Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

Coomara never missed the souls. He and Jack continued the best friends in the world, and no one, perhaps, ever equalled Jack for freeing souls from purgatory; for he contrived fifty excuses for getting into the house below the sea, unknown to the old fellow, and then turning up the pots and letting out the souls. It vexed him, to be sure, that he could never see them; but as he knew the thing to be impossible, he was obliged to be satisfied.

Their intercourse continued for several years. However, one morning, on Jack's throwing in a stone as usual, he got no answer. He flung another, and another, still there was no reply. He went away, and returned the following morning, but it was to no purpose. As he was without the hat, he could not go down to see what had become of old Coo, but his belief was, that the old man, or the old fish, or whatever he was, had either died, or had removed from that part of the country.

Selkies (or silkies, or selchies, as they are sometimes called) have been associated with mermaids for hundreds of years. A tale from Shetland describes how a mermaid once sacrificed her life for a selkie, and how for this reason the selkies have done all that they can to help the mermaids and warn them of danger, often risking their own lives to save them. Both selkies and mermaids are fond of posing upon seaside rocks, both are credited with the gift of prophecy, both sing in the most haunting and melodious of voices. And both mermaids and selkies are the most abundant along the same stony gray coasts: the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, the West Coast of Ireland, the rugged coast of Cornwall.

A selkie is nothing more or less than a were-seal.. .although unlike the unhappy werewolf of popular conception (sad-faced Larry Talbot, for instance), its transformation is not necessarily tied to the phases of the moon, and is usually not involuntary. In the words of the haunting old Childe ballad:

Like their soi-disant cousins, the mermaids—and, in fact, like most of the various kinds of Merfolk who have been scattered throughout the seas of the world by the human imagination—selkies have a curious predilection for taking human lovers ... and although the eloquent and melancholy tale that follows takes place in modern-day California, it has all the ingredients of the classic selkie story: a lonely woman in an isolated house along an empty and desolate strand of beach, a moonlit night, the dark and restless immensity of the sea, and the eves that may or may not be human silently watching from the waves....

Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium, and edits their quarterly magazine. Her elegant and incisive stories have been turning up for the past few years in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Galaxy, Chrysalis, and other places. Her first novel, The Shadow Hunter, was published in 1982. She is currently at work on a new novel, set in Yucatan, tentatively entitled Ancient Voices.

THE HARBOR SEAL LAY JUST BEYOND THE REACH OF THE waves—its dark eyes open in death. The surf had rolled and battered the body; the mottled gray fur was dusted with white sand. Gulls had been pecking at a wound in the animal's head.

Kate shifted her weight uneasily as she stared down at the body. She was alone; Michael, her lover, was still asleep at the cottage. Kate had come walking on the beach to escape the restless feeling left by a melancholy dream. She could not remember the dream; it had retreated like a wave on the beach, leaving behind feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

She raised one hand to touch the ivory pendant that dangled from a chain around her neck, a circle etched with the likeness of a seal. Michael had given her the pendant the night before—-as a peace offering, she thought.

Michael had come to visit for the weekend to apologize and to forgive her—managing the seemingly contradictory acts with the competence that he brought to every task. Kate had left Santa Cruz and Michael to live for a summer in her parents' old cottage; she had needed the solitude to finish her thesis on the folklore of the sea. Michael had brought her the scrimshaw pendant to apologize for accusing her of using her thesis as an excuse for leaving him.

She did not think that she was using the thesis as an excuse. But sometimes, in the dim light of early morning when the gulls cried overhead, she was not sure. She knew that sometimes she needed him. She knew that he was solid and he was strong.

She could hear the distant roar of a truck traveling down Highway One. The cottage was halfway between Davenport and Pescadero—south of nowhere in particular, north of no place special. A lonely place.

Looking down at the dead body of the seal, Kate had the uneasy feeling that she was being watched. She looked up at the cliff face, then out to sea where the waves crashed. Just past the breakers, a dark head bobbed in the water—a curious harbor seal. As she stared back, he ducked beneath a wave.

She hurried back to the cottage, scrambling up the sandstone slope, following the narrow path that was little better than a wash eroded by the last rain.

The cottage was perched at the top of the bluff. The waves that pounded against the cliff threatened to claim the ramshackle building someday. The sea fog had begun a slow offensive against the cottage: the white paint was chipped and weathered; the porch sagged at one corner where a supporting post had rotted through; the windchimes that hung from the low eaves were tarnished green.

"Bad news," Kate said as she stepped in the kitchen door. "There's a dead seal on the beach."

The kitchen was warm and bright. Michael was making coffee. "Why's that bad news?"

"Bad luck for the person who shot it," she said. "It could have been a silkie, a seal person who could change shape and become human on land. If a person kills a silkie, the sea turns against him."

Michael was watching her with an expression that had become familiar during the time that they had lived together—he did not know how seriously to take her. "You've been work- ing on that thesis too long," he said, and poured her a cup of coffee.

She laughed and slipped an arm around his waist, leaning up against him and feeling the warmth of his body. Almost like old times. "Huh," she said, "There speaks the scientist."

"It'll be simple enough to get rid of any bad luck," he added. "I'll call the University of Santa Cruz. There's a class that recovers stranded marine mammals for dissection."

Kate released him, and sat down in one of the two wooden kitchen chairs. The cup of coffee warmed her hands, still cold from the fog. "They don't need to get it. It'll wash out to sea at high tide tonight."

Michael frowned. "They'll want it. This is the only way that they can get specimens."

"Oh." She sipped the hot coffee. Far out at sea, over the crash of the waves, she could hear a sea lion barking. "It doesn't feel right," she said. "It seems like the body should go back to sea." Then, before he could laugh or call her foolish, she shrugged. "But I suppose it doesn't matter. In the interest of science and all."

Michael called the University and arranged to have a crew of students come to pick up the seal that afternoon, explaining that Kate would meet them, that he would be gone.

He looked at her when he hung up the phone and said, inexplicably, "Is that all right?"

"Of course, of course, it's all right," she said irritably. And when he came around the table to hug her, she realized that he had meant that he was leaving, and was that all right? She had been thinking of the seal.