Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (30 page)

“I should ask for a refund of the price of admission,” she mutters. Then, rather more loudly, so that anyone else nearby might hear, she says, “You should
all
ask for your money back.” And, to herself, Cala adds, “I should notify the law, that’s what I
should
do.”

Increasingly embarrassed that she, even for one moment, feared her vivid dreams were anything more tangible than any dream, or the arrival of the carnival any more than a coincidence, she walks past a number of other “exhibits” arranged beneath the tent. There is a fossilized whale vertebra, almost big as a pickle barrel, of the sort long known to anatomists and students of bygone eras as
Zeuglodon cetoides,
generally found by cotton farmers while plowing their fields in Alabama and Mississippi. Here, though, the backbone is claimed to have come from the GREAT AMERICAN SEA SERPENT “HYDRARCHOS,” sighted in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1817, and, earlier, in the cold waters off Cape Ann in 1639. Farther along, past the vertebra and any number of peculiar fishes and invertebrata floating in corked jars of formaldehyde, and protected inside a locked display case, is something like a golden tiara or crown, tall towards the front, and with a very pronounced and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a freakishly elliptical skull. Adorned with an assortment of geometrical and marine designs, the tiara’s plaque reports that it was recovered from a now-extinct cannibal tribe at some undisclosed location in the South Seas. And all this time, there are other men and women (though mostly men), and occasionally she speaks to one of them, explaining the more likely identity or origin of some specimen or artefact. Cala Weatherall has never thought that a lack of education or of a well-nurtured intellect should be an excuse for gullibility. From time to time, her whispered explanations (whispered, for several people have dared to
shush
her) are interrupted by sudden splashing sounds, like water sloshing about in a container of some sort or the tail of an otter or beaver slapping the surface of a pond. And that sound is something else from her four-times recurrent dream, the dream which was emphatically not a nightmare, and even as the sound seems to draw her forward through the ill-lit maze of this rough and mismatched collection, she pushes her
conscious
awareness of the splashing away, away and down.

“If they are all fakes,” one man asks her, “why hasn’t someone put a stop to this?”

“Likely as not, Sir,” she replies, ignoring another of the sudden swashing noises, “whoever runs this racket paid off the relevant authorities well ahead of time, to prevent just such an interruption of commerce.”

The man cocks one bushy greying eyebrow, at least appearing to look shocked at what she’s just said. “My word, woman,” he scowls. “We
elect
these people. Our taxes pay their salaries. We must surely not be quite so cynical as all that.” And then he goes back to examining the barnacle-encrusted iron anchor supposed to have come from the
Argo
of Grecian myth. She patiently explains to the gentleman that the barnacles are of a genus not found anywhere in the Mediterranean, though quite common along the western coasts of Mexico, but he only harrumphs and says something rude about women no longer knowing their proper place. Cala lets it go, as she’s heard far worse in her days, and is accustomed and, to a degree, dulled to the narrow opinions of such men.

“I only
thought
– mistakenly, I will concede – that you’d want to know the truth of the matter,” she murmurs, and quickly steps past the
Argo
anchor exhibit and through yet another curtain, this one comprised of innumerable small glass beads the colour of sea foam and thunderstorms, strung along dangling lengths of silk twine. This area seems even colder than those previous sections of the labyrinth, but somewhat brighter, too, and she pauses, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the unexpected glare. The air here is markedly more dank, and smells particularly, almost overwhelmingly, briny. So strong is the odor, Cala might be standing at the very edge of the sea. Around her, the canvas walls are washed with a reflected, coruscating light, and in only a few seconds more she sees the source of both the saltwater smell and the constantly shifting rays playing across the tent’s walls. At first, squinting at and into the enormous aquarium standing before her – thick glass and a rusty cast-iron framework, a chugging pump to keep the water oxygenated and filtered of detritus – she expects to see nothing more remarkable than a pair of trained seals or, possibly instead, some grim variety of devilfish or giant squid to appall and startle these people who have never known the ocean and its inhabitants.

But the tank does not contain trained seals.

Nor an octopus or squid.

For a time, Cala stands quite still, staring, disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes, willing herself not to draw any obvious conclusions or connections with the dreams, for too frequently, she knows, are we deceived by that which seems so perfectly obvious to our senses. The thing in the tank, she reasons, must certainly be an automaton, an admirably cunning clockwork, impermeable to moisture, but not so unlike the mastodons and doves in the afternoon’s parade along East Evens Avenue. The acquisition of such a device is clearly not beyond the resources of the carnival, and if it
is
only mechanical, then there remains but the niggling issue of coincidence to address. Despite her pounding heart and the sweat slicking her palms and upper lip, she is very near to dismissing it, this absurd fairy-tale chimera peering back at her from the aquarium, its head and shoulders held above the slopping surface, the rest coiled below the waterline. But then it opens its mouth and speaks, and that voice is so exquisite, and so familiar, that Cala Weatherall believes she might well scream, and never mind who would hear or what they would think.

“So long, girl,” the thing in the tank sighs, its voice rolling, tumbling, rushing through the tent like breakers before an incoming tide. “So very, very long have I waited for this night, hauled across time and these death-dry lands, through arid wilderness and the smoldering, unseeing cities of men.”

“No,” Cala says, but the word is not meant as a response, only as a personal statement of her disbelief, spoken aloud for her own benefit. There is still no reason, beyond the coincidence of her recurring dream, to suppose the thing in the tank is not a hoax, and that its voice does not originate, for instance, from a woman sequestered somewhere behind the tank. Probably, she speaks into a small brass horn attached to a length of tubing, and her voice emerges from the mechanized rubber lips of the melusine.

“They
said
that you would be the Skeptic,” the thing responds, not knowing that Cala was not speaking to it (for what sane woman
talks
to an automaton).

“They,” Cala says, repeating what the thing has said, though still not speaking
to
it.

“My dear sisters,” it replies, “Palatyne and Melior. They each, in turn, warned that, in the end, all my searching would yield only so much dubiety and fleer.”

“I have seen many a clever puppet show,” Cala says, and this time she realizes that she is answering the thing in the tank. “I did not always see the strings or the puppeteers, but I never doubted the performers were only marionettes.”

“You do not strike me as the sort to attend a puppet show,” the melusine replies. “Which is a shame, I think.”

Cala Weatherall glances uneasily back the way she’s come, and there’s the curtain of glass beads, still swaying slightly, softly clicking and clacking against each other. She looks back at the aquarium tank, still clinging as ferociously to her disbelief as any caterwauling Baptist minister ever clung to his King James Bible. The thing in the tank has the appearance of a very pale and beautiful woman from the hips up. Its skin has a disquieting iridescent quality, almost opalescent in this light. Its perfectly wrought hands have no nails, but end in sharp, recurved, and chitinous claws at the tip of each long finger, and its eyes are the yellow of the yolk from a chicken’s egg. Its small breasts are shamelessly bare, though Cala notes that it has no visible nipples, and so she wonders, absently, at the utility of breasts so ill-equipped for nursing. A sculptor’s fancy or accidental imperfection, and likely nothing more. She dares to take one step nearer, seeking other flaws in the design. The melusine’s long straight hair hangs in sodden strands about its mother-of-pearl shoulders, black as a freshly-exposed vein of coal. Only, on closer inspection, there are what appear to be dozens of fleshy tendrils writhing within those sable tresses, no bigger around than a lead pencil. Its sharp teeth flash when it mimics speech, and they are almost identical to those of certain lamniform sharks known to ichthyologists as sand tigers, row upon row anchored in gums the bruised colour of ripening elderberries.

“I know your lonely nights, Cala,” the melusine tells her. “I have watched you, at your window, envying the couples passing by.”

“Enough,” Cala replies angrily, for there are limits to what any woman must endure, even in well-meaning jest, and this jest has long since transcended the boundaries of propriety. “I do not know how you people learned my name,” she says, not speaking to the thing in the tank, but to whatever unseen actress speaks its lines. “Though I doubt it was so very difficult. You must have numerous marks each time you enter a new town.”

“And we know your dreams?” the melusine asks, as its scaly, serpentine tails coil and uncoil beneath that human torso. It cocks its head to one side, waiting for an answer, and the small flukes at the ends of its tails slap the surface of the water. “Pray thee, tell how it is we might accomplish that feat?”

For the span of several heartbeats, Cala does not reply, transfixed not only by the power of the thing’s question, but by the rhythmic, almost hypnotic, smack of those silvery-green flukes.
Yes,
she thinks.
Hypnosis, mesmerism, autosuggestion, these must be part of the deception. Turning my own mind against me to achieve this effect.

“Yes,” the melusine says. “Hypnosis, mesmerism, autosuggestion, these must be part of the deception. Turning your own mind against you to achieve this effect.”

Cala Weatherall gasps, and takes another step towards the tank. “It cannot be,” she says. “It’s impossible.”

“Why?” asks the thing in the tank. “Because you have not been taught that it is so? I have not come so far, across gulfs of time and space, merely to deceive a lonely, dissatisfied woman. What bitter daemon has taken hold of the world of men that it no longer trusts its own eyes and its own ears?”

“Ours is an enlightened age,” Cala says, but her voice is hardly audible now, a half whisper as she steps still nearer to the aquarium tank. “Not an age of ignorance and superstition. Not an age of sirens and mermaids and sea monsters.”

“And neither is it an age in which a woman who is brilliant and enterprising, but whose heart does not seek a
man,
can hope for the balm of love or even of a soul mate’s companionship? Did you also sell your heart, Cala Weatherall, when you sold off your imagination? Is there remaining now no way ever that I may comfort thee?”

“It simply is not
possible,
” Cala whispers, meaning only the existence of this creature and not to answer its question. And she realizes, if only distantly, that she has begun to weep, and, whether from sympathy or mockery, the melusine has begun to weep as well.

“It says, you must be brilliant, indeed, if your mind contains a catalog of all those things possible and all those things that are not.”

“They were dreams.
Only
dreams. I have never even dared to hope.”

“A mighty daemon, indeed, that it leads a woman to fear even the meager solace of
hope.
”

Now Cala is standing so near the tank that she might easily extend a hand to reach out and touch the melusine’s strange, restless hair and pearly skin. And she sees, for the first time, a small and tarnished brass plaque bolted to the tank, which reads simply
Le Fontaine de Soif.

“It
is
so, is it not?” the melusine asks, seeing that Cala’s read the plaque on the aquarium. “You are so terribly thirsty, like a woman lost and wandering in an endless desert.” And then the creature ventures the faintest of smiles, and one glistening arm slides out over the rim of the tank towards her.

“It
is
so,” Cala confesses to the beast. “I am so alone. I am so lost, so terribly alone. And you…you are more beautiful times ten than anything I have ever looked upon with waking eyes.” She starts to take the melusine’s hand, recalling again details of her vivid dreams – the wordless embraces in lightless, submerged halls formed of coral and the carved ribs of leviathans. Already, she knows the taste of the melusine’s thin pink lips, the feel of those vicious teeth upon her skin, the unspeakable pleasure of the faerie’s mouth and hands and those appendages for which men have not ever devised names moving upon her and probing deeply within her.

“It is such a small thing, belief,” the melusine tells her. “It is no more than taking my hand.”

And then, in the last fraction of an instant before Cala
does
accept that proffered hand, there is a violent hissing, and a loud
pop,
and all at once the smell of ozone and hot metal, of stripped gears and melting polymers fills the air inside the tent, pushing back the salty, primordial smells of the ocean and of birth and death and love. The thing in the tank shudders and then goes limp, and steam begins to rise from the water in the aquarium. Somewhere nearby, she hears a woman, a woman with a voice like the melusine’s, cursing, and a man begins to shout. Cala lets her arm drop to her side, and her eyes linger only a few seconds longer on the ruined automaton, before she turns and silently makes her way out of the tent and back out into the muggy summer night and the hullabaloo of Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels. The next day, after a few hours of fitful sleep, she will discover the jimmied lock on her dresser drawer and the missing diary wherein she recorded all her secret thoughts and desires and dreams. And there will remain unanswered questions, but she will not ever ask them. There is too much work to be done, a job that fifty men, fifty men easy, would be happy to take if she were to fail. There are calculations to make and orders to be filled, and if in the empty stretches of her nights, she sometimes finds herself far below the churning surface of the sea, beloved and belonging in those sunken corridors, these are things she keeps forever to herself and never again commits to the fickle confidences of ink and paper.