Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  So I got along. What else?

  Before I went back to my room, I stood on the promenade awhile, looking out to sea. It was in vast upheaval, coming in against the cliffs like breaking glasses, and with a sound of torn atmosphere. Like a monstrous beast it ravened on the shore. A stupendous force seemed trying to burst from it, like anger, or love, or grief, orchestrated by Shostakovich, and cunningly lit by an obscured blind sun.

  I wished Daniel could have seen it. I couldn’t imagine he would remain unmoved, though all about me people were scurrying to and fro, not sparing a glance.

  When I reached my nominative aunt’s, the voice of a dismal news broadcast drummed through the house, and the odor of fried fish lurked like a ghost on the stairs.

  The next day was Tuesday, and I went to work.

  I dreamed about Daniel a lot during the next week. I could never quite recapture the substance of the dreams, their plot, except they were to do with him, and they felt bad. I think they had boarded windows. Perhaps I dreamed she’d killed him, or I had, and the boards became a coffin.

  Obviously, I’d come to my senses, or come to avoid my senses. I had told myself the episode was finished with. Brooding about it, I detected only some perverted desire on my side, and a trap from hers. There was no one I could have discussed any of it with.

  On Wednesday, a woman in a wheelchair rolled through lingerie on her way to the china department. Dizzy with fright, if it was fright, I watched the omen pass. She, Mrs. Besmouth, could get to me any time. Here I was, vulnerably pinned to my counter like a butterfly on a board. But she didn’t come in. Of course she didn’t.

  “Here,” said Jill-sans-bra, “look what you’ve gone and dunn. You’ve priced all these eight-pound slips at six-forty-five.”

  I’d sold one at six-forty-five, too.

  Thursday arrived, cinema day. A single customer came and went like a breeze from the cold wet street. There was a storm that night. A little ship, beating its way in from Calais, was swept over in the troughs, and there were three men missing, feared drowned. On Friday, a calm dove-gray weather bloomed, and bubbles of lemonade sun lit the bay.

  I thought about that window looking on the street.

  He should have seen the water, oh, he should have seen it, those bars of shining lead, and the great cool topaz master bar that fell across them. That restless mass where men died and fish sprang. That other land that glowed and moved.

  Saturday was pandemonium, as usual. Angela was cheerful. Her husband was in Scotland, and this evening the extramarital relationship was meeting her. Rather than yearn for aloneness together, they apparently deemed two no company at all.

  “Come over the pub with us. Jill and Terry’ll be there. And I know Ray will. He asked me if you were coming.”

  Viewed sober, a night of drinking followed by the inevitable Chinese nosh-up and the attentions of the writhing Ray, was uninviting. But I, as all pariahs must be, was vaguely grateful for their toleration, vaguely pleased my act of participant was acceptable to them. It was also better than nothing, which was the only alternative.

  “It’s nice here,” said Jill, sipping her Bacardi and Coke.

  They’d decided to go to a different pub, and I’d suggested the place on The Rise. It had a log fire, and they liked that, and horse-brasses, and they liked sneering at those. Number 19, Sea View Terrace was less than a quarter of a mile away, but they didn’t know about that, and wouldn’t have cared if they had.

  Lean, lithe Ray, far too tall for me, turned into a snake every time he flowed down towards me.

  It was eight o’clock, and we were on the fourth round. I couldn’t remember the extramarital relationship’s name. Angela apparently couldn’t either; to her he was “darling,” “love,” or in spritely yielding moments, “sir.”

  “Where are we going to eat then?” said Ray.

  “The Hwong Fews’s ever so nice,” said Jill.

  Terry was whispering a dirty joke to Angela, who screamed with laughter. “Listen to this—”

  Very occasionally, between the spasms of noise from the bar, you could just hear the soft shattering boom of the ocean.

  Angela said the punchline and we all laughed.

  We got to the fifth round.

  “If you put a bell on,” Ray said to me, “I’ll give you a ring sometime.”

  I was starting to withdraw rather than expand, the alternate phase of tipsiness. Drifting back into myself, away from the five people I was with. Out of the crowded public house. Astral projection almost. Now I was on the street.

  “You know I could really fancy you,” said Ray.

  “You want to watch our Ray,” said Angela.

  Jill giggled and her jelly chest wobbled. It was almost nine, and the sixth round. Jill had had an argument with Terry, and her eyes were damp. Terry, uneasy, stared into his beer.

  “I think we should go and eat now,” said the extramarital relationship.

  “Yes, sir,” said Angela.

  “Have a good time,” I said. My voice was slightly slurred. I was surprised by it, and by what I had just vocalized.

  “Good time,” joked Angela. “You’re coming, too.”

  “Oh, no—didn’t I say? I have to be somewhere else by nine.”

  “She just wants an excuse to be alone with me,” said Ray. But he looked as amazed as the rest of them. Did I look amazed, too?

  “But where are you going?” Angela demanded. “You said—”

  “I’m sorry. I thought I told you. It’s something I have to go to with the woman where I stay. I can’t get out of it. We’re sort of related.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Ray.

  “Oh well, if you can’t get out of it.” Angela stared hard at me through her mascara.

  I might be forfeiting my rights to their friendship, which was all I had. And why? To stagger, cross-eyed with vodka, to Daniel’s house. To do and say what? Whatever it was, it was pointless. This had more point. Even Ray could be more use to me than Daniel.

  But I couldn’t hold myself in check any longer, I’d had five days of restraint. Vile liquor had let my personal animal out of its cage. What an animal it was. Burning, confident, exhilarated, and sure. If I didn’t know exactly what its plans were, I still knew they would be glorious and great.

  “Great,” said Ray. “Well, if she’s going, let’s have another.”

  “I think I’ll have a cream sherry,” said Angela. “I feel like a change.”

  They had already excluded me, demonstrating I would not be missed. I stood on my feet, which no longer felt like mine.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” I said. I tried to look reluctant to be going, and they smiled at me, hardly trying at all, as if seeing me through panes of tinted glass.

  It was black outside; where the streetlights hadn’t stained it, the sky looked clear beyond the glare, a vast roof. I walked on water.

  Daniel’s mother had been drunk when she told me about the rape. Truth in wine. So this maniac was presumably the true me.

  The walk down the slope in the cold brittle air neither sobered me nor increased my inebriation. I simply began to learn how to move without a proper center of balance. When I arrived, I hung on her gate a moment. The hall light mildly suffused the door panels. The upstairs room, which was his, looked dark.

  I knocked. I seemed to have knocked on that door thirty times. Fifty. A hundred. Each time, like a clockwork mechanism, Mrs. Besmouth opened it. Hallo, I’ve come to see Daniel. Hallo, I’m drunk, and I’ve come to scare you. I’ve spoken to the police about your son, I’ve said you neglect him. I’ve come to tell you what I think of you. I’ve booked two seats on a plane and I’m taking Daniel to Lourdes. I phoned the Pope, and he’s meeting us there.

  The door didn’t open. I knocked twice more, and leaned on the porch, practicing my introductory gambits.

  I’m really a famous artist in disguise, and all I want is to paint Daniel. As the young Apollo, I think. Only I couldn’t find a lyre. (Liar.)
>
  Only gradually did it come to me that the door stayed shut, and gave every sign of remaining so. With the inebriate’s hidebound immobility, I found this hard to assimilate. But presently it occurred to me that she might be inside, have guessed the identity of the caller, and was refusing to let me enter.

  How long would the vodka stave off the cold? Ages, surely. I saw fur-clad Russians tossing it back neat amid snowdrifts, wolves howling in the background. I laughed sullenly, and knocked once more, I’d just keep on and on, at intervals, until she gave in. Or would she? She’d had over fifty years of fighting, standing firm, being harassed and disappointed. She’d congealed into it, vitrified. I was comparatively new at the game.

  After ten minutes, I had a wild and terrifying notion that she might have left a spare key, cliché-fashion, under a flowerpot. I was crouching over my boots, feeling about on the paving round the step for the phantom flowerpot, when I heard a sound I scarcely knew, but instantly identified. Glancing up, I beheld Mrs. Besmouth pushing the wheelchair into position outside her gate.

  She had paused, looking at me, as blank as I had ever seen her. Daniel sat in the chair like a wonderful waxwork, or a strangely handsome Guy Fawkes dummy she had been out collecting money with for Firework Night.

  She didn’t comment on my posture, neither did I.

  I rose and confronted her. From a purely primitive viewpoint, I was between her and refuge.

  “I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you would, either.”

  “What do you want?”

  It was, after all, more difficult to dispense with all constraint than the vodka had told me it would be.

  “I happened to be up here,” I said.

  “You bloody little do-gooder, poking your nose in.”

  Her tone was flat. It was another sort of platitude and delivered without any feeling, or spirit.

  “I don’t think,” I said, enunciating pedantically, “I’ve ever done any good particularly. And last time, you decided my interest was solely prurient.”

  She pushed the gate, leaning over the chair, and I went forward and helped her. I held the gate and she came through, Daniel floating by below.

  “You take him out at night,” I said.

  “He needs some fresh air.”

  “At night, so he won’t see the water properly, if at all. How do you cope when you have to go out in daylight?”

  As I said these preposterous things, I was already busy detecting, the local geography fresh in my mind, how such an evasion might be possible. Leave the house, backs to the sea, go up The Rise away from it, come around only at the top of the town where the houses and the blocks of flats exclude any street-level view. Then down into the town center, where the ocean was only a distant surreal smudge in the valley between sky and promenade.

  “The sea isn’t anything,” she said, wheeling him along the path, her way to the door clear now. “What’s there to look at?”

  “I thought he might like the sea.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Has he ever been shown it?”

  She came to the door, and was taking a purse out of her coat pocket. As she fumbled for the key, the wheelchair rested by her, a little to one side of the porch. The brake was off.

  The vodka shouted at me to do something. I was slow. It took me five whole seconds before I darted forward, thrust by her, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, careened it around, and wheeled it madly back up the path and through the gate. She didn’t try to stop me, or even shout, she simply stood there, staring, the key in her hand. She didn’t look nonplussed either—I somehow saw that. I was the startled one. Then I was going fast around the side of Number 19, driving the chair like a cart or a doll’s pram, into the curl of the alley that ran between cliff and wall to the beach. I’m not absolutely certain I remembered a live thing was in the chair. He was so still, so withdrawn. He really could have been some kind of doll.

  But the alley was steep, steeper with the pendulum of man and chair and alcohol swinging ahead of me. As I braced against the momentum, I listened. I couldn’t hear her coming after me. When I looked back, the top of the slope stayed empty. How odd.

  Instinctively I’d guessed she wouldn’t lunge immediately into pursuit. I think she could have overcome me easily if she’d wanted to. As before, she had given over control of everything to me.

  This time, I wasn’t afraid.

  Somewhere in the alley, my head suddenly cleared, and all my senses, like a window going up. All that was left of my insanity was a grim, anguished determination not to be prevented, I must achieve the ocean, and that seemed very simple. The waves roared and hummed at me out of the invisible, unlit dark ahead. Walking down the alley was like walking into the primeval mouth of Noah’s Flood.

  The cliff rounded off like a castle bastion. The road on the left rose away. A concrete platform and steps went up, then just raw rock, where a hut stood sentinel, purpose unknown. The beach appeared suddenly, a dull gleam of sand. The sea was all part of a black sky, until a soft white bomb of spray exploded out of it.

  The street lamps didn’t reach so far, and there were no fun-fair electrics to snag on the water. The sky was fairly clear, but with a thin intermittent race of clouds, and the nearest brightest stars and planets flashed on and off, pale gray and sapphire blue. A young crescent moon, too delicate to be out on such a cold fleeting night, tilted in the air, the only neon, but not even bleaching the sea.

  “Look, Daniel,” I murmured. “Look at the water.”

  All I could make out was the silken back of his head, the outline of his knees under the rug, the loosely lying artist’s hands.

  I’d reached the sand, and it was getting difficult to maneuver the wheelchair. The wheels were sinking. The long heels of my boots were sinking too. A reasonable symbol, maybe.

  I thrust the chair on by main force, and heard things grinding as the moist sand became clotted in them.

  All at once, the only way I could free my left foot was to pull my boot and leg up with both hands.

  When I tried the chair again, it wouldn’t move anymore. I shoved a couple of times, wrenched a couple, but nothing happened and I let go.

  We were about ten feet from the ocean’s edge, but the tide was going out, and soon the distance would be greater.

  Walking on tiptoe to keep the sink-weight off my boot heels, I went around the chair to investigate Daniel’s reaction. I don’t know what I’d predicted. Something, patently.

  But I wasn’t prepared.

  You’ve heard the words: sea-change.

  Daniel was changing. I don’t mean in any supernatural way. Although it almost was, almost seemed so.

  Because he was coming alive.

  The change had probably happened in the eyes first of all. Now they were focused. He was looking—really looking, and seeing—at the water. His lips had parted, just slightly. The sea wind was blowing the hair back from his face, and this, too, lent it an aura of movement, animation, as though he was in the bow of a huge ship, her bladed prow cleaving the open sea, far from shore, no land in sight . . . His hands had changed their shape. They were curiously flexed, arched, as if for the galvanic effort of lifting himself.

  I crouched beside him, as I had crouched in front of the house searching for the make-believe spare key. I said phrases to him, quite meaningless, about the beauty of the ocean and how he must observe it. Meaningless, because he saw, he knew, he comprehended. There was genius in his face. But that’s an interpretation. I think I’m trying to say possession or atavism.

  And all the while the astounding change went on, insidious now, barely explicable, yet continuing, mounting, like a series of waves running in through his blood, dazzling behind his eyes. He was alive—and with something. Yes, I think I do mean atavism. The gods of the sea were rising up in the void and empty spaces of Daniel, as maybe such gods are capable of rising in all of us, if terrified intellect didn’t s
lam the door.

  I knelt in the sand, growing silent, sharing it merely by being there beside him.

  Then slowly, like a cinematic camera shot, my gaze detected something in the corner of vision. Automatically, I adjusted the magical camera lens of the eye, the foreground blurring, the distant object springing into its dimensions. Mrs. Besmouth stood several yards off, at the limit of the beach. She seemed to be watching us, engrossed, yet not moving. Her hands were pressed together, rigidly—it resembled that exercise one can perform to tighten the pectoral muscles.

  I got to my feet a second time. This time I ran towards her, floundering in the sand, deserting the wheelchair and its occupant, their backs to the shore facing out to sea.

  I panted as I ran, from more than the exertion. Her eyes also readjusted themselves as I blundered towards her, following me, but she gave no corresponding movement: a spectator only. As I came right up to her, I lost my footing and grabbed out to steady myself, and it was her arm I almost inadvertently caught. The frantic gesture—the same one I might have used to detain her if she had been running forward—triggered in me a whole series of responses suited to an act of aggression that had not in fact materialized.

  “No!” I shouted. “Leave him alone! Don’t you dare take him away. I won’t let you—” and I raised my other hand, slapping at her shoulder ineffectually. I’m no fighter; I respect—or fear—the human body too much. To strike her breast or face would have appalled me. If we had really tussled I think she could have killed me long before my survival reflexes dispensed with my inhibitions.

  But she didn’t kill me. She shook me off; I stumbled and I fell on the thick cold cushion of the sand.

  “I don’t care what he does,” she said. “Let him do what he wants.” She smiled at me, a knowing scornful smile. “You adopt him. You take care of him. I’ll let you.”

  I felt panic, even though I disbelieved her. To this pass we had come, I had brought us, that she could threaten me with such things. Before I could find any words—they would have been inane violent ones—her face lifted, and her eyes went over my head, over the beach, back to the place where I’d left the chair.