1 comments/ 21022 views/ 11 favorites Her Contract Enatails Ch. 01 By: Nate_Walis Measuring time by means of a watch was something that seemed like a distant memory in the few moments that Carla Largo was able to contemplate the swirling mass of stress and obligation that had taken the place of what had once been her life. Instead she had come to orient herself by the colour of the pills that she was taking at any given time during the day as they seemed to be the only thing that remained fixed and constant as she lurched from one place to another under the weight of her responsibilities. Stimulants woke her up in the morning, shaking off the effects of the downers she had taken the night before in order to stop her mind dwelling on insurmountable problems and ensure a few hours of restless sleep. They sustained her through the morning as she sat at her desk, the monotony of her day job threatening to lull her into a trance before a second dose at midday to see her through the afternoon. Numbing painkillers silenced her constant headache as she commuted home and allowed her to ignore the pain in her back and legs that accumulated from hours behind a desk. Their effects made her a dull and unresponsive shadow of her own self as she spent the few stressful hours in the course of each day that she was able with her small family. These were followed by more stimulants to wake up her senses as she crossed town for the third time in the space of the same day. While most would have been contemplating the end of their labours, Carla needed to be as alert and responsive as possible in order to catch the attention of the patrons at the downtown club where she worked most of the night. If she could not command their attention then the money that she so desperately needed would not follow and so the endless cycle of toil, drugs and degradation continued for her. Days blurred into one and there were times when she wondered if the world that she perceived resembled the one that those without the cocktail of chemicals in their systems experienced at all. When she danced, Carla was almost able to lose herself in the act of movement and submit to the rhythm of the music that filled the small private room in which she performed. The moment was fleeting, but in it she sometimes managed to escape the constant battle being fought inside her head between the problems that threatened to destroy her life and the control that she felt slipping away from her a little at a time. There was no doubt the drugs that she relied upon took the edge off and aided her in letting go, although she would have been vehement in her denial that they were the only factor involved. Carla would have been considered too young by some to have been so burdened with problems, being no more than a few years into her thirties. But fate never seemed to share that opinion and she lived in constant fear of the effect of strain beginning to show in the lines of her face. As vain as such an obsession with her appearance might have sounded when taken at face value, weighed against the sheer level of stress she was used to living with, her ability to make money from flaunting her body before those who would pay for the privilege depended upon it. Though she was harsh on her own appearance, filled with paranoia at the need to remain attractive and desirable to the eyes of her clients, Carla seldom failed to seem less than impressive by the standards of the casual observer. Her height was not exceptional, but her body was a collection of fulsome curves that worked from top to bottom as she moved on the podium. The deep brown shade of her skin caught the light beautifully; only serving to add to the allure of her form and her sleek black hair swallowed the same light whole as it span and twisted with her motions. When she danced, she wore as close to nothing as she was able, aware of the fact that the men who paid to see her were not interested in the way that clothes hung from her body in the slightest. Her panties were so small as to be almost lost in the lines of her abdomen and her breasts stood naked save for a pair of nipple caps that covered nothing else. On that night in particular, Carla had felt herself to be on what she considered to be a roll. More than half a dozen clients had sat down to watch as she used the movements of her body to convince them that she was aching to make love to them above any other man alive. The reality of the fact that the simple thought of them even touching her naked skin made her want to be physically sick could not have been further from her mind as she worked. But her sense of empowerment had been shattered by the arrival of a man who, though one of her most valued clients, was always able to make the reality of her situation come crashing down on her head. Aubrey Lister entered the small room in which Carla danced in the same manner as always, like a king striding into the space where he was about to hold court. His entourage remained outside the door, their presence somehow managing to follow Lister into the room while they did not. He seated himself in the chair that stood before the raised podium as though it was a throne fashioned for his sole use and regarded her with his customary smile that encompassed a greeting, a command to begin his entertainment and a lascivious leer all in some expression. Carla knew better than to disappoint Lister, mounting the podium and wasting no time in pouring what was left of her passion and energy into a dance that could result in a significant payment should the man be happy come the end. In reality she had no idea of what paid for Lister's immaculate suits, glinting jewellery and deliberately evident personal grooming. The rumours that followed in his wake were more than enough to convince her and anyone else that the answer to that question was not worth the cost of discovering it. Any man who was as well heeled, well attended by bodyguards and able to display such obvious wealth was likely to be ruthless in keeping his secrets and those that belonged to Aubrey Lister were well kept indeed. Not for the first time, Carla found her mind wandering to the thought of how much money was represented by the effort that went into presenting the man to the world at large. From the shaved dome of his head, all the way down to the expensive leather of the shoes that he wore on his feet. She wondered how many times the salary from her day job could have been eaten up by expenses that would be a trifle to this man's considerations. Carla could not have said why the man always seemed to want to see her dance when there were younger girls working in the club who regularly commanded more for their services than she was able. One thing that she was sure of was the fact that there was no hint of romance or deeper emotion on Lister's part, her experience of the man told her that to him such things were most likely alien concepts as far as the opposite sex was concerned. More likely that she was the subject of some fixation that compelled him to seek out her services and return for more whenever he could. The thought of what might lie behind that fixation scared her, but not nearly enough to outweigh the temptation of his money. When the dancing was done and a small wad of notes had passed from Lister's had into her own, Carla steeled herself for what inevitably followed. If the man had been prone to pushing his luck too far by touching her against her wishes or making it plain that he wanted more than she was willing to give him that might have been easier to contend with. But Aubrey Lister was not nearly crude or stupid enough to behave in a manner that would cause a breach of the etiquette that supposedly existed for such a situation. It should have been no issue at all that Lister insisted on ending his time with her by simply talking to Carla, his deep and commanding voice filling the space between them as she refused to answer his seemingly pleasant and innocent questions or respond to his observations. She knew that for him it was all part of the experience, a game that he enjoyed playing with the woman who was obliged to flaunt herself in front of him. The man seemed to revel in the act of speaking to her as though they were somehow engaged in a relationship that was at odds with reality, as though discussing mundane subjects and aspects of her life that were far removed from her role as a dancer was the norm. The root of the thing, she suspected with her limited understanding of Lister, was nothing more than the exercise of power. He was simply pushing gently at her resolve, secure in the knowledge that she would not be willing to risk losing his favour and therefore his money by rebuking his comments. "I hope that you're getting your rest," Lister's tone was nonchalant as always, "it'd be a shame to think that you weren't getting a full eight hours after exerting yourself like that." Carla tried to block out his words as she folded the bills he had handed to her, back turned and body language as neutral as she could make it. She had no idea as to what Lister knew about her life outside of the club, but she knew that even with the sedative dose that was waiting for her on the bedside table, there would be no more than a few hours of snatched sleep before the next day began. "Suppose there are things that keep you on your toes outside of this place though?" All that she had to do was keep a hold of herself, ignore the words until he used up the time he could legitimately sit there and occupy time that could be earning money for herself and the club if the occupant of the seat were replaced. "I'd make a guess that you have a couple of kids making things interesting in your life," he chuckled to himself. "Not that they ruined the view from where I'm sitting." At the mention of her children, Carla's grip on her emotions slipped and the effect was like the opening of floodgates. A racking sob escaped even as she tried to stifle it with one had while the other clutched at her stomach, the sudden rush of emotion turning her guts into a churning mass of nausea. She was sure that she could have held on through anything that Lister chosen to mention, apart from her children. "Apologies," she turned to see that he was leaning forward in his seat, holding out a handkerchief that could have been nothing but silk, "if I have unintentionally struck a nerve." Carla almost lashed out at him in that moment, picturing the false nails of her hand gouging into the soft flesh of his cheeks. The chaos that would have followed almost seemed like enough to witness the sight of Lister's own blood, starkly red against the ebony shade of his skin. But instead she accepted the proffered handkerchief and tried to regain control of herself. "You know," Lister raised his hands in a gesture intended to convey his supposed honesty. "Some people account me a damn good listener. Tell me all about it; let the whole thing out and I promise you it'll feel better when it's right there in the open, not so bad as it seems bottled up inside anyway." Carla could not recall having ever felt as tired and hopeless as she did at that moment in time. There seemed to be nothing in the world for her apart from toil, weariness and emotional pain without end, stretching as far ahead as she could see into her own future. She felt isolated and alone, trapped in a place where there was no one to share her thoughts with save for her own family who were mired in the same problems and as miserable as she was herself. No matter what she thought of the man, Lister was the first person who had offered to simply listen to her for the sake of airing her troubles. Carla looked at the man and realised that despite the fact she was almost naked, filled with crushing emotional pain and loathed the sight of him, she had absolutely nothing to lose by taking him up on his offer. "It's Water's Disease," she noted the reaction on Lister's face, even he was unable to disguise the sense of dread that the name of the illness carried. "Both of my girls have it and it's killing them a little more each day, right in front of my eyes." "Where did they..." "From me," Carla answered the question that always followed the discovery of the disease. "It's almost never inherited from the father, something to do with the chromosomes. It's passed from mother to daughter like a goddamn curse." "But you..." "I got cured," she was used to this ritual of snapping off answers to questions that people left hanging in the air, unsure of the terrain ahead in their discussion of such a terrible condition. "My folks were well heeled enough to pay for the gene therapy. It ruined them financially, but it saved my life. Only fly in the ointment is that it doesn't stop you from passing the thing on to your own kids." "I see." "Their father and me have tried the best we can to put aside the money to get them treated, but it's so much more than it was back when I was a kid. Then there's the fact that it's the both of them and there's no way I can see one of them cured while the other just keeps on getting closer and closer to the end." "That's nasty mess." "It gets worse," there was no way that Carla could stop the words pouring out of her now. "He just lost his job on top of all of the rest. I don't have a fucking clue where we go from here." Lister let out a breath that summed up the gravity of her situation and then simply shook his head. "I just wish I could make it all go away, make it better somehow." "Well," Lister spread his hands wide, "I could." "What?" "I could make it all disappear, just like that." "But what would it cost me?" Lister laughed at her question and shook his head. "I like a woman who thinks in the same way as I do," he shook his head again. "You see, you understand the way that things work in this world. A man doesn't get where he is by just giving away favours for free. If he's got a lick of sense in his head he always asks for something in return." "Don't play me around," Carla tried to sound resolute. "If you'd really do something like that then just come out and name your price. They're my only children; I'd give my own life for their sake." "Are you sure about that?" Lister's tone was suddenly deadly serious and the implications of what she had said truly sank in with a feeling of sudden dread. "Yes," Carla nodded while her head screamed that she was making a fatal mistake, "I'm sure." "You know what," he nodded at her, "believe you. I think that you're so close to the edge with all of your troubles that you really would put your own neck on the line for the sake of your family. So in light of that, I'm going to make you an offer. This is spur of the moment for me, so it will be for you as well. No chances to go off and think this thing over for either of us, you say yes or no to me here and now. If it's yes then we go straight to work, but if it's no then I walk out of the room and you never mention your life outside of dancing for my money in my presence again. Do we have a deal?" Carla had no choice but to nod in agreement. "Okay, so here's what I'm offering: I'll make sure that your kids get the treatment that they need for starters. But I think the problems are deeper than that, so I'll go further and put them through a fancy school so that they have a solid education to see them right. As far as your old man is concerned, I can get him a job and start him on the way to picking up the pieces of his life." "I didn't hear myself mentioned much in there," Carla tried to keep her voice level. "No," Lister laughed and shook his head, "I'm getting to you when I explain my side of the deal." Carla was now truly dreading what she was about to hear. "Your family gets their problems taken care of, and I get you." "You want to fuck me?" "Yes, but I want more than that." "You want me to leave my husband?" "More even than that." "Tell me what you want, for god's sake." "I am literally asking you to give your life for them. Not to kill yourself or something wasteful like that, but to give up the life that you have with them. In return, they get their problems wiped out and I get you. I make sure they don't miss you by faking your death so they can get on with their vastly improved lives, minus Carla that is. And then I own you and you show me how thankful you are for my generosity in any way that I ask." Carla felt literally sick. Everything that she wanted for the people that she loved was being offered to her on a platter. All she had to do in return was give it all up and hand herself over to Aubrey Lister to do with as he pleased. In another instance the decision might have been one that she agonised over for days or weeks, but he had made it clear that the answer had to be given here and now. Faced with the reality of going on with her life and knowing that she could have made a sacrifice that would have relieved the suffering of her family, Carla could not see how she had a choice in the matter. "Okay," she nodded sadly, "I agree." Lister's eyes seemed to come alive with an avaricious light as he looked at her, as if the downcast expression on her face had transformed her nature in his mind from a woman whom he had paid to gaze at to a piece of property that he possessed totally. He placed his hands upon her body for the first time almost as though he were proving to himself that she was real and that she would not try to fend off his touch. Carla remained still, allowing his hands to explore her naked flesh as a sign that she had fully accepted his terms that she hoped would speak to his character far better than mere words. His attentions made her feel like a portion of meat being tested for its tenderness, her thighs squeezed and her breasts weighed like morsels for the plate. She stopped him only when his hand reached her groin, a moment before it stroked her panties. "Everything," she caught his eye, "as soon as I see proof that you're as good as your word. I won't let you screw me in one way and then in the other when you see a girl still in her teens go jiggling by and lose interest." "You'll get all the proof you need," he pulled his hands away from her. "But I should tell you that this isn't just about the chance to bed you. Oh no, I can go out there and take my pick of women who are willing and ready in that sense. What I want from you is more complicated, kind of like the way that you don't say style with a car that any asshole could buy off the floor of a showroom. If you really want to have something special, you make sure that it's a custom model with all the optional extras that make it yours and yours alone." "You want me to get surgery?" Carla nodded her head just as sadly as before. "I can live with that, so long as you don't want to make me into some plastic bimbo." "Want I want from you," Lister sat back in his chair, "is to be pimped out like nothing else out there. I want you to be decked out like something out of a book of fairy tales." "What?" "I'm gonna have you made into my very own mermaid." "Me?" Carla suddenly felt the urge to look down at her body, wrapping her arms around herself as she did so. "You want me to dance around in some costume for you? Okay, if the price is being screwed in a fishtail, then so be it." "Oh no," Lister shook his head, "I mean for real. Scales and fins and all the rest that goes with it. You aren't going to be dressed as a mermaid; you're going to be one. It can be done you know." "Of course I know," Carla snapped, "I've seen the women they've done it to hawking shit on the TV. But what makes you want to do that to me of all women in the world? I'm a thirty-something mother of two for god's sake, why not stick a set of fins on a model and have done with it?" "Please," he gave her a lascivious look, "you think I want some skinny thing that's used to flouncing around being snapped for glossy magazines and blows away in a puff of wind? I got a place right on the beach down in St Panettierre, private and full of the wonders of nature. I think the thing that could top it all off is a genuine mermaid who looks as though she was made to make a guy go crazy. I want her laid in the surf with shells on her tits and her scaly ass in the air, begging me to pay her some attention of a special kind." Her Contract Enatails Ch. 01 Carla tried to imagine the life that would be hers, reduced to the status of a plaything for Aubrey Lister in his own tropical paradise. She glanced down at her legs and found that she could not even begin to conceive of what losing them and gaining a mermaid's tail would feel like. But if she was sure that he had kept his side of the bargain, then perhaps she could learn to live with the changes to her body. After all, the man could not spend all of his time at the estate he had mentioned. There was a good chance that she would be alone for extended periods of time as his affairs took up his time. If she were allowed to spend that time as she desired, discovering what her life as a mermaid might hold, then she was sure that she could come to terms with the strange hand that fate had dealt her. "Alright," Carla looked him in the eye, "I agree...make me into your mermaid." Aubrey Lister leaned back in his seat and clapped his hands together, his laugh filling the air like a cry of triumph. Carla simply stared at the floor, eyes downcast as if in defeat. The light that streamed in from the open windows and the aroma of the food on the plate before her seemed to be proof positive that staying at home and watching movies was a poor way to see the world. Carla had expected nothing more than grey skies and endless plates of stodge, but the weeks she had spent keeping a low profile in London had left her wondering what else became distorted and distant from the truth once in the hands of Hollywood. Had the circumstances been different, she was sure that the city would have suited her quite well. But then she had not crossed the Atlantic for a simple holiday, and so no matter how charmed Carla may have been by the capital and its bustling atmosphere, she was never more than a moment away from the sad reality of her situation. "Do me a favour," Carla looked up at the sound of the voice, "pick your chin up for me, eh?" The man who was looking down at her as he squeezed into the seat opposite had a pained smile on his broad face and a tiny cup and saucer in one of his ham fists. "For you," Carla tried her best to smile, "not for anyone else, Henry." The way in which the huge man's face lit up when she managed a small grin was enough to make Carla wonder not for the first time, how he had ever come to work for a man the likes of Aubrey Lister. She knew him only as Henry, honestly the largest man she had ever seen in the flesh and possibly the most gentle at the same time. Where his employer had come across the massive Londoner was a subject that she had never broached in the time they had spent talking, but it had been Henry's idea to hide her away in his native city while the preparations were made back home. In Lister's presence he had been a quiet and sombre giant, but in his native environment Henry became a fountain of knowledge and a charming gentleman into the bargain. Balding and with the remainder of his hair in braids, Henry wore a suit that struggled to keep his massive body contained and ate his meals with a gusto that had to be seen to be believed. Carla had almost died laughing when she had seen the serious way in which he took his tea from a fragile china cup, relishing every drop. The only thing that had silenced her amusement at the bizarre contrast was the puzzled look of hurt on Henry's face at her reaction. "This came in the post," Henry placed a disc on the table between them and reached down to pull a laptop out of his neat leather bag. The compact computer was so thin that it could not have been anything but prohibitively expensive, looking almost ludicrous in the hands of a man so large. But despite the disparity in scale, Henry flipped the thing open and powered it up with a few quick strokes of his fingertips before turning it around to face Carla on the other side of the table. There really was no point in either of them speaking as she opened the drive and slid the disc into the laptop. Both knew full well what the contents of the thing were, they had been waiting for more than a month for it to arrive. Now the tense time spent in London that had begun to turn into an uneasy relationship of forced but tentative friendship was about to come to an inevitable end. Beginning to play automatically, the screen displaying a scene of an urban street that Carla was half certain she recognised. The camera panned to the left and zoomed in on a man in a business suit, hurrying down the pavement, weaving around slower pedestrians in his haste to reach his destination. She covered her mouth with one hand as she recognised the face of her husband, the surge of emotion at the sight of him seizing her bodily. But there was something different about Jared Largo, as if he had changed in a subtle manner since she last laid eyes upon him. His face was now clean shaven and his features set with a sad look of determination rather than the hollow look of defeat that she had become so used to. Carla had no frame of reference to compare his expression with, but she supposed that he now wore the face of a man who had been forced to steel himself against the loss of his partner for the sake of his now motherless children. Lister's machinations had offered Jared a lifeline in the form of new employment and he seemed determined to grasp it with both hands and hold on for all he was worth. Abruptly the image cut off and Carla was left with more questions than answers. She wanted to know how he had reacted to the news of the car accident that had supposedly killed his wife, what he had said and done at the funeral where he had thought he was burying her and how he was now making a new life for himself. She wanted to ask the questions, but she knew at the same time that there would be no answers for her. She had agreed to a deal that removed her from his life and him from her own. She had bound them both to a contract, and breaking the agreed terms would result in far greater suffering than they had both endured thus far. Whatever emotions had surfaced with the sight of her lost husband, they were intensified tenfold by the sight of tall railings and the unmistakable sight of a schoolhouse when the image on the screen returned. The grounds of the school were filled with children in uniform, milling around and engaging in what might have looked to the eyes of an adult to be play. Again the camera searched for a specific face amongst the crown and finding faces familiar to Carla's eyes, closed in on them so that they could be seen in exquisite detail. At the sight of Jada and May, she could not keep her emotions in check any longer. Carla openly cried as she watched her daughters mixing with the other girls in the schoolyard, swapping words and smiles with what she hoped were new friends. They seemed healthy, the visible signs of Water's Disease she had been sure she could see in their faces now no longer stretching the skin of their cheeks or sinking their eyes back into the sockets. But most importantly, they looked to be as happy and well as a pair of girls recently deprived of their mother could have been. She closed her eyes and pushed the screen of the laptop down, tears streaming down her face. Carla had tortured herself so many times already with the terrible thought of what her girls would think of her, how they would come to regard a mother who had left them at so young an age that she simply could not go over it again in that moment. She knew that there was no way to make them understand her actions and no comfort for herself as they would never be able to tell her whether they forgave her or loathed her for what she had done to them. Henry had remained typically silent as she watched the footage, but now he placed a gentle hand on her arms and proffered a napkin for her tears. Carla was struck by the way in which he mirrored Lister's actions on the night he had made her his terrible offer. But at the same time she noted the difference between the two men in their motivations as they did so. Now she knew that Lister had showed her kindness only to coax her into opening up to him, whereas his underling seemed incapable of acting out of anything but genuine sympathy and concern. She took the napkin and tried to make herself look vaguely human. "We've got the confirmation," Henry spoke in a calm and low voice, "that means we have to go make the drive out to the clinic. Mr Lister would be very angry if I didn't make sure that you were keeping to your side of the deal when he's kept to his." Carla nodded, resigned to her fate. She tried to hold the image of three faces in her mind as Henry called for the bill, alarmed by the speed at which they had begun to slip from her memory in the space of mere minutes and worried about the effect that longer periods of time would do to her precious ability to recall each of them. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 02 Carla was surprised by the view of the building as the car pulled to a stop with the sound of gravel crunching beneath the wheels. Although she had to admit that she would have been at a loss to describe what she expected the clinic in which she would be operated upon might look like, the red brick house she saw through the window looked to her more like something from a costume drama than a location at which a woman might be able to have herself transformed into a mermaid. As if the whole idea of what awaited her was not strange enough, she now found her mind struggling to cope with the unfamiliar surroundings of an English country house at the same time. She climbed the steps to the main doors of the building in something of a daze, not aware for a moment of Henry dutifully hefting her bags out of the car behind her. Carla drifted into the smart, but understated hallway that served as the entrance and reception without noticing the woman sitting at a desk and smiling at her in a welcoming manner. Instead she walked straight past and found herself drawn to the large French windows at the very back of the hall, where the afternoon light was streaming in through the glass. Henry watched her progress for a moment before turning to the woman behind the desk with an apologetic smile on his face. "Sorry," he leaned forward to read the woman's name badge, "Gillian. She's a bit distracted, what with all of the stuff you do here...if you know what I mean." "Of course," Gillian nodded, her thick accent almost baffling Henry after the time he had spent on the other side of the Atlantic, "you have the papers?" "Right here," Henry handed them across the desk. "Thank you," she looked away for a few seconds, tapping on the keys of the computer set to one side of the desk. "Ms Smith will be allocated a room in another wing of the house to yourself, I hope that will not be a problem?" "No," Henry shook his great head, "she'll be okay without me breathing down her neck. All I need to know is where there's a decent boozer around here." "I hear that the Green Knight is thought of very highly by the staff here," Gillian seemed amused by the mismatch between Henry's appearance and character, "just a few minutes' walk down the lane." "So long as they have some proper beer," Henry waved a hand to excuse himself as he turned to make his way towards Carla. "I've had it up to here with that fizzy piss they drink on the other side of the pond." All the time they had been talking, Carla was silent and still as she stared out of the windows and across the perfectly flat lawns that stretched out behind the house. At first she had simply been interested in seeing what lay beyond the main building, but she had quickly laid eyes upon a sight that occupied her attention and set her heart racing. Beneath a stand of trees, perhaps a few hundred feet from the window where she stood were a pair of figures deep in conversation. At first Carla had supposed they were discussing the horse that stood partially hidden by their bodies. But as they moved, it became clear that there was something simply not right about what she was seeing if indeed they were a man, woman and a horse. The man she could make out fairly well; white, tall and somewhat gangling in appearance he was smartly dressed without seeming formal and his body language radiated concern for the woman to whom he was talking. It was that very woman and the horse that Carla had assumed she was either leading or sitting upon, that confused her. The woman was also tall, though not as tall as the man, and she was strikingly pretty even from such a distance with dark skin and her hair gathered in braids that cascaded down her back. Her horse was small, probably a pony and grey in colour although Carla could only make out its body while its head was hidden from view. That was the problem, she realised, and she could see the top half of the girl and the whole of the horse apart from its head. The girl's legs and the head of her pony were nowhere to be seen. A second later the man moved no more than a few inches to the left and Carla realised that she was confused because she had been looking for something that was simply not there to be seen. Below her waist, the body of the girl simply melted into that of the horse. Carla turned to say something to Henry as he approached, but then she was seized by the thought of how she would feel if people clamoured to stare at her own altered form. She turned back to watch as the centaur and her companion made their way across the lawn, all too aware of the fact that soon she would be in the same position as the girl she was watching. Morning coffee was something that would under normal circumstances have set Carla up for the day, waking her mind from the fog of sleep and getting her focussed on the day ahead of her. But the cup she was clutching in her hands had barely touched her lips in the time since it had been poured as her attention was centred on the face of the man who sat in a comfy chair opposite her own. She had recognised his distinctive features as soon as she had entered the room and been invited to take a seat. Carla had never been troubled by poor eyesight and there was no mistaking that the man who had made her coffee and introduced himself as Dr Pickford, was the same man who she had seen the previous day as he spoke to the stunning female centaur on the lawn. Though the man had a similarly pleasant Englishness to Henry, the fact that he seemed comfortable around creatures that had previously been the stuff of fairy tales as far as she was concerned lent him an air of mystery and made her feel slightly uneasy around him. "I have to tell you that I'm quite looking forward to getting down to business in your case," Pickford took a sip of his own coffee, "if you'll forgive the forward nature of putting it that way." "You have?" Carla was not sure if such enthusiasm was a good thing under the circumstances. "Oh yes," Pickford nodded. "You see while I may have amassed what could be called a large body of work in this area, I always have a fondness for the mermaids that I have been asked to create. I see them as some of my best work and always find that they seem to be the happiest and well-adjusted to the change once the operation has been completed and they've had the time they need to recuperate." "Doctor," Carla looked him in the eye. "I'm sure you know what you're doing and all. But I'm still more than a little scared by all of this...I mean, how am I supposed to handle becoming a mermaid?" "It's different for everyone," Pickford placed a hand on her knee, "some of the patients that I've worked with embraced the change with gusto as soon as they saw themselves in a mirror, others needed time and a helping hand to come to terms with their altered situation. But I'm proud to say that we have never had a case of a patient being left in a position where they were unhappy with what we had done to them. I won't settle for anything less than you being happy as a mermaid or happy as you are right now." "I have a choice?" "Of course you do," Pickford looked surprised at her question. "I am aware of the more sensitive nature of your case and that's not something that I need to bother you with. Nevertheless, the same principles apply here as they always do. If you are not responding well in either a physical or mental sense to the transformation, I will not hesitate to reverse the procedure and refund the cost of the operation." Carla seized on this new piece of information and tried to digest it as quickly as she was able. No one had mentioned for a moment the fact that the process was not permanent and she had simply assumed that there would be no way back once she had become a mermaid. But now Pickford had opened up a whole new world of possibilities and she was aware that her position was being made stronger by the combination of the doctor's good nature and the absence of Aubrey Lister's influence on the interview. There was no way that she would risk trying to convince Pickford to cancel the procedure, there was too much at stake for herself and her family. Instead she stored away the knowledge that the doctor was able and under the right circumstances willing to turn her tail back into legs when the time came. In addition she noted Pickford as a potential ally in any battle against Lister's possession of her liberty, he seemed concerned for her as a patient and unlikely to sanction her transformation into a glorified pet intended only for sexual gratification. The realisation that she was not being cast into a role little better than that of a slave served to bolster Carla's confidence. She decided that if she was secure in the knowledge that the change was not permanent and at least one of those wielding the scalpel was on her side then she could go on without trepidation and face the reality of life as a mermaid. "That makes me feel a whole lot better," she smiled. "I'm glad," she got the impression that Pickford was sincere in his words. The doctor flicked through his papers and allowed Carla a moment to gather herself. "Normally the patient has been filled in on a lot of the details beforehand and I'm simply answering questions and letting them know the agenda," Pickford shook his head. "But I understand that the gentleman who is probably best referred to as your sponsor in this matter has chosen to keep most of those details to himself?" Carla nodded, Lister had been miserly with the information he provided to the point of paranoia. "Well," he looked around the room and then back to Carla, "seeing as how he's on the other side of a rather large ocean and not in the room with us right now, I think we can dispense with his way and make up our own." As she nodded for the second time, Carla began to think that she could get to like this man. "Now the procedure as we've planned it will take a total of three days to complete and the changes that you will have to endure are quite serious. My responsibility will be for the first and second days, in which time I will be making the extensive alterations to your body that will essentially make you a mermaid in appearance. From there I will be handing over to my colleague, a fellow doctor by the name of Ward. His job will be to complete the smaller alterations that were specified in the contract and are not directly involved in the main operation." "And those are?" Carla's mind was suddenly filled once more with the fear of Lister turning her into a pouting bimbo with an avalanche on cosmetic primping and inflation. "I'm sorry," Pickford gave an exasperated sigh, "it's so easy to forget that you've been kept out of the loop in terms of the details." He thumbed through the papers he held, reading with some great speed before looking up at her again. "From what I can see here, it's nothing that should be a cause for concern. This type of surgery is not my forte, but it seems as though there's nothing planned that goes beyond a simple programme to rejuvenate the parts of your body that will not be affected by the main process of becoming a mermaid. Beyond a bit of nip and tuck and a little jab of Botox in a strategic spot, there are no major procedures planned." "If you say so." "Well, I had asked Dr Ward to be here in order to take you through what he'll be doing, but it seems that he's been unavoidably delayed. But as I say, there's nothing drastic in the file and you probably shouldn't worry about the matter overly." "I'll try not to." "That's probably for the best," Pickford's tone became conspiratorial. "Personally I can't see the need for any of this cosmetic nonsense. Don't think that I'm overstepping the mark by saying this, but I am always puzzled by the need that some people have to tamper with the signs of the passage of time when they seem to make no difference to the beauty of the subject. Were it up to me, I'd cancel all of these primping measures and leave you as I find you." Carla gave him a smile at the compliment. As she stood to leave the room, it occurred to her that it was probably a rare occurrence when a man who was about to turn your legs into a tail said he wouldn't change another thing about your body. The sound of the door caused Pickford to glance up from his desk and make a vague show of recognition as Ward entered the room. It had been a good hour since Carla had left and he had given up all hope of seeing his colleague before he began the operation the next day. "It would be nice for a patient to see you before you put on a surgical mask for once." Ward laughed at the comment and sat down on the opposite side of the desk. "I'd love to be able to make a meeting, but there are other demands on my time and you're so much better than me at that side of things. And besides, I'm only handling the minor details on this one so there's really no need for me to be involved." "I suppose you have a point," Pickford conceded. "Less reason for you to get involved like you always do as well," Ward raised his eyebrows. "Since she's not recuperating here, you could save yourself some bother and keep more of a distance this time around." "Well, I'm still not really happy with that arrangement. I know the facilities that the sponsor has for her are adequate, but she'd do better adjusting to the changes here in an environment where we can monitor her closely and offer her the support that she needs." "Support in the sense you were offering it to that rather exceptional girl we recently turned into a centaur?" Ward gave Pickford a look of mock scandal. "As I understand it, she won't let any of the other staff near her. And as for the reigns and halter, I didn't think you were that creative or that that way inclined at all!" "Don't be vulgar," Pickford pointed a finger at his colleague. "You know that there's nothing unprofessional going on between myself and that woman. I've done nothing more than provide the help she needed." "And what does Gillian think of that?" Ward grinned as the other man justified himself. "I'm sure that she's an expert on the help that you can offer." "You leave her out of this." "Okay," Ward raised his hands to signal that the game was over. "Just make sure you do a good job with this one. The sponsor wants us to make his fantasy come to life, not counsel a mermaid that's not right in the head." "What he wants is not my primary concern," Pickford watched as his colleague stood and walked back to the door. "Then you're lucky that it's mine," Ward was out of the door and gone before another word could be spoken. Theatre gowns through the ages had never been designed with the dignity of the wearer in mind and Carla found that as she lay upon the table in the operating theatre, her thoughts were almost totally occupied by such meaningless concerns as whether or not she was being properly covered by the one she was wearing. The inability to focus on more serious issues might have been on account of the slow acting sedative she had been given to ease her into the operation, or perhaps her brain was trying to distract her from the reality of her situation in order to stop her from being overcome with fear and panic. Whatever the cause, she was by that time starting to see her surroundings through a haze of pleasant confusion, as if the edges of her perception had been blurred and the gravity of what was going on around her simply evaporated like water beneath the rays of the sun. She would have smiled at the absurdity of the situation, but she was too far gone with the effects of the drug to do anything more than watch. All these people busily making preparations for her, all of them thinking that she was going to turn into a mermaid if they played their part correctly. How could they believe in crazy things like that? Carla might not have counted herself as a genius, but even while drifting on a cloud of drug-induced delirium, she knew that there was no such thing as mermaids. She was vaguely worried that they might be disappointed when they realised she had legs and feet rather than a tail and fins, but it was a reality they would have to get used to, like it or not. She wondered what time it was, how long before she would have to simply tell them that she was an ordinary woman who needed to make it to work on time. And anyway, if they made her into a mermaid then how would she even be able to get to work? The pedals of her car were intended for feet and not fins, and then there was the ridiculous mental image of her crawling from her parking space and into the office with her backside waggling and her tail dragging across the ground behind her. Could she use a wheelchair, or even her wheeled office chair to get about more easily? And what about the club? Carla supposed that she could as for a tank, which would get her attention from the customers. No, it was all too silly for words and she would simply tell them that it was all pointless and be on her way. At least she would as soon as she had taken a quick nap. Carla closed her eyes and finally fell into a deep sleep as she lay on the operating table. "Patient is under sedation," Pickford spoke for the formal record of the proceedings, his words being recorded by the microphones of the cameras that sat in strategic corners of the operating theatre. "Beginning stage one of the procedure." While the doctor busied himself with a final check of his equipment, theatre assistants slipped the loose fitting gown from Carla's body. The ties at the back of the garment had been left undone and so the whole thing came away with no resistance, leaving her naked body exposed to the lights of the room. Silent, sedated and totally still, it was apparent to anyone who cared to look at the evidence just what had made men like Aubrey Lister pay money to see Carla Largo move. Her figure could never have been described as slight, the curves and shape of her hips and the full weight of her buttocks might have been a near perfect hourglass. But neither could she have been described as heavy, with the smooth lines of her stomach and the well-defined length of her limbs as well. She possessed breasts that were in perfect proportion to her build and skin that seemed to have lost little of its glow as she passed the initial flush of youth. She had been instructed to shower and cleanse herself thoroughly before the operation began, even submitting to a waxing session that had left her body naked of all unnecessary bodily hair. All in all she almost shone with the effects of the preparations she had been required to endure. But all of those who were laying eyes upon her were there in a professional capacity, totally unmoved by the sight of her naked body and concerned only with the task at hand. Pickford supervised a pair of his underlings as they slipped Carla's legs into a large bag made of strong and yet supple transparent plastic. The bag swallowed both legs until reaching to within an few inches of her groin, at which point it was gathered tightly around her thighs so that the rest of her body remained uncovered. A flexible hose was attached to a socket in the neck of the bag an electric pump sucked the remaining air from the bag while a second hose began to pump in a thick, viscous liquid. Soon the interior of the bag was filled by the liquid, forcing Carla's legs to rise as they floated inside the bag. Perhaps ten minutes has passed when Pickford gingerly pressed a finger into the surface of Carla's left leg, just below the seal of the bag. He watched intently after removing his finger, noting the fact that the impression of his fingertip remained indented upon her flesh long after it should have returned to its normal position. He made another small impression further down her legs and noted the same result. Where they had once been simple flesh and blood, Carla's legs now seemed to have taken on the texture of wet clay. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 02 "Drain the bag," Pickford's words were acted upon and the liquid slowly drained from around Carla's lower limbs, a small supply of air being reintroduced at the same time in order to keep the plastic from adhering too tightly to her flesh and thus spoiling the shape of her legs. Once the liquid had been completely drained, the assistants gently released the seal and eased the entire thing off the patient's body. Now it was Pickford's turn to begin work and he set to his task with silent devotion. Firstly he paid attention to Carla's feet, plucking the nails from her toes one by one with a pair of tweezers and dropping them onto a tray held by an assistant shadowing his every move. The nails came away with no resistance or loss of blood, as if the effects of the liquid had simply melted their connection to her body. Pickford discarded his tweezers and pulled off his surgical gloves. Though he knew he should have kept them on his hands, he compared himself to a potter at the wheel and revelled in the chance to feel the flesh of his patient as he worked. He pinched each of her toes, squashing them out of shape and then moulding them together into the mass of her foot so that in a matter of minutes there was no trace of the individual digits whatsoever. Carla's feet simply ended in a blunt wedge as though the individual digits had never existed in the first place. The doctor did not pause, but instead proceeded to press both of Carla's feet down until they were in line with her calves. Bones that should have protested at his reshaping of her feet made no effort to resist and soon the definition of her heels had been lost as he smoothed them into the soles as he had done the toes before them. The blunt points that now represented the end of Carla's legs came together in Pickford's hands as he pressed their flesh together firmly. Rather than remain separate, the altered substance of her extremities yielded like the clay it resembled, the two distinct parts melding into one as his fingers smoothed over the gap between them. He moved quickly on to the calves above her feet, paying the same attention to the flesh and kneading one limb into the other so that with every inch me progressed, ever more of the distinction between her legs was lost. All the time he took more care to preserve the shape of Carla's legs than he had done with her feet, keeping the outline intact while the independence of each limb was fast being lost. Pickford continued his progress as he reached her knees and then her thighs, pressing the malleable flesh into one and smoothing over the join between the legs. His efforts came to a halt at the point where the bag had been sealed around Carla's legs, the extent of her body that had been exposed to the liquid. Above that point her flesh refused to yield to his hands and instead he paid attention to the task of shaping the transition between the two now distinct portions of her body so that one seemed to flow into the other. Following the doctor's instructions, two of his assistant gently rolled Carla onto her side and then her stomach, taking care to keep their hands away from the altered flesh of her legs. Once she was in place, Pickford repeated his smoothing and massaging from her heels all the way to the back of her thighs. His hands worked away at inch after inch of Carla's legs until he had succeeded in blending them into a single limb. As the assistant rolled Carla onto her back once more, Pickford fussed over a piece of equipment that stood at the same height as the operating table and resembled a casket of highly polished metal perhaps four feet in length. The thing was wheeled across the floor on four castors and opened to reveal an interior of black ceramics. This was shaped to accommodate the lower body of a human being, but lacking any distinction for the limbs and instead more closely resembling the shape into which Carla's legs had been moulded. A delicate dance now took place in which the doctor and his assistants supported Carla's lower body while the section of the operating table upon which it had been laid was folded out from underneath. As swiftly as possible, the new piece of equipment was wheeled into its place and the altered portion of Carla's body guided into the bottom half of the device and the lid pressed down on top. There was a faint hiss as the casket sealed itself shut and began to rapidly increase in temperature, the effects of the heat and pressure that it was generating upon Carla's flesh hidden from view beneath the device that swallowed her completely below the waist. Carla woke with a start from a dream in which a revolting little crab had been badgering her about some flaw in her nature that seemed to be a big issue with the rest of the aquatic population, most of whom she was more than happy to tell to go to hell. But the little bastard would not take the hint and the whole thing had degenerated into a lecture on morals thinly veiled behind a depressing musical number. There really had been no other choice but to smash the crustacean into pulp with a nearby rock, but as she blanked out his ever weaker cries for mercy, she had realised with a great sense of relief that it had all been the product of her slumbering mind. The room was dark and it took a few moments for her to recall that she was laid in bed, alone in her room at the clinic. Suddenly aware she had no idea of the time, Carla made to turn over and search out the clock that stood on the bedside table. It was only when she turned onto her side that she noticed the unfamiliar sensations as she moved her lower body. There was no sudden panic or fear that she had been paralysed due to the fact that she could feel every inch of her legs beneath the covers of the bed. The feeling was more akin to being restrained somehow, as though a blanket had become wrapped around her in the night and was now preventing her from moving. Carla reached the table and flipped on the lamp, the clock forgotten as she fumbled with the duvet so that she could see what state she had managed to get into. It was not uncommon for her to toss and turn in her sleep as nightmares assailed her and the multitude of problems in her life preyed on her unconscious mind and so the odd feeling of restricted movement did not worry her in the slightest. But as she pulled the covers back, Carla vaguely recalled that it was the middle of the summer and the weather had been nothing but warm days giving way to nights that left one reluctant to sleep beneath anything that could be cast aside. There was no way that she would have even contemplated adding a single sheet to her bedclothes under such circumstances, so just where had the one entangling her legs come from? Carla's memory came flooding back to her as she laid eyes upon the thick grey stocking that covered her body from the waist down. Of course there was no blanket tangling her legs, she was one day into the process of becoming a mermaid and that was bound to entail some loss of the movement she was used to. At least on the surface her thoughts were so calm and collected. There was a surge of panic building beneath the surface in her mind as she pulled herself into a sitting position and placed her hands on the surface of the stocking. Carla fought to control her emotions and instead tried to focus on the reality of her situation, pondering the fact that while she was visibly bound tight by the stocking, something about the sensation of moving her lower body hinted that it was not the piece of clothing itself that was responsible for her feeling of being restrained. She lifted the edge of the fabric, just below her navel and was surprised to see that her stomach seemed to continue beneath the stocking for a few inches at least. She had been steeling herself to see a mass of scales replacing her skin, but there was nothing that looked to have changed as she rolled the stocking inch by inch down her thighs. Carla thought back over her consultation with Pickford on the day before the operation had begun. Had he not told her that the entire process would take around three days to complete? That would have explained why she had woken up without scales and fins, but not why she was wearing the most unflattering piece of hosiery ever invented and feeling as though her legs had been glued together. But then perhaps that was just what had happened while she was asleep. Carla had continued to roll down the stocking as she contemplated her condition and now she was no more than a third of the way down her thighs, staring at the first visible proof of the fact that she had been physically altered at the hands of Pickford and his craft. Beneath the stocking, it had become apparent that she was quite naked with her groin exposed to the light as it was wound down. But an inch or two below her crotch, the definition of her legs was simply lost from sight as the two limbs melted into one another and became a single appendage. Carla traced the curve of her legs as they framed her vagina in a downward triangle before becoming one mass of smoothed and featureless flesh. Now she began to push the stocking down with a reckless haste and soon the entire thing was bunched around her ankles, revealing the fact that the change was uniform for the entire length of what had once been her legs. Carla twisted her body and simply stared at the changes that had been made to her lower half, experimenting with the range of motion that the new shape afforded her. She managed to point the rounded end of the single limb slightly upwards, oddly more disturbed by the absence of her toes than the loss of her legs. Her experiments furnished her with the knowledge that she was basically able to move her altered limb in the way she could have done the legs that it replaced had they been bound together tightly so that they could not be separated. She doubted that what remained of her feet could have supported her if she tried to stand, but then she supposed that she need not be concerned with such things in her new state of being. So, she thought, this is pretty much a rehearsal for the finished product. When the transformation was complete and she was for all intents and purposes a mermaid, this was the body she was going to have to come to terms with. Rolling around on the bed and pulling her new limb this way and that, Carla tried to balance the restrictions that were all too apparent while she was on land with the advantages that she supposed she would have in what would be her native element. With a tail and fins, she would be liberated once she managed to submerge herself in the water. The thought held a strange appeal, the source of which she could not be sure she knew, but all the same she was aware of a newfound longing for the freedom of open waters. Carla was somewhat surprised to see that she had been allowed to keep her humanity to a degree that meant she could still see her own genitals. She spent some considerable time probing and experimenting, finding that the very tops of her legs had indeed been left out of her transformation and she could slip her fingers between them with a bit of effort. It seemed that despite the fact she was becoming a mermaid, she would still be able to use a bathroom like anyone else. She realised almost at once that this could only have been one of the stipulations that Lister had ensured was a part of her transformation. He had made it abundantly clear to Carla that she was intended to be a plaything for his amusement and gratification. With a tail that started a few inches down the thighs, he intended to have the best of both worlds with a mermaid that was his personal property and also easily taken when the mood took him. There was a full length mirror standing in the corner of the room and Carla stretched herself out on the bed, taking time to contemplate her reflection as she reclined. She had stripped off all of her clothes so as to take in the full extent of the changes made to her body, trying to reconcile the shapely mass of dark skin that spread out before her eyes. The sight reminded her vaguely of a story she had read when she was young, about a kind of fairy women who wore the skins of seals while in the sea and stripped them off to become human and walk the stony shores of the Scottish coast. They were well known for seducing men and slipping away into the sea at night, but could be bound to stay if the man in question found their enchanted seal skin and prevented the his enchanted lover from leaving. Carla allowed herself a daydream in which she was a creature who melted into a seal below the waist, swimming to and fro along a rocky beach. She pictured the cold spray washing over her slippery skin as she fell a little more into sleep with every passing minute. Her mind wandered, looking for the man that she would seduce with her shapely body and exotic nature. The face of her husband was fading into obscurity faster than she was aware, the face of Aubrey Lister had become a talisman of dread and resentment and Henry existed in her mind as more of a lumbering bull seal as her fantasy intertwined with her memories. In her mind, Scotland was not a place of mundane reality, but rather a fairy tale land where creatures like the one she imagined herself to be could haunt the remote shores. The people of this land were pale of skin and odd of character and she fixed upon the idea of seducing just such a man. He would be so different from the men she had known as a human being, but then she had become such a different creature that it only seemed fitting to embrace a lover that matched her in his unfamiliar nature. Unbidden the image of the kind and retiring Doctor Pickford entered her thoughts; tall, thin and almost white in colour, he walked barefoot down the early morning beach she had conjured in her mind. He stopped in his tracks for a moment, as if hearing or more likely sensing that something was amiss, his head turning this way and that as he scanned the sands. Carla watched from her perch atop a rocky outcrop, regarding him with an expression of unashamed and open interest as his eyes fell upon her. She imagined herself naked, wet from the salt surf that crashed around her, bare breasts showing the effects of the chill morning air. Hands so heavily webbed that they almost resembled the flippers of a seal idly stroked the point where her dark skin gave way to the sleek coat covering her lower half. His neck was long and thin, allowing her to see his Adam's apple bob up and down as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Carla could almost imagine the sound of his blood rising as his heart beat faster, pulsing in his ears and feel her own match the speed as she instinctively adjusted to the rhythms of his body. As his eyes lingered on her, wide and full of surprise, she knew within moments that she had him and that he would not flee from that spot for all the wealth in the world. She beckoned him forward with one of her webbed hands, all the time keeping his gaze locked on her. And heavens help him; he came at her call, one step after another until he stood so close that his trembling fingers brushed the erect nipples of her breasts. At that contact between them, Carla pressed herself forwards, cupping his groin in hand and meeting his mouth that was still open in stunned silence with her own. The taste of salt was on her lips as she felt his hands close around her body and begin to lift her into the air, cradling her in his arms. His clothes were soaked from the moisture that covered her bare skin, but neither of them seemed to care, each intent upon exploring the body of the other. Carla was aware of the strength in his arms; sure that he could have held her aloft for some time longer. So when he began to lower her into the shallow waves that moved in and out over the sand, she showed no resistance to his efforts, knowing that the last thing he intended to do was halt his attentions. He laid her upon her back and straddled her in the stony sand and watched as she reached for his flies, fumbling with digits not intended for such a delicate task in her haste to have him as close to her as she was able. Sensing her urgency, he aided her without making her efforts seem clumsy or unwelcome. Once he was free, Carla turned onto her belly and waited for the wonderful feeling of his weight pressing her gently into the sand. He laid over her, hands reaching around to cup her breasts and his lips finding her neck. She angled her head backwards, seeking for his lips once more and at first he teased her by keeping just out of her reach. Carla let out a gasp of mock frustration and made to snap at him, playfully returning his little tease. He rewarded her by kissing her boldly and with a passion that she had doubted he was capable of, her hand grabbing his cheek to hold his lips in place. At the same time she felt the brush of his penis, no more than an moment away from what she wanted. His skin met the sleek fur of her buttocks and she urged him onwards in her mind. And then she woke. Carla tried to bring her breathing under control as she struggled to unravel herself from the sheets. As she scrabbled for the clock on the bedside table, she wondered what was worse; knowing that she was mere hours away from becoming a mermaid or facing Pickford with the lingering memory of her vivid dream still fresh in her mind. The effect of the anaesthetic had already begun to blur Carla's perception of her surroundings by the time she laid eyes on Pickford. He greeted her with characteristic enthusiasm and pleasantries, but she found that she was either unwilling or unable to manage more than a weak smile in response. A large part of her silence was due to the sedative taking hold, but the memories of her passionate dreams were beginning to seep into the edges of her thoughts. Carla found it harder with every moment that passed to separate the flesh and blood doctor who would manipulate her body in a professional capacity with the imaginary man she had conjured to caress and even venerate her altered form. She smiled inwardly as Pickford made his checks and ensured that she was physically prepared for the next stage of the operation, her fogged mind interpreting his attentions as teasing foreplay as she slipped into unconsciousness. With his patient prepared and under the anaesthetic, Pickford wasted no time in beginning the final stage of his involvement with her transformation. Though the most laborious tasks had been completed the day before, he was now faced with the most painstaking and delicate portion of the process and concentration would be of paramount importance if he wanted to get things right. Her naked skin once more exposed to the harsh light of the theatre, Carla lay with the expanse of her single lower limb stretching out below her waist. Raised at the point where her heels had once been by means of a small metal arch, the wedge of flesh that represented the very tip of her body was painted with a coating of the same solution which had rendered her legs malleable the previous day. Soon the liquid had been absorbed into her skin and the exploratory finger the assistant used to prod Carla's skin left a small impression, indicating that the desired effect had been achieved. Pickford noted the assistant's progress and called for a container of transparent plastic to be brought to the side of the operating table. Inside the shallow container, floating in a bath of liquid was a broad and sturdy looking object that might have been mistaken for a cartilaginous fish of some exotic kind. Closer inspection revealed that it was in fact a powerful fin, fully perhaps two and a half feet in width and two in length, ribbed with curving lines of cartilage and ending in pattern of curves between them. The fin was a dark silver in its densest parts, fading to a much lighter shade where it became thinner, but with each shade reflecting the light that fell upon it. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 02 With all the skill of his profession, Pickford lifted the fin from its bath of fluid and manoeuvred it so that the narrow end aligned with the blunt edge of Carla's lower limb. Made malleable by the effects of the liquid, her flesh offered no resistance as he attached the fin to the nerve endings that had once been located in her toes. One rib of cartridge within the fin married up to one set of nerves that had previously been those of her vanished digits, an arrangement that would allow her to move the new addition to her body in a similar manner once the operation was complete. With the nerve endings attached, all that remained was for Pickford to smooth the fin into the flesh of what was now, more than ever, becoming recognisable as Carla's tail. He did this with the same expertise that he had shaped her legs, soon rendering the distinction between what was her own flesh and the specially grown additions ever harder to discern. As soon as the fin was attached and he was satisfied with the look of his work, the doctor called for yet another container to be brought to him by his assistants. Like the first, this was filled with liquid, but below the surface there could be seen the glittering of literally hundreds of small objects no bigger than a penny. One might have mistaken the things for just that, a tank filled with silver pennies that caught the light much as the tail fin that now graced the end of Carla's body. But then what purpose would such things have served in those surroundings? Pickford dispelled any illusion as to just what the tiny reflective objects might have been when he plucked one from the liquid with a pair of tweezers held in one hand and proceeded to spray Carla's tail at the point where the fin met the dark skin with a container he held in the other. Instantly the liquid softened her flesh, indicating that the same solution used to mould her body was contained in the vessel and could be delivered to a desired spot with no more than a squeeze on the trigger. He pressed the silver disc down onto the softened skin, covering a small portion of the area where the fin met the flesh. This was followed by a second disc by the side of the first as Pickford worked his way around the width of Carla's suspended tail until he had done a complete circuit of the limb. But he did not stop there, instead beginning another row of discs atop the first. Laying them over the previous row, as he worked the true nature of his task became apparent. Each row placed over the last and moving ever higher up Carla's tail encased ever more of her lower body beneath what were now clearly scales. Pickford worked tirelessly, placing each individual scale with care and subtlety so that the skin of silvery armour creeping up Carla's tail seemed to swallow her a little at a time. More and more of her formerly human flesh was replaced by the skin of an aquatic creature as she appeared to change by degrees into a mermaid. When he finally reached the point where her legs began to melt into each other, Pickford traced the area where the transition could truly be said to be located with the scales. But he also picked out a decreasing number of spots as he progressed further at which he placed perhaps a trio of pair of scales before reducing the number to a single silver disc. He placed some on her upper thighs, buttocks and belly as though the tail petered away to nothing in the regions of her body that were still recognisably human. Pickford's last task was to take from a far smaller container a series of almost triangular objects that resembled miniature versions of the tailfin he had already grafted onto Carla's body. These he pressed into the gaps between her fingers with the aid of the liquid spray, revealing them to be webbing that transformed her hands into partial flippers that would be ideal for speeding her passage through water. As he moulded the last of the webbing into place, it occurred to Pickford that while this modification to Carla's body might have made her a more efficient mermaid, it would come at a price as regards her digital dexterity. She would be well able to feed herself and perform basic tasks as she had before, but more complicated or involved operations that a normal human being found routine would be beyond her as she struggled with the semi-rigid cartilage between her fingers. Normally he prided himself on his ability to remain suitably removed from the plight of his patients, but for some reason there was a compulsion in him to worry about this woman in particular. Perhaps it was based on the fact that she would not be under his care for her recuperation, the time in which he liked to observe and monitor his patients in order to be sure that they could adjust to the changes he had wrought upon them. But instinct told him that it was more to do with the heavy level of involvement that his colleague, Doctor Ward, had with this case. Pickford respected Ward for his skill and vision, but he had never fooled himself into believing for a second that he liked the man on a personal level and he was sure the feeling was mutual. Beyond his cavalier attitude and lack of respect for his patients, there was a quality to Ward that Pickford could not help but suspect bordered on the corrupt and reckless. When the case had crossed his desk, Pickford noted the fact that the entire contact with The Retreat had gone through Ward's office before arriving in his own. That was nothing unusual, but based on the amount of theatre time that would be required; he was providing more than two thirds of the work to be done as specified in the file. Under those circumstances it was an unspoken convention that the case was first referred to the surgeon who would be responsible for the lion's share of the work. This combined with the requirement for the patient to be whisked away upon completion of the surgery had made him suspicious of Ward's motives. But he had to resign himself to the fact that as there was no hint of malpractice or coercion in the case, there was nothing he could do beyond perform his duties and hope for the best. His work complete, Pickford spared a moment to consider the mermaid laid upon the operating table. Like any man proud of his work, there was always a part of him loathe to see his creations taken away from him. If he had been allowed to do what he wanted with the creatures that he created, he had once dreamt up an admittedly impossible fantasy of spiriting them away to a hidden island where each would be free to live as they chose in their new forms. He hoped that wherever this one ended up, it would be a place in which she would be happy. He also hoped that if she ended up in the arms of a lover, that they would be good to her and make her radically altered life a joy. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 03 The darkness of the room was not truly penetrated as the door opened, but the corridor outside was filled with a shading of deep shadow rather than an absence of light and so a portion small degree of that dark was replaced with shades of grey instead. A vaguely human shape flitted through the gloom and made for the bed, followed moments later by a far larger figure that could have been mistaken for a hunched bear. While the smaller figure moved with purpose and without pause, the larger constantly glanced back over one shoulder as if fearing discovery at any moment. "Stop that," Ward spoke in a low, but audible voice. "Get over here and help me before you stumble into something and wake the entire wing." "Alright," Henry was not happy, "just keep your voice down!" "Don't be stupid," Ward gestured to the room that was rapidly becoming easier to discern as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. "These walls are soundproof and I made sure that the dose of anaesthetic they gave your friend will keep her under for far longer than we need to get what we need to do done." "I just don't like sneaking around in the middle of the night, that's all." "I would have thought someone in your line of business was used to this kind of thing." "Well," Henry paused, "that's as maybe...but I've gotten fond of her." "For god's sake," Ward pointed to the door, "just go and get the gurney. We need to have her finished and out of here as soon as we can. Pickford's getting twitchy and I don't want him sticking his ample nose too far into this one." While Henry ambled back into the corridor, Ward produced a small torch from his inside pocket and proceeded to make a rudimentary check over the occupant of the bed. The beam of his torch revealed Carla Largo, still unconscious from the effects of the anaesthetic that she had been given earlier in the day. Peeling back her eyelids, he noted that they showed no conscious reaction to the intense light as he shone the torch into them. Satisfied that she was intact and that there was no chance of her waking, he turned in time to see Henry return with the gurney. Together they gently transferred Carla from the bed to the waiting gurney. She wore a plain nightshirt and her lower body was covered by a garment of tight grey material in much the same manner as it had been after the first day of her operation. As quickly as they dared, the men wheeled Carla out of the room and away into the night. It was cold in the bare concrete room, but while Henry shivered despite his heavy overcoat, Ward seemed to be unaffected by the low temperature. Instead his attention was fixed solely on the form of the woman now laid out on the makeshift operating table in front of him. Ward would have been more comfortable working in his usual theatre for the tasks ahead of him, but he had taken pains to equip this basement room with everything that he would need to work his art. He had also chosen this location on account of the fact that it was known only to himself and represented a place where he could operate in total secrecy. Armed with a scalpel from a nearby table, he sliced Carla's nightshirt away with nothing more than a few flicks of his wrist. As her breasts were exposed to the chill air, the nipples stiffened against the cold, drawing an amused smile from the doctor. Henry made a move to object, but then seemed to realise the futility of such an action and visibly resigned himself to simply watching. Ward lifted the edge of the stocking covering Carla's lower half and sliced that away as well, moving from her waist to the point where her feet might have been without a moment's pause. He opened the garment up and revealed the slightly iridescent landscape of scales and find which had replaced her legs, turning her from an ordinary woman into a creature of myth. Now Henry could not stop himself taking a step forwards as he tried to take in the reality of Carla's new form. He had simply never seen anything like it in his life. A woman who he had grown attached to in his role as minder was spread out before him and changed utterly, challenging the bounds of what he had thought possible. He was a simple man by nature, aware of mermaids as something that existed only in children's stories and other childish mediums. The idea of such a creature in the flesh had never crossed his mind before and now that he was presented with the sight of such a familiar face married to the body of an exotic and baffling thing, he could hardly make sense of what reactions were stirred within him. The last thing that turned Henry on was the thought of fish, live or dead. But this was not a fish that he had ever seen. Above the waist she was the same old Carla, the woman who he thought was very pretty and dared not to look at in a certain way for fear of his employer's wrath. But below the waist she melted away into a silvery tail that mesmerised him in a way that he was not prepared for at all. He could see the shape of the legs that she had once possessed; trace with his eyes the curves he had snuck a look at while she danced for Aubrey Lister back in the club. The fact that the shape was now a scaled tail that ended in a broad fin oddly did not seem to bother him in the slightest, but rather made him want to forget his fears and put his hands on the thing to feel its texture. He knew that he was not looking at the cold wet tail of a fish, rather at the shapely and inviting body of a creature that experienced the world in the same way that he did. A creature that felt passion and longed to be touched by the hand of a fellow being that understood her needs. "The surgery should be the easy part," Ward's voice shattered the other man's contemplation of the mermaid and brought him back into the room, "it's what comes after that we have to hope will work without a flaw." Both men gazed at the banks of equipment that dominated one corner of the room, a baffling array of computer terminals, diagnostic screens and other undefinable pieces of technology that hummed with a life of their own. "I just pray that your employer knows what he's doing with that thing," Ward shook his head. "You aren't on your own there," Henry rubbed the back of his massive head. "All I know is that Mr Rubin trusts that thing, Mr Lister trusts Mr Rubin and I trust Mr Lister; so that's got to be enough for me." "Sounds like a tenuous chain you've got yourself, but as the contract we signed places the consequences of that infernal device squarely in the lap of your boss," Ward shrugged and let the unspoken words sink in as he prepared his tools. Henry remained silent, dividing his attention between Ward, the machine and Carla. The first he did not trust, the second he was afraid of and the third baffled him in a manner he did not understand. From his own point of view, the work that was required of Ward was a simple exercise of his skills as a plastic surgeon. While Aubrey Lister had promised Carla that she would not be transformed what she would have described as an inflated bimbo on the operating table, he had no intention of keeping to his word. Lister was a man used to getting what he wanted, and when he had described his wish to turn her into a mermaid in terms of customising a car to make it unique, he had not been far from the literal truth of what he intended for her. Like many men who were immersed in a world that was shaped by their own power, he had no concept of how to appreciate the beauty that existed in a thing. Instead he felt the inescapable need to reshape a thing that came into his possession so that it better reflected his own persona and his conception of how the world should be. In this way, women were no different to him and while he had desired Carla Largo as she danced for him so many times in the past, all the time he had gazed at her his mind had been making note of the subtle or rather more vulgar changes that he would have made to her body. Lister had no shame in his desire to alter what an object or a human being was in order to bring them in line with his own vision, his arrogance and egotism simply assumed that his was the only desire that mattered. Another man might have looked at Carla's face and commented that she was beautiful and aging well despite the fact she was taxed by the demanding life she had chosen to leave behind. But Lister only saw the hints of lines that were creeping into the corners of her mouth and the faint wrinkles around her eyes. And so Ward was commanded to obliterate them and inflate her lips with collagen, turning her smile into an exaggerated pout. Her breasts were far from small, still pert and she had often laughed at the way in which they seemed to catch the eyes of men as they walked by. Carla had never been able to understand why her husband had so loved to simply feel their weight in his hands, for minutes at a time while they lay together on a night. But they were too small for a man the likes of Lister and so the doctor obliged him by filling them with implants until they had almost doubled in size, sitting on her chest with all the natural shape that had been impossible with artificial enhancement in the past. Carla's buttocks continued the curve of her body, generous and full and almost as distracting as her breasts had been under the right circumstances. Of course this was not enough for her new owner, who instructed Ward to enhance the size and shape of her backside to the point where she would have been noticed for its curvature over almost anything else had she still been a human being. As he worked, the doctor wondered if Lister would really make a point of testing his work to discover if his mermaid truly did have a posterior that he could rest his drink on. All things considered, he decided that he would not be surprised it that were the truth. There were minor things to be done once he had seen to her face, breasts and buttocks. He peeled her skin with chemicals and gave her treatments that would ensure she was not worn out by the exposure to the rays of the sun, abrasive sand and saline water that she would be in constant contact with. He fused fake eyelashes over her own and treated her eyelids to permanently turn them a shade of silver to match her tail. Her lips and nipples received a similar treatment, becoming an exotic silver so that they stood out and could not fail to be noticed. Ward also used a compact cosmetic laser to denude her body of all hair in the armpits, face and groin on the assumption that it would make matters simpler for her master in the longer term. Her nails were replaced with long silver covers that could have been mistaken for claws, only adding to the effect of the webbing already linking her fingers together. Ward's final touch was something not specified in his instructions from Lister, but a flourish that he was sure the man would appreciate based upon his existing demands. He tinted the exposed lips and inner folds of Carla's vagina in the same silver he had used on her eyelids, lips and nipples so that the eye was drawn to her now smooth groin. He made the assumption that there would be no reason to hide the nature of the creature that she had been transformed into or the purpose to which the man intended to put her. He did not know it at the time, but he could not have been more correct. Now the time had come for the device which had sat in the corner, like the proverbial elephant in the room, all the time Ward had been at work. Neither of the men had a deal of experience with such a machine, but they had been well briefed on what was required and the terms in which their instructions from Lister had been phrased left no room for interpretation. Before she reached him, Lister was adamant that Carla Largo would be hooked up to the machine and her mind exposed to its effects. Henry wheeled the elements that would be connected to the unconscious mermaid to the side of the operating table as slowly as he dared. There was no way he could back out of the thing, but at the same time he simply could not will his body to proceed with any greater speed. For his part, Ward sensed the trepidation in the larger man and though he would never let on, sympathised as much as he was able. Unlike Henry, he understood very well the principles upon which the device was based and just how it worked. The information did not dispel his own misgiving, only made him uneasy on a far more intellectual level than he supposed the other man was capable of. The doctor waited while Henry lifted Carla's head in order to allow him to push the complex apparatus which was attached to the machine over her cranium. It resembled a helmet of some kind and totally isolated her senses from the outside world, or would have done had she not been sedated. Ward jabbed a syringe into her arm, administering a drug that would bring her some of the way out of her unconscious state and yet still leave her unable to move or function in a significant manner. He understood that the way in which the machine functioned required a basic level of activity to be present in the mind of the subject, for if there was nothing happening in the mind, what could the thing have an effect upon? Moments later the device became active as its sensors registered the stirrings of Carla's brain, screens filling with indecipherable data and components starting to spin in their housings. This contraption for which Aubrey Lister had paid greatly and called in many favours began to bombard her eyes and ears with stimuli while monofilament wires burrowed through her scalp, skull and probed into the synapses of her brain. In much the same way he had ignored his promise to leave her body free of excessive implants and cosmetic alterations, Lister also had little regard for any wish that Carla had to remain in mind the woman she had once been no matter how changed she was in body. The steps he had taken to aid her family and lure her into his power were things that in his own mind only served to deliver him what he wanted. Once he was sure he had her, there was nothing of her own concerns that caused Lister even a moment's pause. He wanted a mermaid that fulfilled his desires and no reservations that Carla could have voiced would stop him getting his own way as far as she was concerned. There was no way Lister would allow his new plaything to retain the capacity to recall the woman she had once been, to remember the family that she had lost or to retain the capacity to judge himself or his actions. He was paying for a living toy that would amuse him and satisfy his desires when and where he wanted without hesitation. And he was under no illusions that Carla would submit to being his plaything no matter what she may have promised him. To that end he had decided that in reality as well as in terms of her faked demise, the woman known as Carla Largo had to die in order for his pet to be born. The device would allow that to happen, the probes seeking out the areas of the brain in which the very notions of the self were generated and changing them to suit a new pattern. This was no crude brainwashing or hypnosis, but an actual process that changed the very physical structure of the brain as it went. The alterations made represented a pattern that would fundamentally change the identity, thoughts and actions of the subject according to the instructions programmed into the machine. At one end of the scale a person could be affected in so small a way to make them believe that they had said or done something they had not or lose all knowledge of a single fact, but at the other it could be used to completely change the memories, identity and personality of a subject. And that was just what was happening to Carla as she lay on the operating table. Lister would not only change her in body, but in mind as well. Little by little the effect of the probes sunk into her brain tissue eroded the image of Carla Largo as a woman who had been born, raised and educated in the real world. They scrubbed away at the memories of her past, her childhood and her adult life with her family, leaving a blank slate where the amassed snapshots of her passage through the world had accumulated to make her the person that she was. With that done, they drove deeper still; attacking the basis of her perception of herself as a human being. The concept of that she held of even being a highly evolved primate that walked erect on two legs was seized and obliterated totally. Soon though she recalled what a human being was, she had no means by which to connect herself to the species or belief that she belonged to it at all. Now that the space had been cleared, the probes began to restructure the areas of Carla's brain that had been affected. They made new connections and spanned the gaps that had been left with fresh tissue that would cause her thoughts to flow in the direction that her new owner intended without her even stopping to question what she was doing or thinking. In effect, her mind would never know a thing had been changed because it would have only the new structure of its own synapses from which to draw its conclusions. The elements of the brain that had once given rise to the personality of Carla Largo were replaced at an alarming rate with those that would constitute a quite different creature. Where there had been a relatively strong and independently minded woman, there was now a submissive and simple personality that accepted itself as nothing more than a limited creature in need of an influence to dominate and direct its actions. The new Carla was dependent, shallow and concerned only with her status in the eyes of the individual that she perceived as her master, seeking to please him in whatever she and hoping to keep his attention firmly upon her at all times. She was a mermaid, and she accepted that fact without question as she had always been such a creature. Her tail and fins were as natural as her arms and her hands to her and she simply knew nothing about ever having had legs and feet, finding the idea unnatural and vaguely disturbing. There was no mystery about the role of mermaids either, they were inferior to human beings and existed on the whim of the one that they called their master, grateful for his attention and willing to submit their bodies to him without restraint or pause. And who was her master? The image of Aubrey Lister descended into her consciousness like an angel from heaven. Here was the man that she existed to please, the master that she needed to be close to and craved the attention of. She knew what while she had his eyes upon her and occupied his every thought then she was truly safe and loved without reserve, anything else was to lose her very purpose and simply exist as a thing without meaning. He was the most radiant man she could imagine, the most virile and the most brilliant. No other man could ever please her or care for her as he would and she was dedicated to repaying his endless kindness to her by worshipping him with her own body as soon as she was able. Carla slept; transformed in mind and body the mermaid dreamed of nothing but making the man for whom she was intended happy. Ward glanced at the readouts clutched in his hand and finally nodded to Henry, indicating that the time had come to remove the apparatus from Carla's head. The big man wiped visible beads of sweat from his forehead as he did as he was told. Now all he had to do was smuggle his charge out of the clinic before the sun rose and they were discovered. A private jet would carry them both back to the other side of the Atlantic where the swelling that was already distorting Carla's features from the extensive facial surgery would have the chance to heal. He hoped that Lister would be patient enough to give her body the time that it needed to recover and at the same time that the changes made to her mind would not drive her insane before she was allowed to meet the man who was now the centre of her altered consciousness. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 03 Just for once, Henry thought, it would be nice to have fewer problems to worry about rather than more. The only sounds that reached Aubrey Lister's ear as he opened the door to the opulent bed chamber was the slow slashing of the ceiling fan as its blades cut through the warm air and the sough of the waves that crashed on the nearby beach. He had seen so few faces since his limousine pulled up outside the sprawling mansion that he could have almost believed the entire estate was deserted save for himself and the object of his growing physical excitement. Excitement may have seemed a juvenile term to describe a man as hard and callous as Lister undoubtedly was, but he had waited so long for this moment and expended so many resources upon it that he simply could not contain his desire to see the result of his efforts. He wasted no time in striding through the large room, so used to the sight of the gilt fittings and the marble floors that they passed him by without notice. The doors to the balcony were wide open and he made his way out into the fading light of dusk, staring all the time at the figure laid upon a luxurious couch. At the sound of his approach, the figure seemed to stir awake and turned to face him. The smile that spread across Lister's face spoke of his emotions as he took in the sight of the couch's occupant; there was triumph, satisfaction and a hunger that had nothing at all to do with his stomach. In contrast, the smile that Carla wore as she gazed up at him was one of pure delight and joy, as though his mere presence was a blessing that she could never express her thankfulness for. If she had seemed to be a blending of the woman she had been and the mermaid she was contracted to become when the work of Doctor Pickford was complete, the additions made by his colleague had fully transformed her into something new and different. A person who had known Carla Largo in her former life might have recognised her had they been able to spend more than a moment scrutinizing this fantastic creature, but even then they would have been forced to admit that there was less of the woman and more of the mermaid about her. Her hair had been allowed to grow long, gathered into braids that reached down to her back and woven with an assortment of tiny shells, beads and trinkets that made a quiet clattering as she moved her head. Each of the items chosen to decorate her hair could have been the smallest of baubles and curiosities plucked from the bed of the sea by a mermaid in her travels. She played with the strands as she seemed to enjoy the experience of being looked up and down, twisting them endlessly around her webbed fingers. She was naked above the waist save for a pair of metal caps which covered her nipples, the colour of tarnished silver. Her heavy and yet pert breasts stood naked upon her chest, rising and falling in time with her breathing and her smooth stomach spread out below. A collection of silver chains sat loosely around her waist, descending to her groin where they became a thicker length of interwoven metal which lay over her intimate parts and extended to the point where her skin gave way to the scales of her tail. Her wrists were adorned with bracelets of different sizes and shapes, mirrored in larger bands that decorated her tail, hanging loosely above her fin as it beat on the cushions of the couch. She said nothing as he stood before her, did nothing but stare up at him with large brown eyes filled with a feigned innocence that contrasted with the language of her body in a wicked manner. And in truth, what would she have said? A submissive creature that saw this man as her sole master and hung on his every word, eager to catch his glance and hold it. Lister remained deliberately silent, his arms crossed over his chest as he took in the full sweep of the mermaid's body from head to tailfin. He gave her no hint or clue as to what he expected of her, wanting to test the extent of the demands he had made in her creation and how much they had become a part of her nature. He had to wait only a few moments before the expression on Carla's face changed slowly from innocence to mischief as she sat up on the couch and tucked her tail beneath her backside. Her hands may have been webbed and ended in exaggerated nails, but she was still dexterous enough to open his flies with little trouble. One hand slipped inside and he felt the cool touch of her digits upon his penis as she gently drew it out into the open air, stroking the shaft with her free hand as it came. It would have been fair to say that Lister was excited even before he found his member in the hands of the mermaid. But now that she was massaging him in a manner that spoke of some expertise whilst pouting at him all the while, he was unable to control his reaction. Carla teased him all the time she held his member, placing the head between her lips and sliding her tongue around the tip that was inside her mouth. Her body began to tremble and quake as she drew more of his length into her mouth, as though the very act sent shivers of pleasure through her being. He found his hands wound in the braids of her hair as she finally swallowed him in as far as she was able and moved her head backwards and forwards in a motion that threatened to make him burst right there and then. Her attentions were so intense and she was moving with such passion and strength that he felt sure she would begin to suck the very life out of him were she allowed to go on for much longer. With a herculean effort, Lister pulled her away from his penis and cast her back onto the couch. Carla looked up at him with an expression of puzzled sadness in her eyes, as if she was unable to cope with the idea that he had severed her physical contact with him. But the expression on his face soon soothed her feelings and she smiled once more as he knelt down and scooped her from the couch. He revelled in the feel of her weight in his arms and the contrast between her soft flesh and smooth scales as he carried her into the bedchamber. Far from disappointed with her voracious appetite for his attentions, Lister was delighted by the fact that he had been presented with a mermaid who was nigh on insatiable and hungry for his favour. There was no room in his world for notions of romance in which such creatures pined for princes or sang on rocks. He had demanded a living toy that would enjoy being the object of his desires and willing to obey his every whim to the point where she could interpret what he wanted even before he spoke a word. He had not pulled his penis out of Carla's mouth because he was unhappy with her technique, but rather because he was not about to spend himself on a simple blowjob on the first chance he had been given to enjoy his new plaything. Lister came to a halt by the edge of the Jacuzzi which filled one of the corners of the room. Raised three feet off the floor and filled with water as part of his demands whenever he was in residence, it seemed to be the perfect place to continue his voyage of discovery. Placing Carla on the side of the tub, he saw that once more she needed no urging as she swung her tail into the bubbling water. She twisted her body as she went, so that she disappeared beneath the surface on her stomach and was lost to sight. Lister stripped his own clothes as fast as his sense of dignity would allow him, not caring where the various items landed in the slightest and always fixated upon the churning water, hoping to catch sight of the mermaid when she reappeared. And when she did, it was in a magnificent cascade of water, throwing out a shower of liquid as she burst upwards and flung her braided head back in a display of sheer sensual delight. Carla came to a halt, knelt in the water with beads of liquid running down the curves of her body and dropping from her as though she were a statue placed in the middle of a fountain. She was breathing heavily, eyes seeming to urge him on as he stared at her, asking why he hesitated for a moment. He stepped quickly into the tub, seizing her buttocks and pulling her towards him as he sat on the edge so that she kneeled before him and their faces were on a level. When the chains around her waist brushed his penis, he simply tugged them aside, snapping the fragile ties that held them in place as had been the intention of their design. His eyes happened upon the silver lips of her vagina and he almost laughed with the sight of it, intrigued by the way in which his pet kept surprising him. Carla leaned in close, trying to reach his mouth with her own and he held her slightly at bay, amused by the desperate manner in which she continued to reach for him with straining lips. Then he let her find him and felt her tongue dart into his mouth with a desperation he savoured like a fine vintage. When he tired of her kisses, Lister pulled her from him and turned his body so that he was knelt behind her in the water, pressing her bodily over the edge of the tub. She looked back over her shoulder at him with the same desperation in her eyes as he had felt in her tongue, almost begging him for what might come next. Carla pressed her backside into him, probing for his member beneath the water. He grasped one of her breasts with one hand and found her own genitals with the other, stroking and pressing her so that she buckled in his grasp. Only when she began to gasp and cry out in response to his attentions did he slide between her buttocks and enter her, pushing his way inside with all of his weight in one motion. If she had cried out before, Carla almost screamed in that moment, her hands atop his, her nails digging into his flesh. He moved slowly at first and then ever faster inside her, leaving her lower body to his own and instead searching out both of her breasts. He twisted the metal caps atop her nipples, causing her exquisite before simply tearing them away to expose the silver shade of the flesh beneath. It was at times like these that Aubrey Lister truly envied such a creature as an octopus, longing for more limbs than he possessed so that he could have entered her remaining orifices at the same time. He loathed being restricted to her vagina whilst he massaged her breasts and longed to enter her rear and her mouth at the same and envelop her in the action. In that moment he actually considered the possibility of subjecting himself to the same process he had inflicted upon Carla, just for the ability to do so. But the notion was fleeting and he was soon returned to the real world as he reached his climax and felt the mermaid follow suit. There was no way he could have known it, but she had even been programmed to reach her own orgasm within moments of his, a measure intended to ensure that he was both convinced that he was providing her with everything she could absorb and that his own virility was greater than hers. Lister climbed out of the water and once again scooped his mermaid up in his arms. He crossed the marble floor, not caring that they left a trail of water behind them or that the sheets were soaked the moment he dropped her on top of them. The night was warm and he had many hours ahead of him in which he intended to enjoy himself, his mind filling with thoughts of the way in which he would make use of the mermaid and she rubbed herself against him and stroked his chest in the hope of his paying her attention for even a moment longer. Henry was not a happy man; he had never been disposed towards positive thinking or looking on the so called bright side of life in general. In the past it had been enough to do his job, get paid and enjoy the perks that working for a man such as Aubrey Lister could bring. But no matter how hard he tried, the narcotics were not for him and the women that swooned at the thought of a card carrying member of the underworld made him feel soiled when he was no longer in their company. If he was honest with himself, he could pin down what had been the last straw in his own case without any trouble at all. Carla Largo had been the tipping point, a woman he had got to know back home in London and soon afterwards been forced to watch being turned into a human plaything for his employer's amusement and gratification. Henry was honest enough to admit that he was attracted to Carla, but that was not the root of his issues with what Lister had done to her. Many times he had seen beautiful women be picked up and then cast aside by the man, the process was something he had become used to over the years. But with Carla, something that simply disturbed him characterised the relationship that Lister enjoyed with her. Seeing her become a mermaid had been bad enough, but the change in her personality haunted him with guilt and self-loathing. Gone was the likeable woman who had joked with him in the café every morning, and in her place was an alien creature that reacted to his friendly smile with a look of sheer hostility as she clung to Lister's arm. On another occasion she had literally hissed at him and taken a swipe with her vicious looking nails. For more than a year now he had been forced to endure the experience of seeing her familiar face and knowing that the woman to whom it had once belonged was gone. And the worst thing of all was the knowledge that he had played a vital role in bringing about the transformation which had banished her and left a living plaything in her place. So Henry buried his recriminations and soldiered on, eaten from the inside by his guilt whenever he laid eyes upon the mermaid. Carla woke from her dream, shaken by the images that pursued her through the landscape of her unconscious and once more happy to have left the daily need for sleep behind her until the night came back around. She knew that the memories of her latest dream would soon begin to fade away as they always did, replaced by the genuine delight that she felt with the prospect of another day filled with the things that made her life complete. The fact that every day it seemed to take longer for the images to fade from her mind was something that she chose to ignore, an uncomfortable reality that she was unable to deal with and unwilling to allow to spoil her enjoyment of the waking hours. Although she was devoted to the task of pleasing her master, concerned above all else with the act of obeying his commands and trying to interpret his needs before even he was aware of them, Carla was not a stupid creature in the slightest. Despite the effort she made, there was inevitably a time that she spent pondering the things she saw in her dreams before her mind was swept away with thoughts of how she might be able to serve him best that day. Had she been plagued by nightmares or dreams in which she was in mortal danger, she might have been able to ascribe her fears to the simple nature of the imagery that populated them. But as it was the dreams were simple scenes of what she understood to be domestic life for a human being, images of working in a normal nine-to-five job, snapshots of preparing meals and tending to household chores and mundane interactions with a recurring set of faces that seemed to know her, assuming that she would know them in turn. Carla was disturbed by the very realisation that she should not have been so familiar with such things for the simple reason that she was not a human being at all. Her recollections of life before she had been owned by Aubrey Lister was nothing more than a vague collection of blurred shapes, colour and sounds, but that was perfectly normal for a mermaid. Her kind were creatures that lived from one moment to the next and centred themselves on passions and experiences rather than abstract concepts and long memoires as did human beings. All she needed to be complete and happy was the knowledge that she was loved and held in the esteem of her master, pleasing him resulted in her being granted that security and she was as sure as she could be that there was nothing more important in her life than that relationship. Aside from seeing to the needs of her own body, Carla was content to do nothing more with her own time than contemplate how she could better meet the needs of her master and ensure that she was as exquisitely presented as possible when he deigned to call upon her. Once she was in his presence, there was no need to waste even a second on thoughts of her own, she was given over to him completely. So why were her dreams haunted by simple human beings and scenes from the lives that they chose to lead? The people that she saw in her dreams seemed to have access to knowledge that she was denied, calling her by name as if trying to make her remember things that simply could not be part of her past. They called each other by names that were repeated over and over until she was sure her mind was playing tricks on her as they began to seem somehow familiar. She was hounded by the two young girls who called themselves May and Jada and herself their mother, insisting that she had carried and then birthed them into the world despite the obvious reality that they were human and she was a mermaid. Carla was sure that there was no way she could have been impregnated by a human male, she had been taken time and again by her master and never fallen pregnant in all the years she had gratefully submitted to his attentions. But worse was the man known as Jared, the man who was not her master and yet whispered into her ear of how much he loved her. He was so different from the domineering confidence of Lister that she was sure he could never have been enough for her. And yet there was a quality to the tender way in which he seemed to think of her even more than he did himself that gave her pause. Carla had to admit that she was baffled by the character of a man who seemed too meek and pathetic to simply take what he wanted. But why then did she recall an alien emotion when she still held fragments of him in her memory? An emotion that resembled the satisfaction that Lister showed when he had sated himself upon her, but rather an emotion that was her own. Was it possible that she too could be made happy and contented when her own desires were the object of a lover's intentions? The more she thought about these things, the more they gained a foothold in her mind. She had little need to be aware of the passage of time, but she was vaguely aware that she had been in the possession of Lister for what might have been six or maybe seven years by the time that the memories of her dreams truly began to stay with her in her waking hours. Carla was diligent in never speaking of them to a living soul, but they had become something that she obsessed over when she was alone with her thoughts. The pull that they had upon her had grown even to the point where the image of the man called Jared sometimes sprang into her mind's eye while she was being ridden by her master, forcing her to keep herself under control and fight to maintain the illusion that nothing was amiss. She was aided in her deception by the fact that Aubrey Lister was a supremely arrogant man, not given to questioning the loyalty of a creature that he saw as nothing more than his property and seemed to obey his every whim. Right there, under his gaze and without his suspecting a thing, the Carla slowly put the pieces together in a process that led her from confusion, to frustration and finally to pain as she realised that the images in her dreams could not be a mere figment of her subconscious. Whoever the human woman who seemed to share her name may have been, there was a deep and important connection between them and she had been granted some strange kind of access to her thoughts and memories for a purpose that still escaped her understanding. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 03 She came to the conclusion that she had to find out who this woman was and why she seemed so akin to herself. She had to reach out, and there was only one man who she could even think of trusting. A man who the human woman named Carla had trusted herself. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 04 Henry chanced a look into his mirror, supposedly checking out the flow of traffic, but in reality flagellating himself with another stolen glance at the occupants of the back seat. Aubrey Lister sat back on the leather like a king reclining on his throne, his face a picture of self-assured crapulence as he draped one arm over the shoulder of his favourite pet, the other lost beneath the fabric of her tight denim skirt. Carla, who had been gazing out of the smoked window with the interest of a child a moment before, reacted to the attentions of his fingers with immediate effect. She began to wriggle in her seat, grinding her buttocks into the upholstery and reaching under her tube top to massage her own breasts. She moaned as she pulled her tail up towards her chest, making a show of trying to crawl into his lap in a desperate attempt to bring herself as close to him as possible. These outings into the bustling traffic had become one of Lister's favourite pastimes in recent months. They would ride around whatever location they found themselves in, with the mermaid concealed in the back seat so that he could revel in the act of enjoying her in a public place while preserving the secrecy of his beloved pet. Often he allowed her to lower the windows, looking out onto the landscape passing by as if she were an ordinary woman, thrilled at the fact no one could see her scales and fins as they drove by. The illusion was aided by the fact he had come to be aroused by the act of dressing her in conventional clothes as far as her form would allow, reminded of the fact that she had once done so in her former life before he gained possession of her totally. He garbed her in evening gowns, business suits, summer dresses and even a the regalia of a bride before her took her, thrilled by the fact that he had deprived her of the life in which she could have worn them by her own choosing. But his favourite by far were the outfits that he imagined she would have worn had she been a prostitute of some kind. He was inspired by the women he saw in the most chauvinistic music videos of the time, where the women seemed to be there for little more than display and arousal no matter if they were in the background or the supposed artist themselves. By these standards, the combination of a denim skirt that was barely able to cover her groin and an aquamarine top that strained to accommodate her breasts was relatively tame. But topped off with excessive jewellery and her hair done in thick ringlets, she could have been mistaken for a common trollop were it not for the sight of her tail. Henry tore his gaze away and tried to keep his attention on the road. He had grown used to the driving while all manner of things went on behind him, but today he was faced with the additional problem of a stop on the way. Lister occasionally fitted a business call into his rides and in those circumstances he left his driver in the company of the mermaid while he took care of the matter at hand. When he was left alone with her like that, Henry felt as though she bored holes in the back of his head with her eyes, penetrating his skull with her accusatory stare. But he was not about to disobey his orders, and so he took a deep breath and pulled the limousine off the road and into the gloom of a subterranean parking garage as he had been told. As the car came to a halt, he heard Lister whisper something to Carla before he stepped out of the door. The sound of a battery-operated toy filled the air and informed him that whatever had been said was less than clean in nature. Probably an instruction for the mermaid to keep herself prepared for his return or something equally as lascivious in nature. Perfect, he thought, now I have to sit here and listen to that as well. It came as a surprise to him that the sound of the vibrating toy ceased only a few seconds after Lister had left the limousine and was far enough away to be out of earshot. The silence that was left in its absence seemed heavier than ever, and Henry could hear his own breathing as though it were as loud as a jet engine. "Henry?" Of all the things he could have imagined to break the silence, the instantly familiar voice shocked him utterly. He froze in his seat, unable to turn his head or even glance up at the mirror, afraid that he was moments away from being judged for the sins he had burdened himself with for years now. "Henry," she was closer now, almost up to the hatch between the two halves of the limousine. "Please don't freak out...I know this is weird, for the both of us. But I need to talk to you...I need your help." With a gargantuan effort, he turned in his seat and looked into her face as she clung onto the rim of the hatch with both webbed hands. He could not have put it into words, but there was something different in her eyes and her expression, a depth of emotion that had seemed to be lost when she was transformed from a human being into a mermaid. For the first time he could remember, Henry was able to perceive the same woman she had been in the surgically tweaked face of the mermaid she had become. "I'm sorry," it was short and pathetic as well as a thousand miles away from the intensity of the guilt he was feeling, but under the circumstances it was all he could manage right there and then. "I don't need you to be sorry," Carla shook her head, "I need you to help me get away." "From him?" "Who else?" "He'll kill us both," Henry turned his head away from her as she started to pull herself though the hatch, breasts struggling to make it through the small space. "I don't know about you," her voice was strained as she pulled her tail through after her and fell onto the seat beside his, "but I look at myself as I am right now and I can't help thinking that I'm already dead as long as I stay put." Carla was struggling with herself even as she spoke to him, trying to hold together her sense of self in light of the seemingly random flow of memories and knowledge that was filling her mind unwanted and unbidden. The patchwork of images and recollections was not her own, but rather that of the other woman who shared her name, the human female who she was being forced reconcile with the radically different creature she thought herself to be. Over the past few days the speed at which she had been uncovering these alien memories had become ever faster, filling her mind with awful realisations that she was only now able to absorb. With every new revelation she had become more certain that she was somehow akin to this other woman, that they were linked in a manner that she could not quite understand. It was never a case of their being two distinct voices in her head, the mermaid that she had become was the entity that she remained. The feeling was more akin to discovering hidden doorways inside a house with which you were familiar, opening them to find whole rooms that revealed new aspects that had laid unseen for who knew how long. Carla had found that she had little choice in the matter as these new elements of her mind became one with the whole. She was not becoming the woman as she absorbed her memories, the process felt to her as though aspects of the other woman became her own and were coloured by their mixing with her persona. She had become a gestalt of two different women, one seeping into the other and both changing as a result. She suspected, or more honestly feared that she might have once been the human woman in her new memories. But the thought of being something other than she was now did nothing but upset her, make her gaze at her tail and try to tell herself that it was not true. Even now that she understood for the first time that she was being exploited and abused by the man she had seen as the centre of her world, she was still happy in her body and did not desire to be anything other than a mermaid. This new blending of her persona with that of the other woman had left her still more of a mermaid with human traits than a human trapped in the body of a mermaid. For that reason she found that she could not simply talk her way into gaining Henry's trust and cooperation, but was compelled by her instincts to ensure her success by other means more in keeping with her nature. Carla stretched out and crawled on her belly across the seats, her weight pressing down on his thighs as she came. Her hands gripped the lapels of his jacket and pulled her up his torso as she twisted her own lower half to sit in his wide lap. All the time he was as still as a statue, petrified by the feeling of her body against his. She knew that Henry found her desirable, even the human woman had known as much. For the human woman it might have been enough to trust to her impassioned words as she sought to turn the man's loyalty away from his employer and towards herself. But there was little chance that the mermaid would be satisfied to do the same, convinced as she was of the power that could be wielded through seduction and desire as a result of her intimate experience in such matters. Carla knew that if she could bind a man with her sexual allure, then there was almost no way he could deny her what she asked of him afterwards. On a deeper level, the structure of her altered mind associated such things with a fundamental sense of security, forever linking the concepts of sexual attraction with those of her status and ability to trust the relationships she formed with other individuals. No matter how she tried, there was no way that she would be able to truly place her trust in another person when she was in a position of such need unless she had the reassurance of knowing that they were enamoured of her charms. Carla was a siren in both body and mind, and as such there was nothing she could do to stop herself trying to seduce the man she needed to aide her in her plans. She could already feel the effect she was having on Henry's body, the swelling in his lap below her buttocks and the labouring sound of his lungs as his pulse began to race. Whether the largest part of his stirring was on account of his reaction to her own attentions or his fear at their being discovered and the consequences she could not have said. But regardless of which it may have been, Carla was sure that she could steer the man according to her wishes with little chance of failure. Deftly her hand opened his flies and found his member, not a difficult task under the circumstances. Henry was a large man and it seemed that his body was in proportion down to the last detail as she found a considerable amount of him gripped between her fingers. Carla allowed herself the cruel thought of the comparison in so called manhood between the quiet mountain of a man and the vulgar individual who employed him. She had spent so long in what now seemed like insane worship of Lister that any chance to indulge herself with a man that was not him was the ultimate act of rebellion. While it was undoubtedly true that she did need Henry's help and she was unable to think of securing it without this display of wanton sexual appetite, a part of her revelled in the fact that she was finally going against the will of Aubrey Lister. Carla realised in that moment that while she may have been settling into the idea of herself as a melding of the human woman she remembered and the mermaid that she had become, she was by no means as meek or retiring as the former had been. There was a streak of pure and unashamed independence emerging in her character and she vowed that she would never be put in the position of helpless dependency that the two elements of her personality had fallen into. Henry had one arm gripped on the top of the front passenger seat and the other braced against the door, as though he was expecting to be thrown about inside the limousine by some unknown force. His eyes were wide and there was already sweat beading on his forehead, but he betrayed his true emotions towards what Carla was doing by making no attempt to stop her or voice an objection. Carla gripped the steering wheel with her free hand and guided his penis beneath her skirt with the other. The size and state of his member meant that it had little trouble in pushing the skirt up and off her buttocks as it approached the silver flesh of her vagina. She moved her backside in practised motions, an expert at the art of arousing a man after years of devoting her mind to contemplating little else. The lips of her vagina brushed against the head of his penis with the delicate touch of a gentle kiss, each contact making him shudder and building the anticipation of the inevitable next step. When the moment came, Carla took him by surprise, pushing herself backwards onto him with a force that came out of the blue after her teasing foreplay. He was broad and well built, making the muscles of her body stretch and move to accommodate him until she could spare no more room. Filled to her capacity, she held still for an extended breath and simply allowed the sensation of his body entering her own wash over her before she began to move slowly forward and back again. For Carla the experience was almost a joyous one, not for such a crude reason as the size of Henry's penis, but more for the sense of liberation that it inspired in her. She could not escape the fact that she was a sexual being who would need to be satisfied in order to be truly complete. And yet in this act she had proven that she could overcome the way in which she had been programmed to throw herself at the feet of just one man. It was the very difference in the nature of the sexual act with another man that gave her hope, the unique way in which her body had sunk onto a formerly unknown member and come alive with pleasure. She had feared that she was incompatible with another partner. But she had proven to herself that not only was she capable of breaking free of her former master, she was also able to initiate intercourse with a new partner and gain something from the coupling that was hers alone. Carla found that her enjoyment of the experience was abruptly cut short however, when Henry buckled and came no more than a minute or two after she had taken him inside her. It did not matter, she told herself. She was sure that his premature climax was the result of his nerves and the fact that he was being seduced by a seasoned professional. That was another new characteristic to note, she was not in the least bit shy or humble about the power that she held or the desirable qualities of her body. Why should she be? A quick glance over her shoulder told her that she had him, the exhausted nod that he gave her almost surplus to requirements. "Two weeks," he gasped between breaths. "Two weeks?" "He's flying to Miami on business," Henry explained as his breathing slowed. "That's the earliest we can take a shot at getting you away from him." His face turned serious. "I don't suppose you've thought of where you want to go?" Carla had pondered trying to rediscover her old life, make a fresh start in a new country or even asking him to take her back to the place where it had all begun and begging Dr Pickford to change her into a human so that she could blend into the masses. But the life of the Carla Largo who had been human was gone, destroyed by the machinations of Aubrey Lister. There was no way she could have begun anew as a mermaid amongst the millions of humans in any country on the planet. And she could not contemplate becoming another creature, she had apparently done so once before with the consequences being nothing but traumatic. "The sea," she replied after a long pause. "Just get me to the sea." The setting sun had turned the sky into a riot of colour as it inched below the horizon, vivid bands of yellow, orange and crimson made all the more striking by the effect they cast upon the churning waters of the ocean beneath them. Lingering warmth still carried on the breeze was the final memory of the heat which had characterised the day that was now past, making the night a balmy and pleasant place to be alive and awake. Carla watched from the window of the limousine, able to appreciate the beauty of such a sight on her own terms for what seemed like the first time in her life as defined by the strange course her existence had taken over the past few years. The change that had come over her as she regained a sense of control over her own mind in the past few weeks had been ever harder to contain as the time approached for her chance to escape. Where she had previously been little more than a simpering pet, forever clammering for the attention of the man whom she had perceived as her master, now she was fully able to see for herself just what that same man had done to her. It was a cruel irony that for the sake of preserving her means of being free of his clutches, Carla had been forced to maintain the illusion that she was still his wiling and obedient plaything. For a period of two weeks, she had lived a lie which only served to remind her of the things that she had lost as well as the depths to which she had been taken. Aubrey Lister was by no means tired of his mermaid and made regular use of her body, requiring her to bury her hatred for him behind the adoring mask of the creature that he had turned her into. Carla found herself wrestling with the urge to strike some kind of blow against him as she was made to degrade herself, stabbing for his eyes with a sharp object or biting down upon his penis when he forced it into her mouth. But the thought of her freedom always stayed her hand, keeping her focussed on the possibility of being finally released from her bondage rather than basking in the glow of violent revenge that would inevitably lead to savage retribution soon afterwards. The only other human being with whom she had contact in that time was Henry, snatching moments here and there in which she was able to speak with her own voice and express her own opinions. Carla found that she was able to distract herself from the attentions of Lister by taking the opportunity whenever it arose to make love to his most trusted bodyguard. The dual blow that the act struck, at once betraying her supposed position of his personal property and doing so with someone so close to him, soothed her anger to a degree and gave her the strength to carry on from one day to the next. In her position, the average woman would have rejected utterly the very idea of pursuing a string of sexual encounters while at the same time being subject to the abuse that she was enduring. But as Carla had come to accept, she was not a human being and neither was she an average woman by any means. Sexual desire and the consummation of the lust that she was capable of inspiring in others was a fundamental element of her being and she would use it to both fend off the horrors of her treatment and at the same time keep intact her plans to escape. And she had done just that, holding herself together until the arrival of the allotted day. Henry opened the door and gazed inside, his broad face a picture of anxiety and urgency as he tried to keep his emotions under control. Not even the weeks of careful planing that had brought them to this point or the knowledge that his employer was more then six hours away by plane could reassure him that he was safe. As she looked him in the eye and gave him a smile that she hoped would be some kind of balm for his paranoia, Carla could not help thinking that had the man been able, he would have picked her up and pitched her into the sea like a shot-putter simply to have the whole thing over with sooner. "Ready?" Carla nodded and swung her tail out of the limousine, stretching her body in anticipation of the challenges that awaited her. Her Contract Enatails Ch. 04 She was naked save for a functional top of tight-fitting lycra, the kind of garment that would have looked more in place on an athlete than a mermaid that could have been summoned from an adolescent boy's fantasies. In addition she carried nothing with her save for a small knife, secured in a sheath that hung from a belt around her waist. The subject of kitting her out for this attempt at escape had been a matter of much debate between the two of them. Henry had fretted over her chances of survival and wanted her to make her way into the sea burdened with a myriad of supplies that she was sure would only have been a hindrance in the long term. She was touched by his fussing, but sure that his insistence on such a large amount of things that would more than likely be useless was an attempt to assuage his own guilt rather than equip her to cope with surviving with the sea as her new home. Carla on the other hand favoured keeping what she took and wore to the bare minimum based not on her own whims, but instead on the cold hard facts with which she had educated herself. For longer than the two weeks that Henry had been a party to her plans, she had been labouring on the scheme alone. What she had claimed were simply trips to the numerous pools on the estate for exercise had in fact been a concerted effort to at first assess and then improve her fitness and ability to swim for extended periods of time. She had also schemed her way into accessing books and even a limited amount of time on the internet so that she could read up on the environment in which she would be forced to exist. Even after all the work she had invested in preparing herself, she was far from confident of her chances as far as survival was concerned. Carla knew that she would be leaping from the life of what amounted to a pampered pet and into that of a wild animal, in competition with cold-minded predators and in the clutches of an uncaring sea. The most potent weapons that she could make use of were her mind and body, and they had done nothing for a number of years now save being subservient to the will and whims of Aubrey Lister. She raised her arms and allowed Henry to lift her off the seat, feeling for what she was sure would be the final the sheer strength that was contained in his limbs. There really was no way she could have turned him down on the offer, the distance between the road and the point where the waves reached the sand was simply too far for her to have managed on her belly. In addition he would most likely have ignored her protests and carried her there anyway had she refused. They remained silent for the entirety of the slow walk from the limousine to the first few feet of wet sand. Carla had no way of knowing what thoughts might have been chasing through Henry's immense head, but she suspected that it was a typical parade of guilt for her condition and fear of what awaited him when their scheme was inevitably discovered. He had assured her on numerous occasions that whatever fate had in store for him, it would be no more than a part of the punishment that he willingly accepted for what he had been a party to. Carla had tried and failed to keep herself from speculating as to what Lister would do when the whole thing was laid bare to him. She had even tried to urge Henry to make his own escape when she did, but he had refused to be drawn on just what he would do once she was gone. Carla felt nothing but contempt for most of the human race at that moment in time. Her anger would fade until she was reconciled with the fact that her fate had been perverted by a single individual and realise finally that she did not truly hate humanity as a whole. But there and then she felt sympathy and obligation to no other human being apart from the man that held her as the waves began to surge around his ankles. She realised with a degree of shock, that she would miss the company of this quiet giant of a man. Though they had only been speaking with one another in snatched conversations in the two weeks since she opened herself to him and asked for his aid, he had become the only person who approached a friend in her life. While he might have made love to her more out of obligation to his guilt and her nature as a mermaid, she could not deny that he had been an essential counterweight to the continued attentions of her supposed master. Where Lister was domineering and actually revelled in the act of dominating her, Henry by way of contrast was in need of her constant guidance and urging. Sex between them was an act that she lead and he attended to her every instruction so that she was truly satisfied by the time her climax came. In the altered nature of her being, this affirmed her self confidence and gave her the strength to continue despite the challenges and uncertainty that lay ahead. Carla weighed the possibility of taking him one more time, right there in the surf as an almost territorial act before she was gone. She was not addicted to sex in the way that a person could become dependent upon narcotics, instead the need for physical fulfilment with another was an essential part of her being. She could leave without another encounter with Henry if she chose, but in this case she simply found that she was contemplating the more pleasant aspects of doing so. She dismissed the notion, sure that he would submit to her will, but determined to make this as clean a break with her former life as she could make it. Instead she placed a gentle kiss on his cheek and cocked her head to one side, indicating that he should let her down. Henry knelt and lowered her into the lapping water, careful to ensure that she was safely deposited upon the sand beneath before he released her from his arms. Almost the moment that he did so, a particularly strong wave surged up the beach and swept over Carla, drenching her from head to fin. Caught unawares by the freezing cold of the water after the warm air of the evening, she shrieked in a manner that instantly filled her with embarrassment and made her hug herself in a vain attempt to fend off the chill. It was hardly an auspicious start for a mermaid intent upon making a life for herself beneath the surface of the ocean, and she steeled her will to ignore the temperature of the water in favour of the hard fight that lay ahead. "This is it," she deliberately did not look back at Henry as she inched further into the water, determined to spare his emotions and her own dignity as she went. "Wish me luck and pray for some of your own while you're at it." Henry said nothing as she made her way into the deeper waves, the water reaching ever higher until she was forced to begin to actually work against the water. Soon she was more than a ten feet out into the water, arms ploughing as she moved and her tail finally beginning to tell as she swam. Then she was twenty feet out and reaching thirty faster than ever as the advantages of a mermaid in her native element came into play and she truly made her way through the churning waves in the way that she was intended to. He made no effort to move from the spot even as the water reached further up his legs. Instead he watched until the very last glimpse of silver scales against the fading sun was lost to his eyes. Only then did he turn and begin to make his way back up the beach. His thoughts moved with immense effort from the creature he had helped escape and to the heavy pistol that lay in the glove compartment of the limousine. There were only two men in the world that he would have turned the weapon on, and now he had to discover if he knew one of them well enough to be sure that man was capable of killing the other. Jared Largo slipped off his shoes and walked onto the sand as he did at the end of every day. The solitary walk along the beach had become one of the rituals defined his waking hours, something that if asked he would have claimed was a time when he could collect his thoughts and meditate on the events of the past day. In reality he walked the beach and performed a string of other activities between dawn and dusk each day for the sake of having any routine at all. He was also unsure as to whether he could truly have called his strolls along the beach solitary in that as he lived alone, everything he did was technically solitary in nature anyway. Jared hated the fact that he found himself alone with a head that seemed to be filled with nothing any more than other pointless and random thoughts. He could recall hoping that he would find himself again amongst these new surroundings, but so far he had done nothing apart from begin to sink into what he feared was a rambling and confused decline without the structure of obligations to a work life or loved ones nearby. The location in which he had chosen to settle had gone from a serene retreat from the madness of the wider world to a mundane backwater as time passed. It seemed nothing but a cruel irony that he had once planned to retire here with his wife, before she had been taken away from him all those years ago. But in a way he was oddly pleased that she had been spared the depressing realisation that they could have been so wrong about the nature of the place. But of course it was only in his more positive moments that he was able to think in such as way, ascribing the disappointment of the locale solely to her absence when he was in one of his more common dark moods. There had been a brief burst of excitement in the region within the past year though, a supposed item of news that had brought legitimate media attention and the eyes of the world before it inevitably died down and the place was forgotten once more. The story, as far as Jared was aware, went that a local fisherman had been out at sea alone and seen a brief glimpse of something that sent him scurrying back to the mainland filled with wild claims about what he had seen. As outlandish and fanciful as man's story was, he repeated to anyone who would listen the tale of how he had seen a mermaid as plain as the nose on his face. Had the thing stopped there, it would have been nothing more than the deranged rantings of a man who had spent too much time alone at sea. But soon the details of his story were repeated by others who also claimed to have seen the creature, both after the original sighting and some who said they had seen the same thing before him and feared to share their own accounts due to the fantastical nature of the whole thing. Soon the place had come alive with a media circus, attempts to capture the non-existent mermaid and ever more sightings that became stranger and even more far-fetched as the affair ground on. Of course nothing had been found, how could it? And after a few months the whole thing had petered out as the place sank back into quiet obscurity. Now it was almost as if the entire affair had never happened and Jared for one was pleased to see the back of it all. While there might have been nothing in his life that provided him with much excitement, he was nevertheless happier to live outside of such craziness on a daily basis. He reached the end of the beach proper and began to make his way across the beginnings of the rocky outcroppings that lay beyond. From that point the open expanse of the beach gave way to a series of isolated inlets that were flooded at high tide, but when the waters receded revealed a network of picturesque coves. Jared knew the timing of the tides well and estimated that he could make one of the more pleasant of the coves and be back on the safer sands of the beach before the incoming tide would cut him off. Rounding the final arm of rock to arrive at his destination, he caught a hint of movement in the corner of his eye. It was rare, but not unknown to come upon another person already intent upon reaching the same cove while coming this way and Jared was about to shout an apology and turn back towards the beach when he was stopped in his tracks by what he saw before him. Any man in his position would have been surprised beyond reason by the sight of a creature that seemed to be half woman and half fish, reclining in a tidal pool and regarding him with an all too human expression of shock. The realisation that such a thing could be a reality and the questions that it threw up would probably have come long after the initial surprise had run its natural course. But to add to all of that baffling surprise and revelation the fact that Jared was instantly sure he recognised the face of the mermaid upon which he had stumbled elevated the experience beyond the realms of those who claimed to have seen the same thing before him. He stood, rooted to the spot and unable to make the smallest move either towards the mermaid or away from her. But for her own part, the creature seemed to be afflicted by the same problem, frozen in the act of making what looked like a dive for the deeper waters beyond the pool in which she lay. Neither seemed to be fixated upon the body of the other, which may have been harder to fathom in the instance of the man rather than the mermaid. But instead they each scrutinized the face of the other as if trying to discern something in the features that was either hidden or obscured in some way. In the end, it was Jared who broke the silence. "Carla," he had no idea if such a creature could understand him or even speak at all, "am I going crazy, or is that you?" Suddenly the mermaid broke away from his gaze, as if she could not stand to be seen by him for a moment longer. She tensed her body and propelled herself with a strength and agility that amazed him, out of the pool and into the water that lapped against the rocks. "No!" Jared reacted without a second of conscious thought, casting his shoes aside and throwing himself in the same direction in a desperate effort to follow her. But he was not possessed of the same grace as the mermaid and instead tumbled over the rocks she had leapt over. He landed heavily, pain spreading through his body as the jagged edges of the rock lacerated his skin and the force of the impact jarred him to the bone. Trying to ignore the pain, he pulled himself over the rocks, desperate to locate the fleeing mermaid. Every inch he was able to crawl caused him to make a strangled cry of agony, but he would not relent in his efforts. Soon he reached the edge of the water and cast his gaze around, the realisation that she was nowhere to be seen visible in his eyes as he shook his head in frustration and disbelief. Jared laid his head upon the rocks, still and silent. He knew full well that the tide was edging ever closer, but he decided that he did not much care about what happened to him when it did. There was simply no way that he could make sense of what he had seen and then go back to what passed for his life. Either he was insane and did not realise the fact, or even worse the wife that he had thought dead for almost a decade was still alive and breathing. On some level his mind was trying to process the fact that her legs seemed to have been replaced by a tail, but as far as he was concerned that ranked lower in the grand scheme of things. Jared was emotionally hollow, unhappy with the prospect of the life he had ahead of him and most of all he was so tired that he had no reserves of strength with which to simply go on with the struggle of living as things were. He could not place on top of all that such a revelation and he knew that he could not dive into the sea and search for the mermaid he had just glimpsed. So he made up his mind that he would lay there and be swallowed by the tide. He closed his eyes as the water washed over him and unconsciousness took him. Jared had no idea what, if anything he had expected to be the first thing a person might experience in the afterlife, but he was certain somehow that it would not have been the sensation of being pounded mercilessly upon the chest. His eyes sprang open just at the moment that his lungs gave forth the salt-water that had been pooling in them, heaving the liquid out onto the sand before he began to draw in a series of ragged breaths. He rolled onto his side as the feeling of having been kicked in the gut doubled him over and only then did it occur to him to ask the question as to why he was alive at all. A hand appeared in the corner of his vision and then was lost as it yanked his eyelid open in an effort that he could only suppose was intended to check he was reacting to the light and conscious. Jared supposed that he should have been more surprised to see that the hand was webbed with silver and sported nails that could have been mistaken in the wrong light for a set of talons. But somehow he had already made the leap of the mind in which he was sure there could have been only one individual able to rescue him from drowning. "I knew it was you," he was compelled to speak despite the fact he still could not make out the face of the person leaning over him. "Part of me could never believe that you were really gone." His voice was weak from the effects of choking up lungfuls of seawater and the emotion of what he was saying caused it to break further, but he was certain that he had been heard. The sensation of the hand stroking his cheek seemed to confirm his assertion. "Don't be so sure," the voice was at once familiar and yet tinged with something that added a tone that was totally novel to his ears. "I don't think that I'm the same woman you think I am," perhaps it was the flinty strength that he did not remember in the sound, or the resigned ease with which she addressed the reunion between man and wife regardless of the fact that one half of the former partnership seemed to have both returned from the dead and become a different kind of creature entirely. "I don't care," he tried to focus on her face. "So long as even a sliver of the woman that I used to know is still alive then I won't take a step away from you again." Her only response was a choked laugh that ended in what could only have been a cry. Jared's vision was starting to clear as he reached out and gripped her hand. She made no attempt to pull away from his touch and he tried to make sense of the strange feeling of her webbed fingers against his own. "Looks like being a mermaid agrees with you," he marvelled at the sight of her face as she finally met his gaze fully. "You look younger than you did the day we met." "Flatterer," the hint of a smile was beginning to creep onto her face, and most promising of all was the fact that he was sure he recognised the expression as one his wife had often worn back when they had been together. "They gave me some serious surgery, but they changed more than you might think." "I did notice the tail," he glanced down and stroked the surface of her scales, glad again that she did not flinch from his touch. He had not known what to expect when he touched that part of her body, but he found that the feeling of the scales was smooth and warm in a way that made him want to explore the length of her tail. "I was always a fan of your legs, but this is really something else. I think it's very beautiful, if you don't mind me saying so." "No," she blushed, and again he noted it as a positive reaction on her part. "I mean that they changed me on the inside as well. They played with my mind and made me forget the woman that you called your wife. For years I thought I was someone else, and then her memories started to return and I came to the realisation that I was not the person I thought I was, but I wasn't the woman that I had been either. The person that I am now is made up of pieces from both of them and I don't think that I can ever truly be one or the other again." "I can accept that," Jared nodded. "But why are you saying all these things as though you were telling me that you killed someone?" Her Contract Enatails Ch. 04 "You have to understand that I'm not your wife," Carla shook her head. "I haven't come back from the grave to make everything okay. Probably you stumbling on me like that has just made your life a whole lot worse." "I don't care," she could see from the look in his eyes that he was as serious as he could have been. "I came to terms with the fact that my wife was dead. It almost destroyed me, but I made myself go on and no matter what I did there was nothing that could really make me feel like my life was worth going on with. This is going to sound like I'm trying to blackmail you, and maybe I am. Maybe seeing a mermaid with the face of my dead wife has snapped my mind. But there's no half measures for me as far as you're concerned. Either you feel the way that I do and stay with me, or I walk into the sea and let myself drown. You saved me once before and you might do it again no matter what you think of me, but you can't watch me forever and I'll keep trying to take my life one way or another. I just need you to understand that without you my life lost all meaning and knowing that you are alive and out there now is not something that I can just go on living with lodged in my head." For a moment he thought that he had gone too far, that she would simply slip away into the waves and be gone forever. But instead her eyes filled with tears and she looked out to sea, as if scared of something that lay out across the waters, invisible to all but her. "You don't know how lonely life out there is, how hard as well. There were times when I almost died and times when I nearly gave up and tried to do the same thing as you. I never thought I'd miss human contact as much as I have, not after what I went through. But I can't come back with you and live in an apartment, not when I'm less than human." The words were painful for Carla to speak for the genuine loneliness that she mentioned and also because she found that she truly wanted to stay with this quite, humble man who seemed to long for her mere presence. The loss of human contact that she had been forced to endure during the years she had spent living in the sea and along the coast had taxed her mind greatly. She had snatched the rare encounter with a human being in situations that she had been able to control and judge were worth the risk, seducing a lost and drunken wandered from a beach party whom she was sure would chalk her up to his state of inebriation and even taking advantage of a shipwrecked sailor on more than one occasion whom she had doubts would ever be rescued or believed if he were. Now she had come face to face with a man who lived in her memories and was almost as singly devoted to her as she had been to her former master. Had there been anyway that she could have taken him with her then she would have done so. But how could she live in the small urban apartment that her former human self remembered? "The apartment?" Jared sounded amused. "You really must be something other than human if you think I'm still living there! It's been more than a decade, things have changed since the days we lived in the city. How did you think that I came to be wandering along a beach out here?" Carla gave him a look that seemed to urge him on. "I got a new job pretty soon after you died," he shook his head and laughed. "I'm sorry, it just sounds so strange to actually be saying that to someone. Anyway, it was a hard job, but the pay was good and I made some headway into climbing the ranks before the whole thing came crashing down thanks to some corruption or scandal at the top. I was lucky enough to get out with a fair settlement, enough to buy myself a place not far from here that I planned to grow old in. It's not much to look at, but it backs onto the beach and the nearest neighbour is far enough away not to really count as a neighbour at all." He looked at her appealingly. Carla realised that there was nothing that she say to argue against his proposal. Here was everything that she wanted as well as everything that she needed in the form of a man whom she was sure possessed nothing but a good soul and an enduring love for the human woman that she had once been. How could she refuse him? She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye, but was surprised when he leaned forward and took her in a fierce embrace that resulted in a passionate kiss. Carla reacted to the contact with his body and found herself unable to do anything except return his affection. "I can't promise a happy ending," she held his hands and imploring him to listen to her as she spoke. "We're both different people from the couple who were married all those years ago, but maybe we can make a fresh start as the people we are now and go from there?" "I don't think I could have put it better myself," Jared bent to scoop the mermaid up from the sand and she was unable to stop herself noting the fact that he did so with little sign of trouble, hinting that he would be able to accommodate her needs when the time came. "Might seem like an ungentlemanly thing to say," he glanced down at Carla's naked breasts as they he carried her along the beach, "but I can never recall these things being that large in the past." "If you think those are something," Carla could not help laughing, "wait until you see the rest of the package." "You don't say? "Oh, but I do!" As they made their way up the beach in the fading light, Carla found herself strangely delighted at the prospect of the discoveries that he was about to make. It would be a new experience for her to be making her own a man who was in awe of and worshipped her rather than using her sexuality as a weapon to control another. This would be a voyage of discovery for them both.