Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  Somewhere beneath those waves was her home. The rich strangeness, the terrible sadness of the dream returned to me, and I realized that I was crying, hot silent tears sliding down my cheeks; I licked one off my upper lip, but could not distinguish its taste from the salt miasma of the sea. I stared at the water until my eyes felt as sea-blasted and blind as the figureheads’, and then I began to walk, aimlessly, blindly, my mind in the air with the gulls, in the deep water with the seals, in the dusty prison with the waiting women.

  190. Figurehead. Wood. 30” x 18”. American, ca. 1870-1890. Figure of a mermaid. Ship unknown.

  The selkie answers the phone: “Moonwoman Coffeehouse.”

  “Hi, Russet, it’s me. Byron.” Byron always has to name both of them when he calls her, as if he has to guard against the possibility that their identities might slip. She feels sorry for him, for the crippled understanding that thinks identity has anything to do with something as arbitrary as a name. Russet isn’t her name anyway, but it’ll do.

  “Hello, Byron,” she says warily.

  “Look,” Byron said, his voice a little too high, a little too fast, “I’ve been thinking. I think we should get married.”

  She wants to laugh at him, but she can’t find the breath. Because marriage means Byron isn’t getting tired of this horrible fake relationship, isn’t coming to his senses. No, quite the opposite: Byron wants to make it official.

  She hears herself say, “Well, we can’t talk about it now, Jesus, Byron!” And watches her hand, small and broad and brown, hang up the phone. And then she starts to shake.

  She looks up, and Shelly is staring at her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just Byron, y’know?”

  Shelly says, “I wish you’d just go ahead and dump his ass,” and the selkie gives her half a smile and a shrug and gets back to work.

  She clears tables and scrubs counters all morning, remembering to smile at the regulars, remembering receipts and correct change and to keep out of Shelly’s way as she works. She has the afternoon off. She doesn’t have another meeting with the artist until next week. Byron won’t be home ’til six. She walks to the museum after eating a lunch she doesn’t taste, and then stands in front of the door for nearly five minutes, trying to stop shaking. Ezekiel Pitt isn’t interested in her. The worst he’ll do is tell Byron, and she isn’t afraid of Byron. Byron’s power over her is only a matter of her skin and the old stupid rules about possessing it. Nothing here can hurt her, so why can’t she move?

  Because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of Ezekiel Pitt; she’s afraid of the museum where he dens. Her fear is brutal, terrible, so vast she can’t even run from it. She stands, wooden and helpless, on the sidewalk until a voice says, “Are you all right?” and breaks her stasis.

  It’s the woman from the beach, the pale, mousy woman who was watching the sunrise and crying, and this time the selkie is close enough that even a stupid human nose can catch her scent. “Oh!” the selkie says involuntarily. “You’re . . . ” The woman the artist is cheating on with me. The woman I smell on him, although he claims you’re hundreds of miles away.

  “Magda Fenton,” the woman says. “And you’re Dale’s new model. Russet, isn’t it?”

  The selkie nods.

  And then a thought seems to strike the woman; she tilts her head to one side, like a bird, and says, “How did you know who I was? Dale showed me his sketches, but he hasn’t drawn me in years.”

  “I smelled you.” And then her heart stutters in her chest, because of all the things she shouldn’t have said . . .

  “You smelled me?”

  “On him. I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s sleeping with you.” She doesn’t sound surprised, or even angry. Only tired. “That explains a great deal.”

  “I really am sorry,” the selkie says; she feels sick. Because she can’t claim she didn’t know the artist was cheating on his wife. She can’t even claim she didn’t know it mattered. Not when that’s why she was sleeping with the artist herself. Because it’s the only thing she can do that hurts Byron at all.

  “Dale’s decisions aren’t your fault,” the woman says, almost kindly. “But . . . you smelled me? How? I don’t wear perfume, and I haven’t . . . ”

  The selkie knows she should lie. But she doesn’t. She’s hurt this woman already, and the woman has not tried to hurt her in return. She has behaved like a sister, not a hunter.

  The selkie turns her hands palms up, spreading the fingers. And she says, “I’m a selkie.” It’s the first time she’s ever spoken the words.

  The woman becomes very still for a moment, staring into the selkie’s eyes as if she could find truth in them. Then, slowly, she bends her head to look at the selkie’s hands, the webs between her fingers, the rough skin of her palms. And then she looks up again, her pale eyes like rock, and says, “Where is your skin?”

  The selkie blinks hard against the salt burn of tears. “In there,” she says, nodding toward the museum. “Byron hid it in there.”

  201. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 20”. American, ca. 1850-1860. Figure of a woman, her hands crossed at her breast. Ship unknown.

  I believed her.

  Dale would have laughed at my gullibility, but I was astonished at how little I cared. I saw the truth, not in her webbed fingers, but in her eyes, which were dark and sad and much older than her face. She was a selkie, a seal-woman, and her soul was trapped in the museum just as the figureheads were.

  We walked through the museum together, the only visitors, while she told me about Byron and her skin and in return I told her about the figureheads. Neither one of us mentioned Dale. We didn’t go into the figureheads’ room, but stopped in front of a diorama, dusty and crude, of an Inuit ice-fishing.

  “They’re imprisoned,” I finished. “Does that seem like nonsense to you?”

  “They’re man-built things,” she said. “I don’t see how the ocean can possibly be their home.”

  “Because they’re inanimate?”

  “Because men built them,” she said with an impatient shrug.

  “Not all men are like Byron.”

  “But you’re all . . . ” She waved her hand in an angry, inarticulate gesture and said again, “They’re man-built things.”

  “And the works of human beings have no souls?”

  “Man-made souls,” the selkie said. “Souls that belong with men.”

  “Souls that would profane your home,” I said, understanding.

  “You got that right,” she muttered, a pitch-perfect imitation of the sullen girl she appeared to be.

  There was nothing I could say. I stood silently, helplessly, wondering if it would be worth the effort to try to convince her to come look at the figureheads, or if it would simply be wasted breath. And what, I asked myself, did I think she could do anyway? She was a creature out of a fairytale, but that fairytale had nothing to do with me and my self-proclaimed duty. She had her own problems.

  She’d gone from standing hipshot in front of the diorama to leaning on—no, pressing against the glass.

  “Russet?” I said.

  “My skin,” she said, her voice no more than breath and pain. “It’s in there.”

  “In there?” I stared at the mannequin dressed in stiff, moth-eaten sealskins. My double-take was hard enough to hurt.

  “How can I get in there?” the selkie said, and I looked away from her yearning hands flattened against the glass.

  “There’s a door in the back wall, but—” And then I remembered Ezekiel Pitt emerging from a door marked Employees Only. “Come on!”

  I wasn’t sure she would follow me, but she did. We were halfway down the aisle between the figureheads when she balked, stopping as if she’d been brought up short by an invisible wall. “Are these . . . ” I heard her breath catch. “Are these what you were talking about?”

  “These are the figureheads, yes.”

  “I knew I hated Ezekiel Pitt,” she said, then shook herself and looked at me, e
yes sharp. “Okay, do you have any bright ideas?”

  “You mean you—”

  “I was wrong, okay?” she said, glaring at me. “I thought you were just, you know, telling stories. It’s what you people are good at.”

  I wasn’t sure for a moment who “you people” were. “Don’t selkies tell stories?”

  “It’s not the same. But I get it, okay? I’m with the program. Nobody made their souls, and they don’t belong here. And you want to help them. I get that, too. And—” She broke off, glowering, daring me to laugh at her. “I didn’t think you people cared—didn’t think you could care, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Okay? Now what are we gonna do about it?”

  I had an ally, however unwilling and irritated, and I felt some measure of dread lift away from me. “We should start with your skin.”

  She looked startled, so I elaborated, “We know what to do there.” And then, when her expression didn’t change, “I care about that, too.”

  “Oh.” She shook herself and said, brusque efficiency to cover embarrassment: “Yeah, okay. Through here, you think?”

  “Unless you’d rather just break the glass,” I said, teasing gently, and she responded with a smile as brief and brilliant as a flash of lightning.

  “Let’s not even get started on what I’d rather do. For now, I’m gonna go with hoping this door isn’t locked.”

  It wasn’t. We slunk through it like characters in every bad spy movie I’d ever stayed up watching, long past midnight, instead of trying to sleep in the same bed with Dale. Or with his absence. The hallway was deserted, and the selkie didn’t waste any time working her way back along to the diorama’s access door.

  It wasn’t locked, either.

  “You realize I can only do this because you’re with me,” she said. “I mean, I’m scared out of my mind here.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d care about breaking the law.”

  “I don’t. I care about that creepy motherfucker Ezekiel Pitt.” She slid into the diorama as smoothly as if the air were water, and was back in ten seconds, shutting the door behind her left-handed; her right hand was clenched white-knuckled in a limp, ratty-looking sealskin.

  I knew it was her skin as well as she did; it took my breath away to look at her. Her colors were vivid, her lines clean. She was bright instead of dull, focused instead of blurred. Everything in this town was faded, but not the selkie, not anymore.

  “Are you frightened of Ezekiel Pitt now?” I said, curious.

  She laughed. It was a strange sound, not merely because she sounded like a seal barking, but because it was so obviously a learned response. “Right now, I’m not afraid of anything,” she said. “Let’s see what we can do for your figureheads.”

  Ezekiel Pitt was waiting on the other side of the Employees Only door.

  “Byron called me when he couldn’t reach you,” he said, looking past me to the selkie. I wasn’t even sure he’d registered my presence. “In a tizzy as usual. I told him I’d see what I could do about pulling his chestnuts out of the fire.” He expected her to be afraid of him. It was in his voice, his posture, the way he looked at her. He knew it was her fear of him that had kept her imprisoned, and he didn’t imagine that could change.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Byron’s nuts if I were you,” the selkie said and shoved me gently forward into the figureheads’ hall. “You have other problems.”

  “Do I? Seems like you’re the one with the problem, miss. All I have to do is call the cops.”

  “No,” the selkie said. She reached out, caught his wrist. And held. He brought his arm up to wrench away, and he couldn’t. “You’re a greedy man, Ezekiel Pitt. You’re holding what doesn’t belong to you. And you need to let go.”

  “You’re confusing me with Byron,” Ezekiel Pitt said, still trying to wrench free, and still failing. “And I admit Byron should know better than to think he can hold a—”

  “No.” He stopped talking, his mouth hanging slightly open, and she said, her voice flat and calm, “Let them go.”

  He didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. “What do you want me to do? Throw them all in the sea? They’re valuable, you know, and the museum—”

  “The wood isn’t what matters. The wood is only what holds them here. Let them go.”

  Her grip tightened on his wrist. He was whining now, like a neglected dog: “I can’t. I don’t know how. I don’t know what—”

  “Yes, you do.” She walked over to the green ecstatic-eyed maiden, bringing Ezekiel Pitt with her. She was a wild creature, and the truth of her nature shone through her like sunlight through glass. He was nothing next to her.

  She put his hand on the figurehead’s forehead. He was whimpering, and the noise was both pathetic and repulsive. The selkie was inexorable. She said, “Let them go home, Ezekiel Pitt.”

  His face twisted—a snarl of fury, a grimace of pain—and he cried out, “Goddamn you, you bitches!” as if he could make even freedom into a curse.

  The figureheads were free.

  In the silence, the selkie let Ezekiel Pitt go.

  He backed away from her, from the figureheads which now were nothing but wood, man-made things without even man-made souls. He was cradling his hand against his chest; his mouth was working, though no sound came out until he was five feet from the selkie, out of her reach, and then he hissed, “I’m calling the police, you . . . you bitch!” He turned and bolted, shouldering past me as if I, too, were inanimate wood.

  The selkie looked at me, bright-eyed, gleeful, and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  181. Figurehead. Wood. 36” x 18”. American, ca. 1850. Figure of a woman holding a sword. Ship unknown.

  The woman, who is so much more than the artist’s wife, comes with the selkie to the beach. The selkie is glad.

  They stand together just above the rush and retreat of the tide, and the silence between them is awkward, painful, a human silence.

  The selkie can feel her sisters swimming out in the cold sea; she can feel her wooden sisters, too, singing without sound in the darkness of the deeps. Silence with her sisters won’t feel like this, won’t be wrong.

  She says, “You could come with me. If you wanted?” She wants. She wants this woman to be her sister.

  The woman blinks, her pale lashes making it look more like a flinch. “I’m a good swimmer, but—”

  “The wood isn’t what matters,” the selkie says.

  “You mean . . . ”

  “Your wooden sisters will welcome you. I’ll bring your seal sisters to meet you.”

  “Am I so trapped?” the woman murmurs. She looks at her hands. “Is this a wooden prison?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Dale would agree with you,” the woman says, catching the selkie with her pale eyes. “I’m no more than a figurehead to him.”

  “Dale’s an idiot,” the selkie snaps, and the woman laughs. “I didn’t mean you were trapped. Dale doesn’t have your skin. I just meant, if you wanted to . . . ”

  The woman smiles, a smile as warm as a sister’s love. “Thank you. But the ocean isn’t my home. It might become my prison.”

  The selkie nods. She does understand. “You won’t go back to Dale, will you?”

  “Not a chance,” her sister says and laughs, the ecstatic laughter of a child.

  “If you ever see Byron, you can tell him from me to fuck off. I’m going home.” She strips her clothes off as the sea washes around her feet. Carrying her skin, she wades out up to her waist; then, with one last kick of her human legs, she jack-knifes into the water and clads herself in her true skin. She surfaces fifty yards out, already hearing her sisters’ joy, and glances back.

  Her sister is standing on the shore, waving good-bye.

  Salt Wine

  Peter S. Beagle

  All right, then. First off, this ain’t a story about some seagoing candytrews dandy Captain Jack, or whatever you want to call hi
m, who falls in love with a mermaid and breaks his troth to a mortal woman to live with his fish-lady under the sea. None of that in this story, I can promise you; and our man’s no captain, but a plain blue-eyed sailorman named Henry Lee, AB, who starts out good for nowt much but reefing a sail, holystoning a deck, taking a turn in the crow’s-nest, talking his way out of a tight spot, and lending his weight to the turning of a capstan and his voice to the bellowing of a chanty. He drank some, and most often when he drank it ended with him going at it with one or another of his mates. Lost part of an ear that way off Panama, he did, and even got flogged once for pouring grog on the captain. But there was never no harm in Henry Lee, not in them days. Anybody remembers him’ll tell you that.

  Me name’s Ben Hazeltine. I remember Henry Lee, and I’ll tell you why.

  I met Henry Lee when we was both green hands on the Mary Brannum, out of Cardiff, and we stayed messmates on and off, depending. Didn’t always ship out together, nowt like that—just seemed to happen so. Any road, come one rainy spring, we was on the beach together, out of work. Too many hands, not enough ships—you get that, some seasons. Captains can take their pick those times, and Henry Lee and I weren’t neither one anybody’s first pick. Isle of Pines, just south of Cuba—devil of a place to be stranded, I’ll tell you. Knew we’d land a berth sooner or later—always had before—only we’d no idea when, and both of us hungry enough to eat a seagull, but too weak to grab one. I’ll tell you the God’s truth, we’d gotten to where we was looking at bloody starfish and those Portygee man-o’-war jellies and wondering . . . well, there you are, that’s how bad it were. I’ve been in worse spots, but not many.

  Now back then, there was mermaids all over the place, like you don’t see so much today. Partial to warm waters, they are—the Caribbean, Mediterranean, the Gulf Stream—but I’ve seen them off the Orkneys, and even off Greenland a time or two, that’s a fact. What’s not a fact is the singing. Combing their hair, yes; they’re women, after all, and that’s what women do, and how you going to comb your hair out underwater? But I never heard one mermaid sing, not once.