Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Nobody mentioned the missing mermaid.

  Yet.

  She finally surfaced in the Foghorn Café where the three slid wearily into a booth for breakfast. The Foghorn cook, driving early to work, had marked the mermaid among the missing after that tumultuous night. Word spread quickly among the staff and passed to the diners along with every breakfast order. From what Jake could catch of the excited gabble, nobody was certain of anything, though nobody could get enough of it. The lightning, as sudden and vivid as a dead eye opening, the horrendous blast, the scarred, blackened bell tower, the vanished mermaid were puzzled over separately and together; nothing seemed to fit.

  “That tall ship that comes to visit every year—the Lady Ysabelle—did she sail in last night? Maybe somebody shot off her cannon and hit the Cormorants’ bell? Maybe it took out the mermaid along the way?” Jake, who had his back to her, recognized the lilting ebb and wash of Carey O’Farrell, who owned Sea Treasures, in which tourists could buy wind chimes made of jingle shells, local art and jewelry, and Port Dido tea towels.

  “The Lady Ysabelle’s not due until late summer,” Parker Yeong, one of the Institute’s professors, reminded her. “Besides, they only fire off gunpowder in their fake battles, not real cannonballs. I like your theory, though,” he added cheerfully. “It’s better than the single-boltof-lightning theory. That might explain the bell tower, but not the missing mermaid; she wouldn’t have been in its trajectory.”

  “Yes, and what have those Cormorants been up to?” Emma Cadogan demanded darkly from the table on the other side of Carey. Her portentous, fluting voice caused Shirley Watson, of Watson Fishing and Whale Watching Excursions, to stiffen on her stool at the counter. “I always knew they are an evil bird. Blasphemous to think that the Mother of God would consort with cormorants.”

  Shirley spun on the stool, her whacked-out, sideways grin flashing her gold eyetooth. “So the Lord flung a lightning bolt, missed the birds, but got the church tower instead?”

  Markham loosed a snort of laughter over his coffee. Scott, red-eyed, rattled, punched his brother’s arm, but it was too late. Emma, loftily ignoring Shirley, trained her sights at the three young men in the booth. She was a massive, formidable woman who spent her hours at the Port Dido Visitors’ Center, telling tourists where to go and showing them the quickest way to get there.

  “What do you boys know about all this?” she asked, riveting them in an instant, like that snake-haired Greek with the snarky eyes who lingered in Jake’s memory long after her name. “You must have been out late last night after graduation.”

  Jake heard Markham’s breath again, freed from the stone he had almost become. “Graduated three years ago, ma’am,” he said with a genuine edge of indignation. “Last thing on my mind back then would have been a woman made of wood with a fish tail instead of legs.”

  Emma’s eyes didn’t flicker, Jake saw; she might have pursued the matter for no other reason than to listen to her own voice. But Sally Goshen edged between table and booth wielding a tray full of breakfasts.

  “Did you all hear what happened last night?” she asked them breathlessly. “I just heard—I started my shift late. I was home all the way over in Greengage when that bolt woke me and my son Jeremy and the dogs. Louise in the kitchen said her boyfriend was out with the Coast Guard late last night in a cutter, and they saw the entire bay bright as day when the lightning flashed. He knew it got the Cormorants because they’re the only church in the county with a real bell in the tower.”

  Dr. Yeong swiveled from his breakfast burrito to look at her. “Did he know anything about the mermaid?”

  “What? No.” She stared at him, giving Jake Markham’s mile-high stack with bacon and extra butter. “He didn’t say. Somebody found a mermaid?”

  “No,” Carey explained. “The mermaid on the bridge? She went missing last night.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Vanished,” Markham said, gazing raptly at Sally’s face, with its skin like a ripe, golden, finely freckled apricot. Scott joggled his elbow; he looked vaguely around, then focused on his plate. “Heck’s this?”

  “My Greek omelet,” Jake said. “Spinach and feta and capers.”

  “Capers.” Markham speared one on a fork prong. “Looks like bait to me.”

  “Oop—sorry,” Sally said, putting Scott’s salmon scramble in front of Markham instead. “Oh, yeah, that mermaid. Well? What happened to her?”

  Jake shook his head, drawing in a deep breath of syrup and melting butter as he passed the pancakes to Markham, who handed his brother the scramble. “We have absolutely no idea.”

  They parted company after breakfast, Markham to work catching and baiting fish with huge hooks to catch the cormorants who swallowed the fish, Scott to the community college over in Myrtlewood to study Spanish and welding, and Jake to the South Coast Culinary Institute to learn the difference between hollandaise, béarnaise, and mayonnaise, and which belonged on what.

  The witch opened her eyes and found herself floating on her back with a cormorant sitting on her front holding its wings out to dry.

  Her whole being, whatever it was at the moment, protested the wakening. It was far too soon after a hundred restless years; she needed most of a year to sleep, not half a night—and why was she back in the tide?

  The bird opened its long beak soundlessly, seeming to sense the witch’s ire at the world through its great, flat feet. Then it levitated with a powerful, graceful thrust of its wings. The witch caught its eyes, its vision; for a dizzying moment, she looked down at herself, the wooden mermaid in the water, with her scallop shells and her bright yellow hair curved along her cheek and one side of her smile, her long tail curved upward, fin spread like a fan, the arc broad enough to hold something, the cormorant maybe, that might have perched there.

  Oh, why not, the witch thought with exasperation. At least human, I could have a bed.

  She guided the wood figure carefully away from fishing boats in the bay, from boat ramps and docks crowded with crabbers. Passing gulls took note of the mermaid’s glowering eyes and changed their minds about landing there. After a century, the witch knew the waters—estuary, harbor and bay, every stone, barnacle, and bit of wrack—like she knew her own mind. She brought the stiff, heavy statue easily and unobtrusively to the sandy shore inside a half-hidden cove. There she let her powers flow everywhere into the wood, just as she had for the last century. Eyes blinked, hair shifted in the wash of water, the tree heart thumped, sap moved along its secret ways. The witch swallowed, spoke, making a hollow blat at first. When she tried to stand, she remembered what she had forgotten. Fin morphed into feet bigger than any she had ever had. She stumbled over them at first, and nearly bumped her head on the rocky ceiling. She touched her hair, examined her toenails, gazed with bemusement at the two scallop shells on her chest, no longer wood but real, and at the short, wetly gleaming, scale-patterned blue skirt that barely reached halfway down her thighs. She possessed nothing else: no shoes, no money, not even, she realized irritably, a name.

  “Maybe,” she said aloud, then, remembering, and her smile appeared, a living thing as responsive to her thoughts as language. “Maybe in this body I’m Dido.”

  She vanished for a while to climb up the cliff above the cave, a simple matter for her great, splayed feet and her long, hard arms; then she walked a back road down into Port Dido.

  She let her oddly tall, ungainly but comely shape appear gradually on the sidewalks: a barefoot, very tired, very hungry young woman wearing only seashells and fish scales. People had changed, she noted with interest, during the hundred years she’d been in the water. Like the mermaid, they exposed anything at all of themselves, and much of what they exposed had colorful artwork on it, as though they kept their histories in living canvases on their skin. They let their hair do whatever it wanted; they put extraordinary things on their feet. Even so, some still gave her startled glances. Others grinned at her, or extended a thumb, which meant somethin
g, she guessed: maybe it warded away witches.

  She was dawdling outside a cluster of shop windows in a little square, intrigued equally by the clothes in one, the bottles of wine in another, the little tarts and buns in a third. Her mouth watered; her chilly fingers and feet tried to warm each other. Money, she remembered distantly, was the difference between having nothing and having something. At least it was for mortals, but not necessarily for witches inhabiting the shape of a wooden mermaid turned temporarily human. She was debating in the mermaid’s head the merits of pickpocketing, begging, scaring the change out of the next passerby, or enchanting a few dried leaves into coins, when a shop door flew open.

  “There you are! I’ve been keeping an eye out.” The witch, surprised by the young, brown, dark-browed face peering out, recognized under the thick curly hair and the flawless skin of someone not long in the world the force that had been the tidal goddess’s previous body. She was part cormorant, the witch sensed, and part human, with some very old regional powers tossed into the mix. Like the witch herself, she’d been around a long time, and had many connections, not all of them innocent or unambiguous. “Come out of the cold. Port Dido blows in a fog bank every afternoon and calls it spring. I’m Portia. Did you remember your name?”

  “Not yet,” the witch answered, crossing the threshold. “But I’ve decided the mermaid is Dido. It’s easy to remember.” She smelled all good things then: meat, fruit, chocolate, fungi, grains, spices, and her knees shook. She sat suddenly; a chair caught her midway down.

  “You poor thing.”

  “Something woke me before I had even begun to dream. I’m not sure what it was, but I found myself in this—this—”

  “Yes.” A dimple deepened in one firm cheek; in her smile a bit of ancient mischief sparked. “You did. I can give you a place to sleep for a hundred nights. Or I can give you dinner, a bed for the night, and a job in the morning. Not too early,” she added quickly. “Pub hours. Your choice. Here. Eat this.”

  The witch, biting into strawberries, thick, heavy cream, dark chocolate, and golden pastry that crumbled and floated in air, decided in that moment, that mouthful, to stay awake and human for a while. There were benefits.

  “But what do you get out of it?” she wondered. Even the most noble of witches had her own best interests at heart.

  Portia dropped the lid over an eye dark as the backside of the moon.

  “You’ll see.”

  By the week’s end, opinion seemed pretty evenly divided between blaming the mermaid’s disappearance on the congregation of Our Lady of the Cormorants, whose passion for the demonic bird must have led them into unimaginable wickedness, or the Port Dido High School’s graduating class, which was known for its pranks, or any of the rich tourists who might have driven off with the mermaid as a souvenir of the quaint little town where they had hired a boat for a day to haul salmon and tuna out of the sea. A reward donated by the Chamber of Commerce was posted for information leading to her whereabouts. Merchants set out donation jars to add to the reward. The local paper published a photo of the missing mermaid, the history of her life on the bridge welcoming visitors, and a plea from the chainsaw artist who had created her to return his master work, no questions asked.

  Jake’s girlfriend, Blaine, pretty much said the same thing, wailing into his cellphone as he sat with Markham and Scott in a shadowy corner of the Trickle Down Brewery and Pub, “Jake, how could you lose a seven-foot mermaid? You have to find her. I promised Haley! I promised her! That’s the focal point of the whole color scheme of her wedding. My best friend is getting married and I want her day to be perfect. I don’t care where she went, you have to get her back by Saturday.”

  “I know, baby,” Jake said softly. “I will. Ah—where are you?”

  “Here at Haley’s with the girls, making the wedding favors. Oh, don’t worry, nobody’s here who doesn’t know you’re involved. Everything—the favors, the cake, our heels and dresses, the bouquets, the corsages and decorations—they’re all her colors! Red and that dark, gleaming blue with yellow trim for her hair. Nothing will make any sense without her. You were just supposed to borrow her for a few days then put her back, not drop her into the bay.”

  “It just happened,” he answered helplessly.

  “I know, I know: the lightning whacking the church bell, the thunderclap—I understand that. But why did it have to happen to Haley?”

  “We still have until Saturday. We’ll find her.”

  “What can I get you guys?” the waitress asked.

  Blaine’s voice grew small and far away as Jake stared. She wasn’t covered in blue scales; she had two legs under a short black skirt and black tights. But that red mouth, that generous smile, the curve of golden hair along one side of the smile, all that and the fact that she was taller than anyone in the room made his thoughts tangle to an abrupt halt, like an engine seizing up. He ended the call absently, forgetting Blaine. Beside him, Markham and Scott were absolutely still.

  “Guys?” She twiddled the pencil between her fingers against the order pad. “Drinks?”

  “You—” Jake breathed. “You.”

  “Oh, for—” She gazed at them with pity, one hand on her hip, and shook her head. “No. I am not the Port Dido mermaid come to life. What is it with everyone? I was the chainsaw sculptor’s model. That’s all.”

  “Lived here all my life,” Markham managed. “Never saw you before.”

  “I’ve never lived here before.” She raised the pencil. “Let’s try again. What can I get you?”

  She took their orders. They watched her return to the bar; then their heads swiveled slowly; their eyes met.

  “No,” Jake said flatly, to his own and everyone else’s unspoken suggestions.

  “But the timing—it’s got to be more than coincidence,” Markham said weakly.

  “So? What?” Scott demanded. “So she really was a wooden mermaid a couple of days ago and the fall into the water turned her human?” He batted the back of his brother’s head lightly. “Get real.”

  They were silent, watching her again. Markham mused, “She could come to the wedding anyway. Couldn’t she? Don’t suppose Haley would—”

  “No. I don’t suppose Haley would accept a human substitute dressed up as the Port Dido mermaid. Especially not one who looks like that.” Jake drew a sudden breath. “Did I really hang up on Blaine? I’d better call her back.”

  The mermaid returned with their drinks. Their expressions transformed her enchanting smile into a broad grin. “Don’t worry,” she said briskly. “You’ll get used to me.”

  On Sunday, the witch went to church.

  Our Lady of the Cormorants was a modest chapel framed by a stand of old fir trees, its altar windows overlooking the blue-green estuary. Though its bell tower, tall and rounded like a tree trunk, had been scorched by the lightning, the bell still called the congregation to gather with a sweet, mellow toll. The congregation, the witch who called herself Dido noted, seemed to be all women. In fact, they were all witches with some level of power, though not all of them knew it. They simply felt comfortable, the witch guessed, among the eccentrically skewed worshippers dedicated to the smiling statue generically clothed in a long white robe and a blue mantle, her open hands outstretched over the dark pair of wiry-necked, long-billed, waddle-footed birds gazing up at her.

  Seated on a pew smelling of cedar and candlewax, the witch napped through most of the service, waking only when the pastor, Reverend Becky, unsheathed an edge in her gentle, soothing voice.

  “It’s that time again, Ladies. Those of you with cormorant heritage will need to find and waken those powers to protect the nestlings from predators. Especially from Niall Parker at Davy Jones’ Liquor Locker, who harpoons nests at night when he’s drunk, and Markham Cowell, who gets paid to stuff freshly dead fish with hooks and run them fast underwater to attract the parent birds. Those who can will circle the nestling trees and grounds with your darkest powers so that humans can’t pass
among them. Those with other powers: get creative. Invent noises to scare the predators, swamp their boats if you catch them shooting the birds from the water, put whatever charms and distractions you dream up in places where they’ll do the most good. Keep eyes and ears open for trouble, and stop it if you can before it starts. We are the faithful of our Lady of the Cormorants. It is our belief that we are all—even idiots like Niall and Markham—part of Holy Mother Nature, that we all belong to this earth, that cormorants are of an ancient and wild power that should be protected, and that the sea will provide for us all, human and bird, if we take care of one another and the sea. Amen, Ladies.”

  “Amen.”

  “Please stand for the closing hymn.”

  The witch yawned a great yawn, sent her body sprawling along the suddenly empty pew and went back to sleep.

  She woke up in a tree.

  It was night. She was surrounded by dreams of a fishy, feathery, egg nesty kind, fraught with swift flights over water, sudden, deep dives, the struggles to stretch and shape a long throat and neck around the body struggling equally to wriggle out of them. She had to shield her human nose from the acrid smell of guano on the tree limbs, which seemed to cover them like perpetual moonlight. Parents, half-waking in their twiggy nests, made little blats and moans around her, disturbed without knowing why. The witch woke up a bit more, spread her rangy self more comfortably along the boughs, and got around finally to wondering why she was up a tree.

  She heard voices.

  The patch of forest, between the shops at one end of the street and the Institute at the other, overlooked the bay and a small beach over which the low tide gently sighed and slid, sounding like a contented dreamer. The only lights were distant: from the dorms, from vessels in the marina, from the occasional streetlamp. The half-dozen men gathering under the nesting tree had no reason to be quiet; the wakening parents above, some nervously croaking, weren’t going anywhere. The men, the witch observed dourly, weren’t much more articulate.