The little mermaid was ritually bathing her feet, watching with fascination the blood clouding the water, when on the horizon three familiar faces appeared. She squinted and shielded her eyes from the light, as three heads bobbed up and down in the waves, their eyes searching vigilantly for predators. They waited until the sun had entirely set before timidly approaching, and the mermaid restrained herself from jumping into the water and wrapping her arms around them. She grinned at them, and motioned for them to come closer. The sisters looked at each other in confusion at their sister’s unrestrained facial expressions. Something about it hurt them.
“Oh sister,” said the eldest, “why have you come to this terrible place? We know of your bargain with the sea-witch and that you can never return. Tell us that you regret your decision and we will make a great payment to bring you back.”
But the little mermaid shook her head sadly.
“Oh sister,” said the second-eldest, “why won’t you speak? Will you not converse with your own flesh and blood? We have travelled a long way to hear your voice.”
But the little mermaid shook her head furiously, and patted her throat firmly, decisively. She pointed to the waves. Although the princesses were not used to sign language of any sort and were not inventive by nature, after much consultation with each other, they finally understood.
“Oh sister,” they said, “why have you traded your beautiful voice for this lonely life? You will die here, dried out by the sun. This world reeks of dead things. Everything is so ugly.”
“Don’t you remember how wonderful our kingdom is?” moaned the eldest. “The lights, the pearls, and all the good things to eat. Don’t you remember your own fish’s tail? And now you have two stumps, mutilated like a sea-gypsy.”
But the little mermaid could only smile at their admonitions, so ludicrous they seemed. When the sisters found they were getting nowhere, they changed tactics.
“The sea-witch has a spell that can bring you back.”
A bolt of loathing surged through the little mermaid. She leapt to her feet and mouthed the words “She is a liar!” in her native tongue.
“Oh sister,” said the third princess, who was beginning to feel dizzy from the array of emotions displayed, “haven’t you heard the news? For we are all that is left of the Sea King’s beautiful daughters. Our other sisters are dead. And so is our dear nanny.”
The thing that lived inside the little mermaid began to thunder, rapidly.
“It started with the smaller one, the closest to you in age. It has been said that something caused her heart to beat. Everyone knows a mermaid’s heart is not supposed to beat. Every night, her chamber would be filled with a horrible, drumming sound. But no one knows what caused it.”
The creature inside the little mermaid’s chest contracted and began to moan a still, sad song.
“After she died, the fifth sister followed,” the eldest continued. “She and her betrothed would lie in their chamber all day and all night, touching each other. It was very odd. In a matter of days, the fourth became infected too. Everyone is dying, sister. Although the nanny matters little, as she was meant to die soon in any case.”
“Will you come back with us? Will you help us?” they cried in unison, their blank eyes blinking rapidly, their white skin turning grey in the cold moonlight.
But the little mermaid knew that she could not. She did not know why her family was dying, and there was an unpleasant sensation at the back of her mind that pointed its knobbly, accusing finger at her. She shied away from it, and pushed it down into the deep recesses of her being. Having to return to the neon kingdom filled her with horror, and to enter into another deal with the sea-witch was a nightmarish thought. The witch would demand payment, and take whatever she had left. Besides, didn’t she say that the spell was irreversible? The little mermaid did not want to go back. To say goodbye to the Prince forever, when she had yet to say hello.
So she looked at the empty faces of her sisters and steeled her will. The heavy gravy of guilt filled her and the mermaid made up her mind all over again. Her eyes stung mysteriously as she shook her head a final time. Their mission failed, the mermaids abandoned their youngest sister, without saying goodbye or expressing regret, for this was not their way. However, when the others had already ducked their heads underwater, the eldest turned to the little mermaid and said, “The very air of this world is filled with the beating of a thousand hearts. It is enough to make anyone sick.”
Every night since, the little mermaid would gaze out to sea until all turned to darkness and hope that once more her sisters would appear and bring her news. But they did not come back.
Often she fell asleep in the frozen peace of those evenings. Sometimes she would wake with the white moon staring down at her, like the engorged, pupil-less eye of a Siren. She would drag her numb feet wearily up twenty or so floors to her room. Other times still, she would wake up in her own bed and wonder if she dreamed the whole thing.
The sea-witch regretted that she had ever heard the rumour. Sometimes she mused that the beings and all they promised were a trap, preying on foolish, withered souls and damning them to a different kind of hell. Or perhaps she ought to have listened when they told her not to trust her broken heart. For it had deceived her in the end, and here she was in limbo. Perhaps she should have, in her youth, listened to her father when he begged her to practice rationality. Perhaps she should have thought through her request. Perhaps she ought to have taken it back. But most of all, she wished that she had never found the beings in the first place, and that they had simply let her drown.
It had been wonderful, those very first decades. The solitude, the darkness. The gradual accumulation of her powers. She had crossed the ocean many times over, conversing with whichever sea creature would dare to speak with her, as most considered her an abomination and were afraid. After these limited occasions, the sea-witch began to yearn for companionship.
It was a delightful day for the sea-witch when she discovered the freshly dead bodies of three beautiful sisters lying on the ocean floor, close to the gorge. They were pale as ice, as their lungs had burst not twelve hours before. Already, the fish had eaten the eyes out of their sockets. The sea-witch bared her teeth and brought the bodies to her cavern, where she began to experiment. Her own dark blood was extracted and poured into the mouths of the victims. She sliced the shining black scales from her own fins and stuffed them into their empty eye sockets. And as the girls began to writhe on the ocean floor, their bodies transforming in a hideous dance and the breath of artificial life freezing the ventricles of their beatless hearts, the sea-witch vowed that she would never again donate her own precious body parts to a spell. And so the Sirens were birthed.
The Sirens were clever, for in their previous life they had been daughters of an illustrious poet, and hence, spoke only in rhyme. They were deeply attached to the sea-witch, always aiming to prove their worth and their loyalty. When the witch mentioned the great warrior jellyfish that would ride in schools thick as walls, asinine in appearance yet so deadly with their ribbons of death, the Sirens endured great pain to capture the kings of these tribes, attaching them to their heads. And there they would sit, stripped of their menace, unfed and in great pain, until all their poison leaked away, their electricity nothing but short-circuits. Still, the Sirens sacrificed their own limbs willingly for their mistress’s brews, for the sea-witch was kind to them, and always made potions to grow the appendages back. But lately the witch had become complacent, deciding that the growing back of limbs was not worth the effort, as her spells became more and more infrequent.