by Liz Kessler
I held my breath as the shark passed by.
As I drew nearer to the prison, the water grew darker. Dodging between rocks and weeds, I finally reached the prison door. It looked like the wide-open mouth of a gigantic whale, with sharp white teeth filling the gap. In front of the door, two creatures silently glided from side to side, slow and mean, with a beady eye on each side of their mallet-shaped heads. Hammerhead sharks.
I’d never get past them. Maybe there was another entrance.
I remembered the note in Dad’s file. “East Wing,” it had said. It was a shame there wasn’t one of those You are here signs, like you get at the mall.
I figured I’d been heading west since I’d set off from Brightport, because I’d been chasing the setting sun all the way. Shona and I had turned right from the boat to head toward the reef, which meant I should now be facing north.
I turned right again to go east. In front of me was a long tunnel attached to the main cave. It reminded me of those service stations on the highway — the kind on the median that join the two sides together. Apart from the fact that this was made of rock, that is, and it didn’t appear to have any windows, and was about fifty feet under the sea. The East Wing?
Swimming carefully from one lump of coral to another and hiding behind every rock I could find, I made it to the tunnel. But there was no entrance. I swam all the way along it, right to the end. Still no opening.
The front gate must be the only way in. I’d come this far for nothing! There was no way I’d get past those sharks.
I started to swim back along the other side of the tunnel. Perhaps there’d be a doorway on this side.
But as I made my way along the slimy walls, I heard a swishing noise behind me. The sharks! Without stopping to think, I flicked my tail and zoomed straight down the side so I was underneath the tunnel itself. Pressing myself up against the wall, I wrapped a huge piece of seaweed around my body. Two hammerheads sliced past without stopping, and I inched my way back up again, scaling the edge with my hands and looking around me all the way. A minute later, I noticed something I hadn’t seen earlier. There was a gap. I could see an oval shape about half my height and slightly wider than my shoulders with three thick, gray bars running down it. They looked like whalebone. The nearest thing I’d found to a way in — it had to be worth a try.
I tugged at the bars. Rock solid. I tried to swim between them. I could get my head through, but my shoulders were too big to follow. This wasn’t going to work.
Unless I swam through on my side. . . .
I tried again, coming at the bars sideways. But it was no good. I couldn’t squeeze my face through the gap. I never realized my nose stuck out that much!
I held on to the bars, flicking my tail as I thought. Then it hit me. How could I have been so stupid? I turned to face them. Just like before, I edged my head through the bars, as slowly and carefully as I could. All I needed to do now was flip onto my side and pull the rest of my body through.
But what if I got stuck — my head on one side, my body on the other, caught forever with my neck in these railings?
Before I had time to talk myself out of it, I swiveled my body onto its side. I banged my chin, and my neck rubbed on the bars — but I’d done it! I swished my tail as gently as possible and gradually eased my body through the gap.
I thought back to the time when we were changing to go swimming and how I hadn’t wanted anyone to see my skinny body. Maybe being a little sticklike wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.
I rubbed my eyes as I got used to the darkness. I’d landed in a tiny round bubble of a room, full of seaweed mops hanging on fish hooks all around me.
I swam to the door and turned a yellow knob. The door creaked open. Which way? The corridor was a long, narrow cave. Closing the door behind me, I noticed a metal plate in the top corner. NW: N 874. North Wing? I must have gotten my calculations wrong!
I swam along the silent corridor, passing closed doors on either side. N 867, N 865. Each one was the same — a big round plate of metal, like a submarine door; a brass knob below a tiny round window in the center. No glass, just fishbone bars dividing each window into an empty game of tic-tac-toe.
Should I look through one?
As I approached the next door, I swished up to the window and peeked in. A merman with a huge hairy stomach and long black hair in a ponytail swam over to the window. “Can I help you?” he asked, an amused glint in his eye. He had a ship tattooed on his arm; a fat brown tail flickered behind him.
“Sorry!” I flipped myself over and darted away. This was impossible! I wasn’t even in the right wing. And there were scary criminals behind those doors! Which was only to be expected, I suppose. This was a prison, after all.
Suddenly, I heard a swooshing noise. Hammerheads! Coming nearer. I flicked my tail as hard as I could and swam to the end of the corridor. I had to get around the bend before they saw me!
With one last push of my tail, I zoomed around the corner — into an identical tunnel.
Identical except for one thing. The numbers all started with E. The East Wing!
I swam carefully up to the first door. E 924. I tried to remember the number from that note in Mr. Beeston’s files. Why hadn’t I written it down?
An old merman with a beard and a raggedy limp tail was inside the cell, facing away from me. I moved on. E 926, E 928. Would I ever find him?
Just then, two mallet-shaped heads appeared around the corner. I hurled myself up against the next door, frantically twisting the brass knob. To my amazement, it wasn’t locked! The door swung open. Banking on the odds that whoever occupied it would be less scary than the sharks, I backed into the room and quietly shut the door. The whooshing noise came past the moment I’d closed it. I leaned my head against the door in relief.
“That was a lucky escape.”
Who said that? I swung around to see a merman sitting on the edge of a bed made of seaweed. He was leaning over a small table and seemed to be working on something, his sparkly purple tail flickering gently.
I looked at him, but I didn’t move from the door. He appearead to put the end of a piece of thread in his mouth and then tied a knot in the other end.
“Got to keep myself busy somehow,” he said somewhat apologetically.
I slunk around the edges of the bubble-shaped room, still keeping my distance. The thread he was sewing with looked as if it was made of gold, with beads of some kind strung on it in rainbow colors.
“You’re making a necklace?”
“Bracelet, actually. Got a problem with that?” The merman looked up for the first time, and I backed away instinctively. Don’t make fun of criminals whose cells you’ve just barged into, I told myself. Never a good idea if you’re planning to get out again in one piece.
Except he didn’t look like a criminal. Not how I usually imagine a criminal to look, anyway. He didn’t look mean and hard. And he was making jewelry. He had short black hair, kind of wavy, a tiny ring in one ear. A white vest with a blue prison jacket over it. His tail sparkled as much as the bracelet. As I looked at him, he ran his hand through his hair. There was something familiar about the way he did it, although I couldn’t think what. I twiddled with my hair as I tried to —
I looked harder at him. As he squinted back at me, I noticed a tiny dimple appear below his left eye.
It couldn’t be . . .
The merman put his bracelet down and slithered off his bed. I backed away again as he came toward me. “I’ll scream,” I said.
He stared at me. I stared back.
“How in the sea did you find me?” he said, in a different kind of voice from earlier. This one sounded like he had molasses blocking up his throat or something.
I looked into his face. Deep brown eyes. My eyes.
“Dad?” a tiny voice squeaked from over the other side of the cell somewhere. It might have been mine.
The merman rubbed his eyes. Then he hit himself on the side of the head. “I knew it w
ould happen one day,” he said, to himself more than me. “No one does time in this place without going a little bit crazy.” He turned away from me. “I’m dreaming, that’s all.”
But then he turned back around. “Pinch me,” he said, swimming closer. I recoiled a little.
“Pinch me,” he repeated.
I pinched him, and he jumped back. “Youch! I didn’t say pull my skin off.” He rubbed his arm and looked up at me again. “So you’re real?” he said.
I nodded.
He swam in a circle around me. “You’re even more beautiful than I’d dreamed,” he said. “And I’ve dreamed about you a lot, I can tell you.”
I still couldn’t speak.
“I never wanted you to see me in this place.” He swam around his cell, quickly putting his jewelry things away. He picked up some magazines off the floor and shoved them into a crack in the wall; he threw a vest under his bed. “No place for a young girl.”
Then he swam back and came really close to me; he held his hand up to my face, and I forced myself not to move.
He cradled the side of my face in his palm, stroking my dimple with his thumb, and wiped the tears away as they mingled with the seawater.
“Emily,” he whispered at last. It was him. My dad!
A second later, I clutched him as tightly as I could, and he was holding me in his strong arms. “A mermaid as well,” he murmured into my hair.
“Only some of the time,” I said.
“Figures.”
He loosened his arms and held me away from him. “Where’s your mother?” he asked suddenly. “Is she here? Is she all right?” He dropped his arms to his sides. “Has she met someone else?”
I inched closer to him. “Of course she hasn’t met anyone else!”
“My Penny.” He smiled.
“Penny?”
“My lucky penny. That’s what I always called her. Guess it wasn’t too accurate in the end.” Then he smiled. “But she hasn’t forgotten me?”
“Um . . .” How was I supposed to answer that! “She still loves you.” Well, she did, didn’t she? She must, or she wouldn’t have been so upset when she remembered everything. “And she hasn’t really forgotten you — at least, not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“Listen, I’ll tell you everything.” And I did. I told him about the memory drugs and Mr. Beeston and about what had happened when I took Mom to Rainbow Rocks. And about our journey to the Great Mermer Reef.
“So she’s here?” he broke in. “She’s that close, right now?”
I nodded. He flattened his hair down, spun around in circles, and swam away from me.
“Dad.” Dad! I still couldn’t get used to that. “She’s waiting for me. She can’t get into the prison.” I followed him over to his table. “She can’t swim,” I added softly.
He burst out laughing as he turned to face me. “Can’t swim? What are you talking about? She’s the smoothest, sleekest swimmer you could find — excluding mermaids, of course.”
My mom? A smooth, sleek swimmer? I laughed.
“I guess that disappeared along with the memory,” he said sadly. “We swam all over. She even took scuba lessons so she could join me underwater. We went to that old shipwreck. That’s where I proposed, you know.”
“She definitely still loves you,” I said again, thinking of the poem and even more sure now.
“Yeah.” He swam over to the table by his bed. I followed him.
“What’s that?” I asked. There was something pinned onto the wall with a fish hook. A poem.
“That’s mine,” he said miserably.
“‘The Forsaken Merman’?” I read. I scanned the lines, not really taking any of it in — until I came to one stanza that made me gasp out loud. A ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl.
“But that’s, but that’s —”
“Yeah, I know. Soppy old stuff, isn’t it?”
“No! I know those lines.”
Jake looked up at me. “Have you been to that shipwreck yourself, little ’un?”
I nodded. “Shona took me. My friend. She’s a mermaid.”
“And your mother?”
“No — she doesn’t even know I’ve been there.”
Jake dropped his head.
“But she knows those lines!” I said.
I pulled the poem off the wall, reading on. “She left lonely forever the kings of the sea,” I said out loud.
“That’s how it ends,” he said.
“But it’s not!”
“Not what?”
“That’s not how it ends!”
“It does; look here.” Jake swam over, took the poem from me. “Those are the last lines.”
I snatched it back. “But that’s not how your story ends! She never left the king of the sea!”
Jake scratched his head. “You’ve lost me now.”
“The King of the Sea. That’s our boat! That’s what it’s called.”
His eyes went all misty like Mom’s had earlier. “So it is, love. I remember when we renamed it. I forget what her father had called it before that. But you see —”
“And she could never leave it! She told me that. And now I know why. Because it’s you! She could never leave you! You’re not the forsaken merman at all!”
Jake laughed. “You really think so?” Then he pulled me close again. He smelled of salt. His chin was bristly against my forehead.
“Look — you’ll need to go soon,” he said, holding me away from him.
“But I’ve only just found you!”
“The dinner bell is about to ring, and we need to get you out of here. I don’t know how you got your way into this place, little gem, but you sure as sharks don’t want to get caught here. Might never get out again.”
“Don’t you want me?”
He held my hands and looked deep into my eyes, locking us into a world of our own. “I want you alive,” he said. “I want you free, and happy. I don’t want you slammed up in some stupid place like this for the rest of your life.”
“I’ll never see you again,” I said sadly.
“We’ll find a way, little gem.” I liked how he called me that. “Come on,” he said, looking quickly from side to side. “We need to get you out of here.” He opened his door and looked down into the corridor.
“How come you can do that?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be locked up in here?”
He pointed to a metal tag stapled to the end of his tail.
“Does that hurt?”
“Keeps me in my place. If I take it across the threshold”— he pointed at the doorway —“and I know what I’m talking about — it’s like being slammed between two walls.”
“You tried it?”
He rubbed his head as though he’d just bashed it. “Not to be advised, I tell you.”
I giggled. “Why have doors then?”
He shrugged. “Extra security — they lock ’em at night.” He swam back toward me. “You understand, don’t you?”
“I think so.” I suddenly remembered Mr. Beeston’s words, how he said my dad ran off because he didn’t want to be saddled with a baby. But Mr. Beeston had lied about everything. Hadn’t he?
“What is it, little ’un?”
I looked down at my tail, flicking rapidly from side to side. “You didn’t leave because . . . It’s not that you didn’t want me back then?” I said.
“What?” He suddenly swam over to his bed. I’d totally scared him off. I wished I could take the words back.
He reached under the bed. “Look at this.” He pulled a pile of plastic papers out. “Take a look. Any of them.”
I approached him shyly. “Go on,” he urged. “Have a look.” He passed me one. It was a poem. I read it aloud.
I never thought I’d see the day,
They’d take my bonny bairn away.
I long-ed for her every day.
Alas, she is so far away.
“Yeah, well, it was an early one,” he said, pul
ling at his ear. “There’s better than that in here.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the poem. “You . . .”
“Yeah, I know. Jewelery, poetry. What next, eh?” He made a face.
But before I could say anything else, a bell started ringing. It sounded like the school fire alarm. I clapped my hands over my ears.
“That’s it. Dinner. They’ll be here soon.” He grabbed me. “Emily. You have to go.”
“Can I keep it?” I asked.
He folded the poem up and handed it back to me. Then he held my arms tightly. “I’ll find you,” he said roughly. “One day, I promise.”
He swirled around, picked up the bracelet from his bedside table, and quickly tied a knot in it. “Give this to your mother. Tell her —” He paused. “Just tell her, no matter what happens, I never stopped loving her, and I never will. Ever. You hear me?”
I nodded, my throat too clogged up to speak. He hugged me one last time before swirling around again. “Hang on.” He pulled the poem off his wall and handed it to me. “Give her this as well, and tell her — tell her to keep it till we’re together again. Tell her to never forsake me.”
“She won’t, Dad. Neither of us will. Ever.”
“I’ll find you,” he said again, his voice croaky. “Now go.” He pushed me through the door. “Be quick. And be careful.”
I edged down into the corridor and held his eyes for a second. “See you, Dad,” I whispered. Then he closed the door and was gone.
I wavered for a moment in the empty corridor. The bell was still shrieking — it was even louder outside the cell. I covered my ears, flicked my tail, and got moving: back along the corridors, into the cleaning cupboard, through the tiny hole, out across the murky darkness, until I found the tunnel again.
Shona was waiting at the end of it, just like she’d said she would be. We fell into each other’s arms and laughed as we hugged each other. “I was so worried,” she said. “You were gone ages.”
“I found him,” I said simply.
“Swishy!” she breathed.
“Tell you all about it on the way. Come on.” I was desperate to see Mom. I couldn’t wait to see her face when I gave her Dad’s presents.
