Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  “And I will not forget her in it: lost, white-armed and white-footed and white-faced, sitting on a bollard in the gray shift with the world gray around her, boat and boy and sea and sky of it, looking up to me for—”

  He drained his glass, put it down, and examined the table either side of it. “Well, back then I liked to think it were love and comforting she looked for, but she may as easily have been reproaching me, for taking her up from everything she knew, and landing her here in my strange world, for my strange pleasures, for the rest of our lives, as I thought.”

  He sat a long time with that sour expression, thinking. Then his mind moved on, and his face softened.

  “I hope you have a wedding night half like it, though, Dan’l. I hope you hold someone to your heart with only a shred of what I felt for that animal-woman. It is not something you can give back to the sea, after that. You put your full self, your full soul into them narrow hands, and afterwards you cannot be far from her, for fear of becoming nothing. When you all went, Dan’l—ahh, can you imagine? Can you imagine the—the—” He grinned over the candle at me. “The ghosts we were, the objects! We bare had strength to eat—and some did not, of course, and died that way, Errol Curse was one. We did not manage a funeral even for Errol, just put him away in the earth where he would not smell and interrupt our miseries, though Baker was all for throwing him in the sea, to make the point to Curse’s wife, and Frederick and Batton, what they had done to him.”

  Then the tears started, and I will not show him to you that way. I stayed out the weeping with him, though, and the talking; I poured him more spirit when he asked for it; I agreed with him and soothed him as I could.

  I lifted my head from my arms some time after midnight. He was staring into and addressing his drink.

  “A night like this, it were,” he said, “with the night breeze drabbling in the window just so, with not much to it.”

  I did not know if he meant the wedding night, or the night he met Mam, or the night they all went down to Fishers’ store and saw the first seal-woman, and began the whole thing—or indeed another night of his story, that I had not been awake for.

  I was washing the breakfast plates next morning when Dad came to me, which was unusual of him. Just his approaching, out of his chair when I knew he had already performed all the rituals of his morning, threw the day unusual. Was he poorly some way?

  He came up close. “The Winch girl is here,” he said to my shoulder.

  “Here?”

  His blue eyes swam as surprised as I felt. “She wants to speak to Daniel.” As if Daniel were a third person—which almost he might be, a Daniel that Miss Lory Winch summoned.

  I dried my hands. Dad watched me, watched me go, as if I were become that third man, another creature suddenly.

  She flamed in the street outside. She had her hair different today, tied back still but exploding out beyond her shoulders. But very demure underneath it, with her arms folded.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  Her face was so white it seemed lit from inside. She considered me until my greeting had erased itself from the air into foolishness. “You don’t remember, then,” she said, disappointed.

  Which immediately I did. There was only the one red girl to remember, after all, other than Trudle and Trudle’s girls. “Knocknee Market,” I said.

  She beamed.

  “I went home and bothered my mam about you Killy men. I had not even realized she came from here. I suppose it is not something you boast of, that you were no prospect in a town full of beautiful mer-women.’

  In my head Dad said, Did you like her? And I heard his tone now as I’d not when he said it, the great restraint in it, over the shyness, over the interest. I hid one-third of myself by leaning behind the doorpost. How could she stand so cheerfully in the sunlight and talk so?

  “I am very disappointed not to have seen them,” she said. “From the looks of the lads, they must have been quite a different make.”

  She wore neat mainland shoes, with an odd strap on them that seemed not entirely necessary.

  “Were there any pictures painted of them, or photographs taken?”

  “Cawdron drew some, of his mam, when he was little, that his dad has still on their wall. Grinny’s dad brought a picture from the mainland—not of a wife, but a woman who looked like a wife. Some old painting; this was a picture of the painting. She had quite the look. That is at their place, sometimes on the wall, sometimes behind an armchair.”

  “Come walking?” she said. “You can only footle about on a doorstep so long.”

  “I’ve dishes to finish.”

  “Those can wait, Daniel,” said my dad up the hall. “Or even I could do them, at a pinch. Think of that. You go.”

  “Come down the water?” said Lory Winch. “I have barely seen anything, there was such a crowd around me yesterday.”

  “Are you sure?” I said to Dad.

  “Of course.” He waved me away. “Go. Go. A walk in the sunshine with a pretty girl can only do you good.”

  So out we walked, and down the town, and as we walked and conversed—as she questioned me and I showed her the shapes of my ignorance, as I filled their emptinesses from Dad’s memories and brought them back to her—without hardly being noticed, the rest of that summer went by. By the time we reached the water the air was chill and the sky gray. Graceless the waves moved, chop-chopping where they ought to have been smooth, a field of moving thorns against the underside of the land-world.

  Lory and I walked along the mole between them, the littler water to our left an apron for the town; then to our right and forward the larger sea, busy all the way to the horizon and who knew how far beyond? Foam smeared it here and there, like whiteness being combed out; apart from that, the surface was dark and opaque; nothing splashed or surfaced, and no boat cut through the chop.

  We did not hold hands; we were too secret for that. I did not even look at her, though her orange hair burned as bright now in my heart as it did at my shoulder-height over there. I could see it out the corner of my eye, crawling up into the air, unraveling from its ponytail, the frizzy bits at her forehead and temples flinging themselves away from their tetherment, always sprung back by their curliness. I could see, even as I chewed my lip and looked out at the nothing overriding our mothers, Lory’s curve of white forehead; Lory’s round-tipped white nose spattered with pale freckles; Lory’s mouth that I intended kissing, soon as I could summon myself, the palest apology for color; Lory’s soft girl-chin. All of these were neat and clear-edged against the dirty ocean, and her mainland hair, her dads’ hair, smoked orange into the sky, curled and tumbled down her back like brookwater tightened between rocks.

  The moment passed when we could stand any longer without awkwardness. Still I stood and stared, not knowing what else to do, but Lory turned and eyed the town, and went to the stones at the path edge and examined among them—for sheltering birds, maybe, or for things washed up. Her curiosity would make something arrive there, make the right thing happen now, any moment, and carry her on out of her shyness, and me with her.

  The Drowned Mermaid

  Christopher Barzak

  On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned mermaid was washed ashore. She was curled in an almost S shape, her arms thrown over her head as if to block out the glare of the sun. Her skin was pale, rubbery, and white. The kind of pale that comes from living either beneath the earth or beneath the sea. Her black hair was twisted with ropes of seaweed, and a bruise, golden brown and purple, stained the skin of her right cheek.

  Helena found her. She had woken that morning from another dream of her daughter Jordan, from another night of terror and mystery in which she played the lead role. She’d been in a casino this time, after receiving instructions on how to win Jordan back: “Go to the roulette table, place your bet on black thirty-one, walk away from the wheel without collecting your winnings, and believe me,” a disembodied voice told her, “you’ll win. Walk toward
the nearest restroom, but don’t go in. A man in a dark suit will meet you by the door. Take his arm. He’ll bring you to me.”

  She’d done as instructed, but as usual, never found her daughter. Never won her, never opened the locked safe without tripping the alarm. Or in another situation, she might be fooled into thinking Jordan was behind a certain door. But upon opening it, she would find nothing but a dark, empty room. As in the shell game, Helena could never pick the one under which the con man had hidden the Ping-Pong ball.

  So she had come down to the beach after waking, leaving Paul asleep in bed. The sun had just risen, dappling the waves with light, and gulls screed in the air, circling and diving over the water.

  From a distance the mermaid’s body looked like driftwood, smooth and round, silhouetted by the morning light. It was only when Helena came closer that she noticed the scales glinting in the light; the thickly muscled tail; and after moving one of the mermaid’s arms off of her face, the bulbous eyes, black and damp as olives.

  She knelt beside the body and rested her ear against the chilled skin. A sluggish pulse still pumped through those emerald veins: a slow, locomotive beat. Unconscious then, Helena decided. She stood again, turning her head one way, then the other, scanning the beach to see if anyone else had ventured down this way yet. There was no one around at this hour. But that would change soon enough. It was the end of summer. Within an hour the beach would be strewn with bodies laid out for the sun to take. A ritual sacrifice.

  Working quickly, she lifted the mermaid’s arms and shoulders from underneath and started to drag her. She pulled her away from the hissing waves that collapsed under their own weight, turning to foam as they reached the shore. She dragged, then paused to catch her breath, then picked the mermaid up once more to go a little farther. And all the while the mermaid’s head lolled on the stalk of her neck as if it had been broken.

  It was a long, exhausting journey. But in this way, they reached home soon enough.

  Home was a house perched forty feet above the beach on the edge of a cliff in Southern California. Sleek and modern, it was filled with furniture that had been fashionable two decades before and had again come into style. There was a deck in back of the house, braced against the cliffside, and when high tide rolled in it would begin to resemble a pier, the pilings of the deck’s foundation partly submerged in water. The side of the cliff was buried beneath a lumpy shell of boulders, an ad hoc seawall that served to deter any further erosion that might undermine the house’s foundation. Helena and Paul had lived there for fifteen years, since he took the position teaching history at the university. Before the seawall was built, they had seen whole houses fold in on themselves.

  The only problem to emerge since moving here, to a sleepy village by the sea, was that sometimes, often in the summer, homeless people or drifters would hole up beneath their deck. They’d stay for a day or a week, making homes, fleeting as dreams, among the boulders. Then they’d vanish and never be seen again.

  Helena and Paul never instinctively disliked or feared these people. But as Helena once articulated the problem, “It’s that you can hear them down there, whispering, right below your feet.” It would have been easy to have the drifters removed, but they never called the police. As Helena once pointed out to Paul, who stood with phone in hand, ready to dial 911, “What if it was Jordan down there? What if she just needed a place to stay the night?”

  Paul had placed the phone back on its cradle, but not without saying, “If she needed a place to stay, why wouldn’t she call? Why wouldn’t she come home?”

  In the past Helena would have supplied him with reasonable answers to these questions—it had once been a specialty of hers—but most questions that had anything to do with Jordan had become unreasonable. As well as inexplicable.

  By the time Helena reached the stairs leading up to the back deck, people had started to arrive. They came with surf boards lashed to the tops of their cars, or with children, lathered in sunblock, trudging wearily across the sand.

  Helena climbed one step at a time, planting her feet securely before pulling the mermaid up to the next step. It took a long time. Sweat beaded on her forehead, then dribbled down into her eyes. She could hear her own breathing, sharp intakes of breath followed by exhausted sighs.

  She wished she were younger, not slowed down by midlife. If I only had more energy, she thought several times a day, I could do more. As it was, she spent most of her days barely able to keep up with the house. Every time she turned around, there was a loose tile in the linoleum, or a burned-out bulb that needed to be replaced. Even caring for these small tasks drained her easily. She spent all of her energy in her dreams, overnight, looking for Jordan. By morning, she would wake exhausted, as though she hadn’t slept.

  Finally she reached the deck, forty steps high, where she sat down for a few minutes to catch her breath, arranging the mermaid’s head on her lap. A few strands of hair trailed over the mermaid’s face and Helena snatched at them, brushing them out of those dark, fishy eyes. And those eyes, a person could lose themselves in them, could dive down into their cold black waters and drown.

  She slid the back door open, then pulled the mermaid into the house. Her tail bounced up and down as it rolled over the sliding door track. Helena took her into the bathroom, heaved her tail up and over the lip of the tub, and followed with the upper half. The mermaid’s skin squeaked against the porcelain. She ran cold water from the faucet until it splashed over the sides.

  It was enough. She’d done enough. She leaned against the tub and sighed, satisfied.

  Now for Paul. She would have to find a way to explain this to him as reasonably as she could. This was possible. This was reasonable. She had done something. She stroked her fingertips across the mermaid’s bruised cheek and decided that in and of itself, this purple and gold blossom would win any argument with Paul.

  But before she could wake him, there he was. He walked into the bathroom still wearing his pajamas, grinding the sleep out of his eyes. “Why all the racket?” he asked, yawning.

  And when he removed his hands form his bleary eyes, Helena smiled up at him weakly and said, “Surprise.”

  Paul was uncooperative, angry, and later he realized, a little unkind. Upon seeing his wife sprawled on the bathroom floor with that creature—he immediately thought of it as that creature—lounging in the tub behind her, he began to shout. “What have you done? Where did that creature come from? You must be insane, Helena. Completely mad! Get it out. Get it out right now.”

  She pleaded with him—he knew she’d plead with him, it was like Helena these days—and practically begged him on her knees. “You don’t understand, Paul. She’s hurt. She needs help. I found her on the beach. Just look at her face, the poor thing’s skull has been battered. Please, you must. You have to. You must let her stay.”

  An awkward pause followed during which Helena looked longingly into his eyes and spoke to him like that, with her eyes. It was a trick she’d always been able to pull on him, and each time she did he was helpless. Flustered, he fled the bathroom and went to change out of his thin blue pajamas. He wanted real clothes covering his skin. The nightclothes made him feel caught off guard, vulnerable.

  They passed the day in a series of short, sharp spats, nearly all of which originated with Paul sliding around the corner to stand uselessly in the doorway of the bathroom. He’d stare at Helena pouring handfuls of water along the puckering gills of the mermaid’s throat, the thin little slits opening and closing, drinking the air out of the water. Or he would comment derisively on finding her stroking the mermaid’s hair, humming a wordless tune to soothe her, something she once did for their daughter when she was a little girl. And then Helena would stop whatever she was doing and say, “What? What are you looking at? Go away!”

  He told her he was going to take the mermaid himself and throw her back to the sea. He said, “There are proper channels for dealing with these things, and you, my dear, have followed n
one of them.”

  It was true. If she had notified the police, they would have said to leave the mermaid on the beach. They would have come and blocked the area off with sawhorses and yellow tape that had “Do Not Cross” printed on it in bold black. They had dealt with merfolk before, years ago. The proper thing to do would be to wait for high tide to roll in, and allow it to take her home.

  They decided to make a pact. Helena explained that she couldn’t allow the mermaid to go back with the tide in this condition. She’s unconscious, she argued. Defenseless. In this state, a shark or some other scavenging creature could pick at her. Paul agreed easily enough to that. He said, “Till she’s well enough, then.” And Helena nodded, accepting this proposal. Although, Paul thought, it was a reluctant nod.

  “Till she’s well enough, then,” Helena agreed.

  Paul rolled his eyes at this childish bargaining and retreated to his study, hiding amongst his books, waiting for the moment he could get that creature out of his home. She was eerie. She floated in the tub like a corpse.

  He spent the next two days hunched over his desk, busying himself with preparations for the coming semester, creating his syllabi and course summaries, until he heard the squeals and screams in the bathroom, announcing she had awoken.

  After something special of one’s own disappears, a person should learn to be prepared for unexpected events. After Jordan disappeared, Helena came to feel, paradoxically, both ready to handle anything that might come her way, as well as on the verge of disintegrating into tears whenever she saw anything remotely reminiscent of her daughter. Because of these conflicting emotions, she found herself both willful and in tears as she struggled over a bra, black and frilled with lace—one Jordan had left behind—when the mermaid woke.

  “You mustn’t struggle so,” she told the mermaid, who was attempting to tear the bra from her chest. Helena had covered her with it out of consideration for Paul. But the bra was too large for the mermaid, whose breasts were smaller, firmer than Jordan’s, probably from all of that swimming she did. “But it will do,” Helena said. She grabbed hold of the straining straps and pulled the bra back on, tightening it like a wicked stepmother. “It will do.”