Excerpt: Storm Signals

Bill and Maud Rundle and their crew, Sergei Taco Smith and Tanya, are on a transatlantic crossing aboard Bill and Maud's forty foot yawl "Enigma",. They have just survived a powerful gale, struggling to stay afloat for three days. During the night the storm has stopped, it is very calm and they are all exhausted. That morning they wake up and find that the fishing trawler that has been shadowing them for the past two weeks has disappeared. The ocean around them is strewn with flotsam; the water is very transparent and even below the surface they see pieces of wreckage drifting in stray currents, some sinking and some still on its way up. They begin repairing the damage to the sailing boat; some of the rigging has to be replaced before they can hoist sail again. The yacht is in good condition otherwise, but they have lost their electronics; their navigation and communications equipment won't work. Sergei is working on the fore deck when he spots something floating up from the deep, a little different from the other wreckage: distinctly, a human form. He calls the others over and they watch, entranced as she comes to them:

Mermaid.
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Up from the deep, her arms outstretched as if in supplication, her hands open she came up slowly, swaying slightly and then as a stray eddy current took her, tumbled lazily the figure of a woman, naked, white as and stiff as a statue, a fashion shop mannequin, but too real. She was naked and dragged a length of chain from a ring around one of her ankles. She swayed and her hair, black and very long, streamed out behind and around her. Fascinated the watched.

“Mermaid!” Sergei said, “a mermaid!”

She took a very long time. As she danced up towards them, the water surprisingly clear. A ghostly, eerie spectacle, and with an unnatural beauty too. For she was certainly a beautiful girl. Her eyes were open, large and dark. Her hair, also black and very long waved from her head like a Medusa, tendrils played over her face and around her long neck . They saw around her waist a girdle, an outlandish ceremonial costume with a belt of bright orange seashells and as she came closer they saw she was also had a gossamer net floating from her like a bridal veil. The sea bride. Chained and come free to the surface to visit them, or to bring them a message.

They forgot the gale, the lost trawler, their narrow escape, their exhaustion and clung to the Enigma’s rigging, were entranced and transported into a fantastic, fabulous, new world that was being revealed to them.

“Fishing floats!” Bill said suddenly, “fishing floats and a net. Her body is entangled, the floats are bringing her to the surface … and the chain at her ankle is keeping her more or less upright! But the chain … ah! Yes, the chain.”

Bill was the first to see what must have happened: she had been aboard the sunken vessel, must have been, and against her will as she must have been shackled to the wrecked trawler. They would find out more once they had her aboard. She was heading towards a point about thirty feet off the Enigma’s starboard bow. The gentle breeze was driving the Enigma’s hull with just enough way for her to steer; Bill was back at the tiller and took the boat in that direction. Minutes seemed hours as the Enigma and Sergei’s Mermaid crept towards their appointment. They were startled as she finally bobbed up suddenly, up to her fishing float belt, streaming water and her hair slicked around her naked skin, then settled down to her shoulders as the chain drew her back by her ankle and held her like a strange buoy, only feet away from their hull as Bill steered them around and into the breeze, to a halt. They floated together for a while, all still stunned in surprise – except the Mermaid, her face was surprisingly serene, with no pain in her expression. Sergei snagged her fishing net veil with a boat hook as it drifted towards them on the orange floats. Bill had secured the wheel and returned to the bow as Tanya dove into the sea and secured a line around the strange newcomers chest, under her arms. They got her aboard with some difficulty as the net she had been using as a veil had wrapped around their keel. Tanya handed the line to Bill and dove under to untangle it. Then she stayed in the water and they a attached one of the head sail halyards too her, and they could hoist her onto the foredeck where she lay streaming water. Tanya was the first to touch her but she didn’t need to tell them she was long dead, though no water came from her mouth which was slightly open, full lips slightly parted. She hadn’t drowned either; a gunshot wound under her left breast told them that she was no mermaid and that her human death had not been by water.

Their mermaid had been a prisoner in their erstwhile mystery companion (or pursuer?), chained somewhere in the trawler by a shackle around her ankle. And shortly before the storm had struck she had been shot in the heart. Ironically so far she was the only "survivor" of that vessel. Who was she and who were they?

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Rigging repaired, the set sail again towards Bermuda. Bill makes an estimate of their position and they are far south off their course. Sergei manages to get a radio to work on the international distress frequency: their call is picked up by a coastguard cutter, they report their situation and that they have a murdered body aboard. They given new bearings, and sail to a harbor on an island unknown to them ... and their reception is not what they expected. ...