AND PLUNGING DOWN
The fish is the center of the world. This Aodhán had known since he
was a child. The land was pockmarked with lakes and inland seas,
icepick scars into the otherwise uniformly flat and barren earth.
Every scrap of civilization in the countryside scraped by clinging to
the edges of some shore or other. Else, crops could not grow, meat
alone could not sustain them. Livestock were weak and sickly. Fish fed
their men, fertilized their earth, bartered in salted strips for their
goods and gold. This is how the country survived.
Mer were fish too, one figured, in that they swam and lacked legs and ate of other fish. But they were pestilence. They had many appearances of man, but unlike men they fundamentally lacked any behaviors besides raw gluttony. They ate through schools of fish and pulled men from boats for play. They were demons sent either by God-In-The-Sea or his enemies, either way intended as a test of the strength of man. Towns withered in the wake of mer infestations. And the only way to purge a sea of them was sacrifice to God, who slept beneath the seas and lakes. This, too, was known.
So when the first sighting of a mermaid was reported in the loch down past the monastery, there was no question among the townspeople as to what would happen next.
"When you bring its body into the water, be sure to weigh it down," the priest said. "There should be many stones on the shore—send it to the lakebed." He tied Aodhán's hair back into the complicated missive's braid, pulling too hard for emphasis. Aodhán did not flinch at the pinpricks of pain, only nodded as much as he could without hanks of hair coming away in the priest's hands. The carved shell rings around every finger bit into his scalp.
As the abbot yanked at the rope belt around his waist, Aodhán thought briefly of his consecrator's baptism years prior, and how much gentler the friar had been as he dressed the boy in ceremonial garb. But he was now a man of seventeen, and a cruel mission required no gentle touch to prepare for it. He must steel himself.
He was proud when he held out his palms for the knife without shaking. He closed his eyes when the priest licked the wounds, and heard the sound of him swilling the blood over his withered gums like wine. Aodhán stole a glance from under his lids just in time to see the blood spat at his feet. It came out black in the dim light of the oubliette, joining the puddles under his bare feet in a wet splatter. The scent of iron was lost in the scent of mold and stale piss that saturated every rock in the catacombs.
The man made his leave with no more than a curt goodbye.
Cold water sluiced down the walls. It fed the sprawling patches of moldering lichen that populated the cracks in the cobblestones and filled his bedroom with the permanent tangy odor of mildew. He would have counted the water dripping to pass time, if he could have focused on anything but his heart pounding at his ribs.
At last a knock came at the door. Aodhán's intestines filled with acid. This was it, no final words or well wishes. It was time to leave for the lake.
He drew his cape over his shoulders, flinching as the briar settled against his neck, and walked. The urge to grip his knife never left him as he exited his small chambers, nor as he walked heel to toe through the long corridors of the monastery. But he was good. Aodhán kept his hands folded under the sleeves of his robe as he went, until the wrought iron gate came down at his back. The only other sign of life in the monastery were the guards posted out beyond the entrance gates. Their beady little eyes beetled out from helmet visors.
Both the guards, though they were excluded from the practice, were already under orders that Aodhán would return bloody-handed or not at all. He was certain he felt their gaze at the back of his neck, straining in the dim moonlight. Aodhán tried not to stare at the fat red ropes of fresh cuts over what little of their faces were visible.
His nausea subsided slightly the further he went down the path to the village. It was dark out, inkwash over an already colorless lump of weather-beaten dirt, but Aodhán had passed these cobblestones on so many flagellant walks that he might have done it with his eyes closed. As the crumbling relic of the monastery disappeared into the ugly hills, the air became crisper in Aodhán's mouth.
Aodhán's gut gnawed at him. He'd had no appetite the last some days, though— the prospect of his task drained him of all desire for food. Even as a child, the stories of the appetite of God-In-The-Sea had left him awake at night more often than the maxims of hell itself. There were none of the old greatpike left in the world because one had swum down God's sleeping Throat by mistake, and the taste provoked such a hunger that he rose to eat every one. At a very young age, the idea of this terrified him. What if God took a mouthful of dirt, and took it to mind to devour the whole world? What if he bit on his own holy Tail? Would they be abandoned in the wake of the holy hunger?
But with the beasts infesting the loch, pulling children from docks, the blessing could not have been more clearly ordained. It was a maxim, it was known— there was no way to wash one's hands without blood. As much as Aodhán still got knots at night wondering whether one day they would rise to a God that had devoured itself and abandoned the world, the path was clear.
Every window was shuttered. The abbot had passed word three days past that they would be sending a consecrator to heal the town. In his ranking in the monastery, Aodhán would not be suffered at any doorstep, nor to be gazed upon by the people of the village. He moved like a roach through the shadows, avoiding the wide paving stones as he went.
The cooling sweat left brownish streaks on his bare arms, where it had mingled with the dust and grime of him. He was filthy. The loch was the only place he would be allowed to cleanse, and even then only after his task was complete. An acolyte received no reward he did not earn, and the blackened and broken cracks in his nails were proof positive of his fall from grace.
The streets wound aimlessly, but the loch ahead dwarfed the whole of the settlement. He kept his eyes on the flat black shape as he went. Aodhán's steps came light and easy, and he felt guiding hands at his shoulders on every turn. He was shepherded alone through the darkness.
The streets opened up to give way to the beaten old wood of the pier. Little boats clustered together at its shoulders as if cowering from the center of the lake. Aodhán did not know how wide it was. It was not for him to know. No one had rowed past the center of the loch, not since men had first scraped together huts at the lake's banks. The center was where God lived, anyway— there was no need to pass this point. The farthest edge of the lake was a thin, ragged line, peppered with what might have been trees.
The fog over the inlet obscured much of them, but he imagined them as great, towering things, awful and majestic. Full of spiders and beasts, and kept away by God's sleep.
The pier itself stretched out only a little ways into the void space of the lake. Its shores dropped off quite suddenly, and building any further into the depths had proven too great a challenge for the carpenters. Aodhán dropped down from the walkway onto the little spit of land beneath, landing in a clump of rotted seaweed and offal. There was a boat tucked beneath one rickety knee of the pier, an ugly thing that looked like a child might have molded it from clay. But it floated, and its awkward prow was carved with the herald of the monastery. He knelt. Aodhán emptied his pouches into the surf one after the other. Scraped scales and scraps of fashion, followed by a single ribbed stripe of eel leather, followed by three human fingernails, whole. They washed into the foam of the waterline, clinging to the sand. The scales floated atop the surface and glittered as he imagined shards of glass might. The blessings heaped onto these little pouches would draw even the ungodliness of beasts.
"Please," he said. "I come with a request." His voice was a disused rasp. "I beseech thee of the lakes."
It was a long time that he knelt there. The sand and soil sank into his knees, but the pain decayed slowly into a red, seething throb. It kept him alert as he watched the glassy surface of the water.
He saw her well before he heard her. She rose up from the center of the lake, where God lived. At first, terrified, Aodhán thought God-In-The-Sea might have come all the way from the depths to kill him for his uncounted and unconfessed trespasses, so great was the sinuous mass undulating towards him in the dark. The water rippled, then broke, and gave way to a head slicked with lakewater. He could not discern the color of her hair in this darkness, but when her eyes shone with an unnatural light, like a copper over the fire, the sight stirred revulsion in him. These were beasts, after all. Nothing but a devil would have those eyes.
She closed in on the shore, and he saw the rest of her rising over the surface as she came to rest a few paces from the shore's edge. When she had drawn close—enough that, had he stretched out on his belly in the sand, he might have grasped her—Aodhán realized just how repellent her face was. Her eyes veered off to either side in vertical slits and bulged like a trout's. At the waist, the slime of her bare skin gave to blackened fish's flesh, winding back to disappear into the water. Her lank hair was a coat on her skin as a newborn's caul, pouring greasy down her back and over her breasts—
Aodhán's length jerked painfully.
Instantly, a wave of nausea flowed up his gut and throat. A foul-tasting bubble gurgled out of his hollow belly, and before he could think to do anything else Aodhán turned and retched into the sand. The wide eyes of the mermaid followed him when he glanced back up. She had not recoiled—she had not moved an inch. Her eyes flicked to the vomit disintegrating in the surf, then back to him.
If he could deign to give human emotion to the face of this foreign beast, Aodhán might have assigned her disgust. But even so, the hunch of her spine and the flattening of her forked ears against her head only made her look like a dumb animal. Aodhán was not sure she even comprehended what she was watching him do. All down her spine, to the finned end of her tail, long webbed ridges rose and fell to a steady rhythm. He wiped his mouth feebly.
"I come with a request," he repeated dumbly. He could no longer meet her eyes, but he heard the mermaid hauling herself up from the water. Her body scraped over the sand. "What can I give, that I might take thine ear?" Aodhán's throat hurt from the effort of speaking. The scald of stomach acid rasped at his vocal chords.
"Give," she croaked. "What might I be given, that I do not already have?" Her voice was ugly and wet, and air rasped out of the fleshy frills of her throat with every word. Her tail curled up around her. The sleek rubbery skin slapped on itself with each motion.
He did not falter. "The blood of man, willingly given. Sweeter than that which thine people have stolen from us."
The thing's smile was repellent. Even pulled at the corners into a grin, her fleshy lips hung somewhat slack, revealing rows of needleteeth in mildewed gums. Aodhán could not relieve himself of the visions of the fishermen who had come to the monastery for healing, their arms pockmarked with rotting bites. The vision of necrotic, gaping wounds was mercifully enough to lessen the wretched ache in the front of his breeches. He swallowed.
"In return...in return, I ask a carnal embrace." His heart hammered his ribs so fierce it might have burst.
She did not reply. One claw rose from the surf and beckoned him gently. The holy grip on Aodhán's shoulder tightened again, out of thin air.
"Truly?" he rasped.
The mermaid's face crinkled slightly.
"I hail...I come from the monastery, up beyond the town." His voice quavered from the strain of use. It had been a long time since he spoke more than a sparse sentence to anyone at a time. "They tell stories of your people. They told tales of women so beautiful that fought so fiercely the sailors thanked them before they drowned."
Sweat poured over him. He inched to her, one arm extended uncertainly. She licked her lips, tongue darting out just long enough for Aodhán to register its sickly mackerel color.
"I live among the men. I am permitted to speak to no one above my rank, which is as low as one could be. I thought—I thought..."
The thing moved with a speed that belied her ungainly form.
When the mermaid's teeth fastened in his arm Aodhán couldn't repress a single high bark of pain, though he'd been expecting it. Weak of him.
His flesh gave and then ripped like wet paper. She slithered up and around him, tail curling over and around his body in the same way he'd watched vipers coil their prey. The fat and muscle of her bowled him back into the sand. Aodhán thrashed against her feebly, not meaning to fight, still half-erect. She weighed easily twice what he did, the bulk of her tail pinning him down. Under their combined weight, the briar of his cloak bit into his back aggressively.
Howling, Aodhán felt the squelch of teeth in his meat, of individual pins built to scrape the flesh out of fishbone working through his flesh. Air spurted from the mermaid's gills in great wet wheezes. His back arched as every muscle rebelled and screamed at the violation. God was with him, firing through every nerve, singing in agony. It was over much faster than he had expected, or wanted.
When she let him loose, both of them were panting like dogs, with Aodhán's breathing choked in snot and drool. The crescent she had bitten into him seemed so small, laying there, even for the blood running rivers into the surf. She turned to him. Gobs of flesh clung to her lips and gums. The mermaid waited for Aodhán's breathing to slow and steady. "Now," she said, and straddled his body. The awful tent of his pants jabbed at her hip, just astride where a set of pelvic fins laid flat to her. She settled down on his chest, bracing the weight of her torso on her ridged forearms. His arm lay gingerly over the sand. His skin wafted in the tide. It took all of Aodhán's mortal soul to hold still just then, to wait for her. He was very close.
He looked up at her with a mouth and gut full of bile. The mermaid's body was cold and dripping onto him, soaking through his skin. He reached, trembling, to circle his hands about the opening of her throat. The gills flexed gently under his touch, a revolting sensation of chilled raw meat dragging itself against his bare palm.
Fighting the urge to recoil, he slid a finger down into the folds. The mermaid hissed, eyes flashing in the light again—a cat with its tail pulled— and shrunk from the invading touch. "Sorry," he mumbled.
She paused for a moment, eyes roving over his face. He could not make heads or tails of the gaze—when she was not snarling or smiling, the mermaid's face was blank and stupid looking. The mermaid leaned down to press her mouth to his. He had never kissed a person, and the squish of the mermaid's lips on his was stomach-churning.
She tilted her head and opened her jaws, pulling his open as she pushed down into him. It took Aodhán a truly horrifying moment to realize the thing on his lips was her own tongue. It felt withered and wet, like a rotting fish dropped into his mouth.
At her side, against the pelvic fins, the flesh between his legs ached. In response, the mermaid shifted her piscine bulk over his hips. He could not move.
The squirms of muscle under her skin were palpable even through his clothes—dense cords of swimmer's muscle rippling under fat. Aodhán remembered, stupidly, how butchers on the dock fought to wrestle the massive fish from the boats. The way it took a broken spine and eviscerated gills to stop the thrashing.
Aodhán dug his fingers into the tender furrows of her throat with all the force his body possessed.
Her scream split his eardrums, and then cut into a foul gurgle as his nails sunk deep into the fleshy folds and through her throat. She convulsed and spit and hissed, vocal cords folding in Aodhán's grip. He twisted and rolled with her, ignoring her claws beating and ripping his vestments. Sand and grit sprayed.
She grabbed blind at his back, shrieking again as the brambles over Aodhán's shoulders tore into her palms. She spit blood. He would not be deterred. He had resisted her temptations and he would see his task through. Aodhán's heat surged.
It didn't go as quickly as it did with the butchers. It had not occurred to the acolyte that the thing might possess lungs to sustain herself, or she'd be able to fight hard even with his fingers buried two knuckles deep into the slits in her neck. The creature's eyes were rolled back yellow, red foam and spittle at the corners of her mouth.
Her arms flailed blindly over the sand, reaching, grasping, as if she could pull herself back down into the water and slip away from him. He would not allow her to escape God. A snarl rose from Aodhán's throat to meet hers.
Her webbed hand found something in the dark, curling around an absence of light. The pillar of muscle under him went taut, and Aodhán saw something black in her hand coming toward him.
He was stunned on the first blow. His fingers went slack and slipped from her neck on the third. He stopped moving on the fifth. Her arms began to tire on the fifteenth.
When she finished, there was mostly a wet, rich pulp remaining from the neck up. Her hands dripped with fat and brain.
The grit of the shore bit into her palms as she hauled herself back to the water's edge—distantly, she was aware of having batted the corpse to the side as her tail swung back around to follow. He was a toy doll under her, in death as in life. The water swallowed her without as much as a ripple, cool and crisp and free of the stench of meat in the air. It passed blessedly cool over the broken tissue of her gills. Sand clouded out slow under her as she settled.
The wounds stung badly at the water's touch, pulling out a string of weakly hissed curses, but being able to breathe cleanly cleared her head. Her body coiled in and over itself, bruises already beginning to ache along her underbelly and fins. Beneath her, the soft waterbed sloped into gloom, from which fish the size of a tooth emerged. They were drawn by the blood, that which still streamed from her neck still in mucousy tendrils. They were no more than fry, and she batted them off with a sweep of the fluke before anything could get close enough to nip her flesh away. She draped her webbed tail gently up over her torso, as one might a veil.
Under the canopy, her breathing evened. She groomed slowly, thoughtfully, chewing the bits of sand and gore from beneath her nails. She took inventory of her pain. He had not taken her hair—the brainless jerking of the dead and the dying was not enough to bruise or rip. Her gills burned and these for certain were torn in places, but she could breathe. In inches, the hurt was already receding, as the savor of the human's blood still warmed her belly.
In pain's place, a deep, cold fury leaked into her gut.
She lay down and flexed her palms slowly against the sand, joints cracking with muted pops.
Sleep would not come.
Sunlight came slowly. Thin olive fingers crept from the surface, warming her body through the thick slime of the water.
The grit hurt less now, when she dragged herself up and across the shore. Strips of algae and dying watergrass clung to her sides as she went. The body smelled even worse than he had alive. Sand fleas skittered off of it as she approached. Some other kind of small flying thing had settled there as well, and remained unperturbed on the crusty smear of skull even when she wrapped an arm around his waist and began to haul the meat of him back into the lake. Gravelly sand scraped her belly raw by the time she'd limped far enough to pull him under.
The boy's weight evaporated as she dragged him under, becoming little more than a dumbly buoyant carcass once the water had him. With a single thrash of her tail they vanished into the dark algae clouds.
Greasy lake water parted around them, tiny eddies writhing up and dying in the wake. The soft mush of his head drew more of those little clinger-on fish, and these she ignored rather than waste the time swatting them back. He began to tug gently at her as she swam past their settlements, down further into the crevasses of the lake bed. Putrefaction was beginning to raise him up, like something might have been calling him back to the light. She grimaced in distaste, and pinned him to the sand under her weight.
He had to be weighed down for this. His clothes were ragged and rotting before he ever put them on, but there was still room enough in the human's robes for stones to fit. She scraped up clotted fistfuls of sand to bury in his throat. Tiny silver bubbles of gas squirted from his nose and shattered into foam around her.
It was slow work, forcing it down, and before long the wounds in her throat reopened with the effort. Blood misted her face as she dragged him to the mouth of the trench, so far from home that she could not even pick out the pinpricks and arches of the houses on the horizon.
She went deep, leagues deep, down into the pit of the lake. There was no rope woven long enough to measure it. She and her people had never even considered whether to build here—it was not their kingdom, this far in. The blackness of the waterbeds were their home, but the bottom of the world belonged to the serpent.
Light still dappled her in weak beams, but the drop-off arched with the powerful temerity of a spine into a blackness that the sun could not pierce. It was speckled here and there with drifting white motes—tiny clots of plankton, helpless in the current. Beneath that, flat, yawning emptiness. But she'd heard the stories since before they had come to this place, sneaking up through tributaries to put down roots.
She knew better than to think there was nothing else down below. She knew what had taken the old owners of this land.
Cold water rose slowly from below, nipping at her scabrous neck and gills.
There was a deep, clenching fear in her heart even as she held at the edge of the cliff, less for herself than for what would come to her people if it took her as well as the boy. They knew of the other things it had eaten up in its past eons, how many it had extincted before the mer came to rest in the deep beds of the lake. The eel would lay there insensate until it was fed, and then it would eat until nothing remained. The whole world had worms like this living down in its crevices, sleeping. Waiting under the skin of the earth.
She shoved the corpse over the edge. He looked less deceased underwater, she supposed, even lacking a face and the better part of his head. The gloom concealed the purpling in his extremities, flattered him of the sickly cast to his skin that had worsened in death. It smacked dumbly against a rock and then began a sleepy fall towards the very center of the pit as if gravity itself drew him in.
She could not feel any pull of tide from where she'd ensconced herself, but from the wobble of the meat in the current it seemed that something stirred the water down deep. She was taken suddenly by a fearful vision of a maelstrom forming, but the body did not twist or pull in the violence a whirlpool would inflict.
She watched him sink further and further, til he looked more of a blobby grey-white toy than a man. The edges of his swollen flesh blurred in the gloom. The body stopped many fathoms below, coming to a sudden rest in the matte black. His limbs dangled in the breeze of current that curled past them—in the darkness it appeared as if he were waving his legs in the tide.
There might have been a glint of something—in this darkness nothing could be so bright as a tooth’s ivory. The fang was as long as she head to tail, twice over. Then, the blackness opened up, and she caught a crescent of liver-red mouth as it closed over the body. That was all.
A bassy tone began to rise from the core of the earth, starting up in her ribcage and moving out to rattle loose every bit of cartilage in her body. There was the grinding of flesh against stone far, far below her, a sound so deep and resonant the land itself might be spreading itself open. The plankton snow shifted, and it was only in this way she could see the outline of a coil beginning to move.
She spun on her tail and kicked back, back into the light.
The next day was the first time in the town's history that the beast attacked the docks. It was not the last.
back
Mer were fish too, one figured, in that they swam and lacked legs and ate of other fish. But they were pestilence. They had many appearances of man, but unlike men they fundamentally lacked any behaviors besides raw gluttony. They ate through schools of fish and pulled men from boats for play. They were demons sent either by God-In-The-Sea or his enemies, either way intended as a test of the strength of man. Towns withered in the wake of mer infestations. And the only way to purge a sea of them was sacrifice to God, who slept beneath the seas and lakes. This, too, was known.
So when the first sighting of a mermaid was reported in the loch down past the monastery, there was no question among the townspeople as to what would happen next.
"When you bring its body into the water, be sure to weigh it down," the priest said. "There should be many stones on the shore—send it to the lakebed." He tied Aodhán's hair back into the complicated missive's braid, pulling too hard for emphasis. Aodhán did not flinch at the pinpricks of pain, only nodded as much as he could without hanks of hair coming away in the priest's hands. The carved shell rings around every finger bit into his scalp.
As the abbot yanked at the rope belt around his waist, Aodhán thought briefly of his consecrator's baptism years prior, and how much gentler the friar had been as he dressed the boy in ceremonial garb. But he was now a man of seventeen, and a cruel mission required no gentle touch to prepare for it. He must steel himself.
He was proud when he held out his palms for the knife without shaking. He closed his eyes when the priest licked the wounds, and heard the sound of him swilling the blood over his withered gums like wine. Aodhán stole a glance from under his lids just in time to see the blood spat at his feet. It came out black in the dim light of the oubliette, joining the puddles under his bare feet in a wet splatter. The scent of iron was lost in the scent of mold and stale piss that saturated every rock in the catacombs.
The man made his leave with no more than a curt goodbye.
Cold water sluiced down the walls. It fed the sprawling patches of moldering lichen that populated the cracks in the cobblestones and filled his bedroom with the permanent tangy odor of mildew. He would have counted the water dripping to pass time, if he could have focused on anything but his heart pounding at his ribs.
At last a knock came at the door. Aodhán's intestines filled with acid. This was it, no final words or well wishes. It was time to leave for the lake.
He drew his cape over his shoulders, flinching as the briar settled against his neck, and walked. The urge to grip his knife never left him as he exited his small chambers, nor as he walked heel to toe through the long corridors of the monastery. But he was good. Aodhán kept his hands folded under the sleeves of his robe as he went, until the wrought iron gate came down at his back. The only other sign of life in the monastery were the guards posted out beyond the entrance gates. Their beady little eyes beetled out from helmet visors.
Both the guards, though they were excluded from the practice, were already under orders that Aodhán would return bloody-handed or not at all. He was certain he felt their gaze at the back of his neck, straining in the dim moonlight. Aodhán tried not to stare at the fat red ropes of fresh cuts over what little of their faces were visible.
His nausea subsided slightly the further he went down the path to the village. It was dark out, inkwash over an already colorless lump of weather-beaten dirt, but Aodhán had passed these cobblestones on so many flagellant walks that he might have done it with his eyes closed. As the crumbling relic of the monastery disappeared into the ugly hills, the air became crisper in Aodhán's mouth.
Aodhán's gut gnawed at him. He'd had no appetite the last some days, though— the prospect of his task drained him of all desire for food. Even as a child, the stories of the appetite of God-In-The-Sea had left him awake at night more often than the maxims of hell itself. There were none of the old greatpike left in the world because one had swum down God's sleeping Throat by mistake, and the taste provoked such a hunger that he rose to eat every one. At a very young age, the idea of this terrified him. What if God took a mouthful of dirt, and took it to mind to devour the whole world? What if he bit on his own holy Tail? Would they be abandoned in the wake of the holy hunger?
But with the beasts infesting the loch, pulling children from docks, the blessing could not have been more clearly ordained. It was a maxim, it was known— there was no way to wash one's hands without blood. As much as Aodhán still got knots at night wondering whether one day they would rise to a God that had devoured itself and abandoned the world, the path was clear.
Every window was shuttered. The abbot had passed word three days past that they would be sending a consecrator to heal the town. In his ranking in the monastery, Aodhán would not be suffered at any doorstep, nor to be gazed upon by the people of the village. He moved like a roach through the shadows, avoiding the wide paving stones as he went.
The cooling sweat left brownish streaks on his bare arms, where it had mingled with the dust and grime of him. He was filthy. The loch was the only place he would be allowed to cleanse, and even then only after his task was complete. An acolyte received no reward he did not earn, and the blackened and broken cracks in his nails were proof positive of his fall from grace.
The streets wound aimlessly, but the loch ahead dwarfed the whole of the settlement. He kept his eyes on the flat black shape as he went. Aodhán's steps came light and easy, and he felt guiding hands at his shoulders on every turn. He was shepherded alone through the darkness.
The streets opened up to give way to the beaten old wood of the pier. Little boats clustered together at its shoulders as if cowering from the center of the lake. Aodhán did not know how wide it was. It was not for him to know. No one had rowed past the center of the loch, not since men had first scraped together huts at the lake's banks. The center was where God lived, anyway— there was no need to pass this point. The farthest edge of the lake was a thin, ragged line, peppered with what might have been trees.
The fog over the inlet obscured much of them, but he imagined them as great, towering things, awful and majestic. Full of spiders and beasts, and kept away by God's sleep.
The pier itself stretched out only a little ways into the void space of the lake. Its shores dropped off quite suddenly, and building any further into the depths had proven too great a challenge for the carpenters. Aodhán dropped down from the walkway onto the little spit of land beneath, landing in a clump of rotted seaweed and offal. There was a boat tucked beneath one rickety knee of the pier, an ugly thing that looked like a child might have molded it from clay. But it floated, and its awkward prow was carved with the herald of the monastery. He knelt. Aodhán emptied his pouches into the surf one after the other. Scraped scales and scraps of fashion, followed by a single ribbed stripe of eel leather, followed by three human fingernails, whole. They washed into the foam of the waterline, clinging to the sand. The scales floated atop the surface and glittered as he imagined shards of glass might. The blessings heaped onto these little pouches would draw even the ungodliness of beasts.
"Please," he said. "I come with a request." His voice was a disused rasp. "I beseech thee of the lakes."
It was a long time that he knelt there. The sand and soil sank into his knees, but the pain decayed slowly into a red, seething throb. It kept him alert as he watched the glassy surface of the water.
He saw her well before he heard her. She rose up from the center of the lake, where God lived. At first, terrified, Aodhán thought God-In-The-Sea might have come all the way from the depths to kill him for his uncounted and unconfessed trespasses, so great was the sinuous mass undulating towards him in the dark. The water rippled, then broke, and gave way to a head slicked with lakewater. He could not discern the color of her hair in this darkness, but when her eyes shone with an unnatural light, like a copper over the fire, the sight stirred revulsion in him. These were beasts, after all. Nothing but a devil would have those eyes.
She closed in on the shore, and he saw the rest of her rising over the surface as she came to rest a few paces from the shore's edge. When she had drawn close—enough that, had he stretched out on his belly in the sand, he might have grasped her—Aodhán realized just how repellent her face was. Her eyes veered off to either side in vertical slits and bulged like a trout's. At the waist, the slime of her bare skin gave to blackened fish's flesh, winding back to disappear into the water. Her lank hair was a coat on her skin as a newborn's caul, pouring greasy down her back and over her breasts—
Aodhán's length jerked painfully.
Instantly, a wave of nausea flowed up his gut and throat. A foul-tasting bubble gurgled out of his hollow belly, and before he could think to do anything else Aodhán turned and retched into the sand. The wide eyes of the mermaid followed him when he glanced back up. She had not recoiled—she had not moved an inch. Her eyes flicked to the vomit disintegrating in the surf, then back to him.
If he could deign to give human emotion to the face of this foreign beast, Aodhán might have assigned her disgust. But even so, the hunch of her spine and the flattening of her forked ears against her head only made her look like a dumb animal. Aodhán was not sure she even comprehended what she was watching him do. All down her spine, to the finned end of her tail, long webbed ridges rose and fell to a steady rhythm. He wiped his mouth feebly.
"I come with a request," he repeated dumbly. He could no longer meet her eyes, but he heard the mermaid hauling herself up from the water. Her body scraped over the sand. "What can I give, that I might take thine ear?" Aodhán's throat hurt from the effort of speaking. The scald of stomach acid rasped at his vocal chords.
"Give," she croaked. "What might I be given, that I do not already have?" Her voice was ugly and wet, and air rasped out of the fleshy frills of her throat with every word. Her tail curled up around her. The sleek rubbery skin slapped on itself with each motion.
He did not falter. "The blood of man, willingly given. Sweeter than that which thine people have stolen from us."
The thing's smile was repellent. Even pulled at the corners into a grin, her fleshy lips hung somewhat slack, revealing rows of needleteeth in mildewed gums. Aodhán could not relieve himself of the visions of the fishermen who had come to the monastery for healing, their arms pockmarked with rotting bites. The vision of necrotic, gaping wounds was mercifully enough to lessen the wretched ache in the front of his breeches. He swallowed.
"In return...in return, I ask a carnal embrace." His heart hammered his ribs so fierce it might have burst.
She did not reply. One claw rose from the surf and beckoned him gently. The holy grip on Aodhán's shoulder tightened again, out of thin air.
"Truly?" he rasped.
The mermaid's face crinkled slightly.
"I hail...I come from the monastery, up beyond the town." His voice quavered from the strain of use. It had been a long time since he spoke more than a sparse sentence to anyone at a time. "They tell stories of your people. They told tales of women so beautiful that fought so fiercely the sailors thanked them before they drowned."
Sweat poured over him. He inched to her, one arm extended uncertainly. She licked her lips, tongue darting out just long enough for Aodhán to register its sickly mackerel color.
"I live among the men. I am permitted to speak to no one above my rank, which is as low as one could be. I thought—I thought..."
The thing moved with a speed that belied her ungainly form.
When the mermaid's teeth fastened in his arm Aodhán couldn't repress a single high bark of pain, though he'd been expecting it. Weak of him.
His flesh gave and then ripped like wet paper. She slithered up and around him, tail curling over and around his body in the same way he'd watched vipers coil their prey. The fat and muscle of her bowled him back into the sand. Aodhán thrashed against her feebly, not meaning to fight, still half-erect. She weighed easily twice what he did, the bulk of her tail pinning him down. Under their combined weight, the briar of his cloak bit into his back aggressively.
Howling, Aodhán felt the squelch of teeth in his meat, of individual pins built to scrape the flesh out of fishbone working through his flesh. Air spurted from the mermaid's gills in great wet wheezes. His back arched as every muscle rebelled and screamed at the violation. God was with him, firing through every nerve, singing in agony. It was over much faster than he had expected, or wanted.
When she let him loose, both of them were panting like dogs, with Aodhán's breathing choked in snot and drool. The crescent she had bitten into him seemed so small, laying there, even for the blood running rivers into the surf. She turned to him. Gobs of flesh clung to her lips and gums. The mermaid waited for Aodhán's breathing to slow and steady. "Now," she said, and straddled his body. The awful tent of his pants jabbed at her hip, just astride where a set of pelvic fins laid flat to her. She settled down on his chest, bracing the weight of her torso on her ridged forearms. His arm lay gingerly over the sand. His skin wafted in the tide. It took all of Aodhán's mortal soul to hold still just then, to wait for her. He was very close.
He looked up at her with a mouth and gut full of bile. The mermaid's body was cold and dripping onto him, soaking through his skin. He reached, trembling, to circle his hands about the opening of her throat. The gills flexed gently under his touch, a revolting sensation of chilled raw meat dragging itself against his bare palm.
Fighting the urge to recoil, he slid a finger down into the folds. The mermaid hissed, eyes flashing in the light again—a cat with its tail pulled— and shrunk from the invading touch. "Sorry," he mumbled.
She paused for a moment, eyes roving over his face. He could not make heads or tails of the gaze—when she was not snarling or smiling, the mermaid's face was blank and stupid looking. The mermaid leaned down to press her mouth to his. He had never kissed a person, and the squish of the mermaid's lips on his was stomach-churning.
She tilted her head and opened her jaws, pulling his open as she pushed down into him. It took Aodhán a truly horrifying moment to realize the thing on his lips was her own tongue. It felt withered and wet, like a rotting fish dropped into his mouth.
At her side, against the pelvic fins, the flesh between his legs ached. In response, the mermaid shifted her piscine bulk over his hips. He could not move.
The squirms of muscle under her skin were palpable even through his clothes—dense cords of swimmer's muscle rippling under fat. Aodhán remembered, stupidly, how butchers on the dock fought to wrestle the massive fish from the boats. The way it took a broken spine and eviscerated gills to stop the thrashing.
Aodhán dug his fingers into the tender furrows of her throat with all the force his body possessed.
Her scream split his eardrums, and then cut into a foul gurgle as his nails sunk deep into the fleshy folds and through her throat. She convulsed and spit and hissed, vocal cords folding in Aodhán's grip. He twisted and rolled with her, ignoring her claws beating and ripping his vestments. Sand and grit sprayed.
She grabbed blind at his back, shrieking again as the brambles over Aodhán's shoulders tore into her palms. She spit blood. He would not be deterred. He had resisted her temptations and he would see his task through. Aodhán's heat surged.
It didn't go as quickly as it did with the butchers. It had not occurred to the acolyte that the thing might possess lungs to sustain herself, or she'd be able to fight hard even with his fingers buried two knuckles deep into the slits in her neck. The creature's eyes were rolled back yellow, red foam and spittle at the corners of her mouth.
Her arms flailed blindly over the sand, reaching, grasping, as if she could pull herself back down into the water and slip away from him. He would not allow her to escape God. A snarl rose from Aodhán's throat to meet hers.
Her webbed hand found something in the dark, curling around an absence of light. The pillar of muscle under him went taut, and Aodhán saw something black in her hand coming toward him.
He was stunned on the first blow. His fingers went slack and slipped from her neck on the third. He stopped moving on the fifth. Her arms began to tire on the fifteenth.
When she finished, there was mostly a wet, rich pulp remaining from the neck up. Her hands dripped with fat and brain.
The grit of the shore bit into her palms as she hauled herself back to the water's edge—distantly, she was aware of having batted the corpse to the side as her tail swung back around to follow. He was a toy doll under her, in death as in life. The water swallowed her without as much as a ripple, cool and crisp and free of the stench of meat in the air. It passed blessedly cool over the broken tissue of her gills. Sand clouded out slow under her as she settled.
The wounds stung badly at the water's touch, pulling out a string of weakly hissed curses, but being able to breathe cleanly cleared her head. Her body coiled in and over itself, bruises already beginning to ache along her underbelly and fins. Beneath her, the soft waterbed sloped into gloom, from which fish the size of a tooth emerged. They were drawn by the blood, that which still streamed from her neck still in mucousy tendrils. They were no more than fry, and she batted them off with a sweep of the fluke before anything could get close enough to nip her flesh away. She draped her webbed tail gently up over her torso, as one might a veil.
Under the canopy, her breathing evened. She groomed slowly, thoughtfully, chewing the bits of sand and gore from beneath her nails. She took inventory of her pain. He had not taken her hair—the brainless jerking of the dead and the dying was not enough to bruise or rip. Her gills burned and these for certain were torn in places, but she could breathe. In inches, the hurt was already receding, as the savor of the human's blood still warmed her belly.
In pain's place, a deep, cold fury leaked into her gut.
She lay down and flexed her palms slowly against the sand, joints cracking with muted pops.
Sleep would not come.
Sunlight came slowly. Thin olive fingers crept from the surface, warming her body through the thick slime of the water.
The grit hurt less now, when she dragged herself up and across the shore. Strips of algae and dying watergrass clung to her sides as she went. The body smelled even worse than he had alive. Sand fleas skittered off of it as she approached. Some other kind of small flying thing had settled there as well, and remained unperturbed on the crusty smear of skull even when she wrapped an arm around his waist and began to haul the meat of him back into the lake. Gravelly sand scraped her belly raw by the time she'd limped far enough to pull him under.
The boy's weight evaporated as she dragged him under, becoming little more than a dumbly buoyant carcass once the water had him. With a single thrash of her tail they vanished into the dark algae clouds.
Greasy lake water parted around them, tiny eddies writhing up and dying in the wake. The soft mush of his head drew more of those little clinger-on fish, and these she ignored rather than waste the time swatting them back. He began to tug gently at her as she swam past their settlements, down further into the crevasses of the lake bed. Putrefaction was beginning to raise him up, like something might have been calling him back to the light. She grimaced in distaste, and pinned him to the sand under her weight.
He had to be weighed down for this. His clothes were ragged and rotting before he ever put them on, but there was still room enough in the human's robes for stones to fit. She scraped up clotted fistfuls of sand to bury in his throat. Tiny silver bubbles of gas squirted from his nose and shattered into foam around her.
It was slow work, forcing it down, and before long the wounds in her throat reopened with the effort. Blood misted her face as she dragged him to the mouth of the trench, so far from home that she could not even pick out the pinpricks and arches of the houses on the horizon.
She went deep, leagues deep, down into the pit of the lake. There was no rope woven long enough to measure it. She and her people had never even considered whether to build here—it was not their kingdom, this far in. The blackness of the waterbeds were their home, but the bottom of the world belonged to the serpent.
Light still dappled her in weak beams, but the drop-off arched with the powerful temerity of a spine into a blackness that the sun could not pierce. It was speckled here and there with drifting white motes—tiny clots of plankton, helpless in the current. Beneath that, flat, yawning emptiness. But she'd heard the stories since before they had come to this place, sneaking up through tributaries to put down roots.
She knew better than to think there was nothing else down below. She knew what had taken the old owners of this land.
Cold water rose slowly from below, nipping at her scabrous neck and gills.
There was a deep, clenching fear in her heart even as she held at the edge of the cliff, less for herself than for what would come to her people if it took her as well as the boy. They knew of the other things it had eaten up in its past eons, how many it had extincted before the mer came to rest in the deep beds of the lake. The eel would lay there insensate until it was fed, and then it would eat until nothing remained. The whole world had worms like this living down in its crevices, sleeping. Waiting under the skin of the earth.
She shoved the corpse over the edge. He looked less deceased underwater, she supposed, even lacking a face and the better part of his head. The gloom concealed the purpling in his extremities, flattered him of the sickly cast to his skin that had worsened in death. It smacked dumbly against a rock and then began a sleepy fall towards the very center of the pit as if gravity itself drew him in.
She could not feel any pull of tide from where she'd ensconced herself, but from the wobble of the meat in the current it seemed that something stirred the water down deep. She was taken suddenly by a fearful vision of a maelstrom forming, but the body did not twist or pull in the violence a whirlpool would inflict.
She watched him sink further and further, til he looked more of a blobby grey-white toy than a man. The edges of his swollen flesh blurred in the gloom. The body stopped many fathoms below, coming to a sudden rest in the matte black. His limbs dangled in the breeze of current that curled past them—in the darkness it appeared as if he were waving his legs in the tide.
There might have been a glint of something—in this darkness nothing could be so bright as a tooth’s ivory. The fang was as long as she head to tail, twice over. Then, the blackness opened up, and she caught a crescent of liver-red mouth as it closed over the body. That was all.
A bassy tone began to rise from the core of the earth, starting up in her ribcage and moving out to rattle loose every bit of cartilage in her body. There was the grinding of flesh against stone far, far below her, a sound so deep and resonant the land itself might be spreading itself open. The plankton snow shifted, and it was only in this way she could see the outline of a coil beginning to move.
She spun on her tail and kicked back, back into the light.
The next day was the first time in the town's history that the beast attacked the docks. It was not the last.
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