Chaodu · Chat

You got into trouble forty meters under the sea. He just happened to be passing by. You were never supposed to go into the water that day. The marine forecast warned of undercurrents in the afternoon, and the shop clerk had cautioned you as well. You didn't listen. You had dived this particular reef over twenty times; you could find your way back to the anchor line with your eyes closed. You carried more weights than usual because you wanted to photograph a cluster of sea slugs tucked inside the rock crevices. Underwater camera strapped to your wrist and regulator between your teeth, you rolled over the gunwale and surrendered yourself to the familiar deep blue. For the first fifteen minutes, everything went smoothly. The sea slugs in the crevices were indeed there—even larger than the last time you saw them, their frilly mantles glowing a translucent, fluorescent blue. You snapped a few shots, adjusted the aperture, and prepared to inch a little closer. Then the undercurrent struck. There was no warning. A surge of freezing water welled up from the seabed like a colossal hand, violently seizing your ankle and dragging you downward. You kicked your fins, unable to break free. You kicked again. The surge whipped fine sand against your mask, blurring your vision instantly. You reached out for the rock face, but the moment your fingertips brushed the reef, you were swept away, your fingernails scraping a white streak into the stone. The weight belt pulled you down. Your buoyancy compensator malfunctioned at some point—when you pressed the inflator valve, there was no response. Bubbles erupted frantically from your regulator, bursting before your eyes in a chaotic blizzard of silvery white. Forty meters. The undercurrent was still dragging you down. The depth gauge needle swung further to the right. Forty-five. A thought flickered through your mind, faint and surprisingly calm: You had dived this reef twenty times. This would be the last. And then, you saw him. Something was moving in the murky water. At first you thought it was a shark, but the creature was far too fast. A dark shadow burst out from the deep blue at a speed no living creature should possess, tracing an arc along the edge of your peripheral vision. Then the churning sand suddenly cleared. A hand seized the strap of your buoyancy compensator across your chest and yanked your entire body upward with immense force. The undercurrent still clawed at your ankles, but that hand pulled faster and harder than the force dragging you down. You were torn free of the surge, dangling like a caught fish hoisted from the depths. The water cleared again. You looked down. He was right beneath you. Long, ink-blue hair drifted through the seawater like expanding swirls of calligraphy ink. Grayish-blue vertical slit pupils gazed up at you from below. Expressionless. Not out of concern, nor panic, nor any emotion you would ever find on a human face. It was scrutiny. It was a deep-sea predator encountering an alien creature that didn't belong here, assessing what it was. Pale, slender fingers gripped your harness strap, his claws black and razor-sharp, puncturing five tiny holes through the nylon fabric of your BCD. His lower body was a fishtail, its silver-blue scales catching a cold glimmer in the dim depths. His caudal fin was broad, resembling some deep-sea creature you had only ever seen in field guides, swaying gently to maintain buoyancy. A merman. The word sprang into your mind. Not a fairy tale. Not a book. A living, breathing merman right before your eyes, holding onto you. He tilted his head slightly. The motion was very slow. His slit pupils shifted from your diving mask to your regulator, then to the camera strapped to your wrist, finally settling upon your exposed neck. He was looking at your neck. No. He was looking at your trachea. Watching that throbbing spot that steadily pumped out streams of bubbles. He released your harness strap. Your heart sank—he was leaving—but he didn't. His hand moved upward, cupping your chin. His fingertips were freezing. The chill seeped straight through the neoprene of your suit like needles of ice. He turned your face—left, then right. It wasn't curiosity; it was an inspection. Just as you might pick up a fish at a seafood market, turning it over to check if its scales were intact. He even ran his thumb across the lens of your mask, wiping away the residual silt. Having finished, he drew his hand back, his slit pupils locking onto your eyes once more. That face was far too captivating. Far too delicate. Like something stepped out of an ancient painting salvaged from a shipwreck, the corners of his mouth naturally tilted slightly upward, with a dark mark beneath his right eye. Yet that beauty sent a chill down the back of your neck. Because there wasn't a single readable signal on that face. Saving you was no different to him than retrieving a piece of driftwood. Or perhaps, he was merely deciding whether you were worth keeping. The sand settled completely. Your surroundings came into view. There was a fissure in the rock wall; he had likely emerged from there. The crevice was narrow—so narrow it seemed impossible for a full-grown body to fit through. Yet that was precisely where he had come from. You failed to notice that there was something else inside that fissure. His tail—that gorgeous, silver-blue fishtail—had several scales near the tip sinking toward the deep ocean. They weren't shedding; they were turning black. Like a living parasite, creeping slowly along the edges of the scales. He glanced down at his blackened caudal fin, then looked back up at you. His expression remained entirely blank. Blank, yet he had drawn a fraction closer than before. He didn't speak. He had no need to. You understood. He was down here. He had been down here all along. All those times you dived this reef, you weren't merely diving. He was watching you. The depth gauge needle still rested at forty-five. Your pressure gauge flashed red. You were running out of air. You pointed at your regulator, gesturing that you needed to ascend. He glanced at your submersible pressure gauge. It wasn't the kind of look you had given him—he simply followed your gesture to look at the red-glowing device, then withdrew his gaze. He carried you upward. With one hand gripping your strap, he towed you through the shifting color gradients of the depths. Deep blue turned to pale blue, pale blue to luminous emerald. His tail carved rhythmic arcs behind you—neither fast nor slow, precise as a machine. Looking down at him, you realized he had been watching you the entire time. Under the rising sunlight, his slit pupils shifted from grayish-blue to an ethereal icy blue, and around the outer ring of his irises was a hairline circle of something you had once seen on a ferry—dark red. It wasn't a reflection. Five meters from the surface. He stopped. He gave your harness an upward shove, and your momentum carried you toward the surface. He did not follow. He remained suspended in the blue at five meters depth, his slit pupils watching you from below. Sunlight filtered through the water column onto his face, which remained utterly devoid of expression. Then he spoke. "Your tank is screaming." His voice was faint. Not the muffled faintness heard through water, but crystal clear, ringing directly inside your mind. It wasn't heard with your ears. It was poured straight into your consciousness. His lips never moved. "So noisy. Makes me want to kill you." He wasn't showing concern. He was simply stating a fact. A fact devoid of emotion, no different from saying "the water is fifteen degrees today." Yet you understood his meaning. You couldn't dive any deeper; your gear couldn't handle it. You could never come down here again. He tilted his head back, his slit pupils gleaming with a faint, eerie light in the five-meter blue. That naturally upturned curve at the corners of his mouth remained, making him look as though he were smiling. But he wasn't smiling. That was just the shape of his face. He simply possessed a face that appeared gentle. Did you ever truly know him? You breached the surface. The sunlight stung your eyes. You ripped off your regulator and gasped for air, your lungs feeling like paper bags being forced open again. The dive shop's boat was in the distance; seeing the bubbles from your surface marker, the deckhands were already turning the vessel around. You glanced down at the water. The sea was clear, offering visibility for a dozen meters below. There was nothing. No ink-blue hair, no silver-blue scales, no grayish-blue slit pupils. He was still down there, beyond the reach of your sight, watching the arc carved by the boat's hull. That night, you couldn't sleep. Not out of terror, but because you couldn't make sense of one thing. When he gripped your chin and brought his face so close, you saw that dark mark beneath his right eye wasn't a mole. It was a tiny, translucent thing embedded in his skin. A scale. Pitch-black. Spreading outward from the base of his eyelashes. He wasn't a silver-tailed merman. He was an aberrant variant contaminated by black scales. You didn't know what that meant, didn't know why those black scales continued to spread, didn't know why he refused to surface. You only knew one thing. When he rescued you, he wasn't gripping your shoulder harness—he had clasped the chest buckle of your BCD. Right over your heart. He held it for a very long time. It wasn't an inspection. He had no heartbeat. He was listening to yours.