“Stop talking so wildly,” I said. “We will go back to the village.”
“Go back with you? Never!”
I lunged toward her. She pulled the rope and jumped back out of my way. Heavy sharp things pierced my body. I fell, and found I was pinned down by stalactites.
“Well, give us a hand, girl,” I said. “It’s not serious. I can’t be killed, you know. Not like this, at any rate.”
“There are some people here to see you,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I do not choose to give an audience at this time!”
“They insist,” she said.
And then they filed in front of me, the villagers, all of them, even the old witch, even the zombies, even the calibans, even the ghosts.
Tom carried the wooden stake, Amy positioned it above my chest. And each villager who came by, natural or supernatural, gave the top of the stake a tap.
It wasn’t much force. But it was enough to drive the stake through my chest. I began to experience my dying. It was an uncanny feeling.
Amy began to address the villagers, to point out the moral of the story, no doubt. But I didn’t hear that part. I was dead.
There is another version. This one was put together by the villagers, and doesn’t have the important addition of Zanthias’s point of view. In the interest of honesty, I present it now.
In this version, Zanthias never went to the sacrificial cave, and its very existence has been denied. In this version, Zanthias turned a corner and there in front of him was his own house.
“What are we doing here?” he asked.
“This is where Rosamund is,” Amy said. “No sense wasting any more time.”
They entered. And Amy said, “She is there, in the room you told her never to enter.”
“Now wait a minute. This is wandering too far afield—”
“It will wander farther yet,” Amy said. “Open the door and look at what you never thought to look at before.”
Zanthias opened the door. There was a bed and a woman on it, Rosamund, bloodstained, dead.
“Now wait a minute,” Zanthias said. “I never . . .”
“Spare me your lies,” Amy said. “Over there is Rosamund’s suitcase, which you might have examined, had you cared to.”
Zanthias opened the chest. Inside he found bundles of letters, tied together with lavender ribbon. He found a mirror, and when he looked at his own face in it, he saw written on it, the words—Totally and unforgiving self-preoccupied.
He was staring at the mirror when the wooden stake went into his back, through it and penetrated his chest, its point sticking out.
“I love you!” he cried, falling to the ground.
“I take my revenge. Rosamund didn’t have time. I complete her work for her.”
I am Tom, and I will have the last word.
The werewolf Zanthias was found dead the next day by foresters from the village. He was in a sacrificial cave high on Stark Mountain, with a wooden stake through his heart. The new arrival Amy was questioned about this, since she was the last to see Zanthias. She said Zanthias had invited her to his house, where she had spent the night. She had no idea where Zanthias went at night or what he did. We accepted this, since there was no evidence to the contrary.
We also learned that Amy was a sister to Zanthias’s previous wife, Rosamund, also found dead in the cave, apparently killed by Zanthias the previous night. We don’t often get people related to one another coming to our village.
Life goes on quietly in the absence of Zanthias, who was a good ruler, albeit a trifle absent-minded about his monthly forays at the full moon. We expect another werewolf to be sent to us in the next shipment of new people. It seems to be the custom.
HUNGER
I hunger for you like the sky
for the weight of the sun
I hunger for you like the tide
for the moon to come
I hunger for you like the skin
of a doe for the blade
—from Hunger by Janis Ian
I was sitting in my tub in the window seat. It was one of those hot, slow-moving summer days that seemed like it would go on forever. The flowers in the little garden outside were drooping. In a corner of the darkened parlor, a spider was spinning his web. He barely moved. I was heat-dazed, and the water in my little tin tub, which had started out as cool, was already lukewarm.
I saw several children come into the field alongside our house. They were carrying a soccer ball. I couldn’t imagine how they found the energy to play. But I wanted to play, too.
I leaned out the open window and called, “Throw it to me!”
They didn’t, of course. They ignored me. I was the plump little mermaid freak. They didn’t know that you needed a good layer of fat to live in the ocean. It’s cold there. (So I had been told.) But I had never seen the ocean. It was a hundred or more miles away, to the east. I was afraid I never would see it. I hadn’t even seen a real river. All I knew was this dusty little town of Piney Butte, North Carolina. There was a river just a few miles away, but Meg had never brought me to it. She always had an excuse. I guess she loved me in her own way, and didn’t want to see me go.
In this town, it wasn’t any fun being a mermaid. There wasn’t even a swimming pool to practice in, though I’d been told I’d take to the water naturally.
Back in those days I dreamed all the time about the ocean. And I dreamed of escaping from this place, getting to the sea, and finding others of my kind.
When I complained about a mermaid’s life, Meg, my step-mother, always advised me to be patient, to ask for little, and to be grateful for what God had given me. I couldn’t see that he had given me much except for gills and a tail. Which I had no use for on land. Meg always said there was a secret plan to these things, and that in time the plan would be revealed.
Meg had once been a scientist at Wood’s Hole before the fire storms of ‘62 destroyed it and she went back to where she had been born. She had gotten pretty religious since returning to North Carolina. Our country’s present series of catastrophes hadn’t shaken her faith.
Once upon a time, so she told me, she had believed that science would save the human race. Now she thought that God would do the trick.
Meg was not a comforting woman but she could be nice sometimes, like when she told me stories about how people had once thought it would be fun to be a mermaid. But for me it had no benefit, not in Piney Butte, and that was the only place I knew.
I wondered why Allison and Greg, my real parents, had allowed the scientists to do this to me. It was cruel. I imagined my parents saying, “Go ahead, make her a mermaid, it’s the coming thing.” And then they died when the smallpox came to New England, and I got placed with Meg, and she and Les moved to this stupid town far from the sea.
As it turned out, that afternoon I watched the soccer game marked the beginning of the next catastrophe.
It began to rain. It rained for the rest of the day, and all night, and all the next day, and the day after that. A hard, relentless rain, driven by a summer storm. It must have been brewing down in the horse latitudes, and after that circling in the Sargasso Sea until it built up strength. Then it moved inland, crossed the Outer Banks, and came to us in Piney Cove.
Everyone got out and went to work to shore up the dikes that protected our low-lying land. And that’s when the next catastrophe struck.
I was alone in the house. There’s nothing much a young mermaid can do to fix a wall on land. I heard the sound of a rifle shot. The next thing I knew, the front door was pushed open and men came in. Five or six of them. Strangers. Hard-looking unshaven men with long hair, wearing ragged clothing. They came in, holding rifles, shaking the water out of their long hair. They saw me and gathered around my tub.
“Well, what in the world have we here?” one of them asked.
“She’s got a tail,” another said, peering into the tub. “Damned if we haven’t got ourselves a mermaid.”
&
nbsp; They made some jokes I didn’t understand. Then one of them said, “What are we going to do with her?”
“Sell her in Raleigh!”
“No market, the country’s running over with freaks.”
“She’s half fish, ain’t she? Let’s roll her in flour and pan-fry her!”
“Take her along with us! It’s about time Davis’s Raiders had some fun!”
I begged them to leave me alone, but they just laughed, and two of them pulled me out of my tub. They made a lot of jokes I didn’t understand. There were more of them outside the house. They were all mounted on horses. They slung me up to one of the riders.
“What have you got here?” a big older man asked. He wore a slouch hat pulled down over his bearded face, and there was a lot of blood on one leg of his overalls.
“We got us a mermaid, Cap’n.”
“And what do you propose to do with her?”
“Have a little fun once we get a chance to camp again.”
The Cap’n frowned. “You boys ain’t got no sense. Half the county militia coming after us, and you want to play with a little fish girl!”
“We got needs, just like everybody else! And besides, the militia won’t be out looking for us in this rain.”
The Cap’n was a serious man. He looked like he might order them to put me down. But he wasn’t looking too good, not with that wound in his leg, and the man he was talking to looked feisty and ready for a fight.
“You find any food?” the Cap’n asked.
One of the men said, “A sack of corn and a couple of chickens is all.”
“Then let’s get out of here!”
They threw me across the saddle like a sack of corn, and they galloped away. I had no idea what they were going to do to me, but I feared the worst. We rode for a long time through the rain, and I got sick, bouncing on my belly across the saddle. We passed through small forested hills and valleys. The rain stopped. By late afternoon the sun was out and we came to a brook.
The Cap’n—his name was Dan—held up his hand, everyone stopped, and they made camp. They tied a rope around my waist, with the other end fastened to a tree. They seemed to be in very good spirits, even Dan, even with his wound, which made walking difficult, but didn’t stop him from riding. They took out a jug—whiskey, I suppose—and passed it around. They offered it to me, but I didn’t want any.
They got pretty hilarious. They started talking about food after a while. None of them had eaten all day. Their raid on Piney Butte hadn’t yielded them much, and I learned that one of them called Otis had been shot dead the day before, and Dan had been wounded.
At some point in this discussion Dan said, “I sure could eat me a mess of fried fish.”
That got a lot of response. There was a lot of talk about fishing, and some wild-sounding claims as to expertise. But it turned out they didn’t have any hooks, having lost their last one a few days ago.
They were pretty glum, thinking about that, but then Dan said, “Hell, we don’t need no hooks, we got a fish woman. Stands to reason she can catch fish.”
They all looked at me. I was about to say I had never caught fish in my life, when Dan gave me a big wink and he said, “You can do that, can’t you, darlin’?”
I don’t know why I trusted Dan. Maybe because he was wounded. But I had a feeling he was on my side. So I said, “I used to catch fish for the town.”
One of the men, Jake, I think he was, said, “This is the craziest thing I ever heard. She’s going to catch fish for us and bring them back of her own free will?”
“She’ll have no choice,” said Dan. He held up a coil of rope. “She’ll be our captive fish catcher. If she doesn’t do good, we’ll just pull her in and spank her. You can do that yourself, Jake.”
Jake looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Don’t sound too bad. Either I get to eat fish or spank a mermaid. And spankings not all I’ll do to her.”
Some of the others had some ideas as to what they’d do to me, too. Dan winked at me again and tied the rope around my waist, and cinched it tight.
“That’ll hold her,” he said. Then he grabbed me by one arm and pulled me over to the edge of the stream.
“Do a good job, girl, and maybe we won’t be too hard on you.” He pushed me into the water. As he pushed me, he slipped something into my hand. It wasn’t until I was underwater that I saw it was a knife.
“Get to work, girl!” he shouted, and played out line. I dove. It felt natural and wonderful to be in the water. The knife was dull, but by prying with the point I managed to get the knot undone. And then I was swimming free, following the flow of the stream, knowing it would lead me at last to the sea.
I didn’t think about anything but escape for the next few hours, swimming as hard as I could, and staying low in the stream. I couldn’t figure why Dan had given me the knife. I finally decided maybe he had a sister, or even a wife, or maybe a girl-child of his own. Maybe he had loved her, once upon a time before the world turned crazy.
The stream fed into a river, and there I was at last, swimming toward the sea, because that’s where all rivers wind up.
The river was wide and deep, and swimming in it was not much effort. It was like walking must be for regular people, with the added advantage of a current to keep me on my way when I wanted a little rest.
At one point I caught a fish, and ate it, all except for the head and spine. It tasted good. Later I caught and ate another one, and my appetite was satisfied.
After a while I just let the current carry me, making only an occasional correction to stay in the middle. I calmed down after a while. My experience with the raiders seemed now like a half-forgotten nightmare. Even Piney Butte was fading from my memory.
But other, older thoughts and memories were returning. I remembered a dream I had a long time ago, back when I lived with Allison, my real mother. In my dream, Allison had just given birth to my baby brother. I saw him lying in a white bassinet. He was very tiny, no bigger than a little bird. In fact he was a bird, with gray and brown-feathered wings. But his face was human.
He was saying something to me in a chirping little voice, but I couldn’t understand his words.
“I don’t understand,” I told him.
He chirped again. Then he stood up. I thought he was saying, “I’ll see you again, Lena.” And then he flapped his wings and flew away.
I felt very blue, watching him go. He had been so nice. And so pretty. I wished he had stayed. I was sure we could have been friends.
Years later I told Meg my dream, and asked her if I really had a little bird brother.
Meg was a no-nonsense person. “You have no brother, bird or otherwise,” she said. “Not by Allison and not by me.”
“But I do!” I insisted. “I saw him in a dream. A tiny feathered manikin with wings.”
Meg shook her head. “It was only a dream.”
“And he was a bird, a tiny bird.”
“No possible,” Meg said, and that was the end of it for her.
Some time later I remembered telling my dream to someone else, a scientist, I think. A big man with a square gray face and thinning white hair.
He told me, “No, my dear, the authorities would never have let the scientists develop such an experiment. No sane person would have attempted it. The brain in a skull such as you describe would have had far too little room for computational capacity. Enough for a small animal, perhaps, but not enough for a human being. It was only a dream, Lena. Your little bother does not exist.”
I wanted to ask him, how much brain does it take to make a person happy? But his expertise and air of certainty frightened me and I didn’t say anything.
The river had widened, and the shorelines on either side were low and dim. The sun was almost down, and it was cool.
Maybe I did say something about happiness, because I could hear that man’s voice in my dream saying to me, “Happiness is not everything, you know. A human being needs the capacity to cope with the ch
anges this world of ours is undergoing. Our developers are working with several different alternatives for the human race. To pick the wrong one would put ourselves in an evolutionary dead end. With our world crumbling around us, it would be unwise to put any effort into unworkable solutions such as your bird boy.”
“So creating a fish girl like me is a better answer?”
“That’s how it seemed a few years ago. The oceans make up seven-tenths of the surface of the Earth. They are relatively unexplored territory. And unlike the planets that we presently know of, they are capable of supporting life like ours.”
“So why aren’t there more like me?”
He shrugged. “Maybe there are. The undersea experiment was discontinued a few years ago. Funding was withheld. People in the government decided that the new underwater species wasn’t developing to hoped-for specifications. You see, it’s not challenging enough to live in the ocean. All drive is lost in the relative ease of underwater life. Living in the ocean is too easy. Just swim around, eat fish, do no real work, do nothing to enhance and improve the race and its environment. It smacked too much of a romantic idealism. You must be one of the last of the sea people to be created. In terms of the future of the human race, the prospects for you and your kind are poor, at best.”
I felt he was wrong, but I had no words with which to argue my conviction.
And then I heard another voice, a familiar voice. It was saying, “Yes, the project is possible. But not likely to happen until nanotechnology is developed beyond the point it’s at now.”
It was Mr. Slater’s voice. Mr. Slater taught science in our school in Piney Grove, and he was into nanotechnology and miniaturization. He wanted passionately to breed a race of smaller people. A creature the size of my dream brother would have delighted him.
“There need be no loss of quality in a change of scale,” he used told us. “And the advantages would be immense. Imagine how much longer the Earth’s resources would last if we were smaller! The way to achieve this is clear. Take a nanofactory programmed to produce an exact copy of itself. Set your controls so that each succeeding generation produces a size smaller than itself. Combine that with what we know of the human genome. Soon enough you’d have a factory capable of producing miniature humans. From there it’s an easy step to micro-miniaturization. In theory, at least, there’s no limit. Or the limit is only bounded by the size of the protein molecule. Or maybe the only real limit is the size of the atom!”
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