Falling in Deep Collection Box Set

by Pauline Creeden

  Her eyes continued moving, in search of answers to the many questions tumbling in her head. Besides the bed of layered canvas and brightly colored sailcloth she’d slept upon, there was a clutter of other things in the room. Netting hung on the far corner wall, decorated with bottles and pieces of glass. It wasn’t just thrown together. Someone had created it, assembled it. Art. In spots where the wall had naturally jutted out, the tops had been roughly shaped for seats and low tables. One held tattered papers and a couple small books. The place looked like a home.

  Marissa swept her eyes toward the end of the makeshift bed, noticing a low, uneven opening in the wall, possibly leading to an exit. She glanced around one more time to check for movement before tossing the scratchy blanket aside and standing. Sharp pains ran down her legs to her bare feet, doubling her over. She clenched her teeth and inhaled the heavy air, filling her lungs to keep from screaming. The pain was acute, but it was fleeting, lasting only a few seconds. After straightening up again, she looked herself over. The tank top and running shorts she’d worn on the boat still covered her bikini, though it was all dry, which answered one of her questions: she’d been out of the water for at least a few hours. Her head spun some—dizzy from the thick air, lack of food, something—but it wasn’t enough to stop her from moving toward the opening. She placed her hands along the wall for balance, gently skimming the coarse surface as she ducked to peek through the opening.

  She saw an area similar in size to the other room but low and cramped. With fewer green stones and no apparent water, it was filled with more shadows than light. The rough rocky floor took bites at her tender feet as she stepped farther inside. Even though it was a darker area, she could still make out the contents: two closed beach umbrellas propped against another fishing net on the far wall, three old trunks stacked against the wall closest to her, a plastic lounge chair with missing slats beside them, bottles, a rusty stop sign, fishing poles. Most of the items were placed neatly near the walls. Organized randomness.

  Marissa’s eyes took it all in then came back to the trunks. Smaller trinkets lined the surface of the top one, which stood at her chest height. She zeroed in on a leather wallet and moved in to pick it up. It was water stained and worn, soft on the pads of her fingers. She flipped it open and her knees buckled, dropping her to the floor. Her father’s eyes stared back at her from inside the murky plastic sleeve, two oceans of bountiful life, observing her, understanding her like they’d done every day for so many years. There was no stopping the instant stream of tears. She bawled, not understanding how it could be real, not knowing how his wallet, his driver’s license, had ended up wherever she was. Was it another hallucination? She touched her finger to the plastic, tracing his beard, his cheek.

  “How are you feeling?” a deep voice said behind her.

  Startled, Marissa fumbled the wallet and fell sideways onto her hip. Her blurry eyes focused on the wet bare feet in front of her and traveled up to pale white calves and thighs, where they got caught. Water droplets glided over long, jagged scars etched into the pale skin, emphasizing dark green undertones.

  “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

  Her eyes continued up. A loose bunch of beige material was fastened like a skirt to the guy’s waist, hanging to the middle of his thighs. His chest was also marred with deep gouges. When her eyes finally reached his serious face, she shook her head, scared and confused. It was the merman. Her thoughts had been so hazy, and her vision under the water hadn’t been perfectly clear, but she knew she was right. His pupils were still really big, though she did see a thin line of green around them. Next, she looked to his soft, parted lips, recalling how firm they’d been around her own, giving her breaths.

  All of it still seemed surreal. “Who are you?” She gasped at the sound of her own voice. It was lower, hoarse, almost as if she had a cold. “Where … where are we?” she asked, not fully trusting her own thoughts. As cliché as it sounded, she wondered if she was dead after all.

  He extended a hand, palm up, and waited for her to grab hold. “I’m Dylan Mitchell.” His cool fingers wrapped around her hand and he pulled, helping her to her feet.

  “Dylan,” she repeated, watching the room spin behind his solid jaw and dripping black hair. She’d stood up too fast. White and black specs danced behind her eyes and her whole body tingled.

  Dylan’s hands gripped her waist, catching her before her legs gave out. “Easy. It’s going to be an adjustment.”

  His words struck her. “An adjustment?” She shook her head and backed out of his hold, flickering her eyes around the room again as her balance returned. “Tell me where I am. I need to go. I have to go home.”

  “You can’t. I’m sorry I couldn’t explain earlier, but the water telepathy thing … it takes a while to adapt.” He tapped a finger to the side of his head.

  Marissa’s heart practically stopped. “Telepathy? What are you?” She took another step away, not knowing how to act, what to think. It had to be some kind of a joke. She looked around the room, frantic, waiting to wake up, waiting for something.

  Dylan closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t think I need to tell you that. I can explain where we are, though.” He turned away from her and looked around. “This is where I live.”

  Panic started to set in with realization that he could be telling the truth, about everything. It had all happened. “It’s true?” she whispered, crying again. “But … why can’t I go home?”

  Dylan smoothed a hand over his mouth, considering his words. “You can’t go because I saved you.”

  “So you won’t let me go? Am I a hostage because you chose to save my life?”

  “You are a hostage in a sense, but not mine. You’re a hostage of the sea. The shore is no longer home … and you’re no longer a person.”

  Four

  “What?” She pushed past Dylan, overwhelmed with fear. The rocky floor dug into her feet, but she kept moving anyway, pacing along the close walls with no destination. “That’s not true. I’m human. I’m not like you. Why did you bring me here? What do you want from me?”

  “You’re exactly like me. I know it’s going to be hard to accept, but as soon as you took my breath, the change started. Your body’s not the same.”

  She was certain he was trying to confuse her. He had to have been. “I have legs. I’m walking.” Her voice was gravely, pained, conflicted.

  “And so am I,” Dylan confirmed, looking down at his feet. “But things change in the water. Look, this isn’t easy for me either. I wasn’t supposed to save anyone. I just …” His eyes shifted with a quick glance to the trunks. “I just need to know what happened to you. Why were you there? And who anchored you?”

  Marissa placed her hands to the wall for stability as her thoughts shot to Darci. She’d wrapped the chain with no reservation, no care. It was as if her life didn’t matter. Marissa was just an obstacle after Darci had seen the stone.

  The possibility of revenge crept into Marissa’s mind. She envisioned the shock on Darci’s face if she were to see her again. It enlivened her, perhaps more than it should have. Darker thoughts quickly followed, reversing the roles: Marissa wrapping the cold chain links around Darci’s ankles instead.

  Marissa blinked, pushing those thoughts away to concentrate. Finding an exit was the first hurdle. There were no doors, no other ways out that she could see, and even if she could get out, they were supposedly standing somewhere deep within the ocean. An ascension without assistance was impossible, so the question was, would she try anyway? Would it be better to die than find out the reason Dylan had brought her here? He was strong, but didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt her. He seemed human enough, even considerate.

  Dylan bowed his tall frame to move into the other room, showing no visible affliction from the coarse floor. “You need to eat. I’ll get some food and we can talk about it later, after you’ve rested some more.”

  “I don’t want more rest. I want to go home.” Marissa followed hi
m with hurried, stumbling steps.

  “I told you, you can’t.” Dylan stopped and turned, and Marissa crashed into him.

  She placed her hands on his chest muscles, preparing to push off, but she froze at his body’s normalcy: warm temperature, smooth texture. His height should’ve been intimidating and their proximity was borderline embarrassing, but she was growing too frustrated to care. “Explain it to me then. Show me. I need to know.”

  He tipped his chin down, his lips inches from her forehead. His hands hooked her waist and pushed her back. “Your body needs more rest first. You’ve slept a full day, but you still need more. The change … it takes your body time to adjust. You might not feel much because of the air here. It’s different. It acts like an anesthetic before our bodies fully change.”

  “I slept for a day? I don’t understand any of this. My body is changing? Into what? A mermaid?”

  “Yes, but no, not exactly. We are descendants, not full blooded. Our most common names are Mitad, which means half, and Semivida, which means half-life. They’re based on the negative view of our own lives and the fact that we’re half-breeds. We live la media vida, the half-life.”

  Marissa stepped to the wall for support again, the new information adding more momentum to her dizzy head. “So if it’s about being half human, why can’t I go home? We have legs. We’re breathing, walking.”

  “It’s not the same as the folklore, the mythology. Maybe they once could, but we can’t. The ancestors of those here traveled from the Caribbean, found the cave systems, and settled out of comfort or the fear of being found or hunted. They took humans, changed them, and reproduced. We’ve adapted to these caves. Evolved. This is the only place we can breathe. I told you our air is not the same, and it’s because of these. Estrellas verdes. Green stars.” Dylan stepped closer to the wall, reached out, and skimmed his fingers down the green stones beside Marissa’s head. “The best guess by other humans who were changed years ago is that they produce xenon or something similar. It’s dense, heavier than oxygen. Our bodies survive on it. The water in this area has a high content so we filter it while we swim. If we travel too far, though, we’ll suffocate. It’s that simple, and that complicated. That’s our half-life. For those of us who were saved, it is our curse for getting a second life.”

  Marissa’s vision blurred, her eyes filling with tears from the truth. She knew he wasn’t lying—the tranquil look on his face, the softness of his voice—but if it was all true, it meant life as she knew it was over. She could never go back. The tears tumbled over her cheeks as she thought of everything she was losing: the wind in her face, dry grass between her toes, the rich smell of jasmine, birds flying, phones ringing, children’s laughter echoing through the halls of the museum.

  Everything.

  She couldn’t stop the sobs from escaping, so she pressed a hand to her mouth to muffle them.

  He turned to her, eyebrows knit with concern, the blackness of his eyes taking her in.

  She held her hand up to stop him from speaking. It was suddenly all too much, but she refused to fall apart. She wanted more information. “So … you were human too?”

  “Yes,” he replied. His gaze remained locked with hers and his eyes held a sadness that called to her.

  “How long ago?” She was no longer afraid. The sorrow was too strong, eliciting all of her sympathy.

  “Seven years. Spring break of my sophomore year was mostly a blur, spent drunk on a boat with five friends. None of them lived, and I haven’t touched shore since. I came close to trying not long after, though, and was spotted by a diver. He could have done any number of things, but he let me go. He saved my life.”

  Seven years. Her senior year in high school. It was the start of her father’s obsession. All the pieces lined up. “The man in the wallet?”

  “He was your father, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she whispered with a nod. “How did you know?”

  “I knew as soon as I saw you in the water.” Dylan’s fingers lifted to her face, pinching a few strands of hair resting on her cheek. “There’s a picture of you in his wallet too. Your hair was much shorter then. I never knew your name, but I knew it was you right away.”

  She pulled back a little, unnerved by the idea of him having her picture, knowing her. But, her dad had saved him, and her need to hear more about her father surpassed her worry. “How did he save you?”

  Realizing her discomfort, Dylan let his hand fall. “I think maybe you should rest, okay? You’ve been through a lot already and I—”

  “No, I’m fine.” She closed her eyes, forcing everything else away, the pain, the haze. All she wanted was to know more about her father, what he had experienced, what had led him to abandon his sane life. Her eyes opened and stared into Dylan’s, pleading even before she spoke. “Please, tell me.”

  Dylan glanced around with a deep inhale, expanding his chest, arching his shoulders back. The motion made parts of his scars shimmer, the stones’ light reflecting in the thin lines of healed translucent skin. When he exhaled, he wrapped his hand softly around Marissa’s. “You should sit down at least. Please?”

  She looked down at their hands, accepting the comfort she felt from the gesture, and nodded.

  He helped her over to the bed, letting go of her hand as she situated herself onto the red, white, and blue sailcloth and canvas. Instead of sitting beside her, he hung his hands on his hips and paused for a few silent seconds. “In the beginning, I was in denial. All I could do was focus on finding a way home. The green stars were the key, so I took one to test distance theories, land theories, even though it could risk the lives of those down here. It was selfish and stupid, and I didn’t care.” He paced in front of her, focused solely on the memory. “Your father was with several other divers at the aircraft carrier site, not far from where I found you.”

  “USS Oriskany,” Marissa whispered to herself, picturing the dive she’d made with her father many times.

  “Visibility was too good that day, which was the reason I hid as soon as I realized they were there. My plan was to wait close to bottom until they moved to a different side, to ensure a long enough window where their focus was directed elsewhere. That’s when your dad came into view. He was already at the bottom, separate from the others. I’d been so busy watching them that I hadn’t noticed him. We both froze for a few seconds, staring at each other. I was certain he’d call the other divers, but he held up his hands. When he noticed someone from his group dropping down, closer to our level, he waved me off, pointing around the carrier. He let me go.”

  Marissa stared at Dylan, considering her father’s actions and wondering how he’d felt in those moments. A rush of exhilaration rolled through her, knowing that thrill, that astonishment, had struck him with blinding intensity. He was a researcher, a curious soul meant to recover and preserve the past, always wanting to discover something new, something more. Even so, he’d known no good would come from telling the others.

  “Were you with him then?” Dylan had stopped pacing in front of her. “Did he tell anyone about me?”

  She twisted her fingers in her lap as she sifted through her cloudy thoughts. “He did say he saw a mermaid, but after hearing your story, I know he said it for a different reason. He knew people would call him crazy, so he used that to his advantage. The best way to research you, to find you again, would be to get away from his job. If he had just walked away from work, though, people would have been suspicious. He chose to throw his reputation away, but he never told anyone the whole truth. If he had wanted to, he would have done it all differently. He had your stone. Did you know that?”

  “Yes. I saw him pick it up as I swam away.”

  “He kept it hidden all those years. All he would’ve had to do was show someone at work. Whether he spoke about you or not, they would have searched for the source of the stone with him.”

  “But you knew about it?”

  “Not until the other day. I found the stone and coor
dinates hidden in my parents’ old house. Since I’d abandoned my father like everyone else, I felt I owed it to him, and to myself, to figure out what they meant.”

  “Was it the reason someone wanted to kill you?”

  “Yes. I invited Darci, one of my father’s old apprentices, to meet at the coordinates. When we saw the stone’s reaction to salt water, she hit me and I blacked out. I woke up with the chains around my feet.”

  Dylan sat beside her. His body was close, but not uncomfortably so. It actually made her feel a little better.

  “I was ready to let go when you found me, ready to die,” she admitted. “My father’s body was never found, so being in the ocean, a place that he’d loved, and knowing that what he’d seen was real … It was the best thing I could have seen before dying.”

  “There’s something else I should tell you. I saw your dad one more time. It was when he died.”

  Marissa gasped. “You saw him die?”

  “He wasn’t alone. There was a woman diving with him.”

  “Darci?”

  “Whoever it was sabotaged his tank. I watched the air pour out, watched him struggle with her, but I couldn’t intervene. I’m sorry.”

  Tears slid down her face, burning her skin with hurt and anger. “It had to be Darci. Who else would have done it? Maybe she wanted him gone to advance in the field. Maybe she found something out, though she seemed as surprised as I was about the stones.” Her head spun faster, thoughts racing into oblivion.

  “After his death, she ascended. His wallet, phone, and keys floated down a little while later.”