By Woody Whittick
He’s on the very edge.
He can flee no further, because the dinghy he keeps moored on this bleak coast has disappeared.
He daren’t attempt to swim to the mainland. Not because he fears the finnfolk, the legendary mareel, or the dreaded sul-bregdi sea monster – being a marine ecologist, he’s not damnfool enough to believe in folklore. As he often explains, tales of selkies, kelpies and the like were simply the crude mechanism whereby ignorant people in bygone times warned of underestimating aquatic fauna.
However, he’s wary of real-world hazards. Killer whales lurk in these murky waters, and seals hunt in packs, swallowing their prey whole. What’s more, Yell Sound’s mighty, unpredictable currents are notorious. Countless boats have foundered over time, and many men have lost their lives.
It’s an unforgiving place.
What’s that sound? Distant sirens, or just a trick of his guilty mind?
Based on recent events, and not having slept, he fears his judgement is unsound, and with the rising sun in his eyes and the blustering wind in his ears it’s hard to tell what’s real… but if they have found her body, they will be coming for him, blue lights flashing.
How could such an enlightened man as himself commit such visceral piracy? It’s unfathomable. He is wracked with guilt. He knows no means no. He never meant to hurt her. He’d promised to take things slowly, but for pity’s sake, a man like him’s quite the catch so she should have been eager. He grew impatient and allowed himself to be swept away on a tide of… well, entitlement, he supposes.
Afterwards, she wailed that she’d never forgive him. How could he be sure she wouldn’t tell? How else could he depend on her silence? In that moment, he had no choice, and did what had to be done.
He focusses on his senses, anchoring himself in the here and now to avoid panicking about what he did, and what the hell he’s going to do next.
He hearkens to the mesmerising rhythm of the waves, slowing his respiration in time with their whispering susurrus of salt, surf and foam.
Spent mermaid’s purses rattle in the rockpools as the sea breathes in and out.
The air tastes of tears. It’s pungent with iodine and the brimstone stench of decaying seaweed, straggled microalgae sicked-up by the ocean. He understands these rootless organisms and mutters the names of those he can see, as a litany to steady himself: encrusted red, black bladderwrack, sea-thong, gutweed, furbelows, red rags, undertongue.
Kelpy frond-fingers reach through the brine, stirring the barren pallid sand, that cruel crush of erstwhile stones and shells, the calcified white of dead red maerl, flotsam, jetsam and shipwreck bones, all pestled to a fine meal by the inevitable, relentless density of the ocean.
There is a quickening, and the white horses of the seventh wave crash in, pushing into the shoreline, saturating the peat to a dense blackness, as if pronouncing a verdict on his conduct: there is black and there is white, there can never be any grey.
The low red sun glares at him, appalled.
The screaming of a gull shrills his nerves.
No, not a gull, it is a girl, look, a woman. She’s crying, beyond distraught.
Her hair is matted like black scour weed, blown against the stark whiteness of her face and the blue flash of her eyes. She is drenched, her red dress clinging to her legs, flapping wetly around her ankles like a mermaid’s tail. There’s something profoundly alluring about her, almost bewitching.
She is all the colours of his regret.
He is flushed backwards into the tangled seaweed, and winded by the impact. Something inside him breaks with the wave. He finds he cannot abide the sight of someone so overwrought, literally cannot bear to witness her abandonment to utter distress. Something caused this abject grief. Someone. Somebody like him. How dare he?
He thinks back to last night. To that other lovely woman. To his terrible crime.
He finds that he is weeping. He cannot remember ever sobbing like this, even as a child. He cannot stop. He is heaving with it, gagging, a mess of snot and terrible wailing breathless remorse.
He flails and flounders in the shallows, snarled in fetid weed, conscious how poetic this is for such a pathetic hollow-souled creature as himself. He knows he must somehow try to put things right. This beautiful lady must know that she matters, she is valued, loved.
Now he is certain he hears the keening wailowai of sirens.
Oh, now she is in the sea. She is drowning herself. Please don’t, no…
The seals are closing in – will she be torn apart in the roiling waves before she even loses consciousness?
What a miracle that he is here to stop this. It is surely fate: a chance of atonement, of undoing his wrongs. He must rescue her, to mitigate his sin, to save his sorry soul.
No – to save her, nothing else matters.
He whales into the sea, wailing and yelling, I am coming.
This will be his undoing.
Redress must be paid, and the mermaids’ purses will be replenished.
The gulls’ ha-ha-haa at his gullibility is the last sound he hears, for the merfolk’s stratagem has worked, the shapeshifter has duped him, and his fate is sealed.
Thrashed by muscular tails, slashed by fins, scraped raw by the silver scales of justice, he is tangled in silky selkie hair, choking on red rags and undertongue-weed, caught in the riptide by merciless mer-beasts, undertowed down to the gloomy depths, where silence reigns and the vengeance of the sisterhood is cold.
FOOTNOTES:
‘Yell Sound’ is the water between mainland Shetland and the peat-covered Isle of Yell, named for its pale sandy beaches (‘Yell’ originates from Norse words meaning ‘white’ or ‘barren’.)
GLOSSARY
All the flora and fauna listed (whether ‘real’ or mythological), are reportedly to be found in Yell Sound and/or on the Isle of Yell.
Black bladderwrack: a seaweedwithround air bladders which allow it to float upright underwater, helping it to absorb nutrients when submerged.
Black scour weed: a form of seaweed resembling matted hair, also known as Landlady’s Wig.
Brimstone: archaic word for sulphur, whose smell is reminiscent of rotten eggs, bad breath and skunk musk.
Encrusted red: adeep pinky-red coloured seaweed, which is soft but not floppy.
Finnfolk: amphibious mythical sorcerers from the folklore of Shetland and Orkney. They have the power to calm seas or send storms.
Flotsam & Jetsam: almost always referred to as a pairing, flotsam is the floating wreckage from a sunken ship, and jetsam is cargo jettisoned from a foundering ship in the hope of preventing it sinking. The two are sadly often found together after a ship has gone down.
Furbelows: a frilly-edged seaweednamed for its resemblance to the archaic word for a flounce on the edge of a skirt or petticoat.
Gutweed: a seaweed consisting of inflated tubular fronds, which is abundant in areas of brackish water.
Kelp: a type of seaweed that grows in underwater forests.
Kelpie: atreacherous mythical water horse which can shapeshift into human form.
Litany: a list of words, phrases or invocations recited in a ritual fashion.
Mareel: a malevolent sea devil that takes the form of a huge fish with many eyes and a crest of flame along its back. It is strongly linked to the natural phenomenon of sea phosphorescence, which the Shetland folk also call mareel.
Mer-beasts: mythical beasts of the sea, such as sea-serpents and the other creatures featured in ‘Yell Sound’. ‘Mer’ derives from the Old English word ‘mere’ meaning sea (like the French word ‘mer’).
Merfolk: mermaids, mermen, and other sea-based mythical people.
Mermaid: amythical sea-creature whose top half is a woman, and whose bottom half is a fish.
Mermaid’s purse: the colloquial name for the keratinous egg-cases of chimaeras (cartilaginous fish such as ‘ghost sharks’), which are often found washed up on beaches and which resemble small leathery pouches.
Red maerl: a type of algae (pronounced to rhyme with ‘pearl’) which resembles coral due to its hard external skeleton. When alive it is pinky-red to reddish-purple, but when dead it calcifies and turns white.
Red rags: a tough, leathery seaweed with flattened leaf-like fronds.
Riptide: a dangerous area of strongly moving water in the sea, where two or more currents meet from different directions.
Sea-thong: a seaweed with spaghetti-like fronds that grow up to 2 metres long.
Selkie: amythical shapeshifting mer-creature which can change form from a seal to a human (usually an irresistibly beautiful man or woman) by casting off its skin, which it leaves concealed on the shore so it can return to the sea.
Seventh wave: traditionally,one wave in everyseven is said to be more powerful than the rest, and to encroach further inland.
Siren: a mythical creature, part woman and part bird, whose enchanting songs bewitch men and lure them to their doom.
Sul-bregdi: a malicioussea monster, responsible for sinking ships.
Undertongue: a membranous, leafy red seaweed.
Undertow: a dangerous underwater current which is moving in a different direction from the surface.
Wailowai: a Middle English word for a lamentation or exclamation of profound sorrow.
White horses: cresting white waves, often associated with sea deities.
Woody Whittick
Picture credit: By Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14454464
This is the original version of a story which appears in the YSJU Folklore Anthology 2026