“Precisely. Furthermore, no such hole existed prior to that evening, nor is there any such key on the premises. I concluded that there was one reason only for the keyhole, and that it had been put there for me to spy on the women in the bathroom.”
The old man clapped his hands with delight. “Very good, old man. Deductive reasoning at its finest. But you could have asked me for the skeleton key.” From the pocket of his robe, he removed a long, black old-fashioned iron key with a skull at the top of the handle. “It unlocks all the doors in this house.”
“But you weren’t here at the time.”
My assertion seemed to confuse him, and he scratched at his hair with the blade of the key. “Right, so. Still. You were about to place your eyeball against the perforation and behold the maidens …”
“That was my expectation, but when I looked through the hole, the bathroom itself had been replaced by what appeared to be an ocean and a rocky shoreline that resembled the coast of Maine or Cornwall, some rugged northerly locale. Waves rolled and crashed, and above in the pale blue sky, a gull laughed and winged beyond the frame. In disbelief, I blinked, and then the perspective shifted so quickly that my eye functioned like a zoom lens, making all appear closer or giving me the sensation of being on the sand itself and the rocky ledges near enough to touch. I heard that singing again, a dying strain, as the tune passed along a chain of voices, and then I saw the first of the seven, naked to the waist, and where her legs had been, a fish’s tail. All of them were mermaids, sea-girls wreathed with seaweed, singing atop the outcropping of rocks, luring sailors to their ruination.”
Through the open window, some stray music reached us, the morning medley of a mockingbird auditioning for a mate. I wondered if his cry meant that dawn would soon come, but a quick glance at my watch disappointed me. The birdsong faded.
Beckett took up his part to fill the silence. “Lonesome mariners in their longing often mistakenly believed a herd of walruses, far off on some ice floe, to be a school of mermaids, until the ship drew near to the fearsome beasts. Have you ever seen the tusks of that fellow? Two daggers, big as a man’s leg. Or some say the mermaids were actually the manatee, a freshwater mammal, sometimes called a sea-cow for its placid demeanor, vegetarian diet, and prodigious weight. In India, I believe, it is called the dugong, but you would have to ask that girlfriend of yours. Sita. In either case, a rather far-fetched connection. The mermaids’ song, I’ve heard, is actually the song of the humpbacked whale, as the behemoths wander the oceans of the world, calling one to the other. You’ll not hear a more haunting song on land or the deep blue sea.”
“Aye,” Jane stepped in. “The humpback is a good songstress, and the beluga whale is known as the canary of the sea. But all the tales of whales and walruses is stuff and nonsense. ’Twere never thus that a grown man mistook such a creature for a woman. ’Twere the long years aboard ship that drove sailors to madness. A woman’s body above and a fish’s below is a matter of imagination and great longing and fear. Afore the houricane blew in on us, we had a cloudy night on the sea with no moon or stars, just the lanterns of the ship, and beyond nothing but blackness and the sound of waves slapping against the hull. Nine hours I was on watch, looking into nothing, and is it any wonder that every errant splash became a great sea monster, and every groan of wood meant the spars would soon crash down, and every sigh in a man’s sleep gives birth to a ghost.”
“Nine hours, hah,” Dolly scoffed. “I once waited nine years in a cave for a ghost who I knew was never going to come back. Imagine the demons who visited me.”
Marie shook her dreads. “Try waiting your whole life to be free, and then you will see what the imagination conjures. It is the secret of the voodoo.”
“And the curse of the human race,” the old man said. “Imagination is the fuel of hope. Better you should leave such fires be and see what is truly in front of you.”
Red hair draped across her face, Alice rose with her baby on her hip. “Don’t you dare say such awful things in front of the child. I carried him for nine months, nine months of hoping for him with every breath, imagining what he would be like, and imagining now what he will become. Imagination is no curse, mister, but what separates us from the monkey, and hope is enough to bend iron bars as though blades of grass. Never underestimate the human mind.”
Placing his hand over the region of the heart, Beckett bowed slowly. “I stand corrected. You will forgive me. The young gentleman most of all.” The baby gurgled at him.
Quick as a terrier, Flo crossed the room, spat in her palm, and offered her hand to the old man. “Apology accepted,” she said in a brassy tone.