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The snakes crept and slithered around the murky waters as she reached the sea witch’s house, and she knew there was no turning back now.
The pearly white bones were bound together by fraying ropes from the sunken ships, and held by decaying wooden planks scavenged from the shipyard the house rested in. Algae grew around and between the bones, poking out between femurs, and polypi contorted themselves in between ribcages. The doorknob, she found as she reached for it, was made of the delicate bones of a hand. She drew a breath and took it.
If perhaps the exterior of the mansion was foreboding and threatening, it did not hold a candle to the interior. The walls were smeared with a dripping black substance, and electric eels encircled the room. There was a wide, open hole on the roof, the only source of light, and it glared a spotlight on where the sea witch rested, in the very middle, on her throne of skulls. She sucked the eyeball off a toad, and then turned her red gaze onto the little mermaid.
And then she laughed. A low, rumbling hum from her chest, before flicking the toad away to where the eels swarmed it, and flashed her repugnant teeth in what may have been a grin, lips stretching over yellowed, sharp teeth.
“I know why you’re here,” she drawled, her voice footsteps in an empty amphitheater.
It was all the little mermaid could do to stand where she did.
“Come!” The sea witch announced, and twice clapped her hands. In the blink of an eye, the polipy hands swarmed the room and then were gone, leaving a crooked table and two chairs where once was nothing but seafloor. “ Dine .”
A force from behind pushed the little mermaid onto a wooden chair, on the itchy, tarnished velvet, and towards her slid a plate full of putrid seabass, split open in half. The sea witch’s held caviar as black as midnight.
“You are here for an immortal soul, I can see,” said the sea witch. She pronounced her words strangely, placing accents where they didn’t belong, sounding out the vowels fully, drawing her mouth around the o ’s, and showing all her teeth on the i ’s.
The little mermaid nodded, hands rigid at her sides.
The sea witch began meticulously picking out the fish eggs, eating them one by one after inspecting each thoroughly. “You want to gain legs, like the humans that live on the land above us, so that you may walk among them a local.” The sea witch barked a sharp laugh, and slammed a fist onto the table, rattling the dishes, and the bones around them. “A foolish request, of a foolish girl!” Half of the caviar fell out of the dish and rolled away, pooling around the little mermaid’s tail.
She drew a calming breath and resumed plucking them. “But one that can be fulfilled. This is the last day of the year that I grant wishes, until the next year, and so you have until the Sun’s glow tomorrow. You are in luck.”
“Thank you,” said the little mermaid softly, her voice a melody from a distant childhood memory.
“So you can speak,” said the sea witch, voice like glass breaking, eating the last of the caviar, and raising her hands to clap. But she paused, narrowing her eyes. “Why haven’t you eaten?” she asked, voice resonant and reverberating.
“I can’t eat this,” said the little mermaid, her voice a delicate rose’s petal.
The sea witch sneered. “Of course,” she spat poisonously, and at a wave of her hands, the dish was replaced with several clams, the seabass evaporating into a sickly purple fume.
“Does this now suit your palate? ” she asked mockingly, her voice an acid sizzling through skin to bone.
The little mermaid cleared her throat. “Yes. Thank you,” she responded, her voice a remedial herb, soothing pain.
The sea witch scoffed. “A tongue on you, I see. But a voice... a wondrous voice,” she said, her voice the raking of a nail on a chalkboard, and her chest rumbled again. She clapped her hands, and her own dish was replaced with the head of a shark. She began picking its teeth out, one by one.
“But so comes the matter of payment and consequence for your — desire , my little mermaid. When the human walking sticks, those legs , replace your tail, you will feel as if a sword cuts through your body, and a searing fiiire when the legs grow.” She paused, and made the silence sound ugly. “Shall I go on?”
The little mermaid nodded. “Yes,” she said, her voice a symphony of stead-fasted determination.
“Very well then. Every step you take, henceforth, will be akiiin to stepping on glass. And you must win the love of your prince— ” her lips shriveled around the word, as if the mere utterance of it brought her disgust—” and be his bride, and he cannot marry another.”
The little mermaid swallowed. “What will happen if he marries another?” she asked.
“Oh,” the sea witch said, her voice the sharpening of a knife, brushing the shark teeth off of her plate onto the floor next to her. The little mermaid looked on and found the rest of the room had been covered similarly, from past meals, with past little mermaids. The sea witch’s jarring door-hinge of a voice brought her back to the present. “Then you will die.”
The little mermaid’s blue eyes were lost and hopeless, but she simply nodded.
“Then we shall begiiin ,” said the sea witch, her hateful voice the lightning that starts a wildfire, as she tore the shark’s head in half and ate both pieces with one savage bite.
Moonlight Herself should fear the creature that preys on a shark, and obediently, so did the little mermaid.
The sea witch rose, the blood dripping from her chainsaw teeth unwiped, and for the first time the little mermaid saw how tall she was — ten feet, and her black tentacles reached near the edges of the house. She stretched her foul lips out and revealed her canines, bloodied and yellow and sharp, and once more, clapped her hands.
The dining table was swept away by polipic hands and in its place lay a wide-brimmed iron cauldron. The sea witch’s tentacles squelched and sucked on the floor as she made her way to it, and she waved her hands, summoning ingredients into the cauldron, causing sizzling burns and vicious explosions.
The little mermaid had never felt as small as she did now.
The mixture gave off a fuming stench, coloured green and navy, and it circled around the sea with and above through the roof to the surface of the water. The eels began to circle in excitement, swarming the cauldron and the sea witch and the little mermaid, snapping their jaws and flashing their beady black eyes. At last, the sea witch announced the brew ready.
She drew the draught into a vial and corked it, and sucked and squelched her way to the little mermaid. The little mermaid’s eyes gleamed with want and she reached for the vial, but the sea witch held it back.
“No, no, no,” she said teasingly. “But first comes the matter of my payment.” She barked a wretched laugh, and the eels barked wretchedly with her. “Did you think I would do all of this for free ?”
“For free! For free! For free!” The eels echoed, and zapped the currents around them with blinding electricity.
“What do you want in return?” asked the little mermaid, her voice the scent of cherry blossoms in spring.
The sea witch’s crimson, gleaming eyes bore into hers, and they were all she could see before the sea witch drawled, voice slow, viscous and languid, oozing into the water surrounding them, lips and tongue mutilating the words, her voice a sword of a soldier through the heart, and said—
“ Your voice .”
The little mermaid’s eyes widened. “How will I speak to him? How will I convince him to love me?” Her voice was a gale on a frigid winter night, whistling and cold and fast and anxious.
The sea witch’s chest rumbled. “Well,” she said, tipping the little mermaid’s chin up. “You will have your eyes, won’t you? Your expressive eyes.” She sucked and squelched her way around the room, her eels following her. “You and I both know having your— honeyed voice will make this far too easy for you. You will have no need to try. This is a risssk , you’re taking, and risks are high stakes, high reward.”
The sea witch stopped when she reached the other side of the room, then turned back to face the little mermaid once more. “Unless you don’t want to?” Her voice was all the doubt in the little mermaid’s mind, and the sea witch dangled the vial towards where the eels were, as they began snapping their jaws, pushing and shoving at each other for a taste of the draught.
“No!” cried the little mermaid. “No. No, I will do it.”
The sea witch’s chest rumbled. “Very well,” she said, and snapped her fingers. The little mermaid felt her chest empty as a wisp of white was sucked from it, floating to the witch’s open palm where it grew black, dirty and corrupted. The little mermaid opened her mouth, but before she could do anything, the sea witch raised a finger.
“Don’t reach for it,” she said, her rotten voice a teasing candlelight that seared your finger. “You will regret it.”
The little mermaid nodded. The sea witch tossed the vial to the little mermaid, and she caught it, reflexively. “You have until Sunglow to drink that, and after, there will be nothing.” She warped the flesh of her mouth grotesquely around her teeth, in a disfigured shape that scarcely resembled a grin.
The sea witch’s chest rumbled quietly, and then it rumbled louder and louder until she began cackling, a sound so vile, ugly and terrifying that the eels slid under the sand and scurried to the top of the house. The bones shook, the polypi shrunk back, and the little mermaid’s blood ran cold in her veins.
The little mermaid had never swum faster in her life.
She swam through the shipyard and the whirlpool and the corals and the woody marshes until she reached the dock of the prince’s castle, and she pulled her body up onto it, just as the Sun began bleeding red onto the water, and before she could think twice, she uncorked the vial, threw the lid into the ocean, and downed the draught in one.
A sharp, stinging pain went through her waist, lingered at her abdomen, and flashed through her ribs and tail, and she felt like she would throw up had she eaten anything. She went to scream but found her voice absent and her throat burning. The pain blinded her, and she could only see white light, until she regained her vision and saw in place of her tail two strange sticks attached to her body.
Legs.
The little mermaid had legs.
She went to stand but found glass cutting her feet — she stumbled and fell onto her hands. She examined the soles of her feet. There was no wound, no scar, just smooth skin.
She found a white sheet close by, covering a barrel, and she crawled to it on her— her knees , they were called, took it, and fastened it around her body. Had she made the right decision?
She had learned of immortal souls when speaking with her grandmother, an old, white-haired mermaid living on the top floor of her father’s castle.
“A mermaid’s soul vanishes when she dies,” she had told her, voice a creaking chair by the comforting hearth. “We dissolve into seafoam and our souls exist no more. But humans have an immortal soul, my little mermaid. They live much shorter lives, two hundred years short of our three hundred, but their souls live on after they die, flying up to live above the clouds.”
She had sighed, her voice the clicking of knitting needles, and hugged the little mermaid tight. “But we are content as we are. We have three hundred years to see the world, and it is all we need.”
But the little mermaid had wanted more. That night, she had said goodbye to her garden of flowers and the castle and her sisters, as they slept, and gone to the mansion of the sea witch. She could have lived for 300 years, but she had wanted more, and more, but at what price, at what price—
“What does a maiden like you do here all alone?” A voice cut through her thoughts, a voice that resembled… nothing, at all.
The little mermaid’s head snapped up.
“Do you have a name?” asked the prince, whose voice sounded flat but strangely his own.
The little mermaid reached for her voice but in its place found the coals of a fire in her throat and tongue. She reached for the summer rain, and found it gone, torn from her chest. The little mermaid looked for the spring showers, and saw where she would grasp them before, instead a dry desert and wilted garden. She clawed for the late autumn snowfall and found that in its place remained a sticky tar, tarnishing her from the inside out. The little mermaid prayed for the winter's ice, her last hope, and found it melted and gone along with her voice.
The little mermaid felt a stab in her chest, as if the glass under her footsteps were not enough, and yearned to go back in time, and back to sleep, craved to have never taken, never touched, that bony hand. But instead shook her head and cast her eyes toward his, begging for kindness.
The prince’s breath caught, then after a pause, he clicked his tongue and glanced around. He looked conflicted for a moment, but then beckoned to the little mermaid. “Come with me,” he said — uniquely , she decided — and extended a hand.
The little mermaid took it and rose, and every step she followed him with felt like a thousand knives cutting invisible wounds onto the soles of her feet, making her vision sway and her head feel faint. But she bore it, she obliged her deal and its consequence, and walked with the prince towards his palace, just as the Sun painted the sky pink and gold.