Merfolk

by Jeremy Bates

  Marty checked his dive computer. They were ten minutes past the time they had agreed to turn back. He checked his pressure gauge. He had started with 2800psi in the double steel tanks, and he had already used 1100psi, dipping into his safety reserves.

  Even so, they had to be close to where the channel emptied into the ocean. They could push on, surface in the sea, and swim to shore—

  No. That wasn’t the plan. They could still get lost, never find the exit, and then they wouldn’t have enough air to return the way they had come.

  There was a saying amongst divers that watching your air pressure go down to zero is no way to spend the rest of your life, and he wholeheartedly agreed.

  I’ll come back tomorrow, he consoled himself, and the day after that, if need be. I don’t care if it takes weeks or years, I’ll come back every bloody day until I find the creatures.

  He twirled his pointer finger in tight circles, indicating to Elsa they were ending the dive. She nodded.

  As they were turning around, something large and fast darted past them before disappearing back into the inky abyss.

  Chapter 27

  ELSA

  Elsa knew they were pushing their luck. They had already added an extra twenty minutes to their maximum bottom time. That meant twenty minutes less reserve air, leaving them a forty-minute safety window. Still plenty of time, but you never knew what emergencies could happen, and even a few minutes of extra air could mean the difference between life and death.

  Plan your dive; dive your plan.

  It was that simple.

  She was about to signal to Marty that they needed to head back when he signaled this to her first. She nodded and was performing a helicopter turn, pivoting on a horizontal axis, when she saw a flash of blue bioluminescent light and a wash of white flesh.

  She swung her LED light, trying to track the lightning-quick movement—and saw a powerful, finned tail.

  Then it was gone.

  Marty began swimming after the creature. Elsa remained frozen in shock.

  Was that what she thought it was?

  Could it really be…?

  She wanted to scream at Marty to come back. Tell him they had to stay together. There was a merfolk in the water with them. But of course she couldn’t do any of that with a respirator in her mouth.

  Chapter 28

  MARTY

  Marty felt as though every neuron was firing inside his brain at once, a fireworks of amazement, horror, elation, and surprise. Danger and caution and prudence—none of that mattered right then. All he could think was: It’s there, it’s right there, don’t let it get away!

  It had been darting in and out of his LED light, leading him, almost playing with him—and suddenly it disappeared altogether.

  Marty assumed an upright, treading-water orientation. He spun left and right, his light arcing through the black water at frantic angles.

  There! A dozen feet away! It was directly in front of him and holding itself in a position mirroring his own.

  To avoid blinding the merfolk, he lowered the light to its abdomen and stared in wonder. The creature was both everything and nothing he had imagined it would be. A mane of blue, bioluminescent hair flowed away from its head like a halo. Its face was a mashup of simian and human and Klingon (the latter due to its oversized forehead). Its streamlined upper body was bone-white and hairless, though its flesh darkened to a mottled gray along the tops of its shoulders and the length of its arms. A pair of taut, small breasts, a narrow waist, and a delicate bone structure suggested it was a female.

  It had no legs.

  From its pelvis down was a smooth, powerful tail that tapered into a symmetrical caudal fin remarkably similar to that of a cetacean.

  With a sudden up and down undulation of the tail, the merfolk propelled itself easily through the water, stopping a few feet before him to reveal its grotesque majesty in all its glory. The glowing blue hair and liquid-black eyes—flecked with blue and clearly intelligent—captivated Marty with their alien beauty. Yet the rest of the merfolk’s features were so sleekly eroded he almost felt as though he were looking at a burn victim that had received a too-tight face transplant. The nose was little more than a bump with vertical slits for nostrils. There were no external ears to speak of, only cavities in the sides of its skull. And the mouth, which extended nearly the width of the jaw, featured unnaturally swollen lips that curled upward at the edges to form a surgically butchered smile.

  Then it blinked—translucent eyelids moving horizontally across each eyeball.

  Speechless, Marty raised both his hands, palms outward, in a gesture of amity.

  After a moment the merfolk did the same. Its hands were much larger than his and webbed with thin membranes connecting the elongated fingers to one another up to the third knuckle joints.

  Spontaneously Marty extended his right arm, wanting nothing more than to touch the fairytale creature before him.

  The merfolk extended its own arm, and for one absurdly comical moment he thought it was going to shake his hand. Instead it gripped his forearm, its long fingers wrapping around him with ease. This was painful and instantly menacing.

  Marty stared in confusion at the merfolk. It blinked again, and its puffy lips parted, revealing rows of sharp teeth.

  Alarmed, he tried tugging his hand free. The creature’s grip was like a vice.

  He tried again, pulling with all his strength and kicking with his flippers.

  With its other hand, the merfolk yanked the respirator from his mouth.

  Chapter 29

  ELSA

  It was the most astonishing sight Elsa had ever seen: a human being floating face-to-face, palms-to-palms, with a living and breathing mermaid.

  She couldn’t fathom what Marty must be thinking, having made first contact with a creature he had been chasing most of his adult life, an endeavor that had cost him his career and reputation. Equally, she couldn’t fathom what the merfolk must be thinking. Did it see any of itself in Marty, who shared more anatomical similarities with it than anything else in the oceans? Did it recognize in him a distant, land-dwelling cousin? Did its kind have a collective unconsciousness, and did humans have a place in it? Then again, the mermaid was a primitive animal with no comprehension of modern manufacturing. Clad in his black neoprene wetsuit and twinset tanks and all the hoses and tubes and other scuba accoutrements, Marty was possibly as alien to it as a human a million years in the future would be to her.

  Marty extended his hand, as if wanting to touch the mermaid, perhaps wanting to convince himself it was real.

  The mermaid gripped his forearm.

  Elsa’s awe turned to apprehension when Marty began struggling, a conga line of bubbles streaming upwards from his respirator…then to terror when the creature plucked the respirator from his mouth.

  She could hardly believe her eyes. What had been a peaceful, glorious meeting of kindred species transformed into one of horror and bedlam in a matter of seconds. And all she could think was:

  It knows. It knows he needs the respirator to breathe. It’s trying to kill him.

  Acting on instinct, Elsa removed the titanium knife from the sheath attached to the left shoulder strap of her BCD and swam toward the creature. It turned its head in her direction. For the first time she saw into its eyes. They were watchful and knowing like an owl’s, sending a shot of icy fear down her spine.

  Elsa would have plunged the serrated blade into the mermaid’s chest if she had the chance, but it seemed to recognize the threat she posed and vanished into the black water.

  She snagged the regulator and handed it to Marty, who stuck it back in his mouth. She flashed him a thumbs-up, meaning they should surface immediately, and they ascended quickly. They broke through the surface of the water into a domed area roughly twice the size of the first air pocket in which they had surfaced an hour earlier.

  They removed the regulators from their mouths and gasped the stale air. Elsa’s heart was pounding far too
fast for her liking, and she said, “It knew what it was doing! It tried to drown you!”

  Marty said, “It couldn’t possibly know—”

  “It did! And we need to get out of the water right now.” She aimed her light around the dome and discovered a flow ledge carved into one wall. “There!”

  “Shite! My bag! I dropped my bag!”

  “To hell with your bag! That thing might be right below us!”

  Without waiting for a reply, she swam toward the ledge.

  Chapter 30

  MARTY

  Knowing there was nothing he could do about his bag right then, Marty followed Elsa, reaching the rocky rampart a few moments after her. The edge of the rock was a little distance above the water table, and he needed all of his might to haul himself up and onto it. He suddenly felt as heavy as an elephant without the buoyancy of the water to lighten the load of his scuba gear. Elsa, he noticed, was also struggling to get herself out of the water. As he reached for her hands, her eyes went wide and her body shuddered, as if something had tugged at her.

  In the next instant she was dragged beneath the surface of the black pool.

  “Elsa!” Marty cried, shining his light into the water where she had vanished. He couldn’t see anything but a flurry of bubbles, and he was contemplating jumping in after her (suicidal likely, but you can’t just stand there doing nothing, can you?), when she crashed through the surface, panting for air, her face a mask of terror, her dive knife gripped in her right hand. He snatched her wrists and lugged her up onto the ledge with so much force he stumbled backward and landed hard on the steel tanks still strapped to his back. His skull whip-cracked against the rock, the sharp pain lasting only a split-second before he blacked out.

  Chapter 31

  RAD

  Rad and Jacky were sitting on boulders that had once been part of the cavern’s roof. Legs crossed, right foot tapping anxiously, Rad glanced at her wristwatch again. The butterfly wings in her stomach beat a little faster. “They should have been back ten minutes ago.”

  “Relax,” Jacky said. She was scrolling through the pictures that she’d taken of the cave art. “They’ll be back any minute.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about them swimming through pitch-black tunnels with no way to surface if something happened. Who would ever want to do that?”

  “People a lot braver than us, I’ll tell you that much. Did you know Marty was a cave diver?”

  “I knew he was a good open-water diver. He’s taken me diving to a few coral reefs. But, no, he never mentioned cave diving.”

  “I guess it comes with the territory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you dedicate your life to finding mermaids,” Jacky explained, “and you think they live in underwater tunnels beneath islands, you’re probably going to want to explore those tunnels at some point.”

  Rad shook her head. “I’ve tried almost every extreme sport there is on land, but there’s no way I’d go squeezing through a tight little tunnel underwater. I’d completely freak out.”

  “What extreme sports have you done?”

  “Name something.”

  “Rock climbing?”

  “Yup. Been ice climbing in Switzerland too.”

  “Paragliding?”

  “Of course.”

  “Skateboarding?”

  “Skateboarding? That’s not exactly an extreme sport, is it?”

  “I mean, downhill skateboarding. When they close off a stretch of highway. I’ve seen it on TV.”

  “You got me beat there.”

  “White water rafting?”

  “Yup! I love it.”

  “Parkour?”

  “Park what?”

  “It’s an urban sport. Have you seen those nuts who scale the sides of buildings and leap from rooftops over alleyways and stuff?”

  “I’m not Spider-Man, Jacks.”

  Jacky tucked her phone away. “I wrote a story in the Daily Mirror a couple of years ago when parkour was starting to take off in Colombo. It’s based on those obstacle courses in military training. My Lord, it’s cringeworthy to watch. One wrong move or calculation and you’re likely to find a bone protruding from a limb or your skull smashed open. While researching the sport—if you really want to call it a sport—I followed a teenager around Colombo for a day. He was one of the best traceurs—that’s what they call themselves—in the city. His last trick was running up the wall of a building to a second-floor balcony, and then doing a back flip off it to the ground. I looked away at the last minute because I knew he wasn’t going to land properly. When I looked back, he was lying flat on his stomach, not moving. The doctors at the hospital told me he had compression injuries to his C5 and C6 vertebrae and had no movement below his shoulders.”

  Rad felt queasy. “He became a quadriplegic?”

  Jacky shrugged. “I never found out. The doctor told me the swelling around his spinal cord and neck could take months to go down before they could determine the severity of the injury. I visited him every couple of weeks to check on his progress. Somehow he kept his humor, but I think he was just putting on a brave face for me. The last time I went to the hospital he wasn’t there. His family had checked him out, and nobody seemed to know where he lived.” She appeared introspective. “I hope he recovered. He was a really nice kid.”

  They fell silent for a bit, and Rad’s queasiness refused to subside, as the tale had hit a little too close to home for her liking. She knew the risks involved in extreme sports, of course; they were what attracted her to them in the first place. However, she was under the mindset that the horrible accidents you heard about only ever happened to other people. They wouldn’t happen to her. They couldn’t. She was always well prepared, properly trained, and surrounded by experts.

  It was naïve, she knew, because nothing in life was ever certain, nothing was ever guaranteed.

  She glanced at her wristwatch again and said, “They’re fifteen minutes late now.”

  Jacky said, “Which means they still have forty-five minutes of safety air. Let’s not get too worried yet.”

  Rad nodded reluctantly. “How’s your story coming along?” she asked to change the topic.

  “It’s coming. I’m going to have to sit down with Marty at some point to pick his brain about all the scientific mumbo jumbo he’s been spewing these last couple of days.”

  “Will your editor publish it without video evidence of merfolk?”

  “I can’t see why not. There’s the skull and the DNA results, the spear tips, and now all these cave paintings. I think that’s plenty of evidence for a compelling story. I guess the big question is whether Marty will let me reference him by name if he doesn’t find his irrefutable proof that merfolk exist. He’s so damn paranoid about negative media attention, isn’t he?”

  “He thinks everyone is casting aspersions on him. And when I say everyone, I mean the world. What he wants more than anything is to prove all the doubters wrong. At the same time what he fears more than anything is being mocked in the media again. It’s a tough spot to be in.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think he’s going to let me use his name?”

  “If he doesn’t return with video footage of a merfolk on his GoPro, no, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell.”

  Jacky sighed. “Still, even without—” She stopped mid-sentence, a puzzled expression on her face.

  Rad turned…and saw what appeared to be a glowing blue head poking out of the still pool.

  Jacky rose slowly to her feet. “What the…?”

  Rad got up as well. “Oh my god…”

  Jacky fumbled in her pocket for her phone, but by the time she had it in her hands the mermaid had disappeared beneath the surface of the water, leaving only a ring of ripples where its head had been.

  Rad and Jacky stared at each other in wide-eyed amazement.

  “Did we really see that…?” Rad asked, dumbfounded.

  “It had blue hair,” Jacky
said.

  “It looked like a person. Its face… It looked…”

  “It had blue hair.”

  “Oh my god,” Rad said. “Oh my god.”

  Chapter 32

  ELSA

  Still panting heavily from her narrow escape, Elsa checked on Marty. His face was pale and slack, sunken in the harsh white beam of her LED light. His breathing sounded shallow but steady. She tilted his head to the side and gingerly felt the bump on the back of his skull. It was the size of a golf ball and slimy with blood. The ledge they were on was perhaps ten feet deep, so she dragged his body away from the water until it was snug up against the wall. She sat next to him and rested his head on her thigh. Her pulse continued to race, and she forced herself to calm down and think rationally.

  Turn off the light. You need to save the battery. If it goes, you’re never leaving this place alive.

  Reluctantly, Elsa turned it off. The blackness was absolute. The only sound in the empty silence was their breathing.

  She played over what had happened in the water. The mermaid had clearly tried to kill them, first Marty by removing his respirator from his mouth, then herself by dragging her beneath the surface of the water. It only released its powerful grip on her ankles when she slashed it with her knife.

  So it wanted them dead. The million-dollar question was, Why?

  Did it consider them a threat? Interlopers? Food?

  Elsa didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to dwell on hypotheticals. She needed to focus on finding a way out of the subterranean tomb. Yet this quickly proved to be just as nerve-wracking because the only exit was through the water, and that thing was there, and it was stronger and more agile than them. They didn’t stand a chance getting past it if it didn’t want them to.