The Little Mermaid

Its light had gone dark forever now but it seemed that the world had been turned backwards, because the ocean itself was all alight, glowing with St Elmo's Fire, eerie and raving. The waves crashing against the rocks misted him with sea spray, and Tristam had to take his time to avoid slipping and falling forever into the tide.

The lighthouse door was open just a crack, and although he wanted to run from the swallowing darkness beyond it, in he went anyway, unable to turn away. Rusted metal steps ringed the inside and he walked up them one at a time, ascending toward the iris at the top of the tower. The song was not so loud now, a croon instead of a wail, but it echoed off of the old bricks and surrounded him.

When he came at last to the lighthouse keeper's cabin he found it furnished with materials from the abandoned homes nearby, including a single candle on the table—the only light this place would ever see again—and there, sitting on the bed she'd pulled to the center of the room, was the woman from the sea, barely humming her tune now, just under her breath.

Stumbling, Tristam knelt at the bedside. The woman took his head in her hands, laying it on her naked lap and stroking his hair. Her fingers traced the curls of his hair. Awfully, horrifyingly, Tristam felt relief at her touch.

When he looked into the woman's eyes again and again saw foreboding visions of the place beneath the sea, this time he understood them better.

He learned her name—Lorelei!—and some things about who she was and where she came from, although much of it he couldn't understand, a confused and confusing jumble of names and feelings and ideas. Above all else, though, he did finally understand what she wanted from him.

Standing, he let her undress him bit by bit, her pale fingers fumbling with the buttons until she became used to how they worked. Her eyes (he was close enough now to see the flecks of gold in them, mixed in with the sea-green and the eternal blackness of her pupils) gazed with probing curiosity at the bare flesh that she revealed a little at a time, taking particular interest in the scars, although that scrutiny seemed to fade almost immediately.

Once she finished stripping him down she reclined back on the bed and beckoned with one finger. Shaking again, Tristam climbed up and on top of her without quite realizing what he was doing. Their bodies fit together easily; she pressed her lips to his and tasted the hint of ocean salts that still clung to her body.

Then she wrapped her legs around him and, combing her fingers through his hair again, pulled him down for an even longer kiss. Grabbing his hands, she guided them up and over her breasts, moving them in a circular pattern, until eventually he began doing it on his own.

She felt soft and tender all over, but whenever their kisses went on for too long she punctuated them with a nip of her teeth that always sent a shock of panic through him, but then she would twine her legs around him even tighter to keep him from wriggling free. She forced his head down to kiss the sloping curve of her neck and shoulders, and then she whispered things in his ear in a language he didn't understand but that still left him delirious and inflamed.

The pressure of her embrace left his cock squeezed between his body and hers, pressed almost awkwardly while Lorelei tugged on his hair and dragged his mouth across her body with open-mouthed misses. She writhed underneath him, reclining and luxuriating, only stopping to correct him now and then with firm touches on his neck or shoulders or the back of his head whenever he strayed from what she wanted.

He would have imagined her touch was uncomfortable and that her cold, pale skin would make him flinch. But she clung to him so tightly, rising up or pulling him down whenever even the smallest space appeared between them, that soon enough the heat from his body warmed hers, and the feeling of her lips and fingertips heated him even more.

Lorelei clung to him and pushed his head back to kiss the side of his neck, her mouth and quick pink tongue lapping at his naked flesh as the edge of her teeth nipped at him here and there. Following her direction, his hands wandered across her body and she shuddered and writhed harder, the sensation of her naked form underneath his coaxing a ceaseless hard throbbing from his cock.

Tristam had never been with a woman; had barely even a kiss to show for his attempts at romance up until now. Shamefully, pitifully, one of his great fears had always been that he'd die before he even had the opportunity. Now that it was here it felt almost surreal, as if he'd departed from his usual self, although whether that was because of the experience or the circumstances he'd never know.

She reached down and circled her fingers around him, an experimental gesture. Her face took on a curious tinge as she watched the results, teasing him up and down and reacting with amusement when he swelled in response.

Then she put her hand lower and Tristam braced himself for pain but found that instead of squeezing she simply fondled him down below before letting her fingertips slide up to trace a circle on the soft, sensitive skin at the base of his cock. He gaped, momentarily paralyzed.

Tristam dared a look into her eyes again, and what he saw this time chilled him: his own face, but not as he recognized it. This must be how she saw him, he realized, and he knew then that he belonged to her, and that he was always meant to be a sacrifice stretched across the altar of her body. He knew, dimly, that this should frighten or horrify him, but now for some reason it didn't.

He also realized in a vacant way that she had never stopped humming that hellish song, and that the grip that it had over his head and his heart was the reason he felt so resigned to this now, but of course that knowledge did nothing to alleviate his enthrallment. In a strange way, knowing this even made him feel more deeply ensnared.

That was the moment she chose to take him in one hand and press the tingling, vulnerable tip of his cock against her slippery lower lips. Tristam had to clamp down to avoid losing control immediately; she nipped at his ear and whispered while coaxing him a little bit at a time. A strange wave of sensations washed over him: sharp stimulation, trembling relief, tentative uncertainty.

She cupped his face with both hands and rested her fingertips on his temples. Tristam bit his lip. The tight, wet, intimate feeling of their bodies coming together was alien but still somehow familiar. "Oh god," he said in a shuddering whisper when the last space between them vanished and the inside of Lorelei's body squeezed his naked cock on all sides.

In response to his words she clapped a hand over his mouth, a surprisingly human gesture that briefly brought Tristam back to his sense. But it only took a few motions of her body bucking and grinding against his to lull him back into passivity. He collapsed on top of her in surrender.

A ripe red blush of blood spread under her naked skin, and the wet animal sound made by their bodies together left him feeling senseless and drugged. He moved automatically, rising and falling on top of her, thrusting and retreating.

She rolled him over effortlessly and climbed on top, mounting him and pressing down with all the force her body could muster. Lorelei's head lolled and her hair spilled across her body over him; she moaned and mewled and bit her own lip, and smiled in amusement when he squirmed. Her thighs squeezed him on both sides, pinning him to the bed.

The sweat from Tristam's body mingled with the strange sea spray scent of hers, until soon the old sheets felt wet beneath them. She devoured him with insatiably hungry kisses, her tongue stabbing into his mouth over and over.

The hot, wet burst of his orgasm took him by surprise. Lorelei sighed and cooed in abject gratification, putting her arms over her head and smiling while he emptied into her, continuing until he was spent but still for a while unable to stop, pumping uncontrollably in response to her urgings while she held him tightly against her again.

When she finally let him go the sudden exhaustion shocked him. Breathless, raw, exhausted, he tried to retreat from consciousness almost immediately.

But she didn't let him; Lorelei seized him and pulled him on top of her again, pressing their bodies together and spreading her legs a second time. Helpless, he couldn't fight back, but neither did it seem possible to do what she wanted. She responded by grabbing the back of his head again and staring deeply into his eyes, singing under her breath and holding his gaze for as long as she could.

He felt himself fall into the whirlpool at the center of her pupils and, even knowing that it meant he would be doomed completely, he kissed her again when she wanted, and did everything else she asked.

Hours later Tristam woke with a start, and his confusion at where he was lasted only a second before remembrance catapulted him back into terror.

Lorelei lay on the bed next to him. He pulled away but then froze, waiting to see if the movement would wake her. When she remained in slumber, Tristam strained to stand as quietly as he could, even with the old furniture and the old floorboards threatening to give him away any second.

It was not yet dawn, but dawn was close. Lorelei turned over in her sleep, revealing the pale canvas of her bare back. She was not singing anymore—no, that wasn't quite right; even in her sleep she hummed. But it was quieter, less insidious, less of a snare for his vulnerable thoughts.

Trying to put on clothes and his boots was agony for Tristam, certain every second that she would wake and catch him. He wanted to just leave everything behind but he knew without at least clothes on his back he'd never make it, so he submitted to the mental anguish of dressing himself with the most cautious and furtive of movements, and then, with his heart in his throat, slipping down the stairs, a vague plan to run inland flitting around the back of his mind.

Yes, he'd run away from the sea and this nightmare town, and hopefully, if the gods were kind also away from any certainty that any of this had happened at all.

He only made it as far as the docks before the song began again.

Gritting his teeth, he tried to put one foot in front of the other; it was like trying to resist gravity, like trying to jump high enough to fly off the face of the Earth. Trying to run away from the song turned his knees to jelly; moving back toward it was like falling downhill, so easy it hardly needed to be done. Worse, the longer it went on, the less he wanted to leave at all.

Shoulders slumped, he turned around. The walk back up the lighthouse steps seemed to take twice as long, and yet once he was there it felt like he'd never left. He expected Lorelei to be angry, but the expression on her face was one of amusement mixed with pity. And, perhaps, some haughty satisfaction as well.

Grabbing him, she pulled him down again; no longer wanting to resist, he fell into her, and felt himself vanish.

***

Days passed. He lost count. Why count when it seemed as if things would go on forever? A storm blew in, and both sea and sky were so black and harried that day and night seemed little different, both illuminated only by blinding white bursts of lightning.

Tristam had not tried to escape again since the first day. Partly because he knew it was impossible and partly because the desire had left him.

He spent the hours between lovemaking listening to Lorelei sing over and over about the world beneath the waves. Each time he imagined he could he could see it better, feel it more, even taste the brittle salty flavor of the ocean water...

He also understood, increasingly, that her time here would only last a little longer, although he was unsure what might happen to him when she departed. Part of him worried she might try to take him with her; surely she understood that this would never work? Surely she cared what the result of that would be?

But as soon as he began to fret about such things she had only to touch his forehead with her fingertips or sing a few notes of her song, and away his worries went.

His old nightmares stopped too, drowned out by deeper and darker night reminisces about cities under the sea, or sometimes just nothing at all, and those were the most peaceful times. The pain in his leg stopped; the pain deeper inside stopped too.

He had lost himself completely and found that he preferred being lost. To be lost was like death, but better; it was the death of his idea of himself, and new life as something simpler and easier. Lorelei's eyes told him everything he needed to know now. Lying back on the bed in her arms, he knew relief.

But it wouldn't last.

On the evening of the ninth day, Tristam woke from a blissful dream of nothing to the sound of the lighthouse door slamming open below. The storm had finally broken outside, leaving only the wind and the hint of ozone in the air, and he huddled in the bed, suddenly tense.

Reaching out for Lorelei, he found that she wasn't there. The footsteps on the stairs didn't sound like hers, and he soon realized there were too many of them. Someone, it seemed, had found them, and now they were coming up, and when they reached the top and discovered him here...well, what would happen then he couldn't imagine.

The cabin door opened, and for a moment it was too dark to see anything. Then a flash of dry lightning turned the room white and, horrified, Tristam covered his eyes, but even after the lightning faded he still imagined he could make out the shapes of five woman-things creeping into the room, dripping seawater after themselves.

Lorelei came in from where she'd been standing on the deck—watching the others arrive, Tristam now realized—and approached each of the newcomers, embracing them, and they returned her gestures of affection and words that Tristam couldn't understand and would never hope to speak even if he wanted to.

Each of Lorelei's sisters (because of course this is who they were) seemed to ask her something, and each time she nodded in agreement, and one by one they made a strange gesture. And when it was done she pointed to him, and they all laughed.

Huddling in bed, Tristam braced himself; they were going to kill him, he was sure. And indeed, one of the things even came toward the bed, with malice gleaming in her great eyes.

But Lorelei stopped her with a touch on the shoulder, and the sea-thing shrugged.

They shuffled back down the stairs and away, a parade of horrors. Lorelei was last and, turning back almost wistfully, she gave Tristam a cold, lingering kiss that tasted like the salt of the deepest ocean...

And with that she was gone too, leaving Tristam only with the sound of the wind, the waves, and his own beating heart to keep him company until the merciful dawn.

***

For the rest of his life, there were a lot of things Tristam did not talk about.

His boating accident, for one; it no longer seemed important. His limp became less pronounced as years went by, such that much of the time only he noticed it and few people ever bothered to ask about it.

He did not talk about the time after the accident either, when he'd disappeared into a deserted and forsaken stretch of coast, looking for either reprieve or death and finding neither, or at least neither that lasted.

And he certainly did not talk about the hazy, dreamlike memories that came back to him only in the earliest hours of the morning and the latest hours of the night, when he remembered a certain song, and secrets that only he was privy to about what went on in the deepest ocean, away from human attentions.

Sometimes he dreamed about the six sets of footprints in the sand outside the lighthouse that morning, leading back into the sea. Or about some of the insights he had later about the deferential way that Lorelei's sisters had greeted her, and their amusement when she pointed him out.

Tristam studied too, mostly about the histories of that coastline and of those deserted towns. He took particular interest in folktales and half-mad rumors about the creatures that supposedly lived in the sea near Devil Reef, and how they looked mostly human early in their lives, but as they grew older became more monstrous, and more like the sea.

The stories said too that sometimes these sea devils came to the land to mate with humanfolk, and in the past entire communities had made horrifying bargains with these inhuman powers and coupled with them en masse to increase their numbers.

Nobody believed such tales anymore, of course. But the stories persisted.

Lorelei was out there somewhere, he knew. Probably not alone. He imagined that she had a daughter now, one that took after its aunts and after its grandmother Atargatis, queen goddess of the sea, and after Mother Hydra and Father Dagon before them.

But mostly after its mother, from whom it had surely inherited the most beautiful singing voice in the entire ocean. Tristam was sure that if he ever heard that song, in spite of everything he would feel a swelling of affection and fatherly pride.

And that he would kill himself before letting another note reach his ears.

***

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown,
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
-TS Eliot, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock"