Merfolk

by Jeremy Bates

  They were trapped.

  It knew that. It was likely biding its time, waiting in ambuscade, until they ventured back into the water, where it would kill them and feast on their flesh—

  Stop it! she thought shrilly. Stop thinking like that! You need to stay positive.

  Stay positive. Right. She was trying to. God, she was trying to. But how did you stay positive when you were being hunted by a creature that should only exist in nightmares?

  ∆∆∆

  Rescue.

  That was how they would escape.

  They would simply stay put and wait to be rescued.

  When she and Marty didn’t return to the cavern as scheduled, Jacky and Rad would know something had gone wrong. They would head back to the Oannes. Pip would radio for help.

  Elsa’s fragile hope shattered.

  Who could help? Cave diving was a niche activity. There were perhaps a few thousand certified cave divers in the world. The number of active divers was much less—and the number of rescue divers would number in the hundreds. So finding volunteers who could help them would be difficult, and even if a group was assembled, it would take days (if not weeks) before they would be organized enough to undertake the rescue.

  And by that time it would no longer be a search and rescue; it would be a recovery operation.

  When someone is trapped in an enclosed space, they’re exhaling carbon dioxide with each breath, and it’s that increase in CO2, not a lack of oxygen, which ultimately kills them.

  The air pocket Elsa and Marty were in was the size of a large garage and probably contained about fifty cubic meters of air. Humans required ten cubic meters of air per day. Double that because there were two of them, and they likely only had two and a half days of air.

  Two and a half days.

  Elsa heard water move, a small splash. She snapped on the light and scanned the ominous pool. Ripples the size of tractor-tires shimmered on the surface, but whatever had made them was gone.

  Can merfolk see in the dark?

  Has it been watching me?

  Elsa turned off the light to save its battery and sat perfectly still in the overwhelming blackness.

  Two and a half days.

  Chapter 33

  RAD

  The mermaid reappeared a few seconds later. This time it was swimming toward Rad and Jacky, small wavelets trailing behind its neck and grayish shoulders.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Jacky said, almost dropping her phone in her haste to open the video app. “Got it! I’m filming it. Oh my God, I’m filming it. I’m filming it.”

  Rad didn’t share Jacky’s enthusiasm.

  Everything was happening too fast.

  Everything felt wrong, very wrong.

  She took a step back from the water’s edge and told Jacky to do the same. Instead, Jacky lowered herself to a crouch to capture a better angle of the approaching creature.

  “Jacks,” Rad warned again, her voice tight, “get away from the water.”

  “Shush!” she hissed. “You’re going to scare it away!”

  The mermaid kept coming. Rad made out a fish-like body beneath the water’s surface, undulating, abhorrent. Human-like arms were pressed against its sides. In one hand appeared to be—

  “Jacks!” she cried. “It has a spear in its hand!”

  “Oh my God, it does!” she said in awe, clearly not appreciating the impending danger. “Marty was right! They use tools!”

  Marty, Rad thought frenziedly. Where was Marty? He and Dr. Montero should have been back long before now. There could be a myriad of reasons for their delay, some innocent (they lost track of the time), some more worrisome (they experienced an equipment malfunction), and some positively horrific (they were murdered by a bad-tempered mermaid).

  The latter seemed all too possible. After all, the mermaid was here, and they weren’t. It would have likely passed them on its way. If they saw it, they would have followed it. They would be back here too.

  But they weren’t.

  “Jacks!” Rad shrieked. “For Christ’s sake, get away from the water!”

  The hysteria in Rad’s voice finally cut through the dreamy spell that Jacky had been under. She looked at Rad, dazed, as if wondering where she was. Then she looked back at the mermaid just as it sprang out of the water, exposing its slug-white chest and the wooden spear clutched in its hand.

  Jacky gasped, backed away.

  It was too late.

  With a powerful thrust of its sinewy arm, the mermaid skewered her on the spear, the tip punching through the back of her white singlet, spraying it red. In the next instant the tip disappeared with a sludgy slurp as the mermaid tugged the spear free.

  Jacky tottered like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The momentum of the retracted spear would have pulled her forward into the water and the waiting arms of the mermaid had Rad not lunged forward and grabbed her arm, yanking her backward. She made it two steps before Jacky tumbled flat on her back, becoming a fifty-kilogram deadweight.

  Fueled with adrenaline, Rad barely noticed and dragged her across the ground, two meters, four, six, before finally collapsing, breathless from fear and exertion.

  Jacky’s eyes were closed, her singlet saturated with crimson blood.

  She’s dead.

  Rad glanced at the pool, expecting to see the mermaid slithering onto land to finish her off too.

  It was gone.

  Chapter 34

  ELSA

  They had been trapped for two hours, and Elsa now knew that passing out and dying from carbon dioxide poisoning in two and a half days’ time wasn’t her most pressing concern.

  It was trying not to go crazy before then.

  Two hours and she already felt like she was losing her mind. She could deal with the perpetual darkness, as unnerving as it was. She could deal with being trapped beneath immovable tons of rock. What she couldn’t deal with was the fact there was a mythical monster that wanted her dead circling in the water below her…and knowing that eventually, inexorably, she was going to have to get in that water if she had any hope of escaping this nightmare.

  So the new million-dollar question was, When?

  The sooner, the better.

  Before she lost her nerve.

  Before she lost her mind.

  Before the carbon dioxide buildup started affecting her judgement, because she would need all her wits about her if she had any hope in hell of fighting off the merfolk and getting out of the cave system alive.

  The problem was Marty. Elsa had no idea when he was going to regain consciousness. What if he didn’t?

  She would have to leave him.

  Could she do that?

  If he didn’t wake up soon, his death was all but guaranteed, and if she stayed with him, hers was too.

  Did she really have a choice?

  She wanted to shake him until he opened his eyes, but she didn’t because…

  Because you need him to remain unconscious, need him to offer you an excuse to remain where you are. Because you’re scared to get in the water.

  You’re scared of what’s in the water—

  “Marty,” she said, her voice sounding double its usual volume in the stagnant dark. “You need to wake up so we can get out of here. We can do it together. We both have knives. It’s scared of knives. I’ve already scared it away twice. Maybe it’s even gone? You need to wake up so we can get out of here.”

  She listened for a response. Nothing. In fact, she couldn’t even hear his ragged breathing anymore.

  “Marty?” She punched on her light. “Marty!”

  His head still rested on her thigh. His mouth was slightly parted.

  She pressed her fingers against his throat, positive she wasn’t going to find a pulse.

  It was there, strong and regular.

  “I wasn’t going to leave you,” she said softly. “I wasn’t going to leave you. I won’t leave you. Either we both get out of here together, or neither of us do. So please wake
up, Marty. I need you.”

  He didn’t wake up, and she reluctantly turned off the light.

  “Oh God,” she whispered. She didn’t like how the words sounded in the dark—small, lost, wretched—and so she said nothing more.

  ∆∆∆

  Time ticked on. She had no idea how much; she had stopped keeping track. She simply sat in the same place with her back to the wall and stared into the blackness. With nothing to see, her thoughts and memories assumed an outsized focus and clarity, almost as if they were playing on a screen before her.

  Elsa saw herself when she was no older than five or six, sitting at the head of a table with about ten of her classmates from kindergarten, torn wrapping paper from the presents she had opened, paper plates loaded with chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream, paper cups filled with Coca-Cola or cream soda. Eating her slice of cake and reacting in surprise when she bit down on a quarter wrapped in waxed paper. Standing in the hallway and waving goodbye to her friends as their moms showed up to take them home. Filling her sticker book with the scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers from her loot bag, scratching a root beer sticker, her favorite one, over and over until the scent began to fade. Her dad returning from work and carrying a firetruck-red tricycle, a purple bow stuck to the white banana seat. Riding the trike up and down the driveway, the tinsel streamers on the ends of the handlebars fluttering in the wind, and when she built up the nerve, taking it for a test drive around the block. Years later, sitting on a beach in front of a bonfire, some of the older kids she was with smoking cigarettes and drinking beers. Talking to a chubby boy her age who she didn’t like romantically but who liked her. Going for a walk down the beach with him, eventually holding hands when they were far enough away that nobody could see them, stopping and kissing, French kissing. Disliking the tongue-touching but going with it because some of her friends were doing it. Thinking about the boy when she went to sleep that night, wondering if she was going to marry him, never telling anyone what she had done…and never seeing the boy again, as it turned out he was visiting from a different state. Dressed in a black graduation gown and mortarboard hat, being called up onto the stage, shaking the chancellor’s hand and receiving her degree certificate. Participating in a photograph outside with her entire class, everyone throwing their hats in the air, the future big and bright. Hooking her first great white in the waters of Southern California when she was twenty-four, guiding it onto the research vessel’s lift, throwing a wet towel over its eyes and removing the hook from its jaws, pumping water over its gills with a large hose, screwing a satellite tag onto its dorsal fin with a power drill. Collecting measurements, blood, and tissue samples before letting it go again in the water. Clinking beers with the rest of the crew for a job well done and never feeling so alive. Performing her first overhead environment dive that same year in Florida’s Devil’s Spring cave system, exploring the mystical passageways with a colleague and marveling at the limestone formations and intricately decorated caverns and knowing this was the beginning of what would become a lifelong passion.

  Fifteen years and nearly a thousand dives later, arriving at the Sistema Huautla cave system in Mexico with Ron, rappelling down canyon walls through crashing waterfalls, sleeping underground for days on end, mapping some of the most remote tunnels on earth…Ron getting tangled in the guideline in a narrow horizontal traverse. Working to free him. Ron panicking, his eyes widening behind his mask. Opening his mouth in a silent scream. Swallowing water. Dying in front of her.

  Elsa had never felt as lost and lonely as she had during the days after her husband’s death. Not only was Ron stolen from her and gone forever, but she didn’t even have the small comfort of putting his body to rest. After diving to the site of the accident, the Mexican police had decided Ron’s corpse could not be freed without risk to the rescue divers and called off the recovery efforts.

  Leaving Ron’s body in the cave system, however, was not an option for Elsa—it would be like leaving the victim of a car crash on the side of the road—and over the next two weeks she planned her own recovery effort in secret, organizing a group of twenty divers from the US and Mexico to assist her. The police were right; recovering Ron’s corpse from the way he’d entered the traverse was not possible. That meant they would have to enter the cave system from an alternate entrance and approach his body from the other side. After nearly a month of exploring a warren of unmapped tunnels, they found the one that led to him. The first step in what would be a three-day operation was to lug more than half a ton of gear to the new cave entrance, which was at the top of a large hill. On the second day they got everything into position, leaving twenty cylinders of gas along the route to Ron’s corpse. And on the third day they began the recovery itself, a team of support divers waiting in the shallower level of the traverse while Elsa and a former Navy SEAL named Tom Jarrett dived to the deep section to extricate Ron’s body. Elsa’s nerves had been tense, but by then—six weeks since Ron’s death—she’d had time to process her emotions, and she was laser-focused on the task at hand. When they reached Ron’s corpse, they cut away his equipment. She tried not to look at his exposed hands and lower face, which had been chewed to the skeleton by shrimp, crabs, and other scavengers. Finally they freed his body, but while they were trying to manipulate it into a body bag (which they would tow behind them out of the tunnel), his head snapped free from his neck and sank to the floor. Horrified, Elsa began breathing more quickly, her rebreather struggling to filter out the excess carbon dioxide. Knowing she was doomed if she didn’t get her breathing back under control, she calmed herself, collected Ron’s skull, and returned to the surface with his body to raucous applause from the gathered team. The second she removed the rebreather from her mouth she doubled over and vomited…

  An awful, echoing sound, shrill and discordant, assaulted her ears.

  Elsa thought she was hallucinating, but it was real, coming from the water ahead of her—where she could see two pale faces bobbing above the surface and illuminated by blue bioluminescent hair.

  They were looking at her with their black eyes.

  Their mouths were open.

  They were laughing at her.

  Chapter 35

  RAD

  Jacky wasn’t dead, after all—her chest was rising and falling ever so slightly—but she wasn’t in very good shape. When Rad pushed up Jacky’s singlet to examine the spear wound, she nearly gagged. The jagged hole to the left of her belly button was bleeding freely and bloated with exposed grayish-purple intestines that appeared ready to slip free.

  Rad took off her own singlet and used it to apply pressure to the gash to help stop the bleeding. When Jacky began spasming, however, Rad immediately removed it. Not knowing what else to do, she rested Jacky’s head on her lap and whispered to her reassuringly, telling her everything was going to be fine.

  All the while her eyes probed the deadly pool of water ahead of her, watching for the slightest ripple on the surface. They were six meters from the water’s edge. Rad would have liked to have been much farther away, but there was nothing she could do about that. She wasn’t strong enough to carry Jacky, and she wasn’t going to drag her for fear of exacerbating any of her injuries.

  What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?

  She couldn’t leave Jacky to go get help because, unconscious, Jacky would be at the mercy of the mermaid. She needed Marty and Dr. Montero to return. Then one of them could go to the Oannes while the other two stayed behind to watch over Jacky.

  But Marty and Dr. Montero weren’t going to return, were they? There was a mermaid in the water—a killer mermaid—and it had already gotten them. That was why they were an hour late.

  They were dead.

  This seemed impossible. Marty was too smart to be dead. He knew too much about mermaids to be killed by one. Dead? No. Impossible.

  But he is, she thought blackly. He’s dead. Dr. Montero’s dead. And Jacky’s going to be dead soon too.

  Rad felt l
ike crying. She brushed her fingertips across Jacky’s cheek. They had so much in common, the two of them. Even though she had only known Jacky for a couple of days, she felt like a sister to her.

  “Pip’s going to find us,” she said confidently. “When we don’t return to the boat, she’ll come looking for us. She’ll find the village. The chief will bring her here. Everything’s going to be okay. You just have to hold on, okay?”

  Jacky’s eyelids fluttered, or at least Rad thought they did.

  “Jacks?”

  Nothing.

  “Jacks?”

  Nothing.

  Still, Rad thought maybe Jacky could hear her, even if she couldn’t respond, in the same way people in comas can hear loved ones speaking to them.

  “Want to hear a weird story?” she said. “Once, in the Philippines, I was filming an episode for my show in one of the western provinces. There’s this underground river there that’s really famous. It’s about eight kilometers long and just amazing. It puts these tunnels to shame. We filmed it for the show, and we were walking back to where we were staying along this off-the-beaten path. It was really steep in parts, going up through overgrown forest and limestone cliffs. We came to a spot with an amazing view out over the ocean, and we decided to camp there for the night. Well, here’s where the story gets weird. I woke up in the middle of the night to my crew calling my name from really far away, and I realized I was in a remote part of the forest. I was in my sleeping bag, just lying there on the ground, but it wasn’t where I went to sleep. When my crew found me, I was about a kilometer from where we made camp. I have no idea in the world how I got there. So—weird, huh?”

  Jacky didn’t reply—didn’t show any signs that she’d heard a word of the story—but Rad continued talking regardless.

  “Maybe I’m cursed or something because freaky stuff just seems to happen to me. There was another time, my crew and I were in Japan doing an episode on Suicide Forest. You know, that place people go to kill themselves? Well, we decided to camp overnight in the forest. I woke up in the middle of the night again because I heard a strange noise outside my tent. I unzipped the door to investigate and saw this horrifying old woman crawling toward me on all fours—torn clothes, unkempt hair in front of her face, you know, like the ghosts in movies. Well, I screamed and woke up—it was just a dream, okay? But the scream was real and my crew heard it. When I told them about the dream, they got scared. I figured it was because of where we were. The forest is hugely creepy. Anyway, we went back to sleep, and it wasn’t until the next day, when we were in the van heading back to Tokyo, that they told me they all dreamed of the creepy woman too—only in each of their dreams, she was crawling into my tent.”