In Chinatown, the rain-slicked streets glistened, the beams from slowly moving cars and traffic lights painting abstract patterns on the wet asphalt. David pulled up the hood of his jacket and hunched over as if it would somehow protect him from the gray sheets of rain falling from the sky. He wandered down the streets, seeing the other homeless looking for a place to stay dry and to sleep for the night, but the entire island was drenched by the storm.
Eventually, he found himself on River Street, walking along the embankment at 3 a.m. A sudden flash of lightning made him look up. He glanced over at Aala Park but could only make out faint pools of light in the distance. Weighing his options, David realized the park was probably a swamp by now and he frowned as he pictured himself squelching through the mud and grass. The streets were practically flooded as it was, and the water that had been merely trickling down the street gutters had become fast-flowing streams.
He spotted the silhouettes of two figures sitting on the low masonry wall that was a part of the embankment and squinted. They seemed to be passing a bottle between each other. David sighed and was wondering what to do when he noticed a raft of debris floating down the river. A flash of white caught his eye, but he dismissed it as nothing more than a plastic bag until he saw an eerily beautiful face framed by tendrils of long black hair. A small, hysterical voice in his head started babbling that he had to be looking at a mannequin or a dead body, and then the pale figure began moving against the current.
Time slowed down, the droplets of rain seemingly frozen in place like a shimmering curtain of crystals, and his eyes widened as he saw a tail swishing beneath the water’s dark surface. He wanted to run, but like the rain, he, too, was frozen in place. He watched in horror as the creature’s eyes opened and a pair of milky orbs fixed on him with the cold, dead gaze of a shark. It opened its mouth, displaying long, needle-like fangs that didn’t match with a face that had seemed almost angelic in repose, and it grinned at him.
The creature’s smile grew wider and wider, until it was practically splitting its face in two — and then it winked slowly and deliberately, veering away from him as it headed toward the far side of the river. David wanted to scream, to yell and warn the two people still huddled together of the danger they were in, but they were too far away to hear him. The nightmarish mermaid leaped and arced through the air, reaching out with an impossibly long arm to pluck one of the figures from the embankment. David imagined he could hear a series of faint splashes through the drumming of the rain, but by then he had turned away from the scene and broken into a run.
David kept running and didn’t stop until his legs gave out near Aloha Tower. He was out of breath and doubled over, but he finally felt the horror of the night begin to recede. As dawn broke and the storm clouds dissipated, the ocean was like a mosaic with fragments of pink and orange light reflecting off its surface.
A dark shape moved below the surface, and he felt a cold sweat break out over his body at the thought that it was that horrible mermaid. It circled several times as if signaling to him but left him unmolested as it headed out to sea. Maybe it fed off fear, he mused. If so, then it had fed well off him and its victims.
Sirens in the distance told him the bodies had probably been found, and although he was curious, he wasn’t ever going back to the river again. It was a miracle that he was alive, and he was going to make sure he stayed that way — preferably by finding a place as far from the water as he could get.
