that appeared farthest along, he recognized the face taking shape out of the grain. He had loved it for the past nineteen years.

Danny tried to will the sight away as an illusion born of low light and a brain hungry for oxygen. But it wouldn’t resolve into anything else. He pinched off a half-dozen of the worms, fat and lashing, and flung them to the silt so he could caress his hand along the fresh-carved visage. Even blind, in the dark of an infinite abyss, he would know that cheekbone, that nose, that jawline, that hollow at the throat.

Already, the worms he’d dropped were wriggling back up to her face, to dig back in and resume their task. Mindless, they seemed to obey a directive he couldn’t begin to fathom. But if something out here was capable of snapping a ship’s mast into pieces like a pencil, then maybe it followed that it had workers, drones subjugated by the kind of group mind that turned a school of fish in perfect unison.

There was no why he wanted to imagine, either.

Five above, eight down here, and who knew how many more might be drifting unfinished somewhere between. In revulsion, in the grip of something he felt but couldn’t name, he gave the foremost effigy a shove to send it toppling back, pulling free of the muck and thunking into another behind it, then a third gave way, a slow chain reaction that disturbed the silt, but the worms not at all.

Abruptly, his legs were yanked from beneath him and he was upside-down again, moving up and away, something reeling him in like a fish. He nearly panicked and lost the breath locked inside, until the tug on his ankle made sense. Kimo being Kimo again. He couldn’t right himself under the tension, never enough slack to turn around. Rather than flail at the end of the rope, he relaxed and let it happen, until he broke the surface spewing bubbles and foam, and breathed with a violent gasp, once more a creature of land and air.

Kimo peered down from the boat as if expecting to see him floating motionless. Huh. Must have set another personal best without even realizing.

“How long?” Danny said. Normal. He had to act normal.

“Seven minutes.”

Seven? Whoa. He would never have guessed.

“I had to pull the plug. And yet… you’re fine.”

“You sound disappointed about that.”

“No. That part’s good.” Kimo shook his head—never again, never again. “You need to find somebody else to take you out for this. All you do is scare the shit out of me.”

Poor Kimo. Danny felt genuinely bad for him. Bad for them both. Because it wouldn’t have helped one bit to tell Kimo that, no, he wasn’t fine. He hadn’t come up fine at all.

Worse, he couldn’t tell Gail, either. How was he supposed to convey a thing like this? They’re you. They’re supposed to be you. He couldn’t even be sure how she would react—if she’d find it flattering, the best thing since ambergris, or if the balance would tip and this weird synergy between her and the sea would finally leave her spooked.

Once she picked up on the obvious, that something was wrong, his only option was to lie. Had a bad dive. Burst a blood vessel in my nose. It happens.

All he could do was look ahead. Try to get her away for two weeks, inject some time and distance to break this encroaching spell, and leave whatever carvings might wash up next for someone else to find.

“Why don’t you come with me to Tahiti, for the Billabong? It’s been years.”

“I know. But I should stay. I don’t have the kind of work I can take with me.”

She was hardly doing the work now. “It’ll still be here when you get back. You might even get some new ideas there to bring home.”

“Like tiki carvings? I went through my tiki phase years ago.”

Oh. Right. She had.

He packed and planned and tried his best to make it sound enticing: Seeing the Pacific from another side would do them good. This could be the last time he went there as a competitor. None of it seemed to quite get through.

“I know. I just like it here. There’s something about here. Some people go their whole lives looking for the place they should be. I found my here a long time ago.”

Even before she’d found him—Gail was too kind to say so, but it had to have crossed her mind. He was one more thing the sea had given her, the one thing it was most capable of taking back. That worried her. It had all along.

I love you. You’ve always been my anchor, she would tell him. But it scares me what could happen if the anchor chain ever broke.

In that way of sounds, unusual enough to penetrate, familiar enough to not alarm, it worked its way into his dreams before teasing him awake. The dream dissolved at once, so he lay in the dark with the only thing left: the far, reverberant squeal of a whale rolling in across the water and floating up through the open window.

“Listen,” he whispered, and reached over to give Gail a gentle shake. But her side of the bed was empty, a sure sign she was listening already.

She wasn’t at the window, wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in the bathroom or front room. He knew the feel of a house emptied of any other heartbeat than his own. Danny yanked on enough clothing to call himself decent, a T-shirt and shorts that felt backwards, then stumbled outside, but she wasn’t on the deck, either.

The night was as bright as nights got… all moon and no clouds, and the sea a glittering expanse of silver-white and blue-black. It was the world. It was their entire world.

Braced against the redwood deck, he peered down at the beach. After a moment, his fingers gripped the rail with the same steadying ferocity as his toes gripped a surfboard. He felt every bit as much in motion, shooting through a rolling barrel that collapsed behind him.

From up here, he was so accustomed to the sight of Neptune’s Throne that the high-backed platform was as familiar a fixture of the landscape as the ridge on which they lived. But now… now its shape was different, wrong. He couldn’t see what, exactly, only that some hulking form occupied it, bulbous and enormous, wet enough and slick enough to catch the moonlight with an iridescent gleam.

To his left, a form no bigger than a person traversed toward it, small and dark against the pale sands.

He heard it again, rebounding from the cliffs—the same high, rolling squall that had brought him awake, the forlorn cry he’d always taken for a passing whale, roaming the endless waters and calling out for what or who might answer.

Danny sprinted for the beach stairs, the zigzag flights up which he’d helped lug a lifetime’s worth of the sea’s gifts, clueless, never imagining what it might have wanted, or expected in return.

Pounding down the steps he was as good as blind, the moonlight trapped above the canopy of leaves that crowded up and over. Although he held the rail, heedless of the splinters he picked up along the way, he went tumbling before he knew what happened, something damp and slick skidding beneath his bare foot.

His leg torqued one way while the rest of him torqued another. If pain glowed, his knee could have lit the night. No wave had ever flung him more violently than this, than gravity and his own momentum. He juddered down the stairs, sometimes on his hip, sometimes on his rump, every hardwood step another bruise. When he thudded to a stop he had two flights left to go, and scooted the rest of the way on his ass.

Down on the beach he tried to stand but his knee wasn’t having it. He tumbled to the sand, still warm from the day’s sun. He crawled, striving to see through the pink haze of pain, first making out the moon-etched lines of the cliffs ahead, then below them, the suggestion of some lesser mountain that rose up and slouched back toward the sea.

Danny crawled until he found a line of dimples in the sand, footprints, unbroken and resolute. He followed them, dragging his useless leg behind him, hearing nothing but the wheeze of his breath and the crash and retreat of the waves.

He crawled until the pillars and planks of Neptune’s Throne loomed above him, empty now, but darkened with water and draped with robes of seaweed, the air around it rich with a heavy musk of brine. The sand before it was churned to wet clumps and crooked furrows, as if between here and the water’s edge the beach had been plowed by some dragging thing, bristling with appendages, that had tried to walk but was never meant to move on land.

Alongside the disturbance, the line of her steps turned, veering toward the water. He followed these too, scrambling on both elbows and one good knee, until they were no longer dimples but true footprints pressed into the wet sand, heel and arch and five small toes. He scurried ahead, frantic now, as step by step the prints began to change, the impression left by each toe deepening, as though dug by a hooked and spiny claw, with a growth of webbing in between. He followed them to the foaming lip of the sea, where he lost them, her last footprints erased as the water washed across and smoothed the sand blank again.

Still, he floundered onward as the waves battered him head-on, stopping only when he was slapped across the face and shoulder by something solid, heavy as a wet blanket, that clung like a caul. Sputtering, he peeled it away, and when after the longest moments of his life he accepted what the tattered thing was, he had no idea what to do with it. He couldn’t bring himself to pitch it away, couldn’t think of any reason to keep holding on.

If Gail didn’t need her skin anymore, then where on land or sea was it supposed to go?

Out past the breakers, beneath the moon, a gleaming bulbous dome submerged with an elephantine skronk that he felt ripple through the waves and shudder through the sand.

Then he was alone.

He knew the feel of a shore emptied of any other heartbeat than his own.

He retreated far enough to keep from choking, then rolled onto his back to face the stars, exhausted and sweating from the pain. The water surged in and out for a thousand cycles, and a thousand more.

In time he wondered which of the ligaments in his knee were in shreds. ACL, PCL, LCL, MCL… any and all. He surely had a motherfucker of a hamstring tear, as well. Whatever the damage, his career was done even sooner than expected.

By the time he was ready to move again, the sky had lightened to a formless gray. Fog had crept in across the waters, and with it a stinging drizzle of rain. His knee was swollen double and he couldn’t bend his leg, but nothing much hurt by default anymore.

There was dawn enough for him to spy a familiar shape stranded in the channels where the sea met the freshwater stream from the cliffs. He made for it, mocking thing that it was… as complete a carving as he’d seen, even farther along than the ones sunk amid the kelp beds. Or maybe this was one of them, finished along the way.

He knew its shape, knew the face, the hands folded as if in prayer. But he knew nothing of the changes wrought upon the rest of her: the thin, frilled slits at either side of her throat; the fins along each forearm and lower leg. But he did know, and had all along, that she’d smelled of the sea, and tasted of it, too, and that the ocean and its gods knew their own.

She must have known, as well, somewhere inside. Must have cherished the sea even while living in fear that if she ever went out on it, she might not come back. It would never stop wanting her.

He had to admit that this carving—all of them—appeared to have been made with love. But love, as Gail had said, on a whole different wavelength.

He rolled the effigy back out into the surf, fighting the wishes of the waves, the most grueling thing he’d ever done. But it was still a log at heart. It floated. The first twenty yards from shore were the hardest, the next hundred a little easier. He clung to this new Gail until he could no longer push off the sandy bottom, then threw his good leg over and across, straddling it like a surfboard and paddling out to sea.

In time, the roar of the breakers faded behind him, until he was left with the quieter slop and splash of a calm sea, as the dim sun rose over his shoulders and began to burn the fog away.

He paddled as far as he could, until he thought he might have just five more good, strong minutes left inside. The ocean yawned deep and dark beneath. He could still breathe, but with one leg, could he kick hard enough to overcome the air in his lungs? Could he reach that threshold that changed everything? He had to believe he could. Forty feet. He only had to make it another forty feet.

Two days ago, he’d spent seven minutes under, and it went like nothing. There had to be meaning in that. Superhumans were popping up everywhere, remember. Something in the air, something in the water. A beautiful time to be alive.

He rolled off the log and made the plunge.

He would find Gail again, or he wouldn’t.

He, too, was ready for another way of life, or he wasn’t.

The ocean would accept him. Or it wouldn’t.

He could still be a part of it either way.