We weren’t going after a spirit. We had to catch a physical being, which was why we needed a proper fishing net. Barukh had no objection to us borrowing one of these—fishing nets aren’t things you can find on a farm. It didn’t seem at all strange to him that a net would be useful here.
Two nights later I was under a pile of rushes wrapped in a blanket next to Nachum, staring at a body of water that was barely visible in the moonlight.
It was not how I preferred to spend my evenings.
I’ve been on enough hunts in my life to appreciate the importance of staying awake and aware and still for extended periods, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy the experience. It didn’t help that Nachum had some sort of nasal condition that I never noticed at sea.
“Will you stop that?” I whispered, after hours of listening to it.
“It’s how I breathe,” he said.
“Then stop breathing. You’ll probably alert the thing we’re waiting for.”
The thing in question didn’t turn up that night, though, nor on the next two nights. That was enough time for me to figure out ten different ways to kill Nachum without anyone being the wiser, but that was all I figured out.
We took shifts to ensure one of us was awake when the mermaid showed. That was standard practice on hunts too, but on hunts I wasn’t saddled with the second oldest person in tribe. Thus, when she did show up, on the third night, it was during Nachum’s shift, and he slept through it.
“She used a spell!” he claimed. “It’s the only explanation.”
He said that shortly after we were both awakened by the sunrise, to find a cow standing in the shallows looking at us with bemusement.
“Yes of course, that’s the only explanation. You falling asleep isn’t at all feasible.”
“Never!”
I walked over to the gate. It was clearly unlatched and not broken. If a cow had done it, I would have expected more damage. Also, the latch was on the outside only. A man could reach over the fence and unlock it, but a cow couldn’t, unless the cow also had opposable thumbs and elbows.
I checked the ground from the open gate to the water. If it had been a mermaid somehow pulling herself fins and all from the water, I would have expected a drag trail. The distance was twenty paces, all matted grass and mud, but there wasn’t a trail to be seen. Admittedly, the cow trampled the ground pretty well and could have disturbed the area enough to erase the evidence, but that seemed like an unreasonable possibility.
I walked the patch slowly until I found what I was looking for: a footprint.
“Come see,” I said.
He leaned over to look.
“The footprint of a child,” he said.
It was made by a bare foot, and we both had on sandals. It was also smaller than anything our feet could have done.
“Or a woman.” I glanced at the water again. “It looks like your mermaid has sprouted legs.”
“Well of course. They can do that.”
“Can they?”
“When mermaids wish to cross onto dry land they shed their fins and come ashore on legs. Everyone knows this.”
“By what means?”
“Magic.”
“If the mermaid can use magic, why didn’t she just magically open the gate from the water? Or fly to the gate?”
“That’s a ridiculous suggestion.”
“Right. Of course it is.”
I looked at the cow, who continued to look like she had been caught doing something wrong.
“Maybe you can tell us what happened.”
The cow mooed.
* * *
The following afternoon I decided to put the net we borrowed to good use.
Up to that point we’d been keeping it with us, with the idea being to charge the mermaid and capture it by flinging the net into the water. It was a dumb plan, and in truth wasn’t even a plan, so much as what we decided to do once we both realized we hadn’t thought out the whole net thing beforehand.
It was a big net, though. Barukh only had one kind, the kind that required eight pairs of hands to extract from the waters when full. There was little point in employing it like a projectile. But as a trap, it had promise.
“I don’t understand why you’re putting it there,” Nachum said, which wasn’t helpful. Helpful would have been assisting me in hiding it.
I had spread it out on the ground between the water’s edge and the fence and used ropes and a few conveniently located low-hanging tree branches to create a trap. Ideally, if whomever it was that came out of the water attempted to return to the water again, we could pull on the ropes and capture them before they made it.
“Where would you put it?” I asked. I was trying to bury the net in some of the mud from the shore. I didn’t want the barefoot woman from the sea to feel the rope.
“In the water is where I would put it.”
“I think a mermaid would have far less trouble detecting a net in the water than on the shore.”
“In the dark?”
“This will also ensnare anyone else who might happen along the beach, regardless of whether or not they came from the water.”
“You still doubt if she’s real!”
“I only wish to plan for alternatives,” I said. “My doubt is very healthy.”
“The goal is to ensnare her before she can cast her spell to make us sleep, so it should be done while she’s in the water. Once she’s on land we will not be able to pull on the rope for being unawake.”
“I see. By your reckoning, then, she can only cast the spell from the water, and not at all once ashore. Is this another aspect of mermaid lore I’m not familiar with?”
Nachum grumbled. “Very well, at least get some leaves down here. The mud alone won’t disguise the netting.”
* * *
Something that goes underappreciated nowadays is how very dark nighttime used to be.
The modern adult will describe someone as being afraid of the dark as if this were foolish and childish, but as far as I’m concerned it’s perfectly sensible, because real darkness can be completely terrifying. In my lifetime, night predators were real, they were everywhere, and they were worthy of the active concern of adults and children alike. If you want to know why I spent so much of my life trying to latch onto various tribes and cultures—even ones where I was unwanted or whose beliefs I found barely tolerable—this was one reason. Having a bunch of people around meant both that there was somebody awake at night to sound a proper warning, and there was a large pool of other potential victims on hand.
The moon had been waning over the course of our nightly vigils, so we had less and less natural light to work with each evening. The only other real source of illumination was the stars, and that wasn’t much. We could have lit a lantern, but that sort of defeated the purpose of the endeavor, as a lit flame generally signaled the presence of someone to maintain that flame.
It made for a tense evening. I didn’t trust Nachum to either stay awake or to know when to trigger the net, so even when it was my turn to sleep I didn’t. We had only one shot with the trap; I wanted to be as sure as possible.
That said, I nearly pulled the rope four or five times. Another thing that goes underappreciated in the modern world is how loud a quiet night is. It gets so quiet that very small sounds seem unreasonably large, and before long you’re springing a mermaid trap and catching a bullfrog.
We didn’t do that, but it was close.
I couldn’t say what time it was when we finally heard something non-trivial. Based on the position of the moon it was probably well past midnight, but the moon was hardly there and I had let my talent for reading the night sky atrophy over the years.
What we heard was splashing. We’d been hearing something that we mistook for splashing all evening, but which turned out to be low waves cresting against the shore, and the occasional rambunctious fish. The sound a human-sized being exiting a body of water is much louder and largely unmistakable as something else, although
we didn’t entirely appreciate this until it happened.
Immediately, Nachum—who to his credit had remained awake—grabbed the rope, but I put my hand on his, a silent suggestion to wait.
The watery exit was followed by the thuck-thuck of feet in mud, and then we heard the latch thrown open on the gate. I counted to three, and then we pulled together on the net as hard as we could.
The net rose up and collapsed around… something.
She had been running straight for the water when the trap was sprung, and in a moment we had her dangling in the air. I remembered thinking if she was a mermaid, this had to have been a deeply ironic thing, to have spent all that time in the water avoiding fishing nets, only to have been snared by one on dry land. This assumed mermaids had an appreciation of irony.
Our triumph lasted exactly long enough for me to ponder this, which was to say about three seconds. Then she let out a horrid shriek, the kind that wakes entire neighborhoods and causes adult men to throw themselves on swords, women to rend their garments and tear out their hair, and children to drop dead from shock.
A bad sound, basically. But that, too, only lasted for three or four seconds. Then the rope went slack.
We didn’t hear her splash back into the water, but we couldn’t hear much of anything, as well-rung as our ears had gotten from the horrible cry. But when we ran to the net and found it had been torn open it was clear the water was the only place she could possibly have gotten to.
* * *
“This mermaid is much stronger than any I have encountered before,” Nachum said.
It was morning, and we were at Menachem’s table, having a small meal and reviewing our findings. Menachem’s entire family—as well as probably half of Galilee—heard the cry that was still ringing in our ears hours later, so none of what we had to say was all that surprising.
“She tore apart the net?” our host asked, for a second time. I imagined he was wondering what she would have done to one of his sons.
“Without hesitation,” Nachum said.
“The one you saw before was captured in a net,” I said. “Clearly, this one is more powerful.”
I didn’t actually think this. What I thought was that Nachum never encountered a live mermaid before, and the reason he hadn’t was that real mermaids were too strong to get caught in a fisherman’s net. It was an excellent explanation for why there were no mermaids in captivity or dead ones on display.
“We will have to build a better fence,” Menachem said. “Or move the animals further from the water. We have another field. We can just carry the water to them.”
Haim nodded. “We would lose valuable farmland.”
“Having our livestock drown would be a greater loss.”
“I don’t question your decision, father. And truly, the cows are looking much better now, I am sure it’s safe to move them.”
“Better?” I asked. “Because they’re no longer drowning?”
“They were suffering from a condition,” Menachem said. “We are fortunate not to have lost them all, between the disease and the mermaid.”
“Tell me more about this disease,” I said. “What were its symptoms?”
* * *
It took most of the morning to convince Menachem and Nachum that the mermaid wasn’t going to be coming back. I had to make up a reasonably large number of lies. That isn’t all that difficult a thing for me, but usually I’m better prepared with a stock set of them I can repurpose to fit the circumstance.
This probably isn’t surprising, but being an immortal man in a world where there is no such thing—or where such things are strong indicators of some manner of evil—means learning how to lie well and often.
The first lie I told was that the disease described by Haim and his father was a rare condition known to attract mermaids. I explained how similar skin conditions in sailors once resulted in an entire ship being overwhelmed and sunk, its sailors eaten. For proper effect I described the symptoms of scurvy. Then I turned to Nachum and said that of course, since he was the resident mermaid expert, he had heard of such a thing himself, and could surely back me up.
He wasn’t going to contradict me, because he was far more interested in my continued belief in his expertise than in any truth. I’m pretty sure by the end of the conversation he’d convinced himself that not only had he also heard this thing about mermaids, he had witnessed such a happening first-hand. Within a week, I expected it would become regionally canonical mermaid fact.
I should have been all set after that one lie, because if the animals no longer had the disease they should have in theory no longer attracted the mermaid, but this didn’t do the trick, so I had to make up a bunch more, such as that mermaids could only leave the water in certain phases of the moon, and then only three times a year, and then only thrice in a lifetime. Also, the cry she let out was proof that she was dying, somehow. I can’t remember how I got there, but they believed it.
And of course there was the overarching lie, the one that every other lie was draped over: the mermaid was certainly coming back. It was only that I knew what to do, and I didn’t want anybody else around when I did it.
* * *
Since I had camped out in their back yard for over a week, I was familiar enough with the hours Menachem and his family kept to know when it was safe to return without drawing attention. It was also easier by then to see where I was going because the moon was phasing in the right direction, so there was more moonlight to go by.
Rather than hide under the rushes again I just sat down next to the tree and waited.
It was probably a couple of hours of sitting. The lake was quiet, the cows remained locked up, and that was about all.
When it felt like the time was right—and I can’t explain what right felt like—I walked to the water’s edge. I had an old knife in my pocket, primarily used to gut fish. It was sharp, and too small to use as a weapon unless I got really close to somebody and cut in exactly the right place. I didn’t need it for defense, though.
I made a thin slice across the top of one of my fingers. I would have cut the palm because it’s easier to bleed a person from there, but I’d been cut unintentionally in the palm before and it takes forever to heal. Fingers are quick. They just don’t bleed fast. But I didn’t need much.
I dripped some blood into the water and then swished my hand in the shallows to get more in there, and then I walked back to the tree and sat down again.
Her head popped up about ten minutes later.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said quietly. I didn’t need to speak all that loudly; she could hear my heartbeat from that distance.
When my words didn’t produce a response, I repeated myself in Greek, and Latin, and Aramaic, and was about to move on to Urdu and maybe a Slavic tongue or two, when she responded in Greek.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am nobody of great import.”
She took two steps forward, which raised her upper torso from the water. The shadows ruled over the moment, but I could tell she was unclothed.
“You know what I am,” she said, “don’t you?”
“Yes. It took longer than it should have. I wasn’t thinking. It never occurred to me before that a vampire might live in a lake.”
“There is no sunlight under the sea. Even near the surface, the light only tickles. It’s difficult to catch fire surrounded by water. And I don’t need to breathe. You are unafraid?”
“I have an appropriate dose of fear. Some of your kind have called me Apollo, do you know that name?”
“I do. If that’s your name then you have lied. You are a person of greater import than most.”
Vampires mostly think of me as a special version of them, because of the immortality thing. It’s a lot more accurate to think of them as bizarre versions of me, but I’m the only one around willing to make that argument.
“Thank you for saying so.”
“Are you here to kill me, Apollo?”
“I am not. What do you eat? In the water, what is there for you?”
“Fish have blood. It’s awful. There are other things in the depths that taste better, but they are rare and difficult to capture, and they fight back. So, fish.”
This would be why the oceans of the world aren’t teeming with vampires, presumably.
“And the occasional cow and ox?”
“Sometimes. But they called for me. They still do, can’t you hear them?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
I’ve known vampires to have a deep connection with animals. Some have gone as far as to say vampires and animals talk to one another. I think that’s an overstatement, but they share a certain bond.
“They were in pain. I helped them.”
“You did, I know. They’re better now.”
“Yes. Their cries are different. Now they only long for my company.”
“What happened with the one who drowned?”
“He was dying, and his pain was too great. I couldn’t help him live, so I helped him die.”
“That was very nice of you.”
“It was more than the men would have done.”
“That’s true. But now I need to ask you to stop visiting.”
She fell silent for a few seconds, perhaps to listen to her cow friends.
“They are calling. I miss their blood.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that. But the thing is, if you keep coming here the men are going to realize I was wrong when I told them their mermaid was never going to return. And someday it won’t be two men with a net. It will be ten or twenty, or more. It will be more than you can protect yourself from.”
She laughed. “I was a mermaid, was I? Why would a mermaid care about a cow?”
“I appreciate that. But will you agree not to come back?”
“As I said, I will miss their blood. But I can agree to this. How does your blood taste?”
“I’ve been told it tastes very good.”
“Perhaps then you can let me taste you as a means to seal our agreement.”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 6
