The Ring

FIFTEEN

[RAPHAEL'S POV]

Back in Mexico, where I come from and used to live, I was only five when my dad returned home with a rescue team, looking weak, tired and malnourished. My mom wrapped her arms around him and they cried, because they'd missed each other.
       
I didn't know why they were being extremely emotional. As far as I knew, he'd not been around for just four days. I tugged on my father's shirt and innocently asked why they were shedding tears, but all he did was engulf me in his arms and kiss me all over. No one was explaining to me what was going on.
    
But on the day my father went to sea, at Playa El Pamar, one of the men I see him go to fish with came running home with a worried look on his face. It looked like he had some important news to give. But as usual, my mother asked my older sister to take me to the room so that we don't listen to whatever they're saying.
     
But I got curious when my father didn't return home that night. So I asked my mother, and she said he was having a bad fishing day. She said they weren't having a good catch and so he had to stay another day or two.

One day, not too long after he returned, my father decided that he was going to quit fishing. Everyone was shocked when he made that announcement. I knew he loved fishing, he was even teaching me to become like him. He then revealed a treasure he had found in the sea- a bright, gold ring with a shiny blue jewel in the center.

I listened as he told my mother and sister that he could sell the ring, get money from it and we'll live a better life. Everyone liked the idea, including me. I was finally leaving the slums in Zihuantanejo to a better place somewhere in Mexico City. I'd always wanted to know what the city looked like. But I didn't know the consequences of my father's actions which were yet to unravel.

After one week, we moved to Mexico City. My father was very rich, because he sold the ring for a lot of money. He engaged in a new lucrative job and things were going on well with us.

Not until one day, in 2000, two years after my father's fortune, we heard screams from my parents' bedroom, only to find my father lifeless on my mother's body, bleeding all over. My mother was weeping over his body. My sister, Camila, told me he had died.

Two years later, when I was nine, my mom died too... the same way. The only difference was that my sister and I were there during her last few minutes, and she whispered certain things to Camila and slipped a note into her hand.

I spent the next ten years with my sister, she being ten years older than me, played the role of a mother towards me. We got really close.

But during those ten years, there were strange happenings in the house. Lights were turning on and off, the room could get flooded with water from nowhere, and my sister woke up yelling from her every sleep, saying she was having nightmares. She said she was hearing voices in her head, and some sort of mermaid creature kept talking to her in her sleep.

She wouldn't tell me whatever she was told, but I was always scared. The problem was, my nineteen year old self couldn't do anything about it.

I returned from school one day, and found her in the bathroom, gasping for her.

She kept saying: "Raphael, I'm drowning." But there was no water around. It was sun dry in there. I however managed to get some words out of her before she finally died in my arms.

I got to know the whole truth.

It turns out my father drowned back in 1998 when he had gone to sea. I found a newspaper in my sister's room, proving that. A rescue team found him three days later and brought him home. Down there in the sea, he was rescued by mermaids who revived him with a magical ring, that which he'd brought home.

The problem was, he didn't 'find' the ring as a treasure, he stole it. And one of the mermaids' souls were trapped in that ring. So once my father stole it away, she died, and her sister had come here for revenge.

Camila said she'd been haunting our parents every night, asking for the ring back, but my father had already sold it out. This made her kill both our parents and now she wanted to destroy everything they possessed and loved. Everything they'd gained from selling the ring, including me and Camila.

My father had written his encounter on a note which my mother gave to Camila before she died. And I have the note... and the newspaper.

I got visited by the mermaid one day. I thought she was going to kill me, but instead she gave me an assignment which was worse than dying. She said my life was going to be spared, because I was the only one who could find the ring and return it to her.

That... was a hell of a task.