| Miss Carstairs and the Merman |
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by Delia Sherman |
| The night Miss Carstairs first saw the merman, there was a great storm along the Massachusetts coast. Down in the harbor town, old men sat in the taverns drinking hot rum and cocking a knowledgeable ear at the wind whining and whistling in the chimneys. A proper nor'easter, they said, a real widow-maker, and they huddled closer to the acrid fires while the storm gnawed at the town. It ripped shingles from roofs; it tore small boats from their moorings and flung them against the long piers. Strong gusts leaped across the dunes and set Miss Carstairs' tall white house surging and creaking like a great ship. | |||
| High on the bluff above the town, Miss Carstairs was sitting by the uncurtained window of her study, watching the lightning dazzle on the water and peering, from time to time, through a long telescope. With her square hands steady upon the telescope's barrel, she watched the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden and pit the glass of her window. In kinetoscopic bursts, she saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach and a gull beaten across the dunes; and at about midnight, she saw a long, dark, seal-sleek shape cast up on the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still. | |||
| Miss Carstairs calculated that the shape lay not two hundred yards from her eyrie in a shallow tidal pool, which was, for the moment, holding it safe. She put aside the telescope and hesitated for a moment with her hand upon the bell-pull. It was a filthy night. Yet, if it really were a seal washed into that tidal pool, she wanted to secure it before it was washed out again. |
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The peculiarities of ocean-storms and seals had been familiar to Miss Carstairs since earliest childhood. Whenever she could slip away from her nurse, she would explore the beach or the salt marshes behind her father's house, returning from these expeditions dishevelled: her pinafore pockets stuffed with shells, her stockings torn and sodden, her whole small person reeking, her mother used to say, like the flats at low tide. On these occasions, Mrs. Carstairs would scold her daughter and send her supperless to bed. But her father usually contrived to slip into her room, bearing a bit of cranberry bread, perhaps, and would read to her from Linneus or Hans Andersen's fairy-tales or Lyell's Natural History. Mr. Carstairs, himself an amateur icthyologist, delighted in his daughter's intelligence. He kept her crabs and mussels in the stone pond he had built in the conservatory for his exotic oriental fish. When Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published, he presented her with a copy for her fifteenth birthday. He would not hear of her attending the village shcool with the children of the local fishermen, but taught her mathematics and Latin and logic himself, telling her mother that he would have no prissy governess stuffing the head of his little scientist with a load of womanish nonsense. By the time Mr. Carstairs died, his daughter had turned up her hair and let down her skirts; but she still loved to tramp all day along the beaches. Her mother lectured her daily on the joys of the married state and drained the pond in the conservatory. Miss Carstairs was sorry about the pond, but she knew she had only to endure and she would eventually have the means to please herself. So endure she did for five years, saying "Yes, Mama," and "No, Mama," until the day when Mrs. Carstairs followed her husband to the grave, a disappointed woman. As soon as her mother died, Miss Carstairs ordered a proper collecting case and a set of scalpels and an anatomy text from Codman and Shurtleff in Boston. She lived very much alone, despising the merchants' and fish-brokers' wives who formed the society of the town. They, in turn, despised her. Wealth, they whispered over cups of Indian tea, was utterly wasted on a woman who would all too obviously never marry, being not only homely as a haddock, but a bluestocking as well. A bluestocking Miss Carstairs may have been, but she looked nothing like a fish. She had a broad, low brow, a long jaw, and her Scottish father's high, flat cheekbones. Wind and cold had creased her skin and made it brown as a fisherman's, and her thin hair was silver-grey like the weathered shingles on the buildings along the wharf. She was tall and sturdy and fit as a man from long tramps on the marshes. She was patient, as a scentist must be, and over the years had taught herself classification and embryology and enough about conventional scientific practices to write articles acceptable to The American Naturalist and the Boston Society of Natural History. By the time she was forty-nine, "E. Monroe Carstairs" had earned the reputation of being very sound on the mollusca of the New England Coast. In the course of preparing these articles, Miss Carstairs had collected hundreds of specimens, and little jars containing pickled Cephalopoda and Gastropoda lined her study shelves in grim profusion. But she had living barnacles and sea-slugs as well, housed in the pool in the conservatory, where they kept company with lobsters and crabs and feathery sea-worms in a kind of miniature ocean. When she had her father's gold-fish pond repaired, Miss Carstairs had fitted it out with a series of pumps and filters to bring sea-water up from the bay and keep it clean and fresh. In shape the pond was a wide oval, built up at the sides with a mortared stone coping, and it nestled in an Eden of Boston fern and sweet-smelling mint geraniums. Miss Carstairs was very proud of it, and proud of the collection of marine life it housed. Stocking it with healthy specimens of rare fauna was the chief pleasure of her life, and summer and winter she spent much of her time out stalking the tidal flats after a neap tide or exploring the small brackish pools of the salt marshes. But nothing was as productive of unusual specimens as a roaring gale, which in beating the ocean to a froth, swept up shells and crabs from its very floor. As Miss Carstairs stood now with her hand upon the bell-pull, her wide experience of such storms told her that she must either bring in the seal immediately, or watch it wash away with the tide. She pulled sharply on the bell, and when the maid Sarah sleepily answered it, ordered her to rouse Stephen and John without delay and have them meet her in the kitchen passage. "Tell them to bring the lantern, and the stretcher we used for the shark last spring," she said. "And bring me my sou'wester and my boots." Soon, the two oil-clothed men, yawning behind their hands, awaited Miss Carstairs in the dark kitchen. Although they had been rousted out of their beds in the middle of the night and knew they were in for a wet and dangerous scramble over slippery ground, the men were unresentful. Truth to tell, they were secretly proud of the forthright eccentricity of their mistress, who kept lobsters in a fancy pool instead of eating them, and traipsed manfully over the marshes and mud-flats in all weathers. If Miss Carstairs wanted to go out into the worst nor'easter in ten years to collect some rare grampus or other, then the least they could so was to go along and help her. Miss Carstairs led the way with the lantern, and the little company groped its way down the slippery wooden stairs to the beach. The thunder had rolled away, taking with it the confusing spurts of lightning. The lantern illiminated glimpses of scattered flotsam: gouts of seaweed and beached fish, broken sea-gulls and strange shells. Miss Carstairs, untempted, ran straight before the wind towards the rocks at the lip of the bay and the tidal pool imprisoning her quarry. Whatever the creature was, it was not a seal. The dim yellow lantern gave only the most imperfect outline of its shape, but Miss Carstairs could see that it was more slender than a seal, and lacked a pelt. Its front flippers looked peculiarly long and flexible, and it seemed to have a crest of bony spines down its back. Something was familiar about its shape, about the configuration of its upper body and head. Miss Carstairs was just bending to take a closer look when Stephen's "Well, Miss?" drew her guiltily upright. The wind was picking up; it was more than time to be getting back to the house. She stood out of the way while the men unfolded a bundle of canvas and sticks into a wide stretcher like a sailor's hammock suspended between two long poles. Into this contrivance they bundled their find and, in case it might still be alive, covered it with a blanket soaked in sea-water. Clumsily, because of the wind and the swaying weight of their burden, the men crossed the beach and labored up the wooden stairs, wound through the garden and up two shallow stone steps to the large glass conservatory built daringly onto the sea side of the house. When Miss Carstairs opened the conservatory door, the wind extinguished most of the gas-lights Sarah had thoughfully lit there. So it was in a poor half-light that the men hoisted their burden to the edge of the pool and tipped the creature out onto the long boulder that had once served as a sunning place for Mr. Carstairs' terrapins. The lax body rolled heavily onto the rock; Miss Carstairs eyed it doubtfully while the men panted and wiped at their streaming faces. "I don't think you should submerge it entirely," she said finally. "If it's still alive, being out of the water a little longer shouldn't hurt it, and if it is not, I don't want the lobsters getting it before I do." The men positioned the creature, then shut off the gas-cocks and squished off to their beds. For a few minutes, Miss Carstairs stood biting thoughtfully at her forefinger and looking down at her new specimen. Spiky and naked, it did not look like anything she had ever seen or read about in Allen, Grey, or von Haast. But many common objects look strange in the dark, and calling Sarah back to relight the gas hardly seemed worthwhile. She might as well go to bed and study her find by the light of day. But when she ascended the stairs, her footsteps led her not to her bedroom but to her study, where she spent the rest of the night in restless perusal of True's Catalogue of Aquatic Mammals. At six o'clock, Miss Carstairs rang for Sarah to bring her rolls and coffee. By six-thirty, she had eaten, bathed and dressed herself, and was on her way to the conservatory. Her find lay as she had left it, half in and half out of the water. Growing from its muscular tail was a powerful torso, scaleless and furless and furnished with what looked like arms, jointed like a human's and roped with long, smooth muscles under a protective layer of fat. Its head was round and flanked by a pair of ears shaped and webbed like fins. At first, Miss Carstairs refused to believe the evidence of her eyes. Perhaps, she thought, she was over-tired from reading all night. The creature, whatever it was, would soon yield its secrets to her scalpel and prove to be nothing more wonderful than a deformed porpoise or a freak manatee. She took its head in her hands. Its skin was cool and pliant and slimy: very unpleasant to touch, as though a fish had sloughed its scales but not its protective mucous. She lifted its thick, lashless lids to reveal pearly eyes, rolled upwards. She had never touched nor seen the like. A new species, perhaps? A new genus? With a rising excitement, Miss Carstairs palpated its skull, which was hairless and smooth except for the spiny ridge bisecting it, and fingered the slight protrusion between its eyes and lipless mouth. The protrusion was both fleshy and cartilaginous, like a human nose, and as Miss Carstairs acknowledged the similarity, the specimen's features resolved into an unmistakeably anthropoid arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. The creature was, in fact, neither deformed or freakish, but in its own way as harmoniously formed and perfectly adapted to its environment as an elephant or a chimpanzee. A certain engraving in a long-forgotten book of fairy-tales came to her mind, of a wistful child with a human body and a fish's tail. Miss Carstairs plumped heavily into her wicker chair. Here, lying on a rock in her father's gold-fish pond, was a species never examined by Mr. Darwin or classified by Linneaus. Here was a biological anomaly, a scientific impossibility. Here, in short, was a mermaid, and she, Edith Carstairs, had collected it. Shyly, almost reverently, Miss Carstairs approached the creature anew. She turned the lax head towards her, then prodded at its wide, lipless mouth to get a look at its teeth. A faint, cool air fanned her fingers, and she snatched them back as though the creature had bitten her. Could it be alive? Miss Carstairs laid her hand flat against its chest and felt nothing; hesitated, laid her ear where her hand had been, and heard a faint thumping, slower than a human heartbeat. In a terror lest it awake before she could examine it properly, Miss Carstairs snatched up her calipers and her sketchbook and began to make detailed notes of its anatomy. She measured its cranium, which she found to be as commodius as most men's, and traced its webbed, four-fingered hands. She sketched it full-length from all angles, then made piece-meal studies of its head and finny ears, its curiously muscled torso and its horny claws. From the absence of external genitalia and the sleek roundness of its limbs and body, she thought her specimen to be female even though it lacked the melon breasts and streaming golden hair of legend. But breasts and streaming hair would drag terribly, Miss Carstairs thought: a real mermaid would be better off without them. By the same token, a real merman would be better off without the drag of external genitals. On the question of its sex, Miss Carstairs decided to reserve judgment. Promptly at one o'clock, Sarah brought her luncheon—a cutlet and a glass of barley water—and still the creature lay unconscious. Miss Carstairs swallowed the cutlet hastily between taking wax impressions of its claws and scraping slime from its skin to examine under her microscope. She drew a small measure of its thin scarlet blood, and poked curiously at the complexity of tissue fringing the apparent opening of its ears, which had no parallel in any lunged acquatic animal. It might, she thought, be gills. By seven o'clock, Miss Carstairs had abandoned hope. She leaned over her mermaid, pinched the verdigris fore-arm between her nails and looked closely at the face for some sign of pain. The wide mouth remained slack; the webbed ears lay flat and unmoving against the skull. It must be dead after all. It seemed that she would have to content herself with dissecting the creature's cadaver, and now was not too early to begin. So she laid out her scalpels and her bone-saw, and rang for the men to hoist the specimen out of the pool and onto the potting-table. "Carefully, carefully, now." Miss Carstairs hovered anxiously as Stephen and John struggled with the slippery bulk and sighed as they dropped it belly-down over the stone coping. Suddenly, the creature gave a great huff of air and twitched as though it had been electrified. Then it flopped backwards, twisted eel-quick under the water, and peered up at Miss Carstairs from the bottom of the pool, fanning its webbed ears and gaping. Stumbling and slipping in their haste, the men fled. Fairly trembling with excitement, Miss Carstairs leaned over the water and stared at her acquisition. The mer-creature, mouthing the water, stared back. The tissue in front of its ears fluttered rhythmically, and Miss Carstairs knew a moment of pure scientific gratification. Her hypothesis was proved correct; it did indeed have gills as well as lungs. The mer undulated gently from crest to tail-tip, then darted from one extremity of the pool to the other, sending water slopping into Miss Carstairs' lap. She recoiled, shook out her skirts, and looked up to see the mer peering over the coping, its eyes deep-set, milk-blue, and as intelligently mournful as a whipped dog's. Involuntarily, Miss Carstairs smiled, then frowned again hastily. Had not Mr. Darwin suggested that to most lower animals, a smile is a simple baring of the teeth, a sign of dominance and not of friendship? If the creature was the anthropomorph it appeared to be, a kind of oceanic ape, then might it not, as apes do, find her well-meant smile as sinister and challenging as a shark's grinning maw? Was a mer a mammal, or was it a fish, an amphibian, even a reptile? Did it properly belong to a genus at all, or was it, like the platypus, sui generis? She must re-read Mr. Gunther's The Study of Fishes and J.E. Grey on seals. While Miss Carstairs was pondering its origins, the mer seemed to be pondering Miss Carstairs. It held her eyes steadily with its pearly gaze, and Miss Carstairs began to fancy that she heard—no, it was rather that she sensed—a reverberant, rhythmic hushing like a swift tide withdrawing over the sand of a sea-cave. The light shimmered before her eyes, and she shook her head and recalled that she had not eaten since lunch. A glance at the watch pinned to her breast told her that it was now past nine o'clock. Little wonder she was giddy, what with having had no sleep the night before and working over the mer-creature all day. Her eyes turned again to her specimen. She had intended ringing for fish and feeding it from her own hand, but now thought she would retire to her own belated supper and leave its feeding to the servants.  The next morning, much refreshed by her slumbers, Miss Carstairs returned to the conservatory armored with a bibbed denim apron and rubber boots. The mer was sitting perched on the highest point of the rock with its long fish's tail curled around it, looking out over the rose-beds to the sea. It never moved when Miss Carstairs entered the conservatory, but gazed steadily out at the bright vista of water and rocky beach. It sat extremely upright, as if disdaining the unaccustomed weight of gravity on its spine, and its spiky crest was fully erect. One clawed hand maintained its balance on the rock; the other was poised on what Miss Carstairs was obliged to call its thigh. The wide flukes of its yellow-bronze tail draped behind and around it like a train and trailed on one side down to the water. This attitude was to become exceedingly familiar to Miss Carstairs in the weeks and months that followed; but on this first morning it struck her as being at once human and alien, pathetic and comic, like a trousered chimpanzee riding a bicycle in a circus. Having already sketched it from all angles, what Miss Carstairs chiefly wanted now was for the mer to do something. Now that it was awake, she was hesitant to touch it, for its naked skin and high forehead made it look oddly human, and its attitude forbade familiarity. Would it hear her, she wondered, if she called it? Or were those ear-like fans merely appendages to its gills? Standing near the edge of the pool, Miss Carstairs clapped her hands sharply. One fluke stirred in the water, but that might have been coincidence. She cleared her throat. Nothing. She climbed upon a low stool, stood squarely in the creature's field of vision and said quite firmly, "How d'ye do?" Again, nothing, if she excepted an infinitesimal shivering of its skin that she might have imagined. "Boo!" cried Miss Carstairs then, waving her arms in the air and feeling more than a little foolish. "Boo! Boo!" Without haste, the mer brought its eyes to her face and seemed to study her with a grave, incurious attention. Miss Carstairs climbed down and clasped her hands behind her back. Now that she had its attention, what would she do with it? Conquering a most unscientific shrinking, Miss Carstairs unclasped her hands and reached one of them out to it, palm upward, as if it had been a strange dog. The mer immediately dropped from its upright seat to a sprawling crouch, and to Miss Carstairs' horrified fascination, the movement released from a pouch beneath its belly a boneless, fleshy ochre member that could only be its—unmistakeably male—genitalia. Feeling a most uncomfortable heat in her cheeks, Miss Carstairs hid her confusion in a Boston fern, praying that the merman would withdraw his nakedness, or at least hide it in the water. But when she turned back, he was still stretched at full length along the stone, his out-sized privates boldly—Miss Carstairs could only think defiantly—displayed. He was smiling. There was nothing pleasant, welcoming, friendly, or even tangentially human about the merman's smile. His mouth gaped and was full of needle teeth. The palate was deeply ridged, the gorge pale rose and palpitating. He had no tongue. Although she might be fifty years old and a virgin, Miss Carstairs was no delicate maiden lady. Before she was a spinster or even a woman, she was a naturalist, and she immediately forgot the merman's formidable sexual display in wonder at his formidable dentition. Orally, at least, the merman was all fish. His gaping grin displayed to advantage the tooth plate lining his lower jaw, the respiratory lamellae flanking his pharynx, the inner gill septa. Miss Carstairs siezed her notebook, licked the point of her pencil, and began to sketch diligently. Once she glanced up to verify the double row of teeth in the lower jaw. The merman was still grinning at her. A moment later, she looked again; he had disappeared. Hurriedly, Miss Carstairs laid aside her book and searched the pool. Yes, there he was at the deep end, belly-down against the pebbled bottom. Miss Carstairs seated herself upon the coping to think. If the merman had noted her shock at the sight of his genitals, then his flourishing them might be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to discomfit his captor. On the other hand, the entire display could have been a simple example of instinctive aggression, like a male Mandrill presenting his crimson posterior to an intruder. Had the merman acted from instinct or intelligence? A light touch on her hand roused Miss Carstairs from her meditations. Considerably startled, she nonetheless refrained from snatching her hand away, instead slowly moving her head until she could see into the pool. The merman floated just below her, his hand alone breaking the surface of the water, and Miss Carstairs found herself staring full into his irridescent eyes. She heard—or thought she heard—a noise as of water rushing over sand; saw—or thought she saw—a glimmer as of sun filtered through clear water. Then the merman somersaulted neatly and dove into a hollow under the rock. Miss Carstairs mounted to her study and picked up her pen to record her observations. As she inscribed the incident, she became increasingly convinced that the merman's action must be the result of deliberate intention. No predator—and the merman's teeth left no doubt that he was a predator—would instinctively bare rather than protect the most vulnerable portion of his anatomy. He must, therefore, have exposed himself in a gesture of defiance and contempt. But such a line of reasoning, however theoretically sound, did not go far in proving that her merman was capable of reasoned behavior. She must find a way to test his intelligence empirically. Lifting her eyes from her notebook, Miss Carstairs looked blindly out over the autumn-bright ocean glittering below her. The Duke of Argyll had written that Man was unique among animals in being a tool-user. On the other hand, Mr. Darwin had argued persuasively that chimpanzees and orang-utans commonly use sticks and stones to open hard nuts or knock down fruit. But surely no animal lower than an ape would think to procure his food using anything beyond his own, well-adapted, natural equipment? Since he was immured in a kind of free-swimming larder, Miss Carstairs could not count upon the merman's being hungry enough to spring her trap for the bait alone, so the test must engage his curiosity. Trap: now there was an idea. What if she were to use one of the patent wire rat traps stacked in the garden shed? She could put a fish in a rat trap—a live fish, she thought, would prove more attractive than a dressed one—and offer the merman an array of tools with which to open it—a crowbar, perhaps a pair of wire-snips. Yes, thought Miss Carstairs, she would put the fish in a rat trap and throw it in the pool to see what the merman would make of it. Next morning, the merman had resumed his station on the rock looking, if anything, more woebegone than he had the day before. Somewhat nervously, Miss Carstairs entered the conservatory carrying a bucket of water with a live mackerel in it. She was followed by Stephen, who was laden with the rat trap, a crowbar, a pair of wire-snips, and a small hack-saw. With his help, Miss Carstairs introduced the mackerel into the trap and lowered it into the deep end of the pool. Then she dismissed Stephen, positioned herself in the wicker chair, pulled The Descent of Man from her pocket, and pretended to read. For a quarter of an hour or so, the tableau held. Miss Carstairs sat, the merman sat, the rat trap with its mackerel rested on the sandy bottom of the pool, and the tools lay on the coping as on a workbench, with the handles neatly turned towards their projected user. Finally, Miss Carstairs slapped over the page and humphed disgustedly; the merman slithered off the rock into the pool. A great roiling and slopping of briny water ensued. When the tumult ceased, the merman's head popped up, grinning ferociously. He was clearly incensed, and although his attitude was comic, Miss Carstairs was not tempted to laugh. With an audible snap, the merman shut his gaping mouth, lifted the rat trap onto the rock, hauled himself up beside it, and carefully examined the tools set out before him. The wire-snips he passed over without hesitation. The hack-saw he felt with one finger, which he hastily withdrew when he caught it upon the ragged teeth; Miss Carstairs was interested to see that he carried the injured member to his mouth to suck just as a man or a monkey would. Then he grasped the crowbar and brought it whistling down upon the trap, distorting it enough for him to see that one end was not made all of a piece with the rest. He steadied the trap with one hand, and, thrusting the crowbar through the flap, pried it free with a single mighty heave. Swiftly, he reached inside and grabbed the wildly flapping mackerel. For a time, the merman held the fish before him as if debating what to do with it. He looked from the fish to Miss Carstairs and from Miss Carstairs to the fish, and she heard a sound like a sigh accompanied by a slight fluttering of his gill-flaps. This sigh, combined with his habitual expression of settled melancholy, made his attitude so like that of an elderly gentleman confronted with unfamiliar provender that Miss Carstairs smiled a little in spite of herself. The merman stiffened and gazed at her intently. A long moment passed, and Miss Carstairs heard once more a low susurration, saw once more a silver-blue glittering. Now, Miss Carstairs was not a woman given either to the vapors or to lurid imaginings. Thunderstorms that set more delicate nerves quivering merely stimulated her; bones and entrails left her unmoved. Furthermore, she was never ill and had never been subject to sick headaches. So, when her head began to throb and her eyes to dazzle with sourceless pinwheels of light, Miss Carstairs simply closed her eyes to discover whether the effect would disappear. The sound of rushing waters receded; the throb subsided to a dull ache. She opened her eyes to the merman's pearly stare, and sound and pain and glitter returned. At this point she thought it would be only sensible to avert her eyes. But being sensible would not teach her why the merman sought to mesmerize her or why his stare caused her head to ache so. Briefly, she wondered whether he intended to crawl from his rock and tear out her throat with his needle teeth when she was sufficiently stupified. She dismissed the thought half-conceived and abandoned herself to his gaze. All at once, Miss Carstairs found herself at sea. Chilly green-grey depths extended above and below her; fishy shadows darted past the edges of her vision. She was swimming in a strong and unfamiliar current. The ocean around her tasted of storm and rocks and fear. She knew beyond doubt that she was being swept ever closer to a strange shore, and although she was strong, she was afraid. Her tail scraped sand; the current crossed with wind-blown waves and conspired to toss her ashore. Bruised, torn, gasping for breath in the thin air, Miss Carstairs fainted. She came to herself some little time later, her eyes throbbing viciously and her ears ringing. The merman was nowhere to be seen. Slowly, Miss Carstairs dragged herself to her chair and rang for Sarah. She would need tea, perhaps even a small brandy, before she could think of mounting the stairs. She felt slightly sea-sick. When Sarah came into the conservatory, she exclaimed in shock at her mistress' appearance. "I've had a bit of a turn," said Miss Carstairs shortly. "No doubt I stayed up too late last night reading. If you would bring me some brandy and turn down my bed, I think I should like to lie down. " Some little time later, Miss Carstairs lay in her darkened bedroom with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne pressed to her aching forehead. She did not know whether to exult or to despair. If her recent vision had been caused by the feverish overexcitement of an unbridled imagination, she feared that excessive study, coupled with spinsterhood, had finally driven her mad as her mother had always warned her it would. But if the vision had been caused by the merman's deliberate attempt to "speak" to her, she had made a discovery of considerable scientific importance. Miss Carstairs stirred impatiently against her pillows. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the experience were genuine. That would suggest that somewhere in the unexplored deeps of the ocean was a race of mermen who could cast images, emotion, even sounds from mind to mind. Fantastic as the thing sounded, it could be so. In the first edition of the Origin, Mr. Darwin had said that over the ages a bear might develop baleen and flippers, evolving finally into a kind of furry whale, if living upon plankton had become necessary to the species' survival. Why should not some ambitious prehistoric fish develop arms and a large, complex, brain, or some island-dwelling ape take to the sea and evolve gills and a tail? The general mechanism of evolution might, given the right circumstances, produce anthropoid creatures adapted for life in the sea. And evolution could also account for a telepathic method of communication, just as it accounted for a verbal one. To Miss Carstairs' mind, the greater mystery was how she could have received and understood a psychic message. Presumably, some highly evolved organ or cerebral fold peculiar to mermen transmitted their thoughts; how could she, poor clawless, gilless, forked creature that she was, share such an organ? A particularly stabbing pain caused Miss Carstairs to clutch the handkerchief to her brow. She must rest, she thought. So she measured herself a small dose of laudanum, swallowed it, and slept. Next morning, armed with smelling-salts and a pair of smoked glasses that had belonged to her mother, Miss Carstairs approached the conservatory in no very confident mood. Her brain felt sore and bruised, almost stiff, like a long-immobilized limb that had been suddenly and violently exercised. Hesitantly, she peered through the French doors; the merman was back on his rock, staring out to sea. Determined that she would not allow him to overcome her with his visions, she averted her gaze, then marched across the conservatory, seated herself firmly in her chair, and perched the smoked glasses on her nose before daring to look up. Whether it was the smoked glasses or Miss Carstairs' inward shrinking that weakened the effect of the merman's stare, this second communion was less intimate than the first. As if they were images painted on thin silk, Miss Carstairs saw a coral reef and jewel-like fishes darting and hovering over the sea floor. This picture was accompanied by a distant chorus of squeaks, whistles, and random grunts, but she did not feel the press of the ocean upon her or any emotion other than her own curiosity and wonder. "Is that your home?" she asked absurdly, and the images stopped. The merman's face did not, apparently could not, change its expression, but he advanced his sloping chin and fluttered his webbed fingers helplessly in front of his chest. "You're puzzled," said Miss Carstairs softly. "I don't wonder. But if you're as intelligent as I hope, you will deduce that I am trying to speak to you in my way as you are trying to speak to me in yours." This speech was answered by a pause, then a strong burst of images: a long-faced grouper goggling through huge, smoky eyes; a merman neatly skewered on a harpoon; clouds of dark blood drifting down a swift current. Gasping in pain, Miss Carstairs reeled as she sat and, knocking off the useless smoked spectacles, pressed her hands to her eyes. The pain subsided to a dull ache. "I see that I shall have to find a way of talking to you," she said aloud. Fluttering claws signed the merman's incomprehension. "When you shout at me, it is painful." Her eye caught the hack-saw still lying by the pool. She bent, retrieved it, offered it to the merman blade-first. He recoiled and sucked his finger reminiscently. Miss Carstairs touched her own finger to the blade, tore the skin, then gasped as she had when he had "shouted" at her and, clutching her bleeding finger dramatically, closed her eyes and lolled back in her chair. A moment passed. Miss Carstairs sat slowly upright as a sign that the performance was over. The merman covered his face with his fingers, webs spread wide to veil his eyes. It was clearly a gesture of submission and apology, and Miss Carstairs was oddly moved by it. Cautiously, she stood, leaned over the coping, and grasped him lightly by one wrist. He stiffened, but did not pull away. "I accept your apology, merman," she said, keeping her face as impassive as his. "I think we've had enough for one day. Tomorrow we'll talk again." Over the course of the next few weeks, Miss Carstairs learned to communicate with her merman by working out a series of dumb-shows signifying various simple commands: "Too loud!" and "Yes" and "No." For more complex communications, she spoke to him as he spoke to her: by means of images. The first day, she showed him an engraving of the Sirens that she had found in an illustrated edition of The Odyssey. It showed three fish-tailed women, rather heavy about the breasts and belly, disposed gracefully on a rocky outcropping, combing their long falls of hair. The merman studied this engraving attentively. Then he fluttered his claws and sighed. "I don't blame you," said Miss Carstairs. "They look hardly able to sit on the rocks and sing at the same time, much less swim." She laid aside The Odyssey and took up a tinted engraving of a parrotfish. The merman advanced his head and sniffed, then snatched the sheet from Miss Carstairs' fingers and turned it this way and that. Catching her eyes, he sent her a vision of that same fish, shining vermillion and electric blue through clear tropical waters, its hard beak patiently scraping pylops out of coral dotted with the waving fronds of sea-worms. Suddenly, one of the coral's thornier parasites revealed itself as a merman's hand by grabbing the parrotfish and sweeping it into the predator's jaws. "Oh," said Miss Carstairs involuntarily as she became aware of an exciting, coppery smell and an altogether unfamiliar taste in her mouth. "Oh, my." She closed her eyes and the vision dispersed. Her mouth watering slightly and her hands trembling, she picked up her pen to describe the experience. Something of her confusion must have communicated itself to the merman, for when she next sought his eyes, he gave her a gossamer vision of a school of tiny fish flashing brilliant fins. Over time, she came to recognize that this image served him for a smile, and that other seemingly random pictures signified other common expressions: sunlight through clear water was laughter; a moray eel, heavy, hideous, and sharply toothed, was weeping. Autumn wore on to winter and Miss Carstairs became increasingly adept at eliciting and reading the merman's images. Every morning, she would go to the conservatory bearing engravings or sepia photographs, and with their help, wrestle some part of the merman's knowledge from him. Every afternoon, weather permitting, she would pace the marshes or the beach, sorting and digesting. Then, after an early dinner, she would settle herself at her desk and work on "A Preliminary Study of the Species Homo Oceanus Telepathicans, With Some Observations on His Society." This document, which she was confident would assure E. Monroe Carstairs a chapter of his own in the annals of marine biology, began with a detailed description of the merman and the little she had been able to learn about his anatomy. The next section dealt with his psychic abilities; the next was headed "Communication and Society":
The more she learned about the customs of the mer-folk, the more conscious Miss Carstairs became of how fortunate she was that the merman had consented to speak to her at all. Mermen swimming solitary were a cantankerous lot, as likely to attack a chance-met pair or single mer as to flee it. So Miss Carstairs realized that the merman must look upon her as his companion for the duration of his cycle of sociability, but she did not understand the implications such a companionship had for him. When she thought of his feelings at all, she imagined that he viewed her with the same benevolent curiosity with which she viewed him, never considering that benevolent curiosity is a peculiarly human trait. The crisis came in early December, when Miss Carstairs determined that it was time to tackle the subject of mer reproductive biology. She knew that an examination of the rituals of courtship and mating was central to the study of any new species, and no scientist, however embarrassing he might find the subject, was justified in shirking it. So Miss Carstairs gathered together her family album and a porcelain baby-doll exhumed from a trunk of old toys in the attic, and used them, along with an old anatomy text, to give the merman a basic lesson in human reproduction. At first, it seemed to Miss Carstairs that the merman was being particularly inattentive. But close observation having taught her to recognize his moods, she realized at length that his tapping fingers, gently twitching crest, and reluctance to meet her eyes, all signalled acute embarrassment. This Miss Carstairs found most interesting. She tapped on his wrist to get his attention, then shook her head and briefly covered her eyes. "I'm sorry," she told him, then held out a sepia photograph of herself as a stout and solemn infant propped between her frowning parents on a horsehair sofa. "But you must tell me what I want to know." In response, the merman erected his crest, gaped fiercely, then dove into the deepest cranny of the pool, where he wantonly dismembered Miss Carstairs' largest lobster. In disgust, she threw the baby-doll into the pool after him and stalked from the room. She was furious. Without this section, her article must remain unfinished, and she was anxious to send it off. After having exposed himself on the occasion of their first meeting, after having allowed her to rummage almost at will through his memories and his mind, why would he so suddenly turn coy? All that afternoon, Miss Carstairs pondered the merman's reaction to her question, and by evening had concluded that the mer have some incomprehensible taboo concerning the facts of reproduction. Perhaps reflection would show him that there was no shame in revealing them to her, who could have only an objective and scientific interest in them. It never occured to her that it might bewilder or upset the merman to speak of mating to a female to whom he was bonded, but with whom he could never mate. The next morning, Miss Carstairs entered the conservatory to see the merman sitting on his rock, his face turned sternly from the ocean and towards the door. Clearly, he was waiting for her, and when she took her seat and lifted her eyes to his, she felt absurdly like a girl caught out in some childish peccadillo and called into her mother's sitting-room to be chastised. Without preamble, the merman sent a series of images breaking over her. Two mer, one male, one female, swam together, hunted, coupled. Soon, they parted, one to the warm coral reefs, the other to arctic seas. The merwoman swam, hunted, explored. A time passed: not long, Miss Carstairs thought, a matter of weeks rather than months, although she could not have told how she knew. The merwoman met a merwoman, drove her away, met a merman, flung herself upon him amorously. This exchange was more complex than the earlier couplings; the merman resisted and fled when it was accomplished. The merman began to eat prodigiously. He sought a companion and came upon a merman, with whom he mated, and who hunted for him when he could no longer easily hunt for himself. As the merman became heavier, he seemed to become greedier, stuffing his pouch with slivers of fish as if to hoard them. How ridiculous, thought Miss Carstairs. Then all at once a tiny crested head popped up from the merman's pouch, and the scales covering it gave a writhing heave. Tiny gills fluttered; tiny arms worked their way out of the pouch. Claiming its wandering gaze with irridescent eyes, the merman's companion coaxed the infant from its living cradle and took it tenderly into his arms. Three days later, Miss Carstairs sent John down to the village to mail the completed manuscript of her article and then she put it out of her mind as firmly as she could. Brooding, she told herself, would not speed it any faster to the editor's desk or influence him to look more kindly upon it once it got there. In the meanwhile, she must not waste time. There was much more the merman could tell her, much more for her to learn. Her stacks of notes and manuscript grew. In late January, "Preliminary Study of the Species Homo Oceanus Telepathicans" was returned with a polite letter of thanks. As always, the editor of The American Naturalist admired Mr. Carstairs' graceful prose style and clear exposition, but feared that this particular essay was more a work of imagination than of scientific observation. Perhaps it could find a more appropriate place in a literary journal. Miss Carstairs tore the note into small pieces. Then she went down to the conservatory. The merman met her eyes when she entered, recoiled, and grinned angrily at her; Miss Carstairs grinned angrily back. Obscurely, she felt that her humiliation was his fault, that he had misled or lied to her. She wanted to dissect his brain and send it pickled to the editor of The American Naturalist; she wanted him to know exactly what had happened and how he had been the cause of it all. But since she had no words to tell him this, Miss Carstairs fled the house for the windy marshes, where she squelched through the matted beach-grass until she was exhausted. Humanity had always bored her, she thought, and now scholarship had betrayed her. She had nothing else. Standing ankle-deep in a brackish pool, Miss Carstairs looked back across the marshes to her house. The sun rode low in a mackerel sky; its light danced on the calm water around her and glanced off the conservatory's glazing. The merman would be sitting on his rock like the Little Mermaid in the tale her father had read her, gazing out over the ocean he could not reach. She had a sudden vision of a group of learned men standing around the pond, shaking their heads as they stroked their whiskers and debated whether or not this so-called merman had an immortal soul. Perhaps it was just as well the editor of The American Naturalist had rejected the article. Miss Carstairs could imagine sharing her knowledge of the merman with the world, but not sharing the merman himself. He had become necessary to her, she realized, her one comfort and her sole companion. Next morning, she was back in the conservatory, and on each morning succeeding that. Day after day she gazed through the merman's eyes as if he were a living bathysphere, watching damselfish and barracuda stitch silver through the greenish antlers of elkhorn coral, observing the langorous unfurling of the Manta ray's wings and the pale groping fingers of hungry anemones. As she opened herself to the merman's visions, Miss Carstairs began not only to see and hear, but also to feel, to smell, even to taste the merman's homesick memories. She became familiar with the complex symphony of the ocean, the screeching scrape of parrotfish teeth over coral, the tiny, amatory grunts of frillfins. In the shape of palpable odors present everywhere in the water, she learned the distinct tastes of fear, of love, of blood, of anger. Sometimes, after a day of vicarious exploration, she would lie in her bed at night and weep for the thinness of the air around her, the silent flatness of terrestrial night. The snow fell without Miss Carstairs' noticing it, and melted and turned to rain, which froze again, then warmed and gentled towards spring. In her abandoned study, the ink dried in the well and the books and papers lay strewn around the desk like old wrecks. Swimming with the merman in the open sea, Miss Carstairs despised the land. When she walked abroad, she avoided the marshes and clambered instead out over the weed-slick rocks to the end of the spit, where she would stand shivering in the wind and spray, staring into the waves breaking at her feet. Most days, however, she spent in the conservatory, gazing hungrily into the merman's pearly eyes. The merman's visions were becoming delirious with the need for freedom as, in his own way, he pleaded with Miss Carstairs to release him. He showed her mermen caught in fishermen's nets, torn beyond recognition by their struggles to escape the ropes. He showed her companions turning on each other, mate devouring mate when the cycle of one had outlasted the cycle of the other. But Miss Carstairs viewed these horrific images simply as dramatic incidents in his submarine narrative, like sharks feeding, or groupers nibbling at the eyes of drowned sailors. When at last the merman took to sulking under the rock, Miss Carstairs sat in her wicker chair, like a squid lurking among the coral, and waited patiently for him to emerge. She knew the pond was small; she sensed that the ocean's limitless freedom was more real to him when he shared his memories of it. She reasoned that no matter how distasteful the process had become, he must eventually rise and feed her the visions she craved. If, from time to time, she imagined that he might end her tyranny by tearing out her throat, she dismissed the fear. Was he not wholly in her power? When she knew the ocean as well as he, when she could name each fish with its own song, then she might let him swim free. Early one morning, the merman woke and slithered over the rim of his grey stone prison. Seal-like he humped himself towards the door, pulled himself up the door-frame, pressed the handle, and fumbled open the door. He crawled down the two wide steps to the garden and across the path towards the beach stair. His scales scraped off onto the sharp pebbles; his skin dulled and puckered as its protective mucus dried in the sun. When he reached the sundial in the center of the garden, he heaved himself up on his tail and sought the sea. Then he collapsed. Some little time later, Miss Carstairs came down to find the rock empty. At first she thought the merman was hiding; only when she moved towards the pool did she notice that the floor of the conservatory was awash with water and that the door was ajar. Against all odds, her merman had deserted her. Miss Carstairs groped for her wicker chair and sat, bereaved and betrayed as she had not been since her father's death. Her eye fell on the open door; she saw the blood and water smeared over the steps. Rising hurredly, she followed the trail through the garden to where the merman lay sprawled across the gravel. With anxious, delicate fingers she caressed his mouth and chest to feel the thin breath coming from his lips and the faint rhythmic beat under his ribs. His tail was scored and tattered where the scales had been torn from it. Somewhere in her soul, Miss Carstairs was conscious of dismay and tenderness and horror. But in the forefront of her brain, she was conscious only of anger. She had fed him, she thought, she had befriended him, she had opened her mind to his visions. How dare he abandon her? Grasping him by the shoulders, she shook him violently. "Wake up and look at me!" she shouted. Obediently, the merman opened his opalescent eyes and conjured a vision: the face of a middle-aged human woman. It was a simian face, slope-jawed and snub-nosed, wrinkled and brown. The ape-woman opened her mouth and spoke, showing large flat teeth. Harsh noises scraped over Miss Carstairs' ears, bearing with them the taint of hunger and need and envy as sweat bears the scent of fear. Grimacing fearfully, the ape-woman stooped towards Miss Carstairs and siezed her shoulders with long fingers that burned and stung her like anemones. Miss Carstairs tore herself from the ape-woman's poisonous grasp and covered her face with her hands. A rough claw gripped her wrist, shook it to get her attention. Reluctantly, Miss Carstairs removed her hands and saw the merman, immovably melancholy, peering up at her. How could he bear to look at her, she wondered miserably. He shook his head, a gesture he had learned from her, and answered her with a kind of child's sketch: an angular impression of a woman's face, inhumanly beautiful in its severity. Expressions of curiosity, wonder, joy, discovery darted across the woman's features like a swarm of minnows, and she tasted as strongly of solitude as a free-swimming mer. Through her grief and remorse, Miss Carstairs recognized the justice of each of these portraits. "Beast and angel," she murmured, remembering old lessons, and again the merman nodded. "No, I'm not a mer, am I, however much I have longed for the sea. And it isn't you I want, but what you know, what you have seen." The merman showed her a coral reef, bright and various, which seemed to grow as she watched, becoming more complex, more brilliant with each addition; then an image of herself standing knee-deep in the sea, watching the merman swim away from her. She smelled of acceptance, resignation, inwardness—the tastes of a mer parting from a loved companion. Wearily, Miss Carstairs rubbed her forehead, which throbbed and swelled with multiplying thoughts. Her notebooks, her scholarship, her long-neglected study, all called to her through the merman's vision. At the same time, she noted that he was responding directly to her. Had she suddenly learned to speak visions? Had he learned to see words? Beyond these thoughts, Miss Carstairs was conscious of the fierce warmth of the spring sun, the rich smell of the damp soil, and the faint, green rustle of growing leaves. She didn't know if they were the merman's perceptions or her own. Miss Carstairs pulled herself heavily to her feet and brushed down her skirts with a shaking hand. "It's high time for you to be off," she said. "I'll just ring for Stephen and John to fetch the sling." Unconsciously, she sought the savor of disapproval and rum that was John's signal odor; it was several hours stale. At the same time, she had a clear vision of Stephen, wrapped in a disreputable jacket, plodding with bucket and fishing pole across the garden to the sea-wall. She saw him from above, as she had seen him from her bedroom window early that morning. So it was her vision, not the merman's. The scientist in her noted that fact and also that the throbbing in her head had settled down to a gentle pulse, discernible, like the beating of her heart, only if she concentrated on it. A laughing school of fish flashed through the ordered currents of her thoughts, and Miss Carstairs understood that the merman found her new consciousness amusing. Then a searing sense of heat and a tight itching pain under her skin sent her running into the house shouting for John. He appeared from the kitchen. "Get a bucket and a blanket and wet down the merman," said Miss Carstairs. "You'll find him in the garden, near the sundial. Then bring the stretcher." He gaped at her uncomprehendingly. "Hurry!" she snapped, and strode off towards the sea-wall in search of Stephen. Following his odor, she soon found him sitting hunched over his fishing pole and his pipe. He tasted of wet wool, tobacco, and solitude. "Stephen," she began. "I have learned everything from the merman that he is able to tell me." Stephen turned, looked up inquiringly, and lowered his pipe. "I have decided to release him." "Yes, Miss," he said.  The tide was going out, and the men had to carry their burden far past the spit and the tidal pool where the merman had first washed ashore. It was heavy going, for the wet sand was soft and the merman was heavy. When they came at last to the water, Miss Carstairs stood by as they released the merman into the shallows, then waded out up to her knees to stand beside him. The sun splintered the water into blinding prisms; she turned her eyes inshore, away from the glare. Behind her, Stephen and John were trudging back towards the beach, and above them the conservatory glittered like a crystal jewel-box. Sharp tastes of old sea-weed and salt-crusted rocks stung her nose. Squinting down, Miss Carstairs saw the merman floating quietly against the pull of the sea, one webbed hand grasping the sodden fabric of her skirt. His crest was erect, his mouth a little open. When he turned his pearly eyes to hers, Miss Carstairs read joy in them, and something like regret. "I shall not forget what you have shown me," said Miss Carstairs, although she knew the words superfluous. Mentally, she called up the ape-woman and the scientist, and fused them into a composite portrait of a human woman, beast and angel, heart and mind, need and reason; and she offered that portrait to the merman as a gift, an explanation, a farewell. Then he was gone, and Miss Carstairs began to wade back to shore. |
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