Marty felt as though every neuron was firing inside his brain at once, a fireworks of amazement, horror, elation, and surprise. Danger and caution and prudence—none of that mattered right then. All he could think was: It’s there, it’s right there, don’t let it get away!

It had been darting in and out of his LED light, leading him, almost playing with him—and suddenly it disappeared altogether.

Marty assumed an upright, treading-water orientation. He spun left and right, his light arcing through the black water at frantic angles.

There! A dozen feet away! It was directly in front of him and holding itself in a position mirroring his own.

To avoid blinding the merfolk, he lowered the light to its abdomen and stared in wonder. The creature was both everything and nothing he had imagined it would be. A mane of blue, bioluminescent hair flowed away from its head like a halo. Its face was a mashup of simian and human and Klingon (the latter due to its oversized forehead). Its streamlined upper body was bone-white and hairless, though its flesh darkened to a mottled gray along the tops of its shoulders and the length of its arms. A pair of taut, small breasts, a narrow waist, and a delicate bone structure suggested it was a female.

It had no legs.

From its pelvis down was a smooth, powerful tail that tapered into a symmetrical caudal fin remarkably similar to that of a cetacean.

With a sudden up and down undulation of the tail, the merfolk propelled itself easily through the water, stopping a few feet before him to reveal its grotesque majesty in all its glory. The glowing blue hair and liquid-black eyes—flecked with blue and clearly intelligent—captivated Marty with their alien beauty. Yet the rest of the merfolk’s features were so sleekly eroded he almost felt as though he were looking at a burn victim that had received a too-tight face transplant. The nose was little more than a bump with vertical slits for nostrils. There were no external ears to speak of, only cavities in the sides of its skull. And the mouth, which extended nearly the width of the jaw, featured unnaturally swollen lips that curled upward at the edges to form a surgically butchered smile.

Then it blinked—translucent eyelids moving horizontally across each eyeball.

Speechless, Marty raised both his hands, palms outward, in a gesture of amity.

After a moment the merfolk did the same. Its hands were much larger than his and webbed with thin membranes connecting the elongated fingers to one another up to the third knuckle joints.

Spontaneously Marty extended his right arm, wanting nothing more than to touch the fairytale creature before him.