by Mira Grant
When the Atargatis had reached its destination over the Mariana Trench, anchors had been dropped to help keep the ship in place. Six anchor chains in all extended from the lowest deck, down into the murky depths.
Six anchor chains provided handholds for the climbing creatures from below. Six anchor chains were swarmed, suddenly covered in light and motion and the occasional soft hissing from the things out of the depths. They swatted and clawed at one another when they trespassed into one another’s chosen paths, but without malice or rancor; they had a greater goal ahead of them, and did not have time for infighting or territorial disputes.
In a matter of minutes, the top layer of creatures had reached the rail. They hauled themselves over the edge, powerful arms allowing them to crawl along the deck as they slithered in search of prey, leaving a trail of thick slime behind them. The second wave found their passage eased by the slick, gelatinous layer, and caught up quickly. There was no hissing this time. Their prey was close.
Like all hunters, the things from the depths were shaped by and adapted to their environment. They were sleek and streamlined, with only their “hair” creating any drag on their long, lean forms. Food scarcity was not uncommon in the bathypelagic zones, and so they had learned to come up to the surface, to lure in prey with pleasant sounds as well as bright, fascinating lights. There were very few seagulls in their waters, simply because the birds that tried to feed in their hunting grounds never flew away again.
More and more poured up from below as they continued the taking of the Atargatis. Like the seagulls before them, the people aboard never stood a chance.
Even as the other scientists had scattered, some following Alexandra to see the captain, others consoling a distraught Jonny, or packing up their equipment in anticipation of the upcoming departure, Peter had remained where he was. He played the few seconds of footage from his camera over and over again. He played the footage he had copied from Kevin even more, studying the creature—the mermaid, for lack of a better word—as it rose from the depths, claimed its prey, and disappeared again.
It was beautiful. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life; that, having seen it, he could die content, knowing that he would never see anything so beautiful again. He wished he could have seen it for longer. More, he wished he could have taken it apart, studied it all the way down to its bones, and then built it back up again. Dissection without death, discovery without destruction. It was an impossible dream, but then, so was being on the scene when proof of mermaids was finally drawn up from the deeps. He was staring at the greatest scientific discovery his field would know during his lifetime, and if he was overcome by the wonder of it all, it was difficult to blame him.
A slight slithering sound caught his attention. He turned, and somehow it was only right when he saw his mermaid—or another that looked just like it—peeking around the corner of the nearest corridor. Lights flashed in the creature’s tangled “hair” like bioluminescent stars. Its eyes were most definitely fixed on him, tracking his motions with small, swift adjustments of its gaze.
“You can see,” he said, voice low and pleasant. “I thought you could. It’s nice to be sure.”
“To be sure,” mimicked the mermaid, in an imperfect recreation of his voice. “To be sure.”
Peter stared. Mimicry of the human voice as well as the human form. This was aggressive Mertensian mimicry of a degree he had never encountered before. It explained so much about mermaid mythology—the beautiful women, the beautiful songs. They could follow ships for days, listening to the sailors, until they found something the sailors would respond to. Then they could call them to the rail, and to the water, without ever letting themselves be seen to be anything more than a lithe silhouette with long, flowing hair.
“You are a clever thing, aren’t you?” he asked. He didn’t get out of his chair. If there was one mermaid on the deck, it stood to reason that there would be more. They were beautiful predators, and the ocean was a merciless cradle for their development: they would never have survived through the centuries if they had been foolish enough to follow their prey into hostile environments when they weren’t sure of winning. “Do you have a language?”
“Do you have a language?” echoed the mermaid, and slithered closer. It moved like a mudskipper on land, Peter noted. He would have liked to take measurements, to know how fast they could move. He would have liked to take blood samples, to measure blood oxygen, to know how long the mermaid could stay out of the water.
He was never going to know any of those things, and he found that he was content with this reality. He had seen a mermaid before he died. How could he demand anything more?
The mermaid slithered closer still. He could see the small, fluttering membranes inside its nasal passages—the creature was breathing! It was actually breathing! It must have possessed at least rudimentary lungs. But…why? The Mariana Trench was the very definition of deep water. What evolutionary pressures could possibly have led a creature born in its crushing depths to need the ability to breathe air?
“You’re a miracle,” he breathed.
“You’re a miracle,” the mermaid echoed, before it leaned up and carefully, almost delicately, ripped away his throat.
All over the Atargatis, people—and mermaids—were dying.
Not all of the crewmen were armed, but enough were, and half a dozen mermaids had been shot and shoved over the side before the creatures learned to retreat from humans who held metal in their hands. One of the interns had been wielding Sonja Weinstein’s bone saw, brought aboard in case of large animal necropsy, and was able to slice a mermaid bilaterally before another ripped his head from his shoulders. Peter Harris would have been stunned by what the creature’s entrails and internal organs revealed about it. He might even have warned someone while there was still time. But alas, Peter Harris was already dead, pulled over the side by the mermaid that had taken his throat, his voice, and his life. He gave no warnings, he sounded no alarms; he told no one that the worst was yet to come.
Jill Hale died in a hallway, her body blocking the door to the deck long enough for three more mermaids to slither inside and turn the packed lounge she had been fleeing for into an abattoir.
Jonny Chen died on the deck when his gun ran out of bullets and the mermaids swarmed, reducing him to bloody pieces which they carried with them, one by one, as they dropped back into the sea.
David was heading for the engines, dispatched by Captain Seghers to find out why they weren’t moving yet, when he came around a corner and found three mermaids exchanging quick, furtive hand signals. He froze. Their signs were limited by the webs on their fingers, but he hadn’t spent his life speaking ASL without learning how to recognize other languages.
Maybe they were intelligent. Maybe there was a chance. He stomped the deck, causing all three mermaids to whip around and stare at him. Swallowing hard, he mimicked the signs he’d seen them making, hoping he wasn’t insulting their mothers or something.
The mermaids stared, and didn’t move. David began to think that this might work.
‘David,’ he signed, and pointed to himself. ‘David.’
One of the mermaids raised its hand and cautiously signed something, before pointing to its own chest.
David pointed to the mermaid and repeated the sign. Then he pointed to himself, and signed ‘David.’
The mermaid did the same. It couldn’t quite form the “v,” but what it managed was close enough to make it clear that it was trying to sign David’s name.
He nodded, hoping that the mermaids would put the same meaning on the gesture as he did. Then he repeated the sign he assumed was the first mermaid’s name, and pointed to the rail. The mermaids looked at him blankly. He made the sign again.
The mermaids turned back to one another, fingers moving too fast for him to follow. Then the mermaid he had been communicating with turned back to him. ‘David,’ it signed, followed by the sign for its own name. Then it pointe
d to the rail.
David nodded.
The mermaid looked as bewildered as it was possible for such a creature to look. It slithered cautiously toward him. David forced himself to remain perfectly still. He was getting through to the creatures. If he could just convince them to leave…
The mermaid lifted itself off the floor, somehow supporting its weight on its tail as it leaned forward, grabbed him, and then pitched over the rail. The two hit the water and vanished without a sound.
The other two mermaids turned back to each other. ‘Strange thing wanted to be eaten,’ signed the first. ‘Why?’
The other mermaid made a gesture indicating its indifference. Who knew why strange things did anything? They were delicious. That was all that mattered.
David drowned before he could be torn apart.
The engines finally roared fully to life some fifteen minutes after the assault on the ship began. Most of the crew had stopped answering their walkies. David hadn’t been seen since he left to check in with engineering. Captain Jovanie Seghers gripped the wheel, jaw clenched white, and hit the button for the intercom with her elbow.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are leaving,” she announced. “Stay where you are. We’re going home.”
Crammed into the back of the cabin, Kevin replayed his footage of the first mermaid’s attack over and over again, watching it through the viewfinder. Alexandra and Anne were pressed up against him, their own eyes on the screen. Curran had tried to confiscate the hard drive for “safe keeping” before Captain Seghers kicked him out, calling him a distraction and hence a danger.
Most of the screaming from outside had stopped. He was probably dead now. Somehow, none of the trio could bring themselves to be terribly upset on his behalf.
Alexandra frowned at the viewfinder. “Kevin, did you see any more of these things on the deck before we slammed the door?”
“About twenty,” he said grimly. “They took apart half my crew like they were made of paper.”
“Did they all look like this one?”
“I think so? I have footage, hang on.” He paused the film before fast-forwarding through jerky images. When he stopped, it was on a deck crawling with mermaids, all of them slithering through the slime trails created by their fellows.
Alexandra stared at the screen, cheeks growing slowly pale. Then, to the surprise of everyone around her, she began to laugh.
“You okay?” asked Anne, looking alarmed as Alexandra sank slowly down into a crouch, her hands pressed flat against her face.
“Two,” she moaned. “We’ve answered two questions about mermaids.”
“What?” Captain Seghers turned. “What is she laughing about?”
“Deep-sea fish frequently demonstrate extreme sexual dimorphism,” said Alexandra, not uncovering her face. “One female to dozens, even hundreds of males. They were taking the bodies over the rail. Why? They can’t eat them all. Can’t store food in the water. But they can feed them to something larger. Something they wanted to impress.”
The sea in front of the prow was getting lighter, as if something very bright and very large were rising out of the depths. Jovanie clenched her hands tight around the wheel, and watched it come. One by one, the others in the cabin straightened or turned away from their screens and came to join her, watching as the sea lit up like a second sun.
Only Alexandra kept her face covered the entire time.
Only Alexandra was fortunate enough to die without being forced to see.
The Atargatis was found by the USS Danvers six weeks later, floating without guidance some two hundred miles off its last known position. The window leading to the control room had been smashed from the outside, allowing the waves to damage the controls. There were no bodies found, either there or in the stretch of ocean where the ship had supposedly been anchored before the disaster.
The USS Danvers searched for three days, until her crew became uncomfortable, reporting strange lights in the water, and stranger noises in the night. They turned around and sailed for shore on the morning of the fourth day.
Leave the dark places in the sea for fools and explorers. The USS Danvers, unlike the Atargatis, was going home.
The female anglerfish is several hundred times the size of the male.
They can be found in oceans and coastal regions around the world.
The inquiry into what happened on the Atargatis is still ongoing.
