Chapter Thirteen
The deck
was cold. Priddy could still feel that, though other perceptions
had shut down to whispers and shadow. Cold planks under his stomach
and chest, and a piercing, whelming loneliness he would take with
him when he left his body, which would be soon. His vision had shut
down to blocks of dark and light. It didn’t really matter. He’d
dragged himself far enough. Geoff Blades was one dark block on an
otherwise empty deck. His ankle was within Priddy’s
reach.
He
shouted in terror when Priddy made his grab. Priddy wondered
vaguely what Geoff what seeing, how he looked at this stage of an
unfinished transformation. Bedraggled, gelatinous monster, eyes
blanked by third eyelid, leg-bones melting to soup in the membrane
sac... “Kit,” Priddy said, closing his grip. “Kit.”
“I couldn’t let him see!” Geoff kicked out, but the webbing
between Priddy’s fingers was strong as drying leather pulling taut.
“Don’t you understand? Nobody can see this except me. Mermaids
exist. You’re real.”
“Kit. Get him back.”
“I can’t. He doesn’t matter anymore.” Geoff half-fell onto the
deck. “Only you matter. Listen, Priddy. I know what to do, all
right? I caught a merman once before, twenty years ago, one of
Merouac’s changelings, a boy called Francis. He was like you?—a
human trying to change, although Merouac never knew. All he knew
was that the boy had vanished, and he tore our boat apart trying to
find him. And I’m sorry that I let Francis die, but I learned from
him, okay? Let me go, and I’ll put you into the water, I
swear.”
Into the water. The words fell like
sunshine and music into Priddy’s mind. Everything was too late for
him now, but this grinding death would come easier—would be a
dissolution, a homecoming—in the embrace of the waves. And maybe
there would be enough of him left to find Kit before the sea
consumed them both. With an effort he detached his hold. “The
water.”
“That’s it. I can’t release you, but I promise there’ll be no
more pain.”
Retreating footsteps on the deck. Priddy’s world became a
sphere of sound, with his own fading self at the core. Somewhere
far above, the wind and the clouds were being chopped up into a
rapid-fire beat, a thudding roar, a song from his childhood that
had used to fill him with admiration and yearning. He and Kit would
rush to the window to see if they could spot the grey-and-red
skywhales heading out.
He tried
to focus, but his vision was dark now, the nictitating membrane
opaque and sticky over his eyes. And the lower sphere was full of
music too, if he could only stop his panicked, air-drowned gasps
and listen...
Voice
upon voice. Some of them were piercing, like seagulls in a choir.
Some cascaded down through countless scales to a vibrant silence
that meant ultrasound, the call of the great whales across the
deep. Others swept and whooped, and one—suddenly, weirdly close at
hand—broke up into childish giggles. Something wet slapped Priddy’s
face.
His
third eyelid flew back. His vision cleared absolutely, granting him
an acuity of colour and form he’d never experienced in his life.
Not that it was much use to him now, with his brain too far gone to
make any sense of what he was seeing... A creature was clinging to
the side of Geoff Blades’ boat. It looked vaguely human—like a
human child, a girl, seven or eight years old—until you saw the
eyes. They were huge, upswept at the corners, and a uniform cloudy
teal-blue. A mop of dark hair was slicked to the creature’s skull.
It shot out a skinny arm and slapped Priddy again. Took a handful
of his curls and tugged at them experimentally, as if they might
come off.
Something rattled at the far end of the boat, and the creature
vanished, webbed hands slithering back over the rail. When it
reappeared, it was accompanied by a carbon copy: a twin, to the
last detail. Then a third, and a fourth, and one more on top of
that, a row of starlings along the line of a roof. The last three
had a different cast of feature, though all five were fey as
fawns. Mer-children, Priddy thought, as if that was the sanest, easiest
conclusion in the world. He liked kids, even if they were mythical
and he was almost dead. Two girls and
three boys. Hello.
The
first girl lit up with delight. The monochrome eyes could convey a
great deal, but the smile was the killer: vast, almost ear-to-ear,
lined at top and bottom with a single gleaming blade instead of
teeth. She couldn’t speak. Priddy experienced her flash of
frustration as if it had been his own: not a language barrier but a
difference of concepts, a division in the deepest roots of
communication and what it was for. The child made a kind of O with
her lips. She reached out one weird webbed paw again, and this time
took Priddy’s hand. Very deliberately, frowning with concentration,
she began to sing.
Metal crashed onto the deck, as if someone had dropped a bag
of cymbals. Four of the five mer-child heads ducked away, but not
Priddy’s girl: she hung on, the long, low note of her song morphing
up into defiance. Priddy tried to pull his hand away.
Go, he told her fiercely,
projecting into her mind every image he could conjure of danger,
badness, fear. Fishing nets, sharks, harpoons...
Go! Get away!
Geoff Blades stepping over his body, arms outstretched. Not an
image but a foul reality. “Ah, look at you,” Geoff said, and his voice was
like marshmallows, a promise of sweets and treats any little kid,
Mer or mortal, was sure to fall for. “Easy, my sweetheart. Just
stay still. Oh, my God, I don’t believe it—just look at you...”
The Mirage rocked. One huge lurch, out of phase with the heave of the
storm, sudden and big enough to kick Geoff’s feet out from under
him. He landed hard on his backside: skidded right down the
gunwales in a flail of limbs. Priddy followed helplessly. An
avalanche of metal tubes went with him, aluminium bars and bits of
framework. A wave exploded off the hull, drenching them both. Geoff
began to cough and spit, but to Priddy the shower of saltwater foam
was sweeter than ice on a burn. “Hoi,” a familiar voice said, and
the mer-child’s grip disappeared from his hair. “You’re a good
girl, Hatchling Four, but we don’t touch those till we know how
they work.”
Merouac. Merou, my Merou. Priddy was
too far gone to lift his head or speak. It didn’t matter now. The
boat tipped again, and a hand five times the size of the infant’s
starfish one clenched hard on the rail. Merou.
Yes. Here. “Strike me cold, Geoff
bloody Blades. It is you.”
Geoff
tried to scrabble away. “What are you doing? Let go of the rail or
you’ll capsize her.”
“You think so? How about if I do this?” The big hand clamped
tight, and another blessed rush went through Priddy’s bones,
washing out the pain. “I’m here for my lover, Blades, just like I
came for my poor Francis all those years ago. Tell me what you did
with him. I have to know.”
“He died. He went light and flimsy, like a paper doll, and
he... I didn’t mean it! How was I to know what would happen when he
changed?”
“If a thing grows gills and a tail, and it’s drowning in air,
you put it... in the water.” A third lurch of the deck,
and the Mirage couldn’t right herself this time. Her starboard aft remained
submerged, and Priddy, submerged too, stopped drowning and began to
breathe. Merou’s voice came to him like cello music, a reverberant
caress of the deepest inner coils of his ear. “Listen, you bastard.
The rescue chopper’s here. I won’t forgive you Francis, but give me
this one back—give me my Priddy—and you get to live.”
Blades
sobbed. He took hold of Priddy’s sodden jumper at the neck, his
grasp hot and possessive and deranged. “Don’t you see that I can’t?
This one’s my proof, my prize, my—”
“Is that a dive cage? Were you going to put him in
there?”
“To save him, Merouac! To save him!”
“Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t try.”
The Mirage flipped. Her prow shot skyward. Geoff, the pieces of the cage,
the boxes and cases on the deck—all the necessities of a mermaid
hunt—went rolling and tumbling into the flooded stern, overboard
and into the Atlantic.
Priddy
went too, but it felt like a dive. He stretched out his arms to
meet the water. The first great wave took him like a rag in a
washing machine. Sky and sea whipped over and under him, over and
under, each roll sloughing away the mess and anguish of his
half-altered state. Over and under, and something warm went round
his waist, and he surged up to surface, wrapped tight in Merou’s
arms.
He lay
laughing at the raging sky. He couldn’t stop, even though there
were so many things he had to tell Merou, so much he had to fix.
His head was resting on Merou’s shoulder. He tried to speak, and
his throat produced an extraordinary peal of music instead, like an
opera singer who’d swallowed a set of church bells. “It’s all
right,” Merou said, and his voice was shaken with laughter too.
“You’re changing, my Priddy—that’s all. Come on, let’s get this
jumper off you. You should always be naked for this. You’re nearly
there.”
Nearly there. Yes, as if every come
he’d ever had in his life was building in his groin. He arched his
back, kicking out with the place that had once been his feet. Merou
rocked him, lifting him so he could breathe air, plunging him down
with the trough of each wave so he could breathe water. Lungs and
gills, lungs and gills in transition... “Merou, what’s happening to
me?”
“You’ve been trapped in a halfway change. It’s finishing now.
Just let go.”
The
great tail was coiling round him, curling to shield him, to soothe
the spasms crushing their way down his hips. Priddy was one insane
hair’s-breadth from possessing such a tail of his own. He put his
head back and called and called to the sky, and the seagulls of
Hagerawl Point formed a ring and called back to him, and so did the