Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Did anyone—did anyone ever try to cross the waste?”

  She scratched her head with the parrotfish, thinking back. “A few,” she said, “but that was before it got so bad.”

  “Before—”

  “The waste changes, grows like some living, malignant thing.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. They never came back out, that’s what I do know. Whether they reached Nereis or not, they never returned through the maze.”

  He watched her shift the parrotfish along a branch of coral. The graceful, flowing tendrils of the open polyps turned dark, in his mind’s eye: a long fall of shadow down a shell white face, the single, glistening pearl. She had watched the first creature secrete the first shell, wrapping itself in delicate armor; she had watched it settle in the mud, the preserved form and structure; millions of years later, she had watched Jonah searching for it in cliffs formed after she was born. His back was to her; she sang, so that he would turn and face the living sea. “But why?” he whispered desperately, seeing the waste again. “Why?”

  Dory shrugged a little. “She’s untamed, like the sea. No one questions her; no one questions the spindrift, or the shark’s tooth. It’s there, that’s all, to be dealt with or not. My other daughters—they’ve done their share of mischief, following ships, singing sailors overboard on a whim. Some mortals lived to tell about it; others didn’t. Some even coaxed my children ashore, for a time. But Nereis—she makes her own rules. What she wants, she takes, for her reasons, and there’s always a reason, for she rules the sea. She taught the great whales how to sing; she rides the dolphins as they leap. She set the spirals in the narwhal’s first horn, turning and turning with her hands. She is the restless eye of the sea; all its living things swim through her mind. She took you for a reason.”

  “Why?” His voice had no sound.

  “Ask her.” He did not answer; she shrugged again, shifting the parrotfish. “Then what will you do? Drift between earth and sea until you become a shadow, a ghost, a reflection of yourself, always wanting her and always afraid, mourning what you might have had, but never certain exactly what it was you lost, because you never had the courage to stare that darkness down?”

  “It’s more than dark. And it will take more than courage. I never had much to begin with. Or I never had to think about it.”

  “Adam told you your future: the open door or the closed door. There is nothing for you out here. No hope. No chance of escape. He won’t bargain with you. He knows all the faces of the sea, and all her moods He takes for himself where he can, when he wants He teases humans and sets them adrift in their own desires; sometimes he sees them safely back to shore. But, serving Nereis, he is implacable. She sets her terms; he won’t oppose her and he won’t help you.”

  “No mercy.”

  “As much,” she murmured obscurely, “as you give her.”

  He stirred himself to ask, then didn’t. Mercy, like courage, was one of those nebulous words contingent on action; he preferred going through life without needing to use them. He sat silently, hunched over himself, feeling his hair already drifting like moss. The siren song melted through him again, dark, husky, tender; he closed his eyes, felt the singer’s hands, the wild, roiling embrace of the sea, the pearl that had slid between her lips into his mouth. It’s simple, the song said. Just open the door and enter and come to me. I’m here in the tower, waiting for you. The rest is unimportant. Shadows. Dreams. Ignore them. I am the only reality. Nothing can keep you from me. I am the Queen of the Sea, and I am all the beauty in the sea, and more beautiful than any tale. Come to me. Come.

  He drew breath; pearls slid down his face. Dory glanced at him, a quick, sidelong question. He said, “After all, I never thought I could breathe water, either. I’ve already done one impossible thing.”

  Dory nodded vehemently, disturbing the little fish in her hair. “Yes.”

  “I’ll die in there.”

  “Possibly.”

  “But there’s an end to dying, in there. There’s no end out here. Just that song in me producing an inexhaustible supply of pearls. And Adam’s pitiless eyes.”

  “They are pitiless, aren’t they?”

  “His laughter’s worse.”

  “Worse. Much worse.”

  “And I might not die.”

  “No.”

  “And if I don’t die, I’ll see her face instead of his.”

  “Much more preferable.”

  “I remember her eyes, the first time I saw her sing. In that noisy, smoky bar. She met my eyes and I felt like I’d swallowed a lightning bolt. Did you ever feel like that?”

  “A hundred times.”

  “Even if I die, even if she’s cruel enough just to lure me in there to watch me be eaten, at least the song will stop.”

  “Is it so terrible?”

  “Oh, yes.” He felt the pearls brush down his face again. Dory turned; he met her eyes and let her see the new pearls forming. “Anything that beautiful is terrible. Because it’s outside of you. It’s not you. You’ll do anything to make it part of you. You’d eat it, drown in it, kill it, let it kill you. Anything to stop it from not being you.” He rose. “Even this.”

  “Wait,” Dory said quickly. She collected the pearls he had wept, put them in his pocket. “To remind you,” she said obscurely. He said nothing, waited, his eyes on the wall beyond the maze, until her busy hands found the last pearl, and she let him go.

  Megan reached the bottom of the stairway into the sea. The steps vanished, she had noticed some time back, one by one as she left them behind her. The ocean flowed tumultuously around her, behind her, overhead, but it never touched her. In this world she had entered, the ocean was the dream. The delicate walls and towers shimmering in the timeless golden light of a gentle summer afternoon were more substantial than the school of mackerel overhead. Was it Ys? she wondered. Or was it Tir na n’Og, Land of the Forever Young? Or were all these just human dreams, and this the land beneath the sea that had no human name? Or maybe, she thought uneasily, it was simply what she expected, and the truth lay beyond her eyesight, beyond human imagining.

  The last step vanished; she stood on a path of moonstones that led to the closed gate of the palace. The gate and walls were of crystal and glass, outlined in gold. Within, she could see a garden blown of glass: roses, hedgerows, stately trees whose great ridged leaves resembled kelp. She saw no one.

  There was a glass bell beside the gate, she saw as she came closer. A little glass hammer hung beside it. She wondered, as she lifted the hammer, if the entire world of glass would shatter around her when she struck the bell, to reveal the wildness behind its pristine face. Not even the bell cracked, but the deep sound that came from it, reverberating through the palace, seemed to shake even the light.

  The gate opened immediately, on its own accord, or by invisible hands. Megan stepped into the garden. She waited. No one came. What is this? she thought. This isn’t Adam’s world. This is like my drawings. This is some story out of a book. Where is the man who slithered up through a tide pool like a seal, with a starfish riding on his chest?

  She said aloud, tentatively, “Adam?” No one answered but the trees, their glass leaves ringing like small bells.

  She wandered through the garden, saw glass sea anemones among the windflowers; both moved gently to unseen currents. There were glass benches here and there among the trees, and statues of animals with fishtails: a mer-lion, a mer-peacock, a mer-swan, a mermaid. She looked closely at the mermaid. Its hair coiled over its shoulder like flowing honey; its brows slanted over wide-set eyes; the icy contours of cheekbone and jaw were seal-sleek and beautiful. Megan’s glasses misted suddenly. She touched them, swallowing, and forced herself to move.

  Maybe, she thought, all this is just a way to cushion the fact that Jonah wants to stay. A consolation present for Megan. She saw a door into the palace in the distance, the color of pale coral, limned in gold. As she neared, it opened. />
  She stepped into a vast hall. Soft corals grew in pots, fanned gently by air or water. A grove of giant kelp stretched from floor to ceiling in one corner. Light from stained-glass windows drenched it; the colors danced like fish among the leaves. There was a wainscoting of white scallop shells along the walls; the shells were taller than she. Above them, more beasts frolicked in the sea: mer-unicorns, mer-dragons, mer-wolves, mer-elephants, even, Megan saw with astonishment, a mer-sphinx. Looking more closely at a mer-dragon, she realized it was alive: The walls were coral and all the vivid sea animals formed of coral polyps, pulsing gently to invisible tides.

  Am I in air or water? she wondered. She spoke Adam’s name again, watching for a bubble to form in the air. The name only dwindled in the silence.

  A door opened across the room, inviting her. She didn’t argue. Someone was thinking all of this, but why and how were beyond her speculation. The door led her up a spiral staircase. The tiles lining the steps were black, dark blue, and white, with tiny scallop shells at their corners. Colors changed; the lines in them opened and closed as if to the flow of water. There was a tile missing on one step. She knew, before she studied it, that a piece of one corner would be still embedded in the step.

  Maybe this is Mike’s palace, she thought. What he dreamed up, around the tile, when he thought about it.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened to a bedchamber. It was a tiny tower room, with a bed and a chest, and windows that looked out over other gardens, other towers. She couldn’t see beyond the palace; the light was too bright. The bed was carved of oxblood coral; ropes of kelp hung in a canopy over it. The chest was a giant clam. It opened as she looked at it, revealed a dark, shimmering, closefitting dress of fish scale and black pearl. It weighed nothing in her hands. Beneath it was, she decided finally, a net made of jellyfish tendrils. Beneath that was a cloak made out of starfish. Beneath that was a glowing ball of glass filled with water and tiny, luminous lanternfish. Beside that was a trident as long as her arm. It was made of bone and its three points were barbed.

  She touched a point, uneasy again. I can ignore all this, she thought, and tried to close the clamshell. It would not close. Nor would the chamber door open, no matter how she tugged.

  “Fine,” she muttered finally, dourly. “Fine.” She pulled her clothes off, tugged the scaly garment over her head. It had a light, papery feel, and it glittered silver-dark. The black pearls at sleeve and hem weighted it. Shoes had fallen out of it when she unfolded it; reluctantly she discarded her Reeboks. Shod in thin fish-scale slippers, she felt suddenly vulnerable. What, she wondered, am I supposed to do with a trident while I’m practically barefoot? To placate the clamshell, she tossed the cloak and the net over her arm. When she picked up lantern and weapon, the clam began to close.

  The chamber door opened.

  She went back down the stairs. A different door opened; she entered another huge airy room with a long table in the center of it. A single chair fashioned of mother-of-pearl stood at one end of the table. As she looked at it uncertainly, she smelled clam chowder.

  She pleaded, “Adam, I don’t want lunch, I want Jonah.”

  But silent, invisible servants entered, carrying a formidable array of dishware and flatware; it arranged itself with precision in front of the chair. Chowder was ladled into a clamshell; steamed scallops appeared on a scallop shell; boiled lobster was served in its own shell on a bed of tiny shrimp. Her chair shifted back, waited for her.

  She felt a moment’s revulsion, as if she were being served fillet of merman’s tail. But the smell of the chowder made her feel hollow. Everything eats and is eaten, she thought. I’d eat this at home. Except the lobster; we can never afford lobster. She sat down tentatively, ate a scallop. Nothing happened. She picked up one of three spoons, dipped into the chowder. Her goblets were filled: white wine, champagne, water. Somewhere above her, music began to play softly.

  This, she thought after a while, when the lobster was a litter of shell and she was finishing the champagne, is what they do to the condemned. Feed you all your favorite things, then send you out to die.

  She lowered her glass, and found a merman sitting on the other end of the table.

  She jumped, splashing herself, before she recognized Adam. It wasn’t so much the long, graceful, darkly glittering tail that disguised him, as his expression. He seemed remote, as he had in the tide pool: a wild, beautiful, unpredictable creature shaped by water and tidal forces, ruled by nothing human. She was surprised that he didn’t speak in bubbles, or in the language of whales.

  He said, “The dress and the starfish cloak are camouflage. You’ll need the lantern; sometimes the water is dark. The net and the trident may come in handy; I don’t know. No one has ever used them before.”

  “For what?” she whispered.

  “You want Jonah. For whatever reasons. You must ask the Queen of the Sea for permission to take him back to your world. You will find her in her tower, singing to him.”

  “Where—” Her voice jumped.

  He looked behind him, at a little ivory door that had just unlatched itself and begun to open. “Through there. If you must have him. If he wants you.”

  She tossed back the champagne and rose. “Come with me,” she pleaded suddenly, glimpsing the darkness behind the door. “Adam.” He didn’t respond. Perhaps, she thought hopelessly, he had discarded his name along with his humanity. She bundled everything into the net. She touched her glasses straight, looking at him uncertainly, then walked without looking at him into the dark beyond the door.

  Jonah stood in the ivory doorway, looking out over a wasteland.

  It reminded him of videos of a war zone at night, flashes of light revealing an indecipherable landscape, or of some dim, barren planet that was a constant open sore of volcanic activity. It was a sullen, mutant sea around the beautiful tower, and it seemed to have created its own crazed life. Dark, bulky scavengers patrolled the waters; their skeletons, like those of the tiny fish in regions light could not reach, were luminous. Figures that looked almost human, glowing eerie, phosphorescent colors that might have seeped out of rotting chemical barrels, prowled through the debris at the bottom. There were great, nightmarish piles of it, junk that cascaded in sudden avalanches to resculpt the shape of the waste. Ghostly jellyfish trailing endless tentacles bobbed like underwater torches around the distant black hillocks of debris that rose between Jonah and the tower. A step sideways would have hidden it from him, but not its gentle light, nor the mermaid’s voice.

  He realized that the prowling, phosphorescent figures were turning faces in his direction, scenting him as nothing else did in the sea. He ducked, moving as slowly as everything else in the strange, motionless water, as if it were heavier than the flowing sea beyond the door, or slightly viscous. He crawled, a bottom fish, hiding behind debris, behind dead coral colonies, within stunted, pallid kelp that grew no higher than his head. Once he saw eyes, a face drifting at him out of the murk. It was only a sad-eyed manatee. Its front flippers had been mangled; its back was badly scarred. It moved past him slowly, using its tail, to nose at some pallid sea grass. Things crept through the debris around him, showing a claw now and then, a glassy carapace over bright organs. Once the tentacles of a massive, glowing jellyfish touched a huge, upraised claw. In the electric flash, the scavenger was illumined. It was longer than Jonah.

  Some vast slanted wall appeared in front of him as he rounded a pile; it hid the tower. He recognized it finally, from old World War II movies: a sunken vessel lying on its side, crusted with gigantic mussels. It seemed safer to drift over it than go around; he clung close to it, guiding himself up across the deck from mussel to mussel. He peered over the top, saw other huge old scuttled ships like toys on the sea bottom. Liquid seeped slowly, constantly from their holds, turning the mussels vivid colors; whatever had been buried inside them wasn’t staying put. Jellyfish swimming through the seepage occasionally sparked flashes along their tentacles. One spark shimmer
ed back down the seepage into the hold near him. He heard a muffled explosion. Mussels bounced off the side of the hulk, followed by a stream of black liquid.

  The mermaid’s song, low and gentle across the terrible waste, coaxed him; he gazed at her tower awhile, delicate and pale in the distance, ringed by a moat of empty water. Finally he pulled himself down the side of the ship. The ships lay end to end in a jagged line; he found only more debris in front of him. He crouched under the keel, watching for movement, then slowly crept forward. He found a huge turtle lying on its back, little more than an empty shell but for its head and the plastic bag over it, He shook the shell; the fragments floated away. A dark shadow looming overhead snapped up the head in its wrapper. Jonah dove under the shell. But the shadow had lost interest in food; it thrashed away, drawing the attention of crabs hidden around Jonah. He huddled under the shell until the shadow finally stopped writhing and drifted to the bottom. The crabs moved then, shifting out of the debris, rising out of the sand; one crawled out of an old bathtub. Jonah, turned turtle on all fours, snuck away under the shell while the crabs fed.

  He saw a pale, webbed foot and froze, clinging to the shell. Other mottled feet stalked past him on both sides. He felt a thump on the shell and waited in terror, for the kick that would wrench the shell from his grasp and leave him as defenseless as the turtle. But the ghostly mer-demons passed him silently. He moved finally, crawling over a lead pipe that must have bounced off the turtle’s shell.

  Another enormous shadow passed overhead, sending a plaintive moan reverberating through the water. Only an explosion within one of the sunken hulks answered it, as a passing jellyfish ignited something volatile. That silenced the whale briefly; Jonah heard the siren’s voice again, light, drifting, soothing, and he wondered for a moment which of them she sang to. The whale answered her, and then passed on, silent again, a solitary Ancient Mariner searching for its kind.

  Moving closer to the tower from garbage heap to garbage heap in his undignified scuttle, he began to hear the song more clearly. Sometimes he thought he understood a word, though the language she sang was older than the human voice. It enraptured him, her closeness; her voice teased his attention from the dangers of his journey; it seemed a caress of praise, of pride at his courage. I’m coming, he told her, picking his way past what looked like a demolished building tossed into the sea. He dodged pipes sticking crazily out of lumps of concrete and rounded a toilet standing upright with a baby crab’s eyes peering over the rim. I’m coming… He saw the glistening rain of tentacles sweeping toward him half a second before they hit.