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  OCEAN GRAVE

  A Novel of Deep Sea Horror

  by

  Matt Serafini

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2019 by Matt Serafini

  Prologue

  Carly Grayson woke and at once remembered she was on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Her heart drummed so hard the bed sheets did little jumping jacks over her chest.

  She rolled onto her side with a soft groan and draped an arm over Jesh. Her hand fell instead over a mound of unoccupied blankets.

  A tremor of anxiety popped her eyes wide. Her hand swept for the Xanax bottle on the nearby bed table. The boat’s swells were gentle-but-constant. That should’ve been enough to calm her, only she didn’t like being alone at night.

  That was enough to bring it.

  And it always started the same. An explosion beneath the ribs followed by agitation that gnawed at her brain. Once that happened, fear was the only thing she could think. And that fear spread through her body, where her hands danced jitters and her speech became sporadic stutters.

  Nobody should live this way.

  Carly dropped an oval pill on her tongue and knocked it back without water, then crawled to the edge of the bed and watched the private bathroom’s dark interior like a curious cat, hoping to hear Jesh’s familiar shuffles inside the gloom.

  He was up twice a night most nights because his bladder was the size of a nickel. Tonight, though, the door was ajar and the lavatory beyond it, vacant.

  Carly couldn’t move off the bed. Part of her felt safe so long as she remained planted on this tiny island of Egyptian cotton pillows. Her hands pulled the silk sheets into stress balls as the Indian Ocean’s constant ebbs threatened her equilibrium. Her eyes pulled shut but small trails of salt water leaked. This while her brain pleaded to be anything but stupid.

  There was an explanation for Jesh’s absence. They weren’t alone on the yacht after all, something that had annoyed her upon leaving port. She’d known then this was going to be more than a much needed luxury vacation.

  Carly stared at the floor like it was out of reach. She considered touching down, as if doing so might result in an electric shock.

  Okay, she thought, reminding herself that she’d worked once for David O. Russell and could now survive anything.

  Her feet warmed to the wool carpet. She took the midnight satin robe slung over the night table. The way it felt against her sun-kissed flesh offered slight relief quickly chased off by the thumping unease in her heart.

  In that moment, the bedroom door appeared a serious obstacle to overcome. Carly grabbed a deep breath and stashed it in her lungs, waiting for the calm. From the rounded vanity mirror on the wall, her reflection tried slipping past unnoticed. Its sudden appearance, startling. Her ocean eyes were soaked, her blonde hair a ruffled mop.

  She resented the sight. Here was a woman in no control of her emotions. In no control of anything.

  Carly cursed the cliché and forced her hand around the doorknob.

  It swung toward her to reveal a pitch-dark hall beyond. A check of her robe’s pockets reminded her that her cell phone was just back across the room, parked beside the Xanax. Close enough, but the mere sight of her stillborn quarters filled her with dread.

  Instead of backtracking, Carly pushed on—motivated to find the others. To find anyone. Certain they were one deck up. Wouldn’t have been the first time they traded sleep for excesses she had no desire to indulge in.

  She was through playing the Whore’s Game. This wasn’t Hollywood. The pay was comparable to what she got when star power could open a show, though she wasn’t about to get on her knees to show gratitude. She suspected that had been Jesh’s motivation for bringing others along.

  The other bunks in the hall were shut, and she wasn’t about to go pushing into those rooms and give anyone the wrong idea. Instead she hurried to the end of the hall, up through the compact stairwell to the next deck. The living quarters were vacant.

  Carly’s heart roared. A terrible moment to be passing the unmanned bar. Rows of top shelf bottlenecks returned memories of a hundred Hollywood nights. A thousand stories. A million vices. A lifetime ago. She was a mother now. But there was safety at the bottom of a glass and she needed that. More than anything, she needed that.

  She reached toward the closest glass neck, pausing once she glimpsed herself in the reflection.

  The mirrors aboard the Star Time were telling a story tonight. In this one, Carly saw the actress she used to be. The moonlight shining through the windows caught her just right. An improvement on the depressing scene below. This time, it was like she’d sauntered onto a well-lit set.

  Despite the constant thrum of panic vibrating through her, Carly found a moment of solitude in her vanity. She turned her chin, admiring the contours of her face. Hard to believe she was forty-four later this year.

  Carly took a second to peruse the selection, forgetting her predicament long enough to reach for the brand new bottle of Stoli. She uncapped it and reached down under the bar for a square glass. A few ice cubes remained inside a bucket of melt. It’d been years since she’d tended bar. The memory made her smile.

  “Gonna stop you one way or the other,” Carly whispered to her anxiety.

  She slid the cabin door aside and carried the glass into the open air, sipping steadily as a lazy wind made her bed hair go dancing across her eyes.

  Her stomach tightened into sailor’s knots as she circled the deck and found it empty.

  Her anxiety, now validated, took the opportunity to grow. It drowned out Carly’s feeble chemical and alcoholic suppressants. It pained her to feel this, the panic spreading like cancer.

  The glass slipped through her wobbling fingers and shattered around her bare feet. Her hands clawed at her collarbone as if a turtleneck blocked her windpipe.

  Jesh had shown her once how to operate the lights. But she’d only been half paying attention, sunning herself on the bow, pretending not to notice all the other men, his “partners” leering at her.

  The switches were on the helm—one level up from topside. Carly shuddered at the thought of retracing her steps through the darkened cabin interior to get there. But there was another way, a thin iron ladder bolted to the exterior of the wall.

  It was easier said than done, given her panic. But she needed to get the lights back on. A trembling hand closed on one of the upper rungs, and a bare foot stepped to another. She was slow to ascend, taking her time to ensure she didn’t lose her grip.

  At the top, the only light aboard the ship came from inside the helm. She half expected to find Jesh there, blabbering some excuse about how the gang got blitzed and then on a drunken whim decided it just had to do some night fishing and to go back to sleep, dear. Carly would prefer that, because then this nightmare would be over.

  Only the helm was as desolate as every other inch of this ship. Carly stepped through the door, pausing to get her bearings in the darkness. The door came slamming back into place, giving her butt a “get moving” smack.

  Carly moved toward the control seat. The console was full of switches and knobs that surrounded the stainless steering wheel on three sides. A diagram of the ship was positioned overhead, where blinking LED lights would alert the captain to issues below. There were controls for the bow thruster, along with dual upper and lower autopilot dials. Lower helm air conditioning, as well as radar and GPS.

  When Carly had been a teenager in Grand Rapids, she was placed behind the controls of a speedboat while she and her friends vacationed on Reeds Lake. She was there for the waterskiing, but her then boyfriend, a boy named John whose last name she couldn’t remember, had leapt overboard to escape a mosquito swarm. Carly had intended to lower the throttle but instead gunned it, clipp
ing John’s shoulder with the bow. Nothing serious, five stitches, though she hadn’t trusted herself then and that went triple now because Jesh’s boat was like a NASA spaceship, comparatively.

  On top of the marble counter was an old map, little clusters of unpopulated islands circled in red Sharpie and then, later, she assumed, crossed off in black. One island was only circled in red, and hadn’t yet been slashed through in dark felt-tip.

  It made sense at last. Jesh and his “partners” were searching for something.

  The light switches were off to the side of the helm and Carly flipped them one by one. The overheads for the hull. The sidelights. The sternlight. The mastheads. Slowly but surely, shadows went running off the Star Time and from this vantage, Carly’s paranoia was reinforced. She was all alone.

  With one last button left to flick, she hit the under light. The one that set the surrounding ocean ablaze in deep neon purple.

  Jesh often sailed into shallows where he’d beg Carly to take a midnight skinny dip. For inspiration. He so badly wanted to glimpse her among marine life. To record her. “Beauty among beauty” he’d say. All she could think about was when, and not if, that footage would be leaked to the Internet.

  Carly rose to her haunches and looked down at the water. The under light’s purple glow was muted from behind the window glass. Carly brushed her palm against it, thinking it smudged. It wasn’t.

  She was curious now and went to the door, stepping outside and squinting over the rail. The relief she dared to feel was short-lived and the anxiety came roaring back because it didn’t like being doubted.

  The under light was muted by something. By a spill of dark crimson water that sat atop the surface like oil. In that murk, appendages bobbed like vegetables in soup. Carly stared straight at it until her eyes adjusted.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  She was looking at a piece of a hand, part of a thigh, and an errant arm that drummed against the hull with a lazy knock.

  Carly’s eyes glossed and tears began tickling her cheeks. She could only watch that ebbing water, struck by the realization that it was all that remained of the people who had once been passengers aboard the Star Time.

  The blood thinned at last, ceding ground to the ocean’s natural color while restoring also the vibrant under light glow. A shadow glided out from beneath the ship, scraping against the steel hull with a deep rumble that Carly felt in her molars.

  She choked on a silent scream. Or maybe it was a gag. It didn’t matter. Because Carly was already sinking to her knees, trembling so hard she had to curl into a fetal position in order to stop it.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, regretting every decision that had brought her here.

  The ship swayed and all Carly could think about were the severed body parts settling onto the ocean floor somewhere beneath her.

  Part One

  THE HUNT

  One

  Maxamed Abir Kaahin stepped off the twin-engine plane in Algeria and had not a moment to reflect on the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea as it lapped against the golden dunes beyond the slim strip of runway.

  It wasn’t often that he was away from his beloved isle of Madagascar, and whenever he did travel, it was never for pleasure. Just business.

  Always business.

  The humidity here was such that his forehead grew oily and the curl of his underarm hair began to itch. Across the tarmac, he watched women in flossy bikinis bake beneath the scorching sun and wondered why their men allowed them to expose such gratuitous flesh.

  Ten years ago, a country like Algeria held only modest aspirations of transforming into a tourist economy. Now, western influence could not be ignored in an ever-expanding global market. The United States and European Union controlled much of the world and, for now, were worth catering to.

  Kaahin laughed when those countries openly protested the intake of refugees, citing claims that such “invaders” would inevitably reshape their cultures. He was mercilessly unsympathetic to that line of thinking, because the poison of the west had been doing the same to his people for as long as he could remember.

  Not in the same way, of course. Western degeneracy was worse. Because he could never shield his daughters from it forever. They would inevitably seek university where their minds would corrode. The vilest thing about western education was how it turned children against parents.

  Reshape their cultures? he thought. Not soon enough.

  “We near the meeting,” Alzir said as they reached the tinted sedan parked at the edge of the private runway.

  “And the conditions are satisfied?”

  “To the letter,” Alzir told him.

  Kaahin climbed into the sedan and Alzir followed, slipping his Desert Eagle out from beneath the linen doublet once they were removed from the sight of prying tourists.

  The driver wasn’t theirs, but a local boy on loan from a partner. A guy named Cardiff who owned nightlife up and down this beachfront, and to whom they’d offloaded millions in merchandise over the years.

  The young driver watched his passengers settle into the vehicle and flashed a gold-capped smile upon glimpsing Alzir’s golden gun.

  “The Sundry,” Alzir said and flicked his wrist so the boy turned back toward his business. The kid shifted the sedan into drive and stomped the pedal.

  He was good, driving erratically in order to weed out any tails, of which there were none. “Is not far,” Alzir said. “Ten minutes, further down the beach.”

  Kaahin stared out at calm emerald waters, thinking about how much more comfortable he was out there.

  “Here,” the boy said.

  The Sundry was easy to spot as the sedan rolled up on a strip of tourist traps. It was a tiered building and each level was shorter and more slanted than the previous. One of its sides was curved in order to make it relentlessly modern.

  Western.

  Kaahin found it an eyesore, though it seemed a fine place to hold a meeting. The wrong people would stick out like sore thumbs among authentic vacationers.

  Whether it was INTERPOL, the CIA, or the other one hundred law enforcement agencies that hunted pirates, they never looked quite right—not when you’d been watching them work your whole life.

  Meetings like this required Kevlar. Kaahin’s wasn’t a profession where people tried arresting you. But he wouldn’t wear it today because he was not about to expose his paranoia to a pair of smug western producers. He’d take their money, sure, and tell his story, yes, but only on his terms. And if they betrayed what little trust had been built over the last twelve months of covert correspondences, then Alzir had already been granted permission to cut them down.

  Secretly, he wanted Alzir to cut them down.

  The sedan stopped in front of the ridiculous structure that would look more natural on Miami Beach. Blue neon lights danced across the clean stucco surface, and Kaahin imagined quite a few local men sneaking in here to get a piece of the western degeneracy they promised their wives they despised.

  “You wait here,” Alzir told the driver. “Running.”

  The boy nodded and eyed every bit of foot traffic that got within kilometers of the car. He seemed tense now that it was go time. And that was good. A million things could go wrong.

  “The place,” Alzir said, and cracked the door to get out.

  Kaahin had his doubts about any of this, as always. But the producers had stood up to every bit of scrutiny he could afford. And they had insisted upon holding the meeting in neutral suites arranged by the hotel itself.

  Alzir requested the manager once they reached the front desk. The clerk mumbled into his lapel mic, seconds passed, and the manager appeared from around the corner as if he’d been waiting on mark. He smiled, pretending to be comfortable in the presence of an international criminal.

  “Please,” the manager said and escorted them to a VIP elevator accessible only through his key card swipe.

  Then they were on their way up.

  The producers were waiting in t
he suite when they got there. The one called Hudson had hair the color of desert sand and his beard was flecked with white powder. He drank bourbon like it was water and chuffed his nose every thirty seconds.

  The second man, Gaffney, appeared ready to do all the talking. “This is an honor,” he said, speaking in slow motion. “A Real. Bona fide. Honor.”

  Kaahin ignored the flattery and took a seat at the table of flushed liquor bottles. Alzir stood at the back of the room like a loaded spring.

  “I do not see cameras,” Kaahin said.

  Gaffney slapped his iPhone down on the table and smiled. “We travel light, my man.”

  Hudson continued to sniff as they exchanged trivialities. Lovely weather, lovelier women, and what an honor it was to share this space with the one and only Pirate King.

  They eased into the business side of things. They planned to shoot the whole conversation today. A series of mostly legible questions were scribbled on a yellow notepad in the center of the table, and a damp ring stain marked the top corner of it.

  They discussed particulars. Upon commencement of this arrangement, one hundred thousand US dollars was to be wired into a bank account of Kaahin’s choosing. Upon successful transfer of this payout, he would allow these men their twenty questions.

  “And, hey,” Gaffney said. “Should you want anything extra, we’ve got, you know, a few beach bodies on call.”

  “Please,” Kaahin shrugged. No, he did not desire one of their Hollywood whores. He’d been around enough sheiks to know the kinds of things Hollywood women did for money. There was no more depraved beast on the planet. “The money for your questions. And that will be all.”

  “We can respect that,” Hudson said, rubbing his nose on the back of his hand. “Thing is, my dude, we would like to do a pre-interview with you and your man back there.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Nothing’s that,” Hudson grinned.

  “This is.”