Highway to Hell - Commish.

It was Sarah's first day behind the wheel. The brown-eyed young lady was driving one of her brother's older cars - a blue Volkswagon Golf that had clearly seen better days. She backed the rain-dirtied car out of the garage and headed out of town. It did not matter where she was going; she would stop at any place that looked interesting along the road.

No sooner had Sarah left the driveway when a single snowflake fluttered upon her windshield. Five more followed. Twenty. One hundred. Two thousand. Her windshield was soon covered in white. A single swish of the wipers allowed her to see again.

"Great," Sarah said. She may have been a first-time driver, but she knew that snow made everything worse on the road. As her wipers swished the falling snow off, it became heavier and heavier. What had started with a single snowflake became a blizzard as soon as she reached the highway.

"Crap..." Sarah tried to see a turnaround up ahead. Reversing on a highway was a bad idea. She would have to get to an exit and head back out the other way.

Suddenly, a cold wind blew against her windshield. Norway was naturally cold, but it was almost as if a bird mixed with a snowball had flung itself her way. It did not cause any damage, but was still startling enough to make the new driver steer away from it.

"YAH!" Sarah suddenly turned the steering wheel. She swerved away from where it had hit. Her car began skidding on the icy pavement, sending more snow into the sky.  She had gone off the highway - way off the highway - and into a field of white. She stopped when she heard her car crunching upon the snow.

The way in front of her was white. There were no clouds, no fields - nothing to tell her that she was still on the road. For all she knew, she could have been driving into a sheet of paper. It was a complete whiteout.

"Well...maybe if I can just find my way back to the road..." Sarah thought. She pushed her foot on the pedal and tried to drive again. The car roared to life, but still went out of her control in mere seconds.

"AAAAH!" Sarah's screams echoed throughout the frozen wasteland. She flew across the ice in her car. The wheels were touching the surface, but no matter what buttons she pushed or what switches she flicked, she could not steer them.

The next sound she heard was a menacing crunch beneath her wheels. She soon saw droplets of water upon her window. There were more creaks as the icy path she had just been on drifted away from her. Soon, she saw nothing but darkness and the interior of her car around her.

"Not good..." she said. She soon regretted saying anything; her air was going to run out. Already, water was seeping in through the windshield. There was only a bubble of air keeping the car from plummeting to the bottom.

Before Sarah knew it, she was up to her neck in icy water. The car was slowly filling, belching bubbles out of its doors. She could feel her legs going numb with cold.

She did the only thing she could think of:  unlock her seat belt, open the doors, and try to swim out. Clicking the seat belt apart was easy enough, but the door handles were already icy cold. Prying it open was like trying to break an ice cube with one's bare hands.

There was a click, followed by more bubbles, as Sarah got out of the car. She stared up at the pinpoint of light that she had crashed through. Part of her wanted to wait for her vehicle to clunk on the bottom.  She shook her head; no time to wait.

Swim,, she thought. Her brown hair swirled around her face as she tried to move her body the right way. She tried copying Olympic swimmers that she had seen on T.V., but her body refused to move that way. Instead, her form favored dog-paddling up and swimming almost like a dolphin.

Sarah was swimming. She did not know how she was swimming in the icy cold water, but she was swimming. She swam, with all her might, back up to the patch of white called the surface. It got easier and easier as she got closer and closer to the light.

Just before she breached, Sarah thought she felt something. She tried to ignore it, but looked down once to see her blood clouding the icy water. The next thing ahead of her was a patch of white that she never thought she would be happy to see again.

"Hah...ah..." Sarah panted, breathing steam upon the frigid air.

She looked back at the crack her vehicle had made. Her attention was instantly drawn to a pink-scaled, fishlike tail that had encapsulated her waist. It moved much like a dolphin's; that explained her sudden ability to swim. Exactly how and why it had happened was another matter entirely.

"What? Why am I a mermaid?!" she asked no one. It was not necessarily a bad thing, but she still wanted to know what had happened.

OK, Sarah told herself. Calm down. No matter how much she reassured herself, she had trouble calming down. A million questions assailed her: Where was she? What was she doing here? Why was she suddenly a mermaid - a pink mermaid at that? One question led to another as she tried to piece things together, only to tangle themselves into a gargantuan, messy ball of queries.

Her train of thought only stopped when another voice reached her ears.

"Hmph. Stupid humans, wandering into my river..."

Sarah turned towards the source of the voice. It was snappy and shrill, almost like the bark of a small dog that could somehow talk. Its owner looked, at first, like a moving speck on the icy horizon. When it got closer, the battalion of questions attacked Sarah once again.

Sarah could not properly describe the thing she saw before her. At first glance, one could almost mistake her for a lady in a fur coat; then, after a closer look, they would see that the fur was growing all over her nubile body. Round ears like a ferret's poked out of her mane of white hair. Longer fur protected her clawed feet from the cold. She had a fluffy tail, white like the rest of her, that swished down to her ankles. Like a human, she walked on two feet and had curves that fit a mustelid nicely.

"Dear me," the ferret said. "It seems your car has made quite a dent in Cocytus."

"Err...sorry..." Sarah said. "I'm really, really sorry." She did not mention that her piscine body was sticking to the ice like some horrible, inseparable Velcro fastener.   How the hell did she become a mermaid, anyways?

"I'm amazed you managed to survive," the ferret stated. "Most people die when they hit the water down there. I'm surprised they didn't drag you under..."

Sarah was frozen from both fear and cold. She did not know what this bizarre creature -demon?- had in mind for her.

"So, umm...can you turn me back into a human and give me a lift home?" Sarah asked.

"You turned yourself into a mermaid, dear. There's nothing I can do about that," the ferret said.

"Huh?"

The ferret tapped on Sarah's head. "Is there anything in there? You wanted to survive, so you turned yourself into a mermaid. It probably seems weird to you, but everything is weird by human standards!"

"I see," Sarah looked at her tail. The tips of her fins were still swaying in the water. The rest of her body was slowly freezing with a layer of ice crystals that looked like powdered sugar. "So...about that trip home..."

"Oh noooo," the ferret said, holding up a furry finger. "Y'see...nobody who finds Cocytus ever leaves. Most of them freeze and sink into the ice right away."

Sarah began imagining it. If she had not been able to swim up, she would probably have slowly died of drowning, hypothermia, or both. Then she would have slowly frozen atop the icy water she had uncovered. It made her shiver on the inside, as if the chilling wind was not enough.

"So...what do you intend to do with me?" the mermaid asked.

The ferret looked to the gap Sarah's car had made. "Fix it," she said.

Sarah looked at the crack, bewildered. "How?"

"With your body," the ferret said. She got onto all fours, baring her teeth. Sarah wondered what she was doing until she began sucking cold air in through her pointed mouth.

"What the-?!"  Sarah tried to move back into the water. She was as clumsy on land as a seal; the most she could do was try and wriggle her way back into the depths. She was so preoccupied with escaping that she did not notice a ball of blue, crystalline energy forming in the ferret's jaws.

A blast of that energy hit her tail. In an instant, her fins were sealed in a block of crystal-clear ice. They floated there, bobbing like ice cubes in iced tea. All Sarah could do was look at her frozen fins before diving back under the water again.

She tried to swim away, but there was no point. It acted like the world's craziest bungee cord; Sarah had been just about to dive down farther when her fins, now encased in an ice cube, sent her rocketing back up to the surface. Her brown eyes were wide with shock as she stared at her encapsulated tail fin. It felt like the tip of her tail would break off at any second.

"How convenient for me," the ferret said. "You're right where I want you." Her claws scraped against the icy surface of Cocytus as she got into firing position again. Sarah tried to swim away, but the ice block that was once a mermaid's tail fin was too cumbersome. The most she could do was flail her way to the edge and hope to get back under the water.

She almost got beneath Cocytus's icy surface. No sooner had she drifted beneath the ice when something slashed her face.  Now that she was able to breathe underwater, she could see that a wrinkled human hand had reached down from the ice and marked her with three red gashes.

"AGH!" she suddenly swam backwards in surprise. Her frozen tail clunked against the ice of Cocytus. She thought she heard another crack. Now she was really in for it.

"No good!" she heard from above. She poked her head upward, still bleeding from that scratch. "Now you will be stuck in this river forever. No chance of escape!"

Sarah poked her head out of the water to object.  The ferret was prepared.

"MMPH!" Sarah tried to say something, but instead cracked her teeth against a ball gag made of solid ice. The ferret tied the device around Sarah's head.

"Now stay still," she said. "This will hurt a lot."

Sarah tried to get back underwater. The ferret had already started charging another ice ray in preparation. By some miracle, she managed to enclose Sarah's hands in a band of ice, which then stuck to her back. The band clunked against the frozen part of Cocytus, again holding her back like a dog on a leash.

Sarah wanted to cry out. The ball gag insisted on doing its job. The mermaid was unable to speak as she watched that she-devil's silhouette circling her from above like a shark on the ice.

"You can't escape your faaate, y'know," she said. It was hard to hear her words, but Sarah suspected that she had a plan. "If you wandered here, it must have been fate, after all."

Sarah stood perfectly still. Surely the demon above must have noticed that her mermaid quarry was stationary.

"It's your fate to be frozen here," she said. "Even if you try to run from it, fate will never let you go. I may be a demon, but do you think I like being here all the time, seeing nothing but white? Of course not! I hate it! So suck it up and deal; you might like it more than I do."

Sarah thought about it beneath the ice. Presently, she was prevented from going any further thanks to her frozen tail. Even if she did manage to shake that ferret off by some miracle, she would starve. Then, she would probably freeze and fill the gap anyways. No matter what Sarah did, she would end up above the surface, frozen.

The block of ice circled the edge of the crack. Shortly after it had migrated to the opposite side, Sarah's brown-haired head poked out of the water. The ferret walked over to the edge of the crack, looking down at the mermaid.

"Well?" The ferret's pink eyes looked into Sarah's. Sarah, with her mouth bound and gagged, could only nod.

A smile curved the lips on the white ferret's muzzle. She charged another bolt of icy blue energy in her teeth. This time, Sarah did not even try to dodge.

Well, I guess this is it, she thought. The bolt of icy energy moved in a zigzag from her tail up. She wanted to scream, but the gag had frozen her mouth shut.

Sarah felt her body going cold. Until then, she had been magically insulated; now, the icy energy crept through her flesh like a frigid plant root through dirt. Every scale flaked into a strange, icy projection, each as unique as a snowflake. They would have been beautiful if they did not cut her skin every time one decided to drop off; the open spot dripped crimson like a fountain before ice scabbed over it.

The ice coursed through Sarah's veins more swiftly than her blood as it moved up her body. Her fingers twitched before they were frozen into icy sculptures. Sarah wanted to scream when the ice reached her shoulders, but could not so much as open her mouth to breathe.

The creepiest thing was that, through all of this, she was still alive. Her heart was beating, albeit slowly. Her eyes scanned her surrounding frantically as It was as though she was being put in hibernation, with only her bare minimal systems up and running.

Only her head remained untouched. Soon, that, too, was slowly encased in a crystal of ice. She was forced into looking forever upwards at the white sky. Even though her nose and mouth had been shut, she was still alive, trying to look around like a painting out of a horror movie. She could also hear the ferret's next-to-last words before she left the premises.

"Hmph. Hope y'like it in there, deary. You'll be alive, barely. Have fun looking at nothing, hearing nothing, and feeling nothing but cold!"

Sarah could only watch as the ferret conjured more icy energy. A chill ran through both flesh and bone as Sarah's head was encapsulated in ice. It felt like a million tiny needles were sticking into her skull, slowly drilling deeper and deeper until they hit the brain - an organ that feels no pain at all.

Sarah's eyes were locked open as she was nudged into the gap that she had created, then sealed into that very spot with more ice. Indeed, aside from the ferret, there was nothing else for her to see except the frozen wasteland.

Sarah watched the ferret survey her work. There were thuds and scratches as she scurried around the perimeter, checking to make sure that the ice would not break again. She eventually left with a sharp, "Stupid humans, driving into my frozen river...", but the mermaid remained there, motionless. The only thing she could see was the white sky above the dark water.

This might not be so bad, Sarah thought. She had all the time in the world to think. If she ever got out, she might be able to make money as a mermaid author.

Seven years later, Sarah was still there. She had been staring blankly at the white sky for what felt like eons. The longer she stayed in the ice, the more painful it got. Not only did her body get colder and her systems get slower (only to fire up again just enough to keep her alive), but she missed being outside. She wanted to move. Even if people would jump back at her initial appearance, she wanted to talk. For years and years to come, potentially until the end of time, she would be an oddity - a mermaid encased in ice, waiting in the frozen Cocytus River amidst contorted, frozen humans.

If you wish to see the world's only preserved mermaid, take a close look out your car window next time a blizzard hits. Go off the road a ways until you start skidding. If you hear a sharp voice cursing about her wretched fate, then the mermaid is not far behind. Beware: only the timekeepers in the great beyond know your fate, should you accept it.