Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  “Seamus?”

  Her voice brought an avalanche of memories, a past I had tried to smother with rationality; but now, hearing that familiar soft tentative tone of hers echoing down the line, I realized I loved her yet. My heart lurched as I wondered whether maybe, just maybe, she was coming back.

  “Meredith? Are you okay?”

  “Of course.”

  A yawning silence; I free-fell through it, limbs twitching in anticipation.

  “And you?” she said eventually.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Seamus…”

  Oh, please don’t use my name unless you mean it.

  “Seamus, I’m pregnant. I thought it best if you heard it from me…and well, we’re getting married. Seamus…”

  But I’d already put the phone down, shaking.

  The doctor unwrapped the blood pressure band from my arm. The reading was slightly high but nothing to stop me making the dive. It was my silence that disturbed him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, Doc, fine. I’d just like to get on with it,” I snapped.

  Scribbling on my chart, he gave me clearance.

  The computers had mapped out my descent and the diving tables had told me the exact mixture needed for my body weight at that depth. The Heliox had to be exact to avoid narcosis—the rapture of the blue, Jacques Cousteau called it. This dive was particularly dangerous as the rusting cable was right near the bottom of the rig, a good sixty meters down. Every move was a mathematical calculation. Aside from the tremendous water pressure pressing down on me the whole time, the other big problem with these oil rig dives was the possibility of getting lost in the murky waters of the North Sea and panicking. Elements that have a rational man talking gibberish in a matter of seconds. I know because I’ve seen it myself.

  Personally, the more dangerous a dive the more I like it. Visibility is limited to the narrow beam shining from the lamp clamped to your mask, illuminating a black-and-white murky world, while at that depth the air you’re breathing becomes thick like molasses. But I loved the solitary atmosphere. The sense of possibility in the total silence, the unknown, the feeling of being suspended in eternity.

  I climbed into the dry suit required for deep dives and put on a full helmet with built-in radio and a light. There was not an inch of my skin exposed. I always imagined this was what it would be like back in the embryonic sac. Floating, fully protected, fully insulated.

  Then they lowered me into the freezing waters of the North Sea. Clutching the welding equipment attached to a separate cable, I began to slide down the shotline.

  It only took a few minutes to reach the break in the cable. On the way down I passed through shoals of fish darting around the clumps of mussels, oysters, and mollusks that had grown around the pylons of the rig. The struts created a false reef, which the sea creatures were happy to colonize and the divers happy to harvest.

  Thirty meters deeper and I finally saw the cable through the misty waters. The broken line lashed slowly in the current like a sleepy sea snake. I caught hold of it; a section of about eighteen feet was missing, broken off due to rust. I radioed the information to the surface and was cheered to hear Nick’s voice radioing back down as clear as if he were standing right next to me.

  I had almost finished the repair welding when I first saw it—a glint of silvery-bronze caught in the luminous hexagon of my light. My first thought was that it was the tail of some large fish. I ignored it and continued welding, the dull glow lighting up the area. The creature swam through the beam again and this time I saw enough to make me drop the welding torch.

  Long tendrils of red hair drifted through the water like seaweed; the copper of a sea perch, light fragmenting off the scales and illuminating the white-blue skin. At the top of the tail, where the body of a fish would naturally widen out, were the unmistakable broad hips of a woman. Her sex, neatly located in the center of the tail, was hairless. She had no thighs, just a crevice where evolution had fused land legs together. Nauseous with shock, I dived after the descending welding torch, catching it just in time. I returned to the shotline, hanging on for dear life as I collected my wits.

  “Seamus, what was that noise? Are you all right?” Nick’s voice echoed in my head.

  “It was nothing, I dropped the welding torch, that’s all. Had to get it back.”

  She was floating at the edge of the beam, dipping in and out of shadow. There was just enough light for me to see the full breasts tipped with mauve nipples like those I’d seen on sea cows and the delicate bone of her neck, more pronounced than a human’s, arching out like white coral. Her face had broad cheekbones that were almost Asiatic only more pronounced, a nose that I suspected was decorative rather than functional, and lips that were the same color as her nipples. Her eyes, which appeared to have no pupil or iris but were entirely blue from lid to lid, stared straight at me displaying an intelligence that was so other I had absolutely no way of reading her.

  Even more frightening was her size; she looked to be taller than myself, which made her about seven foot in length.

  “Seamus?” Nick’s voice pulled me back to the reality of the luminous world above. But she was still there, swaying with the current as naturally as a dolphin.

  “Seamus, you sure you’re all right? You sound a little strange.”

  “There’s something down here, something wonderful….”

  As I spoke, still locked on those incandescent blue eyes, she opened her mouth and blew out a large air bubble that shimmered and danced like a silver balloon before ascending out of sight. Then, with a twitch of her tail, she disappeared into shadow.

  Without thinking I broke free of the surface supply of Heliox and turned on my emergency supply cylinder.

  “Seamus, you’re not making sense. I suggest you begin your ascent as soon as possible. Do you hear me?”

  “Later, Nick, I have to follow…I’ve got to…”

  “Seamus!”

  I dropped the welding torch again and, now breathing air from my bail-out cylinder, freed myself from the shotline. The decision surged through my body like liberation. A fine red hair trailed across the glass of my mask and I was off, following the glint of her tail, pinning her with my light. The line above me drifted loose—a broken umbilical cord to the humanity I had abandoned. Or had it abandoned me?

  Nick’s voice faded as we swam deeper and deeper into great billowy clouds of seaweed. Startled fish darted past. I should have been frightened. I should have realized what was happening, but instead I felt remarkably tranquil, as if I’d finally arrived at the pinnacle to which intuitively I knew all the events in my life had been leading.

  Even through my suit I could feel the water getting colder and my ears began to pound as we swam to greater depth. Always before me the tantalizing silvery curves, the wondrous magic of her, and every time I told myself she could not possibly exist she would turn around and hover with a solemn gaze, her hair a floating storm, her pale arms stretched out against the green-black vegetation, her webbed fingers extended, as if to say, “No, I am as real as you are, as visceral as the trickling beads of condensation on your mask.” Then without warning, she would be off again, a twist of silver in a swirl of water.

  We must have swum for a good half-hour, until we reached an underwater cliff-face, a ridge of caves and crevices over which schools of fish zigzagged furiously. It was monumental. Dimly I tried to squeeze a possible location from my befuddled mind but I couldn’t remember any such markings on the map I’d seen of the local seabed.

  The creature was closer now, only about three feet away from me. I could see the markings on her tail clearly: large scales reminiscent of ocean fish found at higher depths. Ridges ran down either side of the tail suggesting a piscine skeleton beneath. Swimming behind, I could see her buttocks protruding above the area where the tail finished. Again here were signs of being human: the cleft between her buttocks was clearly delineated. There was no doubt, mermaid or not
, fish or flesh, she was highly desirable.

  She finally stopped at the entrance of a dark tunnel under an overhanging lip of rock. The huge tentacles of an octopus curled out, partly camouflaged against the rock surface. I reeled back; a nesting octopus could be ferocious when disturbed. But she didn’t hesitate, fearlessly ducking down and disappearing into the tunnel mouth. A second later the octopus shot out, propelling itself furiously through the water like an outraged waterspout, a jet of black ink spilling behind it. A moment later the mermaid reemerged and gestured for me to follow her into the tunnel.

  I glanced at the meter on my air tank; it indicated that I had only about an hour’s worth of oxygen left. I would barely make it to the surface if I left now, and not without the risk of ascending too fast and getting the bends. To follow the mermaid seemed certain suicide. Just then my light captured the glint of something metal. I turned it fully on the object: it was an old mask, clouded up with algae and weed, caught on a rock just at the edge of the tunnel’s mouth.

  The mermaid smiled; at least, her mouth formed the shape of a smile. Whether there was any human perspicacity behind it or whether it was the dumb mimicry of an animal that had once been smiled at and had remembered the shape of such expression I couldn’t tell you. But it was the smile that drew me, against my better judgment as a man, a diver, and a Catholic, into that tunnel.

  The opening was covered with coral and all manner of weed; it was so narrow and dark that I feared I would knock my cylinder and lose what precious Heliox I had left. I was just beginning to despair when the tunnel broadened out into an underwater cave.

  Something was shining above me. Peering up I thought I must be hallucinating as a glimmering indicating the surface of the water seemed to loom up suddenly. To my amazement the head and shoulders of the creature just a few feet in front of me disappeared as she broke the surface. I followed, my mask misting up as soon as I hit air.

  It was an underground air pocket—a cavern of about twelve feet across and seven feet wide. I’d heard about such things but had taken the stories as myth, the kind of tales that giant squids and ghost ships belonged to. But I had to believe that other divers must have been there before me, releasing their air into the cave to create such an unnatural environment.

  I sat resting against a stone bank for a moment, wondering whether I had now completely surrendered to a world of delusion and, if so, would I survive if I took off my helmet and breathed in air that could be noxious.

  Staring up I realized that the ceiling was covered with stalactites that glowed in the dark, giving off enough phosphorescence to illuminate the whole cave with a soft greenish light. I could only assume that the rock was alive with a kind of organism that had evolved to produce light as a survival mechanism.

  Several strange white crabs scuttled sideways into the shadows, pincers waving madly—a species I’d never seen before. Tilting my head I saw the mermaid. Through the misted-up mask she was just a tantalizing outline of shimmering curves and tail, but she was close, close enough for me to touch. I peered at the dial showing the amount left in my tank: thirty minutes’ worth. Without stopping to analyze my choices I unstrapped my helmet and pulled it off.

  The air was surprisingly clean. I had thought it might be foul but instead it was mysteriously sharp, with a higher oxygen content than I’d imagined.

  I lay there for a moment before turning in her direction. Part of me expected her to vanish, melt away like a mirage. Part of me expected to wake up drowning.

  She was lying propped against a shelf of coral, the whole glorious length of her now out of the water, and she was staring at me with as much amazed curiosity as I was showing at her. I placed the helmet on a stone shelf above me so that it illuminated both of us. My heart racing, I cautiously moved toward her, half-anticipating her to dive back into the water and disappear forever like some frightened wild beast. She didn’t move, just stared back candidly, no fear in her eyes. Encouraged, I stopped about a foot away from her and let my fascinated gaze travel her whole physique.

  Her wet hair streamed down one side of her face, leaving the other side of her head visible. Where there should have been an ear was a gill like that of an amphibian, rippling as if sucking in air. The rest of her facial features appeared to be humanlike, as I’d noticed before. Her nose was sharp and upturned, the nostrils teardrops that I now suspected operated as a secondary breathing device. The shape of her face was triangular, probably smoothed down by evolution to make her more streamlined. Her lips obtruded more than a human’s, as if they might serve to gasp air from the water’s surface. She appeared to have teeth. Her shoulders were narrow but the bones in her neck protruded gracefully above heavy breasts that lolled tantalizingly on a narrow chest.

  Below her stomach was a soft curve, and, apart from the fact that she lacked a belly button and that she was hairless, her sex appeared convincingly human. Confrontingly naked, it sat on a pubis that jutted out farther than on a human woman—I suppose because of the lack of legs. The labia and clitoris were clearly visible and directly beneath them began the fish part of her in a long sweep of scales and fin.

  Terrified that I had conjured up my own succubus through thwarted desire, months of celibacy and grief, I lay down on my back again and shut my eyes, hoping to will myself back to some kind of sanity.

  I felt her lay her hand over my cock through my dry suit. I opened my eyes. She was leaning over me, watching as I grew beneath her webbed fingers, her breasts falling over my face. It was too much for any grown male—human or otherwise—I’m telling you.

  I pulled off my suit and lay there as naked as the day I was born. Then I touched her for the first time. She was surprisingly warm and as smooth as silk. There was no hair nor even evidence of any follicles under my touch and her skin was so thin that I could feel the blood pulsing beneath it. She seemed to tremble, a shiver that rippled right down to the end of her tail, which flapped gently against the rock. She was about a foot taller than myself and as broad across the shoulders and hips. The size of her was as exciting as the utter strangeness. Deciding I would have to take the initiative I placed both hands around her waist and pulled her down so that she was lying beside me. Then, leaning over her, too excited to wonder about the danger of it, I began to explore her anatomy.

  I carefully pushed back her hair and touched her lips; she sucked at my fingers like a fish, her mouth warm and soft as any woman’s. I traced the sweep of her neck bone, as beautiful as a bow of ivory, then covered her two breasts with my palms. Firm and pendulous, they had all the fecundity of a woman in her prime, a woman aching with the ripeness of maturity. She was not young, that much I could tell—perhaps in what she measured time, about the same age as myself.

  Her nipples—the areolae covering most of the breast—rose in response and her fish tail began drumming with a restless excitement. I squeezed her nipples, my own erection now pressing against the slippery surface of her belly, her labia stuck to my thigh like a limpet.

  I could have taken her then. There was something incredibly erotic about the way we were examining each other objectively, her cool gaze as she stared at my flesh as if I too were some fantastical creature in her eyes. Instead I ran my tongue down the center of her torso, tasting salt, seawater, all the way down to her vagina. Unlike a human, her outer labia were thinner than her inner lips, it was as if the vagina itself had become a seal against water. Her clitoris was larger than any woman’s, almost penislike. It hardened under my fingers and it was then that she uttered her first sound—a strange croaking that sounded like a seal.

  I watched fascinated as the tip became swollen then I tasted her with my tongue. Again the crystallized salt of the ocean, but sweeter. Curious, I lifted my face; the tip of her clitoris was identical to the blue-black pearl I had found under my pillow, only as soft as flesh.

  I felt her fingers in my hair; she dragged me up to her lips and, curiously, rubbed noses. The kiss of a mermaid, I thought absurdly, until th
e sensation of her breasts against my chest brought me back to the moment. Straddling her tail with my knees, I paused before entering her. The memory of losing my virginity swept through me suddenly—the same sense of excitement and trepidation born of the ignorance of a Catholic schoolboy as I started at the sacred sex of the town whore. A citadel of furled, sticky flesh, gates of Heaven against which I tentatively pushed my adolescent cock. Overwhelmed and humbled before the Fuck God pushed me hard to feel so oh so right, and now here I was again: virgin of sorts, about to commit a transgression that would take me to the edge of paradise. Or would it be Hell? My cock now resting between her thick inner lips, thicker than any woman’s, her skin colder than any human’s. Pulling me in, sucking me in, and then I was there. Tight, wet silken glove, a web that slipped over me, a hangman’s noose of illicit pleasure and I was a goner, so help me God. All thought convulsing into a hot joy as I took her over and over. She, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, her mouth sucking my neck greedily as her tail drummed madly against the rock. Like any woman lost in the moment.

  I slowed my pace. She felt so good I thought I would come there and then, and somehow the idea of that was frightening as if climax would chase the mirage away, would bring death.

  Steadying myself against her breasts, I took one nipple into my mouth as I teased the edge of her with my cock. One blue eye, immense, pressed up against my cheek, swallowing my whole horizon. The musk of her filling everything, the wetness, stickiness. The sense of her squeezing down hard on my flesh. Faster and faster, her webbed fingers pressing into my back, her claws scratching at me wildly, and Oh Mary, sweet mother of God, the pleasure staggering me, it shook the very base of me, every inch of me blossoming and swelling and bursting up, all the months of loneliness, of anger, of grief, of aching for a woman, thirsting for touch, mounting like a burning ball of joy that gathered speed faster, faster, from deep in my body to blast a path right through me in a shooting kaleidoscope of shrieking ecstasy. The shrieking—was it mine or hers? She arched with me, her voice clicking with my cries, her orgasm rippling like any woman’s as she contracted around my exploding cock.