Midnight Dolphin (11 page)

Megan
approached the counter by the entrance. Just as she got close Megan
noticed a trolley piled up with old and tattered books. It had a
sign on top written in biro which said ‘Old stock for sale.
Tuppence each.’ The librarian was busy talking to someone and while
she waited Megan, glanced idly at the pile of books. They were
obviously throwing out the old and worn out books that no one
wanted to read anymore. There, amongst books with split spines and
torn pages she found a dust cover that had become detached from the
actual book on which was written ‘A description of the Lives of the
Inhabitants of the County of Cornwall’ by Jeremiah Smith. Megan
desperately hunted for the book that corresponded to the dust
jacket she had just found. All she could find was half the book.
The last hundred pages or so and index seemed nowhere to be
found.

Megan felt a
knot of excitement in the pit of her stomach. She took the dust
cover and the remaining half of the book up to the counter and
offered the librarian two pence in payment.

‘
You don’t
want to waste your money on that’ said the middle-aged lady
sympathetically. ‘That should have been thrown out with the
rubbish.’

‘
No really I
do’ replied Megan, worried suddenly that the librarian would not
allow her to buy it.

‘
Well you can
just have that one if you really want it’ the librarian went on.
‘It’s certainly not worth tuppence.’

Delighted,
Megan took her prize outside into the sunshine. There was a bench
just across the road and Megan sat down to read. The Reverend
Jeremiah Smith had written his book sometime in the mid-nineteenth
century but Megan seemed to have a reprint from the early nineteen
fifties. The words were crowded close together on the pages which
were yellowed and dusty. There was no index to consult because that
was in the missing part of the book and the chapter titles gave
little clue as to where she could find out about dolphin-children
because they simply referred to different towns or villages in the
county. All Megan could do was to leaf through the book and hope
that she would spot something interesting. She found the style of
writing old fashioned and stuffy.

Flicking
through, Megan came across the chapter concerning Merwater towards
the back.

‘
I will now
record the accounts of dolphins and their strange connection with
the inhabitants of Merwater. Though having the appearance of fish,
dolphins are mammals and must breathe air if they are to survive.
They may remain submersed in the sea for several minutes, however
observations suggest that they must resurface again to take in air
through their blow hole.

Several
fishermen of the parish claim that in the time of their
great-grandfathers, dolphin and fishermen alike cooperated
together. It is said that the fishermen would arrange their nets in
the shallow waters of a cove named Coxcomb Reach at low tide. I
interrogated a retired mariner by the name of Tobias Griffin, a
grizzled fellow with neither teeth nor hair. He claimed quite
resolutely that the dolphins would drive shoals of herring from the
high sea into Coxcomb Reach, whereupon the people from the cottages
along the Reach would lift up their nets and trap the herring in
the shallow waters, from which point they could easily be gathered
in. He claimed that the fisher-folk would return a fifth of the
catch to the waiting dolphins and that by this method both parties
gained mutual benefit from this unusual practice.

I challenged
Mariner Griffin’s account, asking how these sea creatures and man
could possibly reach such an accord. He said that he did not know
but that this had occurred for several generations until the land
behind Coxcomb Reach was enclosed and the cottages cleared to make
way for farming. He claimed that this ancient knowledge was lost
when the cottage folk were dispersed.

I considered
it to be clearly fanciful to suggest that one of God’s creatures
from the sea could communicate with humans in this manner. However
this is not the only account of cooperation between man and this
beast of the waves.There are many rhymes handed down from parent to
child within the parish that attest to such a link. One such rhyme,
the origin of which appears lost, is told as follows:

The dolphin
shall come from May to September

Then you my
sweetheart will be all I remember;

Come away
back from your home on the waves

And stand by
my side as I weep at your grave

There are
several accounts of children falling under the thrall of dolphins.
A boy named Arthur Trescothick is said to have swum with dolphins
regularly until his twelfth year. According to accounts a girl by
the name of Mary Glendow and three dolphins saved eight men from
rocks of Widows Point when their vessel foundered and sank in a
storm in the year eighteen nineteen. She continued to swim with
dolphins until her thirteenth year when the muse left her. A Gideon
Belcher was last sighted aged ten on the back of a dolphin and
never returned to his family. He is said to have disappeared two
years before my arrival in this parish in eighteen forty five. In
the celebrated story of Susan Penhaligon, which I shall return to
in the next chapter, this young girl led a group of her equally
juvenile but deluded followers to a watery grave.

The common
factor in such accounts is that when the association with dolphins
did not lose the child its life, dolphins ceased to have any hold
over children by their twelfth or thirteenth year.

The clergy of
the local parishes preach against such unnatural infatuations from
their pulpits and strive to stamp out these last vestiges of
superstition and ungodly ways. However it is said that in every
generation of children from Merwater there will be at least two
so-called ‘Children of the Mer’, or ‘Dolphin-Children’ and the
stories still persist to the present day.’

Megan looked
up from the yellowed page. ‘
That’s what I
am
’ she thought to herself. She returned
to the book.

‘
I have
determined to trace and interview a dolphin-child myself however
whether by dint of my calling or because of a natural reticence of
the parishioners, my quest has so far proved
unsuccessful….
’

Megan turned
over the page to read on, but found to her dismay that several
pages had fallen out and the next page that she came to was a
description of local folk songs. She continued to flick back and
forth through the book but Megan could find no other references to
dolphins. Even as she did so more pages came loose from the spine
and she had to bend down to pick up a couple that had fluttered
down to the ground beneath her. The remnants of the book were
literally falling apart in her hands as she looked at
it.

It was
tantalising to sit there holding the Reverend Jeremiah Smith’s
book, yet Megan felt that its discovery was of very little help to
her. This book was evidently written and published before the
Reverend had found out anything about the girl who retained her
gift as a dolphin-child into her fifteenth year, as he had
mentioned in his journal. If he found out anything more it was
certainly not recorded here. Megan passed half an hour making notes
in her diary until, glancing up she realised that the bench she was
sitting on would soon slip into shadow.

There was one
respect in which reading the Reverend Smith’s book really struck
her though; she was not alone. There had clearly been many
Dolphin-Children over the years and he had written that one or two
were born in each generation. To know that other children had
experienced the same joy as her comforted Megan; yet knowing that
they all lost their gift did not. She needed to find out what was
the secret of that fifteen year old girl all those decades ago.
Megan sat there, staring at the open page of her book as if by
doing so she would suddenly receive inspiration.

‘
Oh hi there
Megan’ came a voice above her head. Megan looked up from the page
she had been looking at. Looking down at her was the friendly
smiling face of Rachel, the girl from Owl Books. ‘What are you up
to then?’ she asked.

It was a green
windswept sea that the pod swam in that morning. Spray was blown up
from the restless waves which ran with foamed tips towards the
distant shore.

‘
Strange
weather’ observed Storm as they swam along. ‘I sense that something
is going to happen, but I simply cannot say what it might
be.’

Everyone in
the pod felt unsettled and there was a sense of disquiet within the
small group. They lapsed into silence. Only Summer sang comforting
words to her calf No-Name, who though bigger, was still an infant
at his mothers’ side. Eventually the winds calmed, and the pod
rested awhile.

‘
Do you ever
wonder what it’s like to be on land?’ Dancer asked Spirit
thoughtfully. Spirit was only half surprised by the
question.

‘
You’re
thinking about Lucy again aren’t you?’ he replied. Dancer nodded.
‘Yes I often try to imagine what living on the land must be like’
Spirit continued, ‘you know when you swim over a shallow sea bed
near the shore, and you see a crab scuttling along the sand from
one rock to the next? Well I imagine that humans scuttle over land
in the same way that crabs scuttle over the sand.’

‘
It would be
funny if humans walked along sideways like crabs do’ laughed
Dancer.

‘
Once I had a
dream that I was floating in the air above the land and looking
down on the greenness below over the, you know, trees and things. I
saw the long black paths that humans like to follow and those metal
things that they like to travel in. It felt so strange, I was glad
when I woke up again.’

‘
What are you
two up to?’ asked Star-Gazer swimming up to them. Spirit turned to
face her.

‘
Oh just
talking about dreams and things’ Spirit replied. Spirit had a
strange feeling that ever since his mother had returned to them,
she had been both happy and sad at the same time. It wasn’t the
same as before she had been taken away from them. He could not turn
back time though. ‘What do you dream about?’ he asked
her.

‘
You know me’
she replied. ‘I dream about swimming between the stars and chasing
meteors back to the earth. I dream about you when you were just a
newly born calf. I look at Summer and No-Name and all those
memories come flooding back to me.’

They talked
for a while longer and then Star-Gazer swam back over to Summer to
chat to her.

It was then
that Spirit felt a strange sensation run through his body. Dancer
felt it too. It was a feeling that he thought he was beginning to
forget. As they both watched, the swirls and eddies of the current
seemed to coalesce into a human form, then before they knew it,
there was Lucy floating in the water in front of them.

‘
Lucy!’ called
Spirit happily. ‘It’s so good to see you.’ Lucy turned her head
slowly to look at them both.

‘
Hello Spirit,
hello Dancer’ she smiled. Spirit looked at Lucy. She had come to
them as an apparition, but her body was encased in a dark blue swim
suit but her arms and legs were pink and bare. Her loose hair
floated around her in a cloud.

‘
How are you
Lucy?’ asked Spirit. ’I’ve missed you.’ Lucy looked around her with
a distracted air.

‘
I don’t
really know how I am’ she replied absently. ‘I was in the swimming
pool …. Then I was here…’ Lucy trailed off. Spirit didn’t
understand.

‘
What do you
mean Lucy? What brought you here this time? It’s been so long.’
Spirit knew that when she came to him normally, Lucy glided along
in a very purposeful way. This time Lucy was just hanging there in
the water and she hardly seemed to know what she was doing with her
arms and legs.

‘
Spirit’
whispered Dancer. ‘She’s sinking.’ Dancer was right. As they
watched, Spirit could see that Lucy was starting to float
downwards. Lucy seemed quite unaware of what was happening to
her.

‘
Hey, come
back up to us’ said Spirit, half joking but half
worried.

‘
What?’ asked
Lucy. She seemed barely aware that she was actually there in front
of them. She made no attempt to glide back up to them as she
normally would and instead sank further down in the
water.’

‘
There’s
something wrong!’ whispered Dancer to Spirit under her
breath.

‘
Lucy, are you
alright?’ asked Spirit, starting to get worried.

‘
Oh I don’t
know, I just feel sleepy’ she replied drowsily. ‘I’d like to close
my eyes now.’

‘
No don’t!’
Spirit replied quickly. He didn’t know why exactly, but he had a
strong feeling that it would be dangerous if she did. Lucy
continued to drift downwards.

‘
What can we
do?’ he asked Dancer with a growing sense of
desperation.

‘
You stay
there’ she replied decisively, I’ll be back in a moment with Storm
and Star-Gazer. They’ll know what to do.’ So far only Spirit,
Dancer and Star-Gazer had been able to speak to Lucy with their
minds when she came to them as a vision. Storm could see her but
could not pass his thoughts to the girl and needed Spirit or Dancer
as an intermediary to translate what he said.