Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “Hold on a sec, Becky.” Covering the phone, I turned to Oberon. “Do you see anything bad happening to Jay?”

  Oberon stopped and closed his eyes, tilting his face to the sky. We were at the beginning of the tree-lined Mall, the shadows of the bare elm branches playing over his face. I wondered if that’s what the future looked like to him: shadow branches spreading out into the void.

  He flicked open his eyes. “No, I don’t see anything bad happening to Jay.”

  “Thanks.” I uncovered the phone. “Becky, I think Jay’s going to be just fine. And to tell you the truth, I’ve got too much on my plate right now to mediate a band fight. Maybe you should worry about the direction you’re going in.”

  The phone was silent so long I thought we must have gotten disconnected, but then Becky said, “Oh. Maybe you’re right. I’ll talk to you later.” Then she hung up. I’d rarely heard Becky give such a terse response to anything.

  “Do you think I was too hard on her?” I asked, putting the phone away and turning to Oberon, but Oberon was too engrossed with the scene in front of us to answer. It took me a few minutes to make sense of what he was looking at. Where the sun shone through the branches, the pavement glistened with smears of multicolored glitter. It looked like a third-grade crafts project gone horribly wrong.

  “Is this what’s left of the sylphs?” I asked.

  Oberon nodded. Then he knelt down on one knee and gathered a handful of glitter. He raised his hand to his nose and sniffed. “Iron. Dee sent a fog laden with iron molecules. That’s what killed them. The smaller fey can’t stand the touch of iron.” He said something else in a language I didn’t understand and then, rising, flung the glitter into the air. A gust of wind caught it and carried it up to the treetops. I heard a song in the wind—a keening that raised the hair on the back of my neck—and the air above us began to swirl. The leaves and bits of trash on the ground stirred and spun about our feet in quickening eddies that climbed toward the gathering vortex in the sky. Where Oberon and I stood, the air was dead still. We were in the eye of the funnel. I stared up, spellbound, unable to move. This is what it must feel like to be at the center of a tornado, I thought. If I moved even a millimeter, the wind would pick me up and tear me apart. All I could do was watch the currents of air racing above us. One minute they were transparent and then the next they thickened—the way pudding thickens on the stove as you stir it. The air turned into glossy ribbons, within which the sylphs, their bodies distended, their faces stretched in pain, were borne up into the sky . . . and then they were gone. They broke apart into a million bits of glitter and in one horrendous, ripping wrench, the vortex broke free of the earth and flew up into the sky.

  I turned to Oberon and saw his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then my ears popped and sound came rushing back in.

  “They’re gone,” he repeated. “I’ve sent them back into the ether.”

  He turned and walked north up the Mall, and I followed him. As he walked, a cloud of glitter shook free from his hair and lit the air around him like a psychedelic halo.

  _______

  Oberon walked to the end of the Mall to the upper section of Bethesda Terrace, then down the stairs to where the Angel fountain presided regally over the lower terrace and the lake. The Angel of the Waters was one of my favorite statues in the park. My mother had told me the biblical story of the angel who moved the waters of a sacred spring in Jerusalem to heal the sick. The statue showed up in the play Angels in America and most recently on the television show Gossip Girl, but I never got tired of looking at the angel’s calm face, her hand extended over the fountain as if blessing the water. No water flowed from it today, but plenty of people were sitting on its rim, eating lunch, chatting, or just soaking up the winter sunshine. Oberon sat down on the rim of the fountain and turned his face up to the sun. Glitter spangled his skin.

  “What you did just now for the sylphs . . . was it some kind of funeral?”

  “I freed their spirits from this world. Their atoms will be reabsorbed in the earth and appear again in flowers and plants and trees, perhaps one day to be drunk by another sylph.” He opened his eyes and smiled. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be smiled at by him, like having a warm tropical breeze waft against your face. “That’s a sylph’s idea of reincarnation—to be reborn as a flower and drunk by another sylph, only . . .” His smile faded and his brows drew together. He looked away.

  “Only what?”

  “Every year there are fewer and fewer sylphs. Each winter their population diminishes by hundreds. When the last sylph dies, there will be none to drink its reborn spirit and then their race will be truly dead. Like the sleigh beggy and the Irish merrows.”

  “You mean fairies can become extinct?”

  “Of course. I told you we diminish. This world is too hard for most to survive in . . . but then there are some who hang on despite all obstacles.” His smile had returned and he was looking over my shoulder toward the upper terrace. I followed his gaze to the stairs where a heavily bundled figure (it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman) was dragging an overladen shopping cart down to the lower terrace. At the bottom of the stairs the figure looked up and I recognized the bag lady I had seen three mornings ago on Greenwich Avenue—the woman with the nut-brown face who conversed with steam and had greeted me by spitting in her hand and waving. As if to remind me of that greeting she cleared her throat and hawked up a great gob of spit that landed six inches from the polished loafers of a lunching businessman. He mimed gagging to his lunch partner and crumpled his sandwich wrappers into a ball, which he launched over the bag lady’s head toward a garbage can. Halfway there, a gust of wind caught the ball and flung it back at the man. The missile exploded against his chest, splattering his suit with mayo, ketchup, and lettuce shreds. He wiped himself off and fled in disgust.

  I laughed before I could stop myself, and the woman looked up, grinned at me toothlessly, and headed in our direction. The lunchtime picnickers around the fountain began clearing out as she approached—in fear of being spit on, I guessed, or maybe it was the distinctly fishy odor that became detectable a few feet away. By the time she reached us the whole terrace was deserted except for Oberon and me.

  “Mel,” Oberon said, spitting into his palm and lifting his hand in greeting. “Good to see you still have your aim.”

  She grunted. “I was aiming for his face.” She hawked spit into her crabbed, arthritic hand and touched it against Oberon’s palm. Then she looked at me.

  “This is her?” Mel pointed a crooked finger in my direction. “She don’t look like much.” She shambled closer to me until her face was inches from mine. Her face smelled like the East River at low tide. I stayed very still and prayed she didn’t spit on me.

  “This is Garet James, descendant of Marguerite D’Arques, Watchtower. Garet this is Mel.”

  Mel sniffed at my credentials—or maybe she was sniffing at the borscht on my breath. I was glad I hadn’t ordered the gefilte fish. “She’s going to go up against John Dee?”

  “First we have to find him. He moved a fog here last night. Do you have any idea where it came from?”

  “Could be the steam tunnels,” she replied, turning from me to Oberon. “I’ve noticed that the steam coming up onto the streets is tainted.” She sniffed again, rattling the phlegm in her throat.

  “That’s what you were doing on Greenwich Avenue?” I asked, taking a discreet step backward in anticipation of another spitting incident. “I thought you were talking to the steam.”

  I laughed at my misapprehension, but Oberon and Mel didn’t join me.

  “Mel has the ability to communicate with water,” Oberon explained to me. Then, turning back to Mel, he said, “I was hoping you could have a look around and see if you can tell how Dee is moving fog around the city and where he’s doing it from. I thought you might also initiate Garet into the mysteries of water.”

  “Is there anything else his l
ordship would like me to do while I’m at it?” Mel asked in a mincing falsetto. “Maybe pick up his dry cleaning and spit-shine his shoes?” I heard the phlegm gurgling up in her throat and I moved away. The glob headed straight toward Oberon’s face, but he calmly pursed his lips, blew, and redirected the missile into the dry basin of the fountain. I thought he’d be furious, but he only smiled and spread his arms out toward the miscreant.

  “Mel,” he crooned, “who else could I ask? Who else would I entrust but the daughter of Elinas and Pressina, Queen of Columbiers and Poitou, and Banshee of Lusignan?”

  She made a noise in her throat and looked away, but I thought I saw a smile appear under the influence of Oberon’s blandishments.

  “Melusine!” he sang the name like a hymn, and years seemed to fall away from her face. I’d heard the name before. It was in one of the stories my mother used to tell. A prince wandering in the forest came upon a beautiful maiden sitting by a fountain. He asked her to marry him and she agreed, but on one condition: that he never look upon her on a Saturday. He agreed and they married. She brought him prosperity and ten children and built for him the castle of Lusignan. They were happy until one Saturday his curiosity got the better of him and he spied on her in the bath and saw that from the waist down she was really a serpent. Still he kept her secret until their son—a tusked monster—massacred a hundred monks. Then he turned on his wife, blaming her for their child’s tainted blood. Realizing her secret had been betrayed, Melusine turned into a serpent and flew away. She would appear at the castle, though, whenever one of the descendants was about to die, gaining her the title Banshee of Lusignan.

  Could this be the same creature, crusted with grime and hobbled with age? As if in answer to my unvoiced question, she straightened up and stepped daintily into the fountain basin. She lifted her crabbed hands up toward the statue of the angel, and water spouted from the pipes and rained down onto her upturned face. She clawed at her clothes, shucking off layers of shirts and sweaters, pants and long underwear, until she was completely naked . . . and beautiful. Under the streaming water her skin gleamed in the opalescent purples and grays of an abalone shell, her hair fell long and sea-green to her shapely waist where blue and green scales flashed in the sunlight. Her long, muscular tail smacked the water and propelled her out of the fountain, through the air, and to the edge of the lake, where she perched, admiring her reflection.

  “It’s not her reflection she’s looking for,” Oberon said, hearing my thoughts. “It’s Dee. She has the power to see in the water. Go and she’ll teach you.” Oberon nudged me forward, taking my bag off my shoulder as I cautiously approached her. Of all the creatures I’d seen so far, she was the most amazing. No image of a mermaid that I’d ever seen began to do justice to the strangeness of that tail joined to pearly flesh . . . although as I moved closer I saw that even her skin wasn’t precisely flesh. It was coated with chitinous shell like a . . .

  I took a step closer and bent down to see her arms, which were folded under her breasts. She turned toward me, her seaweed-green eyes blinking, and I saw the slits of gills on her throat and the long pincerlike claws where her hands should have been. I started to back away, but then I saw an image forming in the water—a face, but not Melusine’s face. It was familiar. I knelt beside her and bent over the edge of the lake to see better. For a moment I thought I was looking at my own reflection, but then I realized it was my mother’s face. She was moving her lips, speaking to me. I bent closer to hear what she was saying . . . or to read the words on her lips . . . but then her face vanished and was replaced by the face of John Dee, looking straight at me, laughing. I reared back, gasping. Beside me, Melusine made a sound—a kind of caw that sounded like the cry of a raptor before it seized its prey. Then, before I knew what was happening, she seized my wrist tightly in her lobster’s claw and dragged me with her into the water.

  The Source

  My gasp of surprise was the last breath I took before the water closed over my head. I tried to hold on to that breath as Melusine pulled me down through the cold, murky water. I tried to get free, but her grip was pincer tight and only hurt more when I struggled. I looked to see where she could be heading so fast. The artificial lake couldn’t be all that deep, after all. The sun filtered down to the bottom, turning the water a muddy green sparked with gold motes racing past us as we plummeted downward. A shape was beginning to emerge out of the gloom—a round, gaping hole covered with a perforated grill festooned with plumes of algae. A drain? A pipe that brought water into the lake? Whatever it was, we were going to end up grated like cheese when we hit it.

  I closed my eyes and brought up my free arm over my face to protect it against the impact. It was worse than I expected, worse than when that Ford Expedition rammed into my mother’s car. It felt as if every part of my body had hit a steel wall at the same time, as though I were being torn apart, not just limb from limb, but atom from atom. And then, just when I thought I’d lose consciousness from the wrenching pain, it was gone. I felt nothing but the flow of water and weightless buoyancy.

  I opened my eyes—or at least I thought I did. I was surrounded by blackness. Was I dead?

  No, a silky sibilant voice whispered. You’re waterborne.

  I tried to find the source of the voice, but it was all around me . . . and by all around me I realized that the voice permeated my entire body . . . no, that wasn’t quite it, because I didn’t have a body.

  You’re borne on the flow of water. Can you feel it? We’re in the reservoir. From here we can go into the main water tunnel and travel through the city. Dee is sssomewhere in the water system. We must find him.

  How? I asked, thinking the words. I can’t feel—or see—anything.

  You will. It takes a little time to get used to the incorporeal stage. I ssspent centuries in the springs beneath the forest of Brocéliande, percolating in the rock layers far below the earth. Here, before we go into the tunnel, let’ssss evaporate.

  Evaporate? That sounded dangerous. But I could already feel myself growing lighter, rising to the surface. I became aware of light, then I was floating above the shimmering skin of water, merging with the air, dodging dragonflies and watergliders, and then, rising quickly, I was above Central Park. I could see the joggers running around the reservoir and the towers of the Dakota against the skyline. Then we were above the towers, heading for the clouds . . . but then I felt myself grow heavier.

  We fell in a light drizzle back to the reservoir and sank down again into a pipe, caught up in a strong current. Although it was dark, I could sense where we were. The compass Noam Erdmann had implanted in my hand pulsed in every cell so that I could tell we were traveling southwest through the island of Manhattan in a wide tunnel . . . through Water Tunnel #1, I suddenly knew. Not only had the compass stone given me a sense of direction, it gave me a sense of specific location, as if a map of the city were imprinted within my cells. I really was my own GPS! Even though we were deep beneath the bedrock of the city, I knew what streets we were under. When we soared up through the vertical shafts, pushed by the insistent flow of water that had been running downhill from the mountains, and into the water mains, I knew exactly where we were. I knew the apartment numbers we passed as we soared high up into buildings. When we reached the rooftop water tanks, I could identify every landmark within a ten-mile radius. And when we plunged down again through a maze of pipes and back into the main water tunnel, I could have stated our exact longitude and latitude.

  We traversed every inch of the city in the time it usually took me to take the subway from the Village to midtown, but nowhere did we catch a glimpse or scent of Dee. Then at the end of the island we veered southeast and plunged into deeper darkness. I heard rushing water and boats moving above us. We were below the bay, heading for Brooklyn. Melusine was quieter while we were under the bay, and I sensed a tension in her that I hadn’t as we coursed through the city. If she had lungs instead of gills, I would have said she was holding her breath. Wh
en we made landfall in Brooklyn, she seemed easier even though we had to swim against the current upstream, northeast through Brooklyn and Queens, then northwest toward the Bronx.

  At the Hillview Reservoir, Melusine took us on a lap around the lake. I felt her exulting in the wider expanse of water, freed from the pressure of the tunnels.

  Are we going back to the city now? I asked.

  Instead of answering my question she had us plunge into the Delaware Aqueduct and race upstream toward the Kensico Reservoir in Valhalla. Although we were fighting the current, we went faster and faster. Melusine remained stubbornly silent, but I could sense her desire now. I could feel her because as we had traveled together our molecules had crossed and crisscrossed, braiding and unbraiding like long strands of DNA. She yearned to go farther north, up to the mountain springs from which the streams and rivers had sprung. She was a creature of the springs—not the sea—and that was why she had felt uneasy beneath the saltwater bay. She was the goddess of the spring, the sprite of the source. I saw her worshipped at Roman springs and Celtic wells, heard the names she had been worshipped by on the water . . . Sulis, Sequana, Coventina, Egeria, Sinann, Laga. I felt the love she’d had for Raimond de Lusignan and the anguish of betrayal when he turned away from her in disgust. I saw the long years she haunted the Château de Lusignan, her banshee cry serenading the last of her descendants. And, finally, I felt the sadness of exile, a craving to return to her source.