Without speech and, essentially, without limbs there was of course nothing she could do. The maid reached up and pulled something down from the ceiling. It was a long plastic tube. She rolled Bethany onto her back with her foot, leaned down and jammed the tube into Bethany's mouth. Bethany could feel it inside the tube that was already there, and the maid worked it even further down until it felt like it was in her lungs. It hurt a little and felt like she was choking. She felt a click and, for a terrible moment, she couldn't breathe. Then the maid pressed a button somewhere and air was pushed into her lungs, then sucked out, and then pushed in again. The machine was breathing for her! She coughed and gagged. "Better not to do that." said the maid. "It won't do any good and just hurt."
Bethany kicked and wriggled, but it was no good. The maid walked off into the darkness, leaving Bethany alone. Suddenly the metal mesh under Bethany flipped open and she was falling. No! She plummeted into the water with a splash. Instinctively she kicked her legs to try and surface, but the fins on her feet made her move in a way she wasn't used to and she cracked her head painfully on the glass wall of the tank.
Somehow she managed to roll so that she was facing upwards. She could see a circular section of the ceiling, the same size as the tank, slowly descending. It was the lid of her prison, and was featureless metal except for where her breathing tube entered, a tiny square hatch and the spotlight. She couldn't do anything to prevent the lid locking in place on the tank and sealing her inside.
"Welcome to your new home!" she heard through her earpieces. "You'll soon get the hang of swimming around, and your tube is long enough for you to reach any part of your tank. You might get a bit bored in the first week, but you'll soon get used to it and you'll look forward to seeing the infrequent visitors we bring down here. You'll be pathetically desperate for attention. And in a few years, if you're well behaved, we might even put another mermaid in there to keep you company." |