Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“I want you,” he whispered, swaying in the invisible tide. “I want you at the oldest place under the sea. The place where fossils and time began. But how can I live under the sea? I’ll drown, loving you. All through history, people have drowned, loving you.” The tide, playing around him, ebbed slowly, pulling him into its long, powerful embrace; he fell to his knees at her feet. He gazed up at her, saw her face in shadow, and then in light as she bent suddenly. Her fingers tangled in his hair; she drew his head back, kissed his open mouth, and he felt her breath flowing into him like tide, full, relentless, endless, until he heard his own blood sing with her voice. Then the tide turned; he felt it drawing back around his face, his groping hands. It dropped him, receded into shadow, into silence. He lay stranded, beached on the floorboards, swallowing the pearl she had left in his mouth.

  Memory burned his lips as he rose; he gripped the door a moment, blind. He made his way out as unobtrusively as possible, clinging to the shadows, looking at no one, until he found the bar and leaned on it. He lifted his eyes then, saw the room behind him in the mirror.

  He stared at it senselessly. It was made of pearl, of glass, of light. Moonshells crawled across the floor; bubbles drifted, He turned abruptly. On a stage of crystal, the musicians played strands of light. Fish darted in and out of the strands. The musicians’ hair drifted, full of colored snails, brilliant, rippling ribbons of sea slugs. Their faces were so translucent he could almost see the fine bones beneath the skin, as if they were related to the strange, luminous fish in the deep of the sea. Pearls floated from their mouths as they sang, clustered on the rocky ceiling above their heads. The listeners, with hair and beards of sea moss, foam, the gold secretions of pen shells, lifted hands drawn long and fine by endless currents, and sipped from mussel shells as blue-black as their eyes.

  “What?” Jonah whispered; a bubble escaped him, joined the pearls along the cave roof. He felt a touch and whirled. Starfish clung to the bar; a fish swam under his nose. He felt his knees give, and clung to the bar, feeling sea life stir under his grip. Something rippled between his hands, a solitary, shell-less wanderer. He remembered it swimming in and out of Megan’s hair: the little sea hare in her drawing.

  He inhaled a great breath of water as easily as air. “Megan.” Her name choked him, turned his chest to fire. Adam, polishing an abalone shell behind the bar, smiled.

  “Welcome,” he said softly, “to the belly of the whale.”

  Five

  Jonah had vanished.

  Megan, white-faced and stunned, searched the town for him; no one had seen him. She went to the Ancient Mariner; no band, she was told, had played there recently. She tracked Hellbent down in a nearby town: they had never, she was told, had a female singer. No bodies clutching fossils had been dragged to shore by the tide. He was in love with someone; he had run away. That was obvious, she told herself, as she stared, numb and mute with shock, at the blank wall of his absence. Still she looked for some hint of where he had gone, some aberration of his life among his socks, something peculiar among his rocks, a message between the lines of the Compend he had left lying open on his stool in the shop. And even while she searched the obvious, the impossible fact of where he had gone lay stark and clear as the moon in the dark of her mind.

  He had fallen in love with a mermaid and had gone to live in the sea.

  He had, it seemed, taken all the mystery in the world along with him. She could find neither Adam Fin nor Dory. Even Mike had forgotten how to talk. When she asked about the Otherworld, the Land Beneath the Waves, he only grunted, his eyes on his book, and pointed a finger at the shelves. She spent days sketching, hoping that her pen would reveal some message of him, but the sea told her nothing; her sketches remained stubbornly unmysterious.

  So she changed them, sitting for long hours on the sand, drawing feverishly, desperately. She drew roads of light leading to palaces of cloud and glass rising into the morning mists. She drew underwater creatures: angelfish with legs and rippling wings and narrow, delicate fish faces; butterflyfish that flew in great clouds of color above the water; goatfish with slitted yellow eyes and slender, hooved legs that galloped along the sea floor, herded by the damselfish and her dogfish. She drew a seal with Adam’s face; she drew his body with a seal’s face. She drew Jonah, with his long red floating hair and his glasses, and a scaly mer-tail, sitting at the bottom of the sea on a giant clam, reading. She was crying long before she finished it; the lines of his body were starred with tears of sorrow that he had gone, tears of fury that he had left her for another woman, tears of helplessness because the sea showed her only its flat blank face and would not speak to her.

  She left Jenny to run the shop, except at lunchtime. Jenny, worried over Megan’s hollowed, white face, said, “He’d never have just left you, the store, everything. You should call the police.”

  “He left me,” Megan said crossly, “for another woman.”

  “What other woman? You know all the women he knows. You are so close; why would he have left you for someone else?”

  Megan, practicing at the register, which she loathed, banged the drawer shut. “Well, he did. Maybe he’ll be back, maybe not. I’ll just have to keep the store open until we run out of things to sell. Jonah handled all that.”

  “He’ll be back,” Jenny said, with her exasperating optimism. People, Megan decided dourly, existed in different worlds at the same time: the people who inhabited Jenny’s world never ventured farther out to sea than the surf for a little fishing and if they were lured out of that world into someone else’s less predictable world, they probably did come back. “Anyway, he’d never have left his fossils.”

  Megan’s mouth tightened; a tear fell, in spite of her, among the register keys. He vanished, she thought, into a drop of water. Into light. And Adam Fin knows where he is. And Dory knows. But they won’t tell me. And I don’t know why they took him. She said, punching keys, “He told me he was obsessed by another woman. Some singer. He said it didn’t have anything to do with me. How he figured that, I don’t know.”

  “Who is she?” Jenny asked, startled. “Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

  “Well,” Jenny said practically after a moment, “he has all his money tied up in the store. He has to come back and deal with it. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.” She folded her arms against the register, dropped her face against them. The register made a noise; the drawer sprang open against her ribs. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  She walked on the beach later in the dark, dry-eyed, pleading silently for a hook to fly out of nowhere and catch her by the hair. Or for Adam Fin to appear in her path. Maybe he would have taken me where Jonah is, she thought wearily, if I had wanted him. But I didn’t want a mystery. I just want Jonah back, leaving rocks all over the place, and cooking for me, and criticizing my work. I want his bony body and his cobalt eyes behind his glasses, and his mouth nibbling the earrings out of my ears if I forget to take them off. She tripped over something and kicked it irritably into the surf. What could they want with him, anyway? He’s crotchety, he sits around reading all the time, he complains about everything, and he hates meeting people. But he loves me, and he feels like smooth wood in my hands. And he loves my art, and he loves the sea.

  Too much, apparently, she thought, and felt the sting of salt behind her eyes. What if he doesn’t want to come back?

  She sent another bit of something in her way flying into the waves, touched her glasses back up her nose, her eyes wide. He’s human, she thought, not fish. Not whatever they are. He can’t live in their world.

  Seven years, the tales said. Seven years, and even then, some mortals did not want to return to the real world.

  So, she thought, dry-eyed again, her hair wild in the wind, whipping across her mouth. I’ll find him and ask him. I’ll know, then. I’ll know. But how?

  She stopped, staring out at the vast, restless dark. If I find Adam, she thought, maybe w
e can bargain. If he wants me. But I don’t think that’s what he wants. I don’t think that’s what he wants at all. But maybe, when I see him, he’ll tell me what he wants for Jonah. Or what she wants.

  She.

  A face sketched itself in Megan’s mind: a model’s face, with wide-set, sea green eyes, hair black as the sea on a moonless night, cheekbones that could cut. She shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, felt the hollows between her ribs.

  Or me. With my hands colored with washes, my glasses sliding down my nose, my big feet. I can’t sing a note to save my life. Even if I do find him, will he want to come back? But if I don’t find him, I’ll never know. So I’ll find him.

  But how? The waves took up her question, curled it under them, withdrew on long sighs of how? She stood a long time listening, but they never answered.

  Jonah sat against the figurehead of an ancient wreck. Her hair was green with moss, her smile was sweet, distant, the only thing visible in a blind, green face. He leaned his head between her breasts, his back against her fishy waist. She was the only mermaid he had seen down here; he found her smile wry and oddly comforting.

  The wreck lay on a shelf of rock that plunged into shadow. Or it lay in a room so vast the ship seemed simply a piece of decor: a graceful pile of worm-eaten wood, out of which a skeletal hand waved now and then. If he looked for it, he saw the structure of the room, great walls of pearl and watery light, windows of thin sheets of mother-of-pearl through which water moved like air. If he looked hard, he saw the people in the room, glints of light forming faces, shimmering garments. They took more human form to look at him, as if he were some kind of mirror; even then their faces, like living fossils, were disturbing. They were immortal, and as old as water; they could resemble what they wanted. They could wear periwinkles for eyes on a kelp-leaf face. When they took human faces, their beauty could be inhuman.

  So far, only Adam had spoken to him. Others brought him things to eat and drink; what, exactly, he refused to guess. Everything tasted strange, briny, wet; he might have been eating jellyfish or sea slugs, for all he knew. Eating was one of the two preoccupations in the sea. If he looked straight into it, huddling close to the figurehead, he saw the lovely anemones turn into mouths surrounded by fingers with which they stung and guided their food. He watched starfish cling to clams, force them open little by little, suck out the helpless inhabitants from their homes. He saw the sea cucumber extend a sticky finger to dredge plankton from the sea floor; the great-eyed, luminous dragonfish jut out its spiky lower jaw to pin and take in prey larger than itself. He watched the squid rise up from the deep waters below the cliff, pass silently as a nightmare on its way to graze the warmer, livelier upper regions. He watched the sperm whale dive past him as silently to search for the leviathan that never showed itself above the dark; he watched sharks eat the whale, leaving him in a cloud of blood that he could taste. Nothing scented him, though; he left no more trace of himself in the water than if he had been a dream.

  Sometimes he would find the entire sea mating around him. Then some undulation of a great fish’s tail would bring him a memory of the curved, darkly glittering mass in the shadows of the cave. He would grow blind and deaf as the figurehead with desire, and find, when the urgency around him faded, only Adam’s mocking face.

  “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 w*hat 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: Aqua-Man, 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 longhaired, shortsighted 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? Somet
hing 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.