Tremble (63 page)

It was an underground air pocket—a cavern of about twelve feet across and seven feet wide. I’d heard about such things but had taken the stories as myth, the kind of tales that giant squids and ghost ships belonged to. But I had to believe that other divers must have been there before me, releasing their air into the cave to create such an unnatural environment.

I sat resting against a stone bank for a moment, wondering whether I had now completely surrendered to a world of delusion and, if so, would I survive if I took off my helmet and breathed in air that could be noxious.

Staring up I realized that the ceiling was covered with stalactites that glowed in the dark, giving off enough phosphorescence to illuminate the whole cave with a soft greenish light. I could only assume that the rock was alive with a kind of organism that had evolved to produce light as a survival mechanism.

Several strange white crabs scuttled sideways into the shadows, pincers waving madly—a species I’d never seen before. Tilting my head I saw the mermaid. Through the misted-up mask she was just a tantalizing outline of shimmering curves and tail, but she was close, close enough for me to touch. I peered at the dial showing the amount left in my tank: thirty minutes’ worth. Without stopping to analyze my choices I unstrapped my helmet and pulled it off.

The air was surprisingly clean. I had thought it might be foul but instead it was mysteriously sharp, with a higher oxygen content than I’d imagined.

I lay there for a moment before turning in her direction. Part of me expected her to vanish, melt away like a mirage. Part of me expected to wake up drowning.

She was lying propped against a shelf of coral, the whole glorious length of her now out of the water, and she was staring at me with as much amazed curiosity as I was showing at her. I placed the helmet on a stone shelf above me so that it illuminated both of us. My heart racing, I cautiously moved toward her, half-anticipating her to dive back into the water and disappear forever like some frightened wild beast. She didn’t move, just stared back candidly, no fear in her eyes. Encouraged, I stopped about a foot away from her and let my fascinated gaze travel her whole physique.

Her wet hair streamed down one side of her face, leaving the other side of her head visible. Where there should have been an ear was a gill like that of an amphibian, rippling as if sucking in air. The rest of her facial features appeared to be humanlike, as I’d noticed before. Her nose was sharp and upturned, the nostrils teardrops that I now suspected operated as a secondary breathing device. The shape of her face was triangular, probably smoothed down by evolution to make her more streamlined. Her lips obtruded more than a human’s, as if they might serve to gasp air from the water’s surface. She appeared to have teeth. Her shoulders were narrow but the bones in her neck protruded gracefully above heavy breasts that lolled tantalizingly on a narrow chest.

Below her stomach was a soft curve, and, apart from the fact that she lacked a belly button and that she was hairless, her sex appeared convincingly human. Confrontingly naked, it sat on a pubis that jutted out farther than on a human woman—I suppose because of the lack of legs. The labia and clitoris were clearly visible and directly beneath them began the fish part of her in a long sweep of scales and fin.

Terrified that I had conjured up my own succubus through thwarted desire, months of celibacy and grief, I lay down on my back again and shut my eyes, hoping to will myself back to some kind of sanity.

I felt her lay her hand over my cock through my dry suit. I opened my eyes. She was leaning over me, watching as I grew beneath her webbed fingers, her breasts falling over my face. It was too much for any grown male—human or otherwise—I’m telling you.

I pulled off my suit and lay there as naked as the day I was born. Then I touched her for the first time. She was surprisingly warm and as
smooth as silk. There was no hair nor even evidence of any follicles under my touch and her skin was so thin that I could feel the blood pulsing beneath it. She seemed to tremble, a shiver that rippled right down to the end of her tail, which flapped gently against the rock. She was about a foot taller than myself and as broad across the shoulders and hips. The size of her was as exciting as the utter strangeness. Deciding I would have to take the initiative I placed both hands around her waist and pulled her down so that she was lying beside me. Then, leaning over her, too excited to wonder about the danger of it, I began to explore her anatomy.

I carefully pushed back her hair and touched her lips; she sucked at my fingers like a fish, her mouth warm and soft as any woman’s. I traced the sweep of her neck bone, as beautiful as a bow of ivory, then covered her two breasts with my palms. Firm and pendulous, they had all the fecundity of a woman in her prime, a woman aching with the ripeness of maturity. She was not young, that much I could tell—perhaps in what she measured time, about the same age as myself.

Her nipples—the areolae covering most of the breast—rose in response and her fish tail began drumming with a restless excitement. I squeezed her nipples, my own erection now pressing against the slippery surface of her belly, her labia stuck to my thigh like a limpet.

I could have taken her then. There was something incredibly erotic about the way we were examining each other objectively, her cool gaze as she stared at my flesh as if I too were some fantastical creature in her eyes. Instead I ran my tongue down the center of her torso, tasting salt, seawater, all the way down to her vagina. Unlike a human, her outer labia were thinner than her inner lips, it was as if the vagina itself had become a seal against water. Her clitoris was larger than any woman’s, almost penislike. It hardened under my fingers and it was then that she uttered her first sound—a strange croaking that sounded like a seal.

I watched fascinated as the tip became swollen then I tasted her with my tongue. Again the crystallized salt of the ocean, but sweeter. Curious, I lifted my face; the tip of her clitoris was identical to the blue-black pearl I had found under my pillow, only as soft as flesh.

I felt her fingers in my hair; she dragged me up to her lips and, curiously, rubbed noses. The kiss of a mermaid, I thought absurdly, until the sensation of her breasts against my chest brought me back to the moment. Straddling her tail with my knees, I paused before entering
her. The memory of losing my virginity swept through me suddenly—the same sense of excitement and trepidation born of the ignorance of a Catholic schoolboy as I started at the sacred sex of the town whore. A citadel of furled, sticky flesh, gates of Heaven against which I tentatively pushed my adolescent cock. Overwhelmed and humbled before the Fuck God pushed me hard to feel so oh so right, and now here I was again: virgin of sorts, about to commit a transgression that would take me to the edge of paradise. Or would it be Hell? My cock now resting between her thick inner lips, thicker than any woman’s, her skin colder than any human’s. Pulling me in, sucking me in, and then I was there. Tight, wet silken glove, a web that slipped over me, a hangman’s noose of illicit pleasure and I was a goner, so help me God. All thought convulsing into a hot joy as I took her over and over. She, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, her mouth sucking my neck greedily as her tail drummed madly against the rock. Like any woman lost in the moment.

I slowed my pace. She felt so good I thought I would come there and then, and somehow the idea of that was frightening as if climax would chase the mirage away, would bring death.

Steadying myself against her breasts, I took one nipple into my mouth as I teased the edge of her with my cock. One blue eye, immense, pressed up against my cheek, swallowing my whole horizon. The musk of her filling everything, the wetness, stickiness. The sense of her squeezing down hard on my flesh. Faster and faster, her webbed fingers pressing into my back, her claws scratching at me wildly, and Oh Mary, sweet mother of God, the pleasure staggering me, it shook the very base of me, every inch of me blossoming and swelling and bursting up, all the months of loneliness, of anger, of grief, of aching for a woman, thirsting for touch, mounting like a burning ball of joy that gathered speed faster, faster, from deep in my body to blast a path right through me in a shooting kaleidoscope of shrieking ecstasy. The shrieking—was it mine or hers? She arched with me, her voice clicking with my cries, her orgasm rippling like any woman’s as she contracted around my exploding cock.

As I lay there, resting my head on those great breasts of hers, I prayed, “Lord, save me now, for I have lost both my humanity and my soul.”

It could have finished there; in a way it should have—I would have been left with my illusions and my dreams. The satiated misanthrope,
the spent sailor collapsed upon his mermaid like some Pre-Raphaelite painting, except I was a man with penis and testicles and she was a fish with a vagina. But for all of that I knew we had made love, had enjoyed a communion between species. I had to believe that; I was staking my soul on it.

I slid off her exhausted. The air was thinning out—I’d used a fair amount of it with the exertion. I reached across and kissed her, the azure of those eyes piercing me like faith. She smiled beneath my lips, then moved her mouth up.

At first I thought she was going to lick my eyelids—you know, how some women like that. But then her mouth fastened down over my eyeball like a suction cap, sending a brilliant white flash across my closed retina. I waited a split second, wondering if I was being paranoid, but she didn’t let go. The image of the sightless Tattle suddenly shot through my mind. Terrified, I tried to push her off but she had me pinned, her great tail weighted across my thighs. I struggled wildly and my arm touched the side of my helmet. Clawing at it blindly, I swung it hard and hit the side of her head.

Reeling, she let go. A streak of blood appeared at her temple and her face turned several shades paler. She looked at me, as if to say that she couldn’t help what was an animal impulse. Then, without a sound, she slid off the rock and disappeared into the black water.

Rocking myself I nursed my swelling eye, my lungs heaving as the air thinned. I was growing sleepy with the lack of oxygen. I pulled my cylinder over and let the remaining gas out into the cave. It wasn’t an unpleasant place to die. The beautiful phosphorescent light danced on the rock face like a pantomime in silhouette. I lay back and stared at it. I thought I saw all my life pictured there: Meredith, Hanif, the day we’d all gone boating together and caught a crab; my first communion; my parents; the small cottage on the west coast of Cork where my grandfather lived; all of it, the good and the irredeemable. Then suddenly, between the shadows, I see a phrase carved into the rock.

I found my brother here and we were happy. JT

Tattle. Poor Tattle. With one last supreme effort I pulled a large empty seashell toward me and began to whisper into it all that had happened….

I
would like to thank the following individuals for their contribution to the crafting of this book: Belinda Balding, Sue Berger, Gavin Brennen, Rabbi Burger, Michael Donohue, Scott Hocknull (of the Queensland Museum), William Eiseman, Lesabelle Furhaven, Jane Gleeson-White, Katja Handt, Darren Holt, David Knibbs, Adam Learner, Adam Long, Simon Mark-Isaacs, Francis Oeser, Leo Raftos, Moshe Rosenzveig, Paul Schütze, Victoria Thaine, and Des Walters of the Descend Underwater Training Center.

Also on the editing front, Linda Funnell and Nicola O’Shea for their usual brilliance; my Australian agent, Rachel Skinner; and my mother, Eva Learner, for her ongoing unconditional support.