The first adventure featuring Retishella mermaid. Now quite difficult to get hold of, but worth it if you do!
Retishella the mermaid was feeling strange. Not weird and wonderful strange like a trip to the Zooquarium to see the Sea Magic show, or amazing strange like a brilliant birthday, but the kind of strange that gives you a bad stomach or an achy head. Ever since she lost her sister’s junkball in the stripweed bushes and had to search among the stinking blue weed to find it she had not felt quite right. She knew from her mother’s frequent warnings that it was not wise to go near the stripweed beds, but she hadn’t felt anything bite or sting her so she thought no more of it. Now she was feeling very peculiar indeed.
She wondered momentarily if this is what guilt felt like. Next time she would ask Seeley if she could play with her junkball.
She held out an arm and noticed that her smooth skin was starting to wrinkle up like the face of a wizened walrus. She looked down at her beautiful shiny tail and gasped. The silvery scales were swelling and had that pitted look like the skin of a pineapple.
More worrying still was the fact that she couldn’t control the colour of her eyes and hair. This was particularly disturbing because a merperson with no control over their colour can’t show others how he or she is feeling. Herr hair and eyes were changing form red to purple to blue to grey to green to yellow again and again, and it was making her feel quite dizzy. She leant on a seabed rock until the feeling passed.
Taking a deep bubbly breath to calm her shattered nerves, she closed her eyes and pulled her comb and mirror our of her seaweed bag. She flashed her eyes open to take a quick peek and gaped in horror like a fish on land. Reflected in her silver mirror was a sight that turned her warm blue blood to ice: her hair and eyes had lost their colour. Both had gone from a healthy range of vibrant colours to a sludge brown that did not change.
She combed her hair vigorously in the desperate hope that she could coax some colour into it. But it didn’t help. Now she knew how it felt to be a landish girl.
She tried to swim, but her normally powerful muscles felt as weak as a newly-hatched mewler crab. By the time she managed to flip and flop across the sea bed back to her merfamily cave her initial horror was turning to panic.
Retishella’s mother caught sight of her through the mercave window. When she was her daughter slumping across the sandy yard outside the cave she dropped the seaweed tail wrap she was knitting and dashed out in a fluster of concern. She caught Retishella just as she collapsed in a drooping heap by the door. Retishella saw her mother’s hair and eyes turn black with shock.
“Retishella, what on earth is wrong?” she heard the concern cracking her mother’s voice.
“Mother,” croaked Retishella, lifting her head and wincing with pain. “I’ve lost Seeley’s junkball, she’ll never forgive me.” She sank back down to the sea bed, too weak to move.
Retishella’s mother swallowed hard and squashed a tear out of the corner of her eye. Forcing flecks of calm green into her black eyes and hair, she picked Retishella up like she had done all those years ago when she was a merbaby and laid her tenderly on the rock lounger. She stroked Retishella’s wrinkled forehead and wiped her sludge brown hair out of her eyes. Then she turned and stuck her head out of the cave window.
“Seeley!” Retishella’s mother called for her other daughter, “Fetch your father. Retishella’s sick and I’m taking her to the Ocean Room.”
Seeley took one look at her mother’s appearance. She saw the colour of her mother’s hair and eyes. She saw the serious look on her mother’s face and realised that something terrible had happened. She waved her agreement and with a powerful thrust of her tail launched herself in the direction of the breakwaterweed beds her father was tending.
“Retishella, what on earth have you been doing?” her mother grilled her impatiently. “Have you been playing in the stripweed bushes again? Oh how many times have I warned you about the dangerous sea creatures that lurk in the stripweed bushes?” Her mother’s worried ranting would normally induce Retishella to dissolve into remorseful tears by now, but she felt so ill everything sounded like she was hearing it from a long way away, as if she was listening through a tube or at the end of a tunnel.
Her mother noticed the distant, almost vacant look on Retishella’s face. “Don’t worry my little maid,” she crooned, gently picking up her sick daughter. “It’s not far to the Ocean Room. I’m sure they’ll be able to sort you out.”
She tightened her grip on Retishella and swam out into the blue-green ocean until they came to a gap, a wide crack in the rocky seabed that stretched in both directions across the bottom of the ocean as far as the eye could see.
Hugging her daughter tightly to her Retishella’s mother took a deep breath to calm her tattered nerves and dived resolutely down into the seemingly bottomless gully. As they swam deeper and deeper it got darker and colder. Just when they felt the darkness closing around them like a thick curtain of impenetrable weed they stopped on a ledge cut like a doorstep into the rock. On their approach the ledge began to shine, like a security light on a front door. The plankton that lived on it had been trained to light up when a living creature was nearby.
Retishella was feeling very tired and dizzy, and wearily closed her eyes for a moment. She heard the sound of her mother singing the rock door song, followed by a scraping, grating rumble which churned up the water around them and compelled her to open her eyes just in time to see a huge boulder above the light of the doorstep rock slide into the side of the rock wall. Behind it was an amazing room.
The first thing Retishella noticed was that the room was huge. She looked up and could just about make out the outline of the ceiling far, far above them. The room was round, like an enormous bell, roughly hewn out of the sandy-brown rock and lit on all sides by banks of glass tanks full of glowing fish the like of which Retishella had never seen before. Merpeople of all shapes and sizes were milling around, many of them being supported or carried by others. “Goodness,” thought Retishella out loud, “I didn’t realise there would be so many sick people here.”
“Yes dear,” Retishella’s mother answered in that vague voice parents use when they’re not really listening. She was too busy trying to work out where to go. She put her arm around her daughter to support her and they swam together towards the far wall of the Ocean Room. Chopped into the vast walls like nibbles in the rock were thousands of little alcoves, each one labelled with the spirals and squiggles that made up mermaid writing. Retishella’s mother read several labels and stopped by the one that described Retishella’s illness. She helped Retishella place both her hands into the alcove and they waited until a thin slice of dark red rock was dispensed into the middle of one of Retishella’s upturned palms. Retishella’s mother picked up the rock and avidly studied the instructions on it. It didn’t make very encouraging reading.
If a mermaid has lost her colour
‘Tis a very serious thing
She must go and find the dolphins
And dance with the Dolphin King.
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