by Sarah Porter
“That bastard!” It came out in a shriek; even Ellison's composure seemed shaken.
“Dorian, what—”
“That bastard Smitt! He did that! He—It was salt water ... just to mess me up.” Even as Dorian yelled, he realized how strange it was: the night before, when Luce was actually trying to drown him, when the Bering Sea had licked between his lips, he hadn't really been afraid at all. Just cold, and angry, and brilliantly excited.
Apparently he was only afraid of drowning on dry land, in classrooms or office buildings. He almost started laughing from the irony of it all. But hadn't he heard somewhere that sailors got seasick when they left their ships and tried to walk instead through calm, leafy streets?
Ben Ellison, meanwhile, had gotten up and gone to the door. Of course Smitt was standing right there, Dorian thought; he'd probably been listening.
“Hello, Agent Smitt. Would you mind telling me where you got the water you gave Dorian just now?”
Smitt's stare looked impudent. “The drinking fountain down the hall, there.”
“And did you add anything to the water?”
“Of course I didn't.” The voice oozed contempt.
“I see.” Ellison picked up the glass and shook one of the lingering drops out onto his finger, then put it in his mouth. “It tastes fine to me, Dorian.”
Dorian gaped in total disbelief. Salt still hung heavy in his throat. Were they lying, or was he actually losing his mind?
Ellison was nodding again. “Maybe this is another of your symptoms. If anything it just confirms what I already thought.” He sat back down, setting the glass on the wood-grained plastic of the table. “Anyway, Dorian, you were saying?”
“I don't remember.” The familiar words came back, steady as a rolling wheel.
“You were saying someone saved you after the Dear Melissa crashed.”
“I said someone might have saved me.”
They stared at each other, neither of them breaking, until Ellison grimaced and glanced up irritably at Smitt. “Would you mind not hanging around like that?” Smitt and his bland blue eyes left the room, and Ellison sighed. “Are we really back to this, Dorian?” He sounded genuinely sorrowful.
Maybe Luce had put some kind of spell on him, Dorian thought. But maybe she hadn't. It was only fair to give her a chance to explain, wasn't it? “Back to what?”
“I believe a psychologist might describe what you're suffering from as Stockholm syndrome. A disorder in which the victim becomes emotionally attached to his torturer. But in your case it's probably even more complex than that.”
“You think I'm getting attached to you?”
Ellison flashed him a hard look but didn't take the bait. “You have heard the mermaids singing, Dorian Hurst. Each to each. Maybe they even sang to you. And it severely damaged your mind.”
***
Dorian went completely silent after that. Dead still and dead faced, waiting for it all to be over.
Once he'd recovered from the initial horror of Ellison's words, Dorian began putting things together. Obviously they'd talked to Mrs. Muggeridge, and she'd told them how he'd flipped out when he read those lines in class. Ellison didn't mean what he'd said literally, obviously. He couldn't. Instead he'd just decided to use that poem as a weapon, because he knew Dorian would find it upsetting. It was another trick, like the salt water.
After a while they gave up. A new agent, a woman this time, came and drove Dorian to a hotel and left him in a drab room with a takeout cheeseburger and a milk shake. Those things didn't taste horribly salty. Clearly, then, he hadn't hallucinated that awful taste in the water. After he ate he flicked on the TV and took out his sketchpad. All he wanted was to draw a new portrait of Luce. He had the feeling he'd been drawing her wrong all this time, but now that he'd seen her up close again maybe he'd finally be able to capture that weird, dark brilliance of hers.
They might take his bag, of course. Look through it. After thinking for a minute, Dorian decided it was safer to draw Luce as a human being, sitting on the beach and just looking at the sea. Nothing could be less suspicious, could it, than a teenage boy drawing pictures of a hot girl? He drew her wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt—the clothes looked really out of place, but he couldn't help that—with a book on her knees. She seemed like, if she were human, she'd probably be the kind of girl who read a lot. Where had she learned to read, anyway? Did the mermaids like to kidnap English teachers and hold them in captivity?
The thought of asking her that made him smile to himself as he drew.
***
The woman agent's name was Emily James. Probably they'd done that on purpose, too. Probably Emily wasn't even her real name. She came back at nine the next morning and took him to a diner for breakfast. Unlike Ben Ellison she didn't ask him anything about the Dear Melissa. Instead she just made friendly conversation about school, his interests: the kinds of things a dentist might ask to distract you from the fact that you were about to get your teeth drilled. Still, Dorian talked: he'd played basketball but not that well. He wanted to be a comic book artist. Back in Chicago he'd been in a band, but they were kind of half-assed and didn't practice much. She told him all about her brother, who was an illustrator. He kept sneezing. It wasn't too surprising that getting dragged through the Bering Sea had given him a cold.
Then Emily James took him back to the same room in the same white building. Dorian felt the tension all over his back and shoulders. He wasn't going to even consider telling them anything, at least not until he had a chance to talk things over with Luce more. He'd be calm this time. Friendly but quiet. And he wouldn't take anything to eat or drink unless he knew where it came from.
Ben Ellison seemed completely together again, too. He looked up at Dorian with a smile that was oddly warm, considering how things had gone the day before. “Hello, Dorian.” He was opening a laptop, and the movements of his lumpy brown fingers were surprisingly deft and graceful. He looked somehow older today, and his heavy body sprawled wearily in its chair. “I thought you could use a break from all the questions today. It seemed like it might be a better idea to go over some of the background behind this investigation instead.”
“Okay,” Dorian said. That was definitely an improvement. He wouldn't have to talk too much. He was pleased to see that Smitt was nowhere around, too. He sat at a right angle to Ellison, who turned the laptop so they could both see the screen.
“I realized that you might have a mistaken idea. You might think that what happened to the Dear Melissa was somehow new or anomalous. But the fact is that there have been similar shipwrecks through all recorded history. Have you read the Odyssey yet?”
“Last year,” Dorian said. The screen showed a map, but it wasn't of Alaska. He thought it might be the coast of Africa. In a few places there were patches of red dots.
“Then you'll realize where I'm going with this. These clusters of unexplained shipwrecks have been occurring for thousands of years. In certain areas ships will start spontaneously slamming into cliffs or occasionally into each other, even in very good weather. And a feature of these shipwrecks is that there are almost never any survivors. You sometimes find the lifeboats lowered but without anyone in them or life jackets drifting around empty. And in most of these cases dry land should be quite easy to reach. That island the Dear Melissa crashed against, for example. No one made it ashore. And the same thing was true for a Coast Guard boat that smashed into the same island several weeks prior.”
Dorian began to think he'd prefer being grilled after all. He didn't want to think about the number of deaths Luce might be responsible for. “Okay,” he said.
“You'll admit it was strange? Almost nine hundred people on board, an island right there, and not one person swam to safety? You have to ask yourself if they actually wanted to drown. And our sole survivor turned up a dozen miles away.” He smiled at Dorian as if that was somehow a compliment.
“It's totally strange,” Dorian agreed.
“S
o strange that people have come up with all kinds of wild explanations. The Greeks, of course, attributed these wrecks to the sirens, calling mariners into the rocks with irresistibly beautiful voices. You probably remember the episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus plugs his sailors' ears with beeswax so they won't hear the songs...” Dorian made his face as still and empty as possible while Ben Ellison gazed at him with blatant curiosity. Sirens: wasn't that really just another name for mermaids? There was a disturbingly long pause. Dorian made a point of studying the map.
“That's Africa?” Anything to keep the conversation away from sea-girls with magical voices. Ben Ellison only smiled.
“Of course,” he said, just as if Dorian hadn't spoken, “in a more rational age people turned away from myths as a way of making sense of strange phenomena. In recent years these sinkings have usually been attributed to collective hysteria or mass hallucinations. A sudden fit of insanity that overwhelms the crew and passengers all at once. Sometimes referred to as 'mad ship disease.' That's the black-humor term for it, at least.”
This didn't add up with what they'd told him earlier. “Smitt—Agent Smitt—he said the Dear Melissa got sunk by extortionists. Like, some kind of gang...”
Ellison smiled, but he looked sad.
“Nobody here believes that, Dorian.”
“But Agent Smitt told my guardian—”
“Surely you of all people can appreciate our position, Dorian. It's not so different from the problem you've been struggling with. "We have to tell people something. Ideally something that they might possibly believe.”
Ellison stared at Dorian, obviously waiting for him to ask what the FBI did believe. Dorian just gazed into the screen. How many lost lives did those hovering dots represent?
“And to answer your question, yes, that's the west coast of Africa. Let's look at a map of shipwrecks in Alaska now.” Ellison clicked a button. “Keep in mind that the Bering Sea is notoriously dangerous. Terrible storms. There's a high incidence of wrecks there in any case.” A new map came up, and as Ellison had suggested red dots were loosely scattered across it. But in two places they were thicker. One was at the bottom of the image, well south of the Aleutians. There were definitely more dots down there but not really so many. But up near where Dorian was living, around Kuskokwim Bay and a bit farther north, red dots swarmed angrily: so many that whole patches of shore were blotted out. And one of those dots covered Emily's body.
“Why don't people just stay away, then?” Dorian could hear that his voice was getting harsher.
“They do now. There's been an official warning to avoid that section of the coast since early July. The number of sinkings around there escalated so abruptly that people were simply caught off-guard at first.”
“But then...” Dorian stopped himself.
“But then it doesn’t matter? Is that what you were going to say?”
“No!”
“Dorian, I know I said we'd take it easy on questions today. But this person, or this entity, that might have saved you from drowning”
“That's not even real—”
“This unreal entity, in that case.” Ellison paused. “Have you seen it again?”
7. The Queen
It served her right for trusting a human, even once. Even after the big deal he'd made about wanting to see her again, even after that bewilderingly tender good-night kiss, Dorian hadn't shown up the next evening. Luce had swum back and forth for over an hour between the beach and the cliffs where he'd sung before she finally accepted that he wasn't going to come.
A few hours after he'd given her his parka she'd even fought down her aversion to going near human towns, just to bring the rowboat back. She'd towed the boat as far as the village's main dock—it had taken her a while to find both oars, but to her surprise the boat's hull was undamaged—and tied it to a straggling rope. Incredible as it seemed to her now in the cold blue light of a new day, she'd actually been worried that Dorian might get in trouble for stealing it. He must have seen what she'd done for him, Luce thought, but even so he didn't care enough to keep his word to her.
There was only one explanation for his absence that seemed at all likely to her. It must be that he enjoyed playing with her emotions. Maybe this was his way of getting revenge. And to make matters worse Dana was going to show up sometime, and Luce would have to show her Dorian's jacket and rattle off a whole series of lies straight in her old friend's face. Luce had never felt so stupid before, so demeaned. Obviously Dana had been right. Obviously Dorian was treacherous and cold-hearted, and the smart thing would have been to drown him without caring at all. Luce couldn't remember the last time she'd been in such a foul mood. The day seemed mockingly bright and beautiful, with an azure sky and satiny breezes, with water that thrummed to the distant, booming calls of whales, their pitch so deep that it made her scales vibrate.
She hadn't been working enough on her singing, Luce decided. She'd let herself get distracted by some human boy instead. She couldn't do anything about Dorian or about the fact that she'd acted like an idiot. But she could at least develop the one power that was absolutely hers.
She swam out into deeper waters. Even when she had practiced singing recently, Luce thought with disgust, she'd just been playing pretty little games, sculpting blobs of water in midair, making tiny pirouetting fountains and arches. Clearly it was time to get back to using the full force of her voice. Time to remind the waves who their queen really was...
The waves were rough and high, the currents so strong that she had to flick and dance her way between them, slicing back with her tail each time the water grasped at her. Did the sea really think it could push her around like that? Luce dove down and gathered her voice into a long, driving note, slamming it right back into the face of one especially fierce current. Her voice fused with the water. It became a creature of living sound. Luce held the current where it was for a moment, then her unwavering pitch pulsed higher, shoving the immense pressure of the flow back on itself. She blasted the note until it was almost a scream, and for an instant the water in front of her surged in crisscrossing directions. Just above her head Luce saw the surface of the sea starting to bulge in a glassy dome, a swelling tumor of sound. A few porpoises approached, stared at Luce and the misshapen water forced up by her high, pounding outcry, and then rushed off in fright. Luce didn't care. The swell made by the two battling currents rose higher, and Luce was lifted inside it. For a few moments she hovered in tremulous space, gazing down through water like a huge curving window onto an unsettled sea.
Then the bulge erupted. Luce went flying up on an explosive jet of foam, surrounded by airborne waves that curved like wings. She twisted in space at least thirty feet above the surface, screaming now from pure exultation, and crashed back down so hard that it knocked all the air out of her. She fell through waves where the bubbles frothed in such dense clouds that all she could see was moving streams of whiteness, letting her tail spin. Her body rolled with no sense of direction. When Luce finally surfaced again her side stung from the impact, but she was laughing too hard to sing.
She'd raised the water before, used her voice to lift curling waves or straight towers of water. But she'd never controlled such a huge volume of water as that, never made the sea leap so high. If only Catarina could have seen it, or Dorian—
Ugh. Why did she have to spoil the exhilaration she felt by thinking of him now? Luce circled wildly in the murky sea until her body lashed the waves into a ring of froth. Vaguely she noticed the island where Dorian's cruise ship had crashed looming up on her left. Normally the sight of it would have depressed her. Normally she would have worried about slipping into her old tribe's territory, too. But today she didn't care about any of that.
She was gasping from swimming so crazily. Luce made herself calm down enough to drift along the surface, pulling in deep inhalations. Seabirds with bright red feet spiraled in the air above her, as free in their breathing medium as she was in her fluid one. Luce wanted to t
ry mastering that much water again, maybe raise it in a single high wall this time, but she couldn't do that unless she had enough breath to sing with her strongest voice.
She really was getting too close to the old cave, though. She'd thought those were seals popping up for air fifty feet away from her, but now she realized that one had a mushy baby's face and stick-up tufts of hair. There were a few larval mermaids mixed in with the seals, then, and larvae didn't usually swim out this far unless they were tagging along after the older girls. Maybe she should slip back down the coast a bit.
“Samantha? You see that? Is that like a rotting porpoise or something?” The voice was chirpy and cold; it would have sounded completely emotionless if it weren't just a bit too shrill. “I'd say we should drag it out of our territory. Except then we'd have to touch it.”
Anais and Samantha bobbed up and down in the waves, both pearl-skinned and almost shining with beauty, both lacquered with mist and the dizzy pale sunlight. Luce noticed that they were keeping their distance, though, and that Samantha couldn't hide the apprehension in her sea green eyes. It made her want to laugh. “Hi, Anais. Hey, Samantha.” Luce wondered if they'd seen the wild burst of water carrying her up into the air. She smiled to herself. There was no reason not to be polite to the two blondes, not when she could send a vertical wave slashing up beneath them anytime she felt like it. “How's everything been going?”
As Luce had expected, her friendly tone annoyed Anais more than any display of hostility could have done. Luce could feel the hardness of her own smile as she watched Anais's sharp blue eyes start to flicker back in the direction of the tribe's cave. Her golden hair rayed out around her, curling gorgeously with each loft of the water.
“Let's just go,” Samantha muttered weakly, tugging at her queen's arm. “Why should we even talk to her?” Anais ignored her.
“Oh, wait.” Anais made a show of suddenly recalling something, rolling her eyes upward. “Isn't this thing some kind of trashy, broken-down mermaid? I know it's kind of hard to believe, Samantha. But don't you remember there was a mermaid with dark, ratty hair like that? We threw her out of the tribe. Remember?”
