Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (14 page)

“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, eyes 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.

The inventor built the town a virgin.

He had objected, but the mayor, the town aldermen behind him, prevailed. They needed a virgin to make a bargain with the sea monster who hunted the waters off their coast, and they were not willing to sacrifice their daughters. And the inventor, a cripple, both guest and prisoner, knew what would happen to him if he refused. The town doctor was a cold man, all black and white with a cruel red mouth, and he would not balk if the mayor told him to take the inventor’s eyes.

The inventor was not a brave man. He made a virgin as he was told.

She was a monstrous thing, charnel and clockwork, though comely enough to look upon. Only at very close range could one observe the unyielding chill of her flesh, the mechanical regularity of her breath, the blind stone of her eyes. The darkness within her, where others had light. The inventor gave her a name, but no one ever asked him what it was.

He taught her to walk, to speak, to eat and excrete. He taught her to listen, taught her to dance.

He taught her she was a monster by the way he did not answer certain questions, by the way he did not ask certain others. By the way, when she touched him, he always withdrew and always apologized for it, fumblingly, uncomfortably.

He could not teach her to love, but he did not need to.

The mayor and the aldermen were pleased, by her silence as much as her prettiness, by her obedience as much as her virginity. They agreed, not bothering to lower their voices, not caring if she could hear them, that she was a fair and reasonable sacrifice, and at dawn on the first day of spring they took her to the cold coast, the town doctor pushing the inventor in a great wheeled wicker chair, and chained her to an ancient boulder. The town doctor pinched his fingers in the aged and rusty manacles and swore savagely.

She could not bleed, but the mayor had brought a vial of his own daughter’s blood, which he made a fussy little ceremony of pouring into the sea. Then the aldermen retreated to a safe distance, taking the inventor with them, and they waited, the aldermen passing around a flask, the inventor huddled into his chair, the virgin standing straight, unyielding, against the boulder, her blind eyes staring at the sun.

When the sun was a handspan above the horizon, the sea monster arrived, a massive creature, whiskered like a catfish, maned and mantled. Its eyes were great lamps in its ponderous skull, its teeth like scimitars. It drew itself partway out of the sea, its webbed front feet splayed against the rocky beach, and looked under its magnificent tufted eyebrows from the huddled group of men to the virgin standing straight and unyielding against the rock.

The monster leaned forward and snuffled with great dignity at the cold pale skin of her arm. She did not flinch; her breath did not catch, and her eyes continued to stare stonily ahead, unblinking.

“Harrumph,” the monster said at last, pulling its head back. “Yes. An ingenious cheat.”

“Am I?” said the virgin. Her voice revealed her nature, as harsh and unmodulated as the cry of a crow.

But the monster did not seem to mind. “Oh, yes, my poor monstrous patchwork child. Yes, indeed.”

“I
am
a virgin.”

“I’m certain that you are,” the monster said kindly. “But you aren’t a sacrifice.”

“They chained me to this rock.”

“And felt not one shred of reluctance, not one ort of regret. You are no sacrifice, for it costs them nothing to give you to me.”

“So you will not bargain with them.”

“No. I will not.”

The virgin said nothing for a time; the monster, amiable, curious, waited.

She said, abruptly as all her utterances were abrupt, “Could
I
make a bargain with you?”

“You could, for you are a virgin. But—forgive me, my dear—have you anything to sacrifice?”

“I love,” she said, in her harsh inhuman voice. “It is all I have. I would give you that.”

“Ah,” said the monster and leaned forward again, this time snuffling at her hair and face, at her blind unblinking eyes. “So you do. And if I took this love, what would you want in return?”

“I want to be free,” she said, and although there was no emotion in her voice or on her face, the monster smelled her fierceness all the same. “I want to be free of this town and those men and the purpose I was made for. I want to be free of the one who made me.”

“The one you love.”

“He will never love me back. And if he who made me cannot love me, I should not love.”

“That, I think, is not true. But your love for him is a worthy sacrifice. Is this what you want, my dear?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I want to be free.”

“Very well,” the monster said, and it dug its claws into the rocky beach, lowered its head, and arched the tremendous length of its tail out of the water, and then, as swift as the blade of a guillotine, brought it down.

The virgin and her rock and the cliff and the men standing on it were drenched, but what mattered was the earthquake that answered a long moment later, a sullen grumbling grinding voracious snarl that split the cliff asunder beneath the inventor’s great wheeled wicker chair and ran thence, creating a jagged, parlous canyon, to the town and to the town hall and to the cramped back room where the inventor had lived and had taught the virgin to live as well.

In the aftermath, the virgin stood, still pale and unyielding, her wrists still manacled but chained to nothing. And walking up the beach toward her was a young-old man, dressed gorgeously in silks the colors of the sea and sun, with a wild white mane of hair, tremendous tufted eyebrows, and mustaches like those of a catfish. His eyes were great inhuman lamps, though the virgin, of course, could not see them.