Tremble (62 page)

I spent the rest of the night alone in the library. I couldn’t find a reference to anything as big or the same color as my pearl. It really was exotic. I’d placed it on the flat top of a desk barometer and it stared back at me, almost as if daring me to give it definition.

By the time dawn started to creep in under my blinds I’d decided it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I settled under the eiderdown and switched off the lamp, hoping that this time I might actually dream. Of what I don’t know—giant oysters?

I started to doze off but was suddenly flooded with the sensation that I was slipping underwater without my diving mask. I sat up, struggling to draw breath; coughed, almost expecting my lungs to bring up water. But nothing came. “It’s an anxiety attack, that’s all,” I said to myself. “Breathe deeply and it will go away.” I relaxed, then lay down. Again I felt as if I were drowning. Finally, dosed up with sleeping pills, I fell asleep only to wake an hour later. This went on throughout my rest time.

I moved through my next shift with limbs as heavy as lead, a slow dread growing in my guts—the terror of falling asleep. At dawn I approached my bunk like it was an electric chair. This time I had drunk the best part of a whiskey bottle and taken two Valium on top of that, but the fear was still upon me. I lay there, eyelids wide, my heart rattling like a stone in a tin despite the drink and the drugs. Each time my eyes started to droop and exhaustion eased its way through my muscle tissue it felt as if my lungs were filling with water and I was being pulled down into liquid suffocation.

The next day I propped myself up with caffeine and some NoDoz pills the cook gave me. I had no choice: I had a job to do. The new cable had arrived that morning and, as chief diver, I knew it was I who had to go down and weld the new section to the old. I was inspecting the cable when one of the crew put his head around the door to tell me there was a phone call for me.

There was only one phone on the rig and usage was restricted to one call per man per week, incoming or outgoing. I’d never had reason to use it and I couldn’t think who’d be ringing me now. The extraordinary notion that it could be Jim Tattle himself calling from the underworld occurred to me as I walked swiftly to the communications cabin.

“Seamus?”

Her voice brought an avalanche of memories, a past I had tried to smother with rationality; but now, hearing that familiar soft tentative tone of hers echoing down the line, I realized I loved her yet. My heart lurched as I wondered whether maybe, just maybe, she was coming back.

“Meredith? Are you okay?”

“Of course.”

A yawning silence; I free-fell through it, limbs twitching in anticipation.

“And you?” she said eventually.

“I’ve been better.”

“Seamus…”

Oh, please don’t use my name unless you mean it.

“Seamus, I’m pregnant. I thought it best if you heard it from me…and well, we’re getting married. Seamus…”

But I’d already put the phone down, shaking.

The doctor unwrapped the blood pressure band from my arm. The reading was slightly high but nothing to stop me making the dive. It was my silence that disturbed him.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, Doc, fine. I’d just like to get on with it,” I snapped.

Scribbling on my chart, he gave me clearance.

The computers had mapped out my descent and the diving tables had told me the exact mixture needed for my body weight at that depth. The Heliox had to be exact to avoid narcosis—the rapture of the blue, Jacques Cousteau called it. This dive was particularly dangerous as the rusting cable was right near the bottom of the rig, a good sixty meters down. Every move was a mathematical calculation. Aside from the tremendous water pressure pressing down on me the whole time, the other big problem with these oil rig dives was the possibility of getting lost in the murky waters of the North Sea and panicking. Elements that have a rational man talking gibberish in a matter of seconds. I know because I’ve seen it myself.

Personally, the more dangerous a dive the more I like it. Visibility is limited to the narrow beam shining from the lamp clamped to your mask, illuminating a black-and-white murky world, while at that depth the air you’re breathing becomes thick like molasses. But I loved the solitary atmosphere. The sense of possibility in the total silence, the unknown, the feeling of being suspended in eternity.

I climbed into the dry suit required for deep dives and put on a full helmet with built-in radio and a light. There was not an inch of my skin exposed. I always imagined this was what it would be like back in the embryonic sac. Floating, fully protected, fully insulated.

Then they lowered me into the freezing waters of the North Sea. Clutching the welding equipment attached to a separate cable, I began to slide down the shotline.

It only took a few minutes to reach the break in the cable. On the way down I passed through shoals of fish darting around the clumps of mussels, oysters, and mollusks that had grown around the pylons of the rig. The struts created a false reef, which the sea creatures were happy to colonize and the divers happy to harvest.

Thirty meters deeper and I finally saw the cable through the misty waters. The broken line lashed slowly in the current like a sleepy sea snake. I caught hold of it; a section of about eighteen feet was missing, broken off due to rust. I radioed the information to the surface and was cheered to hear Nick’s voice radioing back down as clear as if he were standing right next to me.

I had almost finished the repair welding when I first saw it—a glint of silvery-bronze caught in the luminous hexagon of my light. My first thought was that it was the tail of some large fish. I ignored it and continued welding, the dull glow lighting up the area. The creature swam through the beam again and this time I saw enough to make me drop the welding torch.

Long tendrils of red hair drifted through the water like seaweed; the copper of a sea perch, light fragmenting off the scales and illuminating the white-blue skin. At the top of the tail, where the body of a fish would naturally widen out, were the unmistakable broad hips of a woman. Her sex, neatly located in the center of the tail, was hairless. She had no thighs, just a crevice where evolution had fused land legs together. Nauseous with shock, I dived after the descending welding torch, catching it just in time. I returned to the shotline, hanging on for dear life as I collected my wits.

“Seamus, what was that noise? Are you all right?” Nick’s voice echoed in my head.

“It was nothing, I dropped the welding torch, that’s all. Had to get it back.”

She was floating at the edge of the beam, dipping in and out of shadow. There was just enough light for me to see the full breasts tipped
with mauve nipples like those I’d seen on sea cows and the delicate bone of her neck, more pronounced than a human’s, arching out like white coral. Her face had broad cheekbones that were almost Asiatic only more pronounced, a nose that I suspected was decorative rather than functional, and lips that were the same color as her nipples. Her eyes, which appeared to have no pupil or iris but were entirely blue from lid to lid, stared straight at me displaying an intelligence that was so other I had absolutely no way of reading her.

Even more frightening was her size; she looked to be taller than myself, which made her about seven foot in length.

“Seamus?” Nick’s voice pulled me back to the reality of the luminous world above. But
she
was still there, swaying with the current as naturally as a dolphin.

“Seamus, you sure you’re all right? You sound a little strange.”

“There’s something down here, something wonderful….”

As I spoke, still locked on those incandescent blue eyes, she opened her mouth and blew out a large air bubble that shimmered and danced like a silver balloon before ascending out of sight. Then, with a twitch of her tail, she disappeared into shadow.

Without thinking I broke free of the surface supply of Heliox and turned on my emergency supply cylinder.

“Seamus, you’re not making sense. I suggest you begin your ascent as soon as possible. Do you hear me?”

“Later, Nick, I have to follow…I’ve got to…”

“Seamus!”

I dropped the welding torch again and, now breathing air from my bail-out cylinder, freed myself from the shotline. The decision surged through my body like liberation. A fine red hair trailed across the glass of my mask and I was off, following the glint of her tail, pinning her with my light. The line above me drifted loose—a broken umbilical cord to the humanity I had abandoned. Or had it abandoned me?

Nick’s voice faded as we swam deeper and deeper into great billowy clouds of seaweed. Startled fish darted past. I should have been frightened. I should have realized what was happening, but instead I felt remarkably tranquil, as if I’d finally arrived at the pinnacle to which intuitively I knew all the events in my life had been leading.

Even through my suit I could feel the water getting colder and my ears began to pound as we swam to greater depth. Always before me the
tantalizing silvery curves, the wondrous magic of her, and every time I told myself she could not possibly exist she would turn around and hover with a solemn gaze, her hair a floating storm, her pale arms stretched out against the green-black vegetation, her webbed fingers extended, as if to say, “No, I am as real as you are, as visceral as the trickling beads of condensation on your mask.” Then without warning, she would be off again, a twist of silver in a swirl of water.

We must have swum for a good half-hour, until we reached an underwater cliff-face, a ridge of caves and crevices over which schools of fish zigzagged furiously. It was monumental. Dimly I tried to squeeze a possible location from my befuddled mind but I couldn’t remember any such markings on the map I’d seen of the local seabed.

The creature was closer now, only about three feet away from me. I could see the markings on her tail clearly: large scales reminiscent of ocean fish found at higher depths. Ridges ran down either side of the tail suggesting a piscine skeleton beneath. Swimming behind, I could see her buttocks protruding above the area where the tail finished. Again here were signs of being human: the cleft between her buttocks was clearly delineated. There was no doubt, mermaid or not, fish or flesh, she was highly desirable.

She finally stopped at the entrance of a dark tunnel under an overhanging lip of rock. The huge tentacles of an octopus curled out, partly camouflaged against the rock surface. I reeled back; a nesting octopus could be ferocious when disturbed. But she didn’t hesitate, fearlessly ducking down and disappearing into the tunnel mouth. A second later the octopus shot out, propelling itself furiously through the water like an outraged waterspout, a jet of black ink spilling behind it. A moment later the mermaid reemerged and gestured for me to follow her into the tunnel.

I glanced at the meter on my air tank; it indicated that I had only about an hour’s worth of oxygen left. I would barely make it to the surface if I left now, and not without the risk of ascending too fast and getting the bends. To follow the mermaid seemed certain suicide. Just then my light captured the glint of something metal. I turned it fully on the object: it was an old mask, clouded up with algae and weed, caught on a rock just at the edge of the tunnel’s mouth.

The mermaid smiled; at least, her mouth formed the shape of a smile. Whether there was any human perspicacity behind it or whether it was
the dumb mimicry of an animal that had once been smiled at and had remembered the shape of such expression I couldn’t tell you. But it was the smile that drew me, against my better judgment as a man, a diver, and a Catholic, into that tunnel.

The opening was covered with coral and all manner of weed; it was so narrow and dark that I feared I would knock my cylinder and lose what precious Heliox I had left. I was just beginning to despair when the tunnel broadened out into an underwater cave.

Something was shining above me. Peering up I thought I must be hallucinating as a glimmering indicating the surface of the water seemed to loom up suddenly. To my amazement the head and shoulders of the creature just a few feet in front of me disappeared as she broke the surface. I followed, my mask misting up as soon as I hit air.