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.
&n
bsp; 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 wonder
ed 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.