He made that odd coughing sound and turned his gaze away from us again—his way of showing shame, I supposed, and I felt a bit better about him. But only a bit.
Fielding continued, raising his gaze only as the story swept him up again. “I put the boat on autopilot and followed him down to her cabin in the forepeak. He got a little . . . pushy. . . . She was furious. Her eyes actually sent out sparks! No, really! She grabbed Cas by the hand and she cut his arm open with this little bone knife she had on her bunk, and he started screaming while she shook him so his arm whipped around and the blood made a circle on the floor and the bunk. She was saying crazy things and then she grabbed me, too, and cut my hand and dragged me around the cabin. I couldn’t believe she was so strong! She pulled me around, saying things I didn’t understand, but they made me feel sick and hot, and she was acting crazy. It felt like . . . like I was burning up inside. Then she screamed something, shoved us both out of her cabin, and came after us with her knife. I pushed Cas up the stairs and I was right behind him. Cas got up to the saloon and out on deck, but then he fell down and he was bleeding and the others weren’t there to help us—they were down below, humping like rabbits.
“Shelly must have grabbed the speargun off the table in the saloon and come out after us when I went out after Cas. She followed us and she threw some things into the water. Then she turned on us. She shot Cas! I thought she was going to kill us both but she only spat in my face—it burned like acid—and then she said, and I remember this, ‘Half on the land and half in the sea, and never together your halves shall be. Dead by water if on land, burned alive by salt sea’s sand. Drown in air and burn by sea, reveal your nature, hound, and cursed be.’ More fucking Shakespeare.”
Quinton and I both shook our heads. “No,” I said, “I think that one was probably an original by Shelly. Did she do anything else?”
“She slapped me with her bloody hand and I fell down as if she’d gaffed me. Then she walked up to the bow and started shouting at the air. That’s when the storm came up. Just came. There one minute and not a sign the minute before. Not. A. Sign. I managed to go over, hoist Cas, and get him down to his bunk, but he was in a bad way. I tried to patch him up but he just kept bleeding. When I started back up to retake the helm, we’d just passed Discovery and Chatham islands, I think. We were running late and the sun was going to go down soon so I needed to be back in control of the boat before we left the open water. It should have been an hour or so to Roche from there, but we didn’t make it.”
“What in hell were you doing in the traffic lane?” Zantree’s voice came down through the intercom and, broken, on the wind from the flying bridge.
“We weren’t in the traffic lane! I took her around the west side of the banks. We came up from Port Townsend just like you are, remember? I was planning to go up through the inner channels from Anacortes originally, but we came out to Townsend for the damned fish. I wish we hadn’t. Maybe if we’d been in the channels around the islands instead of the straits there’d have been some other boat to see us and . . . save us. Or maybe . . . we would have run for Orcas or Lopez as soon as we heard from the cops and we wouldn’t have done what we did at all.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
The gray-green haze around him had thickened to a palpable smog and seemed to be contracting into tentacles. . . .
“Like I said, we were running late and short of sleep because of the fish, and Cas wouldn’t have me take the boat back to Townsend when the call came in for Les from the police. Les lost it and then the business with Shelly . . . I missed Mosquito Pass—” Fielding paused when he saw the confused looks on the faces of us three landlubbers. “It’s the southern route into Roche Harbor. We were below it when . . . Shelly happened. I couldn’t turn the boat in time because I was down on deck and I was more worried about Cas anyway, since he was bleeding. But I needed to get back into the pilothouse before we got any closer to the northern route, because there’s a BC ferry that runs up Spieden Channel. You have to stay out of its way and you have to be careful how you maneuver in Haro Strait before you get to Spieden so you don’t get on the wrong side of the traffic lane and get the Canadian Coast Guard on your ass. Right at the channel mouth it’s wide, but you can’t just charge into it like a bull into the ring—you have to watch the markers and make way for the ferry.
“But by the time we were turning for Spieden Channel we were engulfed in a storm—our very own personal storm. It had taken almost three hours to make the distance up Haro Strait that should have taken just one. So now it’s unnaturally dark, we’re stormbound, and the boat’s starting to make noises I knew weren’t good. I couldn’t control her enough to shoot the northern passage to Roche Harbor between Henry and San Juan islands, because there’s another island between them—Pearl Island—right in the mouth of the pass that makes the channel half the width of the southern route. There was no way to get to Roche safely and the storm and currents would not let me turn her around, so I kept her straight on. Straight down Spieden Channel, thinking I might be able to flip her around at the east end of Davison Head into Neil Bay, or even drag for Lonesome Cove east of that. I was willing to run her aground if I had to. Then the merfolk came on board and that’s when people started dying.”
“What happened to them?” Solis and I demanded together.
“The merfolk took them overboard. They just flowed on board with the water that was coming over the rails and then they just . . . it’s like they swam through the boat and they grabbed Cas and Les and the girls. But they left me. And Shelly went with them. After that . . . it’s hard to remember.”
“Did you reach the cove?”
“Cove?”
“In your last log entry you said you were trying to reach Lonesome Cove.”
“No. Not Lonesome Cove. I passed that, too, and— Oh!” And then his exclamation of surprise turned into a shriek of pain and he threw himself out of the hold and onto the deck, writhing, changing, and making noises increasingly animal and horrifying. He rolled across the deck and flopped upward, barking and moving as if blind and burning, then he toppled over the rail and fell into the water. The splash he raised spattered onto the deck with the same power as if we’d passed too close to a broaching whale.
“It’s them! The bell—” he barked just before he sank. The sick-green creepers of energy followed him into the depths.
We all rushed to the rail, but the boat was already too far ahead of the splash and Fielding, writhing in the water, was already changing back to what he had been before. Then he dove and vanished.
“He’s gone,” Quinton muttered.
“He said, ‘It’s them.’ The merfolk?” Solis asked.
“If so, then I now know a lot more than I did a minute ago,” I said.
Both of the men looked at me. I stared for a moment longer at the receding spot where Fielding had sunk out of sight. I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I should have. I turned back to the men.
“Everywhere we’ve seen the paranormal traces of this case I’ve seen the same energetic residue, the same color. A sort of dirty grayish green. I saw it at Reeve’s place when he had his heart attack and I saw it again at the hospital where he died. I saw it yesterday at Seawitch and also at Pleiades. I saw it just now on Fielding, but I’m sorry to say I wrote it off as an aura shift that usually indicates a lie. But that’s what forced him off the boat—that energy. I think he could have stayed, but it might have killed him. It’s not from the dobhar-chú, because it attacked him before at the marina and he said the water hounds aren’t magicians—though he could very well be lying about that and he’s certainly lying about the events of Seawitch’s last night. But if that stuff was what was attacking Reeve the first time I saw it, then the creature I saw at Reeve’s must have been either Fielding or one of his dobhar-chú cousins trying to protect Reeve. Either way, the party responsible for Reeve’s death is one of the merfolk.”