Stories: All-New Tales

When finally Jack lightly touched one foot to the floor of the lake, pushing up a gentle puff of silt, and then with the other creating a second puff, he found there waiting for him a sylph or nix (for the taxonomy of lake spirits was not a subject he was conversant in) clad in raiment of gold and silver, by which token he took this being to be the king of the Mummelsee.

“A good day to you, Jack,” said the king. “I trust you are well?”

“God save us from hurt and harm, friend!” Jack cried. “But however could you possibly know my name?”

“As for that, my dear fellow, I have been reading about your adventures, most recently with those scoundrelly false comrades who threw you into this lake.” The king’s Vandyke and mustachios waved lightly in the water and this made Jack clutch his throat in sudden apprehension that he was breathing a medium for which mortal men were unsuited. But then the king laughed and his laugh was so natural and warmhearted that Jack could not help but join it. So, realizing that a man who could still laugh was neither dead nor in any sense lacking breath, he put aside his fears.

“What place is this,” Jack asked, “and what manner of people live here?”

“Why, as the saying goes, ‘As above, so below.’ We have our farms and cities and churches, though the god we worship in it may not have the same name as yours. Salt hay is harvested to thatch our roofs. Sea horses pull plows in our fields, and sea cows are milked in our barns. Catfish chase mice fish, and water gnomes drive shafts through the muck in search of mussels and precious stones. The maidens here may have scales, but they are no less beautiful nor any more slippery than those in your above-water world.”

So talking, the king of the Mummelsee led Jack along a pleasant road to what destination he did not yet reveal, and all the nixies who had guided Jack down formed themselves into a casual procession behind them, laughing and talking among themselves, and flashing from side to side as they went, so that they resembled nothing so much as a great school of minnows. Above a winding road they swam and then through a forest of giant kelp, which abruptly opened up upon a shining white city.

Great were the wonders of that submarine metropolis. The walls of its buildings were so white they glowed, for they were plastered (so explained the king) with powdered pearls. While the streets were not paved with gemstones, many a fresco set into the exterior walls was made of nothing else, and the scenes they depicted were not of warfare but of children at play and lovers chastely courting. The architecture was a happy blend of Moorish and Asian influences, with minarets and pagodas existing in easy harmony, and entrances on all the upper floors as well as the bottommost. Nor did it escape Jack’s attention that there were neither locks on the doors nor guards at the entrances to the palace—and this was far from the least of the wonders that he saw.

But the greatest wonder of all, so far as Jack was concerned, was the sylph maiden Poseidonia, the king’s daughter, who came out to greet her father on his return to the city. The instant he clapped eyes on her slim and perfect form, Jack was determined to win her. Nor was that a difficult task, as he was a well-made man with a soldier’s straight bearing, and his frank admiration drew from her a happy blush and no protests whatsoever. Further, the mer-people being a Heathen folk and not bound by Christian standards of propriety, their mutual infatuation quickly found physical expression.

Time went by. It may have been days or it may have been months.

Late one afternoon, lying in the princess’s bed, with the sheets and pillows all in sensuous disarray and a greenish-blue noontide light flowing through her bedroom windows, Jack cleared his throat and hesitantly said, “Tell me something, oh my best and belovedest.”

“Anything!” replied that passionate young sylph.

“One thing continues to bother me—a small thing, perhaps, but it nitters and natters at the back of my mind, and I cannot rid myself of it, however I try. When first I arrived in this rich and splendid land, your father told me he had been reading of my adventures. By what magic? In what unimaginable book?”

“Why, in this one, dearest of scoundrels.” (It was the sylph’s single most endearing quality that she loved Jack for exactly what he was and not one whit through any misapprehension of his character.) “What other book could it possibly be?”

Jack looked from one end of the room to the other, and replied, “I see no book.”

“Well, of course not, silly. If it were here, how could you be in it?”

“I cannot say, oh delight of my eyes, for your answer makes absolutely no sense to me.”

“Trust me, he read of you in this book, nor have you ever left it.”

Now Jack began to feel the stirrings of anger. “This one you say—which one? The devil take me if I can make heads or tales of your answers!”