The wind is howling with the force of all the ghosts of the sea. Gargantuan waves rise up and thunder down, threatening to drag the lighthouse and its lone occupant to the briny depths of the Atlantic. Anderson huddles down harder into his bed. The roof leaks copiously. In his dreams, he hears sirens singing.

“It’s w-way too cold to b-be out here,” Anderson mutters to himself as he closes the door behind him. Last night’s storm cost him valuable sleep and body heat and the frigid morning air tells him he’s going to have to remain hypothermic for a good, long while.

“The light...” Anderson stops dead in his tracks. He may have been alone for months but he knows that’s not a human’s voice. It is hoarse, cracked. Maybe he imagined it? Solitude will do that to a man. A cough.

Anderson twirls around and collapses with shock. Lying on a jagged rock eroded to an ocean smoothness by centuries of high and low tides, is a figure. A mermaid. Her skin is the colour of the sky: grey and mottled. Her hair is white and looks like strands of spiderweb. Her tail ends in ragged wisps like a Betta fish.

“Oh my god!” Anderson exclaims, before he can stop himself. She looks up at him with solid black eyes. Anderson has never seen a creature as haunting as this one. She points at Anderson with an elegant, long finger. And smiles.

It took a while to get her upstairs, but Anderson didn’t have a choice. What if the post-storm fishermen saw her? He shudders to think what they’d do to her. He brushes her gossamer scales from his skin as he waits for the bathtub to fill up. “I followed the light,” she says. Her voice is smoky and feels like velvet on his brain.

She explains that the storm had pulled her away. Her hands are raw from trying to grasp anything that could save her. She says her name. It sounds like a scream and a song and a breeze. She tells Anderson how she knew the light was good. She tells him she speaks “human” because they share a common ancestor. She explains the divide between the “land people” and the “water people”.

“I must repay you, kind stranger,” the mermaid smiles coyly, revealing pointed teeth. She closes her lashless eyes and leans forward as if to kiss him. “Um, no thank you,” says Anderson. His face has gone red. “I’m more interested in... the male persuasion...”

“Did I say I was female?” The merman laughs. Anderson looks them up and down.

“I-I’m sorry, I assumed,” stumbles Anderson, for the first time noticing a slight stubble on the merman’s chin. And an Adam’s apple. And a hairy, flat chest.

The merman laughs again. “Just let me thank you,” he says.

They kiss.

“Thank god for the light,” Anderson mumbles onto the merman’s lips.

*

To Be Continued...