By Imam Baksh
As this excerpt begins, Danesh has just had a horrible and humiliating day at his high school and he has taken his little fishing boat out into the mouth of the Essequibo River to be alone. He has just used his knife to steal a colourful reflector off a buoy.
A sense of alarm jolted through him. He gripped his knife tighter and snapped his head left and right, but the river seemed clear.
Then a dark, human-sized, shape burst up from the water and landed on the boat, rocking it. It snarled at Danesh in undecipherable words and swung a spear at him. The tip scratched his stomach, breaking the skin. Danesh tumbled backwards, falling into the water without ever getting a good look at the creature.
Then he was sinking. He needed to breathe! But there was no air. He was going to drown. Just like when the football had struck him, his lungs refused to work.
He recalled the football incident. No, I gon’ vomit and then drown. And I gon’ probably drown pon me own vomit.
It took him a few seconds to realize he wasn’t going to die. Just like when he’d been knocked into the water years before, he could see everything clearly despite the thick brownness of the water. And he didn’t need to breathe. Danesh looked at the knife in his hand.
He looked up at the boat.
He could see her. The creature was a girl about his age and size. Even with the bottom of the boat between them, his special sight revealed her. Her skin was blue-black, and scales coated her legs, right up to her waist. Her long hair was in a thick braid and it was silver—not white or gray, but literally the colour of fine metal.
At first he thought she was wearing only a black tube top and short tights, plus a streamlined pouch strapped to each thigh. But a deeper look showed that there was also a clear coating over her skin, like a hard, but flexible, shell, that moved with her as she turned, scanning the water. Something about the lurching steps of her motion made Danesh think her mind was not working right.
The girl plunged into the water and when the bubbles cleared, she was floating upright with her back to him. Her feet had transformed into a long, almost snakelike, tail with a wide fin at the end. Gills were opening and closing erratically on either side of her neck.
Danesh had listened to enough of the old people’s stories to recognize her as a femaid, though Miss Emmasyn said the original pronunciation was ‘fairmaid’. They were monsters in disguise, who were known to seduce men and murder them for sport. Although, this one apparently didn’t care for the seduction stage of the process, judging by the burning cut near his navel.
The shock of his attack and immersion had worn off enough for Danesh to look for an escape. Tiger Island was behind him and he turned for it. He felt like he was flying, swimming five times as fast as he ever did before, even with the knife in one hand.
But the fairmaid had seen him now, and he could hear her high pitched scream of rage through the water as she came for him, her spear leading the way. And she was swimming a lot faster than he could.
His only hope was the shallows. There would not be enough depth for her to whip the water with her tail there. For a moment, he considered dropping the knife to swim faster, but if he was caught, he would need the blade to fight. Danesh broke through the surface and made it to the wide top of an underwater sandbar. He took a gulping breath, then set his feet under him and kept running in the shin-deep water.
At first the fairmaid tried to circle around him in the lagoon-like space alongside the finger of sand he was running on but his trap had worked. She couldn’t swim with speed in the shallow water. Leaving the lagoon, she switched to her legged form then ran after him on the sandbar, splashing water with each step. He smiled as he realized that she could not run fast enough. He sprinted even harder, opening up their separation. Then his smile vanished when he realized the sandbar did not run all the way to shore.
A hundred feet away was the forested shoreline, but the darkness of the water ahead revealed a depth that he would not be able to cross on foot.
Behind him, the fairmaid saw it too and she screeched in savage glee.
Under the water, Danesh had not needed to breathe, but up here in the air, he panted and wheezed as he ran out of sand and started swimming through the last bit of deep water. He didn’t look back as he heard the fairmaid splash into the water behind him. He tried to gauge how much of a lead he had, but the water muffled sounds too much for him to tell. Just as he crawled up onto the solid beach at the other side, the fairmaid vaulted from the water toward him.
Time seemed to slow and he noted the way the light scattered in red, green, blue and yellow as it passed through the fountaining spray of water around her before she landed on the sand. Time clicked back to normal as she jabbed at him with her weapon. He rolled sideways and kicked her ankle. She fell to her knees, crying out in pain and it seemed like she was too tired to get up. Danesh scrambled to his feet and ran inland.
In the cover of the trees, he turned. The fairmaid stood at the water’s edge. She was clearly ill. Her eyes were red and swollen, lined with pulsing veins that seemed ready to pop. Her gills were leaking blood. She swayed then fell face-first into the sand.
He gripped the sickle tighter upon seeing how vulnerable she was and ran to her. He kicked aside the spear and lifted her head up and set his blade at her neck. The sickle seemed full of power, so much that it was overflowing into his arm.
The fairmaid reached a feeble arm up to grab his wrist and- No, she was reaching for a jeweled pendant which hung around her neck on a beaded necklace. He waited, and eventually she squeezed it.
In the distance, under the sea, something flashed, visible in his special sight, but not to his normal eyes.
The fairmaid looked at him. Except for the dark blue skin, her features seemed very human. Not totally, though. With her hair back, he could see that the tips of her ears were pointed, like the corners of a butterfly wing.
She spoke, her voice harsh and full of wet air, in a language he did not understand. The skin of her throat brushed his hand. It was very warm. Feverish, even. She pointed in the direction of the flash he had seen earlier. There was a circle of swirling light there, about half a mile away, under the waves.
And this creature that had just tried to murder him wanted Danesh to take her there. To save her.
