False Mermaid

“Yeah. Some of these old buildings—I had my flashlight, so I took a look down into the shaft, to see what I could see. And then I hear this voice behind me—‘Careful. It’s a long way to the bottom.’ It was the blind guy I saw earlier. I wondered how he knew the elevator wasn’t there. He says to me, ‘You were on that elevator, weren’t you? This afternoon.’ And I’m thinking—how the fuck does he know that? He’s blind. So I asked him, and he says—” Truman’s voice had dropped to a whisper. Shame rolled off him in waves. “He says, ‘Because you still smell of those flowers you were holding.’ Next thing I know, he’s behind me—” Frank stopped breathing. “And he—puts his hands on me. What did he have to go and do that for? I’m not a fucking queer. I had to get him off me, and it just—happened.”

Unburdened at last, Truman Stark laid his head on the table and sobbed like a child.

6

All night, Nora had tried to sleep and failed. It was something of a reversal; Cormac was the usual insomniac. She lay beside him in the gray morning light, listening to the pulse of the surf outside, reading a musty old volume she’d pulled from a bookcase behind the door—Ortha na nGael: Hymns and Incantations—a compilation of verses collected in western Donegal in the late nineteenth century. Most were dressed up as Christian prayers, invoking the trinity or the Virgin or Saint Brigid, but retained their old shapes from the time before trinities had anything to do with Christ. The verses had been translated from the Irish, no doubt filtered through the transcriber’s Victorian sensibility, but much of the beauty and plainness of the original language remained. Even written on the page, their repetitive rhythms still held the power of incantations.

In addition to the prayers, there were stories of shape-changers, and eerie lullabies; charms for all sorts of bodily afflictions, for fire smooring and night shielding; invocations addressing the moon and sun, for rituals of birth and death, and blessings for all sorts of animals, and not only cattle and sheep, but the wild beasts that figured in the local mythology as well: the salmon and the swan, the bull, the horse, the otter and the limpet, the seal. Rare glimpses into the rhythm of daily life in a place that had been for centuries the last outpost of the known world.

Nora closed her eyes, hearing the music of the words, seeing the images they brought forth, of darkness and light, of work and harvest, the damp breath of animals. The words carried a palpable sense of wonder from the people who had composed and repeated them so many generations before. Nora looked back at the book on her lap, fallen open to a charm against drowning. The words of the last stanza seemed to float up off the page:

A part of thee on grey stones,
A part of thee on steep mountains,
A part of thee on swift streams,
A part of thee on gleaming clouds,
A part of thee on ocean-whales,
A part of thee on meadow-beasts,
A part of thee on fenny swamps,
A part of thee on cotton-grass moors,
A part of thee on the great surging sea—
She herself has best means to carry
The great surging sea.
She herself has best means to carry.

She closed the book and set it aside. How did someone even attempt to carry the great surging sea?

Nearly two weeks had passed since her parents had arrived to take Elizabeth home with them to Saint Paul. Two weeks since the return of her hazel knot, discovered along a river path by Seng Sotharith, and two weeks since she learned that her parents had taken her protector in, that he would be staying in her old room and embarking on studies that would eventually transform him into a physician’s assistant.

It was also exactly two weeks to the day since she and Cormac had helped to recover the preserved body of a young woman from the blanket bog above the rocky beach at Port na Rón. When she went into the bog, the young woman had been wearing two long black woolen stockings and one high-button shoe, a long skirt and petticoat, along with a shirtwaist and short jacket, in the fashion of the time. Her clothing had been preserved as if she’d dressed in it only a few days before, and not over a hundred years ago. There was still no definitive proof that the body in the grave was Mary Heaney, but Roz Byrne was now on a mission to trace the female line, to see if any link could be established through mitochondrial DNA between Mary Heaney’s descendants and the faceless female from the bog.