Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

I eased her out of the stateroom as slick and gentle as I could, for I didnt want her passing out one of her punishments onto me.

But I knew I would never be the same.

In fact, I suddenly knew two new things: that I was going to spend my life on the river, and that I would never marry.

Because Loll had spoilt me for even the most loving of mortal caresses.

And, what's more, she sewed my buttons back on that morning. Though the hands that held my repaired garment out to me—they were gnarled and withered like the great roots of old river trees.

Well, you remember the flood of thirty-six. It was a bad one all right.

It was weird—looking down Seventh Street to the streetlight atop the telephone pole by the confectioner's and seeing that streetlight shimmering and shivering just ten inches from the dark, pulsing stream—that streetlamp like a dandelion atop a tall, shimmering stalk of light.

Beautiful.

But kind of deathly, too.

It was a bad, bad flood in the valleys. Crest of fifty-nine feet.

But then Loll had predicted more than one hundred.

Forecast it and scared poor Darly Pogue—who knew she was never wrong—into running for his life and ending up getting himself the corner room on the fifth floor of the Zadok Cramer Hotel. There was only one higher place in Glory and that was the widow's walk atop the old courthouse and this was taller even than the mound. But Darly settled for the fifth floor of the Zadok. It seemed somehow to be the place remotest from the subject of his phobia.

I was living in the hotel by now so I used to take him up his meals—all prepared by the hotel staff: Loll had gone on strike.

Darly didnt eat much.

He just sat on the edge of the painted brass bed toying with the little carved peach pit from Death Row and looking like he was the carver.

She wants me back. And by God I haint going back.

Well, Darly, you could at least go down and see her. I'll lend you my johnboat.

And go back on that wharfboat?

Well, yes, Darly.

Like hell I will, he snaps, pacing the floor in his Ballyhoo underwear and walking to the window every few minutes to stare out at block after town block merging liquidly into the great polished expanse of river.

On the wharfboat be damned! he cried. It's farther than that she wants me.

I felt a kind of shiver run over me as Darly seemed to shut his mouth against the Unspeakable. I closed my eyes. All I could see in the dark was the tawny sweet space of skin between Loll's breasts and a tiny mole there, like an island in a golden river.

But I'm safe from her here! he cried out suddenly, sloshing some J. W. Dant into the tumbler from the small washbowl. He drank the half glass of whiskey without winking. Again I shivered.

Aint you even gonna chase it, Darly?

With what?

Well, hell—with water.

Aint got any.

I pointed to the little sink with its twin ornamental brass spigots with the pinheaded cupids for handles.

That's for washing—not drinking. It's—

He shuddered.

—it's river water.

He looked miserably at the little spigots and the bowl, golden and browned with use, like an old meerschaum.

I tried to get a room without running water, he said. I do hate this arrangement awfully. Think of it. Those pipes run directly down to...

Naturally, he could not finish.

The night of the actual crest of thirty-six I was alone in my own room at the hotel. Since business on the wharfboat had been discontinued during the flood there was no one aboard but Loll. The crest—a mere fifty-nine feet—was registered on the wall of the Purina Feed Warehouse at Seventh and Western. That was the crest of thirty-six. And that was all.

You would think that Darly would have greeted this news with joy.

Or at least relief.

But it sent him into a veritable frenzy against Loll. She had deliberately lied to him. She had frightened him into making himself a laughstock in Glory. A hundred and fifteen feet, indeed! We shall see about such prevarications!

In his johnboat he rowed his way drunkenly down the cob- bled street to where the water lapped against the eaves of the old Traders Hotel and the wharfboat tied in to its staunchstone chimney top.

Loudly Darly began again to read the story of the Flood from Genesis. He got through that and lit into Loll for fair-saying that she had mocked God with predictions of the Flood.

Loll stayed in her stateroom throughout most of these tirades and when she would stand it no more she came out and stood on the narrow little deck looking at him. She was an old crone, now, her rooty knuckles clutched round the moon-silver head of a stick of English furze. Somehow—even in this moon aspect—I felt desire for her again.

You lied, Loll! Darly cried. Damn you, you lied. And you mocked the holy Word!

I did not lie! she cried with a laugh that danced across the renegade water. O, I did not I did not I did not!

You did! screamed Darly and charged down the gangplank from the big johnboat and sprang onto the narrow deck. No one was near enough to intervene as he struck the old woman with the flat of his hand and sent her spinning back into the shadows of the companionway.

The look she cast him in that instant—I saw it.

I tell you I am glad I was never the recipient of such a look.

Darly rowed back to his hotel and went in through a third- story window of the ballroom and up to his room on the fifth.

He was never seen alive on earth again.

He went into that little room on the top of the Zadok Cramer with a hundred and twenty-six pounds of window glazer's putty and began slowly, thoroughly sealing up his room against what- ever eventuality.

It was a folly that made the townfolk laugh the harder. Because if the water had risen high as that room—wouldn't it surely sweep the entire structure away?

Yet the flood stage continued to go down. It was plainly a hoax on Loll's part. Yes, the waters kept subsiding. Until by Easter Monday it was down so low that the wharfboat could again tie in onto the big old willow at the foot of Water Street.

Everything was as usual.

Or was it?

There had been a savage electric rainstorm on the last night of the flood of thirty-six. The crest of thirty-six was a grim one and it was near what Loll had warned.

And there was no way to question her about it.

Because during the storm—at some point—she disappeared (as Darly was to do) from off our land of earth.

It all came out the next week.

Toonerville Boso, the desk clerk, hadn't seen nor heard of Darly Pogue in three days and nights. An old lady in four-oh-seven reported a slight leak of brown water in the ceiling of her bedroom. Toonerville approached the sealed room on the morning of the Sunday after Easter and he, too, noted a trickle of yellow, muddy water from under the door of Darly's room. There was also a tiny sunfish flipping helplessly about on the Oriental carpet.

You remember the rest of it—

How a wall of green water and spring mud and live catfish came vomiting out of that door, sweeping poor Boso down the hall and down the winding stairs and out the hotel door and into the sidewalk.

That room had been invaded. Yes, the spigots were wide open.

Everyone in Glory, every one in the riverlands at least, knows that the ceiling of that hotel room was the real crest of thirty-six. Colonel Bruce he worked with transit and scale and plumb bob for a month afterward—measuring it—the real crest of thirty-six. It was exactly one hundred and thirteen feet.

I know, I know—there were catfish in the room and sunfish and gars and a couple of huge goldfish and they all too big to have squeezed up through the hotel plumbing, let alone through those little brass spigots. But they did. The pressure must have been enormous. And it all must have come rushing out and filling up in the space of a few seconds—before Darly Pogue could know what was happening and could scream.