CHAPTER FIVE
Where You’ll Never Cry No More
Once upon a time, in a little seaside town, a boy named Jack was put into bed in the attic room of the town’s only inn. Jill sat down on the bed beside him and stared. The bandages on his head were red and soaked through, and his face was very pale.
“Will he be all right?” Jill asked quietly.
The innkeeper stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. She answered Jill in her broad, salty accent. “I fancy he will. He just needs a bit a sleep, and some food, and he’ll be right as the rain, I reckon.” Her Rs were broad and rolling, like everything else about her. They made Jill feel a little seasick. Or maybe that was seeing Jack, as still and pale as death.
“Thank you,” Jill said.
“You can come down when you’re ready,” the innkeeper said. Jill had agreed to help out around the inn—sweep the floors, do the dishes, that sort of thing—in exchange for the room and food.
Jill nodded and the innkeeper left. Jill knelt down by Jack. Gently she pulled back the covers. He did not stir.
The frog had been weeping quietly ever since he’d seen Jack there at the base of the hill. “Leave me here,” he said, and Jill took him from her pocket and placed him, oh so gently, on Jack’s chest. “I’ll keep watch,” the frog said. “You go downstairs now and earn our keep.” He smiled his bravest froggy smile at Jill. Jill returned the smile sadly, stole a final glance at pale Jack, and went downstairs with a heavy heart.
That night, Jill was kept very busy in the tavern. She cleaned up spilled ale and cleared scotch whisky glasses from the rough wooden tables and brought plates of kippered herring and cracked snails in pails. It seemed that every fisherman and his wife was in the tavern that night. They stank of fish, but their smiles were broad, and their eyes twinkled kindly when Jill came by.
“Now, what have we here?” a big-bellied man said. “What’s this wee lass doin’ in our town?”
Jill answered their questions in a vague sort of way and tried not to drop any dishes on the floor. The work and the talk and all the new people helped Jill to think just a little bit less about the pale boy with the red bandage who lay on the verge of death upstairs.
After the townspeople had all been drinking for a long while, the big-bellied man called Jill over to him. He had a shiny bald head and a big red beard. He smiled at Jill and his eyes twinkled. “You wanna hear a story, then?” His breath smelled like whisky and his clothes smelled like fish.
“Now don’ scare the girl,” someone shouted at him, and “girl” had too many syllables.
The red-bearded, big-bellied man laughed and looked at Jill. “I don’t think ya scare easily. Do ya?” Jill set her chin and shook her head. He bellowed with laughter and said, “See!”
So he set her on a stool beside him, and the tavern quieted down, and the man began to tell his story.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a wee fishin’ village that sat next to the wide black sea, in the shadow of some high green hills.”
“They’re mountains!” someone shouted.
“Me foot!” called someone else, and everybody laughed.
“In the shadow of high green hills,” the red-bearded man repeated, smiling, and his Rs rolled like rowboats on the ocean. “And in this wee town there was a wee lass. Just about the size of ye,” and he poked Jill in the chest with a thick finger. Reluctantly, Jill smiled.
“Well, this lass loved the sea,” he continued. “She would go out and stare at it, drinkin’ in its vastness and its darkness, as if the black waves made some kind of mirror where she could see herself. At least, that’s what the villagers whispered to one another as they watched her, with the wind blowin’ her hair this way and that, at the end of the rocks.”
The tavern had gone silent now. Someone began to snuff out the candles, one by one, until the only light came from the flickering peat fire. The hairs on Jill’s arms began to rise and stand up.
“But thas not what the lass was looking at. She weren’t lookin’ at nothin’. She were listenin’. Listenin’ to the song of the mermaid.”
“I knew it!” someone shouted. “The man’s obsessed with the mermaid!”
“Shhhh!” hushed all the others. And the red-bearded man went on.
“The mermaid sings more beautiful than any mortal has ever heard. Her notes rise like gulls on the wind, and sink like the moon sinks into the sea. She holds ’em high, and sings ’em way down low, like the very sea itself. But no mortal can hear them save a young girl. And no young girl can ever resist their sound.
“Well, one day, the mermaid spoke to that little girl, her hair bein’ blown ’round, way out on the rocks. And the mermaid asked if the little girl wouldna like to come and live with her under the sea. And the little girl said she would. Well, tha’ night, as we sat here in this tavern, we looked out the window and saw a great black wave rise up out o’ the sea. And that wave swallowed the wee lass whole. And we ne’er saw her again. And that’s the truth.”
The tavern was silent now.
At last, Jill whispered, “Is that really the truth?”
“We don’t know,” the innkeeper said. “We did a lose a lass in the sea years ago. But all this mermaid stuff? That’s just a tale told.”
“It’s true enough!” the red-bearded man said. “There is a mermaid out there. I’ve seen her.”
“Have ye heard her?” someone asked.
“No, she sings only to the little girls,” said the man. “But she’s out there all righ’.”
“And how do you know it was she that took the girl and not jus’ the sea?”
“I know,” said the bearded man darkly. “I jus’ know.”
After that, the people of the tavern filed out into the pitch blackness, wending their way over stones and dirt to their homes that climbed the sides of the hills. Jill followed them out and watched them go. She watched the red-bearded man particularly. She saw that he lived all alone, in a small hut that stood closer to the rocks and the sea than any of the other villagers.
Jill wondered about the little girl who had disappeared. She wondered if she liked it under the sea, with the mermaids. She went up to her room, wanting to tell Jack the story. But he was still asleep. As was the frog, who was snoring ridiculously. She decided not to wake them.
The windows were like walls it was so black out. No moon, no stars, no light at all. The wind rattled the door on its hinges, and the sea spumed and tossed. Jill, lying on her little bed of straw, could hear the crash of the waves against the craggy rocks. She had never felt such a night, never known the fear and thrill of lying so close to sea and wild. Her body sang. She could not sleep.
Late, late that night, when the wind had died down and the crash of the waves on the rocks had subsided into a calm, rhythmic beat, Jill sat up in bed. Just above the sound of the waves, she heard a high note, held for an impossibly long time.
A weather vane, Jill thought. It must be the creaking of a weather vane.
The note fell—no, it swooned, as if fainting. Then it rose again, running in and out of the beating waves like a flute among a slow, funerary pulse of drums. Jill lay back down. Just a weather vane. Or hinges, creaking.
She lay in bed, listening to the long, plaintive sound. It stretched out across the darkness, and in the corners of the night it seemed to wrap into a pattern of words. Yes, Jill thought as she stared at the ceiling and listened. The notes had words. She sat up again and tried to hear them. She did hear them.
Come, come, where heartache’s never been, the song went.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
Slowly, Jill got up from the bed and walked to the window. She looked out onto the empty, ghostly town. The dirt road led down to the rocks, where the water splashed black and white in spouting spumes. The sea was as dark as anything she had ever seen, but the obsidian waves shone white as they crested and caught the light of the moon now rising. Jill shivered. Again she listened to the word-like sounds.
Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
It was no weather vane. It was a song—sung by a voice unlike any Jill had ever heard. Like a gull rising on the wind, or the moon sinking into the sea.
She turned to see if the song had woken Jack. But he slept on, heavy and senseless to the music amid the black, still night.
Suddenly, she shook her head and laughed at herself. It’s the villagers, she realized. Playing a joke on me. Tomorrow they’ll ask me if I heard something strange in the night, she thought. Just wait and see.
She got back in bed. It was a haunting voice, whomever it belonged to. The voice of a girl, Jill thought. She listened to the words: where heartache’s never been; where you’re seen as you want to be seen; where you’ll never cry no more. As Jill slept that night, she dreamed of such a place, a place of shadow and green.
In the morning, the innkeeper rapped loudly on the bedroom door. “Up! Work!” she shouted.
Jill sat straight up in bed. She looked over at Jack. He smiled wanly at her.
“Hi,” he said weakly.
She leaped up and threw her arms around him.
“Sorry,” he said. “for being so stupid, up there in the clouds.”
“It’s all right,” Jill laughed.
“No it isn’t!” said the frog.
“Wish I could help with your work,” Jack said. His voice was thin and tired.
“You rest,” Jill smiled. And then she said, “Did you hear music last night? Singing?” Jack shook his head. Jill shrugged. “You slept heavily.”
“I didn’t hear anything either,” said the frog.
“You were snoring your head off,” Jill replied. She went downstairs.
All day, no villager said a word about any song in the night. As the townspeople gathered for dinner and drinking that evening, Jill tried to detect hidden smiles, or signs of a communal jest. But there were none.
That night, as she lay in bed, she heard the song again. She looked over at Jack. He was sound asleep. The frog was buried under the covers, but she could make out his even breathing as well, in tiny syncopation with Jack’s.
The song reverberated through the timbers of the old inn. Jill covered her head with a straw pillow and tried to ignore it.
A minute later, Jill was out of bed. She slipped silently down the creaky wooden steps of the inn, out the door, and guided her bare feet down the dirt path to the rocky shore. In front of her, the waves heaved against the crags of rock, shooting their white foam high into the black air. But off to the right, down a little ways from the village, there was a calmer spot, where the water rolled into and spiraled away from a ten-foot-wide rock harbor. Jill walked out there. Above her, the night was clear and very cold, and the stars twinkled sharply. Jill came to the little harbor. She felt faint spray on her face and smelled the heavy salt of the sea. And she heard the song.
Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
She sat down on the black rocks of the little harbor—it would have looked like a wide crescent bay to a toy ship—and she watched the rolling foam swirl in and away. And then, rising out of the sea, sending shivers up and down her back, green as the ocean by day and black as the ocean by night and capped by white foam and moonlight, came a mermaid.
That’s right, folks. A real live mermaid.
Don’t ask me. I’m just telling it like it was.
The mermaid placed her body on a flat stone just a little way into the tiny harbor. Her body—at least, all of her body that Jill could see—was beautiful and naked. Halfway down her moonlight-hued back, green fish scales, lined with shadow, began. Her eyes were black and green with no whites at all. Her hair was the color of the night water reflecting the moon. The singing had stopped. Jill stared.
“A beautiful, beautiful girl,” the mermaid said, her eyes so wide set and luminous she looked like a creature from a dream, “You are a beautiful, beautiful girl.” Jill was unable to answer her.
“Yet you are sad,” the mermaid said, and then she gasped, and her shoulders contracted as if in pain. “So sad! Beautiful girl, what could cause you such pain?”
The wind off the sea blew the spray into Jill’s eyes and face, and her hair whipped around her like a rope on a sail. “How can you tell that I’m sad?” Jill asked, and she felt that she was shivering.
The mermaid looked at her with those wide, black and green eyes. “I come from a place where there was once no sadness. Now that I know sadness, I feel it too strongly to be borne. Tell me, beautiful girl, tell me: why are you so sad?”
Jill looked down. The mermaid said, “Something to do with your mother,” and it was not a question. There was a pause in which only the crashing waves spoke. “Let us talk about other things,” said the mermaid.
So they did. They talked about the mountains, and the stars, and the sea. And after a while, Jill began to feel better.
Jill looked up and saw the first streaks of pink in the sky out over the ocean. The mermaid felt them without seeing them. “I must go,” the mermaid said. “But come tomorrow if you like. We will talk some more.”
“Yes,” Jill said, “I would love to come. Thank you.”
The mermaid smiled. She was about to slide down the rock and back into the sea when she said, “Jill, do not tell the villagers that you spoke to me. There is one who would harm me if he could.”
Jill stared at the beautiful creature. Who could ever want to harm her? She nodded. “I will not tell. I promise.”
The next morning Jill slipped out of her room with no more than a syllable to Jack, and all day she was unable to keep her mind on her work. She dropped two glasses to the floor and then cut her hand as she cleaned up the shards. The innkeeper spoke to her sternly about her carelessness. Jill just wanted night to come.
At last, the villagers had gone home. Jill went to her bedroom.
“Did you break two glasses today?” Jack asked as she walked in. “That’s what it sounded like from up here.”
“I just want to go to sleep,” Jill said sharply. Jack looked surprised, and then away. The frog stared at Jill.
Jill got into bed and turned her back to Jack. “How are you doing?” she asked without feeling.
“Fine,” Jack said as he blew out the oil lamp by his bed. He didn’t sound fine. He sounded angry. Jill didn’t care.
She waited until she heard the first note of the mermaid’s song, checked that Jack was indeed breathing softly and evenly, and then hurried straight down to the little harbor. As she hurried, she sang along with the mermaid:
Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
When the mermaid rose out of the sea and onto the rock, Jill marveled at her moonlit body, her blacks, her greens, her eyes, her hair.
“There is my beautiful friend,” said the mermaid. Jill shook her head in the strong wind, but smiled anyway.
“Mermaid,” Jill said, “you told me last night that you came from a place where there was once no sadness. Is there sadness there now?”
“Yes,” replied the mermaid.
“But why?”
“Do you remember,” the mermaid asked, “that I told you there was one who would harm me if he could?”
“Yes.”
“Once upon a time,” she said, “there were seven sisters who lived beneath these waves. I was the youngest. Each of my sisters was more beautiful than the last, and each more kind and more good. We would rise up on this rock and sing to the people of this village, and they loved us. Indeed, there was a little girl who loved us more than anything, and she wanted to live with us, down in the dark and green sea, where there is no sadness. You see, her mother had died of a great sickness, and she was left alone with her cruel father. When she asked if she could come to live with us instead, we told her no. A little girl, we thought, should live with her kind above the waves. But then we learned that she too was sick, and if she stayed in the village she would surely die. So we relented, and one night she joined us, and then there were eight sisters.
“But her father was furious with us. He cast a net and caught my oldest sister and cut her throat, so her blood, dark and green, flowed over her beautiful smooth skin. Some weeks later, he caught my second eldest sister in his net, and again he cut her throat and spilled her dark green blood. Again and again he caught my sisters, until at last there were only me and his daughter left, living here under the sea.
“The little girl was so sorry for what her father had done that she became sick with grief. After seven days and seven nights of pining, she died from her sadness.”
The mermaid’s wide-set eyes and moon-hued lips looked like they might burst with sorrow. But she said no more.
“That’s terrible,” Jill cried. “Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful!” Suddenly, her sorrow for her own troubles seemed so small and stupid. “Let me help you!” Jill said, “Please! What can I do?”
The mermaid shook her head sadly. “What is there to be done?” she asked. “They are all dead. There is nothing to be done but weep.” And Jill could see that rivers of tears had been steadily streaming down the mermaid’s face for many years, and had dug shallow canyons in her cheeks.
“Who is the man? Does he still live in the village?” Jill demanded fiercely.
The mermaid nodded sadly. “I don’t know who he is. I cannot see the faces of men. Just beautiful girls like you. But he still comes out some nights with his net and tries to catch me. I never know when. I believe he will not rest until I am dead. But what does it matter? My sisters, my sweet sisters, have all died already.”
“He will not kill you,” Jill swore, her teeth set, her hair blown back, her forehead shining high and wet with sea spray in the moonlight. “I will not let him do that.”
When pink began to streak the east, Jill blew a kiss to the beautiful mermaid and went back to the tavern.
The next morning, Jack was awake before Jill. She got up, and he smiled at her.
“I’m sorry for last night,” she said.
“You were tired from working all day.”
“Yes,” she said. “Very tired. Are you feeling better?”
“A little bit better each day,” Jack replied. “But sitting here is boring.”
Jill was humming a slow, sad tune when she slipped into the corridor.
As Jill scrubbed the tables in the tavern and the innkeeper shined the scotch glasses, Jill said, “Whose daughter was it that got lost in the sea?”
The tavern mistress stopped her shining and looked at Jill curiously. “Now what made ye think o’ that, lass?”
Jill shrugged and went back to scrubbing. “Dunno. Just thinking.”
The tavern mistress shook her head. “The man what told the story,” she said. “With the red beard.”
Jill nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
She watched him as he ate his dinner and then drank his scotch and ale. He laughed plenty and told stories and seemed to be liked by all. But there was something about him. Something sad. In the pauses between stories, or when his big-bellied laughter died away, she saw him sigh or look down at the table heavily. She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before. Once, he caught her looking at him. She smiled quickly. He broke into a broad grin. This time, when he looked away, he did not sigh.
Jill ran down to the edge of the rocks that night and told the mermaid that she knew who it was that was trying to hurt her. The mermaid nodded sullenly. “What good will that do, though?” she asked, and her lips and her face and her eyes were so sad and fine they made Jill want to weep. “He will not stop.”
“I’ll make him stop,” Jill said. “I swear it. I swear it.”
This time, as the pink began to streak the eastern sky, the mermaid blew Jill a kiss. Jill felt it on her cheek, like soft sea foam.
The next afternoon, Jill made her way down to the little hut by the sea where the red-bearded man lived. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. So she went around to a small shed that stood behind the house to look for him there. The door stood ajar. Jill looked within.
Hanging from the walls of the shed were dozens of rusty fish axes and harpoons, each covered with fish guts and algae and filth. Covered, that is, save their edges. Those shone sharp and clean.
“Hello there!”
Jill turned around to see the red-bearded man sitting on a stack of peat bricks against the wall of the house, mending a fishing net. “Why, look who it is!” he said, and his face lit up.
“Hello,” said Jill. “I hope I’m not disturbing you . . .”
“Why no! I love some comp’ny while I tend me net. Sit!” he said, and gestured with his foot at an upturned bucket, still wet with the innards of gutted fish. Jill looked at it and remained standing.
“Was it you that lost your daughter to the sea?” Jill asked, even though she knew the answer.
The man’s wide smile faded. He looked at Jill and his eyes were hollow. “Aye,” he said. “’Twas.”
Jill looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded and sighed.
Jill looked back up, straight into the man’s eyes, with a gaze sharper than a fish knife. “Are you trying to catch the mermaid?” she asked. Her mouth was set and her face was hard.
The man looked at her funny. “Lass,” he said at last, “no man can cast such a net as can catch a mermaid.”
Jill did not let him out of her gaze. He looked back down at his work on the net. “This poor rope and twine can no more catch a mermaid than you can catch the light o’ the moon,” he said. He began mending again. After a moment, Jill again said she was sorry for his loss, and started back toward the village. But after a dozen steps she glanced over her shoulder. The man was watching her darkly, keenly, from under his heavy brows. She hurried up the hill.
That night, Jill waited impatiently for Jack to fall asleep, and then, as soon as the mermaid’s song began, she hurried down the steps and out the door of the tavern. As she slipped out into the night, she kept an eye on the little hut by the sea. Its door was tightly shut against the wind and the spray. As she made her way down to the rocks, though, following the sound of the mermaid’s song, she thought she saw the door open just a crack. She stopped. She looked closer. Yes. The door to the bearded man’s house was now standing ever so slightly ajar. Jill kept walking.
When she got to the little harbor, she walked on past it, farther out onto the rocks. The waves crashed around her feet as she climbed the slippery, craterous black crags out over the sea. At last she found a good footing.
“I didn’t want him to see where I meet you,” Jill whispered to the wind. “He’s watching me right now.”
As if in answer, the mermaid sang, Never cry no more again, and her song caught on the word never. The mermaid held it long and low and so sad, and then let it fall and gutter like waves in a rocky shoal. The song ended. She did not pick it up again. Carefully, Jill walked back over the slick rocks, and then up the path and into the tavern. She closed the door behind her. She waited. Ten minutes later, she opened the door just a crack and peeked out. The bearded man’s door was tightly shut.
Jack was sitting up when Jill awoke the next morning. “Hi!” he said. “I feel a lot better. I think I can help you with your work today.”
Jill’s hands instantly became clammy. She sat up and stared at him.
Then, as if deciding something, she got out of bed and came to his side. “Let me feel your head.” The frog crawled out of the blankets and yawned sleepily. She put her hand on Jack’s forehead. Compared to her clammy, sweating hands, Jack’s forehead was smooth and dry and cool. “Take one more day,” Jill said firmly. “One more day, and then you can come downstairs and help me.”
“At least let me sit down there—” Jack began.
“No,” said Jill, and her voice was sharp when she said it.
“I don’t think sitting downstairs would be bad for Jack,” the frog replied, surprised by her abruptness.
Jill thought for a moment. Then she said, “Not for Jack, no. But I don’t think the innkeeper would like him sitting in tavern, staring at the customers, do you? With a bandage on his head?” And without waiting for a response she got up, left the room, and closed the door behind her. Once in the corridor, she took a deep breath and went downstairs.
The lunch service in the tavern was always quiet, because the fishermen did not return with their boats until midafternoon. As soon as the last patron had left, Jill slipped out the tavern door and hurried down to the hut by the sea. The door was closed and no light came from within. The bearded man would, like the rest of the fishermen, be out on the sea for a couple of hours yet.
Jill went around to the back of the house. There, she tried the door of the shed. It wasn’t locked. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.
Within, she scanned the walls. Rusty instruments of death hung from every hook. She studied the hooked blade for opening a fish’s belly, the sideways-bending knife for separating meat from bone, the harpoon points with their barbs that caught and tore the flesh. She found a coil of rope and set to work.
Now, my dear reader, you are probably feeling a little tense right now. If I’ve told this story well at all, in fact, you should be feeling a tightness in your shoulders, and a lightness in your head, and your breath should be coming a little quicker.
And when I describe Jill hiding in the hut with all the “instruments of death,” as I think I called them—well, you are probably expecting something horrible and bloody to transpire.
Good. At least you’re expecting it. That should help a little.
The bearded man came home exhausted and stinking of fish. He walked into his little house and peeled off his great oilskin coat and changed his heavy boots for some lighter shoes. Then, sighing from the day’s work, he went out back and trudged heavily to his toolshed.
He pulled the door open and stepped inside—and found himself tumbling to the floor. His great frame crashed into the back wall, sending knives and knots and awls clattering down upon him. He looked back at the door. There was a rope tied tightly across the frame. He looked up.
Jill stood above him. Her face was furious and black. Her eyes were wide. Her nostrils flared. Her lips were pulled back around her teeth. Above her head hovered the largest, sharpest fish ax the man possessed.
“Leave the mermaid alone!” Jill bellowed.
And she brought the blade down as hard and as fast as she could. The man raised his arm to protect himself. The rusty blade hit his flesh with a thwack and buried itself in his bone. The man howled. Jill tried to pull the ax out, but it seemed to have become lodged there. Jill turned and grabbed the long, curving knife from the wall. She raised it and brought it down—but before it could enter the man’s flesh, she was flung back by a kick to the chest. She tumbled over the rope and out into the daylight.
The man lay amid the fallen tools in the tiny shed, blood pouring from his arm onto the ground. He was staring at Jill.
“You leave her alone!” Jill snarled again, and then she ran.
Jill passed the tavern so quickly she did not see Jack looking out the window, watching her run up the road. Not that seeing him would have stopped her now. She kept going, up, up into the steep and misty hills. The wet grass was like a sponge beneath her feet. She could smell the peat smoke rising from the fires in the houses of the village. It was a sweet, musty smell. She passed a flock of sheep, lying on the green wet hillside. They bleated at her.
At the edge of the little valley behind the first hill, there stood a small sheepfold—just a wooden structure with three walls and a roof, where the sheep could gather if they wanted to get out of the rain. Jill made her way to that. She sat down in it. She looked at herself. Her clothing was splattered with the man’s blood.
She was sorry she hadn’t killed him, but she thought that maybe, lying there, he might just bleed to death on his own. She thought of the beautiful mermaid—how perfect she was. And how she loved Jill. She loved her, Jill knew it. And to think that there had been six more of them, and that the bearded man had killed them all. It made her sick. And then, to think of his little daughter, who had died from grief because of him. Oh, what he had done to his little daughter.
Perhaps, she thought, she would return to his hut that night and be sure the job was done.
When the night was black, and Jill was certain that the people would have left the tavern and gone to their homes to sleep, Jill hurried back across the field of sheep, skirted around the edge of the silent fishing village, and made her way down to her little harbor. The mermaid was singing again. The song seemed to penetrate Jill’s soul. It was intoxicating. It was unbearably beautiful.
Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
Jill’s vision became blurred. She couldn’t see the houses of the village, nor the sky above it. All she could see was the black, heaving ocean and the craterous, craggy rocks that rose up around it, like teeth around a great mouth. The mermaid was singing more sweetly and sadly than she ever had before. Jill came to the water’s edge. She looked out at the mermaid’s rock, surrounded by the spuming, frothing ocean, but the mermaid was not there.
“Here,” she heard. Jill looked down. There, directly below Jill, just beneath the surface of the sea, the mermaid floated. Jill bent over and, staring down at the mermaid, it felt like she was staring into a mirror of obsidian, and the mermaid was her beautiful, perfected reflection. If only the mermaid really were Jill’s reflection, she thought. If only. She wanted it so badly it made her heart ache.
The mermaid’s eyes were wider and blacker and greener than Jill had remembered, and her hair that looked like the shining of the moon on the water at night blew every which way under the waves. And she was smiling at Jill.
“Beautiful girl,” she said from under the water. “Beautiful, brave girl. You have done something to defend me, and to avenge my sisters. I can feel it.”
Jill sat down on the edge of the rocks. She folded her feet behind her and dangled her fingers in the cold, wild water. “I tried,” Jill said. “I tried to.”
The mermaid beamed at her. “You beautiful, brave girl. Here,” she said, “let me kiss you.” And then she was rising up out of the water, her white body shining in the moonlight, her green and black scales shimmering darkly below. She raised her face to Jill’s face and brought her foamy lips to Jill’s left cheek. Jill felt them brush against her skin, and it was the softest, sweetest feeling she had ever felt. She closed her eyes. Above her, a great black wave rose into the night.
The great wave rose, and then paused.
And then it came crashing down upon the mermaid and little girl. It slammed Jill’s body into the sharp rocks. It dragged her, with an irresistible pull, down, down, down. Jill tried kicking, fighting it, but she just sank deeper beneath the waves. She opened her mouth to scream, and water rushed into her lungs. She opened her eyes and they burned from the salt. But she could see. She could see the beautiful mermaid, holding on to her wrists, her face contorted, demented. And behind the mermaid, Jill could see six other mermaids, rushing toward her, their faces twisted, warped. And they sang as their hands grabbed at Jill’s arms, Jill’s legs, Jill’s hair. They sang:
Come, come, where heartache’s never been.
And where you’re seen as you want to be seen.
Come, come, the place of shadow and green,
Where you’ll never cry no more, dear lass,
Where you’ll never cry no more.
And finally, Jill saw the body of a little girl, tangled among the seaweed at the rocky bottom of the harbor. The body was pale, and it floated lifelessly, its eyes staring up unseeing toward the surface.
It was a lie. The mermaid had lied.
The last breath left Jill, the last fight died in her arms and legs and lungs. She went limp. The sea grew dark.
And then, falling through the darkling sea, there was a net. It fell and fell, sliding over the mermaids as if they were not there, as if they were no more than beams of the moon. But it fell around Jill and cradled her, and it pulled her up, up, away from the mermaids’ grasping hands, up to the surface of the water, up above the obsidian waves and into the moonlight and the freezing, bracing air.
Jill was placed gently on the rocks and the net was opened. She coughed and coughed, seawater pouring out of her mouth. She held herself up with her hands and wretched until every last drop of brine was purged. Then, drained, Jill sat back.
A pair of arms draped themselves over her. Small, thin arms. Jill opened her eyes. She could see only a white bandage. Then she felt amphibian skin on her neck.
She looked up, over the bandage that was nestled under her chin, and saw that the big-bellied man with the red beard was staring at her, shaking his head. He looked like he was crying. “I got ya this time,” he whispered, as if to himself. “This time, I got ya.”
The bandage pulled back. It was Jack, holding the frog in his hands. Little Jack was smiling tearfully. The red-bearded man approached and picked Jill up, cradling her, with his one good arm, away from the bandaged one, and carried her back toward the tavern. “I told ya,” he said to her as he walked, Jack following just a pace behind. “No man can cast such a net as can catch a mermaid. But a mermaid can surely cast such a net as can catch a little girl.”
The man with the red beard was all better now. His arm had been in a sling for a few weeks, and each night he removed his bandages and rubbed it with a local whisky. He said that was better than any doctor could do.
His heart was better, too. But he didn’t need any whisky for that. The innkeeper told Jill that, for the first time since his daughter had died, the man with the red beard was his old self again. “I got her,” you could hear him say to himself. “This time, I got her.”
The man treated Jack like a son. Jack, who had watched Jill go down to the little hut, who had seen the man come home from the fishing boats, who had wondered at Jill sprinting away past the inn. Jack had tried running out of the inn after her, but he hadn’t seen where she had gone. All that had been left to do was go down to the little hut. He had found the bearded man, unconscious in the shed, still bleeding. “He saved m’ life,” the bearded man said after they’d told Jill the story. “And yours, too.”
The days were fine, there in the little village by the sea, and the people had grown to love Jack and Jill. But the children had to move on, for they were no closer to the Seeing Glass.
And besides, the mermaid still sang at night, tormenting Jill with her beautiful song.
So the children asked the red-bearded man if he knew where they could find goblins.
The man’s face grew dark. “Why would you want to see the goblins? It’s an evil race, the goblins are.”
“We’re looking for a mirror,” said Jill. “The Seeing Glass. It’s in the deepest part of the earth.”
The man smoothed his red beard with his meaty hand. He shook his head. “If it’s the belly of the earth you want—ay, the goblins could show you there. But they’re more likely to trap you, and kill you, and sell you for parts.”
Jack started, but Jill just set her jaw and said, “Where are they?”
The man heaved himself to his feet and walked with the children out of the tavern. Through the morning mist, he pointed out into the hills. “The Goblin Market is that way.”
The children embraced the big man with the red beard, and then set out into the steep green hills behind the village. They walked away from the small seaside village, away from the sea, away from the tall green hill, and if their sense of direction deceived them not, far, far away from home.