PLANET ZOOTOPIA
AQUARIA
“I’ve been one with the mask for so long the memory of who I was has long since been lost to me.” - Nicholas Faraday, from Mask of the Ancient Mariner
(Page down to read an excerpt from my illustrated novel.)
Rapture and the Ecstasea
The Orbicle of Delphi
Mermalien Odyssey
Chapter Three: The Interloper
In the half-light of a midwinter’s eve a young man staggered out of the rolling surf and dropped to his scaly knees, convulsing as he struggled to remove the creature that engulfed his head. With a fistful of blood-filled orbicles in each hand he pitched forward, hunching his naked body over a clump of rotting seaweed. Lurching backward across the storm-tossed beach, trying in vain to shake it loose, he felt the creature suddenly tighten its grip.
Why are you trying to kill me? he thought. Let go!
The creature’s gill slits flared and with a sickly wet hiss, it filled its leaky airbladder. He released the slimy tendrils, feeling around in the sand for something hard: A shell, a rock, any brand of flotsam or jetsam would do. The creature thrust another probe down his throat. He groped the wet sand, clawing through a tangle of tendrils and seaweed, and finally he found it.
He jabbed the stick into the thing, over and over, feeling every blow as it reverberated into his own dying flesh.
Get off me! his mind screamed.
The creature hissed and spat, and from its mouth agape there came an eerie scream, rising in the still air, a plaintive howl that penetrated the mist. Dribbles of green bile trickled from its aubergine lips, burning into his neck; he arched his back, shuddering with the pain.
Suddenly sensing an ebb in the flow of the creature’s life-force, the young man let his muscles slacken a bit, his arms and legs spread-eagled, his body gone limp. And as he relaxed himself, there came to his inner ear a distant call peeling through the haze: a woman’s voice, delicate and clear. He rolled onto his belly and jerked up his creature-covered head, thinking he’d just heard his mother and convinced he’d see her standing on the stoop, pale hands circling her mouth as she called him to dinner.
Breathe. He remembered the word and tried to say it aloud, but could not; the creature’s prehensile probes had swelled inside his nasal passages, at least one snaking down his throat, stifling his words and nearly suffocating him.
Take a deep breath, he thought. Then he remembered something else; it had been more than fifteen years* since he had tasted even a wisp of terrestrial air. Of course, he hadn’t needed to; so why did he yearn so desperately for it now?
Determined to save himself the young man reached behind his head, fingers digging deep into a crack in the creature’s slippery carapace. He felt a little give, then a tightening grip as its posterior orbicle cinched his neck. He dug deeper and felt a little more give. Then ripping. Sucking. Gurgling.
Finally the creature yielded, the greasy rift in its body opening like a chasm in the earth. Its lips parted too, and from that gaping maw came a cry that pierced the calm, twilight air with an inhuman tenor.
He vomited the creature’s salty probes, felt the sticky veins tear and snap inside his sinuses, then smelled the bite of copper as fresh blood filled his nose. The creature went limp, its orbicles slackening as it fell into the stinking pile of seaweed heaped around his sallow feet.
Finally free of the unearthly thing the young man braced himself, hands on his knees, coughing up phlegm and gasping for air. Then he opened his eyes and actually screamed, though the low, wailing timbre of it conjured an image more muskoxen than human.
He was blind.
Squinting into the dying light of a balmy Sunday evening an old woman cautiously approached the pale but shimmering body of the young man. She had called out to him as he struggled, fearing that he was in a fight for his life and might need her help, and was stopped dead in her tracks by an ear-slitting scream. Now drawing nearer she was again halted in mid-stride, her toes curling into wet sand, and with a sharp gasp she stifled a scream of her own, promptly falling to her knees.
He lay face down in the rising surf, nestled in a frothy wreath of seaweed, a glowing, gelatinous mound of bloody orbicles and a ruptured carapace flattening out in the sand at his side.
“Son,” she whispered, poking him in the ribs with a porcelain finger. “You all right?”
She fell back as another shallow wave washed over them, but he didn’t move. At least, not in the way she had expected him to move. What was it? she wondered. Where had she seen this before?
The old woman crawled back to his side and checked his pulse. His skin felt odd to her, vaguely reminiscent of a soft-shell crab slathered with butter. And it was molting or sloughing off in some places, though it still looked quicksilvery, shimmering with a faint almost prismatic iridescence in the dying Sun’s last rays.
“Of course,” she blurted out. “Like a fish! Only-” She clapped her hand over her mouth, having caught a glimpse of his face in profile.
His eye was wide open, the iris glowing with milky phosphorescence, staring straight into the blackening weed only inches from his bloodied nose - or at least, what was left of his nose. The old woman leaned in for a closer look and saw something moving; a wormlike creature slithered over the young man’s lip and disappeared into his nostril.
Repulsed by the thought of something crawling up her own nose she struggled to her feet and backed away, but then, could not resist taking another closer look.
“Say, what’s all over your ear,” she asked, hovering above him in a circular holding pattern. “Can you hear me, son?”
She barely got a glimpse of the receding web between his fingers as he slashed the air and struck her, an electric sting hurling the old woman backward and slamming her body into the next wave. She sank like a rag doll, the jolt having momentarily knocked her out cold. But before she touched bottom she came to and bobbed to the surface - just in time to see the creature’s pearlescent airbladder jet past her, its orbicles trailing behind it.
The rising tide tried to swallow up the young man, its relentless swells foaming at the mouth of a gaping maw, lapping at his ankles as he stumbled to shore.
Where am I, he wondered, standing there alone in the alien dark on that desolate stretch of beach.
And who am I?
With his eyes still closed he stroked the smooth skin of a hairless pate; it made his scalp prickle and sent tremors coursing down his lateral line. With webbed fingers he explored his face and discovered a flap of loose skin stuck to his cheek. Peeling it away he realized that it was still attached to his right earlobe. With a gentle tug he ripped it off, then panicked and reached for his left ear. He pulled that lobe, but it held fast; both ears, he was relieved to know, were identical.
In a flash he realized he had just heard the faint sound of his own flesh tearing away and suddenly his head filled with the crashing of waves breaking at his feet, growing louder and louder. Bloody nostrils flared as he filled his lungs again and again with fresh air and tasted the sweet scent of something he vaguely remembered.
“What is that,” he asked.
The sound of his own voice startled him. Certain he had heard it before, he sensed a distant memory that held it in a deeper, more resonant tone. But now it seemed foreign, somehow alien.
He rubbed his eyes and opened them, then turned.
“Hello!” he said, and almost laughed.
A gust of cool air swirled and eddied about his naked head, sending shivers up his lateral line; a whisper of a breeze brushed against his cheek, and he caught his breath. How long had it been, he wondered.
He touched the side of his face and saw the lights.
Stars! he thought, as millions of shimmering pinpoints swam - under his feet? He suddenly felt giddy and staggered, losing his balance.
“Close your eyes,” came a stout and commanding voice from behind him.
The old woman slogged through the burgeoning surf, clutching her abdomen, but apparently heedless of any further threat the young man might pose.
“Drop to your knees and bow down, now,” she commanded.
Suddenly fearful, the young man did as he was told. Still, he tried just once to look over his shoulder.
“Head down!” she said.
And with that he keeled over and found himself back in the Royal court, staring at the gilded base of an ancient throne, his nose pressed hard against a cold wet slab, a giant blue claw tapping next to his ear.
In relative darkness the old woman lowered herself to the young man’s side, wincing as she drove a swollen knee into the sand. Feeling for his carotid artery with one hand, she pulled a keychain from her pocket with the other and fumbled for the switch on the penlight before flicking it on. She inched the narrow beam up his mottled torso, gasping at the ragged sight of vestigial scales, finally arriving at his face where her fingers had already found an eye socket. She bit down on the end of the penlight and pried open the young man’s eyelids to check his pupils, but couldn’t find either one; both eyeballs were sheathed in a milky white membrane, aglow with a shroud of phosphorescence. Tracing circles round his sockets with the beam she saw the shadow of a disc lazily swimming about beneath the membrane, as if trying to avoid the bright light. She touched the membrane and moved it around, then plucked it from the socket and tossed it aside. A bold blue iris looked up at her, dilating ever so slightly when she jerked the beam away from it. She opened his right eye, snatched the other sheath, wrapped it in her kerchief and tucked the little parcel neatly into her soggy shirt pocket. She patted it and muttered, “Can’t wait to see that un-under the scope,” and then she slapped the young man. Hard.
“I’ll bet you’re Navy,” she said, in a scolding tone. “One of them Seal fellas, aren’t you?”
She slapped him again, but harder this time. He sputtered, then suddenly coughed up a short length of phlegm-covered tendril that stuck to the old woman’s cheek and entangled itself in her matted hair.
“Lovely,” she said, as she peeled the thick, pinkish appendage away and held it up in the penlight’s beam.
“I didn’t know giant squid were still on the menu.”
She balled up the tendril, rolled it neatly into the kerchief next to the eye-sheath and stuffed the whole business back into her pocket again, muttering to herself, “No telling where the likes of that came from,” and that’s when the penlight’s beam inadvertently fell on his privates. Or, at least, the region where she would’ve expected to find them, had she actually gone looking for them.
“Good Lord, son; what on earth have they done to you?”
As she drew the penlight’s beam near to his crutch, the young man’s hand shot up and grabbed her forearm.
“Where am I,” he asked stridently, pulling her to him.
“You’re hurting me,” she said, her voice shaky.
“Why are you dressed like this?”
“Please. Let go of me! You need immediate medical attention. I can-”
“No,” he said, releasing her, tossing her backward into the surf.
“I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t have come up. I’ve upset the order.”
He stood and looked around.
“It’s nearly high tide. Come.”
He pulled her to her feet, nearly lifting her out of the water.
“What? Where are we going,” she asked, trying to pull away from him. “No! I won’t come with you. Why should I follow you anyway; you don’t even know where you are. Worse, I don’t even know you.”
He sighed and said, “Forgive me, Madam, but it seems that along with my own name I have forgotten my manners, as well.”
Taking stock of his surroundings, he gestured with palms up and said, “I’m afraid I find myself at somewhat of a disadvantage for I am none but an interloper here, and though I know not even your name, our whereabouts or the time of day, yet do I persevere, standing before you, naked and unashamed?”
“Monadeen,” she said. “It’s Monadeen.”
“A pleasure,” he said, taking her hand and bowing.
She smiled demurely and said, “You don’t remem-”
“Oscar,” he said, interrupting her. “Oscar the- No. That’s not it,” he muttered, shaking his head. Then his eyelids flickered and he said, “Do I know you?”
Mona chuckled and said, “I think I would’ve remembered someone like you.”
The young man looked down at his mottled legs and brushed away scales and molting skin that had sloughed off, now barely hanging on. A thick flap of scaly skin, much like a codpiece, pulled away from his groin and fell with an unceremonious splat in the sand. He turned himself away from the old woman.
“Looks like I’ll be in need of a tailor and soon.”
