Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

Amy, my star undergrad, came running into my office late Friday evening. “Doctor Henson!” she cried, gasping for breath.

“Please,” I said. “Just Aaron.” She had only been with me for a week and had been unusually resistant to calling me by my first name.

“I found it!” she proclaimed. She brandished a wad of papers at various angles and stumbled toward the desk, slapping the mess down in front of me.

I couldn’t remember what assignment she’d been given. I furrowed my brow and squinted at the papers, finally deciding to pull the reading glasses from my shirt pocket.

She began shuffling excitedly through the pile of papers, rattling off her thoughts like corn flakes tumbling out of a cereal box. “It comes from the Mohegan-Pequot language through the Algonquian family. As you know, Mohegan was all but lost when Fidelia Fielding died in 1908, and all she left behind were some writings, but since 2012 the tribe has been working on reviving the language, and it was based on their work that you arrived at this pronunciation.” She stabbed her finger at the phonetic breakdown I had handed her a week ago. “Well I was able to identify a series of connected ideas and words in other Algonquian languages, older ones, and eventually I realized that they, too, experienced a kind of vowel shift, though more subtle than that of English, and that these particular sounds, including some of the consonants, are…”

“Wait, slow down,” I interjected, scanning the top document through the reading glasses. In thick, black Sharpie she had scrawled out a new phonetic breakdown of the word. “So are you saying it’s pronounced…

“Don’t!” she shrieked, throwing a hand to her mouth. But it was too late. The sounds dripped from my lips like sour milk and she stared down at me with wide eyes.

I stared up at her and froze.

“What have you done?” she whispered. Her hands were trembling uncontrollably.

An ice cold breeze cut through my button-up shirt, shrinking my skin around my aging bones. I glanced around. The windows were all closed.

Amy shivered and looked around frantically. “Professor,” she breathed, her voice shaking and tense.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped.

A clicking, scraping sound came echoing down the university’s tiled hallway and filled my little office. Amy whipped around to face the door while backing up until she was stumbling over my desk, struggling to scramble on top of it.

I dove under the desk, clenching my eyes shut tightly. The scraping sound grew louder, joined by a constant wheezing, growling breath. The air reeked of acrid musk and rotting flesh.

Amy froze. The scraping stopped. The breathing continued. Then Amy screamed and my desk lurched back, knocking me onto my side as it slid away from the door. A horrible gnashing, snarling sound filled my ears and overwhelmed my senses. I began sobbing. Amy’s screams morphed into a quickly dying gurgle and soon all I could hear was cracking bones and sloughing innards. I tried to hold my breath, both to avoid the stench and to keep from weeping loudly, but my lungs burned and I took noisy, halting breaths into my arms.

The room went silent. Part of Amy collapsed to the floor and a pool of blood seeped under my desk, soaking into my khaki slacks, though they were already wet and warm in the groin area. I shuddered uncontrollably, like a hiker dying of hypothermia. The desk screeched briefly, and once again I was jostled around by its movement. An icy gremlin climbed my spine while hot, dank air wafted down on me. The acidic stench of it made my eyes water.

Thin, bony fingers tipped with long, rigid claws wrapped around my ankle. An involuntary whimper burst through my lips as a powerful arm dragged me out from my hiding place and lifted me clear into the air. I covered my face with both arms, moaning like a heartbroken teenager.

A deep, raspy voice growled at me from deep in the creature’s chest. It spoke slowly and awkwardly, hanging too long on its bilabial nasals and hissing through its teeth on its fricative consonants. “You summoned me?”

I dared not look. I did my best to curl into a fetal position against the pull of gravity. I could feel its rancid breath on my flesh. But somehow, defying all logical explanation, I felt a growing hunger deep in my gut.

A leathery, hairy hand pried one of my arms free from my face. I blinked my eyes open in surprise, then shut them hard again, the image of Amy’s mangled flesh already seared into my mind. But despite my initial thought to retch and gag, I found my mouth watering.

“Feast,” the monster urged, holding me upside down and facing the shredded, dismembered corpse of my understudy.

I stole another peek. The tears in her body were jagged and unsightly. Intestines hung over the edge of my desk, tendons and muscles were strewn along the floor. Thick, black blood covered the top of my desk and pooled on the floor.

My stomach growled. I licked my lips.

The beast lowered me to the floor.

I stared at the gory remains of my star undergrad and swallowed hard.

“Yes, feast.”

[Reddit Post]