The Mermaid

by Shane Scollins

  After swinging his feet to the floor, he walked down the hallway, stopping in front of Tom’s open bedroom door. “Tom, you awake?” A soft snoring noise answered his question. That guy could sleep through a plane crashing into the house.

  Continuing down the hallway, Jake thought the clunking noise had stopped. After a few seconds of silence, it appeared that was indeed the case. He pressed forward to the kitchen, to the side door where the noise seemed to have been most prevalent.

  He looked outside into the early morning light but didn’t see anything. Cracking open the door, he stepped out onto the concrete patio, under the aluminum awning. He scanned the small side yard from broken sidewalk to weathered wooden fence. There was nothing at first, but then he saw them.

  Scattered all over the place were tiny figures. What they were at first wasn't clear, so he bent over and picked one up. The breath sucked right out of his body when he saw what they were.

  He quickly sucked in air and ran out to the street to see if there were any cars around, but he didn’t see anyone. Whoever had littered the yard with tiny plastic mermaids was long gone.

  Jake felt himself freaking out a little bit. This seemed so out of the blue, so bizarre. but then his mind went back to the strange guy standing in the parking lot last night. His comments at the time seemed a little off, but now it just seemed downright peculiar.

  Jake didn’t even know what to think. He wanted to run to the beach and talk to Ariel, but chances were she wouldn’t be there. In fact, he knew she wouldn’t. For some reason he felt compelled to start picking up all the tiny figures. He ran around the yard collecting them, dropping them into a steel bucket that used to hold a small pine tree at one time but was now just home to a small amount of rocks and dirt.

  When they were all collected, he took the bucket and dropped it next to the dilapidated old shed in the back of the house. A sigh of relief escaped him and he didn’t even know why. It’s not like a bunch of little plastic mermaids would mean anything to anyone else but him.

  After going back inside, the one thought that kept sticking to him was that she was real. He knew it already after last night, but now that someone else obviously knew, it became even more real. His fantasy and his reality had just collided. She was real, and someone was trying to scare him away from her.

  He quickly dressed and headed to his car. There was no way she was going to be there, but he drove to the beach at Fort Fisher anyway. It was going to be a wasted trip, there was no doubt, but he needed to try.

  Sure enough, after climbing the rocks, and scanning the ocean, Ariel was nowhere to be seen. He called out to her several times, but she didn’t show up. He went back to his car in frustration, about to head back home, when he recalled something he’d seen the other day.

  Mashing the gas pedal to the floor, he sped up the road to the quirky roadside stand where he’d see the picture of the mermaid on the wall. The place was closed this early in the morning so he just sat in the parking lot and waited.

  At some point, he must have fallen asleep. Awoken abruptly by the slamming of a car door, he sat up. The sun had risen and the cluttered roadside storefront was bathed in bright light and a few curious tourists.

  Tourist season was in full swing and the beaches were crawling with people, mostly from all points north and west. Jake was used to them after years of living at the beach. He liked the town better when they were all gone, but he didn’t really mind it when they were here, either. Some Wilmington area locals begrudged the tourists, but he didn’t care. He just went about his day dealing with the extra traffic.

  Walking around the store, however, he wished they were gone because he didn’t want to deal with them at the moment. He waited patiently, walking around the random items on the warped steel shelves, the pieces of old furniture and other oddities, not really looking at anything in particular, but glancing up continuously at the mermaid picture.

  The crusty old beach bum behind the counter eyed him, probably worried he was trying to steal something, but Jake just stayed the course and walked around.

  A tourist family of four started to filter out of the store and Jake moved up to the counter. He studied the picture past the shopkeeper’s shoulder, trying to figure out if it was Ariel, but it wasn’t clear enough. It was grainy and low resolution.

  “You like that picture.” The man’s voice was scratchy. He had a long gray ponytail, thick gray goatee, and a black seashell necklace.

  Jake nodded. “What’s the story behind it?”

  The man leaned forward. “That there’s one of the only shots you’ll ever see of the Emerald Cove mermaid.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a local. I recognize you.”

  Jake nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I’ve seen you out, you work at the bike shop on the island.”

  Jake nodded. “I did, yeah.” He didn’t want to mention that he owned the place but stopped paying his rent after the accident.

  The man looked around. “You ain’t never heard of the Emerald Cove mermaid?”

  “No. I’ve never even heard of Emerald Cove. Should I have?”

  “Well, there ain’t really an Emerald Cove, but there used to be a restaurant by that name over near the river side at Snow’s Cut. It fell down in a hurricane way back.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The man stuck out his hand. “Name’s Ridge.”

  “Good to meet you, Ridge.”

  “You still surf?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Grab yer stick and meet me at CB south in twenty. I’ll be just past access twenty-six.”

  Jake nodded and exited the building without a word.

  * * *

  After sliding his surfboard off the roof rack of his car, Jake traversed across the soft sand to the water. He saw Ridge bobbing about a hundred feet from the shoreline. The waves were not very large, so there weren’t any other surfers out there. A few skimboarders and swimmers frolicked to his left, but otherwise it wasn’t a busy beach afternoon in the breakers.

  He labored past a few slappy swimmers and an old man on a body-boarder, but when he pulled up, sat next to Ridge, and looked back at the shore, he remembered how much he missed this.

  Ridge looked back behind. “Kinda flat.”

  Jake glanced. “Yeah, not much to speak of.”

  “Sometimes I just come out and sit for an hour. Even if I don’t catch a wave I like the motion of the sea. It’s in my soul.”

  “I know what you mean.” Jake nodded.

  Ridge looked at him. “It’s in your soul too. It’s in your eyes. Every surfer I’ve ever met has that look in their eyes. It’s a twinkle that comes up from the soul and vibes out into the world. It says, hey man, I get it, and most people don’t.”

  Jake nodded. “I feel like that’s probably true.”

  “The ocean is a way of life. It’s something in the salty air, it just pulls you in and melts into you. I could never live inland. The sea is in me.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. And it’s not the same up north, either.”

  “No sir. It is not.”

  “I lived in New York City for four years in college. I went to NYU. It was not an ideal situation.”

  “The ocean is not the same up there, no Gulf Stream. It smells different, feels different. Once you get into the subtropical moisture everything changes for the better.”

  “I guess so.”

  Ridge took a deep breath and blew it out. “Why’d you wander into my shop?”

  Jake looked down into the water. “The mermaid picture…who took it?”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  “When?”

  “Twenty-five years ago this summer.”

  “She was real.”

  Ridge looked at him and narrowed his eyes. “You bet your ass she was real.”

  “Was?”

  “At some point you have to let go. I never saw her again after that week.”

  “You saw
her for a week?”

  “Yes, sir, one glorious week.”

  “You spoke with her?”

  Ridge sighed. “Sometimes things we want to remember just aren’t there for our brains to pull up. That was a long time ago, in another life, another world.”

  Jake looked up at the shore. “I’ve seen her.”

  Ridge nodded. “I know. But what you’re seeing is not what I saw.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ridge started paddling out deeper toward a small budding set of waves.

  Jake yelled. “How do you know?”

  Ridge turned. “There’s something you need to see.” He caught the momentum, jumped up on his board, and rode the wave.

  Jake waited a second for the next wave in the set and paddled in. At that perfect moment he’d learned through years of practice, he popped up on his board, a perfect landing.

  The wave wasn’t much to speak of, it was slow and small, and probably a good wave for a beginner to get a feeling on. But it was the first wave he’d snagged in months and it felt pretty damn good.

  As the ride neared its end, he kicked up the nose and dropped backwards into the water.

  * * *

  Back at the shop, Ridge led him down into the basement, via some old rickety wooden stairs. The basement had a concrete floor and was packed wall to wall with all sorts of things. Jake had never seen so much useless junk. “Do you sell a lot of this stuff?”

  Ridge ducked his lanky frame under a hanging net. “You’d be surprised what these tourists will buy.”

  “I probably would.”

  “I sell them bottles of sand with shells in it. It says Carolina Beach on the glass, but it’s made in China.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thing is, I used to sell actual sand from CB, but the tourists pay more for the crappy China sand because it had fancy writing on the glass. They pay twice as much and it costs me half as much. And after all, I’m in business to make money.”

  He made his way to the back of the basement, where an old non-operating chest freezer sat. Ridge removed a few boxes of junk from atop the old silver chest, and opened the heavy lid. “I saved the newspaper clippings.” He handed Jake an old newspaper. “That paper went out of print about fifteen years ago.”

  Jake looked at the front cover. It wasn’t anything remarkable. “What am I looking at?”

  “Turn to page six.”

  Jake flipped the tabloid style paper to page six. The headline read:

  Body of Woman Found on Beach.

  Jake went on to read aloud, “The body of an unidentified woman found on Carolina Beach this past Saturday, is not that of missing local woman Sharon Royce, missing since August. As of this printing, the body was still unidentified. An autopsy is scheduled for this week in Wilmington. Police did acknowledge the woman had extensive damage to her lower extremities but would not elaborate.”

  Ridge handed him another paper. “Intrigued yet?”

  Jake took hold of the other paper. It had another unimpressive front page. “What page?”

  Ridge pointed. “Page eight.”

  Jake thumbed through until he saw the article with the headline,

  Body of Woman Still a Mystery.

  “The body of the woman who washed up on the beach last month is still unidentified. Blah-blah-blah…huh. It says medical examiner Dorian Friedberg determined the cause of death was a small caliber gunshot wound to the head. He also confirmed that the woman had extreme abnormalities to the lower part of her body.” Jake looked to Ridge. “Extreme abnormalities?”

  “Indeed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It gets better.” He handed Jake another paper. “Turn to page three.”

  He flipped to page three and dropped open his jaw. “C’mon. Seriously?”

  “Read it.”

  “Police confirmed that three bodies were stolen from the Wilmington medical examiner’s office last night and a security guard was assaulted. One of the bodies stolen was that of the unidentified woman found on Carolina Beach on August sixth. Police have no leads and are looking for information on the incident.”

  Ridge made a hand gesture. “Poof.”

  “You think that woman was the woman you took the picture of?”

  “I know it was. I was on the beach when they found the body.”

  “Didn’t everyone see the mermaid tail?”

  Ridge shook his head sadly. “It had been severely mutilated. No one knew what they were looking at. Even I wasn’t sure and I’d seen her.”

  “So who took the body?”

  Ridge turned a frown. “Probably the same sonofabitch that mutilated her. Or maybe some government agency. Someone doesn’t want us to know about something. They tried to scare us away.” He waved a hand. “Ah, who the hell knows, man? It’s all bad news. It don’t even matter who took her.”

  Jake made a face. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You kinda remind me of a younger me. I know that look in your eyes of having seen something that you can’t decide is real. And you can’t decide if you want it to be real or not, and that’s the scary part. Admitting it’s real makes you crazy. Admitting it’s not real makes you crazier. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

  Jake read something in his face. “You saw her more than one week, didn’t you?”

  Ridge nodded once. “We see what we want to see, when we want to see it.”

  Jake took a step toward him. “Someone doesn’t want me to see her again.”

  “Then let it go, son. You don’t want to chase the squirrel up that tree…nothing but briers up there.”

  “Did you let it go?”

  Ridge looked at him but didn’t reply.

  “You let it go and she still wound up dead. Didn’t she?”

  Ridge snarled a tooth at him. “I think you need to leave now.”

  Jake read his face and didn’t want to push it. He sighed and turned away. Before he got to the steps, he turned back. “I appreciate your help.”

  Ridge nodded. “Just fair warning, bro. Let it go away and it will. If you go down that road, you might not like where it leads.”

  Jake turned back and headed up the steps.

  Chapter 11

  Jake entered the pawnshop with the last few pieces of jewelry. He had to buy a few things and this was his last hope to raise the cash.

  As he approached the counter, an older woman with short red hair approached him. “Hi, sweetie, what can we do for you today?” She had a measurable southern accent.

  Jake placed the ring, bracelet, and necklace on the counter. “I want to sell these.”

  The woman quickly looked over the things. “These aren’t stolen, are they?” She chuckled.

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “I’m just kidding, honey. I’ve seen you in here before.” She performed a few tests on the gold and diamonds. “These are nice things.”

  “They probably weren’t cheap.”

  “Buy ’em for a girl, did ya?”

  “Actually, they were given to me by my grandparents. They got them in Europe. I was supposed to give them to someone.”

  “Aha, wedding things for a wedding that didn’t happen. We see that a lot.”

  “Yeah, I just…I have no reason to keep them now.”

  “These are nice pieces. We’ll give you a great price.”

  “I trust you.”

  After doing some calculations, she wrote three numbers on a piece of yellow paper and showed them to Jake. He moved his head back. “Are you kidding?”

  She made a face. “Well, I can up it a little bit, but I think that’s fair market price.”

  “No, I mean, that seems very generous.”

  “Well, they’re expensive pieces. I’ll go to the safe and get you a check. I can’t give you cash for this much.”

  She gave Jake way more than he expected for the pieces. He had no idea this stuff was worth so much. He’d hoped to get a
few thousand bucks or so…he didn’t expect to get ten times that much. She said the ring would probably resell all by itself for six or eight thousand dollars.

  On his way back from the bank he stopped by his shop. He still had the keys even though he had not paid his rent in months. With this money, he could definitely get the shop up and running again if he wanted.

  He pushed open the glass door and flipped on the lights. The place still looked clean and ready for business. After the accident, he’d tried to come into work but could not. He and Paul were the only two people who worked in the shop full time. He hadn’t known Paul very long, only about a year after he moved down from Michigan, but they became best buds. He was handy with a wrench and charismatic with the customers.

  He also had a part-time kid who helped on weekends, but Jake let him go when he could not keep the shop running. Before the accident, profits were at an all-time high and climbing steadily. His projections were putting him so far into the black that he’d have enough business to hire at least one more full-time person and another two part-timers every summer. He’d just branched out into the bike rental aspect at the end of the summer and that promised to be very lucrative.

  As he walked by rows of bikes and parts, he missed his everyday life for the first time since the accident. His visit was nostalgic in a way. It was like this place was frozen in time, stuck in the exact place he’d left his life.

  He glanced up at his baseball trophies on the tall shelf above the register, and his mountain bike trophies below those. It had been a long time since he’d bothered to look at them. He was proud of them, but he was the only one. Neither of his parents were ever really present in his life, they were too busy messing up their own. As long as he stayed out of trouble so his mother’s reputation would not be tarnished, that’s all that mattered.

  He gripped the bars on his favorite red bicycle. It sat untouched in the same place he’d left it. After a few more moments, he locked up and went back to his car, glancing once at the sign that had his name, ‘Wheeler’s Bikes,’ in red letters.

  After heading back home to pick up his kayak, he drove out to the inlet at Fort Fisher. Whoever sent him that warning to stay away from Ariel obviously didn’t know him very well.