by Jeremy Bates
Giggling, Jacky gripped Rad’s forearm and drawled back, “Oh, you poor thing. Just one country house? We have two, and we’ve already downsized.”
Marty was bemused. “How much have you two clowns had to drink?” he asked them.
“We’re celebrating!” Jacky said. “Elsa, I take it Marty told you the good news?”
“He did indeed. The DNA result is quite remarkable.”
“And Elsa has given me some good news as well,” Marty told them. “The great white shark was tagged with an electronic tracking device, which means we know the approximate location of where it ate the merfolk, which means Pip and I have a place to start looking for other merfolk right away.”
“Right away?” said Rad. “Like when?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning! What about Jacks and me?”
“Jacks? What, are you two BFFs now?”
“Don’t change the topic, Marty. You can’t just kick us to the curb.”
“We’ll only be at sea for a few days, long enough to set up a hydrophone array and perform some preliminary sonar mapping of the sea floor. The real work is decoding the data, which we’ll start when we return to shore.”
“Why don’t we go with you?” said Jacky. “I can’t think of a better place to get started on my story. Rad, you’re not filming again until the beginning of next month. Interested in coming along?”
“A few days relaxing at sea does sound rather enticing…”
Marty shrugged. “If you two want to come, so be it. There’s plenty of room. What about you, Elsa? Care to join the party? The more the merrier.”
“No, no, not me,” she said. “But thank you for the offer.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “My, it’s late. I should be getting home. It’s been a wild day, and I think I need a good night’s rest to…get my head around everything.”
“Understandable,” he said, producing his corncob pipe from his pocket and clamping the stem between his teeth. “Let me show you to the gangway, and we’ll see you when we return in a few days’ time.”
Part 3
Demon Island
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath...”
―Herman Melville
Chapter 14
Merfolk: From the Deep. The making-of the original Netflix documentary.
“I know it’s been a long day, Double M,” Fat Mike said, reclining in the director’s chair and sipping a can of Diet Coke from a fluorescent orange straw. “So how about we do one more scene? You good with that?”
Marty had just returned from the bathroom and was settling onto the stool in front of the green screen. “Sure,” he said. “Got something in mind?”
“What they look like. Their physical appearance.”
“Isn’t that redundant? You’ll be showing video footage of a merfolk.”
“Your exposition will lead right into that. Maybe you can explain why they look like they do. Why they have tails and all that shite.”
“They have tails so they can swim, Mike.”
Fat Mike slapped a knee. “Funny, mate! Make sure you mention that on camera. Just as deadpan as you did now. You ready?”
“Sure.”
“Roll camera!”
“Camera rolling,” Gus said.
“Marker!”
Jamie clapped the slate’s sticks together.
“Action!” Fat Mike bellowed.
“In 1758,” Marty said, “the Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus developed the two-name system—Genus and Species—for identifying and classifying all living things. Under class Mammalia, he placed Homo sapiens at the top of air-breathing vertebrate animals. He also acknowledged the existence of Siren, noting the species exhibited paradoxical biological traits. It was clearly an aquatic mammal since its hind terminated in a fish-like tail, but it lacked the blubber and thick skin of other marine mammals. Other physical traits antithetical to those same marine mammals included a neck, external ears, and forelimbs with opposable thumbs.
“The resulting question that everybody always wants to know the answer to: Does this species, which has since become known as merfolk, look at all like humans? What I can tell you from the literature I have studied is that it certainly resembles us, sharing characteristics such as large foreheads, binocular vision, protruding noses, and out-turned lips. It has long been my belief that the large foreheads are not only indicative of a well-developed cerebrum, but necessary to conduct the physiological process for locating distant or invisible objects in the oceans. This is called echolocation, which can be found in most species of dolphins and toothed whales—”
“Cut! Cut! Cut!” Fat Mike said, lifting off his baseball cap and scratching his head with sausage-like fingers. “Echolocation, Double M? What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“Merfolk are presumably a social species like us, and thus echolocation would be necessary for social communication underwater. This would require a bulbous forehead to house the mass of adipose tissue known as the melon—”
“The melon?” Fat Mike shook his head. “No, doc, sorry. Can’t have you talkin’ about fuckin’ melons. You saw the video footage. That thing that washed up on the beach didn’t have a fuckin’ melon in its fuckin’ forehead. Its forehead looked just like yours or mine.”
“We don’t know that for sure, Mike. The shot of the merfolk’s face was not particularly clear, and its hair obscured much of its forehead.”
“Yeah, yeah, but I just don’t know how well shite like echolocation and melons are gonna go over with the audience.”
“We have authentic footage, Mike. We don’t need to sell the public on anything.”
“I hear ya, mate. I do. And although we have authentic footage, there are still gonna be the doubters. So I don’t want to get too carried away here. Tell you what, let’s sit on the echolocation talk for now. Can you explain the blue skin?”
Marty shrugged. “Could be a form of camouflage. Makes it more difficult for predators to see them from below when they’re swimming near the surface?”
“Fuck yeah! See, that’s what you should be talkin’ about. Easily digestible stuff. Stuff people don’t have to think too hard about. What about their eyes? Why do they have yellow eyes?”
“I don’t know why they have yellow eyes, Mike.”
“What about their hair then? That merfolk had a mane on it to rival a bloody lion’s.”
“I don’t know why they have hair either. I always hypothesized that they were bald-pated.”
“Well, fuck, Double M!” Fat Mike exclaimed. “This is the kind of stuff you need to have answers for. It’s what the audience is gonna want to know. It’s what’s gonna make them believe. Make shite up if you have to. Just don’t go overboard. No echolocation, no telekinesis, none of that sci-fi shtick. Stick to the basics, keep it real, keep it sexy, and she’ll be apples.” He glanced at his diamond-encrusted Rolex. “Okay, gotta call it a wrap for today. Have another watch of the footage tonight, mate. Have a good think about explanations for things people want to know. The color of its eyes, its hair—even how it takes a fuckin’ crap. And I’ll see everyone back here bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing tomorrow mornin’.”
∆∆∆
Marty snapped awake, bathed in sweat, his pulse fast and his embarrassment acute.
I’m going to show all you assholes, all you doubters, I’m going to show you…
Chapter 15
ELSA
Elsa lay in bed, in the dark, staring at the shadow-veiled ceiling. She glanced at the glowing digital clock on the bedside table once again. 1:14 a.m. Thirty minutes since she’d last checked. Usually when she couldn’t sleep, she thought about food. Cooking was a hobby of hers, and most nights she would prepare herself small yet satisfying meals. Yesterday had been stacked eggplant parmesan. The day before that, bourbon shrimp, and the day before that…either lemon garlic salmon or beef a
nd mushroom stroganoff. She couldn’t remember. The days tended to blur together the older she got.
She began planning out the meals she would make in the coming week, but she barely got through the second one when she found herself thinking about Dr. Murdoch and his expedition tomorrow. She couldn’t possibly accompany him and his friends, could she? No, she had already declined. Besides, they were nutty, all three of them. Dr. Murdoch was brilliant but delusional, and the two women were… Elsa didn’t know. Were they delusional as well? Did they truly believe in merfolk? Or were they going along with Dr. Murdoch’s theory with a grin and a wink.
Jacqueline’s motive was clear: she wanted to write a sensational story. And she could write it with impunity. She was a journalist, not a scientist. She was simply reporting the news; she wasn’t creating it or advocating it. Regardless of the blowback the story would most certainly receive, she had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
And Radhika? What would be her motive for enabling Dr. Murdoch’s ludicrous claims? She was in a relationship with him. Loyalty then? Obligation? Dr. Murdoch was worth many millions of dollars. Perhaps there was a financial motive involved?
But what did any of that matter to Elsa? It didn’t…only it did. Because she felt an attraction to Dr. Murdoch’s theory. Yes, she thought it was ludicrous. Or at least the rational, sensible part of her did. But there was another part of her she wasn’t so well acquainted with, a youthful, wondrous part that wanted to believe that there was more to the world than meets the eye, that there were miraculous mysteries left to be discovered that defied the restrictions of reason and sensibility.
So what was she to do? Stay behind and analyze whale feces while Dr. Murdoch and company set sail on an adventure that, while doomed to failure, might actually be…fun? Or get off her ideological high horse, let her hair down for the first time in recent memory, and join them?
It should have been an easy decision. Elsa’s three years in Sri Lanka had been anything but interesting. She’d met no new friends. She’d had no romantic encounters. Her work, while important, was unremarkable and lacking the critical acclaim she’d garnered in the US.
Of course, asceticism and anonymity were precisely what she’d wanted and why she’d come to the country in the first place. She’d wanted an uninspired life because she didn’t believe she deserved to have a better one.
She’d lost that privilege when she killed her husband.
Elsa had been scuba diving in the oceans for most of her adult life, she felt at home in them, so it was only a matter of time before she was drawn to the thrill and challenge of cave diving in untouched underwater environments. Since 2010, she had participated in numerous cave survey and exploration projects across the Americas, with her work benefiting a wide range of government institutions, universities, museums, and geographic societies. In 2015 she became involved in an ambitious international diving expedition to map unexplored parts of the Huautla Cave System in Mexico, which had recently been labelled the deepest cave in the western hemisphere.
Her husband, Ron, was a fellow marine biologist and first-rate scuba diver, yet he never showed any interest following in her footsteps. He once told her, “When scuba diving in open water, you always know that by swimming up you will reach the surface. When cave diving, even if you know which way is up—it doesn’t matter. So thanks but no thanks, darling.” Nevertheless, the Mexico expedition was going to be a multi-week undertaking, Elsa had wanted Ron by her side, so she pressed him relentlessly to join the expedition until he finally relented. It had been a selfish act on her part. Cave diving was demanding and dangerous in the easiest of environments, and Huautla was anything but, as it would involve decompression dives at some of the most remote places inside the earth.
On her team’s third day underground, Elsa and Ron began what would be Ron’s fatal dive by descending seventy-five feet through a five-foot-wide shaft. At the bottom Elsa led the way along a horizontal tunnel that required her to army crawl on her elbows and knees until the tunnel opened into a huge room filled with columns and stalactites in every direction. It was only then, when she turned in the pitch-black water to share the awe-inspiring moment with Ron, that she realized he was no longer behind her. She returned through the horizontal tunnel and found him stuck in the narrowest section, entangled in the guideline that connected them both. While she was trying to free him, he began breathing quickly, which overloaded his rebreather with carbon dioxide. Switching mouthpieces at depth was extremely risky, but Elsa saw no other option and gave him a cylinder of gas to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed in his bloodstream. During the switch, Ron’s panic got the better of him, he swallowed too much water, and died within seconds before her eyes. There was no question in her mind that his death was her fault, and she had been living with that guilt—and the ghastly image of his frightened eyes in the final moments of his life—ever since.
“Oh, Ron…” she murmured to the lonely, empty room. She glanced at the clock again. 1:37 a.m.
She closed her eyes and began planning another meal in her head.
Chapter 16
MARTY
Pip went to the Mirissa post office to mail bone samples to different labs in the UK, and Marty, Rad, and Jacky visited a few shops, purchasing food and other necessities for the excursion on the Oannes. At 10 a.m. they were about to set sail when Marty spotted Elsa hurrying down the pier.
“Hello!” he called from the deck, waving to her. “Have you come to see us off?”
She stopped at the bottom of the gangway. “Good morning, Dr. Murdoch,” she said, slightly out of breath. “Actually, I’ve reconsidered your offer. I’ve decided to accompany you on your voyage, if the invitation is still open?”
“Of course it is!” he said, pleased that she had changed her mind. He noticed she was wearing a medium-sized backpack. “I see you’ve packed light?”
“I’m a simple person.”
“Well, come on aboard then. I’ll show you to your cabin.”
∆∆∆
Marty spent some time on the bridge with Pip, charting their course, before settling in front of his computer in the salon. Demon Island, he learned, was one of Sri Lanka’s eighteen national parks. Unlike the others, however, it was designated a wildlife sanctuary in 1964 and visitors were not permitted. Moreover, little scientific research had been undertaken on the island over the last two decades due to the civil war that had consumed the country. All of which meant there was little information—at least in English—about the place. Nevertheless, Marty did come across one curious story which, if true, might explain the island’s nefarious moniker. It occurred in 1703, while Sri Lanka was under Dutch colonial rule. At the time the island had been named Wormerveer, after the town in North Holland. A Dutch soldier named Jeronimus Pelgrom, stationed on the mainland, was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to spend the rest of his living days marooned on Demon Island. He was provided a tent, water, seeds, tobacco, clothing, a Bible, and writing materials. He wasn’t expected to survive six months. When soldiers returned to collect his corpse, they found him gaunt but alive, having survived by eating sea turtles and seabirds and drinking rainwater. He was also raving drunk. As a former distiller, he had learned to brew a potent spirit from the roots of a native plant. He claimed the island was cursed by God and haunted by evil spirits, and he begged the soldiers to take him back to the mainland. They did not, and the castaway Jeronimus Pelgrom was never seen alive or dead again.
When Marty checked the time, he was surprised to find that almost three hours had passed. He stood and stretched and went to the aft deck. The sun was a blistering gold disc in the blue, cloudless sky. The calm ocean appeared to stretch to infinity with not a speck of land in sight. Jacky sat at a table beneath a large straw sunhat she had purchased in a surf shop, earbuds in her ears, working on her laptop. She gave him a quick wave before resuming her work. Rad lay stretched out on a deck chair in a red bikini she’d bought at the same surf shop.
She’d slathered herself in sunscreen and was reading a Clive Cussler hardcover novel from the bookcase in the salon. The Pomeranian was curled in a ball on the deck next to her, apparently sleeping.
She looked up at him and said, “Hi, Marty. This is a great book so far. You remind me of the guy.”
He was flattered. “Dirk Pitt?”
“Of course not. He’s a tall, dark, and handsome adventurer with opaline green eyes. I mean this guy.” She showed him the back of the dust jacket, which was plastered with a photograph of the gray-haired author.
“Thanks, Rad.”
“It’s a compliment.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t tell me you’re grumpy already? It’s not even noon.”
“I’m not grumpy at all. In fact, I’m in a fantastic mood.” Which was true. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so buoyed and alive and optimistic about the future. “How are you feeling?”
“Me? Why do you ask?”
“You had a lot of champagne last night.”
“You know me better than that. I can handle anything you pour down my throat…what?”
She’d caught him looking at her throat. She wasn’t wearing a scarf today, likely because the bruises were no longer visible.
She said, “I feel like a zoo animal when you look at me like that, Marty.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything. I just noticed you weren’t wearing a scarf today.”
“You’re never going to be comfortable choking me, are you?”
Alarmed by her candor, he shot Jacky a look. She appeared oblivious to the conversation.
He said, “We’re not talking about this right now.”
“No, we never talk about it, do we? Can you take a couple of steps that way?” She waved her hand to the right.
