The Selkie (17 page)

“But—” Hexy protested, a hand going to her bosom. She hadn’t thought that she would actually be going to confront the monster this day, and had never considered that there could be other things in the ocean that would try to kill her. Her worry had all been for the evil Sevin. The thought of swimming in the deep without even the protection of clothing was unnerving.

“Keep your shoes, but leave your dress up on that rock. It will be safe from the tide there.”

“My underclothes?” she asked hopefully. “I can keep them?”

“If they are heavy they will only slow us. I am already weakened by the weight of iron. If I tire before we reach shore, you shall surely drown and I will be captured. If he finds me again, he will not stop with torture.” The mermaid frowned and said harshly, “Be honest, seeker, before we risk our lives—and your soul. Do you wish to find your lover or not? Have you the resolve to face great evil without flinching? Decide now if you cannot, and spare us both this journey.”

Hexy swallowed and abandoned modesty and her fear of the unknown deep. “Of course I want to find him. But my lantern?” she asked. “I’ll need at least that.”

“I’ll put it in a bag and keep it dry, but you shall have to hold it while I swim,” the mermaid said impatiently. “We must hurry. The merrow is indiscreet. The drunkard will find someone to talk to. And if
he
knows that you are coming,
he
shall lay a trap—and I tell you now, seeker, I will not let him catch me again.”

“I understand,” Hexy said softly, wishing that she had thought to bring one of Mr. MacKenzie’s ancient pistols. Chances were that the old gunpowder would not have worked, but a firearm would have been comforting. At the very least, she wished she had a knife.

Hexy began to strip, feeling more than merely naked when she peeled her dress and chemise away. For the first time in her life, sun and wind were able to thrust themselves upon her bare skin and touch her at will. Under other circumstances, it might have been enjoyable. As it was, it merely reminded her of how tender was human flesh.

The bag in which the lantern—and her silk chemise—was stowed looked a bit like a sheep’s stomach, but Hexy did not ask from which creature the bladder came or how it sealed up so tightly.

The nameless mermaid had to help Hexy bind up the sponges to her hair and limbs with strips of fish skin, but as soon as they had the sponges tied, the mermaid seized Hexy by the
arm and towed her out into the deep water. Her fingers felt like a giant snake coiled about Hexy’s limb. The mermaid’s strength was terrifying as she forced them both out into the sea in opposition to the tide, but Hexy did not struggle against it. If what the legends said was true, then this woman was risking more than her life to take Hexy to the lair of her nemesis.

In what seemed a very short while they arrived at a gray peninsula, which was guarded by an unwelcome offshore wind that caused discord among the waves and did its best to push them away. The breeze’s unhappy susurrations increased the closer they came to the island, and it finally became necessary to swim under the water to escape it.

Hexy did not close her eyes, since the water did not seem to bother them at first, and she felt the need to watch for danger. It was difficult to judge from beneath the waves what was happening above the surface, but it seemed that Hexy and the mermaid passed under a band of pure black clouds, which suddenly dropped an unpleasant sousing rain upon the water’s surface. It was a painful rain that did not dissolve when it hit the sea, and though she did not breathe, Hexy could still tell that it smelled strongly of sulfur. So bitter and caustic was this water that it forced Hexy to close her eyes against it. After a moment, her skin began
to sting. The hand on her arm tightened and jerked her deeper into the ocean.

Finally, when she thought she must cry out from the pain and lack of air, they moved into a place of eerie calm and clean water, and their pace slowed to one less frantic. They came back to the surface and, realizing that she had not inhaled for some impossibly long time, Hexy took a great gasp of air. Beside her, the finwoman’s breathing was also fast and labored.

Hexy treaded water and looked up at the sky. It was quite impossible, as it was full day and the skies were again clear, but it seemed as though something had swooped over the face of the sun and blotted out its healthy light. An evil veil separated them from the real world. There was illumination in this strange monochromatic land, but no heat. Around them, the water was completely clear, but it was also dead—as sterile as water boiled for tea.

As they drew into the shallows and Hexy found her feet, she was able to see that it was not simply the rock of the peninsula that was the unhealthy gray of blotched accumulations of seagull lime. There was also some scabrous and diseased seaweed that thrived there, growing all over the steep-sided banks, all but masking the narrow entrance to a cave.

“Beware the crabs,” the mermaid said softly, her tired voice hardly louder than the breeze.
“They pinch viciously and will eat you if they get a chance, for they are trapped here and always hungry.”

Hexy stared at the rock. The hermit crabs, if that was what these creatures were, were scuttling along under scorched pans and cracked jars and other human-made castoffs. The brief flashes of their pale corpulence when their borrowed shells wobbled were revolting.

“What’s wrong with them?” she asked, grateful that she had chosen to keep her shoes. “Why do they use those things instead of shells?”

“They have gotten ferocious and fat off the finmen’s poisoned leavings. They don’t fit in their own shells any more.” The mermaid met Hexy’s eyes. “Now, listen carefully. You must go quickly to the cave and get out of sight of spying eyes. The crabs probably will not follow you inside, for even they fear the finmen.”

Hexy glanced at the scuttling monsters and then looked back at the nameless finwoman. Her face was paler than it had been when they first met, her skin completely without color in spite of her exertions. Hexy wondered if she herself wore the same shade of ghastly white, or whether the finwoman was ill.

“Thank you for bringing me,” she said softly.

“I’ll take no thanks for this,” the mermaid answered, reminding her of Padraig. She took
the bag from Hexy and, opening the bladder, showed Hexy the dry lantern and her chemise. “I’d not go in here even to save my love. Howbeit, the decision is yours.”

Hexy nodded.

“Here,” the mermaid said. “I leave you with this gift. This is fresh water from one of your people’s holy fountains that I have been using on my wounds, hoping that it would help heal them. It is supposed to banish evil and cure disease.” She reached down and detached a vial from one of the hooks that marred her tail. She paused a moment before handing it to Hexy.

Hexy hesitated before accepting it.

“What will happen to you without this?” she asked. “Will your wounds get worse?”

“If you have the chance, kill him,” the mermaid advised, not answering her question. Her eyes burned with a mixture of hatred and pain. “You’ll not get more than one chance with that soul-sucker. Good luck, seeker. Kill him and you’ll set us both free.”

The mermaid melted back into the clear, dead water and was suddenly gone.

Ruairidh looked closely at the pearl mussels clustered on the rock. Millions of them abutted one another, fighting for space on the ocher stone. The tiny crevices between their shells hissed as the foaming waters pushed through them, bringing them their almost invisible prey.

He knew by smell which of them had the pretty bits of layered grit that the lasses liked. It would only take a moment for him to retrieve an appealing gift for Hexy, which perhaps would help sweeten his apology. His long absence caused by the dark of the moon and the slow deliberations of the council would perhaps be forgotten in the shimmer of pearls. The
meat from the mussels would be good for their babe, too. Her craving for flesh from the sea had to be strong now.

He had plucked open several mussels and was harvesting their treasures when he noticed a wounded skua sitting atop the rock staring at him with small black eyes. It had a tiny lace bandage wound about one leg. The bird trilled at him as soon as he looked up.

Ruairidh dropped the mussel and started forward. The bird grew alarmed at his approach but did not flee. Slowly, Ruairidh bent over the trembling body and drew in a breath. The bandage had come from Hexy and bore both her and the bird’s own blood.

Suddenly anxious, he nevertheless spoke softly to the little bird. “Where is she, winged one? Where has she gone?”

After a moment the bird blinked and then answered in the way of its kind.

Its words made Ruairidh’s heart leap into his throat. With the greatest haste he had ever used, he reached for his skin, shoving his arms into it even as he ran.

“Keir!” he called, his voice echoing over the water like a lighthouse’s alarm. “The finman has the
NicnanRon!”

Hexy pulled the sponges from their moorings, dropping them into the water, then ran up
onto the beach, picking a hasty path among snapping crustaceans until she reached the mouth of the cave. Once inside its empty shadow, she paused to catch her breath and light her lantern. The smell of the kerosene was awful enough to upset her stomach, but less awful than going into the darkness without it.

As she dressed in her tiny bit of useless silk, she looked about, trying to orient herself to the strange and horrible place. She was surrounded by confusing disorder, which reminded her of the fisherman’s chapel. Heaps of rotting grasses were tumbled together with shattered boards and what looked like bones. Every inch of putrescent flotsam abounded with pale, misshapen crabs as yet too small to compete with their husked brethren in the open stretches of the beach. It was like being inside a stomach.

And the finman now lodging there was a maggot, a cancer, growing inside the stony island and eating it away bit by bit.

The thought sickened and terrified her. Every particle of Hexy’s nearly unclothed being wanted to cry out for Ruairidh to come to her, because she sensed that he was nearer than he had been in days. But she also recalled what the mermaid had said about Sevin listening, and kept silent. The soft patter of water from her sodden hair followed her as she walked and a thought came to her: It could be that Ruairidh
was nearby because he was a prisoner, and it was she who would have to free him.

Hexy didn’t allow herself to consider the idea that she might already be too late to save him.

She noticed a small pile of red rocks shoved to the corner of the cave. They looked almost molten in the trembling light of her lantern, so different from the other stone of the island. Dimly recalling Ruairidh saying something about the red rocks being weapons against sea monsters, she opened the bladder bag and dropped seven fist-sized stones inside. Her fingers were burning by the time the last had been added. Apparently iron ore was now anathema to her as well.

No obvious path presented itself, but she kept searching. After several minutes, Hexy began to fear that there was no exit from this insane cave and that she would have to return to the beach to search for another entrance. She might also have to go out into the water and look for an entrance from under the waves.

This thought made her shudder and renew her efforts to find some entrance, and she finally did discover a tunnel concealed behind the fractured prow of a shattered rowboat. It was low and dark and sloped downhill at a steep angle. The odor that floated up from below was a miasma of terrible smells.

Repulsed, she nevertheless started inside. It
seemed for an instant as she bent her head nearer to the ground that over the sobbing of the tide she could hear the distant barking of seals, but when she stilled her breath and listened, there was nothing left in the air except the sound of waves and hermit crabs’ clicking claws.

A green darkness clutched at her as she descended into the earth. The tide had cleft out a passage from the heart of the stone by millenniums of torrent, and the channel she was traveling was not made for those who went about on two legs. Hexy was soon forced to her hands and knees, her burdened fingers and bare limbs making reluctant contact with the green phosphorescence of the walls that was her only light aside from her lantern. The near darkness was Plutonian and cold as death itself, and the tunnel soon wound back on its own length and headed away from the land and down toward the dead sea.

She was deep in the cave now, and the weight above her was oppressive and the green darkness was horrid and dank. She had to fight off paralyzing claustrophobia as the tunnel continued to shrink in diameter.

The silence around her was as profound as the grave, and why shouldn’t it be? If she were correct in her suspicions, and this was Wrathdrum, then she was venturing among the
dead—or at least among souls that belonged no more to the living.

Unbidden, some lines of poetry from the legend of Kathleen and St. Kevin came to mind:

Fearless she had tracked his feet To this rocky wild retreat And with a rude repulsive shock He hurled her from the beetling rock.

Only Kathleen had likely worn clothes when she went to her death; Hexy had nothing to protect her save a pair of sodden shoes and a bit of damp silk that did nothing to preserve her modesty.

At last, the horrible constriction of the tunnel ended, and she was able to stand erect again inside a broad chamber. The air was less breathable than ever, and the foulness of the now familiar stench was beginning to make her dizzy.

The room she entered was circular, with a flat pool embosomed in the rock floor where there arose a column of still white vapor. Its dimensions were unguessable, but it felt large.

There was a second half-round antechamber off to the right, with an apsidal ledge spiraling up its glowing chimney. In its walls were cut a series of niches, chipped rudely out of the
stone, and in each of these, save two, there rested overturned pots.

Avoiding the flat pool and its mist, which was somehow terrifying in its unnatural stillness, Hexy hurried for the antechamber, her lantern held high.

Terrified but resolved, she paused at the first urn. She set down her sack of stones and took a slow breath before she turned the pot upright. Her nervous exhalation condensed into vapor and refused to dissipate until it attached itself to the pot surrounding it in a light fog. Her lungs told her that they were drowning, even though she was above the high-water mark of the chamber. Except for her ghostly breath she was alone.

Hexy tried to convince herself that this meant that she was safe.

She tipped the first pot upright. The moment the seal broke, something rushed out, an entity formless but vaguely visible and warm. It blew by her in a short hot stream with a sigh that was like a mournful bird’s call.
Chyrme,
Rory Patrick had called the bird’s death songs, the ones they sang when their nests were raided of their young.

A soul!
she thought, tears starting in her eyes as she watched the faint, silver trail that marked its passing.
But not Ruairidh’s. Ian, the fisherman, son of John of Crot Callow.

Crying silently at the horrible proof that this nightmare was real, Hexy hurried to the next pot, turning it over quickly. And then another and another, searching frantically for her lover and praying that he was still recognizable and sane.

But each soul she freed was weaker and paler than the last, and none were Ruairidh. Seaumus, John, Coelph, Cennfailad, Sihtric—some human, some not quite—she knew their names and histories for an instant as they fled past her, searching for the freedom of the open air. The contact weakened her, part of their fear and sorrow clinging to her when they touched her mind and stole a little more warmth from her body.

It was a horrible and draining assault, but she did not blame the lost and sometimes insane souls for their unthinking panic, and forced herself on.

Midway up the ledge, she laid her hands upon an urn and received a ghastly shock. It was not a stranger she touched; it was a soul she knew well.

“Rory Patrick?” she whispered, horror taking her voice and all but paralyzing her. It wasn’t her lover beneath her hands, but her brother.
Her brother!
The thought made her feel sick and dizzy. She had never suspected that he might be here.

The pot under her hand quaked and grew warm, as if the soul inside knew she was there and wanted desperately to be freed.

“Rory?” she whispered again. Gently, fearfully, she lifted it, waiting for the familiar spirit to brush by her unheeding, as the others had.

Hexy, beware. Sevin comes. Flee!
The soft zephyr that had been her brother touched her gently on her face. Instead of draining her of heat, the touch was warm.

Behind her, she heard water lap against rock and a wave of sulfurous gas climbed up the cave walls, partly obscuring the green light in it noxious veil.

Hexy looked longingly at the remaining dozen or so inverted jars and then at the pool below, where the mist had begun to writhe and the water shiver. She was exhausted, but escape for herself and freedom for the caged souls were both equally necessary tasks.

“I can’t leave them with this monster. I just can’t! Rory, can you help me?”

No. I have no form, no strength. Run, Hexy! He’ll take you, too. You cannot save them.
His shade shimmered violently as he warned her.

“But the others—I can’t leave them—”

Before Hexy could decide what to do, the pool exploded in what looked like an aquatic inferno of limbs and sea wrack.

She looked with eyes that strained madly to
see and comprehend but could not at first understand what the creature was. In fact, she thought that perhaps it was more than one type of animal wrapped about each other like some host and parasite. But the mass had only one set of eyes, which were yellow and set in a familiar blue face. They glowed like baleful candles, their tiny, internal fires flickering with fury as they looked upon her.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
a voice screamed in her head, concussing her brain with its vicious din.

Hexy gasped in pain as the thing in the water boiled toward her, heaving itself out of the pool and moving swiftly toward the stony ledge.

Sevin. It was the creature of her dreams but, like everything in his domain, grown infinitely more hideous and warped in the last century. The thing that came toward her was no longer human-appearing at all, but rather a conglomeration of the sea’s dead horrors.

Its head was large and bloated, and covered in gray-green patches of mold or scaled flesh, which had replaced most of its hair. It had an animal’s mouth, though Hexy could not think of any animal that had such needlelike teeth in its maw. Indeed, it looked as if the individual teeth were covered in coarse bristles. Or perhaps the juts were made of more bone.

Its legs, such as they were, were short and
powerful, but it was its arms that made it into a nightmare. They were not arms at all, but rather boneless appendages of an impossible length, covered in large suckers that belonged to a squid.

Its ferocity and spiritual miasma was beyond anything she had dreamed.

Hexy, run!
Rory Patrick urged her again, refusing to leave her, though she could feel his fear and helplessness as the creature approached.
Don’t look at him. He’s an eye biter. He’ll hypnotize you
.

A tentacle reached for her, elongating until it squirmed over the edge of the path and touched her shoe. The tip scorched the leather as he tried to drive in his hooks and drag her down to him.

Another tentacle touched her leg, searing away the thin silk and burning her thigh as it tore at her flesh with wicked hooks. Unable to help herself, Hexy screamed and scrambled farther up the ledge, shoving pots over on the creature as she went.

Souls rioted, bouncing off one another in their confusion. She recognized Reverend Fraser when he was freed, and for a moment, it seemed he would stay with her, huddled around her heart. But then he seemed to gather himself and flew at the scaly horror clambering up the ledge toward her.

Flee, my child!
He said to her.
Save your soul!

Horrified but unable to move, Hexy watched and listened as the old clergyman attacked the monster. For an instant, she thought that perhaps he would be able to force Sevin off the ledge and open her escape route. But Sevin never moved. Reverend Fraser’s soul blundered into him at full speed and began screaming as it encountered the beast’s mouth. Sevin breathed it in, his massive chest expanding as his jaws gaped wide. He gulped it down in one swallow.

“Rory Patrick! Leave me,” she breathed, horror blanking out her mind. “I have nowhere to run, but you can escape.”

I will not
.

She had known fear before—dread, like her fear for Ruairidh, which grew slowly over hours and days. She knew plain startlement, which made the heart race and lent her needed speed when action was called for. And she had learned to fear the helplessness of dreams.

But this was different. It was terror of something beyond her world. Terror of the unexplainable paralyzed her. Despairing souls gibbered at her, as frightened as she.

How could she fight such a monster? How could she save them all?