Maybe somebody was waiting here for her. There's the other set of footprints. Maybe there's a carriage house around back, an in-law apartment or something, and that's where people live.
Sniffing deeply, you can imagine you smell woodsmoke. But when you come around the corner into the back yard, there's nothing but those two sets of tracks, still laid over one another, one big and one little. They cross the yard diagonally, past a trio of blueberry bushes in torn wire cages, and vanish among the trees. The snow is well-trampled, too: you don't think these are the marks of only one passage, or even just a couple.
You glance over your shoulder again. Then, shoulder squared, eyes front, you start forward, whistling the jaunty cardinal's song back at him.
You hope to see him flicker through the trees-red wings would be a welcome distraction from a world of white and black-but the only movement is the pall of your breath hung on the air, the way it curls to either side when you move through it. A hundred yards into the trees, just the other side of a snowy scramble over a humped stone wall that must once have marked a field boundary, the paths diverge-larger booted footsteps back towards the road, smaller sneakers deeper into the wood.
"Two roads diverged in a snowy wood," you mutter, conflating two poems, but Frost isn't here to correct your misquotation and, furthermore, it amuses you. The problem is, neither of them looks particularly less-traveled. But you're guessing that the smaller feet must be Aisling's, which means you should go that way. Deeper into the woods, in the fading afternoon.
Well, if it gets dark, you have a flashlight.
The wool socks and your insulated boots keep your toes warm, so when they start to hurt it's just from walking downhill and getting jammed up against the front of the boots. The slope turns into a hill, and at the bottom of the hill you spot a broad swift brook, running narrow now between ice-gnarled stony banks. The chatter of the water against stone reaches you along with the smell.
Somebody told you once that ice and water don't smell. When the scent of this fills you up, you wonder if their nose was broken. It's clean and sharp and somehow, counterintuitively, earthy. Rich. Satisfying.
Aisling's trail-if it is Aisling's trail-ends at the ice.
"Shit!" You slalom down the slope, though there's no point in hurrying. Whatever happened here happened hours ago, and there's no sign of Aisling. Her footprints vanish when they reach the stream.
There's an obvious course of action. Wool socks will keep your feet warm even wet, your boots are reasonably waterproof, and it'll be safer to splash through the water than try to walk on the icy rocks. As you teeter into the brook, arms outstretched, an icy gout leaps up inside the leg of your jeans. You'd shriek, but the cold is so intense it's silencing.
You're committed now. You turn upstream, at a guess, because a guess is all you have. Some other bird is singing now, something more flutelike and complicated than the cardinal, and it seems to come from this direction. Under the circumstances, music seems as good a guide as any.
You're still trying to decide if you've chosen the right direction when the brook vanishes among jumbled boulders into the side of the hill.
"Well, fuck," you say. Water can go where you can't. Downstream, then, you think, and turn.
The music is coming from out of the ground. An acoustic illusion, some trick of how sound conducts around the stones. But you turn back nonetheless, unable to resist the lure of a mystery, and inch closer to the stones. Wool socks or not, your toes numb in their boots. Despite that, when you kick a rock by accident the pain spikes to your knee.
When you put a hand on the rocks and lean into the gap, the echoes tell you it goes on. The entrance is tight, but you could squeeze through without stripping. The rock under your hand tells you something else, too: it's a known cave, one with regular visitors. The stone is polished as if in a tumbler, rubbed smooth by many years of passages, the wear of cloth against stone.
You grope in your pocket for the light, twist it on. The floor's all mud within, frozen and sticky, but you can see a trail down the corridor where someone's crunched through surface ice into the muck beneath.
Inside, the singing reverberates. There's no mistaking it now: it's a human voice, distorted by resonances, rippling with overtones and echoes. And it's singing one of your songs.
Your heart squeezes so hard it chokes you, a triphammer beat of relief and excitement and fear. You have to clear your throat twice to speak, but when you get your voice unstuck you shape a breath and call out "Aisling?"
The singing stops, but the echoes trail, complexifying before they die. Away in the cave you hear a splash, and that echoes too.
"Aisling? I have a light. Talk to me, so I can find you?"
There's a pause, when you expected hysterical calls for help. And then she says, "I'm back where the water is. Come and find me."
You follow the stream again, this time through the muddy deposits and then over clean stones. Your light skitters over gray and black and pale, streaks and circles, and some of that must be fossils because you don't think stones grow in those shapes. You've always heard that the dark in a cave is supposed to be oppressive, that the weight of stone over your head should press you down. But it's peaceful here, quiet and sweet, calm as a cathedral. The water rings on stone like a Zen fountain, and Aisling sings harmonies around it to guide you.
The deeper into the cave you get, the warmer the air becomes. Not warm, actually, but no longer freezing either. The mud underfoot stops crunching, and when the stream drops off sharply you step out of the flow and onto the well-worn trail beside it.
When you step on the bra, you almost drop your light.
It's a black bra, the stiff seamless under-a-t-shirt kind, and piled beside it, soaked on the cave floor, are white panties and a thin blue t-shirt. No jeans and no shoes. Sometimes, don't people get crazy with hypothermia and take off their clothes because they think they're dying of heat when they're already freezing?
"Aisling?"
"Down here," she says. "In the water."
You shine the light down, to where the cave opens away from a winding braided channel and becomes something like a room. Its rays reflect from a rippled surface, the limpid waters of an underground lake, so transparent that even with the flashlight glare you can see the weird white limestone structures that hump and glide across its bottom. And you can see Aisling in the water, through the water, her colorless hair all around her like seaweed, teacup breasts white as the rock she floats over, the featureless flesh where her eyes should be, the wide slash of her lipless mouth, and the ragged plumy sweep of her long, light-scattering tail.
"You're a mermaid," you say, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Listening to your own level voice shocks you more, right now, than Aisling does. "You're a mermaid in a cave."
"Very good," she tells you, her voice a reedy, layered thing. "Most people are much worse about denying the evidence of their eyes. Come on in, my darling. The water's fine."
The water, in point of fact, is freezing, or very nearly so. Ice crystals brush your naked arms and legs, the water sucking heat from your liver and ovaries. You start to shiver before you're even fully immersed, a bone-rattling chill that makes you fear for your tongue should you attempt to speak. And yet still you walk to her, until the cave water laps your collarbones like desperate tongues, until the finny spikes of her webbed outreached fingertips scratch the calluses on your own.
The flashlight, left propped on a stone, spreads sallow light around the cave, inadequate to touch its corners. The blind mermaid still seems clearly delineated, as if she collected light or as if some inner light illuminated her. Maybe mermaids are bioluminescent. Maybe nobody's ever done the research.