When you step on the bra, you almost drop your light.
It's a black bra, the stiff seamless under-a-t-shirt kind, and piled beside it, soaked on the cave floor, are white panties and a thin blue t-shirt. No jeans and no shoes. Sometimes, don't people get crazy with hypothermia and take off their clothes because they think they're dying of heat when they're already freezing?
"Aisling?"
"Down here," she says. "In the water."
You shine the light down, to where the cave opens away from a winding braided channel and becomes something like a room. Its rays reflect from a rippled surface, the limpid waters of an underground lake, so transparent that even with the flashlight glare you can see the weird white limestone structures that hump and glide across its bottom. And you can see Aisling in the water, through the water, her colorless hair all around her like seaweed, teacup breasts white as the rock she floats over, the featureless flesh where her eyes should be, the wide slash of her lipless mouth, and the ragged plumy sweep of her long, light-scattering tail.
"You're a mermaid," you say, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Listening to your own level voice shocks you more, right now, than Aisling does. "You're a mermaid in a cave."
"Very good," she tells you, her voice a reedy, layered thing. "Most people are much worse about denying the evidence of their eyes. Come on in, my darling. The water's fine."
The water, in point of fact, is freezing, or very nearly so. Ice crystals brush your naked arms and legs, the water sucking heat from your liver and ovaries. You start to shiver before you're even fully immersed, a bone-rattling chill that makes you fear for your tongue should you attempt to speak. And yet still you walk to her, until the cave water laps your collarbones like desperate tongues, until the finny spikes of her webbed outreached fingertips scratch the calluses on your own.
The flashlight, left propped on a stone, spreads sallow light around the cave, inadequate to touch its corners. The blind mermaid still seems clearly delineated, as if she collected light or as if some inner light illuminated her. Maybe mermaids are bioluminescent. Maybe nobody's ever done the research.
Don't be an idiot. The research?
Her knobbled-slick hands close on your wrists and she draws you into water so cold you can't feel it, can't really feel the moment when your feet lose contact with the knobbled-slick limestone floor. Her brawny tail pries between your legs, fish-slippery, hard muscle rasping-rough with the scales that sparkle. Fins hook your ankles, glass-sharp on knobby bone, and her hands glide wide on your scapulae, so you can feel the prickle of their roughness and also the way your bony edges press into her palms. She has breasts, and why on earth would a mermaid have milk and mammal breasts when she is so obviously not a mammal? But there they are, floating against your own, nipples as hard and white as the rest of her.
When she kisses you on the mouth you feel the prick of all her sharp sharp teeth. You kiss her back, eyes drifting closed, shivering so hard you barely find her mouth, and her best of voices whispers, "Open your eyes."
You do, and see the dim light glitter on the cave roof as she floats you. The cold is sinking deep, deep into your meat and organs, so you shake already like a woman in orgasm.
The blind mermaid doesn't care. You put your hands in the dilute cloud of her hair, so she pulls against your grip as she kisses down your throat-leaving rings of pinpricks on your collarbone-down the slopes of your breasts until you grind against her strong uncooperative body, arching back, crying out.
She scrapes your belly like rough stone, her hands pressing the small of your back up to hold your face in air. She hums to you as she kisses until you could drown here, drown in her voice, drown in this desperate cold and die happy. Water falls from the cave roof, strikes your mouth and eyes. You imagine the stalactites it's forming, each single droplet a force for legacy.
"Sing for me," she says, half-underwater. Her lips scrape the skin over your hip ridge until you whine. She likes to kiss where the bones come up under the surface of your body like gliding fish. "Sing for me, or I kiss no more."
"Cold," you manage, though it falls from you like a whisper. Your teeth aren't knocking themselves to pieces in your head anymore. You think that means you're dying: that your body won't shiver anymore.
"Sing," she says, with a flicker of her tongue that-cold or not-makes you cry.
So you sing in the mermaid's arms, in whispers and tiny sharp gasps of breath that blue your lips with cold, expecting her touch will be your death and not caring, for the beauty of the frozen song.
You awaken stiff and alone with your scrapes and bruises, when you expected not to awaken at all. Someone has heaped stained cloth and a torn old sleeping bag under and over you. In sleep you've curled tight as a grub, your abdominal muscles aching with contraction. There's light: it must be the next morning.
You hope it's only the next morning. When you lift your head, you realize that you're not in the cave any longer.
You lie on a plywood floor before the soot-stained brick pad that supports a cast-iron woodstove. The walls are peeling metal and seem very close to either side and from about waist-height they're mostly made of rows of windows, as if you were in an airplane fuselage. The windows are covered in a layer of transparent plastic, condensation misting the enclosed side and turning to frost on the metal-framed windows.
That woodstove ripples with heat. Radiant energy flattens against your face, picking moisture from your cheeks and eyelids. You turn from it and try to find the strength to roll away, but your arms won't move you, so you pull the edge of the sleeping bag up as a shield, instead and assess the damage.
Your skin burns everywhere she kissed you, swollen in chilblains red as lipstick prints. They smart when you press them, though your fingertips are cold enough that all you can feel is how much they hurt when you touch anything.
The plywood shudders with footsteps, and this time the adrenaline gives you enough energy to sit. Half-sit, anyway, slumped forward on locked elbows with your hair draggled in your eyes like a shipwrecked survivor pushing herself up from the surf. You feel castaway, cast-off. Seawracked and adrift, or maybe fetched up hard against the rocks and dashed there.
"Oh, good," a voice says, too loud. "You lived. Don't bother talking until you can look at me. Save your strength, 'cause I can't hear you."
You get your head up as he squats down, scarred boots laced only partway and the ragged cuffs of his dungarees spattered with salt and mud and (mostly) sawdust. He's a white guy, hair gray and thinning on top and not long. His cheeks were clean-shaven about three days ago: now silver hairs sparkle against dull skin. He's not a big guy and he's not a young guy, and even though he's dirty and ragged and you're naked on the floor under a pile of rags he doesn't make you scared. You wonder if you'll ever feel scared again, after the cave, after the mermaid inside it.
He tugs the sleeping bag up over your shoulders with a rough-skinned hand and steps back. "I'll get you some coffee," he says. "And some clothes."
By the time he comes back with a flannel shirt, t-shirt, cardigan, and too-big men's jeans washed soft, you've managed to edge away from the crisping heat of the woodstove and get yourself wedged into a ladderback chair. An enamel pan sits atop the stove, steam rising from the water that must be simmering inside, but you can't tell that it's making any difference to the humidity. A few steps away from the stove, you can feel the baffling cold seeping through the metal walls of what you now realize is an ancient schoolbus, probably up on blocks and definitely not in any condition to ever go anywhere again, because from here you can see the holes in the firewall where the steering column and gearshift used to go.