Water

by Hardy, Natasha

  I stared at him desperately.

  “I will take you up again, but I want to show you something first,” he said. “Trust me.”

  His voice was somehow plaintive. He brushed his thumb over my cheek, the gesture slow and dreamlike in the water.

  I looked at the surface. The circle of light was only a hand’s breadth across. My lungs began to burn again as I searched his eyes and, out of sheer desperation, made the choice he’d been waiting for.

  He smiled.

  “Don’t hold onto a breath, it will only make you uncomfortable,” he instructed. “Breathe the air out through your nose and in through your mouth.”

  I nodded to show I understood and breathed out. This time he immediately filled my lungs with air again.

  “OK, wrap your arms around my neck and keep your legs as close to my body as you can.”

  I lifted my arms from where they’d been pushing uselessly against his bare chest, and put them awkwardly around his neck, my movements slow and weightless in the water. He was grinning mischievously as he suddenly pulled me against him, the warmth of his body pressing against the length of mine.

  My shorts billowed around me, and my bare legs brushed something as smooth as silk.

  My blood ran cold.

  It was the exact sensation I’d had in the jade pool. Exactly the same sensation as my recurring nightmare.

  I didn’t have time to think about it though because Merrick circled the perimeter of the pool with startling speed. I realised he was giving me the opportunity to practise our breathing, waiting for me to become completely comfortable, before he suddenly flipped us downwards and then very quickly spiralled us into a narrow passageway that seemed to be angled upward, although it could have just as easily been downwards I was so disoriented.

  The water lightened to a soft greeny blue, still crystal clear, as he slowed down to almost a complete stop. My eyes felt as though they would pop out of their sockets as I stretched them to take in the alien beauty that surrounded us.

  We were in a water-filled underground cave. I glanced upward as Merrick pointed to the ceiling, relieved to see sunlight filtering through some cracks in the rock above us.

  “We are beneath the fissure you leapt across earlier,” he explained, the perfect clarity of his voice still startling me.

  I nodded to show I understood, and accepted another breath from him as he released me and showed me how to float, suspended in the water above an exquisitely delicate world of ancient stalagmites that must have grown from the cave floor thousands of years ago. They glowed softly in pastel shades of green, blue, lilac, yellow and pink, each one delicately unique as it reached longingly for its partners which stretched from sections of the cave roof. Some of them had met each other in the middle all those years ago, before the cave became flooded with water, and Merrick wove gracefully between the columns they created circling back to me every couple of seconds to give me another breath.

  On one of his trips back to me I grabbed his arm before he could swim away and tried to speak. It came out as a muffled hurrrgmpf, but he smiled and replied easily.

  “It is beautiful.”

  Despite the exquisite beauty of the cave, I was still wary and painfully aware of how utterly dependent I was on Merrick for my next breath. The crisp mountain water had chilled me to the bone and the nagging worry about how I was going to get back to the surface, and most importantly the sun, clouded the beauty that surrounded me.

  Merrick seemed to read my mind, because on his next round back to me he pointed to the surface.

  I nodded as he wrapped his arms around me and swam quickly back through the passageway in the same disorientating swirling spiral before shooting to the surface, the speed of the water stinging my face.

  The warmth and light of the midday sun blinded me as we burst out of the pool in a wave of water.

  Despite the incredible beauty he’d shown me, I disentangled myself from him and swam quickly to the side, slipping on the smooth rocks in my hurry to get out of the water and away from him, dragging great gulps of air into my lungs.

  “What was that?” I rasped at Merrick, terror of the implications of what he’d just done and shown me making me breathless as I pulled myself out of the water onto the rock.

  He was laughing as he sprang nimbly onto a boulder opposite me.

  “The speed is awesome isn’t it?” he asked, grinning like I should have enjoyed the experience. “That cave is pretty average but the speed…” He laughed.

  “I’m not talking about the swimming,” I whispered, clenching my teeth angrily.

  He cocked his head to the side looking at me quizzically, surprise and amusement playing across his features.

  “How did you breathe for both of us?”

  I whispered, because I was afraid that if I didn’t whisper I’d be screaming at him, crazed and uncontrollable.

  He just ginned at me, looking a bit confused. “I already told you, I’m an Oceanid.”

  “No,” I told him emphatically, “you didn’t tell me that.”

  He cocked his head to the side, thinking. “Well, not in so many words I guess,” he replied.

  Even though we’d come looking for them, even though Josh’s story had sparked a deep longing in me for them to be real, I realised in that moment that I’d never actually expected to find any fish-people, or Oceanids or whatever they were called.

  It had been a strange alluring idea that they existed, but faced with the very obvious evidence that Merrick was decidedly more than human, I found myself scrambling to accept the reality of what he was saying.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked, exasperated by his casual demeanour, and hoping to find something solid I could cling to.

  “I know you’ve heard of mermaids?” he replied, squeezing the water out of his hair before running his fingers through it to smooth it away from his face. “I watched you play in your swimming pool at home, and I’ve seen the drawings you keep in the back of your diary of what you used to dream about. You know what an Oceanid is.”

  I gaped at him in astonishment, unable to articulate the shock at his obvious intimate knowledge of me, and finding his words oddly comforting as he reminded me of what I’d been dreaming about and maybe even yearning for my whole life.

  He grinned at my expression, waiting for me to say something more.

  A tiny spark of hope that I hadn’t even realised existed blossomed in my chest as the events of the past few days clicked into place with his nonchalant explanation and confidence that I already knew what he was.

  He’d been watching me carefully, and now smiled when I grinned back at him in delight.

  “So are you ready?” he asked.

  “Ready for what?” I countered, still feeling a little bewildered with how quickly a lifetime of dreams could become a reality.

  “To go and meet the others,” he replied, again looking bemused that I hadn’t already figured this out.

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “You should be,” he said, a little smile playing across his lips. “I mean, you took to breathing with me really quickly and your Dad…”

  His expression turned serious as he looked out over the swaying grasses and the mountain-framed view of patchwork meadows and farmland far below us.

  “Your Dad …” his next words were so quiet they almost drifted away on the breeze. “… is one of us.”

  I stopped breathing in shock.

  It was one thing to discover creatures I’d always suspected existed. Quite another to be told my father was one of them. I turned the idea over in my head, trying to view it from an angle that made any sense. Tiny pinpricks of memories assaulted me, anomalies that by themselves meant nothing but when viewed through this lens all came together to paint a strange picture, one that seemed to shift and move as another memory popped into focus until they eventually solidified.

  The absence of any family information about Dad’s parents or siblings, most obv
ious in his lack of oral history – I couldn’t remember a single story from his childhood, nothing good or bad.

  His complete lack of knowledge of any school subjects, he hadn’t been able to help me with reading or maths or any other subject.

  One of my more confusing memories – Dad staring at a television programme on whaling, big fat tears tracing frightening patterns down his cheeks.

  I’d been staring into the pool as I thought, absently trailing my foot through the water as I did so. The whispers I’d heard previously interrupted my scrambling thoughts, as my muscles locked down in shock.

  “You can hear them too can’t you?” Merrick asked, his face alive with delight.

  I stared at him, my mouth hanging open a little in shock.

  He laughed at my expression.

  “That’s how we communicate, through the water.”

  I snatched my foot out of the pool, looking into it anxiously.

  For the first time in my life I was facing the reality that there was other sentient life apart from humans on earth. That I could deal with, but the revelation of Dad possibly being an… ocean creature was something else entirely because the implications were that if Dad wasn’t human, then neither was I… not fully anyway.

  “What exactly are Oceanids?” I whispered, the sound floating in the hollow over the pool and echoing softly back at me.

  He looked up and straight into my eyes. Everything around me faded into a blur, and all that was left was the intensely beautiful and determinedly passionate expression on Merrick’s face. Every cell in my body strained towards him as I waited for him to tell me the “something” I knew would change my life forever.

  “We are water people, Nereids,” he clarified.

  “Uh, are you talking about… uh…fish-people as in like mermaids?” I stuttered.

  He winced and then nodded. “You could call us that too, I guess.”

  “So you’re telling me my Dad is a mermaid?” The sentence was a preposterous one.

  He shook his head and a moment of relief flooded me. “No, he’s a merman,” Merrick replied firmly.

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and stared at him.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Every Oceanid knows of your Dad, Alexandra, he was one of the greatest warriors we’ve ever had.”

  “Was?” I whispered weakly, my mind reeling.

  He nodded. “He left the ocean, and his people, a little over twenty years ago, but before that he spent a lot of time helping Oceanids to survive.”

  “But my Dad doesn’t even like the water,” I replied, “I’ve never seen him swim.”

  Merrick shrugged. “Well, there’s a good reason for that. If you had seen him swim you would have known that he wasn’t human.”

  Abruptly he sat up straighter and stared more intently into the pool, his mouth snapping shut and a low groan escaping from him.

  I was starting to freak out as again, the thought crossed my mind that I was being particularly stupid hanging out with a guy I didn’t know, who to all intents and purposes had almost killed me earlier and who was now behaving as if a variety of personalities were having a boxing match in his head.

  I stood and began to edge my way towards the side of the boulder, wondering how I was going to get across the chasm and then down to earth again without breaking my leg.

  “I think I’d better be getting back to the cave,” I said, interrupting whatever strange exchange was taking place in Merrick’s head. “The boys will be getting back soon, and I don’t want them to worry.”

  I leapt across the fissure, scrabbling as I landed to maintain my balance, my palms prickling at the thought of what lay far beneath me, before making my way to the side of the rock. I sat down in preparation to slither on my bottom to the ground below, mentally saying goodbye to the shorts I was wearing as they would probably be ruined.

  Merrick’s voice drifted over me, freezing me in place. “They won’t be back tonight.” His voice was quiet and there was an edge of anxiety to it.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, twisting so that I could see his face.

  “They’ve been taken by some of the less understanding Oceanids,” he said matter of factly, “and we had better get going or we’ll be too late to have any sort of say in their fate.”

  Several frightening scenarios flicked through my head.

  Slave trade, I’d been told, was still alive and horribly well, as were several frightening member-killing cults, not to mention murderers and even possibly vampires.

  Fear made me far bolder than I felt, my muscles bunching involuntarily as I crouched at the edge of the boulder, prepared to run or fight him.

  “Leave me alone,” I yelled, followed by a string of useless threats about our parents finding us.

  He shook his head, smiling at me. “No one knows where any of you are, Alexa. So shall we go? Luke and Josh really need you and from what I can tell, time is running out for them.”

  I was horrified, all my fascination with Merrick evaporating as I realised how vulnerable I really was. I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth about Luke and Josh. I sized him up. He was strong and agile and obviously very comfortable in his mountain surroundings, far more so than I was.

  “You make it sound like I have a choice,” I said bleakly.

  His face softened as he realised my hesitation had been driven by fear.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Alexandra. I’ve already gone to great lengths to ensure you are safe. I will protect you.”

  He walked around the perimeter of the pool, leaping easily over the fissure, and held out his hand.

  I hadn’t missed the inflection on “me” and ultimately, it was the unsaid threat that convinced me that Luke and Josh were in some sort of trouble.

  I nodded once and, ignoring his offer for help, leapt inelegantly over the fissure and, for the first time in three years, jumped voluntarily into the pool of water, my previous fears replaced with much greater and more imminently real ones.

  Chapter 11

  Spectacle

  He met me in the middle, wrapping his arms around me as I allowed myself to sink deeper and deeper into the pool, accepting, if a little unwillingly, the breath he breathed into my lungs.

  I was no longer panicking about dying, because clearly he wanted me alive. The fear of being submerged that had plagued me was strangely absent once I was wrapped in his arms. I waited cautiously for the pain that had incapacitated me to shoot up the sides of my head. It too was no longer an issue. As much as I was relieved not to feel the fear of the pain, its absence unsettled me.

  I turned my attention to my surroundings, the strangest of which was the difference in temperature between two halves of my body. The front of me was pressed tight against Merrick’s body and was very warm, my back, however, was freezing in the icy water.

  I was distracted from my discomfort though when I managed to focus on the sides of the pool, which seemed to be made of a brilliant blue transparent rock.

  After a minute of slow descent, Merrick turned us away from the receding light, head-first into the inky depths of the pool. As I stared at the disorienting darkness, the fear reappeared, settling into a heavy ball in my stomach.

  There was no going back now.

  At first, the dark was so complete that I could see nothing. The only points of reference I had were Merrick’s arms around me and the rhythmic pattern of our breathing. Claustrophobia clawed at my chest as I stretched my eyes wide, trying to get some sense of the size of the pool and how fast we were going.

  Tiny pale blue and green orbs began to flash past us. I was convinced I was either fainting or seeing things. I closed my eyes tight but on opening them, the star wars effect continued.

  I squeezed Merrick’s arm, trying to communicate without letting go of the precious oxygen in my lungs. He slowed down a little and asked me if there was any problem. I pointed at the water, hoping he’d be able to understand my unspoken q
uestion.

  He slowed down further so that I could see the spots better. They were fish, tiny but prolific. As they moved they sent off little sparks of blue, green or yellow light, reminding me of the fireflies that floated above the willow-lined lake at Luke’s house.

  Merrick reached out one of his hands and trailed his fingers across the side of the rock closest to us. Four streaks of colour trailed behind him as if the rock itself was responding to him.

  I accepted his next breath and then risked speaking, my voice muffled in my own ears. “What is it?”

  He pulled me closer and stopped moving.

  “Close your eyes very tightly for a few seconds,” he said.

  Curious, I obeyed. When I opened them my eyes adjusted more quickly to the dim light.

  The dark was alive.

  The water was a strange pale shimmery turquoise with tiny pinpoints of light throughout, which seemed to dance to an unheard tune, swaying in unison back and forth in the current.

  Merrick grinned at my expression and moved us closer to the rock which I discovered was covered in splotches of whitish lichen. I reached out a tentative hand and gently stroked the rock. The texture was almost slimy, and I snatched my hand back. My revulsion changed to awe as the lichen began to glow a pale whitish green.

  I let out a muffled giggle of bubbles feeling as light and happy as I could remember.

  The schools of brilliant fish I’d glimpsed earlier darted in the current, occasionally pecking at the rock face and lighting up the lichen.

  I let go of my stranglehold on Merrick and trailed my fingers through the water, my fingers leaving a wave of pale light. I had the strangest feeling of vertigo. There was no concept of up or down, forward or backwards. There was just… space, beautiful shimmery turquoise space.

  Some cracks in the rock provided a foothold for delicate aquatic life in the form of spongy-looking, brightly coloured invertebrates which spread out, tendril-like, into the blue shimmer, waving along with the rest of the luminescent specks that made this place so magical.