T R North - [BCS279 S02] - Silver Springs (html) Read online

  Silver Springs

  By T.R. North

  The boat was staggeringly white, floating untouched as it was against its backdrop of old cypress and rich swamp loam. Even the heat seemed to glance right off it, leaving the rest of the slowly decaying landscape to soak up that much more of the punishing sun. The first word that popped into my head was pristine, which seemed absurd given its purpose. Medicinal, I suppose was what they were going for. There were VD clinics back home that had a certain feel; everybody wanted to be healed, but nobody wanted to admit they needed it. The vessel’s proprietor could hardly paint ‘Sin-Eaters Incorporated’ in big black letters on the side and expect anyone to board in broad daylight and full view of the hotel’s shaded veranda. Scrub it bright as clean linen and pitch it like a pleasure cruise, on the other hand, and people in need of its revolutionary advances in moral hygiene queued up just so on the crushed shell walk leading to the dock, eager and ready to pay for passage.

  We were almost first in line for tickets, just behind an elderly woman with her two grown children supporting her, her high collar and tight-buttoned cuffs already damp with sweat. Once they unhooked the chain and let us onto the dock, the heels of her boots clicked unsteadily against the wooden planks under her thick skirts. The daughter’s cloche was wilting in the damp heat. The son’s shirt was going limp and rumpled under his waistcoat, sticking to his skin wherever his mother had clutched at his arm.

  I wondered which of the trio had initiated this trip. Mother commanding her offspring? The two women trying to protect the treasured only son from his misdeeds? Mother and son locked in a pact to protect the only daughter’s honor? The vice of which I was fondest was my habit of inventing scandalous intrigues for perfect strangers. The vice of which I was here to be rid was...

  I supposed it would depend on whom you asked. My mother would say it was coveting my neighbor’s goods, that commandment I always seemed to be breaking. My father had less use for priests. A practical man, if superstitious enough to think this might work—the sort of man who wasn’t sure what good lighting a candle did the dead but would throw salt over his shoulder if he spilled any. It helped that he seemed to think of it as modern-day leechcraft, something that science hadn’t quite caught up to yet but for which there was still a rational explanation. He wanted me to stop stealing. Hard to say whether his greater dread was the law’s arm or the neighbors’ tongues, but either way, here we were, travelling all the way down to Florida to lay low and fix things.

  In a way, we were on the lam. It was funny, thinking about it like that. My parents and I in our Sunday best, all hiding out in the half-settled reaches of the tropical swamp until the more metaphorical heat died down. We’d even waited until nightfall to board the train southbound to St. Augustine . All this over a few things pilfered here and there. When a racketeer left town ahead of the Ness gang, it was just him and a suitcase; I’d managed to drag the whole family along.

  I picked at the cuffs of my lace gloves—purloined from a Woolworth’s before we’d left New York—and tried not to imagine alligators lurking in the water under the dock.

  There had been a stuffed one at the last train station before we’d hit the end of the line, big enough to fascinate and fill with dread all at once. I’d closed my eyes on a world lit up by Mr. Tesla’s miracle filaments and opened them a day later in one filled with gape-mouthed monsters and sideshow magic. My mother had flipped her lid at the sight of it, huge and hideous and right there on the platform, only to be assured by one of the locals that she could see one twice as big and alive to boot for a nickel just down the road. It got a lot harder to dismiss the promises of backwoods hokum with dragons lurking on either side of the road, hissing at the horses and bellowing from the marsh.

  The springs seemed too clear for an alligator to hide in, but I couldn’t see any mermaids either, and we’d been assured they were there. My father was staring into the water, dark brows beetled as if doubt was beginning to creep in under hope’s threshold after all. His cousin had sworn to him that this company could do what it promised. His cousin had always been a reliable man, but reliable was hardly infallible.

  The slap of scales on water brought everyone on the dock up on point, looking for the source, but the ship’s captain shook his head.

  “Just the black bass,” he assured us. “The springs are full of them—they’re why we have the merfolk here.”

  “They eat, then?” I asked, curious. For some reason, I’d pictured pretty maids who sat on rocks and sang all day, magical creatures with no baser needs like food or sleep. It seemed foolish now, with the captain watching me, right up there with the time I’d suddenly realized that the saints in the cathedral windows had been real people once and weren’t just figures out of a story. Of course the mermaids had to eat something.

  The captain nodded slowly, weighing his words. “Fish, mostly. If they smile at you, you’ll be able to see it in their teeth—they’re pointed like a cat’s.”

  “They smile?” I was surprised at that. The way the barkers at the station had talked about them, a visit to the mermaids to wipe your slate clean was a solemn, vaguely mystical affair.

  “They pick up a few things from watching people. They’re clever enough, where food and silver’s concerned.”

  He climbed aboard before I could ask any more questions, and the old woman’s son cast a worried look at the water. My mother fanned herself and held my hand more tightly as we waited for our turn to be escorted to the white-painted wooden benches lining the interior of the boat. It was a floating box, from the outside. Flat bottom that was half glass, flat top that was half cloth, walls that were half window. It crouched there on the water, just waiting to sink once we were all aboard.

  It was hard not to imagine a surge of cold water clawing at our ankles, soaking our clothes, dragging us down. Fish, mostly. Would a human being be a bit of welcome variety, if it helpfully made its way into the water of its own accord?

  Back home we’d gone to a sideshow that had a diorama done up life-sized and automated, full of stuffed fish with teeth like knives posed in the middle of attacking a stuffed cow that was half skeleton. The fish had been outfitted with miniaturized motors to make their jaws open and close, and the little click every time their teeth snapped together had raised the hair on the back of my neck. My mother had dragged me away from it, scolding me for believing such absurd lies. A week ago, she’d have said the same thing about a stuffed alligator.

  One of the dockhands must have seen me staring. “The glass is thick, miss. Heavy.” He tipped his hat as he imparted that bit of wisdom. “It won’t break for anything short of a sledgehammer, and the weight keeps it on an even keel, even with the negligible draft.”

  The deck felt strange under my feet when he walked us aboard, and a thrill ran up my spine. If we fell through the glass, I thought that we might not drown at all but keep falling and falling through the clear water until we struck the bottom as surely as if we’d leapt from a rooftop. It made me think of the carriage they’d exhibited at the State Fair the month before last, all kitted out with magnets so that it floated on nothing at all when they turned on the juice.

  The wave of the future, the inventor had said. Imagine a trolleycar that can deliver groceries right to your doorstep while the milk’s still cold and the bread’s still hot! Compatible with all existing streetcar lines!

  The conductor joined us once the benches were full. He was dressed in bright white from top to toe, a perfect match for the boat and a sharp contrast to the rest of us. We passengers had dressed as gaily as we could afford, all done up in our finest and as
united in our common goal of giving up sin as any revivalists or teetotalers. The conductor’s eyes glittered when he spoke, and he held a porcelain plate full of silver coins that he rattled softly as he passed from one person to the next, urging us to pick one.

  “Whichever calls to you, there’s a coin for every ailment!”

  He said that to me, with a wink and a smile. My father waved the plate away and my mother crossed herself against it. Already blameless, I supposed, with nothing to confess. The mermaids were like priests, weren’t they? Like priests, except the mermaids didn’t care if a person was sorry or not, so long as they were offering something the mermaids wanted in return. I took three pieces, my own plus the two my parents had refused. It seemed like a good idea to have something else up my sleeve in case I botched the first try, and of course it wasn’t like my light fingers were the only complaints against my character.

  Would I give three mermaids one apiece, or would one mermaid take all three? I shucked my gloves and slipped them into my pocket, holding the silver against bare skin. It felt cool in the heat, as if it was drawing something from me already. The edge of the first coin bit into the side of my thumb, and I tried to picture the creature that would take it in exchange for the burden of whatever gangrenous rot of which I wished to be relieved. A girl like myself, I decided. A girl like myself, but with no heart of her own and a fishtail instead of legs. A girl who could do as she pleased.

  “Now, folks.” The conductor waited to continue until our attention was on him, when he’d made a full circuit of the cabin and come to the front, alone. “What you have in your hands is not silver but a ticket to a better life. Whatever you took from the plate, hold it tight and think hard on what you want the mermaids to carry away with them. They are not, unfortunately, clever creatures. Their lack of human minds is what frees them from malice, from cruelty, from vice of all kinds. They will not suffer for the sin they subsume, because they have no capacity to suffer in the way a man might. The naturally clarified water fortifies their constitutions in the same way exposure to polluted, poisonous air weakens and corrupts ours.”

  He cleared his throat and looked around, making sure we were all paying attention and that we seemed understand him. Directly behind his head, like a halo, was a hand-painted sign in looping gold letters: “No refunds.”

  “For the same reason they can cleanse you, they can’t interpolate what you mean if you’re unclear. You must be forceful, and direct, when you imagine those qualities you want to give them along with the coin. You must be focused as the dot of sunlight concentrated by a magnifying glass. It must be perfect, or they’ll only take muddy intentions of change, a bit of regret, and a patina of guilt.” He went through the assembly, making eye contact with each of us in turn, his face stern. “Or worse yet, they may carry your aspirations of improvement with them to the cold silent depths, and then where will you be?”

  At peace, I thought, then was immediately ashamed of myself.

  I shielded my eyes. The sun was glittering off the water, off the boat, off my pretty dress. I hadn’t noticed the boat pulling away from the dock, but we were drifting on the open water of the springs now. I was bathed in light, in the brightness of the sky and its reflection. No magnifying glass in sight, only my scattered desires. I held one coin in my palm and imagined the overwhelming impulse that came right before I grabbed something that didn’t belong to me and stuffed it in my pockets. Clear as crystal, clear as the water under the boat. The other two I’d save for the cringing fear of discovery and the soft warmth at a pretty boy’s smile, two weaknesses I could do without if I wanted to make something of myself.

  I took my cue from the young couple closer to the prow, kneeling on the bench and leaning halfway out of the window, one hand braced on the sill and the other clutching the coin. A cloud passing over the sun let me see again. Below us in the water, something that might have been either mermaid or alligator was circling lazily, getting closer with every loop of the spiral. It seemed fitting that the choice was between redemption and death, and we wouldn’t know which until it was probably too late to do anything about it.

  Then it paused and twisted upright, and dark hair blossomed around it like a drop of ink in a glass of water. My heart thumped in my chest, each beat seeming to say, “Real, real, real.”

  I hadn’t believed before, it seemed. Not truly. My mind skipped back to the nymph on the rocks, combing her hair with a shell and singing in the moonlight.

  My mother quietly murmured a prayer behind me, and I could hear her rosary beads ticking against each other as they moved through her fingers. I’d given her the rosary as a birthday gift. I’d stolen it from a pawn shop on a dare. The other girls had thought I was brave, and their belief had made it real for a full week before the feeling wore off. I’d dreamed of learning to type, picking up shorthand, earning a secretary’s salary, moving into one of the ladies’ boarding houses where you could do as you pleased so long as it didn’t involve bringing men home, as though I could pilfer myself a whole new life.

  Turns out that was the sort of thing a body had to pay silver for.

  More shadows were circling now, sleek shapes dark against the sandy bottom. I focused on the one I thought of as mine. My mermaid, coming for my silver, cleansing my sins. She seemed to sense it, too, growing clearer and closer and homing in on me. I clenched the silver in my fist when I saw her features. Not precisely, not yet, but any moment now— Already I could make out a nose, eyes, a mouth.

  Then she breached the surface and blinked at me with golden eyes. Her pupils weren’t quite perfectly round, and a milk-film caul snapped shut over them before her true eyelids fluttered. Her features were too sharp, like a woman’s but thrown into an unnatural relief. Her skin was scribbled all over with faint scalloped lines, row after row that gave her a dappled look like she was still waiting in shadow even now in the sunlight.

  It was horrible, but I couldn’t stop looking. It was beautiful, but I couldn’t move.

  She smiled when her eyes focused on my fist. Use would have taught her to expect silver; she didn’t need to see it to know it was there. She reached up the side of the boat with webbed, sharp-clawed hands.

  Her skin was cold and wet when she touched mine. The pads of her fingers were tough, like an animal’s. She tugged at my fingers, trying to loosen them, and I came back to myself enough to let go. She plucked the silver from my hand delicately and looked pleased with her prize. No one seemed to know what the mermaids did with the silver or why they wanted it, only that they would happily take whatever came with it. After the space of a held breath, she looked back up at me and frowned, her sharp little fox-face crinkling up in confusion. She reached up again, tentatively, and this time her hand wrapped around my wrist.

  Whatever she might have intended, my father was faster. Perhaps he’d expected some mischief or wrong turn on my part, or maybe some last spark of paternal instinct had warned him, but he yanked me back by my other arm before the mermaid had the chance to get a good hold on me. My hand bloomed hot and bright with pain.

  My mother screaming, and the twist of my ankle when I came off the bench too hard and quick to keep my feet, barely registered. I found myself flat on my belly on the glass bottom of the boat, hand pressed against the cold pane as blood welled up from three scratches gouged deep into the back of it. My mermaid had followed and stared back at me from the other side of the glass, her eyes forlorn and her mouth working, cat’s teeth snapping soundlessly together. She pressed her hand to the glass in a mirror of mine, swam away with a flick of her tail, then returned to repeat the gesture.

  My father hauled me up by the shoulder and held me upright against his chest. The conductor stared at me, his face as pale now as his suit. The elderly woman with her two grown children reached into her clutch and offered me a handkerchief. It didn’t occur to me what for until I glanced down and saw my hand still bleeding.

  I mumbled my thanks and bound the torn skin as best I coul
d, awkwardly tying the cloth tight. The ship lurched under us as the captain turned back toward the dock, trading unreadable glances with the conductor as we went. I sat down on the bench and listened to him quietly assuring the other passengers that this was the first time anything of this nature had ever occurred in his long tenure as conductor, that mermaids were perfectly safe but of course still wild, that he was sure this was simply an accident, a bit of exuberance or innocent imitation on the mermaid’s part or perhaps clumsiness on mine.

  It wasn’t as loud in my ears as my mother’s frightened weeping or my father’s tight-jawed entreaties for her to be quiet and not make a scene. If we’d been alone I might have asked them if it was the blood, the public failure of my redemption, or the simple shock of mermaids being real. As it was, I imagined my mother’s horror at seeing her beloved daughter set upon by a monstrous animal, and I wrapped the idea around myself like another sort of bandage.

  We were last off the boat when it docked, everyone else rushing ahead as soon as the conductor seemed disinclined to stop them. Once the cabin was cleared, I got to my feet, my father steadying me and me steadying my mother. The conductor was staring at the bloody handprint I’d left on the glass, then turned away from the gruesome mark when he caught me watching him. He handed my mother and me over to the dockhand—the kind one who’d assured me the boat wouldn’t sink—and kept my father back to issue a sweat-mopping promise that the mermaid had meant me no harm. The company would happily arrange for a doctor to see to my hand in return for our agreement to overlook this little mishap in any future conversations we might have about our time at the springs. My father agreed immediately; he was in no mood to confess the purpose of our visit to anyone, eager to have my wounds tended, and without the cash to pay for a doctor himself.

  The doctor they produced before the hour was up daubed my hand with a tincture of mandrake, declared me a brave girl, and promised my mother that it was barely more than a few scratches. The ankle was less bothersome, and for that he prescribed rest, elevation of the limb whenever possible, and that I confine myself to slippers for the next few days. He then pulled my father aside and issued strict instructions on changing the wound’s dressing and who to contact if any further symptoms developed. He was confident, but of course any scratches from a wild animal were to be treated with caution.