Daniel was gone.
“Oh my God,” she said, in a tone of fascinated horror. “The narcissistic bastard knocked himself overboard.”
“Come on.” Suzanne grabbed her hand, dragging her toward the chaos. “I want pictures of this, and all my cameras are on the boat.”
There was no sign of Daniel when the pair reached the side. The sea was calm, giving no indication that it had just swallowed a man. Bikini models leaned over the rail, shouting and cursing, eyes scanning the horizon. Elena felt her stomach sink. She’d grown up in the Mariana Islands, been born and raised on Guam, and she’d heard stories about this stretch of ocean.
How could I have been fool enough to take this job? she thought, turning to the cabin. Only fools sail where so many have been lost. She waved her arms frantically, hoping he would see her even though she couldn’t see him. They needed to turn around. They needed to get out of here.
Elena didn’t consider herself a superstitious person, but she would have had to be living under a rock not to have heard people whispering about what happened around the Mariana Trench when the sun was bright and the waters were still, when the fish had moved on and the things in the deeps grew hungry. There had been that mess a few years back, with a research vessel and the television network that showed all the Star Trek reruns. How she’d laughed at the thought of their being foolish enough to sail there, in the open waters where the bad things were.
She wasn’t laughing now.
She wasn’t laughing when the screams started behind her, high and shrill and terrified, or when she felt the touch of a hand—oddly long and spindly, covered in a cool, clammy film, like aloe gel was smeared across the skin—on the back of her ankle. Elena stopped waving her arms. She closed her eyes. If she couldn’t see it, it wouldn’t be real. That was the way the world worked, wasn’t it?
Her scream, when it came, was short and sharp and quickly ended. The boat began to move, her brother finally throwing it into gear, but it was too little, too late; his own scream soon joined the fading chorus.
The yacht rented by Daniel Butcher for his private entertainment was found three days later, drifting some eight hundred miles from its chartered destination. No survivors were ever found.
Neither were the bodies.
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