by Liz Kessler
“Come HERE!” he bellowed.
I looked around, desperately hoping I’d spot who it was that he was addressing. I mean, it couldn’t be me. It couldn’t be. What had I done this time? Surely this wasn’t about the ring!
“Yes,” he growled in a quieter voice that was even more threatening than a shout. “You.” He pointed directly at me.
I swam through the porthole that we used as the underwater door, my tail shaking so much I thought it would fall off.
“Alone!” Neptune barked as Shona approached the porthole behind me.
“I’ll wait here. You’ll be OK,” Shona whispered, sounding as if she believed it about as much as I did.
I wobbled toward Neptune like a jellyfish and waited for him to speak.
But he didn’t. He just stared. Stared and stared at me until I wondered if he was going to turn me to stone with his eyes. But he wasn’t even looking into my eyes. He was looking at my open hand, at the diamond.
“For once, Beeston did well,” he said in a quiet voice. Quiet for Neptune, anyway. It still vibrated through the air, splashing water across the sides of his chariot with each word. “All those years and it was right here,” he murmured even more quietly, his eyes still fixed on the ring.
My hand burned under his gaze. It felt as though it were on fire, flames scorching through my fingers, screaming along my arm, into my body, all through me. I clenched my teeth and waited.
Eventually, Neptune raised his head to look me in the eyes. “Remove it,” he said simply, holding out his hand.
“I —”
“The ring. Give it to me. NOW!”
As he waited for me to hand over the ring, the sea rocked and ebbed around us. I bobbed around, bouncing up and down in the water while I fumbled and pulled at my finger. My hands shook with terror. I couldn’t do it. The ring was completely stuck. My finger swelled and throbbed.
“I — I can’t,” I stammered, my words jamming through the thudding in my mouth.
At this, Neptune rose higher in his chariot. As he did, the waves grew sharper, splashing against me, slapping my face, pulling me under. “Come here,” he said. Swirling my tail around as hard as I could, I propelled myself back up and swam toward the chariot.
Neptune held his trident in front of me. “Put your hand out,” he said. I did what he said. Then he reached toward me with the trident and touched the ring.
The result was electric. Literally. I felt as if I’d been struck by lightning. My body zipped into life as though a thousand volts were buzzing through every nerve. Neptune must have been struck too. His beard seemed to have flames flying from it. His tail was shooting sparks out in every direction. A jagged orange light danced and crackled between us, alive and on fire.
Neptune finally pulled the trident away. Breathless, he paused to gather himself. Then he reached out with his hand. Grabbing my wrist, he pulled at the ring.
“AAARRRGGH!” he screamed, leaping backward. He shook his hand, blew on it, plunged it into the water. As he did so, the sea raged around us, building into the worst storm I’d ever seen. Clouds darkened, blackening the sky, closing down on us. I was being tossed around everywhere. Even Fortuna shook so violently that it was starting to break free from the spot in the seabed where it had been deeply stuck for more than two hundred years. The boat heeled madly from side to side.
“Damn those vows!” Neptune bellowed. “They were not meant to prevent me from touching the rings! I am the king of all the oceans!”
What did he mean? What vows? Why couldn’t he touch the ring?
As if he’d heard me, Neptune snapped his head around to face me. “That ring has been out of my sight for hundreds of years,” he said. “And that is exactly where it should have stayed. Never have I thought of it in all those years. Never. Not once did I question its whereabouts.” He laughed sardonically. He wasn’t smiling, though. “Although I should have known the kraken would have found it and protected it. The kraken understands loyalty.”
Neptune looked up to the sky. “It should have remained hidden, out of sight, buried in the seabed,” he called to the clouds, which split apart and cracked in claps of thunder. “I need it to be buried, along with everything it represents.”
Then he turned to me. “You have brought back to life what should have remained forever out of mind, forever forgotten,” he said. “Get out of my sight.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I swam as hard as I could toward Fortuna.
I could see Millie, gripping the rail with both hands, her legs thrown from side to side on the deck, her black gown whirling out around her. Shona must have still been inside. Plowing through the water as hard as I could, sinking with every stroke, plummeting down and swirling around before being thrown back above the water and landing again with a splash, eventually I made it to the boat. I gripped a lower railing and tried to steady myself.
“No! Wait!” Neptune called to me. “I will not allow this to happen!” A streak of lightning zigzagged across the sky, ripping it in two. The boat swayed again, dragging me under the water and hurling me back up. Gasping for breath, I clung to the porthole as thunder exploded across the sky. It sounded as though someone were beating a bass drum with speakers the size of a planet.
Neptune’s face had turned purple. “You cannot defy me!” he barked. “I am Neptune, king of all the oceans, and you will NOT take advantage of my laws. Do you hear me?”
I nodded frantically. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, my voice shaking. “I hear you. I — I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to steal your possessions. Please, I’ll give it back. I’ll put it back exactly where I took it from.” I struggled with the ring. Again, it wouldn’t budge. My finger felt bruised.
But there was part of me that was glad it wouldn’t come off. The ring made me feel — what was it? Safe. Important. However strange it made me feel at times, the strongest sensations I got from it were ones that made me feel comforted and protected.
“Enough!” Neptune boomed. “I WILL have it back. And I know how to get it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, gripping the side of the boat as it swayed in the waves that were still crashing all around us. “I don’t understand what I’ve done!”
“It’s what your parents did in creating you!” Neptune bellowed. “And now I shall uncreate that.”
Uncreate me? What did that mean? I swallowed hard through a throat that felt as if it were filled with a giant rock.
Neptune paused for a moment and looked away. When his eyes returned to bear down on me, I thought there were tears in them. Neptune, crying? If I weren’t so terrified, I might almost have laughed. The thought was ridiculous. Neptune didn’t cry!
He slowly raised his trident. As he held it above his head, the waves increased, the sky darkened even more, Fortuna rocked to the side. “YOU!” he boomed over the cacophony of the raging storm. “You shall no longer be semi-mer. You shall not have the privilege of living both on land and in the sea. You shall NOT share my world with any other.”
“What do you mean?” I cried. “I don’t understand!”
“THIS is what I mean!” And then he waved his trident above his head, swirling it around and around. As he bellowed his curse at me, the sky began to swirl too. A dark cone of clouds spun across the horizon, skating toward us, whipping up the sea in its wake, gathering pace, growing in size, and darkening in color with every second.
“No longer may you be a semi-mer. You will be one or you will be the other.”
“No!” I shrieked. “Which will I be? Do I have to decide?”
“You do not CHOOSE! You do not have a say. It is my choice, your fate. Mer or human — I will decide, in my time. And here is where the curse begins.”
Another wave of the trident; another black cone spinning toward us, this time drilling into the sea. I clung more tightly to Fortuna, trying as hard as I could to pull myself into the boat.
“You will know the curse is upon you as soon as I finish speakin
g,” said Neptune. “You will feel its effects begin. In a matter of days, when the moon is full, the curse will be complete. And you shall take your new form.”
My new form?
“In the meantime, as the curse unfolds, you will gradually lose aspects of both your human and your mer self. While you are human, remnants of your mermaid self will remain, and while you are mer, the human half will still be felt. Until one sides takes over completely, you will be neither one nor the other.”
In that moment, I lost the ability to fight back, to argue, even to believe there was anything I could do. There was a tiny split second when everything became calm. The sea, the sky, even the air around me — it just stopped. Stopped dead. Like my thoughts.
“Emily!”
Someone was calling me from the boat. Millie! I’d forgotten about her! She was still on the deck, soaked and bedraggled. Her hair was plastered all over her face; her gown stuck to her like an extra skin. “Emily! Get inside — quick!” she yelled.
Without thinking, I darted through the porthole — just in time. A second later, Neptune howled, “I will NOT be cheated. I WILL NOT forgive. I am NEPTUNE, the ruler of ALL the oceans, and my rule is the LAW!”
And then it struck us. All I saw was blackness, whirling blackness, surrounding us. Then the tornado wrapped itself around the boat, drilling into the sea and sending us spinning.
I couldn’t hear Neptune’s words anymore, but I could still sense his rage, still feel him shouting to the sky as Fortuna was raised and hurled in a million directions.
It seemed to last forever. It was like the scariest ride you could ever imagine at a fairground, the fastest, most dangerous roller coaster in the world — multiplied by a thousand. I clung to one of the benches that stretched across the lower level of the boat. I tried to scream for Shona, but I couldn’t even use my voice. My words were whipped away from me as soon as I tried. Was she still there? All I could see was water whirling around and around, a cyclone even within the boat. Side to side, back and forth like a rodeo horse, we tipped and spun and clattered. I tried to scream, but again and again the water snatched away my words, my gasps, even my thoughts.
In the end I just hung on. I twisted the ring around, clutched it in my palm, and prayed that the cyclone would soon stop — and that I would still be alive when it did.
Eventually the cyclone slowed. It felt as though we’d been in the storm for hours and hours. It was stopping. The boat still rocked and dipped, still turned uncontrollably, but there were calm moments in between. It was in one of these calm moments that I finally managed to call for Shona.
“Emily?” Her voice, from somewhere at the opposite end of the boat, was the most welcome sound in the world.
“Shona!” I called again. “Where are you?”
She emerged from under the table that used to have all Dad’s things on it. I shook away the pain that stabbed at my chest when I thought of him.
Shona looked as I’ve never seen her look in my life, and as I don’t think she’d ever want anyone to see her again. The blond hair that she spent an hour a day brushing was matted and splayed across her face; the glittery patterns she’d been painting on her scales all day had run and splattered into dark, smudgy patches all over her tail. Her face was so white it was almost transparent. She looked like a ghost. A mermaid ghost.
As she swam toward me, I could tell by the expression in her eyes that I probably looked just as bad. At any other time, we would have laughed. I’m sure we would have. But laughter seemed as out of reach as every other normal thing in my life. We fell into a hug.
“What happened?” Shona asked in a numb voice.
I shook my head. “I have no idea. Neptune — he was angry. So angry.”
“I told you what his anger could do, didn’t I?” Shona said. “I told you it could create storms!”
“Well, yeah, ages ago — but I thought that was just stories, things you learned in your history lessons. I didn’t think we could actually be caught up in one!”
“No,” she said, “nor did I.” She looked out through the porthole. “At least it seems to be stopping,” she said hopefully.
Just then, Millie shouted down through a trapdoor. “Emily, are you all right?” she called, her voice coming out in gulps. “Oh, Emily, please answer me. Are you there?”
I swam over to the trapdoor. “Millie, I’m fine! And so’s Shona.”
“Oh, thank the goddess, thank the lord, thank you, thank you!” Millie sobbed. “Oh, if anything had happened to you, I just don’t know what I — oh, Emily, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault!” I said, reaching up to pull myself through the trapdoor. Millie was sitting on the floor shaking, surrounded by the contents of our home, scattered all around her. Clothes were strewn all over the floor. Drawers were hanging open; glasses and dishes were smashed to pieces everywhere. I could hardly bear to look.
I hitched myself up and sat on the floor with her. My tail flapped and wriggled as it began to fade away. Starting from the tip and working all the way up, I felt it turn numb, then gradually fade away as my legs reemerged, tickling like a nerve recovering from a local anesthetic.
“Come on, Millie. It’ll be OK,” I said, reaching out to put an arm around her. I have no idea what made me say that. Perhaps I hoped that Millie would believe me and then she could convince me it was true.
Her big shoulders heaved and shook; her head bowed as I tried to comfort her.
As I sat awkwardly patting Millie’s shoulders, I waited for my tail to finish transforming. But something wasn’t right. It seemed to be taking longer than usual. My legs were fine. A bit numb, a bit tingly, but they looked normal enough. It was my feet. They weren’t forming properly. Come on. What’s the matter? It didn’t usually take this long. My toes still seemed to be joined together, kind of webbed.
Webbed? A cold dart of terror stabbed at my ribs. Neptune’s words. You will be neither one nor the other.
The curse had begun.
“Emily, Millie, I think you need to look outside.” I didn’t have time to dwell on my thoughts any longer. Shona had swum over to the trapdoor and was pointing urgently out through a porthole. “Go up on deck,” she said. “I’ll swim around and meet you.”
I stood and helped Millie to her feet, and we stumbled together out onto the deck, picking our way through the debris that lay everywhere. I tried not to focus on the strange sick feeling stirring in my stomach as I walked across the deck with feet like rubber.
I don’t know what I expected to see outside the boat. Don’t know if I thought that somehow it would all look the same as before, now that the storm had passed. Or if there was a part of my brain clinging to the crazy hope that we were somehow still at Allpoints Island.
But if I had thought anything of the sort, I was in for the biggest disappointment of my life.
I didn’t recognize anything. I could hardly see anything, for that matter. Just sea. And sky. No island. No other boats, no bay. And not another soul in sight.
There was a stillness in the air as though the world were holding its breath, waiting till it was sure that the storm had really passed.
At first, all I could see was the ocean, deep navy blue, lying still all around us, still as a hundred miles of glass. Just above it, a low mist hovered in a perfect line.
The sun was beginning to set, the sky bruised with clouds like bunches of deep mauve cotton, stealing whatever bits of blue they could find. Wispy gray mists floated higher up, racing the slow, heavy clouds below them.
Then the edges of the clouds began to change and brighten as though someone had taken out a peach-colored felt-tip pen and was drawing an outline around each one. As though they wanted to make up for the heavy blackness of the storm. Soon pink and orange seeped into the spaces between the clouds. The sun forked out, through every gap it could find, in bright orange fans. It was like a painting.
A lone seagull sailed across the sky as though it were putting its
signature on the picture.
And then we saw it.
“Look,” Shona whispered. She pointed into the mist along the horizon. Millie and I peered to follow the line of her finger. Gradually it came into view as we stared, standing out above the mist as though it were balancing on it.
A castle.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
No one replied.
We went on staring, each thinking our own thoughts and silently asking our own questions. I didn’t ask any more questions out loud. What was the point?
Standing at the very front of the boat, I slowly turned around in a circle, taking in the whole view. Absolutely the same all around us. Totally, totally still sea. Stiller than I had ever known it, bluer than I had ever seen it, quieter than I had ever heard it. The boat lay on the slightest tilt, lodged on something. But what? There was no land to be seen, nothing to be seen at all, in fact, except the ocean, and the castle, and the mist.
Shona ducked under and swam out of sight. A moment later, she emerged, wiping the hair from her face. “We’re stuck on a sandbank,” she said flatly.
A sandbank. In the middle of the ocean?
Shona shrugged and shook her head in answer to my unasked question.
I squinted at the castle to examine it more closely. It stood proud and majestic above the sea: a gothic silhouette against the sunset, like a cardboard cutout. It was a child’s picture of a castle, perfectly symmetrical, a turret balanced squarely on each side, a tower in the center. Two thin arched windows were just visible in the top corners. As I looked, something tugged at me. It felt as though there were a wire between the castle and my chest, pulling at me. I knew in that moment I would have to go there.
The sky was turning red behind the castle, blacking out everything except its outline and the line of mist wafting around it like cigar smoke. Every now and then, as the mist ebbed and flowed, I noticed that the castle seemed to be standing on an island of rocks. Jagged and threatening, they held it high, as though carrying it on a platform, a grand stage in the middle of the ocean.