Off the Coast of Bar Harbor, Maine
Present Day
The old man lit his pipe. He shook out the match, tossed it away and took a drag. He adjusted the old sailor’s cap on his head, tilted his head and squinted at Christina Kaya. “You okay, kiddo?”
A cool wind with the sharp bite of tobacco blew through Tina’s hair. She gathered it into a ponytail, tied it with a blue elastic, then zipped up her jacket.
“I’m fine, Ben. Just a little cold. I’ve not adjusted to New England weather yet.” Tina sighed contentedly, “It really is a beautiful sight.” Tina looked out on the ocean under a bright, full moon. “It’s a shame what mankind is doing to it.”
She and the old man sat on a bench outside her cottage. Though old and small, it fit her needs perfectly. It gave her easy access to what had brought her from San Diego to Maine, the lonely brick lighthouse that stood next to the little island she occupied, about a fifteen-minute boat ride from the coast.
“If the ocean knows one thing,” Ben puffed away on his pipe, “it’s how to take care of itself. The mysteries of the sea are like those of deep space, man can just barely comprehend them. There are stories of the oceans that go back as far as man has walked the earth.” Ben, who had lived on the coast longer that she had been alive, was full of fascinating tales of the ocean.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, Tina had been fascinated with stories of the deep sea. She especially had been drawn to mermaid folklore since reading The Little Mermaid by Han Christian Anderson, a story she had revisited countless times.
Tina smiled. “Beautiful sirens leading sailors to their deaths.”
“Maybe so. Back in 1979, there was a strange accident with a fishing boat.”
“The summer I turned seven.” Tina smiled at the memory. “We went to Sea World.”
“To this day, no one knows what really happened. Probably never will.”
“Tell me,” Tina said. “I think I have time for another story.”
Ben relit his pipe, settled back into his wool jacket, and crossed his arms. “Well, let me see if I remember how the story went….”
Off the Coast of Bar Harbor, Maine
October 2, 1979
Finishing off his third beer, Al Sylvester let out a loud belch, smashed the can against his forehead and tossed its dented remains onto the floor. His wife constantly badgered him on his sloppiness and poor table manners. He didn’t care. Not like he was what you’d call a cultured man or one of those liberal arts majors over at the University of Bangor, who would spend their lives counting money. He was a good ol’ boy who worked for a living.
His pal Jester Bangs laughed. “You keep doing that, you’re going to end up with brain damage.”
Al waved him off. “I’ve been brain damaged since 1951, listening to the old lady nag for the past twenty-eight years.” He popped open another beer.
The Phebe, Al’s forty-plus-year-old saltwater fishing boat, floated about fifteen miles off the coast. Al and Jester left the Bar Harbor Municipal Pier a little after six. They would head back around ten, or when they were good and drunk. Whichever came first. They had started drinking on deck shortly after leaving the pier, tossing cans into the ocean before retreating to the cabin.
“How was today’s haul?” Jester worked on the dock most every day, unloading the fish that Al and other fishermen brought in. There were days though when the pampered collage student Al had hired to work on his boat called off sick—probably with a hangnail—Jester went out with Al on the water. Today wasn’t one of those days.
“Good,” Al yawned. “Got hell from that lady at Moonshine Café again. Went in there for a cup of coffee and she gave me this jive about how I was endangering the environment. Putting fish on the endangered species list. Though, I did catch a blue lobster a few weeks ago. Never came across one of those before.”
“Are you talking about that lady with the legs that look like tree trunks?”
“That’s her. Told her she had no call talking that way to a fisherman like me. We provide that dive of hers with stuff to put on the menu. I’m like, lady, when a working stiff who spends his afternoon breaking his back on the docks, comes in for salmon, do you think the cook pulls the fish out of his ass? No, I bring it for him.”
Jester laughed, trying to stand, wobbly after a few beers. Maybe more than a few. Jester peered out the Phebe’s starboard window at the Atlantic Ocean surrounding their small boat. A peaceful autumn night, all told, not a cloud in the sky. Al looked up as a shooting star arched overhead, turned to point it out to Jester and noticed his friend squinting at the dark rolling waves.
“Sit down, man,” Al belched, “before you fall down.”
Jester scowled into the darkness; his voice barely audible above the waves tapping on the hull. “There’s someone out there.”
“It’s all in your mind, or in one of those cans on the floor there.”
“No, man, someone’s really out there.”
Al scratched his scruffy cheeks. “You know how I don’t like to get up once I get some drinking in.” When Jester didn’t reply, Al sighed, stood, and looked out the window.
“See that?” Jester pointed out the window.
In fact, Al did see it. “Son of a bitch, there is someone swimming out there,” Al rubbed his eyes. “How the hell did he get there?”
“Maybe he fell out of a canoe or something?”
“A canoe?” Al starred in disbelief at his friend. “This far out? At night?”
“Whatever happened, we better help him before he drowns.”
“Yeah.”
Jester took a pair of binoculars off the peg on the wall and looked towards the swimmer. “What the…”
“What’s wrong now?”
Al grabbed the binoculars from Jester to get a look for himself. Instead of a man, like they thought, a woman dove in and out of the waves. Except Al wasn’t sure it was a woman. Not entirely. From the waist up, she looked like a young woman, wet hair, bare breasts. It was when she dove into the water, that Al thought he could see… fins.
“I don’t fucking believe this.” His eyes must be playing tricks on him. Full moon or not, it was dark.
Jester tried to say something but couldn’t find the words.
“This has got to be some kind of joke.” Al lowered the binoculars. “Maybe Max Wiseman put her up to it. You know, hired some chick who’s a really good swimmer. Expecting us to be so drunk we would believe anything we see.”
“Think Max would really do something like that?”
“Damn right he would. I’ve known him twenty years. Thinks he’s Sid Caesar. A real laugh riot.”
“We’ll, just in case, we better see if she’s okay.”
Al and Jester walked up the three stairs to the main deck, then climbed the ladder up to the control deck. As Al started up the ignition, Jester continued to look through the binoculars. “She’s still out there.” Jester shook his head. “I think she’s turned around and is looking at us. She’s too far out and it’s too dark to see really clear.”
Please save me.
Jester nearly dropped the binoculars. “Did you hear that, Al?”
“Yes, I did,” Al shook his head. “At least I think I did. It was kind of like a voice in my head.”
“It was her.” Jester folded his arms, lips set.
“That’s impossible”.
Please help me.
As Al readied the Phebe, a song filled his ears. No words, but it was definitely singing. He could tell by the look on Jester’s face, that he heard the same thing. Al shifted the boat into drive. The singing grew louder, until Al felt that his head would explode. He shifted into a higher gear.
“She’s heading back towards the coast,” Al turned the wheel to change course as the singing throbbed inside his skull. “I’m going to follow her.”
The Phebe was quickly nearing the coast, with Al and Jester in a hypnotic state, no longer in any control of their actions.
Off the Coast of Bar Harbor, Maine
Present Day
“The following morning, the Phebe was found, smashed against the rocks off the coast. Alan Sylvester and Kermit Jester Bangs’s bodies were found in the cabin, their faces screwed up in stark terror.”
“How did their bodies get in there?” Tina asked, confused.
“Nobody knows. And that was not the only strange occurrence. The county pathologist who performed the autopsy said their bodies showed indications of having been under water for at least twenty-four hours. On top of that, the chief of police said right before leaving the crash site, he thought he saw a woman out in the ocean. No one knows what happened that night.”
“Then how do you know all this?”
“There was a journal left in the wreckage, detailing the entire experience. The official story is that Al Sylvester made the entry sometime before the Phebe crashed. They figured that the guys were so drunk that they were hallucinating and did not know what they were doing.”
“Wow, what do you think?”
“I knew Al Sylvester and Jester Bangs. Heavy drinkers. But Al could hold his liquor like no other. He was fully capable of piloting that boat no matter how drunk he got, and they were drinking beers so it wouldn’t have messed him up at all. Jester was a little slow, not what you would call an overly intelligent man, but not a seeing things sort of man either. Add to that, Bill Rogers, the chief of police at the time, was a no-nonsense man of the law with little to no imagination. Not someone who would see what he claimed he saw.”
“What happened to the journal?”
Ben took another drag on his pipe. “That’s another piece in a much larger puzzle. Bill Rogers signed the journal into evidence but the next day when he went to retrieve it, no journal. It was gone. No sign of a break in.”
“So, what do you think happened?”
“It could be what the old timers in these parts referred to as Tom Foolery.”
“That’s not what you think.” Tina looked out at the ocean.
“As I said, the ocean knows how to take care of itself.”
After Ben took his boat back to Bar Harbor, Tina went around to the front of her cottage. She took out her keys, unlocked the door, turned on the inside lights.
She crawled into bed, took her reading glasses and dogeared copy of The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson that she’d had been rereading, off the nightstand and started the book where she had left off the night before.
Halfway down a page, she heard a noise coming from the living room. It sounded like someone coming in her front door. Odd since she was the only one who lived on the island and had locked the door behind her when she came home.
Tina took off her glasses and placed down her book, slipped out of bed and quietly tiptoed out into the living room. The room was empty, but the front door was opened an inch. Maybe she hadn’t locked it after all? Pulling the door shut she went over to the table under the window to get her keys. An old leather-bound journal lay on the table, its pages crinkled as if it had been resting in water a long time. She looked around the room, wondering who could have placed it there. Then she noticed wet footprints leading from the door to the table.
The name Phebe was inscribed on the cover. More than a little shaken but overcome with curiosity, she slowly reached out and opened the journal, and flipped through several pages until she came to the last entry dated October 2, 1979, signed by Alan Sylvester, Jr.
She let out a gasp. Someone had been in her house, left the journal that had been missing for forty-three years, and left. Why? She grabbed a pair of binoculars from the drawer of the oak table and went outside. The cool air stung her arms, and the cold steps were uncomfortable on her bare feet, like pins piercing her skin. She listened intently. There was a sound coming from the dock. Trying to ignore the cold discomfort of her feet, she went down the stone steps. As she reached the bottom step, there was a splash as if someone had dove into the ocean. Tina stopped at the edge of the dock, staring across the rolling water. There! She could just make out the shape of someone swimming away, under the light of the full moon. The figure had long wet hair, naked breasts. As the female dove, the light of the moon shined off what looked like scaly fines. Tina’s mouth dropped.
The mermaid stopped swimming and turned in Tina’s direction. Tell our story, Christina, Tina heard in her head. The story of man’s rape of the ocean. The mermaid turned and swam away.
Shivering in the cold, goosebumps on her bare arms, Tina stared out on the ocean for a good long while, uncertain if she wished for what she saw to reappear or feared it. And what was she to make of this? She had come to Bar Harbor, in part, to write a paper on climate change’s effect on the ocean and the creatures in it.
Tell our story.
Yes. She knew what to write now. The story would be told. If people didn’t listen, she was afraid that just like Al Sylvester and Jester Bangs, they would pay for their arrogance. As Ben said, the ocean knew how to take care of itself.
After a while, Tina slowly walked back to her cottage.
The End