Melissa Allor

Fiction | Short Story | Mermaids | Horror

“Hello!” My voice echoed off the bare rock walls. A sliver of light cast a shadow over my right foot. It was just enough to let me see the chain bound to my ankle. The other end was fixed firmly to the wall on my left. My legs stretched out before me, and I sat with my back against an opposing wall. The corner I was seated in at least afforded me that small luxury.

“Can anyone hear me?” My voice cracked as I shouted into the darkness that seemed to swallow my words as quickly as they left my lips. Both hands reached up grasping at my parched throat. How I longed for a glass of cool water. Ironic, considering water is what brought me here.

I wondered just how long I’d sat there.

It had all happened so quickly. One minute I was dancing barefoot in the sand, the tips of my toes dipping into the black edge of the coastline, and the next the ocean welled up, swirling around my feet until I found myself pulled into the murky depths. I swallowed more salt water than I thought possible.

In the rush I found it was impossible to judge which way was up and which was down, but I frantically waved my arms and legs remembering what I’d learned about the ocean’s deadly under tow. Only the minute I surfaced, the current pulled me under again, or at least, I thought it was the current.

I shook my head, looking again at the bracket on my ankle. Something had definitely been here, and whatever, or whoever that was, had chained me up like an animal.

I couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond my toes. The black around me seemed to swallow me the longer I sat there. I thought that my eyes were supposed to get accustomed to the darkness, but somehow this darkness was different, stranger. My first sense of my surroundings had screamed just one word: evil.

The silence echoed around me, until I didn’t know if minutes or hours were passing, and my fear grew with each passing moment. I had long since stopped attempting to release my foot from its chain. I contemplated different ways of breaking my foot to make it small enough to release from its confinement.

When I was a child, I read a fiction book that taught me that a captured woman who had handcuffs on her wrists could break free provided she broke her own thumb. In the story, she was quickly able to slide off the only barrier to her freedom, the cuffs. I always wanted to be that brave.

It seemed my captor knew of such a story as well, because they chose to cuff my ankle, and provided I didn’t chop it off myself – I wasn’t likely to be going anywhere.

I opened my mouth ready to offer up a last futile attempt at calling for help, when a small sound reached my ears. Immediately I sat up, my body aching and tired from lack of movement and sitting on the hard rock floor.

“Who is there?” I attempted to confront my foe with bravado, even in my weak position. No response came to me, but the trickling sound of water surprised me, and it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting in a small pool of salt water. At least I was still near the ocean. Maybe I wasn’t as far from civilization as I thought. The darkness here was threatening to take my sanity.

I felt rather than heard the movement of someone, or something approaching me. A small shove in the water as something entered the same pool I was seated in caused it to lap at my thighs.

“What do want?” I whispered, no longer caring if the fear reached my voice.

It’s time. The voice invaded my head so quickly, I wondered if it had been there all along.

“Time for what?” I asked.

It’s time. Repetitive, I thought, and not very helpful.

“What do you want with me!” I screamed into the darkness, careful not to let my voice shake this time.

Look at me. The voice hissed inside my head, and yet I knew it was an outside force speaking to me. I even sensed the direction. It was just to my right. I shifted closer to the wall on my left, closing my eyes. Determined not to listen to the voice in my head.

Look at me! This time the voice was angry, screaming even. My eyes flew open with the force of the shock, and immediately I realized my mistake. In front of me were two emerald eyes. Glassy, and polished, wet. I watched the way the lid clamped open and closed over the eye. So very unlike my own. A work of fiction, that I couldn’t have dreamed up.

The eyes were attached to the body of what I can only refer to as a mermaid. I thought I knew what mermaids were. I thought they were beauty and hope and magic. Only, even as I was struck dumb by her beauty, I could feel the magic in my head as she spoke. Hope, already fleeting, was definitely sucked from the air as she approached.

I pressed my back into the wall behind me, attempting to make my gangly large body, small before her. Her eyes held mine still, and I watched as she hunted me. She smiled, revealing rows of razor pointed teeth.

It’s time. She said this last while smiling at me. For a second, I thought I might survive. For a second, I believed she might be here to save me, and so as my throat was ripped from my body, I sagged to the ground with a smile upon my face.