Winter's Mermaid (Mermaid Series Book 1)

by Dan Glover

  "This kind of reckless action will be the demise of humanity."

  Lady Lauren spoke as if to no one while they gathered the remains in black plastic bags to take back to the castle where they would be interred. Each person in the group was charged with picking up one whole skeleton. He went to Lucy's remains to begin the grim work. While carrying the sack of bones back to Orchardton Hall the rattling disconcerted Nate's senses, as if they were speaking to him, as if he could hear Lucy's last words ringing out like tiny bells.

  "Maybe I'll kiss you, Nate."

  He remembered the last time he talked with the girl and how they argued. She seemed so sure of the new life she was setting out to build. He suspected Drummond led Lucy away not on account of being in love with her but to torture Nate, the same way he had always done.

  He should have killed Drummond when he had the opportunity. No one would have cared, least of all Lucy. He missed her... the way she had of being her own person even if it meant defying the Ladies.

  Being with Lucy down in the catacombs soothed his anxieties. Her skull was better formed than the others, her teeth brighter, and her eye sockets more perfectly symmetrical. As for the skull of Drummond, Nate brought a hammer to break it to pieces before scattering the dust onto the dirt upon which he walked. He imagined what it might have been like to cave in Drummond's head while he yet lived, when he had the chance and yet didn’t follow through. Perhaps he might have enticed Lucy to stay in that way. Still, it was comforting to have her in his hands now.

  The nature of death intrigued him. He understood he might one day die too yet he also knew there was a possibility he might never pass into that great unknown. Often times he discovered himself in dire straights, perhaps falling from a high place with the ground rapidly approaching, or an unknown assailant attacking him with a weapon he couldn't parry.

  Just before the end he would blink himself awake. He figured death might well be much like those dreams only when a person attempted to wake up, they couldn't. Being in the depths below the castle among the bones of those who once walked the earth lent Nate a sense of togetherness with the dead that he couldn't always find among the living.

  "Please tell me about my father, Lady Lily."

  It was a question he asked of his mother and of Lady Lily too. He believed Lady Lily was about to answer him but then he saw her eyes cloud with concern that she might be sharing news Nate's mother would rather she did not.

  "He was a man, my sweet Nate... neither good nor bad."

  He felt a longing for Lady Lily that he hesitated to share with her though he also sensed she had the same desires for him. This want arising for her was different than the longing he felt for Lucy. The girl was more like a plaything to be used and discarded after he had his way with her. What he felt for Lady Lily was much deeper.

  When he thought of Lily the portent of death no longer troubled him. It was as if she held the key to not only immortality but to everlasting love too. Though he didn’t voice it, he was in love with Lily. He was certain of it.

  Since Lily was the oldest one at Orchardton Hall, he considered her to be the wisest as well. Some questions couldn't be answered, however.

  "What happens when someone dies, Lady Lily?"

  They were sitting in the garden with azaleas and rhododendrons in bloom, forsythia bushes blushing red and orange, the anemone tangling with the pussy willows in the shade, and dogwood trees whispering their surreptitious longings to the magnolias as Lily looked deep into Nate's eyes as if studying them for their secrets.

  "I think it depends on what they wish to happen, lovely Nate."

  "But if they're dead, how can someone wish anything?"

  "Sometimes I think dreams are like death. We go places and we see things that seem exceedingly real at the time. Perhaps death is like that too. Whatever we decide will happen, happens."

  "Will we ever die, Lady Lily?"

  "Everything born dies, darling Nate. Some things last much longer than others, however. One day when the earth is a cold dead husk tumbling through the darkness of heaven we may perish along with it."

  "Maybe by then I will build a spaceship and fly to another world."

  "Ah... you are a dreamer, sweet Nate. Will you take your Ladies along for the ride?"

  "Do you really have to ask, Lady Lily? How can I live without my Ladies?"

  "Perhaps that is our destiny, my precious Nate... to wander from star to star filling the universe with our beauty and our laughter. If death is but a dream then I think it is the dream I will follow."

  Chapter 23—Consequences

  "I thought she killed me, Karen."

  Karen awoke in the hospital. Her mid-section was tightly wrapped. The attending physician explained in Russian that two of her ribs were broken and two others cracked while Hector looked on wearing thick coke-bottle style eye glasses set in heavy black frames.

  "They're to help with my double vision."

  He spoke only after the doctor left the room.

  "Someone sucker punched me from behind. Whoever it was must be traveling with our creature. I can't think straight. They say I have a serious concussion. The symptoms should pass in a week or two, however."

  "I never thought Lily was capable of violence."

  "Oh for Christ's sake, Karen, it is nothing more than a wild animal. I've been telling you that for years. You're damned lucky to be alive too."

  "Maybe it's time to call for help, Hector."

  "If we involve the police they're liable to ask questions we do not want to answer, Karen."

  "What about our people?"

  "Who can we trust?"

  "Yeah, I suppose there is that."

  "Look... we'll rest up a few days until we're both fit to travel. We'll keep on with our original plan. Nothing has changed. This is just a small setback. When we meet up with it again, we'll take the proper precautions we should have taken this time."

  "I need to get some rest, Hector."

  "I'll go then... but first I thought you might like to know that another case of Lake Baikal disease showed up right here in Moscow. Your little friend must have been having quite a time before we arrived."

  "Tell me about this new case, Hector."

  "The man has all the classic symptoms... he is a male around twenty five years old found comatose in an office cubicle dying of a rampant infection, parasitically based from what I can find out. A friend of his says they were in a discothèque the night before. He saw his buddy kissing a tall attractive woman that fits our creature's description.

  "When he came into work the next day he complained of feeling ill. By noon no one had seen him. When they investigated they found him collapsed in a chair in a cubicle no one uses. I've suggested the medical examiner here order the whole office building quarantined but the nitwit will not listen. They have the patient in the general hospital population, for Christ's sake. Morons. He's still alive but unconscious, at least that's the last word I got. He could well be infectious."

  "Which hospital is he in?"

  "Why, this one."

  "Get me a wheelchair, Hector. We have to see him immediately."

  "I told you he's comatose. We can't speak to him. What's the sense of seeing him?"

  "We have an opportunity here to learn more about this infection. We've never had a patient who lived. Get me a wheelchair, Hector, or I'll walk to the idiot's room. Goddamn it, that bitch did a number on my ribs."

  "Don't get your panties in a wad, Karen. Hold on. I'll get your wheelchair. These glasses make it seem as if I'm walking under water."

  The security guard sitting outside the man's room was easily enough bribed with a couple hundred rubles into leaving his post unattended. Karen rose from her wheelchair with a grunt tottering to the chart hanging from the end of the bed.

  "Karl Simkovich, twenty four years old, lives in Moscow."

  She read aloud knowing Hector's vision was giving him problems, that and he couldn’t read Russian.

 
"His blood pressure is way low. They are giving him saline. What the hell... is this the dark ages? Get me a syringe, Hector, and some gloves."

  He opened one cabinet and then another, finally locating a syringe in plastic wrap and handing it to his assistant. She pulled on her gloves, ripped open the plastic with her teeth, took an alcohol swap from a tray next to Karl, and prepared to draw blood from a vein in the patient's exposed wrist.

  "You really shouldn’t be doing that, Karen."

  "Shut up Hector. If you don’t like it, get out of here."

  "Hey, girlie, I'm the boss here."

  "Guess what, Hector. We're not in Kansas anymore. Come on. We need to find a microscope."

  Karen staggered back to her wheelchair pointing to the door.

  "Let's get out of here before anyone finds us. I think I noticed a laboratory down the hall. Push me, Hector. I can't do it. My ribs ache too badly."

  Hector wheeled Karen down the hallway to a room with the word лаборатория emblazoned up it.

  "This is it, Hector."

  "How do you know? It's in Russian."

  "I spent my senior year in high school as an exchange student in Russia. I can still read the language."

  The door was locked. Looking down the hallway, Karen spotted a janitor's cart outside a room. On the side of the cart dangled a set of keys.

  "Go down there and steal those keys, Hector."

  Karen sensed that their roles had reversed. Now that his assistant had become his boss he did as he was told. A few seconds later they were inside the lab.

  "What are we looking for?"

  Hector sounded like a child who had been scolded and now was being compliant with his mother. He sidled up close to Karen but didn’t attempt to push her aside like he would have a day ago.

  "I'm not sure. Hand me one of those clean slides."

  Karen squeezed a miniscule droplet of blood from the syringe onto the slide, covered it, and inserted it under the microscope. She put her eyes to the lenses and gasped.

  "What do you see?"

  "Nothing, I see absolutely nothing."

  "Let me look."

  Hector moved in when Karen stepped aside, took off his glasses, and looked through the microscope himself."

  "I can't see a thing. My eyes are too blurry."

  "There's nothing to see, Hector. I told you that. Take me back to my room."

  Later that night after Hector had gone to his own room Karen pulled out her laptop. Luckily the hospital had WiFi. Logging on she ran a search for crystallized structures within the bloodstream. A number of tropical diseases caused by Trypanosomatids were the closest relative of what she was searching for.

  She was particularly intrigued by references to extensive post-transcriptional mitochondrial RNA editing. She wondered what the agent behind the structures was attempting to rewrite in Karl's pre-mature mRNA. Although the article cited octahedrally complex structures in the protozoan-class diseases, Karen was sure she witnessed dodecahedronally shaped crystals swimming in Karl's blood sample.

  Having been a party seven years ago to the autopsies performed on the deceased in Lake Baikal, Karen realized the patient here was dying. More than likely he would be dead by morning. There was no cure. Yet at the same time he seemed to be lingering a good while longer than those poor unfortunates who died so quickly of the same infection. According to the chart the man was admitted two days ago. He should be dead by now.

  The saline solution... it must be inhibiting the growth of the crystalline entities within the bloodstream.

  "Lily comes from a fresh water lake."

  Karen often talked to herself not only while she was alone but while working out difficult medical issues and though she knew it was a sign of a deeply seated psychosis she also realized she exhibited all the classic characteristics of a sociopath. She didn’t care. She learned long ago that the world was made of men taking advantage of women. She grew up watching her mother being dominated by her father. She hated having to spread her legs for Hector and yet she understood how things worked.

  This was her chance to make a mark on the world. Such epic discoveries only come around once every few hundred years and they were always made by men. This time it might be different, but only if she played her cards right.

  She wondered if Hector might in fact have been hurt much worse than the examining physician suspected. She knew subdural hematomas were often misdiagnosed. She also realized that in Russia the health care industry was still mired in the Middle Ages.

  Karen remembered reading an article on how an overdose of certain antihypertensive medications could mimic the symptoms of a subdural hematoma. She made a mental note to look into acquiring the needed drug at one of the black market pharmacies that proliferated in the back streets of Moscow.

  Karen couldn’t seem to get Lily's voice out of her head, the one asking her to set her free, to come away with her, and to live with her forever. She whispered to the night.

  "I should have taken you up on your offer, Lily. Maybe it is not too late."

  Chapter 24—Safe Harbors

  True to her word Lily accompanied Nate to the harbor in Aberdeen.

  They rode in an old red Volvo station wagon that Nate restored to mint condition, modifying the front seats to allow more leg room. He drove, taking a winding circuitous route through a dozen villages and towns. Lily understood that Nate was surreptitiously searching for survivors but she said nothing as she enjoyed the ride.

  "We'll be leaving for the Lake soon, Lady Lily. Are you excited?"

  "I am looking forward to seeing my home again, yes. The need to submerse myself into the waters is growing with each day. Do you feel it too?"

  "I feel something. Lately I've been having these vivid dreams where I dive deep under the waters like you and Lady Lauren do and I dance along with you, only with you, Lady Lily. Is that a foolish dream?"

  "You are beginning to feel the pull of the Lake, my darling Nate. Those dreams are not foolish. They portend great happenings in your life. The Renewal is a special time among our kind. These things that are happening to you will lead you to your rightful place among the races."

  "Mother Natalia tells me that my father is dead. Did you know that, Lady Lily?"

  "Yes, my love... I knew that. What else have you heard about your birth?"

  "Mother Lauren told me many strange things. She said I have three parents. I am a child of a man named Lance Adams. His body was frozen long ago. Doctor Karen retrieved what was needed to fertilize an egg from my mother, Natalia. Lady Lauren says she is my mother too. I wonder how this can be."

  "That you must talk to the doctors about for I do not understand the process they used. I only know that one day I had a dream. I saw a man who was a mixture of the races, human beings and my kind. He was a good and loving man who reinvigorated both species which were on the brink of extinction.

  "When I woke I went to your mother. I told her what we must do. She agreed to carry the child that the two doctors would attempt to produce with equipment in their laboratory. You are that child, my darling Nate. These dreams you have of dancing beneath the waters with me will come true very soon."

  "Some of the other children call me a monster, Lady Lily."

  "I have learned that children are sometimes cruel, my love. Do not pay them any attention."

  "Drummond tried to drown me on my first trip to the Lake."

  "I dislike death yet I find I am not unhappy that man is gone. And what did you discover, my darling Nate?"

  "I can breathe under water. I already knew that before Drummond held me under the Lake... he would have killed me otherwise."

  "Of course you can breathe under water, sweetest Nate. All creatures with gills can do so."

  "So Drummond was right... I am not a human being."

  "Does this disappoint you?"

  "No, Lady Lily, it only confirms what I already knew."

  "That brings me much joy, lovely Nate. We are destined t
o become lovers, you and I. Does this appeal to you?"

  "It is all I dream of, my Lady."

  "I have a secret. It appeals to me as well."

  "Will we have children together, Lady Lily?"

  "We will have a child together, my love, for I am only able to bear a single baby."

  She did not like lying to him yet at the same time the music dictated they have but one baby.

  "Will it be a boy baby?"

  "This is yet to be seen, but yes, I suspect he will be a boy."

  "Will we be a family, Lady Lily?"

  "Will you have me for your wife, my love?"

  "Yes, I have dreamed about it. Will you have me as your husband, Lady Lily?"

  "I can think of no other."

  "What will become of Lady Lauren and mother Natalia?"

  "We will be together for all time, darling Nate. We will have plenty of opportunities to enjoy all the loves in our lives."

  Lily was so distracted with their conversation she didn’t realize they'd reached Aberdeen. Nate pulled up by the ruins of the harbor. Moldering ships still moored to their rotten tethers were half-sunken in the muck of the low tide of early afternoon. Getting out of the car they walked down to the shoreline.

  "I hoped for better, Lady Lily."

  "I have heard that boat builders would often put their skills to use inside of large buildings. Perhaps we should explore a bit more before giving up, lovely Nate. We might yet find a sea-going vessel."

  "My mind is on other things, Lady Lily."

  "Teach me of those things."

  "We have a blanket in the back seat. Perhaps we might lay it out on the soft sand."

  "Your wish is my command, lovely Nate."

  She was atremble with desire as they walked back to the car to retrieve the blanket and pillows they brought along in case they might have to spend the night. She told herself she should stop this thing now... it was too soon.