To Catch a Mermaid (5 page)

“See if it’s got a zipper,” Boom said. “In case it’s a costume.” Someone might be playing a trick on them. Maybe this was one of those hidden-camera shows.

Mertyle lifted the tail, continuing her inspection. A little squirt of yellow landed on the comforter.

“It’s a real tail,” she said, plugging her nose. “And that’s real merbaby poop.”

The baby scrunched up its face and squirted out another little blob. “Disgusting,” Boom groaned. The stuff smelled like Halvor’s hot fish nectar. Boom opened the window to get rid of the stench. A blast of winter air quickly deodorized the room.

The bedroom window looked out onto Prosperity Street and the Mumps’ house across the way. The Mumps’ minivan pulled into their driveway. Daisy Mump, Hurley’s little sister, leapt out, as did three other girls. They carried sleeping bags and overnight cases and giggled when they pointed at the Brooms’ house, a run-down shack compared to the Mumps’ stone mansion. But before the girls caught sight of Boom at the window, Halvor stormed into the front yard, still holding Erik the Red’s axe. The polished silver blade reflected the cloudy sky.

“You girls seen a big fish flopping about?” he hollered over the broken picket fence. The girls screamed and ran into the Mumps’ house.

“Put that thing away!” Mrs. Mump scolded, pointing at the axe. Her coat stretched across her chest like she had torpedoes under it. “You’re going to hurt someone.”

“I’ll do as I please in my own yard,” Halvor cried, shaking the axe.

“Well, that’s not really
your
yard,” Mrs. Mump yelled, grabbing her purse. “You’re just a servant and you aren’t doing your job because that yard is an eyesore. It’s the ugliest yard on Fairweather Island. Look at all those horrid weeds. Why don’t you do something about them?”

“Mind your own business!” Halvor hollered. “For sure!”

Mrs. Mump stomped her high heel. “How dare you speak to me like that. If I see you swinging an axe anywhere near my daughter again, I’ll call the police.” She stormed into her house, slamming the door.

Feeling the sting of Mrs. Mump’s rude words, Boom closed the window. The commotion had awoken the baby. It opened its fang-filled mouth and began to whine — a sound like wind seeping through a crack under the door. Boom stepped toward it and the whine turned into a growl. He took another step — another growl. But it didn’t growl when Mertyle sat down on the bed and scooped it up. It peered at her with its watery eyes and made a little bubble.

“Why does it growl at
me
?” Boom asked. “I’m the one who saved it from the reject seafood bucket.” He stepped forward again and the baby whipped its head around and gnashed its teeth at him.

Mertyle smiled. She actually smiled. To Boom’s knowledge, Mertyle hadn’t smiled since the twister. “I’m going to keep it,” she said with a giggle. “It’s the cutest baby I’ve ever seen.”

Cute? It smelled like mud and left green slime on the walls and yellow puddles on the bed.

“But we can’t tell Halvor,” she added. Boom knew exactly what she meant.

Halvor hated merfolk. During the past year, as he had worked as their cook, he had shared many stories with the Broom children — stories of Viking raids and great battles, of Viking journeys across the unknown sea, and of encounters with strange creatures. To the Vikings, the most feared sea creatures were the merfolk, who stirred up gales and lured sailors to their deaths with an eerie song.

“On a night as black as coal,” Halvor had told them, “a pair of green hands pulled Erik the Red’s beautiful wife, Matilda, overboard and drowned her. All that remained was a shred of her dress hanging on the rail and a conch shell, the mark of the merfolk. Sick with grief, Erik the Red declared that merfolk would be Viking enemies until the end of time and that all Vikings, and their direct descendants, were obligated to kill them on sight.”

Boom swallowed hard, imagining the axe slicing through green baby flesh. Even though it had bit him, it didn’t -deserve to have its head chopped off. “You’re right. We can’t tell Halvor.”

“We can’t tell
anyone
about it,” Mertyle said, her eyes widening.

“Why not?”

“Because the scientists will come and poke the baby with equipment, just like in
E.T.,
and the government will try to put it in a cage, just like in
King Kong.
Then the circus will stick it into a tank and people will point fingers at it.” She tightened her arms around the baby. It began to chew on a strand of Mertyle’s hair.

Boom sat down on his bed to think this out. How could they possibly hide this thing from Halvor and the rest of the world? If this creature was truly a merbaby, wouldn’t that be the most amazing discovery of the twenty-first century? Having discovered it, wouldn’t he become the most famous kid in the entire world? And wouldn’t that make Hurley crazy with envy? Sure, being Kick the Ball Against the Wall champion was a big deal, but discovering a creature that no one believed actually existed was as big as stepping on the moon. Bigger!

But Mertyle wanted to keep it a secret and hide it in their room like a stolen toy. What would happen when it grew up? Like when Winger had talked his mom into buying a baby boa constrictor and then the snake had tripled in size and swallowed their cat! Exactly how big do mer-teeth get?

“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea,” Boom said. “We don’t know how to take care of a merbaby.”

“Please, Boom. I’ll take care of it. I know you found it, but it doesn’t really like you. You don’t have to do anything. It can stay here with me and watch game shows.” She stroked its hair. “I think it’s an orphan. It needs me.”

Boom looked over at the wall calendar, where the big red circle marked today as his day. This wasn’t at all what he had expected.

Mertyle hugged the creature, and the gloom that she had worn for the past year fell away like a heavy cape.

“Sure, Mertyle,” he said with a sigh. “You can keep it.”

Chapter Eight:

The Goldfish Acrifice

W
ith no fish for dinner, Halvor served toast and marmalade, which Boom and Mertyle ate as fast as they could. He left for his Sons of the Vikings meeting at seven. Once he had disappeared down the dark street, Mertyle grabbed a book from the living room coffee table and rushed back upstairs. “It’s one of Halvor’s Viking books,” she told Boom as he followed. Boom knew the book well — a poorly bound manuscript with shaggy edges and well-worn pages. “The facts might be questionable but it’s the only one that has a section on mermaids.” Mertyle began to read while the baby took another nap.

“It says here that mermaids have no tongues,” she told Boom as her fingers flew across the page. “They can’t talk. They only sing. It says that mermen sometimes eat their young. Oh, that must be why the baby doesn’t like you.”

“Eat their young? Let me see that.” Boom reached for the book, knocking a lamp over in the process.

The baby woke up and began to cry, but it was no ordinary cry. The cry filled the room like a whistle, darting between the sheets, boomeranging off the corners, and shooting down the tunnels that led to Boom’s eardrums. When it had possessed every possible space in the bedroom, the cry overflowed into the rest of the house.

“Hello?” Mr. Broom called from the attic.

“Oh no,” Boom moaned. He ran up the narrow stairway that led to the third floor.

“What’s that odd noise?” Mr. Broom asked. Boom could see only one side of his father’s face through the crack in the attic door. Mr. Broom had grown a long beard, and the eye that peered out was wild with panic. “Such a strange noise. It sounds like a dangerous sort of wind.”

“It’s . . . it’s just a new teakettle,” Boom lied.

“Not the wind?”

“Not the wind.”

“Not another twister?”

“Not another twister.”

Mr. Broom nodded, then shut the door. Boom ran back down the stairs.

“I think it’s hungry,” Mertyle hollered above the earsplitting shriek. She shook the Ry-Krisp box, but only crumbs fell out.

Boom stuck his fingers into his ears, but that didn’t help. The sound managed to seep through his cells. It was the most annoying sound in the world. Worse than a car alarm. Worse than Principal Prunewallop droning through her megaphone. Even worse than Mertyle’s know-it-all voice. If an earwig had crawled into Boom’s ear and sung “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” it would have been less annoying than the merbaby’s cry.

Mertyle hurriedly turned the page in Halvor’s book. Then she shrugged and shook her head. “Doesn’t say anything about what merbabies eat.”

“Babies drink milk,” Boom yelled.

The shrieking continued as they rushed downstairs. The sound oozed its way through the single-pane windows of the tiny house. While Mertyle held the baby, trying to calm it, Boom poured milk into a plastic water bottle. Then he squirted the milk into the creature’s tongueless mouth. The baby quieted, but only long enough to spit the milk onto Boom’s face.

“Hey,” Boom complained, pointing his finger. “Bad baby.”

“Did you warm it?” Mertyle asked. “Babies like warm milk.” She had wrapped the creature in one of her doll blankets. The seaweed ponytail stuck straight up. The merbaby looked like a troll. An angry troll.

Boom put a saucepan on the stove and began to heat the milk. He knew how to do this because Mrs. Broom had taught him how to make hot chocolate. He wiped milk from his eyebrows and wondered if merparents spanked their children.

“Shhh,” Mertyle urged as Boom stirred. The baby cried even louder. One of the dandelion jars shattered from the sound wave’s impact. “The milk is almost ready.” But Boom had turned the burner on too high, and the scent of scorched milk rose from the stove. “Oh, that’s just great,” Mertyle complained.

“If you’re so smart, then why don’t you do it?” he asked defensively. He turned off the burner, grabbed Halvor’s oven mitts, and dumped the pan into the sink. The last of the milk lay curdled on the bottom, charcoal black. The baby started to shriek again, and a full marmalade jar exploded on the pantry shelf.

“Do we have any more rye bread?” Mertyle cried.

There was no bread in the pantry, and Halvor had already fed the leftover heels to the squirrels. Boom scraped a spoonful of marmalade off the shelf, careful to make certain it contained no bits of glass. He poked the spoon into the baby’s open mouth. Like the milk, the marmalade shot out between the sharp teeth. This time Boom ducked. The orange blob landed with a splat on the wall. But the creature didn’t start shrieking again. Instead, it pointed at the kitchen window, where Hurley Mump was pressing his face.

Mertyle gasped and turned her back to the window. Someone started pounding on the kitchen door. Mertyle pulled the edges of the doll blanket around the baby and ran upstairs. “Go away,” Boom yelled at Hurley, who scowled menacingly. Someone pounded at the kitchen door again.

“What’s going on over here?” Mr. Mump asked when Boom opened the door. He kept his blond hair shaved close to his scalp, just like Hurley did. “What’s that terrible noise that’s been coming from your house?”

Hurley appeared at his father’s side, his eyes narrowed. He smirked in the way he always smirked at Boom. An
I’m so much richer than you are
smirk. An
I’m the KBAW champion
smirk.

But had he seen the baby?

“Teakettle,” Boom said. “We got a new teakettle.”

“Teakettle, you say?” Mr. Mump weighed about three hundred pounds. Barbecue sauce glistened around his lips. “That teakettle disturbed our dinner. I suggest you get rid of it or I shall call the police.”

“Yes, sir,” Boom said, faking a smile as he shut the door. Mr. Mump always acted like he owned the neighborhood.

From the bedroom window, Boom and Mertyle watched Mr. Mump and Hurley cross the street. “I think Hurley saw,” Boom said. The baby’s shriek had weakened to a low moan. Mertyle looked at it worriedly.

“We’ve got to feed it something,” she fretted. “If it won’t eat marmalade, what can we give it?”

“I don’t know.” Boom was still picturing Hurley’s smirk. “You told me that you’d take care of it.” Trying to hide a merbaby was possibly the worst decision he had ever made, worse even than trying to outrun Mr. Jorgenson. For a fat guy, that man could move surprisingly fast.

“Please, Boom. It’s got to eat or it will die.”

Suddenly, the baby stopped moaning and reached out both hands toward Mertyle’s desk, where, along with a can of pencils and a stapler, sat the goldfish bowl. “Oh, of course,” Boom realized. The creature came from the ocean so it would eat food from the ocean. “Why didn’t I think of that before? It wants fish food.” He picked up the cylinder of SuperGrow Fish Food from beside the goldfish bowl and sprinkled some into his hand, offering the flakes to the baby. But the baby ignored the flakes and continued to reach out. “Fish food,” Boom explained, offering the flakes again. The baby shook its head and started that mind-numbing, bowel-loosening shriek. If the shriek disturbed Mr. Mump’s barbecue feast again, they’d be in big trouble. Mr. Mump would call the police, and the police would come and want to speak with Mr. Broom. They’d discover the merbaby for sure. They might also discover that Mr. Broom had been ignoring his children, and they’d take Mertyle and Boom away to a foster home, and they’d put Mr. Broom in a mental institution. And what if they discovered Halvor’s Viking weapons collection in the garage? Those things had to be illegal.