Then another thing happened that made us hopeful about escape.
‘I think it’s time to talk about mermaids.’
‘Woohoo!’
‘Hurrah!’
There was an immediate burst of clapping and cheering from the crowd in the Big House. Mermaids are always a super popular topic, and also sea serpents. We love stories about creatures from the sea, so we all settled comfortably, really wriggling nicely into the mesoglea to make a good seat, you know? I think we were all in a happy mood anyway after Pitiful Pete’s ‘almost-escape’– apart from Pitiful Pete, that is, but even he was sitting at the front vaguely listening, so he can’t have been feeling too bad. In all, we were looking forward to a good evening.
There isn’t much to do here, and sometimes, in the winter, it’s really hard to tell the difference between night-time and daytime. All of those misty, dark days blend into the misty moonlit nights, and dawn and dusk can be so long and drawn out you can’t tell when they begin and end. Even if you try to sleep for twenty-four hours, you’ll find you can’t – and believe me, we have tried. So we spend seriously a lot of our time telling stories, and it’s something that’s important to us. We all take it in turns and the rule is you have to listen. Sometimes they’re not stories, they’re maybe just rants, or something random somebody wants to tell us. But we always take it seriously.
Today it was the turn of Staring Crone. I don’t remember ever having heard her speak before, though Kate has promised us ‘she’s a real sweetie’. The trouble is, Kate’s not always reliable about that sort of thing; she once said Old Albert was ‘absolutely lovely and had a great sense of humour’, which kept the rest of us laughing for a week afterwards. So I’d never risked chatting with Staring Crone; she’d never exactly given the impression she’d reply anyway.
‘Uh, we’ve heard a lot of mermaid stories, haven’t we?’ Staring Crone began. Her voice was creaky and quiet, like her throat was coated in rust. But it was a great start, so we all nodded enthusiastically.
‘I hope she does The Little Mermaid,’ whispered Kate.
‘And they’re lovely,’ Staring Crone continued. ‘We’ve got the idea that their upper body is normal but, uh, naked, and human, but their lower body is a powerful fish tail. I think there were some nice stories about hidden cities under the sea and happy adventures with songs and dancing fish.’
‘But there are other stories too. From other places. Other countries have stories about mysterious sea creatures which can live on the land and under the sea. They’re not all as nice as mermaids.’
‘Like the kriks? They can live on the land and under the sea,’ I whispered. ‘And they’re not very nice.’
‘“Nice”?’ James started laughing. ‘“Not very nice”?’
‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘They’re ruthless killing monsters, then.’
‘They’re creepy bastards,’ said Lana. ‘Now shut up. You’re being annoying.’
The Big House had gone unusually quiet. This wasn’t the talk we’d been expecting. Staring Crone continued, her voice stronger now, louder and more confident. ‘Many of those stories were violent, or were about the sea creatures killing humans. There are Greek Sirens, who deliberately lured sailors to their deaths, and there’s the Scottish “Selkie”, which lives as a seal in the water, but sheds its skin to become human when on land. In fact, uh, I think the mermaid stories haven’t always been nice. The stories I remembered, like The Little Mermaid, were recently changed to focus only on the happy bits of the story. The original versions were much, much darker and more violent.
‘And, uh, do you know that the Danes and the Japanese both had a legend about a giant sea monster with lots of tentacles? The Danes called it the Kraken, and it was big enough to swallow whole ships. So, uh, what I mean is that I think we should think about these stories as being more than just stories. I think we should start treating them as fact.’
You could have heard a fish fart. The whole room was completely silent. It was properly awkward. Staring Crone had never stopped doing her thing, of staring into the distance, so it was never like she was definitely talking to us. But now it wasn’t clear whether she’d stopped talking to us. Then, for no reason at all, there was a sudden release, and everyone just started to clap crazily.
‘This is brilliant!’ said James, excitedly beating his fist on the Jellyfish’s surface. ‘I can’t believe it!’ What the . . .’
‘If she wants to just carry on staring at stuff and then coming forward every so often and saying something amazing, then that’s OK with me,’ said Lana. ‘I’ll even take her her food.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said James. ‘This is the best thing ever!’
My cheeks hurt with grinning. I mean, the idea that those old stories might actually be true? And that this whole big killer jellyfish thing might not be new? It was amazing! Also . . . it sort of made sense, weirdly, or more sense than most of the other theories people had come up with, anyway.
‘Thank you very much.’ Dr Jones stood up. ‘Very much indeed.’ She frowned at us, her matted brown hair tied back neatly with a natty orange strip of plastic. She raised her hands and the crowd settled down slightly, but there was still an undertone of excited muttering. ‘I think we probably all have a few questions. Would you be prepared to take them?’
Staring Crone moved slowly, now focusing her stare down towards her audience. Her long grey hair parted as she did so; beneath, you could see her white chapped lips and almost-glowing black eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Some.’
‘I’ll start, if that’s OK?’ said Dr Jones. ‘Why do you think the stories should be treated as fact?’
‘There are too many of them,’ said Staring Crone. ‘It’s just uh, a pattern. Some of the stories are ancient so they will have been changed over the years as they were told in different forms. But uh, the two big problems we’re facing are common to the stories. We’ve got creatures on land who kill humans – the kriks – and, uh, we’ve got giant sea monsters with multiple tentacles that sound like giant jellyfish. We humans are in a mess right now, but I don’t think it’s the first time it’s happened.’
‘Sorry?’ said Dr Jones. ‘You don’t think this is the first time it’s happened?’
Staring Crone tilted her head slowly towards Dr Jones, so that her hair fell over her face again. There was a pause before she spoke: ‘Noah’s Ark.’
The room immediately erupted into chaos again. This time, there was no way Dr Jones could control us. People were standing up and shouting, some people were laughing crazily, I think both Lana and James were just making random noises of amazement.
Noah’s Ark? When sea levels had risen in the Bible? I honestly think it was the cleverest thing I’d ever heard. Because that was just like us, wasn’t it? Floating along after sea levels have risen and maybe most people have died. I know Noah wasn’t on his ark for very long – only forty days, or something like that – but him and his friends were stuck on there with a whole load of animals, and that might actually have been more annoying than all the people here. Living with a crowd of lions and owls and badgers and everything would have been a nightmare. That would be much worse than Old Albert having food in his beard, or Stinky farting in his sleep – though, on the plus side, Noah was on an actual boat and not a crazy living jellyfish, and he could land that boat on the shore without being attacked by kriks. Yeah, maybe it was just luck Dr Jones chose Staring Crone to speak straight after Pete’s ‘almost-escape’. But I think not. I think some of the other people knew what she was going to say. I’m not sure Dr Jones was surprised. Staring Crone’s talk was definitely the second big thing which made us rethink our chances of escape.
It took a while to get the room quiet again, and there were a lot of people who had something to say – though it was mainly to repeat what Staring Crone had already said, using different words. But eventually, Dr Jones managed it. Then she spoke to Staring Crone again. ‘What do you think we can learn from those stories?’ she said.
There was another long pause. Staring Crone didn’t immediately look as though she had noted the question, but then there was a movement in the hair, a flicker in the matted mess in front of her mouth. ‘What can we learn?
‘Uh . . . we can learn that people survived. The stories are told by people who survived.’