Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

by Elizabeth Bear

  There was only one thing he could do: go after it.

  Fingers shaking, Andy climbed to his feet, reaching over his shoulders to pull off his shirt. He dumped his keys, loose change, phone, and his City of Portsmouth New Hampshire detective shield in its badge wallet on the narrow shelf next to the boat’s controls. Shoes were next, kicked across the narrow space, and then he was down to his shorts and tugging on the thick compressing skin of his wetsuit.

  Andy straightened, swung around, scanning the waters for nearby ocean traffic. He spun to the thin stretch of New Hampshire along Odiorne Point to the west, and then to the Gunboat Shoal buoy, lit up and rocking back and forth on his right. He had made no plans to get in the water today, just a couple lobster traps to check out—keep-busy stuff—so he did a few stretches and took in a few deep breaths, letting them out slowly, preparing for a quick dive. The tank he had aboard was empty, but he did have his emergency bottle—Spare Air. At the shoal’s fifteen-meter depth he might get as many breaths out of it.

  It would have to be enough.

  He was still cinching up the weight belt when he went in after his wedding ring, a full breath of air in his lungs, a dozen or more in the tiny yellow tank in his hand.

  Darkness met him with a shock of cold against his face, the mask digging into his skin. It made his teeth hurt. He released his first breath and kicked into the deep.

  At ten meters Andy Kavanagh found the ring Julia had officially slipped on his finger at the close of a beautiful spring ceremony in Newburyport, with family and friends and bright sunlight. His wedding ring gleamed in the dark—bright metal halfway down the index finger of a dead man’s hand. Lifting toward the surface, only bone and tattered tendons, the gruesome appendage drifted alone.

  Andy found the rest of the corpse floating meters off the ocean floor, anchored there with chains at the ankles. The skeleton was intact, every rib in the cage, long threads of ragged tendon and muscle drifting from the legs, teeth jutting. Shreds of skin and hair on one side of the skull curled gently with the current. Gaping holes looked up at him.

  Andy stared, almost forgetting he had to breathe. He fumbled with the tank, took a long pull on the emergency bottle, scooping the water to spin around when he caught movement off to his left. There were other rotting bodies in the deep, chained to the bottom, all of them complete, ten meters down, swaying with the tides and reaching for the surface.

  He wasn’t afraid, but he felt something unbalanced in the cold ocean, with dozens of the dead chained in place, all of them looking desperately up at the dazzle of sunlight above.

  He knew that kind of longing.

  It kept him from ripping apart someone’s drowned bones to get his ring back.

  His cop brain came online, kicked him up to the surface, made him claw his way across the deck, gasping for air. He tossed the Spare Air aside, metal ringing across plastic and wood. Stumbling to the navigation panel, he unhooked his phone from the shelf. He fumbled with it for a second, his cold fingers having trouble holding onto to it.

  Andy was thumbing through the phone’s interface when she came aboard.

  His fingers froze over the screen, halfway to calling in what looked like a dozen corpses anchored to the seabed a mile off the New Hampshire coast. He looked up as a woman with long dark braids stepped out of the Atlantic and onto the open deck at the stern, seawater pooling around her.

  He dropped the phone. One hand gripping the boat’s wheel hard, he twisted around, punched in the combination on the lockbox, and pulled out his gun.

  She was wringing the water out of her hair, and didn’t appear to be concerned when he swung the deadly end of the SIG 9 millimeter toward her.

  She just nodded, smiling sadly, and said, “I see you found my collection below, Andy. That’s good. Means the game is on.” Then she tossed the tungsten and gold ring to him. “But I’m a little disappointed. It’s your turn, and you forgot the most important piece.”

  He almost dropped his gun, but he caught the ring.

  She straightened, pulling at her long-sleeved tunic where dark wet folds had bunched around her waist. A pattern of deep sea corals ran up one side of the garment from hem to neckline. She wore leggings of the same dark blue material with the same branching pattern down her left leg. Bare feet.

  He stared at her for a few moments, noting her complete lack of diving gear and the fact he was shaking with cold while she appeared to feel quite comfortable soaking wet in the chill ocean air.

  His voice came out in a dry whisper. “What are you?”

  She tilted her head, her smile fading. “Don’t you mean who? Hi, my name is Andy? Hello. How are you, Klearistis? I’m well. Thank you so much for asking?”

  Andy Kavanagh shook his head, setting the gun down beside him. “What are you?” He slid on the ring and reached for his phone, dragging it close to listen to the dispatcher.

  “Oh, you mean like an ethnic group or nationality? Like seaborn?” She seemed relieved at how simple the question had become. “Then that’s what I am. Thalassogenêis—seaborn.” She twisted around to hold one hand east, toward the cold gray Atlantic. “I come from the sea, Andy.”

  He just shook his head, picking up the gun again, holding it steady while he tapped on the phone in his other hand. He kept his focus on her as he called the police and the Coast Guard, glad he was a detective: if he weren’t they might think him crazy. Still, he didn’t mention his visitor. Just the bodies.

  Klearistis had stopped talking, as if she didn’t want to interrupt his demands for divers and crime scene investigation.

  With the call over he asked, “Now. Talk. What do you mean you come from the sea?”

  “The world, the universe, everything that is . . . is a plenum, filled space. You realize this?” She swung one finger up, pointing at the sky. “I think I understand your problem. You see this, the air around you—” Her hand fell, gesturing across the waves. “—as different from that. Instead of just looking at them as a shift in density, pressure. Someplace that just happens to be thinner or thicker than another. So when I say—”

  He cut her off. “What’s your name again? Spell it for me?”

  “Klearistis.” She didn’t bother with more than the first letter. “Begins with a K.”

  And she went on, explaining how the surface was just an interface, that it wasn’t much different from, say, the thermocline, which marked the transition layer from shallower water and the deep ocean. The boundary between the two was just as clear. Just as sharp.

  Fifteen minutes later the Coast Guard roared up, seconds ahead of a Portsmouth Police craft. Andy waved four officers aboard, two of them geared up with body armor and the new H&Ks the department was using.

  Klearistis sighed, nodding resignedly. “Julia was wounded a week before she was killed.”

  Andy froze, the mention of Julia, and information about her he had never known, poured through his thoughts like pain leaking from his soul. Something inside him twisted and shuddered. A hint of anger spiking above the torment he would feel sharp and deadly later when he was alone with his memories.

  For several moments he couldn’t speak.

  His mouth was open, ready for words, but he just pointed out the perpetrator, and Klearistis turned away from him—some of his pain in her own eyes.

  She held out her wrists, ready for the cuffs.

  The Coast Guard craft had swung around the bow of Andy’s boat, cutting in to slide smoothly along the port side, two women in blue coming aboard with guns held low. They had a quick, low discussion with the police, and then one of the Portsmouth cops placed handcuffs on Klearistis, and guided her over the rails to the police craft, which roared off toward the rocky coastline, coming in sideways to bump up against a fishing pier just up from Pulpit Rock.

  In another twenty minutes Andy Kavanagh had his boat tied up alongside the same pier, and he climbed ashore to talk to the gathering officers and crime scene personnel. Ducking away from strobing blue light
s, he passed a line of black police cruisers—a couple state troopers, mostly Portsmouth PD. The last one held Klearistis. She looked up from the backseat, and gave him a happy nod, lifting her hands from her lap to show him the dark metal handcuffs.

  Andy just shook his head, then made his way toward a cluster of uniformed police and plainclothes detectives. He knew most of them, and was anxious to explain what he had seen so far. Not much more they could do until the Portsmouth Police divers were through with their scene study and retrieval.

  The gathered officers turned to him, one holding up a hand with a friendly smile.

  “So, Andy, what’s a famous author like you doing pulling in lobster pots and diving into a whole garden of bodies anchored to the seafloor?”

  He waved away the detective’s words—he wasn’t famous. Eight books published, thrillers and mysteries, but he hadn’t written a word since Julia’s death.

  “Hey, Oscar. That’s about it. Garden full of bodies. Along with the gardener.” Kavanagh didn’t have the strength for a smile, and hoped some thin layer of sociability came through in his voice. He held up his hand, with a flash of metal. “Ring fell off my finger into the water. I went in after it. Bunch of corpses in the dark, and then she comes out of the water and claims they’re hers.”

  He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the nearest police cruiser.

  Detective Oscar Vansteen leaned to one side, trying for a better view of the woman. Then he stepped past Andy, a puzzled look on his face.

  The police cruiser was empty, with all four doors closed and locked. Klearistis was gone, the handcuffs placed neatly in the center of the back seat.

  She was waiting for him the next morning, seated in his office. For some reason—it may have been that he hadn’t slept well—he wasn’t surprised to see her.

  Door locked, shades drawn on the windows. He would give someone the task of going through the surveillance feeds later to see when and how she had entered the station, as well as how she had made it past several manned checkpoints and more than a few locked doors.

  But there she was, comfortably waiting for him in one of the two chairs arranged in the open area on the other side of his desk. She wore the same style of clothing as before, but the pattern was brighter: still mostly blue, but with random orange rings flowing up from her ankles to lines and bubbles of fiery turbulence at her shoulders.

  She rose when he opened the door, nodding her head seriously, almost a bow. He arrested her again—and he was going to use his own handcuffs this time, calling in an officer to escort her to one of the open interrogation rooms.

  Bent over the video panels on his desk, scrolling through scheduling layout, he said, “Put her in room K.”

  She held out her hands again—just as she had on his boat, compliant, and then went along quietly with the uniformed officer, as if handcuffing and interrogation were all part of some nearly useless but inflexibly adhered to set of formal procedures—an elaborate show. The cost of doing business or getting into the appointment book of Detective Andy Kavanagh.

  A few minutes later Andy passed along a few assignments, including having one of the data specialists look into the security feed. He came through the heavy interrogation room door with his ident card. The mag locks snapped apart and then shut, the loud metal crack of heavy steel posts pulled into the mechanism, and then jammed through the brace in the frame after the door closed.

  He slapped a thin folder on the table in front of him, pulled out the chair and sat down, bracing his elbows apart, gaze locked on her face over his folded hands.

  As if nothing important had happened in the last twenty hours, Klearistis started with the last words she had spoken to him. “Julia was wounded a week before she was killed.”

  He was up, something dangerous and angry kicking him to his feet. The folder with the case report skidded off the end of the table to the floor. He placed both his hands on the flat stainless steal surface, leaning toward her, teeth grinding together. The words just wouldn’t come out.

  Klearistis casually waved him back to his seat. He blinked, following her motion as she placed her hands under the table, back in her lap. Five minutes into things and she wasn’t wearing the handcuffs anymore, but he couldn’t process the break in reality. His fingers were white, his hands pulled in to grip the big heavy table in the center of interrogation room K.

  He took his seat again.

  “Minor injuries, three tiny pieces of metal in her thigh—from an explosion.” Klearistis paused, watching him for a moment. “By the look on your face, she didn’t tell you about them—no call, no email, no mention of it on Facebook.” She waved away his concern. “Probably didn’t want you to worry.”

  Dropping all the way back into the chair, Andy looked across the table at her, then let his head fall forward. He released a deep breath. Lost.

  Klearistis nodded. “She did tell me about them.”

  His head snapped up, sharp focus in his eyes.

  “Julia had a few days leave, standard recovery. This was really minor. I don’t know how your military operates—how it’s all connected, but it was Navy doctors who pulled out the shrapnel, taped things up, and told her to rest for a few days before heading back to her unit. They had already flown half the squad out to Kuwait, most with injuries more serious. Two days at some arranged resort space, and then Julia was back in the action.”

  His voice came out quiet, intense. “Did she say anything?”

  Klearistis nodded, and without thinking, he found he was nodding back at her, eyes starting to get heavy with tears.

  “A great many things.”

  Klearistis lifted her hands from her lap, set the handcuffs gently on the table, and reached across the space, stopping inches from him. “But I want you to see something.” She held up one finger, wagging it back and forth as if to stop him from asking the next question, and then putting it to her lips. “No words, just one expression of what you meant to her.”

  He blinked, wiped his eyes, still nodding.

  “Not just this.” She reached over and tapped on his wedding ring with one finger.

  And then she took one of his hands in hers, fingers cold as the North Atlantic against his skin.

  The world went dark, then they surfaced somewhere with too much sun. He squinted against it, turning to find Julia in a dark green bathing suit, a bandage running high up one leg. She was standing at the water’s edge in some phenomenally bright part of the world. Julia laughed and held up the rectangle of plastic, the waterproof—probably bulletproof—sleeve with their wedding picture in it. She brought the picture to her lips, kissed it, whispered something he couldn’t catch, and held it tight as she stepped into deeper water and went under the waves.

  The vision shimmered, going fuzzy, and there was laughter out of frame, some of Julia’s squad mates, or others in recovery, telling her she shouldn’t get the bandages wet. Julia stepped out of the clear blue sea a minute later, holding the photograph in its shielded case as if she was protecting it, as if she was the one who was bulletproof.

  Andy Kavanagh was breathing hard when the lights came back on. Klearistis let him go, her cold fingers sliding out of his grip. She leaned back in her chair for a little while, watching him, the sorrow in her expression mirroring his.

  Then she got up and walked out of interrogation room K, leaving the handcuffs on the table.

  Klearistis held up a hand in greeting, wringing water from her long braided hair with the other. “I’ve been following you for weeks.”

  Andy looked at her, eyes narrowing suspiciously. He had taken out the Elenora—his thirty-four foot lobster boat with Julia’s middle name—a mile beyond the Shoals, mainly for seclusion: some quiet, a few gulls, the Atlantic, and his thoughts.

  And his pain.

  Klearistis stepped aboard five minutes after he had shut down the engine.

  She started in as if they had been speaking moments before, “I set up my collection to get—I don’t
know—to get the conversation started?”

  He just stared at her. Collection? “The bodies chained to the floor of the ocean?”

  She nodded, a gentle smile, almost embarrassed. “I collect them. It’s one part of a game we play. And they remember so much. They tell me so much.” She froze halfway through a shrug, as if something horrifying had occurred to her. Then shook her head, eyes going wide. “I didn’t kill any of them, you understand? They are surfacers—people like you, but who have died in the sea. Drowned. One was an airplane pilot. Very sad, badly damaged. Bones scattered—took me days to gather them. I have wired them all together so they can talk.” She stopped, reacting to the look on his face. “You know? I collect memories—mostly final memories of those who drown. The last thoughts in their heads.” She waved vaguely in a circle, indicating the Atlantic all around them. “The art, the positioning, they are just the means to . . . filling my collection. And playing the game.”

  His voice was rough, sharp, accusing her of something. He just didn’t know what it was. “And Julia?”

  She nodded, a serious scowl forming. “That was different. Blood in the water—that’s how it began. I felt the call, as if she had died under the sea, but when I found her she was well, swimming, even playful. Julia was not supposed to get the bandage or wound wet. But she did. It bled a bit and I felt her pain and her longing. I met her in the shallows, and she . . . shared some knowledge with me. She told me you’re a storyteller—that you write stories. And she showed me that picture.”

  His voice came out hoarse. “Our wedding picture. Long gone. She had it in a sealed plastic sleeve.”

  “She told me all about you.”

  “I don’t care about me.” He shook his head, right at the edge of tears. “Tell me about her.”

  “Fine. I followed Julia Kavanagh. I saw something different in her—she was so strong, so calm, but she didn’t stop. She did not step aside, even when it was clear that her shadow was deeper. Her shadow had changed. She saw that it was deeper than any of the others when they stood in that bright sunlight. She just nodded, and went on with her life.”