“What does that mean?”
“I told her what it meant to me—that her life was over.”
He leaned closer, his voice dropping to just above a whisper. “What did she say?”
Klearistis brought her open hands together, her fingers meeting and flattening against each other. She was doing something with the motion, a pale glow lining the spaces where her fingers and palm touched. “She said nothing.” He noticed for the first time that Klearistis had a sheer fan of skin between each finger, translucent webbing. “Julia just laughed and held up your wedding picture. Like a shield. But the next day she told me you would want to hear the story.”
Klearistis moved closer, and gently folded her legs under her, sitting cross-legged a few feet away from him.
She reached out and took his hand, touching the ring on his finger—
And there was gunfire. Close. Sheets of flame washing over him, heat blasting through the shell of the Humvee. Soldiers dead in their seats, bleeding, missing pieces of muscle, exposed bone, one in the back struggling with her harness or wounds, bleeding out. With the last of her strength she tugged out a clear plastic sleeve with a picture of her wedding day, smiling and holding Andy Kavanagh. Tears running though the dirt on her face, she lifted it to her lips and kissed it, leaving a print of lips in her own blood.
Andy Kavanagh pushed the door closed and swung out a chair in interrogation room K. He sat down across from Klearistis. Eleven o’clock in the morning and she had—again—just arrived without an appointment. After a minute of staring at her, he gestured to the webbing between her fingers. “You said you come from the sea? Seaborn?”
She nodded, held up one hand, palm open toward him. “That’s what I am. In many ways no different from you, but I can breathe at any depth, I can certainly see better than you in the dark. The pressure of the abyss has little effect on me.” She made a casual swimming motion with her arms. “And there’s no doubt in my head that I can beat you in a race across or through any water.”
He sounded skeptical. “You live underwater?”
“In a city—just like you.” She gestured to the windows and the urban scene beyond them. “It’s called Nine-cities because it is like nine cities all pressed together. It has other names, but that’s generally what we call it, the Nine-cities. I’ll show you.” She brought her hands up in a cupping motion and darkness poured out of them, filling the space between them in seconds, blocking out the light from the windows, the sky, almost everything he could see of the world—because this one was suddenly filled with another. A molten hot sphere hung mid-water, glowing almost as bright as a small sun over what was clearly an urban setting, scaled down to fit in the space before Klearistis. The city—or nine of them making up a complete metro area—sprawled across a plane at the base of high mountains, with wide bands of what looked like farmland, blocky and angular sections of territory, with different shades of green and orange.
A city at the bottom of the sea with its own sun.
Andy leaned into the view, bending to one side to take in walls and battlements, massive floating rocks lined with buildings and bristling towers, long spines of bridges connecting other large floating sections of city. There were structures like round-cornered office buildings floating and tethered with hundreds of vine-like threads to a massive central tower with battlements that loomed over everything.
“Okay, that doesn’t look anything like I’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t easy pulling his gaze away, but he looked over the top of the three-dimensional view to Klearistis, sitting calmly in her chair creating visions out of thin air. He pushed one hand into the space, almost touching the city. “And other than the fact that you have a body with arms, legs, and a head, I don’t see much that else makes you like me.” He stammered pieces of a few words, and finally got out, “You collect dead bodies, for fuck’s sake.”
She waved one hand and the whole city scene on the floor of the ocean vanished. “I have two strong bleeds, one each off my mother and father. It enables me to do certain things—collecting, for instance.”
“Bleeds?”
“Of power. Kind of like a pool of energy that passes along the connections between blood relatives. I gain what my parents are losing. Blood flows down. If I ever have children they will begin drawing off my bleeds at some point. Two bleeds in one person used to be rare, but there’s been . . . ” She went silent. He was too busy trying to understand everything she had said to make sense of what she hadn’t.
“And you do something with memories? You gather them?”
“The final memories. Mostly. The dead also tell us the rules, give us context for the game. Identify the players.” She indicated him with a nod of her head. “And the pieces.”
His breath caught in his throat. He coughed quietly, and said, “And Julia was different?”
“Yes. I knew her before she died. And I knew what she told me about you—that you write stories. ‘Mysteries,’ she called them, stories about murders and other crimes, and how a character like you tracks down the criminals. I have read all of yours.” As if stumbling on a thought she didn’t want to lose she said, “There is a good book store in your city. They carry your books, and if you ask the clerk he will order them for you—free second-day shipping.”
Andy leaned into his hands, cupping his face. “Just tell me one thing.”
Klearistis patted his arm, gave him a warm smile. “Yes, I enjoyed reading them. Very much.”
His pulled back as if shocked, and then covered his face again. A minute later he let his hands fell away, and he looked sick. “Julia is not . . . part of your collection?”
Klearistis leaned forward, reaching for him, shaking her head. “No. Not Julia.” Then, as if it might make him feel better, she added, “Julia did not die in the sea. I only collect those who have lost their lives in the shallows or the deep.”
He nodded, rubbed his eyes, and after a minute’s pause, Klearistis gestured across the table at him.
“It’s a game we play. You tell stories. That’s important.”
He looked confused. “In what way?”
“You are now a prize, or my game piece—I think that is a better way to put it. The game runs in my family. The last few years it’s my cousins and me mostly. The game used to be called enfilade. It has a different name now.” She paused, watching him, as if to see if he had heard of it. “There is the meaning of the word in battle, an enemy attack on a position from the side, flanking fire. The real game is—you know the word enfiler, French, means artistry in the set up, to put on a string?”
He sounded angry. “To string along?”
“Sort of.” She said it cheerfully, as if stringing cops along was something she enjoyed.
Or putting them on a string like lucky beads.
Andy let his gaze drop to the case report, open in front of him, trying to get his thoughts in order, picking sentences and paragraphs at random. Some of the bodies have been identified—some were not identifiable. Most of them died years ago, or if recent, then through some known accident, ferry sinking in the Gulf, Flight 4199 going down off Bermuda. He ended up focusing on several words of the opening line, foreign national committing crimes on U.S. soil.
“It was actually in the water.” She held his gaze for a moment, and shifted in her seat in interrogation room K, bringing the handcuffs into view and placing them gently on the edge of the table. “Not on soil.”
Andy let out a long exasperated breath, trying to understand. “This is really a game for you? Why are you here?” It was clear that she could get up and walk out at any moment. Nothing was holding her in interrogation room K except her own wishes.
She shrugged. “All the doors lined up.”
He waved in the general direction of his office. “My door was fucking locked. It was locked today. It was locked yesterday.”
As if she was glad that he finally understood. “Yes, it was!”
She kept her smile, watching his focus drift dow
n her arm to her folded hands resting on the tabletop. She leaned to one side, reached over and tapped the handcuffs. “They are terribly uncomfortable. Sorry, I was just trying to keep up the charade.”
As if she was suggesting a path he had no intention of going down—the possession of some sort of weird powers, he turned the talk back to the last part of their conversation that made sense.
“So there are doors in this seaborn world you’re describing?”
She closed her mouth, looked at him closely, tiny shifts as her eyes scanned his face. She was studying him. Andy started to smile at her puzzled reaction, but it felt painful, unfamiliar, lines deepening from the corners of his mouth, a slight pull of muscles under the skin. He gave up, returning to serious territory.
Finally, he said, “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Strange.” Her eyes locked on his, something cold and dark, the pressure of the abyss hitting him. “I am trying to determine why you would think I come from a world without doors—and presumably an entire realm of architecture with the embarrassing lack of attention to any methods of egress.”
He stumbled over that, made the motions of clearing his throat to think of something to say, and ended up with, “You’re baffled by my question?”
She shook her head. “No more than you would be if I held extremely eccentric opinions about biology and made it known that you don’t appear to have any lungs or any method of respiration.”
Andy was scowling now. “Without lungs how would we breathe?”
“Without doors how would we ever know what an inside was? Without doors there is only the outside.”
“And you want to show me this inside?”
She opened one hand, reaching out for him. Her voice was sharp. “Look.”
He leaned forward. “At what?”
“The ocean is in my hand.” And when she uncurled her fingers the cold and dark filled his world. It wasn’t wet because that only made sense at some interface with dry. It was a world of ice and heavy pressure. It was lightless and the weight of miles weighed on his bones, on his chest, on every breath.
“Are you still with me, Andy Kavanagh?” She gave him a playful slap across the face.
“Where?” It was as if he only had enough breath for one word.
“With me. That’s the only place you need to know about. Anywhere else will kill you.” She cleared her throat, indicating she was about to let the currents take them in a different direction. “There are tears of sorrow in the water, there is time in the water, but mostly there are memories. The dead share theirs with the sea, and that’s why I collect them.” She reached over and gave his chin a tug, making sure he was paying attention—as if things were about to get complicated and she didn’t want him missing an important point. “The ocean is more than H2O and a handful of salts—sodium and chloride ions, magnesium, sulfur, carbon, potassium, and more. It has abilities your physicists have only started to wonder about. It has memory and language and mind. And She has these in greater and deeper numbers than any of us are ever likely to encounter.”
“She?”
The lights in interrogation room K came back on, and the walls, the table, the chairs swam into focus.
“The sea is now a woman. Everyone knows that.”
Klearistis came to see him the day after, no trouble getting past the threat of bullets or the strength of bulletproof glass. And he knew she would not show up on security video either. He’d had it checked for her previous visits. His office wasn’t monitored; she would not be seen until she entered the interrogation room. And nothing of what she had shown him had been captured digitally; only Andy Kavanagh briefly staring at the woman or her hands.
He sighed, waved her to the chair. “Sorry, I can’t believe this is part of some game.” Andy Kavanagh took out the prints he had made of the dive team’s underwater shots, thirteen bodies in various states of decay wired together and anchored to the seafloor, just off the New Hampshire coast. “What is it really?”
“What it looks like.”
“Bodies floating—”
“A collection of the dead. Like valuable pieces in a game. It has many purposes—and the rules give me a lot of leeway, but this time I used them to lure you in a particular direction. It’s the name of the game—the mermaid game. Or perhaps a better way to describe it is ‘whoever comes home with the greatest poet wins.’ ” She said the last in just above a whisper, her voice souring as if the words hurt to say them.
“Pieces in this game?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore. They are a required part of the performance, but they’ve been played. We now consider them off the board, like pawns in chess that have been taken.”
“You said you and your cousins play?”
“Many times.” She pointed at him as she said the words, her expression telling him that there was still uncertainty about the game’s outcome.
“What makes this time different?”
“Two things. A poet and his love. More importantly, I knew Julia before she died.”
“And?”
“And I have more than just memories of her. More than just your memories of her to guide me.”
His mouth was a clamped line. His hands started to shake, and she reached over to hold them tightly. She closed her eyes, sang a few lines in a language he couldn’t follow, and then opened her hands, released him, and leaned back in the chair. “Andy, is your pain, your grief . . . difficult?”
He was already nodding. “Only in the space between. I can only endure—clear my head—for minutes.”
“Between what?” She shook her head, didn’t understand. “Minutes?”
“There are only minutes between the dreams and quiet moments when I think of her—and those don’t last. The rest of it is pain.”
Klearistis nodded seriously. “If you let me, I can take that away.”
He shook his head. “No you can’t.”
“Yes, I can.” Keeping her eyes fixed to his, she leaned toward him. “Careful with this.” She placed the wedding picture in the protective case on the tabletop, a thick smear of dried blood across half of it. “That is hers.”
He just stared at it.
It hit him suddenly—“That is hers” didn’t refer to the picture in its case. He moved slowly as if the air was thick as the sea, his hands reaching through the fluid and weight of the deepest ocean, picking up the hard rectangle with one captured instant of their wedding day, turning it to face him.
The print of Julia’s lips, where she had placed a final kiss, was clear in a brown film of dried blood.
His shoulders dropped, and all the tension and pain in his head poured into Klearistis’ waiting hands—they were waiting, pressed together, cupped on the tabletop as if she was holding them under a faucet.
He said, sobbing, “Please, take it. I don’t have the strength anymore, and it slips through my fingers. I can’t hold onto to it any longer.”
Then the lights in interrogation room K came back on. Andy Kavanagh looked through a blur of tears at the picture in his hand. He was alone in the room, and he knew Julia was really gone.
A year passed, and Andy Kavanagh found he could endure more than minutes. It became hours, days, sometimes weeks without pain cutting through his memories. He still watched videos of their wedding, that dive trip off the Maldives, Julia’s first parachute drop at the Airborne School at Fort Benning—one of a hundred dark dots in the sky that sailed through the blue, ’chutes opening, and he had followed her down, trying to use the scope and shoot video at the same time. Julia had landed on her feet.
She always did.
He watched the light and motion and her beautiful smile—and he laughed with her because the memories had remained important without hurting him.
Another year passed, and Klearistis found him on the rocks at Odiorne Point, staring out over the low waves at the Atlantic. She walked through the surf, wringing out her hair, and then came up the beach t
o sit beside him.
She seemed a little older, a little sadder. He looked over and smiled, and noticed the effort it took her to return it.
She didn’t say anything, so he started. “I miss Julia more than ever.”
“That is good.”
“But I feel more alive.”
“Also good.”
He nodded, a question ready—a question he had been carrying around at the front of his mind for a couple years. “So, what have you done to me?”
“I have taken the pain from your memories. I take your pain, so you don’t have to feel it.”
He lost his smile. “But—”
She cut him off. “I am strong. I am calm.”
“This isn’t still part of some game?”
That brought a hint of her smile back. “You are writing. I know you just finished another book. So I won this round of play.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Does the winner get anything?”
“Of course. I’m this game’s winner, and I took what is mine. I get to take on the memories as if they are my own. I get to keep what I have learned from the ones who are lost.”
“Why?”
“Why the game?” She shrugged. “It’s a family thing, something we’re all very good at. Memories, words, stories, paintings, drawings, they help you grow. They help others grow. When I lured you into the water you hadn’t written a word in four years—not a word since Julia died. To me, to my cousins, to my aunts, this is a competition, but we do it to help you—you surfacers—fill the world with stories and images. We need you to take memories of joy and shame and pain, build stories around them, and fix them to a page—or in a frame on a wall. It’s been going on for centuries, probably as long as surfacers have told stories of women from the sea. That’s why we call it the mermaid game.”
“You’re talking about legends? Folklore? Like mermaid stories, women from the deep luring sailors to their dooms?”
She nodded sadly, staring out at the cold ocean. “Something like that.”
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Page 33