The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

THE CURIOUS ALLURE OF THE SEA ^{CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN}

So stunning was the view from the deck of her new house that Jenny thought it might be worth the loneliness. Late afternoon sunlight made monstrous shadows of the pine trees on either side of the property, but straight back from the deck where the ground dropped away toward the rocks, she had the perfect vista—nothing but the indigo sweep of the Atlantic Ocean, the cold wind off the water, the white froth of the chop around the island, the circling gulls, and the occasional seal basking on the rocks. The romance of it plucked at her heart. She stood on the deck, tugged her thick wool sweater more tightly around her, and thought there might not be a more beautiful place on Earth. The house was hers. The deck was hers. But she couldn’t share it with anyone.

Not ever.

It started months earlier, on the rainy autumn morning when they found her father’s boat. Tom Leary had gone missing two days earlier after a lifetime at sea. Jenny had spent the time praying for him to radio in, praying the Coast Guard would find some trace of his fishing boat, the Black Rose. Praying for it, and dreading it as well.

Matt Finn knocked on her door at just past seven that morning. She opened the door of her rented cottage in pajama pants and a threadbare Patriots shirt, an arm placed self-consciously across her chest, eyes narrowed because she was too sleepy to open them all the way just yet. Officer Finn normally cut a fine figure in his uniform—Matt had been proud of his badge since his first day on the job, back when they’d still been dating—but that morning he just stood in the rain looking tired and sad, blues soaked almost black, and Jenny took one glance at him and knew.

He hesitated as he tried to muster up the words.

Jenny just shook her head. “I’ll get some clothes on and be right out.”

She shut the door and let him stand out there in the cold September rain. It never occurred to her until much later that she should have let him in. By then, she’d wish that she had. If she’d known how things would turn out, she’d have savored every moment of contact she could get. But wisdom always came too late.

In the car, Matt shut off the crackling voices on the radio. She was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do that, but the silence helped.

“They found the Rose?” she asked.

Hands tight on the wheel, Matt nodded. The wipers swished the rain off the glass and the engine hummed, and it took him a moment or two before he spoke.

“He wasn’t on it.”

“No sign of him at all?”

In answer, Matt reached out and took her hand, holding it there on the seat between them as the police car carried her out to the dock. When they’d parked and gotten out and were walking the rest of the way, and she saw the dark figures milling about in the gray storm light, and the Coast Guard ship, and the Black Rose bobbing against the dock beyond it, she wished Matt could take her hand again, almost reached for him but thought better of it. He was married now, and didn’t belong to her anymore.

Cops murmured words she barely heard. Three strutting seagulls had landed on the boat’s bow railing and were squawking at each other in some kind of territorial dispute. When a fourth tried to land, they banded together to chase it off.

A Coastie put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder, trying to prevent her from boarding the Rose, but a cop intervened and the hand vanished. Her heart broke with the force of her gratitude. She had to see for herself. Her father had always known the sea would take his life, but he’d always said it gave him life, too, so that would only be fair.

It didn’t feel fair.

The boat creaked under foot as she stepped down onto the deck. She glanced around, saw an abandoned life vest and some long black Guinness cans, empty of course. This was the debris of her daddy’s idea of fishing. His catch would be in the coolers, no doubt, though one would have several more of those black cans. The life vest made her brow furrow, though. Why had he dragged that out from its usual resting place? There hadn’t even been a storm.

A couple of the gulls hopped to the deck and started making their way back toward her, angry at her intrusion. Lost in the worst of dreams, Jenny noticed the oddness of their behavior, but only barely. Ignoring the birds, she stepped into the wheelhouse.

It felt haunted, but it took a moment for her to realize it was the silence that gave it that ghostly atmosphere. The boat was too dark. Too quiet.

A creak behind her caused her to turn, but it was only Matt and another cop.

“The engine?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“How does that happen?”

The cops shifted uncomfortably. “It’s being investigated.”

“He still had his cell phone, Matt. Radio or not, he could’ve called. And he would have, unless he thought he didn’t need to. Could he have flagged down another boat? Maybe someone…”

She didn’t want to think about it. About violence toward her father.

“Anything’s possible,” the other cop said. “The weird thing is there’s no damn fish.”

Jenny frowned, glanced past the cops toward the deck. “He drank at least three beers, which meant he was out for a while before… whatever happened. No way did he spend that kind of time and not catch anything. This is Tom Leary we’re talking about.”

Matt shot a dark look at the other officer, then shrugged. “No fish. No sign he’d even been fishing. Equipment all put away, nice and neat.”

Her frown deepened. She hung her head, pondering what her father had been up to on that morning two days past. The emptiness of the wheelhouse began to feel suffocating, the air too close despite the side windows being open. She took a deep breath and felt a tingle at her back, as if someone might be in there with them, watching from a shadowed corner. Jenny turned, but saw no one. Instead, she felt her gaze drawn to the hook to the right of the throttle, where her dad had often hung his hat. In its place was a grimy silver necklace upon which dangled a flat rectangular stone about two inches in height.

Jenny bent to study that stone, reached out to lift it into her palm, chain still looped around the hook. The stone had been carved with three spirals, all connected at the center so they seemed to flow one toward the other in a never-ending circle.

Waves, she thought. They look like—

“Hey, Jen, don’t do that,” Matt said, taking a step toward her. “You know you’re not supposed to touch anything.”

Jenny let the stone talisman slip from her fingers and it swung for a moment below that hook. She took out her cell phone, opened the camera, made sure the flash was on and snapped a shot. Her fingers felt warm where she’d touched the stone and the urge to reach out for it again grew powerful. An unfamiliar regret ignited inside her, and for just a moment the loss of that stone, the wish to return it to her grasp, seemed more important than the mystery of what had happened to her father.

“Looks pretty old,” the other cop said, crouching to peer at the stone. Jenny fought the urge to keep it from him.

“Your father’s?” Matt asked.

Jenny pulled herself away, skin crawling with unease at the way the presence of that stone tugged at her insides. “I guess it might’ve been. I don’t remember seeing it before.”

Matt bagged it for evidence while she stood out on the deck in the rain. Jenny felt the eyes on her as she waited for him to drive her home, knew they were wondering just as she was what happened to Tom Leary, whether he’d gotten drunk and fallen overboard or if there’d been some kind of foul play, or if—as happened from time to time with those men who spent most of their lives alone out on the water—he had just given himself over to the sea.

“The Coast Guard’ll keep looking,” Matt promised later, as he was driving her home, the shush of the windshield wipers and the drum of the rain on the cruiser’s roof making her sleepy. The words sounded hollow coming out of his mouth. Jenny barely heard them and certainly didn’t believe them. “We’ll find him.”

But of course they didn’t.

Someone stole the spiral-carved stone out of evidence on that first night. Jenny couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop looking at the photo she’d taken with her phone.

The morning after the Coast Guard called off the search, she had that ocean symbol tattooed on the inside of her right forearm. Three days later, she went back to the same shop and had the friendly, bearded artist tattoo her father’s name in the same spot on the opposite arm. She mourned, of course. Grief cut into her in moments quiet and loud, sometimes out of nowhere. Sorrow welled up like blood in a wound, spilling over and staining whatever it touched. And yet there were good moments as well, and anytime she looked at the tattoo, the ocean rolling on forever in that circle of waves, the infinite sea, a kind of peace filled her. Healed her. Though she’d never been much for fishing, Jenny had inherited her father’s love for the sea, felt its allure just as he always had. With that tattoo, it felt like the sea remained with her wherever she went.

And her father, of course. Tom was with her as well.

As much as it hurt to lose him, she felt as if somehow they were still together, out on the water, sharing that serenity. But it was the skin on the inside of her right arm that drew her gaze most often. Sometimes she would trace the three spirals with her fingertip. It relaxed her completely, made her feel as if she might float away. The thought did not trouble her at all.

All would be well. She felt sure of it.

On the third day after her second tattoo, she noticed the behavior of the gulls. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Jenny had put off her real estate clients the best she could and spent her time cleaning up after him. The funeral had brought with it a maelstrom of emotions. She’d listened to a hundred stories about her dad, some of them new to her and others comfortingly familiar. There’d been tears and laughter, and the unwelcome presence of her Aunt Eleanor, who’d spent the wake and funeral with her lips in a constant twist of disapproval. She’d come with her son Forrest, this woman who’d never understood the way the sea had called to her brother and always believed it had been laziness that caused him not to make “more” of himself, as if a man who earned his living out on the water could ever be conceived of as lazy.

Jenny had wanted to be polite but only barely stopped herself from telling Aunt Eleanor and her tax attorney son to go fuck themselves. Maybe down the line, when Jenny could clear her head, she’d realize she ought to dig through her father’s things and mail some keepsake or other to Eleanor, but as she began to go through the old man’s belongings, she found nothing her aunt deserved. Not that there was much to choose from. The boat still had a loan and would need to be sold. The house, though—she’d grown up in it, and so had her father. The taxes were nothing to sneeze at, but it had no mortgage, and she was grateful for that. Over the years he’d gone through very lean times, but Tom Leary had never given in to the temptation to take the money out of the house. There’d be an official reading of his will and it would have to go through probate, but she knew what was in it. Whatever he’d had would come to her.

All of these things were swirling in her mind as she parked her car outside the Whale’s Tale, a pub that looked over the harbor. As she climbed out, her shoes crunching in the gravel, the tattoo on her right arm felt strangely cold, as if it were winter instead of early fall. She slammed the car door and shivered despite the sweater she wore. She turned her wrist to stare at the tattoo on the inside of her forearm. It looked just as it had before and she felt foolish, wondering what she had expected.

Jenny took the walkway next to the restaurant—the main entrance opened onto a wooden boardwalk facing the harbor. She scanned the handful of people seated on the outside deck in spite of the chill and wondered if her lunch date would have opted for inside. It was comfortable for September, but the sky hung low and the clouds promised rain. She wished Matt had been her lunch date—he’d been so kind and attentive since her father’s death that she wondered if they might start over—but instead she was meeting with Rudy Harbard, who’d been one of her dad’s competitors and wanted to buy the Black Rose. They’d never liked each other much, Dad and Rudy, but Tom Leary had always respected the man.

As she stepped onto the boardwalk, Jenny inhaled deeply. The smell of the ocean, the sound of it, filled her heart. She glanced out at the water, at the boats bobbing out there, at the men working on their decks, and she longed to be with them. For a moment the idea of selling the fishing boat felt so wrong that she couldn’t take another step. She had always loved the sea, but now she felt a yearning so deep her bones sang with it. If she sold the boat—

A flash of white and gray whipped past her face. The gull cried out as it struck her right arm. She felt its claws but its momentum carried it past her and she twisted away from it. The bird alighted on the boardwalk, sending several people scurrying out of its path. Jenny glanced down at her arm, saw the small trickle of blood there, and then stared at the bird.

“You little shit,” she said. “You’re in for a kicking.”

She marched toward the bird, expecting it to hop backward or fly away, but instead it came toward her. A shiver went through her. Jenny heard another cry and looked up to see other gulls alighting on the little fence outside the restaurant’s porch and on top of a trashcan on the boardwalk.

A man touched her back. Startled, she jerked away from him, feeling as if she were under attack. The gull hopped closer.

“Let me help you,” he said, so calmly that he almost seemed to be sleepwalking. Maybe fifty years old, handsome and tan but leathery from a lifetime in the sun, he stared at Jenny as if he’d never seen another human being before, studying her as if to decipher some puzzle she represented to him.

“If you want to help—” she started.

The first gull cawed and took flight, right toward her. The leathery man dragged Jenny into a protective embrace. The bird might have struck him, she wasn’t sure, but then he turned and shooed it away. A toddler carrying an ice cream cone shrieked as the bird zipped over her head. Two other gulls jumped down to the boardwalk, and the leathery man shooed them away as well.

Over a dozen passersby had paused to become spectators, not including the people on the deck of the Whale’s Tale who were observing the show. Several of them, Jenny saw, were focused on her instead of the weirdness going down. One woman had her head tilted, her mouth slightly open, as if she’d taken the world’s best drugs. Jenny felt her skin crawling with the attention.

The man with the toddler—her father, she assumed—abandoned his child and walked toward her, scrutinizing her in a way that reminded her of a hundred showing-up-naked-at-school nightmares.

“Hey,” he said softly as he approached. “You. I need… I want…” He blinked and crinkled his brow like a flicker of common sense had tried to push into his forebrain. Then he shook his head. “What are you? Why do I want to—”

Leathery guy grabbed him from behind and slung him away. The quiet man almost tripped over his own toddler, startling the girl into letting her ice cream drop from the cone. She stared down at the strawberry glob on the boardwalk and her lip trembled, and then she started to cry.

The little girl’s sobs drew everyone’s attention. Even those who’d seemed somehow mesmerized were distracted long enough for Jenny to rush to the hostess stand. The fiftyish brunette had been watching the whole thing unfold and she frowned with maternal worry as she escorted Jenny straight to the restaurant’s entrance.

“Come inside, honey,” the brunette said. “We can call the cops—”

The tattoo on her right forearm prickled with the cold, as if the ink had turned to ice on her skin, and Jenny rubbed at it to try to drive that chill away.

“It’s okay. I don’t need… it was just—”

“Fuckin’ peculiar is what it was,” the hostess said with a glance over her shoulder. She dragged open the door, put her free hand on the small of Jenny’s back, and gently guided her inside. “Have yourself a drink, at least. Take a breath. I’ll let you know when those guys are gone.”

“I’m supposed to meet someone,” Jenny started to say, as the door swung closed behind them.

The crack of impact made her cry out as she and the hostess grabbed hold of one another. Jenny spun, backing away, staring at the spider-web pattern splintered into the door and the smear of blood streaking the glass. Through the clear, unbroken glass toward the bottom of the door, they could see the seagull that had just killed itself trying to reach her.

“What the hell?” the hostess whispered.

She glanced at Jenny and for the first time that maternal concern vanished. Instead, the woman took a step away, as if to move out of the line of fire, in case of whatever came next. Resentment kindled in Jenny’s chest, mingling with anger and wonder and a kind of helplessness she’d never felt before. She stared at the hostess, infuriated by the idea that the woman was afraid to come near her.

Later, she would remember that moment and wish that she could make everyone as hesitant to approach her as the hostess had been.

Over the following days, it escalated quickly. Everywhere she went there were men and women who looked at her too long, watched her too closely. Not everyone—whatever the allure, it wasn’t universal—but enough to make her increasingly uncomfortable. Even small children rushed to invade her personal space. Out for a morning run, Jenny encountered Emma Brill, a friend from high school, who’d been walking her infant son in one of those fancy jogger-strollers. The moment the boy saw Jenny, he’d begun to cry, stretching his arms toward her as if desperate to be held. As if Jenny were his mother instead of Emma. For a few minutes, Jenny complied, just so she and Emma could continue their conversation—though it consisted of the same beats as most of her recent conversations, full of condolences and shared memories.

When she’d given the baby back, the infant had loosed a piercing wail, shrieking as he tried to hold on, his face turning purplish-red. Emma apologized, trying to soothe the baby. Jenny whispered her own apology, promised to talk to Emma soon, and started off again on her run, sneakers crunching on the sand and grit in the road. The baby shrieked on, inconsolable, and even when Jenny had outrun the sound, the wind would gust and carry it to her in small, lonely snatches, as if the baby would scream forever.

Gulls cawed and circled in the sky. As she ran along a narrow path just a few hundred yards from the ocean, small crabs scuttled out from the high grass and scrub. At first she ran over them, careful not to step on and crush them, but after half a minute she noticed they all seemed to be moving in the same direction—toward her—and she paused to look back the way she’d come. There were dozens of the little things, and more emerging from the grass. All of them were moving in her direction. The ones she’d passed had changed course to follow her.

A tremor of fear went through her. Jenny sneered at the emotion, angry with herself, and she started running again, part of her convinced she could still hear Emma Brill’s baby screaming for the loss of her. Her heart pounded and the tattoo on her right forearm went colder than ever before, as if the ice had slid deeper inside her, right along the tracks of her veins. She put a hand on it as she ran, taking peace from the contact, drawing comfort from the symbol there. For a little while it seemed like her thoughts became softer, and her feet carried her forward in a sort of trance.

The path branched to the right, toward the street that led to her neighborhood. A dozen steps toward home, gulls cawing above, twenty of them circling now, she staggered to a halt.

Three people waited along the path, the high sea grass waving on either side of them. One she didn’t know, but the other two were fisherman. Men who’d spent their lives at sea, who felt the call of it in their hearts the same way Tom Leary did.

Jenny backed away. At the split in the path, she took the other fork, picking up her pace. A gull darted past her head close enough that she had to duck, but she only ran faster, kept running without really thinking about where she might go, although in the back of her mind she’d known all along. She fled to the place she’d always run to when she was in trouble.

Home.

The cottage she’d been renting was only a few miles from the old Federal Colonial where she’d grown up, and now her run brought her onto a path that emerged two houses down from her childhood home. All the houses along Dunphy Road sat on a bluff, facing the ocean, with nothing but the street and a pile of enormous rocks separating them from the steep drop off the bluff into the water. Jenny sprinted along the road toward the front steps, heart already lightening.

A car rolled up beside her, slowing to match her speed, and then the tires skidded to a halt. Jenny turned, startled, to see Matt climbing out in that familiar uniform. She saw the pain and regret on his face as he walked up to her and her only thought was of her father.

“Did they… did they find his body?” she asked.

Tears welled in Matt’s eyes. One slid down his left cheek, and others followed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Seagulls fluttered down to alight on his police car and on the front porch of her house. Across the street, a woman had been photographing the ocean. A professional, with a camera strapped around her neck that looked as if it cost more than Jenny made in the average home sale commission. Now the photographer turned and gazed at her like Dorothy at the gates of the Emerald City.

“Where did you find him?” Jenny asked. Horror swept through her as she imagined having to identify her dad after his body had been in the water for weeks.

Matt grabbed her by the arms, held her tightly, and leaned in to breathe in the scent of her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She started to protest and he nuzzled her throat, pressed his cheek against hers, kissed her forehead lightly.

“I can’t…” Matt said. “I can’t keep away. I just needed to come to you. Get lost in you.”

The words might have been romantic if not for his grip on her arms. If not for the hopeless look in his eyes and the fearful, desperate tone of his voice.

“Matt, no.” She tried to extricate herself from his grip. Took a step back, drawing him with her instead.

She saw the expectant look in his eyes, as if he felt certain she would understand. And the truth was that she did. Jenny said his name, looked down in frustration at the grip he had on her arms and saw that his hand covered half of the triple-spiral tattoo.

“No!”

She twisted her arms down and outward, breaking his grip, then stepped in and shoved him with both hands. Matt staggered backward, arms pinwheeling, and fell on his ass at the edge of the road. The gulls on his car took flight, darting toward her. Jenny spun and raced for the porch, took the stairs two at a time, lifted her arms to protect her face as the gulls there flapped up from the railing and came at her. She batted at them, heart pounding, fighting the scream that had been building inside of her.

Tom Leary’s wicker chair sat on the porch. Jenny picked it up with both hands and used it to shield herself, keeping it aloft with one hand while she plucked the spare key from on top of the lantern to the right of the door. Gulls cawed and pecked at the wicker.

Matt cried out her name and the plaintive tone in his voice made her own tears begin to fall.

The key scratched around the lock and she wanted to scream, but then it slipped in. She turned it, then grabbed the knob and gave it a twist. The door swung inward but the wicker chair caught on the frame and she released it. The gulls scrabbled away from the chair as it fell, just long enough for her to spin around and slam the door, locking it from the inside.

Trying to catch her breath, she glanced at the tattoo inside her left forearm, taking comfort from her father’s name inked there. But she felt her gaze pulled toward that other tattoo, and only when she let her eyes shift to it did she find real peace.

A sound broke through her reverie, gulls clawing at the door. She looked up at the peeling paint, and the door shook in its frame.

“Jenny, please!” Matt called.

“Go away!”

“I can’t. God help me, I can’t.”

She turned and bolted up the stairs to the second story, then all the way to the third. At the front of the house, a bay window looked out at the sea, but Jenny had more interest in the yard below. With her left hand, she covered the spiral tattoo, soothing herself. From the vantage point at the window she couldn’t see the front porch, where Matt still pounded on the wood and gulls still roosted.

But she could see the road. She could see the cars and pickups that had pulled up there, and the men and women who had begun to gather, gazing up at her home with the sad eyes and heartfelt longing of people who knew the thing that so fascinated them would be forever out of their reach, that the thing they most loved could never love them back. Fishermen and tourists, the photographer and several small children who seemed to belong to no one, who seemed to have wandered away from their parents to follow the allure of something they would never understand, whether as children or as adults… they all wore that same look.

Jenny had her hand on the tattoo, knew she could take that peace with her wherever she went, but there would always be those who felt the same allure. She wondered about the talisman, where her father had acquired it, how deeply it had affected him. If it had killed him.

Though she knew the answer. Of course she knew.

She could remove the tattoo, of course, but she felt it just as others did. It called to her, soothed her, satisfied a yearning in her, and Jenny couldn’t surrender that. Not for anyone or anything.

Yet even as she understood that, she also understood they would never stop being drawn to her. She had to get out of there, could make it down the steps and out the back of the house. Her father’s old Harley was there, in the shed he’d used as a workshop forever. She knew where he hung the keys. She’d go. She’d do it right now, leave all these people behind, escape whatever drew them to her.

But she knew what drew them. Knew she’d never leave it behind, even if it weren’t inked into her skin.

Still, she couldn’t stay here.

She bolted. The Harley waited for her.

Beyond that, she didn’t know. Not at first.

The current of her life swept her out to sea.

Jenny had given up her rented house, put a For Sale sign in front of her childhood home, and entered a lease-to-own agreement on this starkly isolated spot on Comeau Island. There were twenty-seven other year-round residences on the island, but the nearest was half a mile through the piney woods from Jenny’s place. They weren’t the drop-by-for-a-welcome sort of neighbors. Nobody came to borrow a cup of sugar. People didn’t live on a remote island off the coast of Maine because they felt like being neighborly. The best she could hope for would be that someone would come to check on her if they saw smoke rising from her property that couldn’t just be the chimney.

These were the only neighbors she could allow herself.

Questions lingered. How long could she last out here? How long would the proceeds from the sale of the family home allow her to live without a real job? The money would be substantial, at least four times what this island cottage would cost to purchase, but it wouldn’t last forever. To many people she’d known, it would be paradise—nothing to do but read, watch movies, and gaze at one of the most beautiful views imaginable. But even heaven could become hell if you were a prisoner there.

The questions haunted her, but not as much as they might have. The tattoo on her right arm would turn cold as ice and she would cover it with her left hand and be suffused with that sense of peace for which she’d yearned her entire life. It soothed her, made the questions withdraw into the recesses of her mind. In those moments, her doubts and regrets seemed small and unimportant. When the gulls landed on the railing of her deck or came too close and she had to chase them off, even fight them off, even kill them when it came to that… she found solace in the infinite ocean inked on her arm.

Four days into her exile, Jenny stood on the deck again in a thick blue sweater she’d owned for years, the sleeves pushed up, her hair tied back in a ponytail. Coffee steamed from the same mug she’d used the previous three days and she cupped her hands around it, enjoying the warmth on that chilly morning. She glanced warily at the sky, watching for the gulls. By now she was familiar with their patterns, the way they would begin to diverge from their natural flight, circling closer and closer until they descended. She had fifteen or twenty minutes to enjoy the deck and the breeze, so she took a deep breath, sipped her coffee, and reminded herself how many people would trade anything to wake to this view every day.

The triple spiral on her arm sent the chill down to her bones and she smiled. Somehow that icy cold made the rest of her warmer.

Her view through the pines had a golden, early-morning glow. She’d walked down to the water on her first two days here, but yesterday she had not ventured out. It wasn’t worth the trouble to bring the baseball bat to deal with the gulls, and the crabs had proliferated between the first and second days. Several sharks had begun to patrol the end of her creaky little dock, and though she knew they could not come after her, still it gave her a shudder to see them gathering like that.

Jenny breathed in the aroma of her coffee, let it fill her head a moment before she took another sip. Gulls circled out over the dock, but there were more of them now, and several looped nearer to the house.

Another sip of coffee. Another pulse of ice from the ink on her arm.

She pressed her eyes closed and inhaled the smell of the ocean. When she opened them, she noticed something moving down by the dock. The rocks and sand seemed to be shifting, but it was too far away to see in detail. Jenny placed her coffee mug on the railing and slid her phone out of the band of her sweatpants, opened the camera function, and zoomed the picture.

The tiniest of sounds escaped her lips. Her hand shook and she almost dropped the phone, but she managed to steady her right arm—left hand over that tattoo, calming her.

The rocks and sand were moving, all right. Shifting and scuttling, covered with crabs large and small. Even horseshoe crabs. There were a few lobsters, dying on the rocks. A small octopus slithered across the sand toward the path, moving almost without moving, as if it glided in her direction by will alone. Down at the water’s edge, fish flopped in the surf like they had tried to come ashore.

Staring through the zoomed camera image, breath caught in her throat, Jenny scanned the path and the water’s edge again, but something at the upper edge of the image drew her attention and she tilted the camera up to see pale hands gripping the weathered boards, and then a dead woman hauled herself up onto the dock.

Jenny cried out. Dropped the phone. Heard it crack but reached for it anyway. Bumped it with her fingers so it skittered out of her reach and she had to follow it and pick it up, opening the camera again. Zooming again.

The woman on the dock wasn’t alone. A bald man in sodden, salt-bleached tatters crawled and rolled in the surf, managed to get onto his knees, and then stood. He turned and looked through the opening in the pines, straight up at Jenny’s house. Or he would have, if he’d had eyes. At this distance, even with the zoom on the phone, it was hard to tell, but they looked like nothing but black pits to her.

Out in the water, something moved. Not a shark fin this time. The top of a head, another man, walking toward shore, his white hair and beard tangled with seaweed.

Three so far, moving in like the crabs. Moving in like the gulls. People who’d been called by the sea and whose lives had ended in its depths, one way or another. Pale things, drawn back by an allure they’d never understood while alive.

Strangely calm, Jenny placed her cracked phone on the railing beside her coffee mug. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She traced her fingers over the triple-spiral tattoo, that infinite wave, then clamped her hand down over it. The ink turned so cold it felt like teeth biting deep.

Tears welled in her eyes as that familiar floating calm lifted her and she took several breaths. If only she could have kept her eyes closed and floated in that peace forever.

Instead, she opened them. The gulls had begun to circle closer. The blanket of crabs scuttled up the path between the pines. The small octopus would be down there, gliding along with them, although she couldn’t make it out. The people, though… she didn’t need the camera zoom to see those figures stumbling in the shadows of the pines.

She wanted to give herself over to the ink. To the infinite sea. But she had been a fool to think that she could stay in one place and not have the lure intensify.

Jenny turned in a slow circle, looking past the pine trees and her new house, imagining what lay beyond it all, trying to think of someplace, anyplace, she might run. A flutter of wings made her spin around and she stared at the single gull that alighted on the railing between her coffee mug and her cracked phone. It stared at her, black eyes yearning.

She left the gull there on the deck, left her coffee and her phone and went inside, drawing the sliding glass door closed behind her. The house breathed, quiet except for the crackling in the fireplace. The wood smoke gave the whole place the scent of autumn, reminding her of better days.

The metal screen curtain on the fireplace slid back easily. Jenny took the little iron ash shovel that hung with the tongs and poker, and she rested it on top of the burning logs. Crouched there, she waited while the iron grew hot, waited as her knees began to ache. When the first gull hit the slider, she didn’t flinch. It happened many times a day and she’d learned to ignore the sound. Her gaze shifted to her left forearm. Her sweater sleeve had slid down to cover the tattoo there and she slid it back up so that she could look at her father’s name and wonder how it had come to this. Had he been searching for the talisman or had he brought it up from the sea bottom with his net or a hook? Had he cut open a fish and found it inside?

It didn’t matter now, but still Jenny wondered.

The little hairs on her arm stood up and she shivered. Despite her nearness to the fire, or perhaps because of it, the ink on her right forearm felt icier than ever. The cold seemed almost to cut her, but she didn’t look at that triple spiral now, refused to glance at that symbol of the infinite sea despite the yearning in her.

Long minutes passed.

Another thump against the glass. Something scratched against it but she didn’t look. Jenny told herself it was just a gull, or maybe the first of the crabs to arrive.

She took the iron shovel from the fire with her left hand, stretched out her right and placed the flame-heated metal against the spiral tattoo. Hissing through her teeth, shuddering, she squeezed her eyes shut and kept the metal pressed there, as tightly as she could. The smell of searing flesh nearly made her retch and she went down on both knees, weeping silently as she fought the urge to take the shovel away.

At last she slumped to her side and let it fall from her hand. Breathing fast, almost hyperventilating, Jenny forced herself to look at the ruined skin. The tattoo had been cracked and blistered and reddened, but the ink showed through.

The cool solace of the sea slid up her arm, soothing the burn.

Jenny sat up and reached her left hand into the fireplace. She screamed as she grabbed the top log, cried out in agony as she dragged it out and pressed it to the spiral tattoo. Body rigid, she held it until her vision went dark and she slumped again to the floor.

The heat on her face brought her around. Her eyelids fluttered and she found herself staring at the still-burning log, bright embers glowing in the wood. It had landed on the tile between her body and the fireplace, and she knew the whole house could have gone up in flames. The idea did not terrify her the way it should have.

Her left hand sang with pain. Her right forearm screamed with it. Awkwardly, she shifted into a sitting position, cradling that left hand in her lap and the right arm across her knee. Full of dread, she braced herself to look down at the tattoo she’d worked so hard to destroy.

Even before she saw the wreckage there, saw the hideous, blackened, oozing flesh that would bear the scars of this day forever, she shuddered with relief. That peace she’d found had left her. The symbol had been burned away. No cool solace touched her skin.

Slumping, crying softly out of pain and gratitude, she found herself staring at the other tattoo. The one on the inside of her left arm. The one with her father’s name and the dates of his birth and death.

A terrible thought occurred to her.

The most terrible thought.

“No,” she whispered, launching shakily to her feet. “Oh, no.”

In agony from her burns, Jenny stumbled to the sliding glass door. With her good hand she dragged it open, then ran out onto the deck and down the stairs, ignoring her cracked phone and her coffee mug, noticing only that the gulls were gone.

“No,” she whispered as she turned at the bottom of the steps and ran down along the path between the pines.

If only she’d waited.

Heart thundering, left hand still cradled against her, she picked up speed, stumbled and nearly fell but managed to catch herself as she ran in the shadows of those trees. There were still crabs there, dozens of them, but they scurried away from her as she ran past them, disturbed by her presence. Searching for some comfort she could no longer provide.

At the dock, she paused a moment, staring out at the waves. Her burns throbbed, the pain only growing, and she felt as if they were still on fire.

Jenny strode out onto the dock, scanning the water for any sign.

“Daddy?” she called, quietly at first. Then again, louder, almost screaming.

She fell to her knees on the warped and weathered boards and stared out at the open sea.

It gave her no peace.