Fantasy Life (27 page)

“My flashlight caught the wings. I thought it was an oil slick, and I learned a long time ago that tiny oil slicks in water near the highway could mean that a car had gone off the road.”

Zeke had actually taught that one to Gabriel. Cars that bounced off the road often left a trail of fluids before vanishing into the underbrush. It always paid to follow those little fluid
trails. Gabriel himself had found more than one unconscious tourist hidden by thick underbrush. Without Zeke’s little trick, the tourists might have died.

“How did you know it was a creature and not a slick?” Denne asked.

“I saw the body,” Zeke said. “I thought it was a doll, and I was worried. So I bent down and pushed at it, and the whole damn thing moved—including what I thought was water.”

“You knew then that it wasn’t human?” Gabriel asked.

“And that it had been alive.” Zeke grimaced. “I saw that face. I thought it had drowned too.”

“It can’t drown,” Denne said. “These things live underwater.”

“You think,” Gabriel said.

Denne gave him a sideways look, with just a hint of amusement in the eyes. “I think. As I said, the things I’ve read about water sprites are unreliable. I’m going to have to take a real look at her.”

“Like that breaks your heart,” Zeke muttered.

“Actually it does,” Denne said. “I’d like to keep her intact.”

Gabriel winced. He didn’t want to think about taking this little creature apart.

“You call it ‘her,’” he said. “Is it female?”

“As I said,” Denne said, “I’m going to have to take a closer look. She looks female to me.”

“Looks like an it to me,” Zeke said. “There aren’t any defining characteristics. I mean, how do these things reproduce?”

“For all we know, they divide like worms,” Denne said. “Or maybe they leave larvae somewhere and go through a pupa stage, like butterflies. Or they could spawn, like salmon, coming from eggs and—”

“In other words,” Gabriel said, “you have no idea.”

“And I’d like one.” Denne could barely contain his
excitement. “What I want to know first, though, is what killed her. To my knowledge, no one has ever found one of these so far away from the sea.”

“But you just said we don’t know anything.” Zeke rolled the toothpick between his fingers. “For all we know, these sprites swim upstream to die.”

“There’s no stream there,” Denne said.

“I beg to differ,” Zeke said. “There’s a small creek that flows into the river. With all that rain, and the way all the creeks have swollen these last few weeks, it might be hard to distinguish the creeks from river water.”

“Good point.” Denne nodded at Zeke. “All of which we’ll need to explore.”

Gabriel bent over the little corpse. It was the source of the mud smell as well as a not-faint-enough odor of decay. Its eyes, which were open, had no whites and looked inhuman. He wondered if they would look like that if that creature were alive.

This water sprite’s mouth was partially open, and inside he could see hints of very pointed teeth—something he had not expected.

He straightened, and it seemed like the men in the room had been watching him. It made him feel awkward. He was not used to being the center of attention.

“All right,” he said, looking at Denne, “so what’s the secret?”

“Secret?” Denne put a hand near the creature. The movement seemed proprietary to Gabriel, as if Gabriel had no right to be so close to the sprite.

“You drove a hundred miles out of your way to get here this morning,” Gabriel said. “Now, I know that for all your bluster, you trust us to handle a corpse here for a few days if you’re too busy to collect it. So what’s going on? What made you drive into the valley and back?”

“Aside from curiosity?” Denne said.

“Curiosity could wait a few days,” Gabriel said.

“Spoken like a man with no interest in science.” Denne’s gloved finger lightly touched the sprite’s torso. From Gabriel’s perspective, the touch seemed to make no difference at all. The torso looked firm, unlike human skin, which would have changed slightly at a single touch.

“I wouldn’t call this science,” Zeke said. “This is pure fantasy.”

“It’s fantasy when it’s made-up,” Denne said. “These creatures are quite real, and this year, I’ve gotten two corpses to prove it.”

Gabriel frowned. “That’s it, isn’t it? The fact that you’re actually gathering proof?”

“I didn’t need proof,” Denne said. “I’m not sure anyone who lives here does.”

“But you want to become some big mucky-muck who discovered the world’s greatest collection of fantasylife?” Zeke asked. “Like those guys who discovered lost tribes in the Andes?”

Denne shook his head. “I’m not sure, exactly. If I did that—if I went public with this little sprite and our fish woman—I would change Seavy County forever. Imagine all the tourists that would come.”

Zeke played with that toothpick. “Not to mention the TV people and the magazine people and—”

Denne poked his fingertip in the sprite’s mouth, moving her jaw. “I’m not equipped to write for scientific journals. I’m a practicing coroner, a doctor—even though my ex-wife never thought so—not a research scientist. I’d have to give these babies up to some research university.”

“Where some other scientists would get the glory,” Zeke said.

Gabriel wasn’t sure if that was a problem for Denne.
Denne had never been about glory. He enjoyed mystery and strangeness and the darker side of life. Denne not only found death fascinating, he found its causes just as interesting.

“It’s not that.” Denne moved his finger away from the creature’s mouth and set his hand beside its head. “It’s harder to articulate than that. It’s that our proof is gone.”

“Proof of what?” Zeke asked.

“Proof that what we know to be true actually is.” Denne spread his hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. “We all know that there’s strange things that happen here. We’ve experienced it, whether we like it or not.”

Gabriel leaned against a counter, a realization coming to him as Denne spoke. Gabriel had come back to Anchor Bay because he liked the strangeness and the magic. Because, on some deep level, he needed it.

“It’s like—I don’t know,” Denne said. He looked at Zeke, who shrugged. “It’s like—believing in God. If you believe, you see evidence of God’s existence all over the place, but you can’t translate that evidence to other people. If they don’t believe, they don’t understand the evidence. But imagine if you could introduce them to incontrovertible proof—”

“Like taking them to some cloud and introducing them to a fatherly old guy with a beard and wings?” Zeke asked.

“Exactly,” Denne said.

“If that’s your view of God,” Gabriel said, thinking of all the various views he had encountered in his travels.

“Which begs another question,” Denne said. “If it’s not your view of God, do you then accept the old man with a beard as God or as some old philosopher sitting on a cloud?”

“Why does it matter?” Zeke asked.

“Because,” Gabriel said, “every country, every town for that matter, has legends and myths of its own. Some are rooted in history, and some have disappeared into time. Some are expected—like little ghost stories around a murder site—
and some are so bizarre that you can’t quite accept them.”

Denne looked over at Gabriel, as if he couldn’t believe Gabriel was getting into the philosophical part of the discussion. Gabriel wasn’t sure he could believe it either. He tried to listen to conversations like this, not participate in them.

He said, “And if it turns out that all of Seavy County’s legends and myths are true, then maybe all of India’s are too, or those of the various African countries or the stories of the leprechauns in Ireland. And if those stories are true, and there are no more leprechauns, then what happened to them? How did they go away?”

Gabriel’s voice shook a little, as he realized what he had been thinking. All the stories he had heard all over Europe. Elves and fairies and mermaids—pagan rituals gone awry, and Christians slaughtering nonbelievers. He shuddered. If all of those things were true, the bloody history of the world had just gotten a lot bloodier.

Zeke put the toothpick back in his mouth. “I still don’t see how it matters. People aren’t going to care if we call fish women mermaids or if God is some old man on a cloud or some benign being that can spread itself across the sky. We’ll still go on and live our lives just the same as before.”

“Really?” Denne asked. “We make accommodations to the other creatures in our lives all the time.”

“Accommodations?” Zeke asked. “What do you mean?”

“Let’s ignore the lengths people go to, to take care of their house pets and horses. Let’s just talk about business. Like that fight a couple of summers ago in the Klamath basin over water rights. The farmers wanted to irrigate their land in a drought, and the state wanted to protect the salmon runs. Or the problems we’re still having in the forests over logging rights versus old growth versus the rights of rare and nearly extinct species like the spotted owl. Seems to me, your father moved back to Anchor Bay, Zeke, when a lot of the logging jobs went to the
tree farms in Georgia rather than staying in the forests of Oregon.”

Zeke’s eyes narrowed. Gabriel’s stomach was jumping and he wished he still had his coffee.

“Still don’t see how it matters,” Zeke said.

“Like this,” Gabriel said softly. “What if Hamilton tells the world about water sprites, and the world decides these creatures have value. Will we be able to continue running fishing boats in the harbor outside of Anchor Bay? What if the boats run over sprites? What if sprites are rare in highly fished areas? Do we protect fishing rights? Or do we save these little creatures?”

“It might be more complicated than even that,” Denne said. “I gave you examples of things that are valued, but not sentient. What if we can prove these creatures—this little being right on this table—live in a society with culture and a language and everything else? What if her brain is as powerful as ours? What if she just chooses to use it differently?”

“Differently?” Zeke asked.

“There are groups,” Gabriel said, “that choose to live in primitive conditions. People sometimes chose not to live in a technologically advanced society, even though they have the knowledge and the ability.”

“Like the Amish,” Denne said.

“For an American example, yes,” Gabriel said. “Like the Amish.”

Zeke sighed. He pushed away from the wall, rolling the toothpick over and over in his hands.

“Do you understand my point now?” Denne asked.

“Oh, I understand it,” Zeke said. “But having brains and stuff hasn’t stopped people from wiping out other cultures. It seems to be part of the human experience. We exterminate the things we don’t like—only I guess, when it’s something with a brain and a culture, we call it genocide, right?”

Denne’s face had gone pale. “What are you saying?” he asked, his voice sounding shaky.

“I’m saying that you let people know these things exist,” Zeke said, “and if these things have any of the mythical powers they’re supposed to have from fairy tales and stuff, then I wouldn’t expect tourists and CNN.”

“You think we’d kill them?” Denne looked stunned.

“I think there’s no doubt,” Zeke said. “I don’t think there’s any kind of live-and-let-live in that scenario.”

“How can you be so sure?” Denne asked.

Gabriel swallowed hard. He looked at Zeke, who rolled his eyes, then grabbed his cap off a nearby table. It was obvious that Zeke was as close to done with this conversation as he could be.

“I’m pretty sure too,” Gabriel said.

Denne whirled his head and frowned at him. “How can you be sure?”

“Aside from basic human nature, which you should understand, Hamilton, given what you do,” Gabriel said, “there’s one thing you might not have considered.”

“What’s that?”

“These creatures must have existed elsewhere. That’s how we got the stories about them.”

“Yes,” Denne said.

“But there are a lot more people in the world than there have ever been. We’re encroaching on property no one has seen or used in a long time, and the elf sightings have not gone up. There aren’t stories of tiny water sprites being found in someone’s stream. No one talks about fish women.”

Gabriel paused. Zeke was staring at the creature, an intense look on his face.

“So?” Denne asked.

“So,” Gabriel said, “why not?”

Denne shrugged.

“We hear about little gray aliens and stupid criminals and dolphins, and there’s a program on the Travel Channel about haunted places all over the United States.”

“I saw one about London,” Zeke added.

Denne shook his head slightly.

Gabriel let out a sigh of exasperation. Sometimes Hamilton Denne was so in touch with the world, so in touch with the culture, and sometimes, he was absolutely clueless.

“If these fantastic creatures were as common as they once were—as they would have had to have been to be part of folklore from every part of the world—then there should be shows on television devoted to them. Mermaid sightings, and centaurs mingling with horses, and the occasional werewolf baying at the moon.”

Denne’s eyes narrowed. He was watching Gabriel as if Gabriel were the enemy. But Gabriel didn’t quit.

“We’d read articles about them in popular magazines, and the newspapers would occasionally cover some story about someone who thought they saw a group of gnomes crossing the road, but it turns out that all the person saw was a group of schoolchildren.”

“They’re part of the popular culture,” Denne said.

“They
were
part of the popular culture,” Gabriel said. “Shakespeare wrote about them—‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’—and the Brothers Grimm codified the stories in Germany a couple of centuries ago. But no one talks about them now, not that way, not really.”

Denne ran a gloved hand through his hair, then winced and looked at his palm, as if he couldn’t believe he’d touched himself after touching the dead body.

“And you believe,” he said slowly, “that this is because the magical creatures are what? Gone? Dead? In hiding? What?”