That night, I dreamt about the mermaid. I called her to one of those caves along the coast that Phillip had mentioned. Unlike the others, she came to me willingly. It was Astrid. I recognised her first by the incomplete tattoo on her upper arm shimmering through a sheen of water. Dark hair draped across her upper body. Her lower half was finned and serpentine.Astrid gathered my clothing and drew me into the water. She pulled me under, held me there, and pasted her mouth onto mine. The mermaid’s tears could grant wishes but I’d read, in other legends, that a mermaid’s kiss could let a man breathe underwater. Certainly I felt no fear as she drew me deeper and deeper into the darkness.
Feeling refreshed, I woke up the next morning, ate a small breakfast in the kitchenette, dressed, and went out again. In the morning the town was still quiet. Holidaying couples occupied the cafes while the restaurants I’d noticed last night were closed instead. Most of the touristy stores were opening. Returning to the palm reading and tarot store, I found the door propped open and a sign on the sidewalk with the same icon of a hand with an eye in its palm. Incense wafted out of the open doorway. Inside was rain noise and new age music.
I went inside to find a small, dimly lit store, cluttered with crystals, statues, candles, and other esoteria. I made my way to a desk at the back. Incense sticks burned at some kind of altar. The rain sound came from a miniature fountain to one side. Behind the desk was an older man, roughly the same age as Phillip. Not really the person you expected to be running this kind of store although he did look like an aging hippy. Mid-sixties, tall, gaunt, and bald on top but with steel grey hair pulled back into a ponytail. He peered over the top of a wireframed pair of glasses.
“Hello, can I help you?”
“Jimmy? Jim, was it?” I asked. “We have a mutual friend, Phillip.”
“Phillip? Uh, Phillip Wiseman?” Jim struggled with his memory.
“He told me you might be able to tell me more about the Sirendale Mermaid.”
Jim looked surprised. I introduced myself and gave him the same story about writing a book on local legends. I told him about the things that Phillip had opened up about, seeing and hearing the mermaid, rumours about caves along the coast. He listened without interruption, face not giving much away.
“You really believe in all that?” Jim asked.
“He said you knew all about this kind of thing.” I gestured around the room at the new age paraphernalia. “And yes, I do believe in it, do you know anything?”
“I do,” Jim said. “I might.”
“I’m really trying to find out everything I can, to maybe even track her down, do you think it would be possible? Have you ever seen her?”
The older man hesitated but he looked more excited than nervous. Licking his lips, his eyes darted around the store as if checking we were alone. Like Phillip last night, Jim seemed glad for someone to talk to who might actually listen.
“I haven’t just seen her, she saved my life,” Jim said.
“Really?” I asked.
“When I was just a small boy.”
Jim shut the shop and led me to the back of the store, behind the counter. I understood then why the store was so small and cramped, it had been sectioned off into a front and back room. In the centre of the backroom was a round table covered in an ornate tablecloth with a crystal ball in the middle. This must have been where Jim did his readings, tarot or seances or whatever. Dusty curtains let some sunlight filter through the rear window. A few tapestries and mystic posters covered the walls but it was clearly just a converted storeroom.
“This is where I keep the good stuff, not the tourist crystals and books out there,” Jim said.
Jim gestured to a heavy bookcase tucked into one corner. It was much more ornate and solid than any of the shelving in the store. Books, old and new, pristine, leather bound tomes and dogeared paperbacks, were crammed across the shelves with no sense of organisation. A malformed skull, something like a baboon but perhaps too big and not quite right, was tucked into one of the corners of the upper shelf. Various boxes, newspapers and magazines were crammed among the books.
“I’d love to have a look,” I said. “But you’ve actually been saved by the mermaid?”
“When I was a boy,” Jim repeated. “It was-, I must have been only five or six years old and wanted to go swimming. It wasn’t like what it is today, back then. Children, even as young as that, we could run free and as long as we were home by dinner our parents wouldn’t worry. It was winter or autumn, not too cold but not tourist season so the beach was abandoned.”
The old hippy gestured at me to sit at the table. He sat across from me, staring intently over his small glasses with the crystal ball between us.
“I was swimming and I got caught in a rip current. I was too young to know what kind of danger I was in. It pulled me so far out, so fast, all I remember is turning around and the beach seemed like it was a mile away. No one was in sight. My mother and father didn’t know where I was. I tried to swim against it, I didn’t know any better, but I wasn’t strong enough. I kept getting dragged out until land looked very, very far away.”
“What about the mermaid?” I urged him.
“I’m getting to her,” Jim said. “This would be one of my earliest memories but I was so frightened it’s all burned into my brain. I was so far out, all I could do was paddle and try to keep my head above water, and hope for a boat to come along or something. But I was already so tired from trying to swim against the current I couldn’t keep it up for long. Soon I was swallowing water. With all the breath I had left, I cried for help.”
“I didn’t even see her at first, something just came up from below and hit me. I might have thought a shark had gotten me, but I don’t think I was thinking anything at all. She picked me up but then dragged me under again, and I saw her. Beautiful, she was so beautiful. Dark hair, floating in a halo around her head. Her face was-, unearthly. I looked down and realised she had scales on her collar, her breasts, her hands, human hands but with webbing between the fingers. Her lower body, however, was that of a fish, long and slippery with fins, sweeping from side to side in the water below us. And then she pressed her mouth onto mine. It was the kiss of life, she breathed air deep into my lungs. I vomited up the water I had already swallowed and then found I could breathe even though the surface was above my head. Every time I sucked in water it was like I was sucking in air.”
“Amazing, so the mermaid’s kiss really can keep you from drowning.”
Jim nodded. “There wasn’t much more to it, the mermaid grabbed me and we went racing through the water. I was too shocked to do anything but hold on. She was so fast, we were back at the beach in a minute. She said nothing, just pushed me back into the surf so it would wash me back in. The last thing I saw was her smiling, dark lips, the most wonderful smile, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I washed up on the shore, no one had known I’d been gone, no one had known where I’d been, but it happened, she had saved me.”
Jim seemed satisfied by the telling of his story. He leaned back with almost a smug smile, letting me absorb it. Whether it was true or not, Jim certainly seemed to believe it. I thought about Phillip and the stories of the other fishermen about meeting the mermaid. Apart from the guy who claimed to have made love to her for one solid night the stories were all about mere brushes with the strange creature. Jim could have made it all one grand adventure but it too was just a small encounter that happened to save his life.
“How do you know it wasn’t just a dream? Maybe you were on the verge of drowning and dreamed it all? And somehow you got lucky and washed up anyway.”
“You would have to take my word for it, but for years after, I couldn’t drown. It was like a party trick, I could sit on the bottom of a pool for as long as I liked, breathing in the water. Phillip might remember, I don’t know, we went to school together. I lost the power sometime around the time I turned twelve but it was there, for years, just we were kids and never realised how amazing proof of something like that would be to the adults around us.”
Jim got up from the table but gestured for me to keep sitting. He retrieved the largest of the cardboard boxes from his bookcase, marked on the side with the word ‘MERMAID’. As he flipped open the lid I could see it was full of books and magazines as well as other bits and pieces. A couple of the books I’m sure I came across in my own research, plus printed sheafs of paper or handwritten notepads, CDs, floppy discs, and a couple of figurines that looked like driftwood, mermaid figurines.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I’ve been researching her for years now, years and years, as well as other-, phenomena,” Jim said. “If even half of it is as real as she is, then the world is a far stranger place than we give it credit for. More in Heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”
“What about her tears?” I asked. “I read that her tears can grant wishes. Can even-, can even bring back the dead.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the same stories, I can’t really confirm or deny it. The stories are all-, stories. Mostly, she refuses to give her tears away to anyone she considers unworthy, which is pretty well everyone, if they even manage to capture her. And she always gets away.”
“If you don’t want her tears, why all the research?”
Jim considered the question, wondering whether he trusted me enough to open up with the answer. “I just want to see her one more time. I’m getting to be an old man, I mean, not so old I’m ready to hang it up but when I am someday, I want to try and call her to me and see her one more time. Thank her for the life I wouldn’t have had without her.”
“You could call her to you?”
“Well, maybe, nothing is for certain.”
Jim was cagey again with me now. He wanted to share the secret, he’d had no one else to talk to about this, but we’d reached the need for another level of trust. I didn’t want to push him too hard. I didn’t think he’d keep talking to me if he realised I was primarily interested in the mermaid so I could harvest one of her tears for its wish granting abilities.
“I should really check on the shop but you’re free to stick around,” Jim said. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
I ended up going to one of the cafes on the main street to grab us two takeaway coffees, and then I hung out with Jim while he ran the store. Not that there was much to run. A few tourists browsed the crowded shelves, buying nothing. I pressed on with Jim. Instead of pushing him on how to trap the mermaid, like I really wanted, I circled around it. I talked to him about other stories about the mermaid he’d collected. Other children who’d been saved, he enjoyed talking about those, and sailors who’d heard her song. When we ran out of steam on that topic, I asked him about some of the other legends from up and down the coast, and about other items on his bookshelf in the back. He didn’t question my cover story about writing a book. Becoming easier with me, he remained grateful for the company.
I was hanging around as another bored couple came in. They browsed for almost twenty minutes, rejecting Jim’s offers of help, and I could hear them quietly making fun of some of the stock. Eventually, out of obligation, they bought a single candle. The old hippy winced through the sale, gave them their change, and they left. I weighed up his desperation. His store wasn’t doing a roaring trade and, as he himself had said, he wasn’t old enough to give it all up yet.
“A thousand dollars,” I said.
“What?” Jim asked.
“A thousand dollars, just for info,” I said. “Anything you have on the mermaid that I could use to set up a meeting. That’s all I want, I’m not going to capture her and try to sell her to the world. I just want my proof, for myself, like you got when you were saved by her.”
“A thousand?”
It was hardly a life changing amount of money. I could have offered more but I felt like it would have made him more suspicious of my motives. He had to believe I was sincere. That all I wanted was to try and meet her. Clearly, he needed the cash though. I nodded.
“I can’t promise anything,” Jim said. “I don’t know if any of it would work, I’ve never tried it.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “I’ve chased the supernatural my whole life and I’ve never felt so close to coming face to face to it as I do talking to you.”
We returned to Jim’s mermaid box. First, Jim pulled out a couple of maps printed on A4 paper with oversaturated colours. They were maps of Sirendale but not regular maps, some kind of survey maps. Locations were circled in red on both maps. Locations of caves, I realised, based on the odd little bites taken out of the coastline.
“The coast around Sirendale is riddled with small caves, most not even accessible from above the surface,” Jim said. “I selected a bunch which I think are the most likely places to find her.”
“Okay, so I should check these?”
“No, no, that’s not all.” Jim held up an old school cassette tape from the box, in a case that showed it was a recordable one.
“What is that?”
“Another mermaid’s dying song. It’s-, chilling, beautiful, an extraordinary artefact.”
“On an old tape?”
“It was recorded decades ago, and it won’t transfer onto any newer medium.”
“I don’t get it, so, maps and a tape of a dying song?”
Jim was excited. I might have had to bribe him to put him over the line but it was clear he badly wanted to show off what he had. This was his life’s work, after all.
“The mermaid is all alone, she sings for more members of her kind,” Jim said. “My plan was to go down to one of those caves and play that tape so that she could hear it. She hears the dying song of one of her people, she’ll come rushing to find them before they pass.”
I nodded, feigning amazement. Part of me thought the mermaid might be pretty upset to come racing to the aid of a dying member of her kind and find she’d been tricked but that didn’t really bother me. A plan was already starting to come together in my head.
“For a thousand dollars, I’ll make you a copy of the maps and you can borrow the tape. And you have to tell me if it works.”
Jim hadn’t seemed to think all the angles through. He was desperate to see this happen but too frightened to try it for himself. I wasn’t going to argue, however. Provided the mermaid was not some shared delusion, this was my only chance to bring Astrid back. Everything had led me here. I agreed and left to get money from an ATM.
~~~
With Jim’s maps, instructions, and a couple of days hiking and searching I found my staging area. Beneath one of the hills well outside of town was a perfect cave. A large crack in the headland was partially overgrown by brush, long but narrow. I shimmied down inside it. I was no experienced spelunker and had already given up on a number of caves because the only access was underwater or too tight, enough that I’d be afraid I’d get stuck if I went any further. Getting stuck when some of these caves were well out of the way and largely unknown was out of the question, I might scream and scream for days without anyone coming to find me. I had a good pair of boots, a backpack, a waterproof flashlight, but no ropes, no pistons, no special cave-diving equipment.
Rock squeezed my chest. Wriggling and writhing through, I felt a drop under my feet and my heart leapt in my chest. I fell and stumbled, loose rocks under the soles of my boots as I grabbed for the rough walls. They opened out so I was no longer being squished. Heart beating hard, I steadied myself until I was sure it was okay and reached for my flashlight. The beam swept around the inside of the cave. Cold and damp, the air was salty and stuck to my lungs.
A flat expanse of rock littered with more loose stones circled a pool of water fresh from the ocean. Crashing waves echoed through the cave like a giant seashell. I could see just enough of a gap above the waterline of the pool to see a lower entrance that led all the way outside, so water flowed in and out of the cave on the tide. Casting the light around, I could tell I wasn’t the only person to have discovered the cave. Crumpled beer cans and the scattered remains of a small campfire lay among the rocks. I found a shredded pair of panties and the dried up worm of a used condom as well, unfortunately. All the trash looked dusty and faded. Relics of a bygone age.
Soon as I’d taken it all in, a plan formed in my head. I spent a little while measuring and sketching it out. The pool stretched about five or six strides from the front wall of the cave and was narrow enough that I could have jumped across it with a running leap. At its deepest point, I could have stood straight and kept my head above water. Big enough for the mermaid to enter but not enough room to hide. The second cave entrance, where the water flowed in and out, was roughly half the size of an average doorway. A crack in the rock that would be easy enough to squeeze through, and easy enough to block.
I climbed back up the narrow passage, squeezed tightly around the shoulders. I kept the flashlight in hand until I could see sunlight. Prying myself out with my hands and elbows, I crawled back onto the spiny brush and grass.
Over the next few days I got together everything I would need to see my plan through. First stop was a massive hardware store where I did most of my shopping. Funnily enough, it took me the longest time to find something to play the tape with the mermaid song. I went to a department store, a couple of electronics places and even a couple of Sirendale’s op shops. Finally I figured out I could buy a tape player online and kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. I bought a boombox, retro but brand new, made by a company that produced them for whatever reason. I had it express delivered to the motel. The bored receptionist who seemed to be there most of the time took the delivery, and seemed to be wondering why the hell I was staying with them so long I was now getting packages delivered.
Setting the boombox up in my room, I slotted in Jim’s tape. The medium was old and scratchy. Bent over the table, I listened intently. In the background of the recording was something bumping around and lowered voices speaking in Spanish or Italian. Then a voice cut through like nothing I had ever heard before. I grabbed the volume knob, twisting it down as if worried about someone overhearing something embarrassing. It was so alien, like some kind of strange instrument, and yet so alive it could only come from a living throat. Whale song was the closest analogue I could think of but in a woman’s voice that quavered up and down the register into notes I didn’t think any human being could sing. And it was in pain, so much pain that it was dying seemed self-evident. Nightmarish and yet so beautiful. It was what the moth felt as it got too close to the flame, engulfed in luminescence only to realise its wings were burning.
Images rose unbidden from my mind. Astrid first and foremost. The sight of her in the bloody tub, face still, unfinished mermaid tattoo on her arm. But memories from childhood as well, at the funeral for my grandmother. When my pet dog Smokey died. A pet fish I’d had when I was very young. I’d scooped it out of the bowl, watched it flop on the tabletop in a puddle, and when it stopped moving I was struck with the feeling I’d done something very, very wrong. Simultaneously, I wanted this grief to be over and yet to feel something so strong and so pure, I never wanted it to end. Touching my cheek, my hand came away wet and I realised I was crying as hard as I had ever cried for this strange creature dying away from its own kind, in pain, in some far removed place and time.
The tape ended. It hissed as it spooled through the player. Eventually, with a shaking hand, I managed to hit the stop button. I had my bait.