Waking Storms (10 page)

“Yes.” Dorian thought of Luce insisting that she didn’t want to kill humans. Even if she’d been telling the truth, though, it was pretty clear the other mermaids didn’t feel the same way. They’d just go on murdering as many people as they could until someone stopped them. The floor kept pitching dizzily, and he could feel the blood drain away from his face. Ellison was watching him closely again.

“I can think of two very good reasons why you might not have told us everything you know. The first one is that you were convinced nobody would accept the truth.” Dorian swayed. “Agent Smitt, would you please get Dorian a glass of water? He’s looking a bit peaked.”

Smitt was sneering so hard that Dorian thought his face must ache, but at least he left the room.

“Reality is far, far more complicated—and much richer and more amazing—than the vast majority of people could ever imagine. Would you agree with that? Dorian?”

“Yes,” Dorian said again. At least he hadn’t lied to Luce. He’d told her straight out that he thought he had every right to expose the mermaids if he could just find someone who would believe him.

“Then let’s just assume that, in this room at least, there is nothing whatsoever too incredible to be believed. I’ll accept absolutely anything you tell me. Does that change your story?”

Dorian opened his mouth to tell Ben Ellison everything, and stopped. His breath hissed abruptly. They wouldn’t understand that Luce was different from the others, and he’d have no way to make sure she didn’t get hurt. He pictured her dead body, back arched and fins dragging, floating in a giant tank of formaldehyde. Luce, short for Lucette. Dorian felt a sudden surge of desire to bury his face in her hair.

Ellison waited patiently, his deep eyes studying Dorian as if this choked silence was remarkably interesting.

“I see,” Ellison said at last. “You want to tell the truth. There’s something stopping you.”

Dorian was having trouble breathing. The ocean followed him everywhere.

“That brings me to my second theory, then. The other reason why you’d refuse to talk. It might sound a bit far-fetched, but personally I’m convinced that it’s the right explanation.” Ellison started nodding to himself. “Dorian, I think you’ve been subjected to a form of mind control. You’re not telling me what you know because the ability to do so has been
stolen
from you.”

Subjected to mind control,
Dorian thought. Wasn’t that just a fancy way of saying he was enchanted? When he considered the way Luce’s song stayed with him, traced like razor cuts all over his thoughts, he had to admit that made a lot of sense. He had been so arrogant, thinking he was somehow totally immune to a power that was strong enough to kill practically anyone.

Luce seemed too sweet and straightforward to control someone’s feelings with magic that way. But that could be an act, or just another way her spell was working through him, warping and reshaping his perceptions. Dorian still didn’t want to accept the idea, but if Luce had deliberately enchanted him—
if
she had—then that would definitely explain why he couldn’t make himself hate her. It would explain why he thought about her constantly and why he was starting to have feelings for her that weren’t hatred at all.

“Dorian?”

Dorian looked up. Even the walls seemed to ebb and swell.

“What if somebody saved me?” His voice sounded terrible, the words torn off like shreds of old paper.

Ellison nodded his enthusiasm. “That seems very plausible.”

Smitt opened the door, a dark blue glass in his hand, and passed it to Dorian. Dorian clutched the smooth surface desperately. There was a pause while Ellison shot a warning look at Smitt, who backed out of the room again with obvious reluctance. “Dorian. I know this isn’t easy, but you need to make the effort.
Who
saved you?”

Dorian took a gulp of the water, gagged, and sent it spewing out of his mouth. The glass dropped onto his lap, sending a soaking tide across his knees, then rolled unbroken along the carpeted floor. He heard his own panicked cry.
Sea
water. The taste of drowning, the taste of squeezing death, thick with salt, weedy, airless—

“That
bastard!”
It came out in a shriek; even Ellison’s composure seemed shaken.

“Dorian, what—”

“That bastard Smitt! He did that! He—It was salt water ... just to mess me up.” Even as Dorian yelled, he realized how strange it was: the night before, when Luce was actually trying to drown him, when the Bering Sea had licked between his lips, he hadn’t really been afraid at all. Just cold, and angry, and brilliantly excited.

Apparently he was only afraid of drowning on dry land, in classrooms or office buildings. He almost started laughing from the irony of it all. But hadn’t he heard somewhere that sailors got seasick when they left their ships and tried to walk instead through calm, leafy streets?

Ben Ellison, meanwhile, had gotten up and gone to the door. Of course Smitt was standing right there, Dorian thought; he’d probably been listening.

“Hello, Agent Smitt. Would you mind telling me where you got the water you gave Dorian just now?”

Smitt’s stare looked impudent. “The drinking fountain down the hall, there.”

“And did you add anything to the water?”

“Of course I didn’t.” The voice oozed contempt.

“I see.” Ellison picked up the glass and shook one of the lingering drops out onto his finger, then put it in his mouth. “It tastes fine to me, Dorian.”

Dorian gaped in total disbelief. Salt still hung heavy in his throat. Were they lying, or was he actually losing his mind?

Ellison was nodding again. “Maybe this is another of your symptoms. If anything it just confirms what I already thought.” He sat back down, setting the glass on the wood-grained plastic of the table. “Anyway, Dorian, you were saying?”

“I don’t remember.” The familiar words came back, steady as a rolling wheel.

“You were saying someone saved you after the
Dear Melissa
crashed.”

“I said someone
might
have saved me.”

They stared at each other, neither of them breaking, until Ellison grimaced and glanced up irritably at Smitt. “Would you mind not hanging around like that?” Smitt and his bland blue eyes left the room, and Ellison sighed. “Are we really back to this, Dorian?” He sounded genuinely sorrowful.

Maybe Luce had put some kind of spell on him, Dorian thought. But maybe she hadn’t. It was only fair to give her a chance to explain, wasn’t it? “Back to what?”

“I believe a psychologist might describe what you’re suffering from as Stockholm syndrome. A disorder in which the victim becomes emotionally attached to his torturer. But in your case it’s probably even more complex than that.”

“You think I’m getting attached to you?”

Ellison flashed him a hard look but didn’t take the bait. “You have heard the mermaids singing, Dorian Hurst. Each to each. Maybe they even sang to you. And it severely damaged your mind.”

***

Dorian went completely silent after that. Dead still and dead faced, waiting for it all to be over.

Once he’d recovered from the initial horror of Ellison’s words, Dorian began putting things together. Obviously they’d talked to Mrs. Muggeridge, and she’d told them how he’d flipped out when he read those lines in class. Ellison didn’t mean what he’d said
literally,
obviously. He couldn’t. Instead he’d just decided to use that poem as a weapon, because he knew Dorian would find it upsetting. It was another trick, like the salt water.

After a while they gave up. A new agent, a woman this time, came and drove Dorian to a hotel and left him in a drab room with a takeout cheeseburger and a milk shake. Those things didn’t taste horribly salty. Clearly, then, he hadn’t hallucinated that awful taste in the water. After he ate he flicked on the TV and took out his sketchpad. All he wanted was to draw a new portrait of Luce. He had the feeling he’d been drawing her wrong all this time, but now that he’d seen her up close again maybe he’d finally be able to capture that weird, dark brilliance of hers.

They might take his bag, of course. Look through it. After thinking for a minute, Dorian decided it was safer to draw Luce as a human being, sitting on the beach and just looking at the sea. Nothing could be less suspicious, could it, than a teenage boy drawing pictures of a hot girl? He drew her wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt—the clothes looked really out of place, but he couldn’t help that—with a book on her knees. She seemed like, if she were human, she’d probably be the kind of girl who read a lot. Where had she learned to read, anyway? Did the mermaids like to kidnap English teachers and hold them in captivity?

The thought of asking her that made him smile to himself as he drew.

***

The woman agent’s name was Emily James. Probably they’d done that on purpose, too. Probably Emily wasn’t even her real name. She came back at nine the next morning and took him to a diner for breakfast. Unlike Ben Ellison she didn’t ask him anything about the
Dear Melissa.
Instead she just made friendly conversation about school, his interests: the kinds of things a dentist might ask to distract you from the fact that you were about to get your teeth drilled. Still, Dorian talked: he’d played basketball but not that well. He wanted to be a comic book artist. Back in Chicago he’d been in a band, but they were kind of half-assed and didn’t practice much. She told him all about her brother, who was an illustrator. He kept sneezing. It wasn’t too surprising that getting dragged through the Bering Sea had given him a cold.

Then Emily James took him back to the same room in the same white building. Dorian felt the tension all over his back and shoulders. He wasn’t going to even consider telling them anything, at least not until he had a chance to talk things over with Luce more. He’d be calm this time. Friendly but quiet. And he wouldn’t take anything to eat or drink unless he knew where it came from.

Ben Ellison seemed completely together again, too. He looked up at Dorian with a smile that was oddly warm, considering how things had gone the day before. “Hello, Dorian.” He was opening a laptop, and the movements of his lumpy brown fingers were surprisingly deft and graceful. He looked somehow older today, and his heavy body sprawled wearily in its chair. “I thought you could use a break from all the questions today. It seemed like it might be a better idea to go over some of the background behind this investigation instead.”

“Okay,” Dorian said. That was definitely an improvement. He wouldn’t have to talk too much. He was pleased to see that Smitt was nowhere around, too. He sat at a right angle to Ellison, who turned the laptop so they could both see the screen.

“I realized that you might have a mistaken idea. You might think that what happened to the
Dear Melissa
was somehow new or anomalous. But the fact is that there have been similar shipwrecks through all recorded history. Have you read the
Odyssey
yet?”

“Last year,” Dorian said. The screen showed a map, but it wasn’t of Alaska. He thought it might be the coast of Africa. In a few places there were patches of red dots.

“Then you’ll realize where I’m going with this. These clusters of unexplained shipwrecks have been occurring for thousands of years. In certain areas ships will start spontaneously slamming into cliffs or occasionally into each other, even in very good weather. And a feature of these shipwrecks is that there are almost never any survivors. You sometimes find the lifeboats lowered but without anyone in them or life jackets drifting around empty. And in most of these cases dry land should be quite easy to reach. That island the
Dear Melissa
crashed against, for example. No one made it ashore. And the same thing was true for a Coast Guard boat that smashed into the same island several weeks prior.”

Dorian began to think he’d prefer being grilled after all. He didn’t want to think about the number of deaths Luce might be responsible for. “Okay,” he said.

“You’ll admit it was strange? Almost nine hundred people on board, an island right there, and not one person swam to safety? You have to ask yourself if they actually wanted to drown. And our sole survivor turned up a dozen miles away.” He smiled at Dorian as if that was somehow a compliment.

“It’s totally strange,” Dorian agreed.

“So strange that people have come up with all kinds of wild explanations. The Greeks, of course, attributed these wrecks to the sirens, calling mariners into the rocks with irresistibly beautiful voices. You probably remember the episode in the
Odyssey
where Odysseus plugs his sailors’ ears with beeswax so they won’t hear the songs...” Dorian made his face as still and empty as possible while Ben Ellison gazed at him with blatant curiosity. Sirens: wasn’t that really just another name for mermaids? There was a disturbingly long pause. Dorian made a point of studying the map.

“That’s Africa?” Anything to keep the conversation away from sea-girls with magical voices. Ben Ellison only smiled.

“Of course,” he said, just as if Dorian hadn’t spoken, “in a more rational age people turned away from myths as a way of making sense of strange phenomena. In recent years these sinkings have usually been attributed to collective hysteria or mass hallucinations. A sudden fit of insanity that overwhelms the crew and passengers all at once. Sometimes referred to as ‘mad ship disease.’ That’s the black-humor term for it, at least.”

This didn’t add up with what they’d told him earlier. “Smitt—Agent Smitt—he said the
Dear Melissa
got sunk by extortionists. Like, some kind of gang...”

Ellison smiled, but he looked sad.

“Nobody here believes
that,
Dorian.”

“But Agent Smitt told my guardian—”

“Surely you of all people can appreciate our position, Dorian. It’s not so different from the problem you’ve been struggling with. “We have to tell people
something.
Ideally something that they might possibly believe.”

Ellison stared at Dorian, obviously waiting for him to ask what the FBI
did
believe. Dorian just gazed into the screen. How many lost lives did those hovering dots represent?