Waking Storms

by Sarah Porter

  “Here you go. Wait. Want a few more?” The larvae crooned wordlessly, snuffling at her and gobbling up the shellfish. One of them was pale, but the other was probably Inuit, and gazed at Luce with eyes like black pools. Sometimes Luce thought of giving them names but then thought better of it. That would only make her feel worse when they died.

  Late twilight brushed the cresting waves with strokes of indigo, moody purple, slate gray. A few scattered islands cut black patches from the blue-glowing distance. The spruce-fringed slopes of the coast began to call to Luce, and she felt the tidal pull of desire to give herself to the sea. To spiral out through the night blue water, caress each wave with soft curls of her own song, and then maybe—just for a little while—float farther north, out past the fishing village where she'd thrown the bronzehaired boy onto a pebble beach. Not that she expected anything to come of this expedition besides some painful memories...

  She was careful to keep her singing quiet as she swam out, even though hardly any boats seemed to come through this way anymore. Probably the crews had finally gotten spooked by all the shipwrecks and decided that this part of the coast was simply unlucky. Every time Luce noticed a big commercial fishing boat or a cruise ship, it would be swinging out toward the horizon as if it wanted to avoid the area on purpose. That was fine with her. She knew, though, that Anais and the others had to be seething with frustration, watching their prey repeatedly glide out of range. Still, there was the occasional small fishing boat or kayaker, and Luce couldn't take the risk of anyone hearing her sing. She played with the water as she swam, sculpting it with rivulets of music. Several months before, she'd discovered the secret of controlling the waves with her voice, and she'd been practicing obsessively ever since Catarina had left. Now as she skimmed along the surface she let out a series of high, bright, concentrated notes, calling up a row of perfect jets of water that splashed down again as she swirled away. Then she dipped below, still singing, opening ribbons of air inside the sea.

  She could even make small blobs of water levitate now. She'd been working on sculpting water in midair with tiny variations in her song, shaping transparent fish and seabirds, stars with dangling tentacles, human faces...

  A spangle of shining windows to her right marked the fishing village set back in its small crook of harbor. Luce reflexively edged a bit farther out to sea. Even if no one saw her, human settlements always had an air of discomfort around them, a subdued menace. Farther on was the beach where she'd left the boy, followed by a wall of low, uneven cliffs thick with half-dead spruce. Luce swam in closer again, gazing up. Trees stripped naked on the windward side tilted forlornly out of jags in the rust-colored rock, their bare tan branches like decaying lace. She caught the flash of something white and plummeting, probably a hunting owl, and heard an animal's cry from the edge of the woods. It was loud and determined, and Luce stopped singing to hear it better. Maybe a rabbit was screaming as the owl carried it gripped in piercing talons.

  No. The cry went on too long for that and, it occurred to Luce, it was oddly musical, though to a mermaid's ears it was much too coarse and graceless to count as actual music. Not really like an animal's voice at all. Almost human, in fact, and now that she thought about it there seemed to be something peculiar about the sequence of notes. There was one note that soared up, high and feverish, followed by a tumbling fall...

  Luce heard her own small cry of astonishment. She stopped where she was, her tail flopping straight down in the water. She wanted to clutch at something, but there was nothing to hold on to, only the lift and fall of waves.

  It couldn’t be, Luce thought. It just couldn't! The voice from the cliffs faded away, leaving only the sigh of wind behind. Maybe it had been her imagination after all. Much as Luce had wanted something like this to happen, she found her heart pounding with relief at the rushing silence. She waited another minute for the voice to come back—the voice that had seemed, for a moment, to be singing Luce's own very distinctive song of enchantment—and the cold wind throbbed alone in her ears. It must have been an animal; didn't certain animals sound almost human sometimes? It was better this way, Luce told herself. She circled away, ready to head back to her cave.

  In the evening dimness at her back a single high note emerged. It hovered over the sea. Then the voice released it, letting it roll through descending tones then drift and spread. The melody wasn't made to be carried by a human voice, but even denuded of all magic, its notes knocked askew, its velvety harmonics missing, it was unmistakably Luce's own song.

  Her fellow mermaids knew Luce's song, of course, but there was only one human who had ever heard it and survived. She'd heard the exact same voice singing once before, in fact, as she'd watched the boy lean against a white railing, ignoring the flailing shapes of the people who hurled themselves overboard right beside him. Luce swirled in confusion. The boy with tousled bronze hair must be standing between the trunks of dying trees, dusk light reflecting in his wide-set golden eyes. There was no other explanation for what she was hearing. He'd gone to a lonely spot on the cliffs to pour out this song, gone to the kind of place that humans generally preferred to stay away from, especially after dark. He'd deliberately sought out a refuge where no one would hear him.

  No one, that is, unless someone just happened to be drifting along the sea swells nearby. Was he actually calling to her?

  Luce slipped cautiously nearer to the shore, until she was just below the spot where she heard the voice. It seemed to echo out from the top of a sloping cliff where the rock cracked in a pattern of elongated diamonds. He was only twenty-five feet above her now, maybe less; Luce could just make out a hint of something golden shifting between the trees, a pale hand holding a dead trunk. She kept her body straight down in the water so that the shimmer of her tail wouldn't give her away. Even if he looked right at her, her dark hair would blend into the dimness of the night-streaked waves, and the subtle glow of her skin was no brighter than the natural phosphorescence of the water here. The song lapsed into quiet, but Luce was so close now that she thought she could hear his breathing mingling with the steady whirr of the wind.

  Now that she was so close, Luce realized the impossibility, even the horror, of trying to speak to him. She'd helped kill his family. Anything she could say would be outrageously cruel. It would even be wrong to ask for his forgiveness. She had no right.

  “Fuck,” the boy said. His voice was weary but distinct, and he pulled his hand back and slapped the bare trunk, hard. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He grabbed the trunk and shook it till it creaked. It sounded like he might be crying.

  Luce's body lifted and fell, tugged toward the rocks and then shoved back again. The waves shattered on the cliffs, flinging blots of foam against her face.

  “I'm sorry,” Luce whispered. She knew that the moan of the sea would drown out her voice; she'd probably have to shout to make herself heard. “I'm sorry. I do understand how much I hurt you. I do. I'm an orphan, too.”

  “You monster.” His voice was louder now. A long rasp of pain. He couldn't know she was there, could he? She couldn't see his face, only his forearm and hand emerging from the trees. “Why didn't you just kill me, too? You sick, evil, inhuman thing. You know my little sister was only six years old? And you just go and wipe her out like she was nothing...”

  Luce bit her lower lip, hard, to stifle the shriek that nearly tore from her. The words raked through her chest; she felt as if the boy had reached inside her, jerking the halves of her rib cage apart.

  “You know they made us read a poem in class today?” The question was oddly bland, everyday-ish, but that only made the poisonous grief in his voice seem worse. Did he really not know that she was just below, listening to him with a sharp ache tearing through her heart? “It was a poem about you, or anyway about mermaids, and I completely lost it. They make it sound like hearing the mermaids sing is this beautiful, incredible experience, when really, even if you live ... You know your song is stuck in me? I'd be better off dead
than hearing something like that all the time, and there is nothing that will ever make it go away. And your face ... Maybe the most evil thing about you isn't even that you kill people. It's what you do to the ones who survive.”

  But it’s the same for me! Luce wanted to tell him. You’re stuck in me, too, and you’re not even magic. You’re just totally, boringly human. And wasn't that even worse, in a way?

  Luce really understood, for the first time, why the timahk had that rule, that insistence that no human who heard the mermaids sing could ever be allowed to live.

  It was so much easier to forget them if they died.

  The moon floated up over the horizon. It hung just above a distant island, immense and sullenly, gloriously golden. Its light reflected off the water so brilliantly that Luce seemed to be surrounded by an armada of burning paper boats.

  She leaned away from the rocks, pushing back with slow swirls of her tail. She didn't know when she'd started crying. She closed her eyes and slid up the curl of a wave on her back. Darkness swayed in her head, and everything was cold apart from the hot stripes of her tears.

  “Oh my God! Wait!” It was the bronze-haired boy yelling down at her. He was leaning recklessly far out now, his slim body curved like the sail of a ship. Only the hand still clutching the spruce trunk kept him from tumbling down the slanted cliff. Luce gazed straight up at him in shock, wanting to scream at him to be more careful, but her voice knotted in her throat. How could she say anything to someone who felt such perfect loathing for her?

  It had been so thoughtless of her to show herself, stretching out on the water like that. She should dive deep under the waves, vanish and never come back. But his eyes fixed on hers pinned her where she was. She hadn't really expected she'd ever see that face again, those ochre-gold eyes set far apart, that bronze hair, longer than it was last time, flicking wildly in the wind.

  “Look. I need to talk to you, okay? You owe me!”

  I’ve already heard what you have to say to me, Luce thought. Evil, sick, inhuman ...She felt a sarcastic impulse to point out to him that in some circles “inhuman” would be considered a compliment. Now he was peering over the edge as if he was evaluating his chances of making it down that precipitous slope of loose, blade-sharp scree without breaking his neck.

  His chances weren't good. But what if he tried it anyway?

  He turned his gaze back on her, hard and taunting. Luce was reminded of the way he'd looked at her right before he'd dived off the rail of the buckling cruise ship. She had to vanish. Get away from this place, before the sight of her goaded him to do something idiotic.

  “If you don't get over here and talk to me,” he announced harshly, “then I'm coming after you!”

  Luce dove. It had to be an empty threat, she told herself. It had to be. He'd seen at first hand how incredibly fast she could swim, after all. No matter what he said, he'd have to realize the absurdity of trying to catch her in the water. She swooped down through dim regions at the base of the cliff, weaving among loose boulders palely crusted in barnacles. She wasn't about to go far, though. She had to find a spot where she could slip up and watch him unseen, just in case...

  Just in case he needed her help. But she shouldn't even want to help him, Luce told herself. Why should she feel that saving him once bound her to him, obligated her to rescue him again even if he did something that was purely self-destructive? He'd said himself that he'd prefer to be dead.

  A square of pitching moonlight above showed the way to a narrow opening between two straight planes of stone. Luce skimmed her way into it, the rocks pressing in on her shoulders, and slipped her face halfway into the air so that the water still played around her mouth. She looked carefully up and saw him from behind now. He was still leaning out but not quite as far. His head was pivoting back and forth as he scanned the waves, searching for her. But she'd been right. He hadn't tried to make it down to the water. Luce strained to repress a gasp of relief.

  “Fine. You're still hanging around listening, aren't you?” Luce was irritated with him for guessing right and also with herself for being so predictable. “I'll be back. Same time tomorrow. You wouldn't have come this close if you weren't at least curious about me.” He kicked at the cliff's rim, sending a small avalanche clattering down into the water. Dark rocks split the golden film of moonlight. “Or did you just want to make sure I'm still suffering?”

  Luce almost felt provoked enough to say something, but before she could figure out the right retort he'd gone, scuffing off down the path where the trees blocked him from view. After a moment's fury she was glad. Answering him would have been momentarily gratifying, but it would have also been a huge mistake.

  Almost as big a mistake, she thought, as saving him in the first place.

  3. The Paper Boat

  He'd gone to the cliffs four nights in a row now, crying out his best imitation of that monstrously beautiful song. But the darkhaired mermaid hadn't come back, or at least she'd been careful not to let him see her. For all he knew she might be somewhere out there every night, hidden behind rocks or sliding along below the water's surface. Either way, she was still stubbornly refusing to let him confront her. Let her be like that, then. He'd find another way to make her deal with him.

  He kept thinking back to the morning of the shipwreck. He'd been so consumed by remembering her song, he realized, by remembering the overwhelming presence of death, that he hadn't paid enough attention to certain details. After the crash he'd pulled himself up onto the ship's railing and dived overboard with the hazy determination of swimming for the rocks nearby. She'd caught him around his rib cage, pulling him away from the wreck, and surfaced with him maybe a hundred yards away. He'd replayed all that in his head at least a thousand times.

  What he hadn't given much thought to was the way she'd acted when they emerged into the air. She'd looked around nervously, staring toward the fractured ship, then toward the water where mermaids trilled in unearthly voices to the drowning crowds. Now that he was bothering to focus on that particular moment, he realized the way she'd glanced back was furtive, embarrassed. It was exactly the way a girl in high school would act if she was talking to someone seriously unpopular, worried that another girl in her clique might catch her at it.

  And a second after that she'd told him that they had to dive. She'd wanted to get out of sight. It all made sense now. She didn't want any of the other mermaids to know what she'd done. She was afraid of getting in trouble with them. Dorian couldn't help laughing nastily when he realized it. He had something on her. He could use it. Now that the plan was forming in his mind, he couldn't sit still. His eyes roamed around the bedroom they'd given him, one wall completely covered in an incongruous photographic mural of koalas and bamboo. Everything else in the room was lacy or floral; his few scattered belongings were clearly intrusive, disturbers of the peace. Lindy's sewing machine and knitting supplies took up a large corner. Dorian kept jumping off the bed, pacing twitchily back and forth, even though it was after two in the morning and he definitely didn't want Lindy waking up.

  He was going to blackmail a mermaid. Excitement jumped in his muscles at the prospect, speeded his breath. He wrenched open the bottom drawer of the hideously ornate, baby blue dresser with its painted wreaths of bloated purple roses. He'd finished well over a hundred drawings in the months since he'd first seen her, and now he pulled thick messy stacks of them out from under the tangle of jeans and hoodies. Not all of them would work—there were dozens that showed cresting waves crowded with staring eyes, or sometimes with one huge eye all alone. Cyclops waves. But there were others where he'd made a painstaking effort to capture her face, drawn her framed in peaked slopes of water. A number of those portraits showed a decent likeness, though somehow getting her features right didn't begin to convey how phenomenally beautiful she was. "When Dorian drew her, she was never more than very pretty. But one thing was obvious about her: she didn't look anything like mermaids were supposed to, with her short, spiky,
almost punk, dark hair and long, shadowy eyes. He felt confident that if any other mermaid found one of the drawings, they'd recognize that face right away.

  They'd realize the truth, too. Probably she wasn't supposed to let anybody see her. If the mermaids weren't all seriously careful to keep out of sight, he wouldn't be the only person in the world who knew they were more than an old myth.

  It was lucky that he'd used black permanent marker on glossy paper. The images wouldn't bleed in the sea. Dorian began sorting through the stack with his hands trembling, pulling out the best ones and setting them to the side on the matted carpet. He'd just do one or two to start with. If she still wouldn't cooperate, well, he could draw as many more as he needed.

  He took out his pen, thinking of a message. It seemed bizarre to imagine that she could read, but then it was also inexplicable that she'd known English. In a movie she would have learned by secretly watching TV somehow, but Dorian knew that wasn't it. Say she could read, then, freakish as that sounded. It wasn't any more freakish than the fact that she existed. He thought for a minute before writing in clear block letters in the empty space above her head: If I keep putting these drawings in the water, your friends will find out what you did. So you’d better come talk to me. I’m not playing. He hesitated briefly and then decided not to sign his name. There was the risk his message would be discovered by a person instead of a mermaid. Dorian took the inscribed drawing and folded it into a crude boat. He stuffed it in his pocket and clambered out his ground floor window, dropping into a narrow channel of bracken that ran between the houses.