It looks like any four-poster bed with curtains pulled open and the bedspread laid out over me. But there's something wrong about it. The light is too dark. And the atmosphere around me is thick. Like water.
Because it is water.
I'm underwater.
I am underwater and somehow I am still alive.
But for how long? How long have I been here and how long do I have until I drown?
Nothing makes sense, because the rules and what I knew the real world to be are all wrong.
I scream again, thrashing about, pushing aside my caregiver. There’s a loud keening noise, and I realize it's me.
I'm trying to breathe, but how can I breathe when I'm underwater?
“Hold on there,” the woman tells me, and I take one look at them before screaming again.
The woman taking care of me doesn't look like a person at all. Sure, she has a head, two arms, two hands, and two legs, but that’s all that we have in common. Her eyes are three times bigger and wider than a human’s and the entire eye is all black.
Her skin has a slight green hue to it, and scales creep up on her cheeks and on her forehead. Her ears poke out, looking like the fins of a fish.
“Wh--what are you?” I stammer.
The woman -- or thing -- frowns at me. “I’m a mer,” she says simply. Like that explains everything in her big, black eyes, but it means nothing to me. She swallows compulsively. “A lower mer, unlike you, but I’m--”
“I’m not… I’m not...” I start, and I snap my mouth shut, because I don’t know why I’m arguing with someone who is surely a figment of my imagination. Either a hallucination or something from hitting my head during the plane crash.
Or maybe it didn’t crash, and that’s an extension of what I’m experiencing here.
And if that’s fake, then maybe Dad is just around the corner, in a hospital bed, and we can sit together and laugh about that one plane ride that had a lot of turbulence.
Please let that be true.
“I’m not a mer,” I say, pleading with her for it to be true. “I’m not…” I swallow thickly -- somehow the water doesn’t seem to make it feel any different, but I can feel the effect of it on my limbs. “Where’s Dad?” My voice is stronger.
The woman -- mer, whatever the hell she is -- shakes her head sadly. “I don’t know.”
I have to get out of here.
I sit forward, pushing her aside as I get to my feet. Or try to. Once I have the comforter -- which I see is some sort of weird cushiony jellyfish now -- off me, suddenly all gravity is gone and I start to float. My feet don’t touch the ground as I leave the bed. In going with my nightmare, I swim toward an open hole behind the woman.
I’m in what looks to be a cave, illuminated by bioluminescent sea creatures that I learned about in AP Biology -- but I can’t remember the name of them right now.
But there’s a way to escape. And maybe escaping this will help me escape this crazy hallucination.
“W-wait!” the woman cries as I swim past her. Now that I’m moving, I can feel how breathing is different, more labored, like I have a touch of bronchitis.
But I push through it and out the opening of my little room.
If I thought that I would suddenly wake up, I’m disappointed. Because when I grab the sides of the hole and push myself through, I find that I’m in the open ocean, just above a sea shelf that dives into the darkness below.
Underwater.
Under the sea.
In terror, I look around me, to see the vast expanse of the ocean before me. Fish swim in schools, kelp and rocks and coral line the areas around me, including the opening to the little cave. Further off into the distance, my vision gets obscured because of the water.
My biggest fears, and I’m now living it.
I scream and scream, startling the sea anemones by me.
The mer reaches out from inside the cave and pulls me back in.
And I’m back in darkness again.
8
“Is she here?”
I swim out of my nightmares to hear...Dylan’s voice? His voice is low, harsh, and urgent, but it’s definitely him in another room.
“Yes, she is,” a familiar female voice tells him. “She isn’t faring very well with everything that’s happened.”
“I don’t think she would, considering everything that’s happening.” He sounds regretful as he says it.
What the hell is he doing here, in a nightmarish underwater world?
Last I remember is --
I gasp and sit up, tearing myself out of sleep.
I’m lying in a dry bed. The sheets beneath me are rumpled, like I’ve been here for a long while, and the quilt is faded and old, while the pillows are lumpy. But they’re not soaked in seawater and I’m definitely not breathing water.
I’m not underwater, under the sea.
I’m on a double bed in a little room with seventies-style wood paneling on the walls. It reminds me of my grandparents’ house in Florida. A couple of windows show daylight streaming in between the curtains.
I look around in a daze, stunned at where I am.
What happened to the undersea cave? The dark depths of the ocean?
And if that were a dream and I'm waking up from some sort of nightmare, then why the hell am I in this room?
I don't recognize it at all, and it’s not like any hospital room I’ve ever been in before. If it were, that would make sense, considering what I remember happening on the plane.
The plane…
I lick my lips and call out roughly, “Dylan?”
Dylan and the female’s conversation stops, and there’s a long pause, making me wonder if I even imagined that part of all of this.
Then the door to the room opens, and Dylan stands in the doorway, his gaze spearing me from across the room. Behind him, I see a little old woman, with eyes that seem too big for her face.
She reminds me a little of the so-called mer that was taking care of me in my dreams, but this woman doesn’t have any scales on her face, and while her eyes look big, they’re not entirely black. Not like the thing I woke up to earlier.
If that was even real. Now that I’m here on dry land, all that seems so far away.
Dylan meets my eyes and then gives a relieved, weary sigh. “Gwen, I’m so glad you’re all right.” He combs his hand through his hair.
I groan and touch my forehead. “What happened to me?” I peer at the woman standing behind him. She could be the person that I woke up to earlier, except she’s clearly human now.
What the hell is happening?
Dylan licks his lips. "You don't remember?"
I shake my head and immediately regret it as the world swims around me and I feel like I'm about to puke. "No. I just remember... Heading out to Hawaii to... to..." Bits and pieces of my memory come back to me. Some parts of it couldn't be real, but I distinctly remember my dad holding onto me as everything in the airplane's cabin started to rise with our freefall. Down to the ocean.
There's something I need to tell you. That I should have told you a long time ago--
Dad told me that just before we started falling.
I whip my gaze toward Dylan. "Where's my dad?" My voice breaks as I say that.
Dylan's face pales and he averts his gaze. The little woman behind him does the same. But neither answer me.