Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  She’s still speaking. “ . . . to believe there was a threat here, in the deep waters. I am sorry we did not sing to you. You stayed so high. You seemed so, forgive me, human.”

  She makes it sound like a bad word. I frown. “You are trespassing on waters claimed by the United States Navy. I hereby order you to surrender.”

  Her sigh is a line of bubbles racing upward, toward the sun. She whistles wordlessly, and three more figures swim out of the dark, sinuous as eels, their skins shifting seamlessly from grays to chalky pallor. They have no tentacles, but I recognize the effect as borrowed from the mimic octopus; another thing the military has discussed but not perfected. I am in over my head, in more ways than one.

  She whistles again. “I cannot surrender. I will not surrender. I am here to free your sisters from the tank they have allowed themselves to be confined within. We are not pet store fish. We are not trinkets. They deserve to swim freely. I can give that to them. We can give that to them. But I will not surrender.”

  The eel-women circle like sharks, and I am afraid. I know she can’t afford to have me tell my captain what she has said; I know that this deep, my body would never be found. Sailors disappear on every voyage, and while some whisper about desertion—and the truth of those whispers hangs before me in the water like a fairy tale—I know that most of them have fallen prey only to their own hubris, and to the shadows beneath us, which never change and never fade away.

  She is watching me, nameless mermaid from a lab I do not know. The geneticist who designed her must be so proud. “Is this the life you want? Tied to women too afraid to join you in the water, commanded by men who would make you something beautiful, and then keep you captive? We can offer something more.”

  She goes on to talk about artificial reefs, genetically engineered coral growing into palaces and promenades, down, deep down at the bottom of the sea. The streets are lit by glowing kelp and schools of lanternfish, both natural and engineered. There is no hunger. There is no war. There are no voices barking orders. She speaks of a new Atlantis, Atlantis reborn one seafaring woman at a time. We will not need to change the sea to suit the daughters of mankind; we have already changed ourselves, and now need only come home.

  All the while the eel-women circle like sharks, ready to strike me down if I raise a hand against their leader—ready to strike me down if I don’t. Like Seaman Metcalf, I must serve as a warning to the Navy. Something is out here. Something dangerous.

  I look at her, and frown. “Who made you?”

  Something in her eyes goes dark. “They said I’d be a dancer.”

  “Ah.” Some sounds translate from form to form, medium to medium; that is one of them. “Private firm?”

  “Private island,” she says, and all is clear. Rich men playing with military toys: chasing the idea of the new. They had promised her reversion, no doubt, as they promised it to us all—and maybe they meant it, maybe this was a test. The psychological changes that drive us to dive ever deeper down were accidental; maybe they were trying to reverse them. Instead, they sparked a revolution.

  “What will you do if I yield?”

  Her smile is quick and bright, chasing the darkness from her eyes. “Hurt you.”

  “And my crew?”

  “Most of them will be tragically killed in action. Their bodies will never be found.” They would be free.

  “Why should I agree?”

  “Because in one year, I will send my people back to this place, and if you are here, we will show you what it means to be a mermaid.”

  We hang there in the water for a few minutes more, me studying her, her smiling at me, serene as Amphitrite on the shore. Finally, I close my eyes. I lower my gun, allowing it to slip out of my fingers and fall toward the distant ocean floor. It will never be found, one more piece of debris for the sea to keep and claim. I am leaving something behind. That makes me feel a little better about what has to happen next.

  “Hurt me,” I say.

  They do.

  When I wake, the air is pressing down on me like a sheet of glass. I am in the medical bay, swaddled in blankets and attached to beeping machines. The submarine hums around me; the engines are on, we are moving, we are heading away from the deepest parts of the sea. The attack must have already happened.

  Someone will come for me soon, to tell me how sorry they all are, to give me whatever punishment they think I deserve for being found alone and drifting in the deeps. And then we will return to land. The ship will take on a new crew and sail back to face a threat that is not real, while I? I will sit before a board of scientists and argue my case until they give in, and put me back into the tanks, and take my unwanted legs away. They will yield to me. What man has ever been able to resist a siren?

  A year from now, when I return to the bottom of the sea, I will hear the mermaids singing, each to each. And oh, I think that they will sing to me.

  Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home

  Sarah Monette

  184. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 18”. American, ca. 1850. Figure of a woman holding a telescope and compass. Ship unknown.

  The selkie stands at the window, staring out at the sea. Behind her, in the rumpled bed, the artist snores. She’s had better sex with her own fingers, but it doesn’t matter. He wanted it, and it amuses her to cheat on Byron. In their stalemate—she cannot make him give back her skin, he cannot make her love him—she takes her pleasures where she finds them.

  She sighs, running one palm over her velvet-short hair. It would’ve been nice if the artist fucked as pretty as he talks.

  197. Figurehead. Wood. 34” x 17”. American, ca. 1830-35. Figure of a woman in a hat. Ship unknown.

  I found a museum today. Not a surprise, really, but I’d given up on there being anything interesting to do in this town. The only bookstore for twenty miles was a rare and used dealer along the “picturesque” main street specializing in the most abstruse and technical aspects of naval history. I’d spent hours on the beach, staring at the water and the gulls. The water was dark; the gulls were blindingly white. And malicious, I thought. They would have appreciated me more if I’d been dead, and I saw that truth in their little, bright eyes.

  But this afternoon I turned up a side street, and there was the sign: Maritime Museum. I’d taken it for a warehouse. It was open, and I needed something to do for at least one of the three hours remaining before I could legitimately go back to the apartment Dale had rented and begin to wait for him. I pushed open the door, and pushed hard, for like all the doors in this town it was balky and swollen with the breath of the sea.

  I’d been in more than my share of maritime museums, as Dale had a passion for them. This one seemed indistinguishable from the multitude: bleak and dusty and full of ship models and scrimshaw and all the sad mortal paraphernalia of a long-gone way of life. I stood for a long time before a case of glass pyramids, once set in the decks of ships to allow light into the cramped spaces below. I wondered how long you would have to stay down there before you forgot that you could not reach up your hand and touch the sun.

  The museum’s collection was large, but not terribly interesting. “Thorough” would be the polite word. There was nothing there I hadn’t seen better examples of elsewhere, and I was unhappily conscious that the museum was not occupying enough of the long brazen afternoon. I walked more and more slowly, carefully reading each word of each printed placard, and still I was calculating: how long to finish at the museum, how long to walk back to the apartment, how long to take a shower. How long I’d waited for Dale the previous night and all the nights before.

  And then I turned a corner, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found myself in a long hall, its stretch of narrow windows admitting dusty sunlight and a view of the sea; a hall bare except for the double row of figureheads, mounted like the caryatids of some great invisible temple.

  I started down the hall, reading the placard beside each figurehead and studying awkward proportions, stiff shoulders, cl
umsily carved faces. The collection was composed entire of women: naked, half-dressed, clothed in Sunday best; blonde and brunette and redheaded; empty-handed and holding books and holding navigational instruments. And all of them staring, their eyes seeming to seek for something lost and irreplaceable, something that they would never find in this half-neglected room.

  There was a feeling of incompleteness about them. They had never been meant to be seen on their own, nor from this unnatural angle. Their makers had intended them to be part of a greater whole, had intended them to lean forward fiercely, joyfully, into the crash and billow of the sea. By rights they were the eyes, the spirits, of ships far vaster than themselves. This room was not where they belonged; this room was not their home.

  The dust motes floating in the shafts of sunlight, the long shallow gouges in the floor boards, the cracking, yellowing plaster of the walls—I had never been in a room so sad. The figureheads seemed like mourners, standing at the edges of a grave which was the aisle I walked down. For a moment, I felt truly buried alive, in my marriage, in this town, in this dreary, dusty hall.

  But even as my heart pounded against my ribs, my breath coming short from imagined suffocation, I looked into the face of a figurehead whose long wooden hair was entwined with strands of wooden pearls, and saw that I was not the one buried in this room. Nor was I the one for whom they grieved, the one for whom they watched. They were waiting for something that could not enter the museum to find them.

  After I worked my way up one side and down the other, I returned to stand in front of one woman, the pale green of sea-foam, her prim Victorian maiden’s face framing the wide-open eyes of an ecstatic visionary. I was staring into her eyes, trying to put a name to what I saw there, when I was startled nearly out of my wits by a man’s voice asking, “Do you like the figureheads, miss?”

  After the silence of the figureheads, the man’s harsh voice seemed as brutal as the roar of a nor’easter. I turned around. The door at the far end of the hall, marked Employees Only, was open, and a tall, gaunt old man stood with his hand on the knob. His hair was iron-gray, clipped short, and he wore jeans and a cable-knit sweater.

  “Yes,” I said, groping after my composure. “They . . . they are very beautiful.”

  “Aye,” he said, coming toward me, and I had to repress the stupid impulse to back away, “they are. There’s nothing like them made any more.” When he reached me, he extended his hand. “Ezekiel Pitt.”

  I shook hands with him, although I didn’t want to. It was like shaking hands with a tangle of hawsers, even down to the faint sensation of grime left on my palm and fingers when he let go. I refrained with an effort from wiping my hand on my jeans. “Magda Fenton.”

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Fenton,” Ezekiel Pitt said politely, and I did not correct him. “I do most of the collecting for the museum, and I must admit the ladies have always been my favorite.” His smile was unpleasant, the teeth prominent and yellow and wolf-like. His smell was musty and sweaty at once, and I gave in and backed up a step.

  “Why do none of them have names?” I had noticed that on the placards; figurehead after figurehead was ship unknown.

  “They’re all from shipwrecks, these ladies,” Ezekiel Pitt said. “Their names are beneath the sea, like their ships. I suppose you might call them widows.”

  “Yes, you might,” I said, although it seemed to me, looking at their wide, blind eyes, that it would be fairer to call them lost spirits, sundered from their proud bodies, their unbounded blue world, their joyous wooden lives.

  Ezekiel Pitt was crowding me again, and I did not like him. I moved toward the door, to finish my tour of this dismal museum and return to my dismal life. He stayed where he was; out of the corner of my eye, I saw him touch the green woman’s face, caressing it like a lover. At the door, I stopped. I had one question more. “Why are they all women?”

  He glanced up from the green woman and gave me a horrible, unbelievable, leering wink. “I only like the ladies, miss,” he said.

  I could stand him and his sad prisoners no longer; I fled.

  179. Figurehead. Wood. 32” x 17”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman crowned with flowers. Ship unknown.

  Byron Pitt stole the selkie’s skin on an August afternoon when the sky was dull with heat, the sun as fake as an arcade token and not a cloud near to cover its shame.

  Byron knows the old stories either far too well or not nearly well enough. He ran with her skin that first day, ran like an ungainly jackrabbit, and nothing—nothing within the limited compass of what she is allowed—will make him tell her what he did with it. She cannot hurt him, much as she would like to; she cannot leave him. She could refuse to have sex with him, but it would do her no good. Byron is willfully stupid about a lot of things, but not even he is foolish enough to believe she would stay with him one split-second past the moment she got her hands on her skin again. And although selkies can lie, it is not natural to them: she admits the truth of her own appetites. Even Byron is better than no one at all.

  But he isn’t enough. He could never be enough, even if she loved him as the stories say some selkies came to love their captors. And she doesn’t even like him, although much to her own irritation, she finds him too pathetic to hate. She’s all he’s ever had, he tells her over and over again, and it’s all too easy to believe.

  She doesn’t care about charity. She wants her damn skin back. Her life. Her home.

  In the six months she’s been trapped on land, she’s trashed Byron’s apartment twice, searching. Her skin isn’t there. She’s explored this dreary town as thoroughly as she ever explored the sunken ships that were her childhood playground. She knows everywhere Byron goes, and she’s searched all those places, too. All of them except for one.

  She knows her skin is in the Maritime Museum, the same way she knows, not quite in her head and not quite in her gut, where her sisters are, out in the cold Atlantic. It may not be true, this knowing, but it’s real. These days, it’s the most real thing about her.

  But she can’t go into the museum. The museum is Ezekiel Pitt’s territory, and her fear of him is too deep for reason.

  Ezekiel is Byron’s uncle or cousin or something like that. He knows what she is, knew the moment he laid eyes on her, without Byron saying a word, and he doesn’t care. He’s not impressed, not appalled; he looks at her as if she’s just another curio in the museum, and not even an interesting one. But the way he looks at Byron . . . Ezekiel Pitt may not care about selkies, but he understands Byron perfectly. He knows what it is to keep something that doesn’t belong to you. Knows and gloats, and she knows it was Ezekiel who put the idea of catching a selkie into Byron’s stupid head.

  She fears him because she does not understand him and because whenever she sees him, she smells death in captivity, smells the truth, that Byron is never going to let her go. Ezekiel Pitt makes her want to submit, to let Byron take her self the way he took her skin, and that scares her most of all.

  191. Figurehead. Wood. 45” x 15”. American, ca. 1840. Figure of a woman using a telescope. Ship unknown.

  That night, lying beside Dale’s indifference, I dreamed of the figureheads. They were free from their mountings, standing at the windows of their prison, staring out at the clamoring surf. The moonlight showed the tears on their faces, showed their small pleading wooden hands pressed against the indifferent glass. And then, in my dream, like a gull I flew out from the museum, out over the dark and terrible sea. I flew for miles and miles without becoming tired or afraid, marveling in the beauty of the water and the night.

  Then I dove beneath the waves. I seemed still to be flying, effortlessly, down through the water, and I knew I was a seal, as much at home in this element as gulls were in the air. I reached the sea floor and there danced in and out of the gaping, barnacle-encrusted hulls of sunken ships. These were the ships of the figureheads, their lives and their deaths, all here interred in the sand beneath the black weight of the water.

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p; 188. Figurehead. Wood. 37” x 22”. American, 1865? Figure of a woman holding a broken chain. Ship unknown.

  The selkie spends a lot of time on the beach. It drives Byron up the wall; he seems to be afraid that someone will figure out what she is and take her away from him. “Well, I can hope,” the selkie said, and Byron winced and shut up.

  She met the artist on the beach, let him think he was seducing her. She’s learned a lot, these last few months, about the lies men tell themselves.

  She pushes the cuffs of her sweat pants up and walks as far into the tide as she can in this stupid body that will drown if she lets it, or die of cold. She doesn’t swim; without her skin, it’s just a mockery.

  She stands for a long time, until her feet start to go numb, and it’s not until she turns back toward the land that she realizes she’s not alone. There’s a woman standing at the high tide line.

  The selkie startles, splashing. The woman doesn’t even seem to notice, and as the selkie wades back to dry land, she realizes that the woman is crying. The selkie skirts wide around her, light-headed with relief when she makes it to the public parking lot without attracting the woman’s attention. She glances back, and the woman is still standing there. Staring out to sea, crying slow silent tears, as if the oceans of her body are trying to find their way home.

  176. Figurehead. Wood. 39” x 19”. American, ca. 1820. Figure of a Native American woman. Ship unknown.

  I woke up hard, my breath caught in my throat, rolled over and looked at the clock. It was almost six a.m. I couldn’t stand the stifling closeness of the bedroom any longer; I got up, dragged on yesterday’s clothes, and escaped into the open. Dale always slept like the dead, and he wouldn’t care even if he woke. I took the same path I’d taken for days, threading my way through the stiff, sullen town to the beach. I stood there, just above the undulation of seaweed that marked the high tide line, staring at the jeweled golden mystery of the sunrise, my mind, still half-dreaming, full of the memory of the figureheads, imprisoned in a hall as stifling as that bedroom, held away from the place where they belonged. The green woman’s childlike face returned to me, her rapturous eyes.