by J. R. Rain
I laugh. “I think you’re spending too much time in the tanning bed, Mom. You’re turning saddle brown.”
“Ack.” Trisha stares at her wrinkled arm as if she hadn’t noticed the color. “Maybe you’re right. I look like overdone fried chicken. And, yes, I’m kidding about that.”
“Good.”
She winks. “That Devil’s Lettuce is all mine. Willin’ ta share though.”
“It doesn’t really do anything for me. I guess my body’s weird. No reaction.” I make a show of wiping off my face. It takes quite a bit more than twenty minutes of jogging to get me sweating.
“Poor deprived thing. You’re an angel, aren’t you? Bet you don’t even drink.” She winks. “Oh well, more for me then.”
I offer a sad smile. In the months after Albert’s death in 1920, I tried to drown my sorrow with rather unladylike quantities of alcohol. “Oh, I used to drink a lot, but it lost the allure.” Of course, what I don’t mention is it became rather difficult to get once Prohibition ramped up.
“High school?” She shakes her head. “Wild ’un.” Her ‘disapproval’ becomes a grin. “Just like me.”
“Yeah. I still don’t believe I never got in trouble.” No sense challenging her belief I was a rebellious teen.
“Ever try anything else?” She stuffs her towel in her bag and spends a moment glancing between the elliptical machines and the hallway to the pool.
Mother gave me laudanum a few times when I groused about feeling sick or sore. People today rather frown on dosing sub-ten-year-olds with narcotics. I remember being so high once, I believed my bed had come to life and wanted to eat me. “Nah, nothing recreational.”
“Oh, I’m going up to this nature retreat in Olympic Forest next month. I think it would do you good if you can spare the time off work.”
Trisha going on a ‘nature retreat.’ Translation: a senior-citizen version of Kyle Brennan’s campground. I need to see where that winds up being. I can’t stand going more than a day or three without the ocean, and by day three, I’d pass for someone on heavy chemotherapy minus the hair loss. “Maybe. Send me a link or something about the place, and I’ll see what I can do with my schedule.”
“You got it, Alex.” She fires a finger gun at me. “Bah those damn machines. Pool today?”
I beam. “Absolutely.”
idle the rest of the day away at home and watch the sunrise from a wraparound cushioned bench set in a bay window overlooking Lake Washington. A light rain patters the windows. Despite no longer being susceptible to cold, I snuggle with a mug of hot, honeyed India Black tea. There’s something about curling up with pillows and blankets that feels appropriate for a rainy day near the water.
As the sun slips beneath the horizon, my mind drifts again to the last night I’d spent as a mortal.
What I had seen gliding among the bodies defied my belief. The creature moved with great ease and power, swishing a muscular fluke much like a whale’s. He wasn’t a whale, of course. I stared at a man, a bare-chested, powerfully-built man―at least from the waist up.
My mind floundered, then tried to explain away the entire shipwreck as a bad dream. Sometimes, I think I’m still stuck in that nightmare. You know that feeling of walking into a room and forgetting why you did? I get that sometimes, only I’m wondering if I’m still lying in bed on a cruise ship in 1924, waiting to wake up. Of course, I know that’s not true. The poor soldier’s widow couldn’t imagine half the wonders of modern life.
At the instant I processed what my eyes told me, that I beheld at a mermaid―err, merman―I figured I’d died and wound up in hell. All the dead around me, bulging eyes, desperate hands clawing at nothing, made Heaven seem an unlikely option.
My body didn’t look different. Since I remained aware, unlike the poor wretches drifting around, I initially thought I’d become a demon and expected to find my fingers tipped with claws like the man-thing circling us. Back then, people didn’t speak of death. No one discussed out-of-body experiences, at least not in public. That had made sense, I’d thought at the time. My soul had left my body in death, and I observed from the outside. How else could I be alive and everyone else dead? How could I be underwater for so long yet not be another listless corpse?
The man-creature glided around the bodies with the haughty, disaffected expression of a maître D’, as if hunting for the perfect wine to go with dinner.
I closed my eyes, demanding to wake up. Preferably, in bed, in my lonely apartment above the laundromat where I’d taken work after Albert’s death. Finding employment as a childless widow had not been easy. I had hated that little hole in the wall and longed for adventure. I thought I’d found it when I saw an advertisement for a cruise going up the coast. When I had stepped up the gangplank, I’d secretly wished never to return to Los Angeles. I daydreamed I would meet another man on that trip, a handsome and loving man who’d take me away from the drudgery of washing other people’s clothes. I dreamed of meeting an explorer, a man who’d sweep me off on one grand adventure after another.
In a way, my wish had been granted. I never did return to Los Angeles―at least not as a human―and I had met a man. Or, mostly. Somewhat? Okay, not really. I also never woke up in my bunk bed, hating the noise and stink of the laundromat below me. I did not return to that life and the world at large. Only my mother, who lived until 1955, knew the truth, and took it with her to her grave.
The rest of the world believed I had drowned in the wreck, not that many knew or cared about little old me. Staying away from society at large made what happened to me easier to cope with.
Believing, hoping I was dreaming, I expected once again to wake up in that crummy little apartment stinking of bleach, get up, and go to work. I pinched myself, my wet fingers sliding off my wet arm. Slapping my cheek wouldn’t work; my hand didn’t move fast enough underwater to inflict any real pain.
My motions attracted the man-thing. He came about in a quick turn. His silken blond hair, which had been trailing behind him, bloomed in a cloud around his shoulders. He watched me with intense curiosity. The mass of corpses surrounding me twisted and drifted, all tilting to one side or the other, oddly upright.
To my surprise, I gasped. Or thought I gasped. I made a sound with my voice, far below the stormy sea. A sound had escaped. Somehow. Not merely any sound, but my voice. For some reason, I hadn’t died, and I was talking. Under water.
You’re dreaming, Alexis, said a female voice that didn’t belong to me, a voice that turned out to be Licinia, although I hadn’t known it at the time.
I questioned why, if I’d been dreaming, would I feel so wet and cold? I recalled everything before the cruise, weeks of preparation and packing, begging Mr. Abbott, my boss, to give me the four days off, working double shifts to pay for the ticket. For reasons I couldn’t (and still can’t) explain, I had been desperate to go on that boat. I needed to do it. Even if my boss hadn’t agreed to give me the time off, I still would’ve gone. Perhaps a part of me knew this would turn out to be a one-way ticket.
Few things in my life had I ever felt so sure of. I had been desperate for something new, different, extraordinary. I had to get away from endless piles of filthy laundry. Even if the ship hadn’t wrecked, I doubt I would’ve returned. And who knows what might’ve happened after. Mother had understood my wanderlust, and until only a year ago, she’d been the only person I’d told my secret. She knew everything even if she didn’t understand it. To anyone else, she played the grieving mother, but I visited her on and off in the wee hours. After a few years, it became easier. I still appeared twenty-five, so I could arrive in broad daylight and no one would even think me her daughter, just some nice young woman keeping the old lady company.
I had gotten my wish for adventure. I lived a life no one could have imagined.
Except for the creature who had turned me, of course. I hadn’t felt it, but the strangely handsome merman had done something to me with that kiss, and a light bite on the neck bestowed as so
on as I’d fallen into the spasms of drowning. For whatever reason, he’d chosen to make me one of his kind rather than devour me as he did the captain. Soon after he’d noticed me move, he’d returned his attention to the dead man, and proceeded to consume him before my eyes. The once-enchanting face distorted into a creature from the depths of Hell. His jaw extended and widened, his mouth full of tall, triangular teeth partway between spears and those of a shark.
He bit first into the Captain’s neck until the head came free, then pulled great handfuls of flesh from the man’s chest, gobbling them down one after the next. Deeper and deeper into the chest he reached, devouring muscles and organs, until finally grasping the heart. The glee on his monstrous face was unmistakable as he held it up to examine. After giving me a wide grin, he bit the heart in two, tossing his head back to swallow the chunk without chewing.
I hung there motionless, watching him draw out the man’s offal, discarding some parts like the stomach and bladder, and eating the kidneys, liver, and spleen. I’d been an avid reader and good student, wearing out my school’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy. Before the generally-accepted futility of a girl trying to get a higher education in 1917 crashed down on my shoulders and I became a soldier’s wife, I’d daydreamed of being a doctor, or a nurse. Despite being a woman at the turn of the century, I had dared to dream.
After I’d been changed, I did continue my education, but many years later, and under an assumed name, though I’d lost the focus of my youth and wound up studying a whole mess of various subjects but never turning it into a career.
Once the merman finished with the captain, he turned his culinary attention to a new wife I had spent time chatting with. I had been envious of her before the wreck; she had the life I had been dreaming of, a life taken away by the war when it claimed my husband. In hindsight, my situation had been partially my fault. I decided to give up my dreams and marry young. Albert didn’t force me. The woman upon which the merman feasted had married only after finishing dual degrees in science and math. She’d been on her way to Seattle with her husband to become a teacher in a private school.
The merman bit into her smooth neck, taking her head clear off in one bite. She was, of course, dead long before his teeth found her flesh. For that, I felt grateful. I watched with mute, fascinated horror as he feasted on her remains as he had done the captain. With the last bits of her sinking to the seabed, the merman appeared to have had his fill.
When I cringed from her sinking bones, a sort of slow, ponderous motion caught my eye. I stared at the settling hull of the boat lurking in the distance amid a cloud of silt.
I have to be dreaming. My dreams had never been so vivid. I couldn’t be alive at the bottom of the ocean. No light should reach here, yet I could see. Streaming currents of glowing energy touched everything, even the woman’s head which had drifted closer to me, illuminating this undersea world. The taste filled my senses: acrid, salty, dirty, pure, and contaminated. I swallowed nothing. I didn’t seem to be breathing, though I didn’t think my lungs had filled with water. Something else, something life-giving, kept them inflated―a substance, an energy that allowed me to stay deep below the surface, alive and confused, and horrified.
And curious.
So very curious.
Perhaps I should’ve swam away as fast as I could, or tried to reach the surface and help those struggling to survive, if any still lingered. Yet, I did nothing. I huddled at the bottom of the ocean watching the man-thing examine more bodies that had drifted down.
I still didn’t believe I was alive. Who would’ve believed these sights after all? Yet as the bodies continued to sink, collected by the man-thing. Cautiously, I swam about in a lazy, exploratory path. My bare feet flashed in the eerie light past the hem of my nightgown. I still had legs. When I’d pressed a hand to my chest, I felt a heart pounding with fear. At that moment, I knew I hadn’t died, but couldn’t explain how.
The creature collected the bodies, dragging them to a hole in a collection of rocks a short distance away, in an undersea cave. In a sense, it resembled a house. I’m sure the merman had nothing to do with the shipwreck, but he collected the dead like a farmer who’d gone hunting for buck and stumbled across a field of easy pickings. In time, he disappeared into his lair, not once giving me a second glance, or acting remotely concerned that I’d remained out there alone. Or maybe he’d expected I would do what I wound up doing.
In that cave, eighty-some years ago, I thought I might find some answers, so I’d gone inside.
I would live in that sea cave for months.
At first, I had felt like a prisoner, but any sense of captivity was purely self-inflicted. The merman, whom I came to know as Barnaby, showed me the ways of our kind, though at the time, I hadn’t thought of it as ‘my’ kind. He saw what he had done to me as a gift. In his mind, he had saved me from a terrible death. Something about the way I fought so hard to survive but looked like a frightened young girl had struck a chord with him. Despite regarding humans as food, he’d felt pity, longing, or perhaps a kind of twisted love.
To be honest, I’m not sure if I am alive or dead. In later years, I would come to know that creatures like vampires, true undead, existed, though I fall somewhere in between, a ‘shifter,’ like a werewolf. Alas, unlike vampires, I won’t live forever, likely three to six centuries, depending on Licinia’s strength. It’s unfair really. Vampires, like me, are removed from the cycle of creation, but they get to live forever unless something destroys them.
What Barnaby had saved me from had been the afterlife, or more precisely, reincarnation. My existence as a mortal woman had been plain, boring, but decent. Licinia said souls keep going around and around until they finished whatever cosmic destiny had been set for them. After that, perhaps an afterlife or something no one understands. I suspect if such a thing as an afterlife existed, mine would’ve been pleasant, but I will never find out.
My first transformation had been the single most painful ordeal I had ever gone through, and hopefully ever will again. Drowning still rates as the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had, but strangely enough, it hadn’t hurt as much. When the fusion first occurred, the pain had been unbearable. Nowadays, I find the change pleasant, after all, I associate it with total freedom. But the first time…
Barnaby had warned me about it a few days after I’d ‘moved in.’ He’d said the first fusion would happen on its own sometime within a few weeks of the change. After two months, we both realized I had been overdue. Maybe I’d clung too much to my self-image as a human being? I had legs. Human legs. My flesh and blood, real, unlike Barnaby, whom I still pegged as either a demon or a hallucination. Perhaps the delay had come from Licinia’s nature. She’s nowhere near as wicked as some of the Dark Masters can be; we’d certainly grown to become as close as sisters, or given our age discrepancy, mother and daughter.
But anyway, Barnaby had described the fusion as both painful and ‘amusing.’ My relationship with him had become quite strained after some months. I saw him somewhere between a kidnapper and a lecher, for he had tried to lay with me many times. I would not allow it. True, he was strong, but as it turned out, I had taken to my new self rather fast, and had grown in strength rapidly. I could fend him off, but couldn’t feed myself, so I had to rely on him for nourishment. I refused to feast on the humans he’d collected from the boat; something about eating people I had conversed with, even in passing, felt… wrong.
I demanded fish or anything from the ocean, having a taste for the living, which Barnaby found repulsive. He preferred the dead; the longer they’d been dead, the better. I would later learn my preference for fresh food came from Licinia. In contrast, the entity within Barnaby favored putrid flesh―the more rotted the better.
In our air-filled undersea cavern littered with bones and foul scents, where a tangled mass of scavenged clothing formed our beds, I had cried out in pain, watching a thick, leathery material appear on my legs. It darkened from pale flesh to sea-green
, and crept around my thighs to meet in the middle. Over what felt like hours, but had been closer to ten minutes, the material spread from my crotch to my feet, melding my legs together, elongating them, and changing my lower half into something quite far from human.
When it started, I cried out in agony, reaching for my warping legs but afraid to touch them. The change had finally come. Yes, I assumed at that point I had died and gone to Hell, because people’s legs didn’t fuse together, melt like giant wax candles, or turn green. Barnaby, his legs perfectly human, stood a short distance away, staring at me with a faint smile.
I sat with my back pressed against one of the slimier rocks, my hands having dug deep into a pocket of soft sand. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t do anything but scream as the skin of my thighs bubbled and rippled. The pain―burning, tearing, cutting―was unlike anything I’d ever felt. I wished I had drowned all those months ago, like the others. My skin churned and roiled like an ocean surface in a raging storm. My screams didn’t leave the cave. No human ears knew of my suffering.
Barnaby laughed. Seeing me in pain visibly aroused him. I swore I would kill him, and he laughed some more. The boiling sensation, the rising and falling skin, shifted toward my inner thighs, morphing into thick, rigid scales that glimmered like gems.
I gasped and struggled as the process repeated along my outer legs. The leathery membrane that had formed between my legs thickened, the distinction between two individual limbs faded. I gawked at a rounded fishtail, as the sleeve of scaly flesh crushed my legs together amid the cracking and breaking of bones. Tighter and tighter it compressed, until I came near to blacking out from agony.
I screamed and screamed… and screamed as my body rearranged itself.
When the pain stopped, I lay flat on my back, gazing up at the cave ceiling. Weak, I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at the new me in mystified, curious horror. An iridescent swath of scales started at my waist and stretched at least twice the length my legs into a wide, beautiful tail. A rainbow of blues, greens, and violets shimmered in the light of the life-energy swirling around me. Gossamer fins of various sizes protruded here and there, and where once had been feet, a wide, shimmering fluke flapped when I tried to move.