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It's raining. Not an uncommon event in England. Especially not in a seaside town, where the grim (and yet occasionally colourful) brick and stone faces of buildings are regularly lashed by inclement weather, their soulless eyes staring out upon grey-green waters in which there is no hint of the tropical, and rarely any sun that could be described as intense. Half Atlantic, half North sea, on good days you can make believe you're elsewhere, and on bad days even the underwater inhabitants turn to drink.
And that's during the day. During the night the strange euphoria that afflicts diurnal creatures when they stay up past the sun's setting, affects the humans who call Brighton their home. At least it affects the young ones, who respond by piling out of their ancient flat faced houses onto the ancient streets to school together and drift with one mind towards the pubs and clubs and other places where they can beat their ennui down a little with numbing alcohol. A shoal of alternatively drab or garish fish, mix matched and with no sense, understanding only unconsciously that they are living in the final days of the world. Or final nights. Certainly, for some, it is their personal final few hours, the dangers of sea, rain, vehicles, drugs, and fellow human being innumerable and unacknowledged till after some cold grey corpse is identified on a cold grey table in some cold, grey morgue. Another bites the dust, the others will be back to their hollow laughter soon enough.
Grey, abominable and abhorrent to the unyielding nature of black and white. One rainy Friday evening, as the pubs begin to heave and the clubs open, a curly haired human head emerges ever so slightly from the choppy waters of the English Channel, now deep blue in the dark, the creature's blank eyes fixed upon the nearby shore all lit up with artificial light as if in defiance of the order of nature. Had a torch or other beam shone upon those eyes it would have been violently rejected, reflected by the sharky pupils so wide and black. After a moment or two, the figure slips back under the water with an ease and mastery impossible for the entirely landborn creatures called homo sapiens. That's not to say that they can't become like to the denizens of the deep, but that requires a certain forfeiture.
Half an hour later, first one hand and then another rises out of the inky sea to grasp a strut of the pier, powerful muscles tensing and pulling a white form out of the black water. Mermaids like to climb the pier because it allows them to ambush unwary guards on moonless nights, but tonight the goal is different, and first one entity and then another emerges from the deep to spy upon the shore and grow more comfortable in the air before dropping back into the water, emerging from it onto the sand on the shadowed side of the pier.
Male versions of mermaids are almost never seen by humans in their aquatic form. Men do not look quizzically upon other men, and male merfolk have more pressing things to do than sun themselves on rocks. There would be no point in so doing anyway, as most are as ugly as the average male human, and besides, almost all sailors are men. Male merfolk actively hunt rather than entrap, spending most of their time chasing fish and sea mammals down deep, leaving their beautiful female counterparts to tempt humans off their ships, or create storms that wreck vessels and produce a harvest of hearts. It is a very uncommon merman who will leave the sea to walk amongst mankind even to hunt, let alone to entertain himself. Doing so hurts, besides being dangerous.
But in every population there are oddities, outliers, and a pair of foreign mermen, passing by on a return journey to the Black Sea, find themselves lured by the brittle sound of merrymaking. Specifically the brittleness and lurking despair in the laughter, the music and the chatter lures them, because they are predators, and that sound spells weakness and vulnerability. They've had many good meals at the expense of this gloomy, mist shrouded island. Many feasts were had off this damp green table.
For the time it takes them to step out of their fishy lower halves onto newborn legs, any watcher would witness horror as men appear to climb out of the serrated jaws of sharks in a gush of black blood. But there are no watchers to see the mers transform. The artificial light blinds them to both the stars and everything else.
A couple of young men enter an alley, and another couple exit, dressed just the same, but with a spot or two of red where there was none before. Down rain slicked pavements strut the pair of club goers, hands in the pockets of new jeans, moist fingers playing with the lighters and keys they find there. Abnormally good looking by the standards of both species, unnaturally good looking even, like their female counterparts, they put a mermaid's trademark technique to the test by striding up to those responsible for letting people into nightclubs, letting their faces do the talking. The bouncer they approach isn't gay, but he decides to let them in because of their looks anyway, reasoning that exceptionally handsome men attract women, which attract average men, flocks and flocks of them.
“Be good, lads.” He says to the larger of the two, only to receive a blank stare back.
🦈🫀🦈
For several hours the boys in borrowed clothes are good, dancing and drinking like the rest inhabiting the dark and dingy buildings, dancing and drinking much better than them. Dancing and drinking with a wild abandon which attracts as much as their looks and mysterious silence does. Crowds begin to coagulate on opposite sides of the dance floor, gathering around one or the other young man. Their temporary lovers laugh and smile and sing, but the men do not, all they allow themselves are enigmatic closed lip smiles, their eyes never lingering on the faces around them. Despite this their expressions are ecstatic. They appear to be in their own world, which only makes those around them wish to be the one who breaks them out of it. Now and then one or the other leaves the floor with a hopeful partner, disappearing somewhere, only to return ten minutes later, without their companion. But the crowds never thin noticeably, more and more people are always entering the club.
So it goes, on and on, all night, the pair never stopping their dancing aside for these breaks with a chosen one.
“Hey, sweetie. Come with me.” Whispers an older man with carefully plucked eyebrows, into the ear of the smaller of the two mermen, the one with curly hair, while he dances with his eyes half shut. The man speaking to him kneads at his hard waist with a soft hand, the invitation clear. Shooting a harpoon glance at the comrade he exited the sea with, the merman leaves the dance floor, squelching across the dimly seen tiles and out the fire exit into a dirty alley. Here, the man who solicited him receives the last surprise he ever will as the pretty boy he meant to do something hideous to does something hideous to him instead, pushing him back against the wall roughly, a hand to his chest, too strong to move.
“Oh, you're like that, are you, gorgeous?” simpers the man, enjoying the feel of the sharp nails digging into his skin, until he doesn't. Five half moons of nail turn his enjoyment to discomfort when they pierce his flesh, while showing no signs of stopping. Meanwhile, the pretty boy is beginning to look not so pretty, his russet brown eyes turning darker and darker until they surpass normality and become true red moments before filling with black from corner to corner. But before the victim can scream, another hand slams down on his mouth, a hand smelling of salt and iron. Jaw muscles tense, and his assailant's cherry lips part to reveal triangular teeth hooked backwards for an unbreakable bite. All the while, the hand on his chest continues to dig its fingers into his flesh, inexorably, shunting aside skin, fat, muscle, and eventually bone, blood cascading from the five tunnels being dug towards the violently pumping delicacy secreted away within.
“I am like something.” says the merman, in a watery voice like the black depths of the sea.
A little bit later he returns to the dance floor, the ground attempting to hug his shoes, exchanging a look with his friend, who seconds later steps outside with a giddy girl. She slips and falls on the way out, but the beautiful man picks her up, so gentlemanly, so strong, his face kind as a summer's day. Flashes of strobe light act like bolts of lightning, very very briefly picking up a dance floor swimming in blood and a dancer wearing a grey shirt stained black down the front.
By dawn the men have left the club, alongside most of the rest of the clientele. A club which becomes a crime scene when some bleary eyed manager slips on a puddle of mystery liquid and brings his sticky, dripping fingers to his face. Outside, an impossible heap of bodies are found stuffed in a skip, each one missing its heart and all of its blood, looks of agony on the corpse’s grey faces.
Frightened police follow bloody tracks, which continue far down the street, much farther than they should. It is as if the suspects were the ones bleeding, and bleeding copiously. Once they reach the beach many more indentations, as of high heels and small feet, are seen to accompany them. A crowd of dancers, going for an evening stroll with suspected murderers?
Between these many small disturbances, two large sets of bloody steps mar the shingle, red liquid bubbling over rounded pebbles, all the footprints ending at the waterline.