Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans)

by Richard Chizmar

  Andy realized that he was lying on a beach and mentally babbling.

  He sat up with a start.

  Why was he lying on a beach in the middle of the night staring at the stars?

  And…he realized with the heavy movement of his erection as he shifted…why was he naked?

  It came back to him with a flash, the swim to the hidden cavern, the trunks of treasure, the naked woman who had never said a word to him yet somehow had stripped and taken him.

  Holy shit.

  But how had he ended up back here? And where were—? He stopped asking the question as he turned and saw the dark outline of his swimsuit crumpled next to his waist. Andy shook his head and yanked one leg hole over his foot. It was almost painful to pull the waistband over his manhood…which remained throbbingly, painfully erect.

  “What the fuck happened tonight,” he whispered, as he began to walk, a little unsteadily, back up the beach towards the faint lights of the town above.

  * * *

  Rollin-de-Callais was a dead town. When Andy woke up the next morning, and walked through the empty lobby of his hotel, he realized that while there were a lot of buildings, nobody really lived here. There had been an old stone sign, upon entering the town. And a long row of buildings, classic, long-standing stone structures that had clearly been constructed long before Andy’s great-great-grandparents had been conceived. The buildings were hundreds of years old, and there was a hotel and nearby bar…but really, when you began walking around…it was quickly evident that there were very few structures that were actually occupied. Most had glass that was not only spiderwebbed with cracks, but frosted brown with the age of disuse.

  Andy left his hotel and walked a few blocks, noting that all of the facades seemed well-aged. More than “well.” Cracked stone. Dirty, spider-webbed windows. Closed doors. The place was a museum of dust and age. As he walked down one block, Andy wondered if anyone had been there in months. Maybe years.

  It was depressing.

  Eventually, he found a block where there was a fruit market, another hotel, and a café that was serving breakfast. He found a table and sat down, ordering a coffee and some eggs from a dour-looking old waitress who may or may not have spoken English. He honestly wasn’t sure if they’d communicated or not when she nodded and walked away from the table.

  But she did come back with a steaming cup of something black…so he had hopes for his plate.

  It had scrambled eggs, a biscuit…and a brown, dried out thing that could perhaps be called bacon. He chewed it and determined that no bacon had ever tasted so poorly. It was burnt and crusty.

  He drank his tiny bitter cup of coffee and stared at the pictures on the brick walls. Black and white stills of people who he did not recognize, and brands of food (or beer) that he had never tasted.

  There was only one other patron at the place, at a table in the corner near a window. Andy stole the occasional glance in her direction, but she did not appear to share his curiosity. He worked on his breakfast in silence, and then, when the sullen waitress took his credit card for the bill, he finished his last bitter, salty bites of food, and then left the depressing restaurant to walk around the rest of the seaport town.

  Andy wandered the next few blocks, where the town still seemed to have some life. A small news and sundries stand seemed to still be open, along with another small restaurant. There was a tiny grocery (which appeared to pull in no patrons at 9 a.m. in the morning), and a fish market, where an old Chinese man was still stocking the tray with fresh caught. It was early…and eerily still.

  But the quiet was not the sleepiness of a town just before waking up. It was the silence of an abandoned place. The silence of loss.

  Andy passed the tiny fish market and a small café, and then walked another three blocks past shuttered buildings before finding a corner with another open door; a small tavern called The Gentil which advertised “rooms available” on a small placard sign above the tall wooden doors. He looked down the street that ran along the edge of the cliff that led down to the ocean…and didn’t see any other buildings that appeared occupied. Everything appeared grey and eaten by the salt and wind. The wood facades showed wide dark cracks; the windows were boarded and broken.

  He looked over the edge of the cliff to the ocean, which surged grey and green against the shore below. It looked like a long fall down. The wind gusted against his chest, and he rocked with the force for a second before stepping back. If he fell, he suspected nobody would find him before the birds or crabs picked his bones completely clean below.

  There was nobody really around here to find him. Andy turned away from the ocean and walked back toward The Gentil behind him. He was curious about the place. It was like a last outpost before the wastelands. And when he walked inside…it was a different world. The air smelled warm, full of smoke and onion. The bar was long; heavy dark wood stretched down one wall and angled 90 degrees to jut against the other. Two golden taps stretched up from the center of the bar, and behind it, the wall was covered in mirrors and glass shelves; Andy could make out a long collection of bottles of scotch—McCallan and Old Pulteney 21 years—on the second shelf, most of them dusty with age.

  “How kin I help ya?” an old man’s voice came from the back of the room. Andy walked deeper into the room and saw the man finally, far to the right, sitting on low wooden chair just behind the edge of the bar. The man was portly and old; his head was nearly bald, but there were long tufts of white at his ears, and a strap from his glasses that hung behind his ears.

  “Just looking around,” Andy said.

  “Where ya from?”

  “San Francisco,” he answered. “Just got in last night.”

  The old man nodded. And raised a thick-tufted eyebrow. “And what in the serpent’s name would make ya come to these parts from there?”

  Andy shrugged. “A death wish?”

  The old man stifled a grin and nodded.

  “Might have some truth to your mouth there.”

  Andy walked across the creaking planks to rest an elbow on the bar. “What happened to everyone here?” He said. “It looks like the whole town closed up shop and walked away.”

  “They didn’t walk away,” the man said. “They swam.”

  “Did the fishing dry up here?”

  The man shook his head. “The fish are just fine. It’s about the other things that swim in those waters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The old man shrugged. “The ocean giveth, and the ocean taketh away. Some of us leave…and some of us have stayed.”

  Andy stepped closer to the man. “How long have you lived here?”

  “All me life,” the man said. “It’s where I was born. But that don’t make it a place that’s safe. That don’t make it a place where people can survive and thrive. Take a look outside and you’ll see what I mean there.”

  “That’s my point,” Andy said.

  The man put a hand on the edge of the bar and pulled himself upright, with a grunt and a moan.

  “I will tell you this,” he said. “The faster you get out of this town, the longer you’ll see the sunset.”

  With that, the man turned his back, and hobbled to a doorway behind the desk. He disappeared through it and never looked back, leaving Andy in an empty lobby.

  “Well,” he said aloud. “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t need a room here. He should be in sales.”

  Andy looked around the old room and shrugged. Then he pushed open the door and stepped back out on to the street.

  He’d learned nothing. Apparently, he had been dismissed.

  Andy shrugged, and walked back to his own hotel as he considered. He was here to swim to the pirate’s hidden chests. He wasn’t going to accomplish that by diving into the waters that other people told him to.

  He walked back through the mostly mothballed town and decided to change clothes and head back to the cave he had been in yesterday. When he walked into the lobby of his small hotel, he h
eard a couple speaking vehemently in French in the sitting room…and an old man demanding something at the front desk in German. To him, it felt as if the town had decided that the tourist was gone, and the real people had taken over again. And the real people didn’t speak English.

  He walked past them all and walked up the creaky back stairs to change and get the things he needed from his room. After the previous night, he thought what he really needed was a pepper spray that worked underwater. A woman had stopped him from getting what he’d come for yesterday, and while the flashes of memory he had of the event made him feel both warm with excitement and queasy with guilt, he didn’t need her to get in his way again. This had been an expensive journey…and he needed to walk away with something to show for it.

  Andy walked down the creaky back wooden stairs with a backpack on his shoulder that he hoped to fill with some shiny things from an old abandoned pirate’s chest. But first, he had to swim there again…and after yesterday, it was not looking like he could bet on being there alone.

  Andy stripped down to his trunks on the beach, and dropped his clothes next to the grey and listing lifeguard station that remained (and appeared to have been long relegated to abandoned status). He pulled the straps of the backpack onto his bare shoulders and walked down the cool sand and into the breaking waves.

  He hoped that in the middle of the day that he wouldn’t run into whatever force he had yesterday. With a deep breath and a leap, he was head down into the shadow of the waves.

  * * *

  The dark spot in the wall underwater was easy to find after yesterday…it came up quickly as he swam along the rocky finger in the water, and Andy pulled himself up and through it. When he stepped onto the dry area above the water level, Andy’s heart began to beat double time. What if the woman who’d found him yesterday was still here?

  The best thing he could do would be to work fast.

  Andy flipped on the waterproofed flashlight that he’d packed and looked around the cavern. He quickly found the chests he’d seen the day before. He shone the light all around the underwater cavern, but other than grey walls, there was nothing to be seen. It was silent here, and dark.

  Andy held the backpack open next to one of the chests, and began to move the gold chains and coins from the treasure chest into his own holder. The pirate’s chest didn’t need these things any more. It wouldn’t care if he divested them. He worked fast. But tried in vain to do it quietly. With every clink of metal on coin, Andy shivered. And looked around. He saw nothing moving in the shadows, but he felt as if a hundred eyes were watching him. He was a beacon in the middle of the dark.

  The backpack filled slowly, and Andy lifted it several times to make sure it hadn’t grown too heavy. It would be just his luck to strap it on his back, end up sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and drowning because he couldn’t carry it and couldn’t get it off his shoulders.

  He hefted it when it was about three-quarters full and decided that that was the limit. Then he swung it onto his back and stood. Holding the flashlight out in front of him, Andy started walking deeper into the cavern. He knew the safest course of action would be to dive back down the hole that he came in through…but he was curious. Where did this cavern lead…was there anything else to see?

  The floor was grey and glossy when he shown the flash across it. The walls around him looked the same and grew narrower the farther he walked from the entrance. Andy stepped carefully across the damp surface, and after just a few yards, the room narrowed to a small corridor. He held the flash ahead of him and looked at the space beyond. The corridor narrowed, but on the other side, he could see that it opened out again into a wide space. And in that space…there were things that should not have been there. Things that would not normally being in a cave that was only accessible from a doorway beneath the mark of low tide.

  The flash moved across a latticework of wooden walls, and something that looked, from a distance, like rumpled blankets. Andy took a breath. He knew now that the woman who’d pressed him to the ground (now, there was a euphemism) wasn’t just someone else who had happened on the cave at the same time he had. People lived down here.

  A chill went down his back when he realized that the booty in his backpack was not just lost goods. If people lived down here, then the chests were not abandoned. And that made him a thief, not a scavenger.

  Andy stepped back from the corridor and moved the flash back from chest-high to focus on the floor. He was not putting the stuff back. He’d waited years and flown halfway around the world to find it. So he could not be found here.

  Something slapped, wetly, on the floor somewhere nearby. He didn’t wait to see what it was. Andy ran to the small open pool that led back out to the ocean. He jumped in feet-first, and as his head slipped below the surface, he thought he saw something move in the cavern he’d left behind. It could have been the shifting shadows, but to him it looked like the shifting curls of a woman’s hair.

  Whatever it was, it vanished a second later as his face slid beneath the steadily churning saltwater.

  He panicked at first, as the water sucked him and the backpack down; he didn’t float in the waves, he sank…like a stone.

  He imagined arms parting the water behind him, following him down into the blue. The thought propelled him to action; he kicked hard, cupped his hands, and swiped them to his side. A moment later, Andy stopped sinking, and instead began moving slowly away from the rock ledge and towards the shore. Every feathery touch of seaweed fronds on his feet made his heart jitter.

  But he walked out of the surf unchallenged. One large heavy backpack dripped water slowly but steadily down his back as he began the walk back up the sand and stairs to return to the town above. Or what was left of it.

  Every few steps, he turned his head and looked behind. But all he saw was the empty, untenanted sand of a lonely beach. No angry seawomen were chasing him down. He was alone on an empty beach.

  Andy left it behind as fast as humanly possible.

  The dining room of the inn was all but empty that evening, and Andy ate a bowl of soup and homemade bread alone in the back corner of the room. A fireplace blazed on one wall, throwing flickers of uncertain light against the wall of trophies. Large glossy-scaled sharks and other large fish were mounted across the room. Their eyes seemed to stare and watch the room with the shifting of the light. A shiver ran down Andy’s spine as the open eyes of the four-foot long, blue-gilled monster nearest to him seemed to swivel and stare straight at him.

  He looked away, refusing to hold eye contact with the dead. Instead he downed the last remnants of the bland but filling stew of beef, potato and leeks in a brown gravy, and then emptied the flagon of lager the waitress had offered.

  Waitress was probably a misnomer—she was likely the owner or wife of the owner, he thought. She had checked him in yesterday and was the sole person moving in and out of the kitchen. For all he knew she had cooked this dinner as well.

  An older couple sat in the other corner of the room talking in whispers. Every now and then, he caught one of them staring directly at him. They quickly looked away when he met their gaze. Between them and the fish…and the guilt of having a backpack full of treasure sitting unguarded upstairs, Andy decided not to stay for another lager. He put two foreign bills into the holder and pocketed a receipt. Then he pushed back his chair and went upstairs.

  There was nothing to do here but turn out the lights and go to sleep – the room had no television and was just a long and narrow space carved into the attic. The ceiling slanted down nearly to the floor on the side where his bed was shoved up against it, a tiny window broke the darkness of the night just to the other side of his headboard.

  Sleep came quickly in the tiny room. But it was a troubled sleep.

  Andy dreamed of that night so long ago; sex on the beach with Cassie, rough sex. And the darkness that spread out across the sand beneath her head when he realized too late what he’d accidentally done. She had brought him ou
t to that empty stretch of beach to help her cast a sex magic spell…and her implements of magic or voodoo or whatever you wanted to call them—candles and stones and a book of spells—he’d left buried in the sand as he’d walked her body to the edge of the California precipice and dumped it into the black waves. It was a memory he’d dreamed and relived a thousand times, only this time, as her limp body splashed into the ocean below, he suddenly felt himself pulled along. He was yanked off the cliff and sailed down the rocky bank behind her, splashing into the whitecaps just behind her feet. He could taste the salt on his lips and the burn in his eyes as he opened them to see her floating just below, a naked white cruciform, arms spread-eagle, hands reaching out, it seemed, to touch the bottom of the sea.

  Reaching out to touch skeletal fingers outstretched from the ocean floor.

  * * *

  Andy woke with a jolt, his heart pounding.

  His forehead felt wet, and cold.

  He had come halfway across the world but he would never escape the horror of that terrible, deadly night. The guilt weighed on him like an anchor. And right now that anchor was making him feel suffocated. He wiped the water off his face; it covered his hand and he wiped it clean on the bed. Too much. He couldn’t have sweated so much. Crazy. He wiped it again and felt how damp his hair was. Andy sat up, threw the covers off and stepped out of bed.

  He stepped across the room to reach the lamp on a small table just beyond the window. His right foot stepped in something cold.

  Something wet?

  The light clicked on, and he looked at the narrow passage that led from the bed to the hallway door just 12 or 15 feet away.

  There were footprints in his room.

  Wet footprints on the old wooden planks. They led to…and away…from his bed.

  “What the fuck,” Andy breathed.

  He sat down on the bed for a moment, gaping at the evidence. Someone had been staring at him sleeping. The footprints near the bed didn’t even look like prints…they were small pools, the water there had dripped and spread, while someone stood there, staring. The prints nearest the door had nearly evaporated.