A la Node

There was a layer of coarse black sand and round stones on the bottom of the swimming pool. I watched this out-of-place sea bed drift slowly towards me, until my head made gentle contact. The pressure was painful in my ears, but I bore it and resisted the urge to push myself back up through the water to the air above. There were shells down here, and there, just inches from my eyes, a bone. Yes, of course. There would more, many more.

I let my natural buoyancy lift me up, twisting to face the sound of someone else hitting the water. I touched the sandy bottom with my feet and gave a small push, watching the figure that came towards me under the surface. She was long and lithe, a vision of sumptuous flesh. Her long hair curled out and around her oval face, accented the high cheekbones, caressed the long graceful neck, accented pale red lips with its faintly green color. Beneath the swirls of hair, large round breasts floated free of even the hint of gravity. Against all reason, her skin spoke of warm beaches and warmer beds, it was tanned but had a translucent rosiness, it spoke of sunlight and youth and exuberance. It called out ‘sex’ in a low dusky voice. It practically screamed danger.

My hand floated past the pocket of my jacket, which hovered around me in the water like a billowing cloak. It was an incidental motion, hardly more than the random flotation of a man stunned and barely aware of the water around him. She came on slowly, unconcerned.

Behind her, behind the hair, beyond the breasts, if a man could force his eyes so far, the warm tones of her skin were reflected in scales. The tail was long and sinuous, longer than he expected, but somehow in perfect proportion. All of her was in perfect proportion. She had no reason to fear him, this intruder so easily thrown into the water.

Her eyes fixed on mine, and I felt the force of them for the second time that night. My hand drifted up, but her eyes held mine, nothing else seemed to exist for a long while. Her willpower pushed into me slowly, there was no urgency in those deep green pools of light, just her, and the eroding edges of my self-control. Then I felt the surface break on the top of my head. I gave a single kick to raise my ears out of the water before I pulled the trigger.

How far would the bullet travel in the water? Not far, but did she know that? Had she simply seen the gun and not been concerned? My eyes were back underwater in an instant, the visceral concussion of the gun still echoing in my lungs. I saw her stunned face only briefly before I kicked hard for the side of the pool, her mouth was curled open in momentary shock, lips stretched across a row of pointed white teeth.

I went up and out in one motion, the weight of the water in my clothing making this far less graceful than I had hoped. I rolled and managed to get my feet under me, and turned to face the pool. She came out of it as if lifted by wires, and sat on the edge.

“You are under arrest, put your hands up, and don’t make any sudden moves!” I sounded very loud in my own ears. She jerked her head up to glare at me and the gun I was pointing at her head. Water dribbled out of the barrel.

How long did it take her, I wondered? It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds between me hitting the water and her following. She had legs when she threw me in, she had a tail in the pool. She made no move, and her tail remained, scales glistening in the setting sun.

“Mister-”

“No talking! And I said HANDS UP! I will shoot you if you don’t comply.” She glared at me, her green eyes seeking my own. I forced myself to look away from her face, fleeing her hypnotic gaze and smile of glistening needle-like teeth. I fixed my eyes firmly between her breasts instead, sighting along the barrel of the gun. I stepped closer and fumbled in my other pocket for the ring.

“I was just going to say,” and there it was, that siren’s voice, wrapping itself around my mind again like tentacles. I was dazed already, but my training insinuated itself between her words and my mind and a harsh policeman’s mantra rose in my head, and then skittered away. She continued, “that you really ought to meet Daddy.”

What came out of the water could not possibly have been in it a minute before, nothing that big, that red, that hideous, could have been in there without being seen. Surely not. I had just closed my fingers around the ring when the massive claw burst out of the water and swept my feet from under me. I threw it desperately in the direction of the mermaid and slammed into the concrete in time to see the second claw come sweeping out of the water much, much too fast. I knew I was dead.

And then it was gone. The surface of the pool was undisturbed, except where the mermaid’s tail pushed up gentle waves as she rocked gently at the edge of the pool. Her hands were  clasped around something that she held close to her face. She stared into them in fascination, the illusion of Daddy forgotten.

In the grip of the spell I had thrown myself to the ground hard and my head now rang with pain. I crawled to my gun and gripping it hard, struggled to my feet.

“You are under arrest for the murders of…”  but she was oblivious, absorbed in the ring. I almost wept with relief, the damn enchantment had actually worked for a change. The noise of sirens rose high and loud as my backup finally arrived.

Sergeant Roberts handed me a towel. “Good work, Smith, you’ve made Beverly Hills safe once again for pool boys. Hurry up and get yourself dried out, we’ve got leprechauns downtown again.”

The Arrest by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.