Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Where can I find her?”

  “She’ll tell you where. She’ll tell you how.” He cracked an oyster between his fingers, drew out the pearl and ate it, amused at Jonah’s expression. “Be patient. Here, only the fish hurry.”

  Jonah dropped his head back against the mossy breast. “Am I dead? In my world?”

  “This is your world.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You’re not dead. You are living in the great whale’s eye. You have become something rich and strange.” He tossed the oyster in the path of a passing starfish. “Strange, at any rate. Your eyes are haunted; there are little snails in your hair. You should have stayed with Megan.”

  “Megan.” She was another life, the Otherworld of air and light.

  “Remember Megan?”

  “Of course I do,” he said irritably.

  “You vanished out of her life. She stands at the edge of the sea and mourns.”

  “She knows?” he said, so startled he nearly became aware of the water in his throat. “She knows I’m here? How could she possibly?”

  “We gave her pieces; she put them together.”

  “But why?”

  Adam shrugged a little. In the sea, he wore a sort of bodysuit of a glistening, fish-scale blue that covered everything and hid nothing. He looked, Jonah thought sourly, like something out of Action Comics: Aquaman, hero of the deep, capable of tying the giant squid into knots while processing oxygen out of water in his lungs to share with the beautiful, unconscious scientist with one foot caught in a giant clam. Except for his eyes, which viewed Jonah with as much tenderness as a shark. “She’ll tell you.”

  “Who? Megan?”

  “My sister.” He touched the figurehead lightly; for a moment he wore its sweet, human smile. “She chose you.” He pulled moss off the face, bared one worm-eaten eye.

  “She said for me to find her, in her world. I’m here. She brought me. As if—as if she might have wanted me. I mean—” He swallowed, touched his glasses, across which a minute snail was crawling. “Maybe all she wanted was another set of bones.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, what am I? Some long-haired, short-sighted bookworm whose idea of a good time is picking brachiopods out of a cliff. And she—” He loosed the word again, on a long, slow whisper, trailing bubbles like tiny pearls that caught in the mermaid’s moss. “She. . . .” He stirred restively, blind with the memory of her kiss, of the swelling tide that had touched him everywhere. “How could she want me? She just brought me down here to torment me, the way she tormented me in my world.”

  “My sister never takes what she doesn’t want. The sea changes itself at every touch of light, but it is never false.”

  “Then where is she? Is there another price to pay for her? What more can I pay than this?”

  “She’ll tell you,” Adam said equivocally. “And you still owe me.”

  “I know,” Jonah said indifferently. “But what have I got left?”

  “Your ears. Your eyes.” He flashed his teeth at Jonah’s horror. “Time. Your fingers. How can you feel stone with no fingers? Your teeth. You have a lot that you don’t seem to value. Your voice. Shall I take away your voice in return for my sister?”

  “What,” Jonah asked tersely, “do you really want?”

  Adam pulled more moss from the wooden face, uncovered a pearl in its other eye. His face changed. Jonah, watching in astonishment, felt his own face melt into expression. He lifted one hand after a moment, caught what fell from Adam’s eyes and floated down as pearls. Maybe, Megan thought, standing on the cliff above the tide pools, I could get there by drowning.

  The tide pools were appearing and disappearing under the rush and drag of water. Barnacles opened and sent out feathery legs to catch at food roiling over them. Anemones’ graceful tendrils stunned the minute transparent animals tumbling past, who were themselves filtering the rich brine through nets of mucus in their mouths. The feeding frenzy, invisible to Megan’s eye, yet vivid to her mind’s eye from all the books she had been reading, made her wonder what Jonah ate. Sushi, she decided morosely. If I throw myself into the water, maybe they would rescue me, guide me into their world. Or maybe they would just let me drown.

  Then she snatched at the word, remembering it from half-forgotten tales. Guide. I need a guide.

  She sat down on the cliff, flung a pebble into the water instead of her body. What could possibly guide her from the wonderful yet predictable sea, where nothing was left uncounted, undissected, unexamined, and ultimately uneaten, to that world where the sea sang with a siren’s voice and the wild breakers blowing spume changed into the white horses of the king? Something had led Jonah there, where his mermaid languished and blew bubbles and showed him, no doubt, how to make love to something whose appropriate parts resembled a tuna fish. But she walked, Megan remembered; she had legs when she walked on land.

  She sighed, and tossed another pebble.

  How had all this begun? she wondered. There was a time before the singer, and a time before Dory and before Adam Fin. When there was no magic, just Jonah and me living together, and the shop, and my drawings. Then one day, then once upon a time, then something happened. . . .

  The sea hare crawled into my drawing. The sea hare brought the magic.

  She contemplated that, frowning. Follow a sea hare into the sea? It would be akin to following a slug through a forest. And she had found the sea hare in her drawing, not in the tide pool. She would have to walk through that sea of paper and ink to follow it.

  Gulls along the tide line began shrieking, bickering over something edible that had washed ashore. Burrowed beneath their feet, the clams siphoned water through holes in the sand, filtering out microscopic suppers. She and Jonah ate the clams, except when some pesticide dump contaminated them. Then the plankton ate the pesticides, the clams ate the plankton, someone else ate the poisoned clams. So far, always someone else. Not, she remembered sadly, that it mattered anymore. Not to Jonah, who had been eaten by the sea.

  Is he still alive? she wondered, chilled. Did they leave his bones somewhere so deep he’ll become a fossil before he ever gets washed ashore? Jonah, lying in the dark abyss, slowly covered by a constant fall of sea debris. . . . “No,” she whispered, shaking hair out of her face, “they didn’t take him to kill him.” She thought of Adam, lying in the surf, watching her pull garbage out of her pockets, the look on his face as if he were the one dying. . . .

  She stood up restively, frustrated by so many pieces that didn’t fit. Adam. Dory and her fishhook. The singer. She had never met the singer; she had spent five minutes with Dory; Adam she knew a little better. . . . She began to walk along the cliff, toward town. Adam had watched her draw. Adam had watched her recognize him as something more or less than human. Adam had stood in the tide, willing her to touch him, and then he had turned her name into a pearl. She had put the pearl in a little box with her grandmother’s gold wedding band, a tiny perfect sand dollar no bigger than a nickel that Jonah had given her, a fossil shark tooth she had found, a dried rose from some forgotten dance, the opal-and-gold earring that Jonah hadn’t eaten.

  She began to walk a little faster. From the time after the coming of the sea hare, there were her two drawings, and there was Adam’s jewelry. She hadn’t looked at either for some time; for all she knew, the sea hare had crawled back out of the picture carrying all of Adam’s things. If not, maybe there was some clue, somewhere. An inky arrow, a dotted line, a trail of earrings showing the way. Follow the yellow brick road, the path of the setting sun, take the road not taken. . . .

  At home, she checked her drawings first. The tide pool, matted but not yet framed, still held its unexpected visitor. Her hair still floated in the tide, tangled in Dory’s hook. She went downstairs, into the shop, where Jenny was wrapping a necklace of moonstones for a customer. She went behind the counter, gazed down through the glass at the shelf where Adam’s jewelry was displayed. Jenny turned to her as the custome
r left.

  “He’s selling very well,” she commented. “Don’t you think we should get a few more pieces? And we have some money for him he never picked up.”

  Megan, finding no messages in the gold spirals, the penguin pin of moonstone and onyx, made a noise. She straightened, her eyes still on the fine work. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “He must have left a phone number.”

  “Not with me.”

  “An address?” Her white brows rose above her glasses. “He must have given Jonah some idea. . . . Now where did Jonah put—” She opened a drawer or two, then lifted the phone and removed the address book beneath it. “What is his last name?”

  “Fin.” Megan slid her hands over her eyes, feeling a sudden urge to laugh. “Adam Fin.”

  Jenny ruffled pages. “Well, he’s not under Fin. Maybe Adam?”

  “I don’t think even Jonah knew. He asked me once where Adam lived.”

  “He never left a number?”

  “No.” Her voice came out unexpectedly husky; she bent over the counter again, swallowing past the burn in her throat. “He didn’t leave anything. Except these.”

  “Well,” Jenny said again, blankly. “That’s odd. He’ll be back, sooner or later, to check, I’m sure. I’ve sold at least one thing every day. And someone said she’d think about the penguin pin. Someone bought the sea-otter pin just yesterday—I told Jonah to take that. And the blue-whale earrings got snapped up right away.”

  Megan, chin on her palm, swiveled to look at her. “What else?” she asked dully. “Do you remember?”

  “Of course. I made a list. How else would we know what to pay him?”

  “Oh.”

  Jenny smiled a little and produced it efficiently from the drawer beneath the register. “The sea-turtle pin. The cats-on-fishhooks earrings. The bracelet of silver dolphins. The rabbit-moon earrings.”

  “Which?”

  “The black rabbits running under the quarter moons.”

  “But I remember—” She moved abruptly; her elbow slid jarringly off the counter. “But Adam was wearing one when he first came.”

  Jenny shrugged. “He must like them. The gold-and-amethyst pendant—”

  “Hare.”

  “What?”

  She was staring at Jenny. “Hare. Not rabbit.”

  “Well,” Jenny said tolerantly, “whichever.” She went back to her list, while Megan, gazing at amethyst and moonstone through the glass, followed the trail of the sea hare into her life.

  Jonah, left alone for a long time under the mermaid’s smile, was driven finally, by her blind stare of pearl and wormwood, to leave her for something that could see him. He moved easily, he found, through an element that seemed to shift constantly between air and shadow, water and light. Sometimes he saw clearly how he wandered, along with whale and mackerel and jellyfish, through rooms whose walls were living coral, with ceilings of pearl and gold, or walls of giant kelp rising open to the light, jeweled fish darting among the leaves. Occasionally figures passed him, so vague he barely recognized the sudden sketch of color, the swirl of water, until he felt their eyes, their attention. Once or twice, he followed more familiar forms, humans of a dreamlike beauty, long hair bound with pearls and cowrie shells, slender feet disturbing not a grain of sand. These he would have expected, if he had ever thought about such a place. They would melt away eventually, reappear with hands of scallop shells and jet-black eyes that never blinked. Sometimes they followed him; he would feel their eyes and turn, and find something part kelp, part luminous, and always with those intense, unblinking eyes. They never spoke. Once, compelled to turn, he found a tiny purple animal rippling after him, leaving a glistening trail that hardened into mother-of-pearl. He recognized the sea hare. Something that looked like a fat gray cucumber flowed up behind it and ate it. He heard Adam’s laughter.

  He began seeing odd human things: bits of time frozen on the ocean floor. Some he expected: the pirate’s chest sagging open, spilling coins and diamonds; the marble head of a warrior gazing pensively at a brain coral; a gold goblet; a steel buckler lost in some sea battle; cannonballs, like the eggs of some huge sea turtle, scattered in the sand. These lay where they had fallen, in the midst of gardens blown of glass, in hallways, on tables, in fountains that spilled air instead of water. In one of the gardens, where colorless roses glistened like ice around him, and he walked a path of darkly gleaming fish scales, he heard the faint, gentle song that haunted him.

  He stopped. It came from everywhere. The light changed, or his vision became unearthly for a moment: the shining towers of light and gold, the gardens spun of glass, the windows of every fish’s color, were of such loveliness he knew he had stepped beyond his world. A pearl fell from his eye. And then the vision was gone, leaving him alone, neither of one world nor another. But the song, stealing like rapture into his blood, was unchanged, and it beckoned now from one fixed place in the sea.

  He moved again, more quickly. The sea itself lured him: a leaf traced his lips with its fine edge as he pushed through a stand of kelp; others clung briefly, intimately, like hands. He found a path of soft white sand or crushed pearl beyond the kelp; the song, flowing on its own warm current, grew stronger. He followed the path, tripped over a wooden mast with a rotting sail, then climbed over a cargo of burst oak barrels. Within the slats of one barrel, he saw the mad, bald, old-man’s face of an eel; it chilled him, but did not notice him. Something nibbled delicately at his ear: a tiny fish grazing as through the inner whorls of a shell. The path vanished under a huge tangle of cable; he climbed it, and then what looked like a jungle of plumbing pipes, scarcely noticing what he picked his way over, intent only on

  finding the path again. He found it, meandering like the song into a garden whose walls of coral and anemone and stone rose higher than his head, lining the path. Pale anemones opened slowly as he passed, showing him their hungry mouths. The path veered sharply, ended at a wall. He stopped; the song beckoned on the other side. He retraced his steps, turned a corner, another, and was stopped again by a solid mass of crimson coral. The song, stronger now, came from beyond it. He stood a moment, bewildered, while small fish darted through his floating hair. And then he recognized the maze.

  He gave a cry of frustration and longing; all around him coral polyps snapped shut. But the singing, deep, languorous, soothed him, coaxed him to turn, try again, turn down the next branch, where the singer would be, pale as pearl, sleek and naked as a fish, her long black hair jeweled with bright anemone; there, she would be, not there, but there, not this turning, but that, or most certainly that. She would be there, singing, her long fingers gently sliding over, under an oyster, feeling for its pearl.

  He reached the end, found not a mermaid, but a little ivory door set in a vast black wall that cut across the center of the maze. There were no more choices to make, there was only the closed door, and the singing on the other side of the wall. He opened it, resigned to finding the other half of the maze. The singing drifted over him, through him, murmuring, enticing.

  What lay before him stunned him.

  He closed the door after a long time, stood with his face against it, trembling. Still the singer called to him, the haunting voice of the siren, with her hair of drifting kelp and her icy fingers of foam: Come to me. Come. I am all the beauty in the sea, leave your mortal world and come. . . .

  He felt someone beside him, knew without looking who it was. He whispered, “That’s death in there.”

  Adam leaned beside the door, his own face carved of ivory, as colorless and hard. “You see.”

  She was still singing, still pulling at his heart, his bones. “Why? Why there?”

  “She is waiting for you,” Adam said shortly. “That is where she chooses to wait. You followed her between earth and water to find her. You wanted her that badly.”

  He stared at the door, as if he could see through it across the dark and terrible waste, to the luminous tower at its heart. “I can’t.” He swallo
wed; there was a pearl caught in his throat, pearls trapped behind his eyes. “I can’t fight my way across that.”

  “Then find your own way back to your world,” Adam said. His eyes were deadly as the eel’s eyes; his voice colder than the abyss. “This is her price: you will find her in that tower. This is mine: if you refuse, you will stay here forever, between earth and water, neither of one world nor another; you will never die, and you will never cease to hear her sing.

  “Choose.”

  SIX

  Megan gazed into the tide pool, looking for the sea hare. She had brought her drawing pad, to try to coax it back into the world. The anemones were still there; the starfish had crawled away; the chiton, nibbling pink algae, had turned pinker. She dipped her hand into the pool, stirred the bottom. Nothing popped to the surface; nothing shifted itself beneath the sand into her hand. She dried her hand on her knee, leaning over to watch the water still. It reflected the blank morning mists, the shadow of her face.

  She whispered, “Adam.”

  And he was there, looking up at her, through her dark reflection.

  She jerked back, with a cry. He lifted his hand above the surface of the water, seized her wrist. He didn’t pull her, just held her: an arm coming out of a circle of rocks holding eight inches of water. She felt like a shrimp grabbed by an anemone.

  He said nothing; his face, colorless, expressionless, beautiful, seemed hardly human. He wore something that looked like fish scales; a tiny sand dollar, like the one in her box, clung to his hair. A basket starfish, its intricate arms weaving and branching, spread itself across his chest.

  She was shaking with shock, with his sudden unfamiliarity. She found her voice finally. “I was—I’m looking for Jonah.” Still he said nothing, his face underwater rippling a little, as the wind brushed the pool. She heard her heart pound, in his silence. “Can you help me?”