by Jack Ketchum
A loud female voice, clearly audible even through his ear plugs, shook him from his reverie.
"Tomas! Please, Tomas, help me!"
Tomas tore the cotton from his ears, snatched up a lamp, and ran outside. He clattered down the jetty and skidded to a halt. Basha clung to the boards. Deep scratches striped her face and body, her blood glistening almost black in the flickering lamp light.
"We were attacked by another pod...the others escaped, but I was too slow...Tomas, they killed Constance!"
"Oh, Basha..."
Her pain and despair was palpable. Without thinking, Tomas prostrated himself on the jetty and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her into an awkward embrace. He sought only to comfort her, but the touch of his skin on hers intensified the mermaid's allure beyond his ability to resist. He turned his head and pressed his open mouth to hers. His heart seemed to stop in his chest as she returned his kiss.
Then she grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled. She was strong, freakishly strong, and he offered no resistance as he slid into the water. He clasped Basha to him, and their combined weight dragged them slowly down. Basha wriggled away from him, and he had a moment to consider how lovely her hair looked as it swirled about her in the gentle current, another moment to wonder how it was that he could see her, underwater and in the dark, and then he was shooting skyward.
He drew a deep, shuddering breath as he broke the surface. His lamp had tipped over and set the jetty alight. The heat from the mermaid's kiss flowed outward from his lips to infuse his entire body, mirroring the fire. The flames cast a ruddy glow over the water as they licked at the spilt oil and raced along the boards.
It was as if he were seeing fire for the first time. The flames bowed and pirouetted, seguing from the palest yellow to vivid orange to arterial red; their own hushed roar the song to which they danced. The sea lapped gently at his shoulders, caressing him through his sodden robes as he treaded water. He inhaled again, savouring the scented air. Salt, seaweed, sagebrush, burning pitch, he could distinguish each aroma, yet it all combined into an exquisite perfume. Now he understood why so many men risked death to embrace the mermaids; in one instant Basha had changed him. She had brought him anew into the world, immersed him in sensation, she had...
She had brought him closer to God.
He wept. Basha came to him to drink his tears, catching each drop on the tip of her tongue. The sea rippled around him in a dozen different places as Sh'teth and her pod rose to take their turns embracing him. In the dimmest regions of his lust-fogged mind, he wondered if they had used Basha as bait to lure him into the water. Once this would have enraged him, but now it no longer seemed to matter.
He wept as the mermaids' caresses became more insistent. They tugged and tore at his robe and undergarments until he floated naked, and they adorned him with their own bare flesh. He wept as they took their pleasure of him, holding him submerged until he reached the brink of unconsciousness, then allowing him the briefest of respites before dragging him under again. He wept as his own climaxes ripped him apart and reassembled him in strange new ways. Even as the mermaids took him down for the final time, he wept, although whether it was from the agony or the ecstasy, he could not tell.
***
The boat sat low in the water under Brother Alton's weight. With every lurch of the oars, water splashed over the sides, soaking the hem of his habit.
"Don't know why you're bothering," said his escort. "You can't convert the mermaids, and there are four gravestones on that island to prove it. I hear Brother Tomas even wrote a letter to the bishop telling him so—right before he died."
"If such a letter exists, then it is the property of the church, and no business of yours," he said. "In any case, Brother Tomas was weak, just like the others." He jabbed at his chest with a podgy forefinger. "Whereas I will prevail."
She raised one eyebrow, and went to speak, when there was a disturbance in the water off the prow of the boat. Alton half-stood to see what it was, sending the boat rocking.
"Welcome to Koreka, Brother," said the thing in the water.
Alton sat slack-jawed and speechless. Nothing he had read or heard about the mermaids could have prepared him for this. She was beautiful, she was terrible, she was completely, unmercifully compelling. As she lifted her body above the waves, he could already feel himself drowning.
—Boyd E. Harris
Boyd E. Harris is the publisher for Cutting Block Press, a small press company in Austin, Texas. His books +Horror Library+ Volumes 3 and 4 were nominated for Bram Stoker Awards for best anthology, and his anthology Tattered Souls 2 is nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award.
He is a two-time Black Quill Award winning editor, one for Dark Recesses Press magazine, and one for +Horror Library+ Vol. 4.
As a writer, Boyd has seen dozens of short stories and novellas published in magazines and anthologies, and he fantasizes of a day when some avant-garde travel magazine will pay him to combine his two favorite pasttimes—writing about horrific things and exploring exotic places—into a hair-raising series of travel adventures he'll call "Boyd's White Knuckle Tours".
—Atlantis Purging
By Boyd E. Harris
They hauled it up in the shrimp nets sometime between three and four pm. The medical examiner determined that it had been submerged for six to eight months, decomposing slowly in the chilly waters of the Atlantic. Heavy currents on the Ocean's floor had shoved the torso along, until it rolled its way into East Chesapeake Bay where it was discovered. Both legs, one arm, and the head were missing. When I arrived, they were just beginning to disentangle a protruding bone of the upper arm from the shrimp net to free the remains.
But whose was it? Fingerprint and DNA tests matched it to nothing in any missing person files, and this was with the most advanced network systems in place. Investigators had direct access to the records from every city, state, and federal database in the country.
Just about the time I decided it was a dead story, the second cadaver rolled up on Buckroe Beach; but it wasn't exactly a body. It looked more like the leg quarter of a raw, cutup chicken. The hip section and most of the lower abdomen were still attached. The skin and flesh were blanched, shredded and flapping, with everything under the abdominal wall hollowed out except for eight vertebrae. The spinal column had snagged the steel support sticking out from an old concrete pier post and it swayed with the rips of the water.
I moved in close enough for a few snapshots, but nothing where I had any real good angles. Standing beyond the taped-off area, I wasn't close enough to see, but I was told later that a shark's tooth had been found lodged between two vertebrae.
Then things got interesting. Within a week, three dozen more surfaced, most of them rolling up on Buckroe beach, but a few finding their way through into Chesapeake Bay. None were whole bodies. Most were missing limbs or heads and a few had sizeable chunks gone from their legs or torsos. There were also a few individual heads, hands and feet. The heads were missing eyes, or what was left of them didn't resemble anything of the like. The noses and ears were usually scraped away from rolling along the rough Atlantic floor.
For me, it became a daily ritual to scour the three miles of Buckroe Beach just before sunup, where high tide left a line of seaweed every morning. I looked for bodies as though they were sand dollars or starfish in the prime of the combing season, hoping to happen upon the first body that would be identified. Hoping to get my ugly mug on "Good Morning America." Anything to change a lifelong string of bad luck.
This was my second attempt as a newspaper journalist. The first one had been a disappointment. I'd been a sports columnist and had pretty much pissed off all the local professional athletes. When the star players thumb their noses at you, it's time to move on to something else.
Then I took a short stint into network marketing. You know, the pyramid thing. I failed dismally at that. I figured only annoying people do these things, so I'd probably be pretty good at it, but then
I realized that you have to at least have friends to make it work, and that was an area I was sorely lacking in. So I returned to the Times Herald, giving it another go, this time as a big story reporter.
At 5:40 am on July 10th, almost three weeks after the discovery of the first torso, human remains #33 was discovered by yours truly. Unfortunately, like every other discovery in this bizarre series of wash-ups, it would never be identified.
This one was just an arm with part of the shoulder section. It had washed up on the beach not two hundred yards from my condo. It was tangled in seaweed and a dozen or so sand crabs had their pinchers out, picking at it, circling it, trying to decide if there was a meal worth having.
Blanched free of the foul smell you normally get from rotting corpses and so far removed from anything that looked human, it was almost easier to think of it as a washed-up sea creature. These parts just seemed like pieces of raw chicken or pork or whatever you could conjure up in the brain to keep the actuality from seeping through.
Cable news personalities were describing people like me, what I was doing, and commenting on the callousness of it. The exposure was making the front page daily and the competition for the next big break was brutal. Newport News had become a haven for reporters, scientists, and theory specialists. Tourism gave way to freaks and wackos, and there were plenty of those to take up the slack.
One afternoon I got some close-ups of a very disturbing partial corpse. I sold my best photo of it under the table to a shock journalist from Way Out magazine. I knew my newspaper wouldn't use it, so I figured it was only fair for me to make a buck.
These were shocking photos indeed. The corpse was missing half its head and all of its arms and legs. It wasn't clear how the chunk had been taken from the head, but it was covered with a layer of skin, almost as if it had tried to heal itself after sustaining the bite or injury. Over the skin, there was a white, fuzzy film covering not only the head, but also pretty much the entire remains. The edges of the injury were smooth, and it looked like the skin covering it was holding in whatever brains had been left behind. There were lumps under the skin, which at least meant something meaty was trapped in there. The remaining eye, plenty deteriorated, was barely visible as it was covered with the same filmy skin.
The media hounded police and FBI investigators for a week, trying to get someone to explain what it was. Finally, authorities from the coroner's office told us it was marine fungus. Fine with me; I had something to report.
On the following day, The Daily Herald chief editor, Mike Shields, who also happened to be my uncle, allowed me to print one of my nastiest pictures of the marine fungus-covered remains, so I got twice the mileage on it.
I think everyone around Newport News was becoming desensitized, not just me. I heard that a photographer from the Newport News Weekly was caught placing a corpse in different poses for his little photo shoot. Even I probably wouldn't have gone that far given the chance.
Then things went berserk along the shorelines. One morning, eight different parts were reported from eight different bodies along Buckroe beach and smaller neighboring beaches. They washed in at just about the same time. Never whole bodies, always sections and extremities. Multitudes of sand dollar pieces washed up in different times during the year, and only a few whole ones appeared when they were in season. I wondered if there was a human season coming.
On that day, I realized that none of the victims had been found clothed. This meant whoever was dumping them had a purpose other than just dumping them. But then again, to date, only sections of bodies had washed up. Clothes aren't going to cling to a leg and hip, or a head and shoulder section very long. There were a lot of things to consider, but something was happening that was beyond what you'd expect from a mafia hit-and-dump or a drug smuggling operation gone wrong.
Then something caused federal and local authorities to begin smothering the beaches, ready to pounce on every wash-up. They concluded that the curious world had seen enough. Almost every morning a couple of separate body parts were discovered on Buckroe beach, but the authorities were there way too quick for most of us to get to them. They also taped off more and more space between the bodies and us. Something was up—and whatever it was, they were keeping it secret.
And this was about the time the freak show on land cranked into overdrive. There were marine biologists teaming with oceanographers to analyze and form theories on the washed-in human debris. Ocean currents in most parts of the world were said to vary slightly, allowing fair speculation on origination point, but not along the Southeastern coastline of the U.S., and especially outside Chesapeake Bay. Here they were almost impossible to estimate.
Nor could you predict the time of deposit very well. The varying water temperatures of the currents moving through the Atlantic are as unstable as the current directions themselves. This made it difficult to estimate time of death and disposal based on the level of decomposition.
One oceanographer had all her ducks in a row, claiming to have documented the 800 miles of water currents for two years, but her records were discounted as flawed, because most of the bodies and pieces had been bitten by sharks. None of her current stream studies were shown passing through shark-infested waters.
While all this went on, I continued my search for the big break. One morning, while approaching the beach from the back door of my condo, I nearly tripped on a man sleeping on a broken-down cardboard box. From stumbling backwards, I spilt half of my instant coffee and dropped my Pop Tart into the sand. Choking back a scream, I realized this guy was just a bum trying to rest.
He sat up to face me, his silhouette shaking in front of the glowing dawn, and muttered, "Easy does it!"
I stumbled away from him, half embarrassed, but still churning from the scare. After distancing myself a hundred feet or so, resentment set in.
Who was this bum, to choose valuable beach property as a camp? To impose himself on my highly taxed neighborhood community? There were new laws written to remove most of this scum from our way of life. In fact, how had he escaped the Homeless Relocation Program of last spring? The city had scooped up, found scrap jobs, homes and mental institutions for these vermin in a record-setting tax dollar usage campaign. This was the first I'd seen of a homeless person since then.
When I returned, the bum was gone and I decided not to report it. With a busy day planned, I didn't need to wait for the cops to come out and do their dog and pony show.
The pieces washing in were growing in numbers, and yet we still had not found a complete body. Over 250 separate human remains, apparently masticated by sea creatures, notably sharks, and none had been identified.
Because I was classified as an investigative reporter, I decided to do some investigating. I researched drug cartels and mafia activity, cautiously, of course; didn't feel like a Columbian necktie would suit me. I looked into the whereabouts of all Eastern seaboard charter boats and checked for reports on Cuban refugee activity. After exhausting every possibility I could think of, the mystery was no closer to being solved. This type of work wasn't meant for me, but then again, what work was? The self-defeating attitude wasn't helping either.
But I couldn't give up, especially with all there was to gain. There were dozens of out-of-town reporters here to pounce on the next breaking news, but since I was so close to all this, I had to be the one. I was tired of living off my parent's money and going without a girlfriend. Something had to give, even though I had no idea where to look.
Then around noon on September 4th, Manny Bruenstein called. He was my only good contact in Newport News homicide. He had been tight-lipped about this whole thing since early on, but now he wanted to have lunch.
I cabbed it to Hampton marina, getting off at the end of the boardwalk, near the Watertrails Sports fishing dock. I bought a pack of Marlboro's at Deep Eddie's Bait Shop and lit one for the stroll down to the restaurant.
I had grown addicted to spending as much time as possible walking along the water's edge. You
never knew what might wash up next, and like anything you get obsessed with, your habits form around the obsession.
Flicking my ashes away from the inward wind of the bay, my eyes caught the bum I'd stumbled over on the beach a few mornings earlier. He was sitting between two wood-sided buildings, also smoking a cigarette, watching me. He was a kid, and though I had not seen his face in the earlier encounter, I knew it was him.
As I turned off the boardwalk toward Blackbeard's entrance, I shot him a cold stare. My hard facial features, thanks to an overactive acne problem in my adolescence, deep eye sockets, and large cheek and jawbones quickly intimidated most, but this kid kept watching me.
As I sat down, the waitress put a 22 ounce pilsner glass in front of me, frothing over with a crisp local microbrew.
I sipped my beer and spoke of the Braves and their chances at winning a Pennant. Manny enjoyed sports talk, which was a good thing for me. We became friends during my sports column days and I think that helped him see past all my flaws.
He sipped his beer and laughed with me about mundane baseball stats, but I could see something was eating at him.
Manny was a young veteran of the NNPD. He'd joined at 21 as a blue shirt and then worked his way into the violent crimes division. At 35, he was well on his way to running the homicide department. He was a very sharp guy, but a little sloppy with his appearance and sloppier with the company he kept.
He gave me a troubled look, which was my cue.
"What's up, Manny?"
There was trust in his eyes. "One of the bodies has turned up with a positive ID." He chugged a good portion of his beer and wiped the back of his hand across his face. "The Commissioner is having a press conference tomorrow morning. The fed in charge will be with him."