‘I think there’s something I have to ask you,’ I said.
‘What?’ she asked. And I had the impression that she already knew what I wanted to ask about, but she was in no hurry and, placidly amused, was not about to make things easier for me.
I started to speak, then dipped my head as laughter interrupted my speech like a stutter. Finally I let out a breath, almost a sigh, and approached my subject with diffident but frank ineptness, only half looking in Gwendoline’s eyes.
‘How exactly do mermaids have sex? I mean, I presume you do have sex.’
‘This is just idle curiosity, is it?’ she teased.
‘Well, no. No, not really, no, it isn’t.’ Perhaps thinking I had suffered enough she relented and let me get away without spelling things out any further.
‘I think you’re probably more interested in how mermaids have sex with humans aren’t you? I’m afraid the tail makes it impossible normally. But there is a way humans and mermaids have been lovers in every sense of the word. They have even had children together. Certain sacrifices have to be made, though.’
Her amusement seemed to have faded revealing a deep seriousness that puzzled and intimidated me. I felt a little chided by the word ‘sacrifices’, and was suddenly ashamed of my thoughtless eagerness.
‘I see,’ I said, unwilling to change the subject but not knowing how to take it any further.
After I had been silent for some time, Gwendoline spoke again.
‘I am willing to make the necessary sacrifices, you know.’
I was too grateful to say anything, saddled with a feeling of indebtedness that could never be lost.
She continued, ‘Humans and merfolk had links and dealings a long time back, so that all sorts of complicated relationships were developed, secrets were shared and new secrets were forged. We still have records of these things. I believe, however, only a few fragments have survived in the memory of the human race, and these have been scattered like a puzzle between the different races and continents. Only by piecing the fragments together will you find a clue to the innermost secret of relations between humans and merfolk. There is a ritual that is to be performed before a human can mate with a mermaid. It is very rarely used these days. In fact, to my knowledge it hasn’t been used for nearly a thousand years. After the main links between humans and merfolk were severed it became a shunned ritual. It is the ritual to transform the mermaid’s tail into human legs and sexual organs.’
Her head had been lowered throughout this speech and she spoke it as if reciting an old lesson from memory.
‘Are you sure you’re willing to go through with this ritual?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is it shunned?’
‘Once the transformation has taken place, it can never be reversed. That is the sacrifice.’
I was flattered and bewildered that she should be prepared to lose her beautiful tail for my sake, but I also sensed a worrying reticence regarding this ritual. I brooded for a while, pretending to myself that I was struggling with the issues involved in this situation, pretending that the struggle could go either way, but really I knew it was predetermined. If Gwendoline was willing, as she had intimated, then I would take advantage of this and carry out the ritual.
I received my instructions from Gwendoline and took some of the Kraken powder down to the beach when a full moon was reflected in the slack waters. I walked along a spur of rock jutting out into the sea and placed the powder in two braziers, either side of me, to form a sort of gateway. The rocks, the rock pools and the waves seemed to become one thing, so that the solid, unmoving darkness that I crouched upon was the same as the restless darkness of the waves. In the darkness, I seemed to be sitting upon all that was enduring and solid in the ocean itself. Looking out over the patterns of shadows I thought of the ribbing of clouds or sand-dunes in a desert. The sea was like a million bodies of shadow, tossing and murmuring in their sleep, flinging out arms languidly.
I lit the powder and watched it flare up weirdly sending plumes of colour and fiery sparks out over the waves to disappear, mournful as a funeral barge, into the colourless reaches of the night. There was a feeling of potential, of resonance, the air was like the skin of a drum, tense and ready for me to beat it. I called out the words I had been taught, careful to pronounce them correctly, as if this were a performance where I had to give my best and get things right first time. My confidence was enough, the drama of my voice rolled around the darkness, and I felt as if I had only just pulled off a difficult balancing trick. The words were simple, as all spells of power must be, since they were nothing more than a password recognised by hidden powers. The potency of those words on the fertile night was soon to be proved by the fecundity of the ocean.
I watched as, incredibly, a rectangle of water began to shift and boil in isolation from the water around it. It was as if a column of water were rising from the waves. Then, as if taking shape from the writhing water, the book rose to the surface. The waves themselves had knitted together to form the dark metal binding patterned with a web of ridged and horny tentacles. Now it floated impossibly on the black waters and I realised that all that was left was the simple physical task of retrieving it.
I splashed into the night waters with some apprehension of what might inhabit them where ‘a book of spells’ is summoned. I wanted to get out of that water as quickly as I could, thrilling though it was to feel the night turned liquid cold against my skin. I was afraid to touch that terrible book, and my instinct about this proved true. As soon as I grasped it, it lost its mysterious buoyancy and I was dragged under by its weight.
I dared not let go of it, for fear I would lose it forever, and so let myself twist in underwater blackness, not knowing where the surface was. I flailed and swam as best as I could. I am not the strongest of swimmers and was afraid that I would drown. Still I held onto the book. I found that my lungs had a greater capacity than I had imagined. I already felt as if my lungs would burst when my feet struck sand and stone. Then there still remained a struggle to the shallows, where I could breathe, whilst a lightning pain raced up and down my body and I gashed my leg on some savage rocks. Still, the point where the book had surfaced had not been so far out and I found, gratefully, that my head soon broke the waters, and, gasping, I was able to slow down and trudge exhaustedly against the rise and fall of the tide back to the shore. There I collapsed on the sand with the book cradled in my arms, wondering what forces wilder and stronger than a shipwrecking sea-storm could release the book in such a manner to anyone who might know the right call. I held it out and looked at it in the moonlight. I felt like Moses having received the stone tablets on which were written the commandments, graven by no human hand. But this did not look like a normal tablet of stone so much as a slab of cooled and blackened lava, its bubbling viscosity now solidified. A clasp kept its strange metal covers shut tight.
Often, it seems to me, the human race sees love as something cosy and domestic, invented for their benefit, to make their life happier and more comfortable. People look forward to love as a part of their future; they search for it as they search for a home of their own, lay claim to it as if taking out a mortgage.
This has not been my experience of love. For me love is a wild thing that one foolishly coaxes into one’s life, hoping to tame it, to become familiar with it. And it does become familiar. You forget that it is wild and strange to you, that it only came to you recently from you know not where. So when, without warning one day, it suddenly pounces on you and tears you to shreds with its wicked, beautiful claws before escaping back to where it came from, you are amazed. Then you remember, it was a wild thing when it came to you. It was not put there for your benefit, after all. Still, there remain mocking, lacerating memories of the brief limbo period when that wild thing did seem familiar to you, and you are left to wonder whether that disconnected fragment, that deadly shining shard, like the middle of a story with no end or beginning, was anything more than a taun
ting illusion.
So I have been left with memories of Gwendoline, memories of a devastatingly brief meeting that was over before it began, memories of a hauntingly finite time together, elliptical, its significance lost to me. These memories are like images frozen in the sharp splinters of a shattered mirror. I grasp them to me and find that they cut me easily and deeply.
Many of these memories are simple things impossible to relate, a certain expression or tone of voice, the light bringing out a particular quality, as if one of the many souls inside Gwendoline were surfacing for a briefer-than-mayfly existence. For instance, I remember when I was playing with her, encircled by that tail that looked as if it were made of sweets; she looked back over her shoulder at me and smiled unaffectedly, warmly, and I felt as if we had shared some gentle and unexplainable joke, as if Gwendoline were a girl showing me a secret treasure-trove of trinkets. It was a moment of strange closeness. Other memories are more complex, like the time I had dug out a fabulous emerald green gown from my wardrobe for Gwendoline to wear. It made her look like an Edwardian lady. As I carried her up the stair-well she seemed like a beautiful invalid. Seeing her tail flop out from under the dress brought home to me her inhumanness far more strikingly than when she wore no human garments. I was thinking we were an odd couple, if we were a couple, and thinking how I had always been incongruous in any couple. Some old saying about fish and bicycles struck me as particularly descriptive of that incongruity. Then Gwendoline spoke to me in that sea-voice, tilting like waves, stirring my feelings as with the rudder of her wide tail end.
‘You’re a strange man,’ she said.
‘How would you know?’ I asked.
‘I just know. You don’t live hundreds of years without learning something. You are strange because without knowing it you are convinced that I am absolutely ordinary and that you have to protect me from your strangeness, that you have to explain things and make them easy for me to understand. I don’t think any other human would be so convinced that between himself and a mermaid he was the oddity. You’re really hardly interested in me at all, except as an audience to your own strangeness. You don’t know you’re doing it and that makes it quite charming in a way, and quite sad.’
‘Is that really how it seems to you?’ was all I could manage in reply. Looking in her eyes I saw that it was.
Yes, yes, the memories trail together as elegant as houseplants growing at different levels in an ornamental stand. Among the gentle blurring of leaves, shoots are sent out, dangling the trembling image of a face on a swan-delicate neck, the head thrown back, that sweet, moist elastic smile. The face turns away to show the corner of an eye, the enigma of the ear among strands of hair. The lashes flicker and become laughter in the dimpled inside of her elbow. The cloudy tenderness of the flesh above her hips, surrounding her navel, is as white as china, takes on a greenish tinge where it joins her tail, which flicks as her head inclines in bemused inquisitiveness. These illuminated moments have become complete only now that their beauty is set off unbearably by the loss that has twisted them into tragic falsehood.
For now Gwendoline is gone. For a while I was plunged into the many-limbed cloud of beautiful pain that was her life. Then the clouds came between us, separating us forever. Clouds like the green intoxicating milk from her pearly breasts. And now, when I try to penetrate those rolling clouds, I see her in the murky ocean become a dank boudoir, curtains, drapes, tapestries of seaweed, where countless centuries of inhuman lovers wait for her with bodies of gods, circling and falling upon her changed body like sharks in feeding frenzy, sheets of fins and tails blowing in undersea currents. I am mocked, cuckolded by this vision. In connecting with Gwendoline I unknowingly linked with a vast network, a web of lovers, past and future, joined one to another by the flesh. But I, the only human, have been left behind, rejected by this pulsating, many-limbed organism, this sprawling sea spawn. I alone am cut off by the green clouds of love’s terrible amnesia. Perhaps these visions are madness, a withdrawal from the use of the Sunken Tongue, some lasting damage from the Kraken Powder, or the simpler madness of passion. But the pain is the same as if they were reality.
But my story is not yet finished. There is still a little way to go. I carried the Book of Kraken up the steep, narrow road from the beach, soaked and shivering. Something about the book made the blackness of the night weird and alien. Everything had been painted with an interstellar blackness that made the road, the branches of trees that hang proboscidean, the sides of cliffs, look like a scene from another planet. When I got back into the cottage and heard the ticking of clocks I felt I had arrived in an eerie, haunted capsule where time itself was worm-eaten. What was it about the influence of that tome that made me feel like some wizened and iniquitous meddler in the fabric of reality and the secrets of other dimensions? Yes, it was as if the creaky old cottage had been built on some fissure from which leaked a radiation that distorted reality, and I had somehow recognised this book as something from the same dimension as that radiation.
Watching my shadow loom and shrink I took the book up into the attic studio where Gwendoline waited. She was visibly impressed at the sight of the book. In fact, I detected a note in her awe that made me feel I was in the presence of something forbidden and dangerous. Gwendoline undid the clasp through some strange and subtle manipulation that I did not quite understand, and laid the book open on the side of her pool. The leaden pages gave off a cracked aura of age like the blocks of an ancient pyramid. Yet they were unblemished, and, spun from some water-resistant alloy, shone groggily on Gwendoline’s face. I had never seen the Sunken Tongue in script form before. The thin, ethereal characters looked like patterns of seaweed, tracing and curling horribly. Gwendoline slowly turned the pristine leaves.
‘It’s here,’ she said. ‘The Sacred Ritual of the Marriage of Man and Mermaid.’
Then she began to read out the details of the ritual and to instruct me in the part I had to play. I could not read those ancient letters, of course, so I had to learn by heart those sections which I was to recite. I did not much like the words I was to utter, but the physical details were even worse. The whole thing was rather dark and morbid for a marriage ceremony, and made me think more of some heathen sacrifice. I thought of the ritual being performed long ago in dark, rough and murky undersea caves when humans and merfolk still had strong links. There was something squalid in it.
Gwendoline, in a state of suppressed agitation, seemed rather distant, concentrating so much on how the ritual was to be carried out that she hardly seemed to acknowledge my presence. This made me feel isolated and apprehensive, but I took her mood for temporary pre-occupation, and was simply grateful that she was so intent on going through with the whole thing.
The ritual was one that could be performed at any time, so we decided there was no reason to wait. Suddenly, we had come to the moment when the ritual was to begin, and I trembled with the sense of something about to happen. I have often felt that very little can be said actually to happen in life, events being as flat and substanceless as passing reflections in a puddle. But now something was going to happen.
In preparation I had to arrange the mutilated bodies of fish in a pattern around the pool, according to a diagram in the Book of Kraken. It was a strange geometrical pattern. As a sculptor I found myself mesmerised by its construction, and as with the building of the pool, I pieced it together as meticulously as a work of art, feeling the power of its creation, the charge of expectancy that it set up like a force field. Then more of the Kraken powder was burnt.
I cleaned the knife I had used to hack the fish, knowing I was soon to use it again. I was relieved to find Gwendoline meeting my gaze for the first time since I had brought the book of spells up into the attic. Her eyes were full of a devouring intentness almost feverish. I held up the blade between us like the flame of our shared experience. But for all the silent heat and hunger of the moment, it seemed to me that Gwendoline’s spellbound state was fuelled in part by some se
cret source that I did not have access to. And so the blade was also the symbol of our separation, and it was the blade we would have to get past to be finally together.
‘Why do I feel like we’re saying goodbye?’ I asked.
‘Don’t speak,’ she said tersely. ‘Just carry out the ritual.’
I felt like Orpheus in the underworld forbidden to look back and reassure himself that Persephone was really following. I allowed myself to gaze openly at Gwendoline’s glittering tail, that leviathan of desire, and realise that I really was saying goodbye. Soon, in appearance, at least, Gwendoline would be irrevocably human.
Even given the extreme unlikelihood that any reader might find themselves in a position to enact the Ritual of the Marriage of Man and Mermaid, I am exceedingly reluctant to write down here, in original or translation, the words of power that I next uttered. The words were cryptic and contained allusions to transformation that seemed to me a dark and croaking voice. Still, utter them I did.
With those secret chants still hanging in the air like a sense of foreboding, I slipped into the lukewarm water with Gwendoline and watched the lambent flames from the braziers dance on our naked flesh. I felt as if we were in just such a cave as I had imagined.
Gwendoline’s whole body was beautifully twisted, like hair tossed back on a pillow. I thought of how this time and this place, in all the universe, was ours. Not mine or hers, but most gloriously ours. Our eyes had not broken contact for some time and every little nuance of movement took its place with wordless completeness between us as if the lambent flames were a net woven of our combined passions. For this reason, knowing it would be caught in the net of our shared feelings, I almost enjoyed the pain I felt as I deliberately sliced open the palm of my left hand. As the many beads of blood streaked from the gash, I felt Gwendoline’s sympathy trickle with them.
Morbid Tales Page 6
