Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  He was still trying to back away, but his path was blocked by a cloudy wall, his legs snarled in warm weeds. In the murky depths of the wave, he could just see a girl's face beginning to form. Dorian knew that he couldn't let himself see that face, and with a frantic effort he flung himself around, straining to run. Something fleshy hit his mouth, and he heard himself screaming, and screaming again.

  He had a mouthful of cloth. It was his pillowcase. He was banging his head into the pillow, and that awful yielding wall was only the mattress. He lurched up onto his knees, gasping, with his sweat-slicked hair cloying around his face, and found himself staring at a baby koala perched on its mother's back, gray light sifting through the frilly curtains.

  “I hope you had a nice restful sleep,” the man in the suit said. He was sitting in the rocking chair where Lindy did her knitting. His blue eyes were as blank as gobs of flattened chewing gum on a sidewalk. “A nice, deep, soothing sleep really makes all your troubles seem to melt away, doesn't it?”

  Dorian wasn't sure if this was another dream. Irrationally he thought his clock might be able to tell him whether or not he was asleep. All the red digits said, though, was that it was already twelve minutes past eight. Why hadn't the alarm gone off?

  “I'm going to be late for school,” Dorian announced reflexively to the man, who suddenly appeared far more substantial.

  “You won't be attending school today, Mr. Hurst.” The man stood up. He was tall, and his blue eyes were small and so close-set that they seemed to be about to merge together. He had freshly shaved, sticky-looking cheeks and a long, flat nose with broad pink nostrils.

  “I have a test today. In English.” Dorian was finally awake enough to wonder what the man was doing there. He was awake enough to remember the night before, when he'd skimmed along the pitching sea with a mermaid's lips soft and cool against his own. How could anything in his normal life seem real compared to that? Luce. And she would come back to the beach tonight...

  The tall man smirked. “I believe Mrs. Muggeridge will accept a note from the FBI, Mr. Hurst. You can take your test after you get back from Anchorage.”

  “From ... I'm not going to Anchorage!” Dorian heard a soft shuffling out in the hall and looked up in time to catch Lindy's frightened eyes blinking in at him. She hurried out of view.

  “You aren't? You know, I've mentioned to your nice relations here that we suspect some unpleasant things about the Dear Melissa. Foul play, maybe. Criminals, maybe. Extortion, you see, aimed at the cruise line. We'll keep popping your ships if you don't cough up.” The man bent down and jerked open Dorian's dresser: not just any drawer but the bottom one. Dorian was suddenly very still. The drawings ...

  The man threw a pair of jeans onto the bed. Dorian forced himself to be casual, even obnoxious.

  “So?”

  “Well, I've explained to them that these extortionists are smart people. They recruit someone on board to help out. Someone impressionable, like a teenager. Naturally, I told them, young Mr. Hurst will want to do whatever he can to help us bring these fiends to justice.” A gray sweater flew after the jeans, landing on Dorian's knees. That freckled hand couldn't be more than half an inch away from grazing the stacks of paper.

  “Wait!” Dorian yelped the word, and the agent straightened and raised his eyebrows, his pink lips puckering. “Of course I want to help. I just didn't see why it had to be Anchorage.”

  “Can't stand the thought of getting out of this dump for a day or two?”

  Dorian stared him down. “Can I get dressed, please?”

  “You hadn't exactly studied for that test, anyway, had you? I'm doing you a favor.”

  “Are you trying to see me with my clothes off?”

  “You think you're the first person to come up with that line?” The agent was sneering, but he still backed off, slapping the pale lavender door shut behind him.

  Dorian wasn't about to put on the clothes the agent had flung at him. He picked out an outfit that was as obviously different as possible: a red hoodie over a ragged Mr. Bubble T-shirt marked all over with his own sketches, a pair of black cargo pants. Then he reached through the tangled clothes in the bottom drawer and stroked the paper. Even without looking he was painfully aware that he was touching an image of Luce's face. He stared around the room, but there was really no better place to hide the drawings. Not from someone who might search, anyway.

  After a minute's thought, he pulled the drawings out and slipped them under a pile of Lindy's knitting magazines. He didn't think she ever looked at them.

  A day or two? What would Luce think if he wasn't at the beach tonight?

  He walked out into the kitchen and found Lindy nervously flipping pancakes while the tall agent leaned on the counter. He gave Dorian's outfit a sharp once-over but didn't say anything. Lindy caught the look, though, and turned to Dorian reproachfully.

  “Dorian, couldn't you wear something nicer? For your trip with Agent Smitt?”

  “Oh, that doesn't matter, Mrs. Basel. We don't care how our young man here looks. External appearances are so unimportant.” He gave Dorian a wide, sickly smile. “Don't you agree, Dorian? What matters is what's on the inside.”

  ***

  After the first shock of Smitt's arrival Dorian's thoughts began to drift again. As he went through the motions of stuffing an overnight bag and layering on extra sweaters in place of his missing parka, he was thinking of Luce, imagining how he'd explain: I thought if I didn’t go along with it maybe they’d start following me or something. I had to throw them off ... She was already worried about the police. She would understand that he had to act in a way that would keep them from getting suspicious. At least, she'd understand if she ever gave him a chance to explain. Maybe she'd get so angry at waiting around for him tonight that she'd never come back. The idea sat inside Dorian like something cold and gelatinous clogging his heart. Real life was wherever she was, in her face where every curve held a kind of shuddering brilliance, in her disarming bursts of honesty. I’m supposed to make sure you die tonight. And I just blew it completely. Maybe it was crazy, but Dorian couldn't help grinning at the memory of those words.

  Everything else in his life was just something other people expected from him. He kissed Lindy on the cheek, carried his bag to the car, and sat silent next to Smitt as they drove to the airfield. Whatever happened, Dorian thought, it shouldn't be too hard to convince them he was totally ignorant. The FBI thought a criminal gang had brought down the Dear Melissa, Smitt had said. Dorian could truthfully claim he didn't know anything about that. Once they'd boarded the small propeller plane Dorian stared out the window. Instead of the clouds he saw her face with its soft internal glow, her eyes shut tight, in the moment before he'd covered her mouth with his. Once again he'd known exactly what to do.

  He'd outsmarted death a second time. It was impossible to repress the thrill of that, the sense it gave him of his own outrageous specialness. If he could make a mermaid like him too much to kill him, how ordinary could he be?

  ***

  In Anchorage there was another car waiting. Smitt took the front seat while Dorian slumped into the back. He'd spent a day here with his family just before they'd left on their fatal cruise, and he remembered the drive into town, the freeway curving beside a blue waterway, a handful of white office buildings set against whiter mountains, the blue-green luxuriance of trees. They pulled into an underground parking lot beneath one of those white buildings and took an elevator up to a floor where anonymous beige hallways mazed away in all directions.

  Smitt led Dorian around several turns. His eyes were still empty, but his smirk kept getting tighter, as if someone were steadily pulling on a drawstring threaded through his mouth. After a few minutes he opened a door onto a small room where a brown plastic table sat surrounded by blue plastic chairs. An older, thickset man looked up at them expectantly. He had tan skin—maybe he was Italian or Hispanic—gray hair, and large sympathetic eyes. His smile struck Dorian as genuine
and even reassuring.

  “Thank you, Agent Smitt. And this is Dorian, of course. I've seen your picture. I'm Ben Ellison.”

  “Hi.” Dorian smiled back awkwardly and shook the proffered hand. Ben Ellison waved him to a chair, and Dorian sat down while Smitt leaned against the door. Ellison pulled a file folder out of a laptop bag and opened it, and Dorian caught his breath.

  “Your mother really liked to post pictures online, didn't she? It's wonderful to see a strong relationship like this between a boy your age and his little sister. I wish my kids could get along half this well.”

  The picture in the folder showed Emily sitting on his shoulders. They were in a park, the pale sky laced by bare black branches. She was wearing a bright polka-dotted jacket and mittens made to look like duck faces. She held her hands up menacingly on either side of Dorian's face, thumbs flared to show that the ducks were quacking furiously. His own gloved hands wrapped her legs, and he was laughing so hard that he couldn't quite stand up straight.

  Dorian turned his eyes away, only to find himself confronting Smitt's contorted smile.

  “You must miss her very much,” Ben Ellison said. Now his voice sounded too warm, almost gluey.

  “Of course I miss her,” Dorian said. It came out harsh, rasping. He didn't know where to look; definitely not into Emily's giddy face.

  “I know you do. I spent a great deal of time studying these pictures.” He turned over the photo of Dorian and Emily in the park. From the corner of his eye Dorian could see more images of himself: roughhousing with his sister, reading to her, jumping with her in a pile of leaves. “Seeing them, I couldn't doubt that you were telling us absolutely everything you know that might help us to understand why she died.”

  Dorian didn't know what to say to that. “Sure.”

  “The little jerk's been doing nothing but lying his ass off from the first time we talked to him,” Agent Smitt snarled from behind Dorian's left shoulder. Dorian couldn't help twisting around at the words, and Agent Smitt's blue eyes met his with a slick, repellent look of self-satisfaction.

  “Please, Agent Smitt.” Ellison was warmly reproachful. “That's not at all constructive. We have no reason to believe that Dorian is actually lying.”

  Dorian was aware that he was being played with, but awareness didn't stop any of it from affecting him. He felt the repulsive slap of Agent Smitt's words, his queasy smirk, and then the soft comfort of Ellison's reply.

  “From everything we've learned, it sounds as if Dorian had a truly enviable life before the tragedy. Mother a professor of Russian history, father in medical research. Beautiful home, top schools. Everyone who knew them describes a very cultured, happy, loving family. ” Ben Ellison was watching Dorian too intensely as he spoke those last words. Dorian was careful to keep his face completely frozen. “Dorian would have more reason than anyone—anyone at all—to want to get to the bottom of this.”

  Dorian sneezed, loudly. Smitt snickered and said, “That's what you'd think, all right.”

  “That's what we all thought,” Ellison agreed. He focused his attention on Dorian again. “Your story doesn't explain anything, of course. 'Everything went dark'?” Was there a note of sarcasm in his voice? “But considering how little we know about the effect an occurrence like that might have on the human mind ... Well, let's just say that I was prepared to accept your version of events. It did leave open the question of how you reached the shore, though. We can definitely rule out the possibility that you swam.”

  “I never said I swam.” Dorian felt his throat getting rough. “I said I didn't know how it happened.” Ellison nodded, fixing his serious gaze on Dorian's face.

  “You don't know how it happened. Of course. But how do you think you made it to land? What's your theory?” Dorian stared blankly. “Just speculate. I'd like to see what ideas we can come up with together. Anything at all.”

  “I mean...” Dorian had found a spot of carpet to stare at. “Maybe I took a lifeboat or something part of the way? And I just repressed it?”

  “Maybe.” Ellison nodded. “But if you took a boat, you did it long before the Dear Melissa crashed. You were discovered on the beach exactly fifty-three minutes after the time of impact, but by my estimate it would have taken you at least four hours to paddle that distance alone. And that”—for the first time his mouth bent like Smitt's—“that would suggest you had some advance knowledge.”

  They were getting back to the whole criminal conspiracy idea, then. In a way it was a relief. “I didn't know anything.”

  “Then you didn't take a boat.”

  Dorian met Ellison's brown eyes as Smitt burst out laughing behind them. The gaze Dorian shared with Ellison went on for too long but it was also somehow unstable, disorienting.

  “We know how the brat got to shore!” Smitt yapped. “Stop pretending we don't.”

  “Agent Smitt...”

  “He knows it, too. He just keeps spewing lies.”

  “Withholding information isn't the same thing as lying.” There was a lull. Ben Ellison started flipping through the stack of photos again, and Dorian clung to the edges of his chair. He was feeling terribly unbalanced, as if ocean waves were pushing up beneath the dull beige floor and tilting it subtly from side to side. Something cold and vast and seething was coming too close.

  “Dorian...” Ellison seemed genuinely concerned. “At a certain point I was forced to entertain the idea that there were some things you weren't telling us. But I couldn't believe you would have willingly participated in anything that might hurt Emily. I had to try to come up with other explanations for why you might be choosing to keep quiet, even though you must realize what's at stake here. We're trying to make sure no other little girls have to die the way Emily did. You do understand that, don't you?”

  “Yes.” Dorian thought of Luce insisting that she didn't want to kill humans. Even if she'd been telling the truth, though, it was pretty clear the other mermaids didn't feel the same way. They'd just go on murdering as many people as they could until someone stopped them. The floor kept pitching dizzily, and he could feel the blood drain away from his face. Ellison was watching him closely again.

  “I can think of two very good reasons why you might not have told us everything you know. The first one is that you were convinced nobody would accept the truth.” Dorian swayed. “Agent Smitt, would you please get Dorian a glass of water? He's looking a bit peaked.”

  Smitt was sneering so hard that Dorian thought his face must ache, but at least he left the room.

  “Reality is far, far more complicated—and much richer and more amazing—than the vast majority of people could ever imagine. Would you agree with that? Dorian?”

  “Yes,” Dorian said again. At least he hadn't lied to Luce. He'd told her straight out that he thought he had every right to expose the mermaids if he could just find someone who would believe him.

  “Then let's just assume that, in this room at least, there is nothing whatsoever too incredible to be believed. I'll accept absolutely anything you tell me. Does that change your story?”

  Dorian opened his mouth to tell Ben Ellison everything, and stopped. His breath hissed abruptly. They wouldn't understand that Luce was different from the others, and he'd have no way to make sure she didn't get hurt. He pictured her dead body, back arched and fins dragging, floating in a giant tank of formaldehyde. Luce, short for Lucette. Dorian felt a sudden surge of desire to bury his face in her hair.

  Ellison waited patiently, his deep eyes studying Dorian as if this choked silence was remarkably interesting.

  “I see,” Ellison said at last. “You want to tell the truth. There's something stopping you.”

  Dorian was having trouble breathing. The ocean followed him everywhere.

  “That brings me to my second theory, then. The other reason why you'd refuse to talk. It might sound a bit far-fetched, but personally I'm convinced that it's the right explanation.” Ellison started nodding to himself. “Dorian, I think you'v
e been subjected to a form of mind control. You're not telling me what you know because the ability to do so has been stolen from you.”

  Subjected to mind control, Dorian thought. Wasn't that just a fancy way of saying he was enchanted? When he considered the way Luce's song stayed with him, traced like razor cuts all over his thoughts, he had to admit that made a lot of sense. He had been so arrogant, thinking he was somehow totally immune to a power that was strong enough to kill practically anyone.

  Luce seemed too sweet and straightforward to control someone's feelings with magic that way. But that could be an act, or just another way her spell was working through him, warping and reshaping his perceptions. Dorian still didn't want to accept the idea, but if Luce had deliberately enchanted him— if she had—then that would definitely explain why he couldn't make himself hate her. It would explain why he thought about her constantly and why he was starting to have feelings for her that weren't hatred at all.

  “Dorian?”

  Dorian looked up. Even the walls seemed to ebb and swell.

  “What if somebody saved me?” His voice sounded terrible, the words torn off like shreds of old paper.

  Ellison nodded his enthusiasm. “That seems very plausible.”

  Smitt opened the door, a dark blue glass in his hand, and passed it to Dorian. Dorian clutched the smooth surface desperately. There was a pause while Ellison shot a warning look at Smitt, who backed out of the room again with obvious reluctance. “Dorian. I know this isn't easy, but you need to make the effort. Who saved you?”

  Dorian took a gulp of the water, gagged, and sent it spewing out of his mouth. The glass dropped onto his lap, sending a soaking tide across his knees, then rolled unbroken along the carpeted floor. He heard his own panicked cry. Seawater. The taste of drowning, the taste of squeezing death, thick with salt, weedy, airless—