Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Whaugh, this place stinks. Who’s got the bottle?”

  “Here.”

  “That one there, Niall. That big nest, higher up. Harpoon that one and it’ll pull the others down along the way.”

  The witch heard a gulp, a spit, a sudden, sharp laugh. “Last time you’ll snarf our fish, you up there. Look at them. All they do is eat and breed, make more mouths to take the fish out of ours. Do it, Niall.”

  A light went on; it searched the tree, falling short of where the witch sat. She could see a reddened, raspy face or two, the hands of the harpooner adjusting his line, raising the long weapon with its sharp, glinting dart, taking aim.

  Get out, Portia’s voice in the witch’s brain said very clearly. Fast. Now.

  There was a grunt, a whip of line, and a strangely solid thud. The witch, balanced precariously on the very tip of the tree, once again invisible, heard branches cracking, something heavy careening through them, men shouting in warning, the bottle breaking.

  The thing finished its fall with a massive thud in the middle of the road.

  There was utter silence. The witch, all her senses galvanized, powers she had forgotten she possessed, crouched, alert, waiting to attack, finally heard a dry swallow below.

  “Damn, Niall. You harpooned the Port Dido mermaid.”

  Jake, driving back from his culinary classes at the end of the day, thinking of nothing more complex than a cold one at the brewpub, saw the mermaid at her post on the bridge giving him her familiar, welcoming smile. He was so used to seeing her, he barely noticed her, for as long as a couple of seconds. Then he swore, slammed on the brakes, and backed up without thinking once, let alone twice, and causing the car behind him to swerve onto the embankment.

  Jake ignored the furious horn while he stared. The mermaid seemed her usual cheerful self, except for the large, oddly metallic fish scale in her tail near where human knees might have been. Jake squinted. The oversized fish scale looked weirdly like the bottom of a beer can, sliced off and nailed or glued into place to hide some—what?

  Something fishy.

  A face loomed into his open window, grey-browed, time-furrowed, and as annoyed with him as she had been all during second grade.

  “Jake Harrow, you nearly ran me into the harbor!”

  “Sorry, Ms. Priestly.”

  “Well, are you planning to move anytime soon? People are piling up behind us.”

  “Yes, Ms. Priestly. Sorry.”

  Something else he realized as he parked at the Trickle Down: something else was wrong with the mermaid. But what? The short, slender, dark-haired waitress who greeted him as he joined the Cowell brothers looked absolutely nothing like the mermaid they had seen there before. That fact he thought about briefly, then decided never, ever, to think about it again.

  The expression on Markham’s face, usually stolid and already set in its ways until now, told Jake exactly what he wanted to know.

  “You put her back,” he breathed, after the waitress had delivered his beer.

  “We did. Late last night. I was with Niall and some of the fishers—they were nest-rustling—” He paused, drank, then stared, wide-eyed and stunned, into his glass. Jake wondered if he had forgotten how to blink.

  “Well, where did you find her?”

  Markham drank again. “Up a tree.” Jake stared at him, then at Scott, who shook his head slightly.

  “No, I wasn’t there to see it, but I wish I’d been.”

  “Me, too,’ Jake said fervently. “How’d she get up—”

  “Ask him how she got down,” Scott said, and answered for his brother. “Niall brought her down with a harpoon.”

  “He—what—what the hell, Markham?”

  “We didn’t know she was up there! Who would have guessed a mermaid up a tree? We were aiming for the cormorants’ nests. But down she came instead, nearly fell on our heads.” He paused to gulp beer. “But that’s not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing was that he shot up, she came down—all seven feet of her, and you know how heavy—but nothing else did. Not a bird, not an egg, not a feather, not a twig. Nothing. Birds all sat there and watched while Niall pulled out his harpoon, which should have just bounced off her—unless of course she’d been a real mermaid, and then—” He blinked finally, and shook his head, looking rattled. “And anyway, Adam Paring found some cutters in his tackle box and made a patch out of a beer can to hide the damage on her scales.”

  “But how did—who—? What, she climbed into the tree herself? A sneaker wave floated her up and left her there without drowning the nests?”

  “You know what I know, and that’s all I know,” Markham said heavily. “Except that I need another beer.”

  “Well, that explains the beer can in her tail.”

  “You noticed that?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s not exactly subtle. Other than that, though, she seems. . . .” His voice trailed. He examined his first glimpse of her, felt the lack again, nothing where there should be . . . what?

  “Her cormorant is gone,” Scott said, and Jake nodded, relieved.

  “Yes. That’s it. That’s what I was missing.”

  “Way things are happening, maybe it flew away when she slid into the water,” Markham said, and reached for Jake’s beer. “And maybe it picked her up later and dropped her in the tree. I don’t know. You can’t think about it too much. Things start happening in your head. Weird thing is—”

  “What’s weirder? What could be?”

  “You know how the cormorant stood in the curve of her tail? And now it’s gone. But there’s no sign it had ever been there. No paint missing where its big, flat feet should have been. No bare patches in the tail. Just blue scales. So.” He paused to drain Jake’s glass. “Maybe it really did fly away.” He looked around the pub. “And now we’ve got the mermaid back, but where’s the waitress we thought was her?”

  “I am so not thinking about that,” Jake groaned. “I’d better call Blaine—”

  “No,” the brothers said together.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere near that mermaid again. If the bride wants something blue and yellow and red I’ll dye my hair and paint myself.” He was silent then, musing over maybes, and what-ifs, and teasing the improbable out of the impossible. What did a lightning bolt, a church bell, a mermaid have in common? A cormorant, of course. A beer appeared in front of him like a lifeline, pulling him back out of his thoughts. “Promise me,” he pleaded.

  “What?” the brothers asked.

  “If you ever figure all this out, don’t tell me. I will never want to know.”

  “You might have warned me,” the witch said grumpily.

  “You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t want to wake you,” Portia said sweetly. They were back in her shop, inhaling tea and laying waste to a tray of sweet and savory tarts. The witch, who had forgotten what she looked like, even if she could remember where she had left her original self, had cobbled a body out of forgotten reflections she had coaxed from a mirror in a thrift shop.

  “That harpoon might have killed me.”

  “Nope. I was guiding it all the way up, and the mermaid all the way down. I had everything under control, even the birds; it helps to speak their language. Reverend Becky told us to be creative against the predators.” There was a look in her dark eyes, where antiquities lurked, that made the witch instantly suspicious.

  “Now what?”

  “Just a thought.” Portia straightened a nicely painted index finger, licked chocolate off of it.

  The witch felt a yawn ballooning in her, tried to hide it, then gave up and let it happen.

  She said, tiredly, “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Well, I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to. But it would be a place to sleep for as long as you want. After all, they’ve got that mermaid attached to an antique ship’s anchor now, and she’s not going anywhere. They can’t seem to find her missing cormorant.”

  “I suppose you haven’t a c
lue.”

  Portia gave her a smile, lovely, carefree, inviting, not unlike the mermaid’s. The witch stifled another yawn, felt herself drifting again on a slow ebb toward dreams.

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe. But promise me: no more surprises. I just want a long and very peaceful nap.”

  “You got it.”

  The wooden cormorant was back on its roost in the curve of the mermaid’s tail sometime before dawn, where it remained undisturbed for months until it finally woke again and flew away.

  The Gorgon in the Cupboard

  harry could not get the goat to stay still. His model, who was an aspiring actress, offered numerous impractical suggestions as she crouched beside the animal. In fact, she rarely stopped talking. Harry didn’t like the look in the goat’s eye. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed to him arrogant beyond its age, and contemplating mischief.

  “Give it something to eat,” Moira suggested. “Goats eat anything, don’t they? That old leather sack, there.”

  “That’s my lunch,” Harry said patiently. “And the less we put into the goat, the less will come out of it. If you get my meaning.”

  She giggled. She was quite charming, with her triangular elfin face, her large green eyes with lashes so long they seemed to catch air like butterfly wings as they rose and fell. She dealt handily with the goat, who was eyeing Harry’s lunch now. It strained against the rope around its neck, occasionally tightening it so that its yellow eyes verged on the protuberant. A bit like hers, Harry thought.

  “Try to remain serious,” he pleaded. “You’re a scapegoat; you’ve been falsely accused and spurned by the world. Your only friend in the world is that goat.”

  “I thought you said you were just sketching the outlines today. Putting us in our places. So why do I have to be serious?” The goat, in whose rope her wrists were supposedly entangled, gave an obstinate tug; she loosed one hand and smacked it. “You should have gotten a female. They’re sweet-natured. Not like this ruffian.” She wrinkled her nose. “Stinks, too, he does. Like—”

  “This one was all I could borrow. Please.”

  They were still for a miraculous moment, both gazing at him. He picked up charcoal, held his breath and drew a line of the goat’s flank onto the canvas, then continued the line with her flank and bent knee. She swatted at a fly; the goat bucked; they both seemed to baa at once. Harry sighed, wiped sweat out of his eyes. They had been there half the morning, and little enough to show for it. The sun was high and dagger-bright; the tavern yard where he had set his poignant scene was full of sniggering critics. Idlers, he reminded himself, resuming doggedly when the pair settled again. They wouldn’t know a brush from a broom straw. Still. He paused to study his efforts. He sighed again. There was something definitely wrong with her foot.

  “It’s hot,” she said plaintively, shaking her heavy hair away from her neck, disturbing the perfect, nunlike veil across her face.

  “Ah, don’t—”

  “And I’m starving. Why can’t you paint like Alex McAlister? He lets me sit inside; he dresses me in silks; he lets me talk as much as I want unless he’s doing my face. And I get hung every time, too, a good place on the wall where people can see me, not down in a corner where nobody looks.”

  The goat was hunkered on the ground now, trying to break its neck pulling at the rope peg. Harry glanced despairingly at the merciless source of light, looked again at his mutinous scapegoats, then flung his charcoal down.

  “All right. All right.”

  “You owe me for Thursday, too.”

  “All right.”

  “When do you want me to come again?”

  He closed his eyes briefly, then fished coins out of his pocket. “I’ll send word.”

  One of the critics leaning against the wall called, “Best pay the goat, too; it might not come back otherwise.”

  “I might have work,” Moira reminded him loftily. Mostly she worked early mornings selling bread in a bakery and took elocution lessons in afternoons when she wasn’t prowling the theaters or, Harry suspected, the streets for work.

  “That goat won’t get any younger neither,” another idler commented. Harry gritted his teeth, then snapped his fingers for the boy pitching a knife in a corner of the yard. The boy loosened the goat from the peg, got a good grip on its neck-loop to return it to its owner. He held out his other hand for pay.

  “Tomorrow then, sir?” he asked indifferently.

  “I’ll send word,” Harry repeated.

  “Don’t forget your dinner there, sir.”

  “You have it. I’m not hungry.”

  He dropped the charcoal into his pocket, tucked the canvas under one arm and the folded easel under the other, and walked home dejectedly, scarcely seeing the city around him. He was a fair-haired, sweet-faced young man, nicely built despite his awkward ways, with a habitually patient expression and a heart full of ravaging longings and ambitions. He was not talented enough for them, this morning’s work told him. He would never be good enough. The girl was right. His paintings, if chosen at all to be hung for important exhibits, always ended up too high, or too close to the floor, or in obscure, badly lit corners. He thought of McAlister’s magnificent Diana, with the dogs and the deer in it looking so well-behaved they might have been stuffed. And Haversham’s Watchful Shepherd: the sheep as fat as dandelions and as docile as—as, well, sheep. Why not scapesheep, he wondered despondently, rather than scapegoats? No goat would stand still long enough for mankind to heap their crimes on its head.

  Then he saw that which drove every other thought out of his head.

  Her.

  She was walking with her husband on the other side of the street. He was speaking fervidly, gesturing, as was his wont, probably about something that had seized his imagination. It might have been anything, Harry knew: a poem, the style of an arch, a pattern of embroidery on a woman’s sleeve. She listened, her quiet face angled slightly toward him, her eyes downturned, intent, it seemed, on the man’s brilliance. He swept fingers through his dark, shaggy hair, his thick mustaches dancing, spit flying now and then in his exuberance. Neither of them saw Harry, who had stopped midstream in the busy street, willing her to look, terrified that she might raise her dark, brooding eyes and see what was in his face. She only raised her long white fingers, gently clasped her husband’s flying arm, and tucked it down between them.

  Thus they passed, the great Alex McAlister and his wife, Aurora, oblivious to the man turned to stone by the sight of her.

  He moved at last, jostled by a pair of boys pursued through the crowd, and then by the irate man at their heels. Harry barely noticed them. Her face hung in his mind, gazing out of canvas at him: McAlister’s Diana, McAlister’s Cleopatra, McAlister’s Venus. That hair, rippling like black fire from skin as white as alabaster, those deep, heavy-lidded eyes that seemed to perceive invisible worlds. That strong, slender column of neck. Those long fingers, impossibly mobile and expressive. That mouth like a bite of sweet fruit. Those full, sultry lips. . . .

  I would give my soul to paint you, he told her silently. But even if in some marvelous synchronicity of events that were possible, it would still be impossible. With her gazing at him, he could not have painted a stroke. Again and again she turned him into stone.

  Not Aurora, he thought with hopeless longing, but Medusa.

  He had tried to speak to her any number of times when he had visited Alex’s studio or their enchanting cottage in the country. All he managed, under that still, inhuman gaze, were insipid commonplaces. The weather. The wildflowers blooming in the garden. The stunning success of McAlister’s latest painting. He coughed on crumbs, spilled tea on his cuff. Her voice was very low; he bent to hear it and stepped on her hem with his muddy boot sole, so that whatever she had begun to say was overwhelmed by his apologies. Invariably, routed by his own gracelessness, he would turn abruptly away to study a vase that McAlister had glazed himself, or a frame he was making. McAlister never seemed to notice his hopeless passion
, the longing of the most insignificant moth for fire. He would clap Harry’s shoulder vigorously, spilling his tea again, and then fix him in an enthusiastic torrent of words, trying to elicit Harry’s opinion of some project or profundity, while the only thought in Harry’s head was of the woman sitting so silently beyond them she might have been in another world entirely.

  He walked down a quiet side street shaded by stately elms and opened the gate in front of the comfortable house he had inherited from his parents. Looking despondently upon his nicely blooming hollyhocks, he wondered what to do next.

  If only I could create a masterwork, he thought. An idea no one has thought of yet, that would attract the attention of the city, bring me acclaim. Make me one of the circle of the great. . . . Now I’m only a novice, a squire, something more than apprentice yet less than master. Harry Waterman, dabbler at the mystery of art. If only I could pass through the closed doors to the inner sanctum. Surely She would notice me then. . . .

  He went across the garden, up the steps to his door, and stopped again, hand on the latch, as he mused over an appropriate subject for a masterpiece. The goat, while original and artistically challenging, held no dignity; it would not rivet crowds with its power and mystery. At most, viewers might pity it and its ambiguous female counterpart, and then pass on. More likely they would pity the artist, who had stood in a sweltering tavern yard painting a goat.

  Aurora’s face passed again through his thoughts; his hand opened and closed convulsively on the door latch. Something worthy of those eyes he must paint. Something that would bring expression into them: wonder, admiration, curiosity. . . .

  What?

  Whatever it was, he would dedicate his masterpiece to Her.