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MY FAVORITE LINKS:
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MY RESIDENCE INFO:
City: Burnham on sea
State/Country: Somerset
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BOOKS PUBLISHED:
 The first book about Retishella mermaid is now available on Amazon.
opening chapter
Retishella the mermaid was feeling strange. Her skin was starting to wrinkle up like the face of a walrus. More worrying still was the fact that she couldn’t control the colour of her eyes and hair. This was very annoying and potentially dangerous because a merperson who can’t control their colour can’t show others how he or she is feeling. Her hair and eyes were changing from red to purple to blue to grey to green to yellow again and again, and it was making her feel quite dizzy. She leant on a seabed rock until the feeling passed.
When it did she pulled out her comb and mirror to try and sooth her troubled hair. It was then that she noticed something that turned her warm blue blood to ice. Her hair and eyes had lost their colour. Both had gone from a healthy range of vibrant colours to a sludge brown that did not change. Now she knew how it felt to be a landish girl.
She tried to swim, but felt too weak. By the time she managed to flip and flop across the sea bed back to her merfamily cave she was beginning to panic. Her mother came to meet her and Retishella saw her mother’s hair and eyes turn black with shock.
“Retishella, what on earth is wrong?”
“Mother,” croaked Retishella, “Help me”.
“Seeley!” Retishella’s mother called for her other daughter, “ Fetch your father. There’s something wrong with Retishella and I’m taking her to the Ocean Room”.
She gently picked up Retishella and swam out into the blue-green ocean until they came to a gap, like a wide crack in the rocky seabed. Retishella’s mother started to swim down the bottomless gully and the deeper they went, the darker it got. Just when it was almost too dark to see they stopped on a ledge cut into the rock. Retishella was feeling very tired, and although her eyes were closed she could hear her mother sing the rock door song. She heard a scraping, grating noise and opened her eyes to see a huge boulder slide into the side of the rockwall. Behind it was an amazing room.
The first thing Retishella noticed was that the room was huge. She looked up and could not see the ceiling, it was too far above them. The room was round, like an enormous bell, and roughly cut out of the sandy-brown rock. Chopped into the vast walls were thousands of little alcoves, each one labelled with the spirals and squiggles that made up mermaid writing. Retishella’s mother read several labels and stopped by one that described Retishella’s illness. She reached inside the alcove, took out a rock, and read the instructions on it.
If a mermaid has lost her colour
‘Tis a very serious thing
She must go and find the dolphins
And dance with the dolphin king.
Retishella mermaid discovers that the only way to cure her of
her mystery illness is a trip across the ocean to find the Dolphin King.
The journey is a memorable one, where Retishella and her father encounter
kindness and brutality in equal measures from the sea creatures they meet
on the way.
But the most memorable part of the whole journey is Retishella's meeting
with the Dolphin King, an event she will always treasure.
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This is the opening chapter of book 2 in the Retishella series, and is in need of a good publisher!
It was on the seabed in a bare spot. No grey rocks, no sea creatures, just brown sand and IT. Retishella mermaid found it by nearly falling over it. She was hurrying because she had sat for too long on the storm-making rock; brewing up walls of seething seawater and creating towers of angry black cloud with her mermaid song. She was having great fun moulding and guiding the storm until she realised with a start that she was late. “Oh no!” Retishella cried looking down at the dials on her crystal time reader. “Mother, I forgot!” She had promised her mother that she would be home in time for dinner and realised that if she didn’t hurry that wasn’t going to happen. She stopped abruptly when she collided with something round and hard.
“Ow!” she cried out, rubbing her torn tail fin, which was stinging with pain.
“Stupid rock!” she exclaimed and leant down to examine the obstacle. But no sooner had her angry words left her lips than her eyes caught a flash of brilliant orange and she stopped in her tracks, hair and eyes yellow with curiosity. She cautiously reached out and picked up the thing that she had tripped on. It was a bright orange shell, unlike any shell she had ever seen before. It was huge, bigger than both her hands, a hollow, smooth, shiny spiral with a hole in one end. It twinkled and sparkled fiery orange like sunset on the surface of the sea. It was beautiful.
“Oh!” Retishella crooned though there was no one around to hear her. “It is so lovely.” She decided there and then that it would brighten up the cave near her hammock next to her collection of rocks and crystals shaped like dolphins. She just knew she had to keep it. She imagined the reaction from all her friends if she took it to school to show them. She had never seen anyone bring a shell like this to school before, she’d be the most popular mermaid in her class; no, the most popular mermaid in the whole school.
First of all though, she had to get it home. She lifted it up, noticing that although it looked light it was quite heavy. She tucked it under her arm where it rested against her body, stretching from her underarm to the palm of her hand. When her fingers securely clasped the bottom edge of the shell, with a push of her strong tail Retishella lopsidedly lolloped in the direction of her family cave.
At home, Retishella showed the shell to her brothers and sister. Their hair glowed yellow with curiosity and each one of them took a turn to hold it.
“I’ve never seen a hollow shell as big as this one before!” exclaimed Retishella’s oldest brother Jofin, picking the shell up easily with a swoop of his strong hands and holding it up to the light of the glowfish tank to get a better view.
“Yeah,” laughed Tomlid, looking up at the shell his brother held, “too sparkly for me, yuk!”
Jofin passed the shell back to Retishella. “Come on Tomlid, let’s go tell Father!” Jofin playfully pushed his brother with a flap of his shiny tail and the merboys bounded off in a noisy tussle.
Retishella’s younger sister Seeley was more circumspect.
“Can I hold it?” she asked, unable to take her eyes off the mesmerising shell. She lifted it out of Retishella’s hands and stumbled slightly under the weight.
“Oh Seeley,” giggled Retishella, supporting the bottom of the shell in case her sister let go, “It’s nearly up to your middle, far too big for you to carry!” Seeley grimaced at Retishella’s words; sometimes she hated being the youngest. She turned her attention back to the shell and with a chubby finger traced the spiral pattern round and round.
They were interrupted by the sound of their mother’s voice behind them.
“There you are girls; I’ve been looking for you. I need you to collect some more breakwater weed to cook for dinner.”
“Mother, look what Retishella’s found, isn’t it fine?” Seeley mused, still hardly able to take her eyes off the sparkling orange sphere.
Their mother was not so impressed.
“It is not like the shells we normally get round here, Retishella,” she warned, flashes of light blue in her hair and eyes showing she had her misgivings about this strange shell.
“Oh Mother,” said Retishella wistfully, “I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Can I keep it? Please!”
“Hm I don’t know, I’ve got a funny feeling about it. Why would anyone leave such a valuable-looking shell on the middle of the seabed? I’m not so sure.”
Retishella gathered up the shell and started to slouch off; her crestfallen face a picture of misery. “Oh Retishella my maid,” her mother sympathised, putting a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “How about if we take it to Mersia tomorrow?”
Mersia was their merrow, a wise and sensitive mermaid.
“If she says it’s OK,” continued Retishella’s mother, “you can keep it.” Reluctantly Retishella agreed and handed the shell to her mother who put it away in a cupboard.
That night as Retishella lay on her hammock trying to sleep she heard a new, sad noise. It sounded like a mergirl crying with desperate, deep slurpy sobs. She got up and swam to her sister’s hammock to see if she was making this upsetting sound, but Seeley was sleeping soundly with great bubbly snores, her sparkling green hair showing she was dreaming deeply. Retishella went back to bed and closed her eyes but she could still hear the disturbing noise; it seemed to be swimming around the cave and swirling around her head. The sadness in the sound was so profound, as if it was coming from deep within the coldest depths of the heart of the creature making it. It was so poignant and touching that Retishella found herself crying without even knowing why. She realised it was pointless trying to sleep until she found out what it was, so she got up from her hammock, and groggily followed the sound trail of the sobbing noise.
She floated into the main cave. The sound was coming from the cupboard where her mother put the orange shell. The dozy sleepiness she had felt up to now drained away from her and blue flashes of nervous excitement caught in her green hair and eyes as she swam over and opened the cupboard door.
In the dim light of the warm blazepebbles still glowing in the grate, Retishella peered at the shell on the bottom shelf of the cupboard. For a moment she wondered if it was the same shell she had found the day before. It was the same shape, the same size, with the same spiral pattern that wound from the central point to the edge of the shell. “Yes,” thought Retishella, “it certainly looks like the same shell.”
But there was one important difference. Instead of glimmering a deep, sparkly orange, it was glowing a throbbing purple. Retishella bent down to reach it and recoiled with a startled flash of red hair as she realised that the crying sound was coming from the shell! Dark green blobby drips were oozing from the large oval hole at the end of the spiral like globby tears. Retishella cautiously laid a testing hand on the shell before picking it up. As she lifted the shell from the cupboard the loud sobbing turned to a noisy wail. Retishella didn’t know what to do. She hugged it to her like her mother would have done if she or Seeley were hurt.
“Whatever is wrong?” she asked and then felt silly talking to a shell. But she nearly dropped the shell through shock when it answered her in a small, thin, reedy voice; “I want to go home! Please, someone, take me hooowwwmmme!” Then it groaned and wailed, even louder than before.
“Where is your home?” asked Retishella gently, trying to be helpful.
“Blackrock Ridge” came the tedious whiny voice, calming down rapidly, “do you know where that is?”
“Yes,” replied Retishella, fingering the white dolphin-shaped stone in her tail purse that had been given to her by the Dolphin King. It was her most treasured possession and somehow touching it helped to calm her nerves. She attempted to swallow her feelings of alarm but her hair gave her away by turning a fretful blue. She had always been told by her mother and father not to go anywhere near Blackrock Ridge. She heard her mother’s words of warning echo in her head: “Merpeople disappear there and are never seen again.”
“Well I can’t take you there, it’s too dangerous,” said Retishella sensibly, “I’ll get my mother or father to take you in the morning”.
The shell wailed louder, and spread tearful droplets again, making drab green clouds in the cavewater.
“I can’t wait until the morning,” it moaned hysterically. “I came over this way to get some breakwater weed for my mother who needs it to make a medicine. I must get it back to her before dawn, and now I’m lost.”
“Well I suppose I could take you near to Blackrock Ridge,” said Retishella thinking out loud, “ but I’m not allowed to go all the way there.”
The sobbing stopped suddenly, as if it had been switched off. “Thank you kind mermaid,” whined and grated the voice, “my mother will reward you well.” The orange shell continued more urgently; “Come on then, let’s go, please hurry!”
“I must just tell someone where I’m going, or at least leave a note,” replied Retishella prudently, her hair turning an apprehensive darker blue.
“We haven’t got time,” insisted the shell. “The sun will begin to break the surface of the water in an hour, and we have a long way to go. When we get there I’ll ask someone to send a message to your mother and father and they can come and get you. Now come on!”
The shell sounded desperate and determined and Retishella felt that she couldn’t say no. She tied her seaweed tail purse around her middle, slipped a bright young glowfish into a clear crystal jar, picked up the shell and with a push of her strong tail, moved silently out of the cave.
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