Eclipse Three

Swell by Elizabeth Bear

Of course you notice the blind girl.

After you've packed up the merchandise table and started clearing the stage, she lingers, beached with small white hands wrapping the edges of her little café table like bits of seaweed dried there. She clings to scarred black wood as if something might sweep her adrift and drown her.

The crowd breaks and washes around her, flowing toward the door. The wrist loop of her white cane pokes over the back of her chair like a maritime signal flag, in case you somehow missed the opacity of her face-wrapping black shades in the near-dark of the club. And still she remains, a Calypso on her tiny island, while you coil patch cables and slide your warm mahogany fiddle into its case, while the café staff lift chairs onto tables and bring the house lights up glaringly bright, until you start to wonder if whoever she's waiting for is coming to assist her.

The tall redheaded bartender polishes glasses, her apron tossed over the Sam Adams Boston Lager draft handle. Up in the crude timber-built mezzanine, institutional stoneware makes flat clicking sounds and sticky food smells as someone piles it into a washtub. Your sweat's turned cold with the stage lights off, and your flat shoes reek of spilled beer. You're just packing the fiddle pickup into its hand-cut foam when you see Little Eddie the house manager (little to keep him straight from Big Eddie the redheaded bartender) come through the kitchen doors and notice the blind girl.

He starts forward, turning sideways to miss skinny dreadlocked Clara as she pauses with the washtub full of plates, but you set the pickup on the closed fiddle case and hop off the riser so you can get to the girl first. Nobody needs Little Eddie at the end of a bad night. You've had enough bad nights here to know.

He sees you coming and lets his steps go purposeless, turning to stack the glasses on the worst table in the joint-behind the pillar, next to the kitchen-so he can keep a hairy eyeball on you. You come over to the blind girl's table, careful to make some noise, and stop four feet from her.

"Miss, do you need some help?"

She doesn't lift her chin to seek your voice, which makes you think she's been blind since birth. She does tilt her head, however, a vertical crease appearing on her brow.

"You're the singer," she says. She sounds like the cold outside has gotten into her sinuses, her voice rough as if its nap caught on a sandpaper throat. "Has everyone gone home, then? I like to wait for the crowds to clear."

When she lets go of the table-edge, you can imagine you hear her flesh peel free of the wood. It wobbles as she releases it, rocking back and forth on crooked coaster feet for a moment before settling down with a little list to the left. House left. Her left. Your right.

"Everybody's gone," you say. "We're closing up. Do you have somebody to help you get home?"

"Oh," she says, "I can manage."

She's plain, with bland colorless hair to go with the transparent skin, but even stuffy and hoarse, her voice lifts the fine hairs on your nape like a breath.

Dubiously, you glance at the light jacket draping her chair, the summerweight, girl-cut t-shirt stretched over her bony shoulders. Even more dubiously, you glance at the door. Each time it opens, the cold washes into the café. Each time, it takes two seconds for the cold to cross the open floor and curdle on your skin.

Of course, she can't read your body language. So you clear your throat and say, "You know it's January out there."

"I know my way home." As if to prove her point, she stands and gathers her red-tipped cane and jacket. She starts working her way into the latter one sleeve at a time, but the cane gets in her way. You'd offer to take it, but there's no way to catch her eye.

"Sure," you say. "But I can drop you. I'm parked out back."

"You want me to get into a car with a stranger?"

You laugh. "What's going to happen?"

"Sometimes serial killers have women who find victims for them," she says, and you'd think she was totally sincere if the corner of her mouth wasn't turning upward just a little.

"You can call home before we leave and tell them I'm bringing you. And everybody here will see us leave together."

She's on the hook, but it's not set yet. She chews the inside of her cheek.

"I'll even warm the car up before I bring it around," you promise, and just like that she says, "Okay."

She moves toward you, cane swinging, and you stand aside. She taps expertly towards the door. You follow her from the music hall, thinking that it's weird that after all that she didn't give you a chance to go and fetch the car. She's still going to have to wait while you load your gear.

One nice thing about a blind girl: you don't have to be embarrassed by the un-vacuumed state of your ride. Or the fact that it's a Corolla with a quarter million touring miles on it. It used to be red about six years ago.

You know you shouldn't ask her, but who can resist? After she gives you directions you ask, "So how did you like the show?"

Her silence is enough warning to brace yourself for honesty. But then what she says is thoughtful, and not as bad as you were expecting. "You still sound like everybody else," she says. "But that won't be forever. You'll find your voice."

You nod, and realize again that she can't see you. You know you're generic. Everybody starts off generic. All garage bands sound the same, as a girl you used to know liked to say. So you're generic. But you're still growing. It's a slow, painful process, though, and there's always the fear you'll die before you finish.

Evolution is the most awful god of all.

"That stuff you sing about," she said. "You really believe it?"

"I believe it's important to say it out loud," you say, because you have to say something. She makes a little noise of consideration or disapproval, like a thumped violin, and you're afraid to ask which.

You can't really talk, so you just reach across the center console and touch the back of her hand, lightly, with two fingers. The side road whirs by under the Toyota 's wheels, the verges studded with bare trees burnt-bone stark against dirty snow. The blind girl's not wearing any gloves. You don't think she had any. Her hand is cold.

Cold flesh, not the surface cold of human chill with the sense of warmth under it, but cold to the bone.

"You must be freezing!"

"I'm always cold," she says, and pulls her hand away. "Bad circulation. I was born that way."

"What's your name?" you ask, because it seems like a good way to apologize.

She says "Ashley," you think, but when you repeat it she corrects you. She has to say it twice more before it dawns that what she's saying is Aisling, only she's pronounced it the Irish way, correctly.

By the time you've repeated it to her satisfaction, you're wondering how she meant to walk all the way out here with no sidewalks and no sight. And who on earth would let her try it. She can't be more than seventeen. Even if you weren't sure from her skin, she doesn't have on the purple wristband the café uses for over twenty-one.

"What does your house look like?" you ask.

"It has a big porch," she says. "The front lawn is overgrown but there's a slate walk. The trees kind of clear out around it. When the echoes get sharp you're nearly there."

Of course, you think, but then you deserve it for asking what the place looks like, don't you? And up ahead you can see a break in the trees, a place where the headlights stop catching on crossed black trunks.

"The driveway's not plowed," you say, pulling up to the curb. There's a tromp line through the snow which must mark out the route of that slate path, and-as promised-a big deep three-season porch that wraps the front of the ramshackle, light-colored farmhouse like a grin.

"We don't have a car," she says.

There's no porch light, and the light pole in the stand of birches by the street looks like it hasn't worked in years. White paint shags from the cast iron like the bark of the young trees that surround it, all clearly delineated in moonlight amplified by snow.

She opens the car door while you're still wondering if you should get out and help her, but the stiffness in her neck says she wants to do this for herself, and she doesn't seem to have any problem finding the path through the snow. Her cane seems to waver before her like a snake's tongue tasting the air.

"Thank you," she says. She shuts the door and moves forward confidently. Caught on the horns of your dilemma, you opt to drape your hands over the steering wheel and watch, just watch. To make sure she gets into the house, that's all.

She climbs the snowy steps without mishap. The lights in the house don't come on when she rattles the porch door open and steps inside.

The door is shut behind her before you realize you never told her your name, and she never asked it.

You keep a musician's schedule, but when you wake up early the next afternoon you haven't overslept. You've still got a couple hours of daylight and it's Tuesday, so no gig tonight, though you're supposed to be driving to Boston on Thursday and Albany Friday night. The memory of the girl and the steps haunts you all through cold spaghetti breakfast, too much coffee, a shower that washes the stiff stage sweat from your hair. At least you don't reek of cigarettes, the way you used to after a gig back when you started.

It's not until you're wrapping the robe around your shoulders that you realize the steps Aisling climbed last night had not been shoveled, and that while there were footsteps leading towards the house, there hadn't been any leading in the door.

You're skinning into jeans, wool socks, a thermal top and flannel shirt before you realize you've made a decision. More coffee tumbles, black, into a travel mug, and with a jingle of metal you lock the door behind you.

It's crisp clear winter as you descend the wooden steps, ice melt crunching under lace-up boots, but the air breathed through the alpaca scarf your sister knitted is warm and smells of lanolin. You scrape the windows of the Toyota, saving gas and the environment by choosing not to warm it up before you climb in and drive away. It starts on the second attempt, grinding and complaining, but bumps out of the driveway easily enough, as if it were just following its nose.

You remember the way, and twenty minutes later you're pulled up in front of Aisling's house.

In daylight, it looks even more disreputable. The gutters along the edge of the porch roof sag. One has frozen saplings sprouting. You pull the Toyota over into the snow bank until the tires crunch on ice and get out. Even though this is the country, city habits die hard. You lock the doors behind.

It's cold enough that the snow squeaks under your boots, and the sun hasn't yet made a brittle crust on top. You stride through it, noticing two sets of footprints-one big and one small, one boots and one sneakers-and stop by the front porch door. Footprints lead around the side of the house, off towards the oak wood, but on the steps only two trails break: one up and one down.

The ones leading down cross over the ones leading up.

You fish a miniature Maglite out of your pocket and shine it through a grimed louvered window, though you already suspect what you're going to see inside. Boxes, torn and waterstained. Mouse droppings. Blown leaves curled like brown dead spiders. There are footprints in the dirt on the boards, but they stop right inside the door and turn around.

A ghost-story chill chases around your shoulders, or maybe that's just the wind sneaking between your scarf and your hat. Deep in the woods, the metallic call of a cardinal blurs through naked branches: wheet, wheet, chipchipchipchipchipchip. Nobody lives here, and hasn't in years.

You catch yourself looking over your shoulder and shake your head. No one is sneaking up behind you and you'd be sure to hear them crunching if they were. Still, when you step back from the window, you hunch your shoulders at more than the cold.

The trail leads around the left side of the house. You stuff your gloved hands into your coat pockets and rub the sleek case of your cellphone with leathered fingertips. You'd call 911, but what would you tell them? I dropped a girl off here late last night and I'm not sure she was really blind? You're not even sure if she was really here.

If you call, you won't have to find what you might find in a snowdrift. But then if you call and there's nothing, what will that look like? Better to go check for yourself, just to make sure.

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.

Don't be an idiot. The research?

Her knobbled-slick hands close on your wrists and she draws you into water so cold you can't feel it, can't really feel the moment when your feet lose contact with the knobbled-slick limestone floor. Her brawny tail pries between your legs, fish-slippery, hard muscle rasping-rough with the scales that sparkle. Fins hook your ankles, glass-sharp on knobby bone, and her hands glide wide on your scapulae, so you can feel the prickle of their roughness and also the way your bony edges press into her palms. She has breasts, and why on earth would a mermaid have milk and mammal breasts when she is so obviously not a mammal? But there they are, floating against your own, nipples as hard and white as the rest of her.

When she kisses you on the mouth you feel the prick of all her sharp sharp teeth. You kiss her back, eyes drifting closed, shivering so hard you barely find her mouth, and her best of voices whispers, "Open your eyes."

You do, and see the dim light glitter on the cave roof as she floats you. The cold is sinking deep, deep into your meat and organs, so you shake already like a woman in orgasm.

The blind mermaid doesn't care. You put your hands in the dilute cloud of her hair, so she pulls against your grip as she kisses down your throat-leaving rings of pinpricks on your collarbone-down the slopes of your breasts until you grind against her strong uncooperative body, arching back, crying out.

She scrapes your belly like rough stone, her hands pressing the small of your back up to hold your face in air. She hums to you as she kisses until you could drown here, drown in her voice, drown in this desperate cold and die happy. Water falls from the cave roof, strikes your mouth and eyes. You imagine the stalactites it's forming, each single droplet a force for legacy.

"Sing for me," she says, half-underwater. Her lips scrape the skin over your hip ridge until you whine. She likes to kiss where the bones come up under the surface of your body like gliding fish. "Sing for me, or I kiss no more."

"Cold," you manage, though it falls from you like a whisper. Your teeth aren't knocking themselves to pieces in your head anymore. You think that means you're dying: that your body won't shiver anymore.

"Sing," she says, with a flicker of her tongue that-cold or not-makes you cry.

So you sing in the mermaid's arms, in whispers and tiny sharp gasps of breath that blue your lips with cold, expecting her touch will be your death and not caring, for the beauty of the frozen song.

You awaken stiff and alone with your scrapes and bruises, when you expected not to awaken at all. Someone has heaped stained cloth and a torn old sleeping bag under and over you. In sleep you've curled tight as a grub, your abdominal muscles aching with contraction. There's light: it must be the next morning.

You hope it's only the next morning. When you lift your head, you realize that you're not in the cave any longer.

You lie on a plywood floor before the soot-stained brick pad that supports a cast-iron woodstove. The walls are peeling metal and seem very close to either side and from about waist-height they're mostly made of rows of windows, as if you were in an airplane fuselage. The windows are covered in a layer of transparent plastic, condensation misting the enclosed side and turning to frost on the metal-framed windows.

That woodstove ripples with heat. Radiant energy flattens against your face, picking moisture from your cheeks and eyelids. You turn from it and try to find the strength to roll away, but your arms won't move you, so you pull the edge of the sleeping bag up as a shield, instead and assess the damage.

Your skin burns everywhere she kissed you, swollen in chilblains red as lipstick prints. They smart when you press them, though your fingertips are cold enough that all you can feel is how much they hurt when you touch anything.

The plywood shudders with footsteps, and this time the adrenaline gives you enough energy to sit. Half-sit, anyway, slumped forward on locked elbows with your hair draggled in your eyes like a shipwrecked survivor pushing herself up from the surf. You feel castaway, cast-off. Seawracked and adrift, or maybe fetched up hard against the rocks and dashed there.

"Oh, good," a voice says, too loud. "You lived. Don't bother talking until you can look at me. Save your strength, 'cause I can't hear you."

You get your head up as he squats down, scarred boots laced only partway and the ragged cuffs of his dungarees spattered with salt and mud and (mostly) sawdust. He's a white guy, hair gray and thinning on top and not long. His cheeks were clean-shaven about three days ago: now silver hairs sparkle against dull skin. He's not a big guy and he's not a young guy, and even though he's dirty and ragged and you're naked on the floor under a pile of rags he doesn't make you scared. You wonder if you'll ever feel scared again, after the cave, after the mermaid inside it.

He tugs the sleeping bag up over your shoulders with a rough-skinned hand and steps back. "I'll get you some coffee," he says. "And some clothes."

By the time he comes back with a flannel shirt, t-shirt, cardigan, and too-big men's jeans washed soft, you've managed to edge away from the crisping heat of the woodstove and get yourself wedged into a ladderback chair. An enamel pan sits atop the stove, steam rising from the water that must be simmering inside, but you can't tell that it's making any difference to the humidity. A few steps away from the stove, you can feel the baffling cold seeping through the metal walls of what you now realize is an ancient schoolbus, probably up on blocks and definitely not in any condition to ever go anywhere again, because from here you can see the holes in the firewall where the steering column and gearshift used to go.

He leaves the clothes and turns his back, except you're not sure you can get the pants on by yourself. You'd call him, but you don't know his name, and after you say "Hey!" a couple of times you remember what he said about not being able to hear, and how loud he spoke.

Well, you made it into the chair. You can probably make it into the trousers.

With a little help from the chair you do. You're pulling the flannel shirt over the t-shirt when he comes back with a big blue plastic travel mug with a gas station logo on the side. It steams when he gives it over. Some of the warmth within seeps through the empty spaces between its inner and outer walls and stings your hands, but you cup it close anyway. It's white, which makes it cool enough to drink, and you don't stop until you've drained it to the bottom. It tastes like oily vanilla creamer and boiled coffee grounds and enough sugar to make your teeth ache and leave grit on your tongue and at the bottom of the cup, which right this second makes it the best thing you've ever tasted.

When you hand the cup back to the man, he fills it up from a thermos that sits on a knocked-together wood table along one side of the schoolbus. He must sleep underneath it, because a cot mattress is just visible behind the curtains tacked up to its underside. The second mug of coffee you cradle between your palms and savor, and when he's looking at your mouth you say, "Thank you."

Your voice startles you a little. Maybe it's the cold stopping up your ears, but it sounds plummier and more resonant than it should.

"T'ain't nothing," he says, and grins. "You're not the first one to meet the girl in the cave and come off worse-and better-for it." He touches his ear. "I can't hear her singing anymore, but I keep an eye out for anybody else who does."

"Are there a lot of us?"

He shrugs. "Every five, ten years or so. It's been a while since the last one. You'll probably more or less recover, given time."

"More or less?" You swallow more coffee, scrub the sweet sand of sugar across your palate with your tongue.

"Don't expect you won't be changed. By the way, I'm Marty."

"I'm Missy," you say, which is what your mom called you when she wasn't mad. You nerve yourself, as if bracing against some cold that's inside you, and say, "She's under my skin."

"She gets there," he says. "What are you going to do about it?"

You shrug. He hands you a pair of wool socks-your own socks, washed out and damp still.

"I've got some work," he says. "You're welcome to stay in here until you feel well enough to go. There's soup in the cupboard. You can heat it on the stove if you want."

He points, tins in a series of stacked Guida crates. You see Progresso lentil, Campbell 's clam chowder. Boxes of crackers stuffed inside plastic freezer bags so the mice don't smell them.

"Thanks," you say. "I'm good. What kind of work?"

"Excuse me?"

"Your work," you say. "What kind of work do you do?"

"Oh." He stares down at his hands. "I make dulcimers and stuff."

"You're a musician?" He's not looking at you when you say it, though, and you have to repeat.

He shakes his head. "Luthier," he says. His eyes slide shyly aside. "I make instruments for other people. Do you want to see my shop?"

You put on your boots, which he must have rescued from the cave also. When you get outside in the cold, you realize that the schoolbus is parked in a clearing in the midst of a winter-bare multiflora rose and blackberry bramble, the canes bent and the sprays of withered crimson hips, no bigger than the head of a big sewing pin, bowed under tiny hats of snow. Beyond them, reached by tunnel-like paths that Marty must clear with a machete during the growing season, lies a ring of trees-the border of the woods, with its cave and its mermaid.

Other than the cold and the thorns, the first thing you notice when you step outside is the hum of a diesel generator, isolated off to the side in a little tin shack, its feet propped off the ground on cinder blocks. Marty's "shop" proves to be a wooden shed, also on blocks from what you can see through the snow, up against the side of the schoolbus so the bus serves as a windbreak. On the far side is the rusted out corpse of a DeSoto, the hood tatted to lacework by years.

The shed's other three walls have hay bales stacked against them, which might make you worry about fire, but the hay looks so wet it wouldn't burn if you soaked it in gasoline.

When he opens the door, heat comes out like a sticky wall. You hear the crackle of a woodstove in here too, and smell sharp sweet frankincense. A handful of resin smokes on the iron stove lid, giving the sixteen-by-sixteen room funereal or cathedral airs. Sawdust covers the floor inside, worktables lining every wall, lathes and sanders greased and dirty. Shaker pegboards circle eighteen inches below the topwall, unfinished instruments dangling by their necks. Dulcimers, yes. Mandolins, basses, guitars. A single white unsanded fiddle hanging from a neck like the wrung neck of a swan, like the curled tendril of a fern.

You draw a breath full of sawdust and incense and think, Too perfect. You might even say it, but Marty wouldn't hear you, and sometimes talking to yourself is really talking to be overheard. So you wait until he turns to check your reaction, moving into the warm shop with the snow dripping off your cuffs, and you say, "You made all these?"

"Every one." He reaches out and taps the hull of a double bass, the face striped purpleheart and rosewood and something gold. It thumps like a melon, sweet and ripe, so you wonder if he can feel the resonance through lingering fingertips.

"Do you sell them?" You want to touch the jazz guitar hanging over the lathe. Its faceplate is honey-colored, riddled with holes from worms that must have worked in the tree after it was fallen. The neck is mahogany, and it too has small scars, the imperfections of salvaged wood.

"I give them away," he says, and lifts down the guitar you were eyeing. It's finished and strung; he sets an electric tuner on the bench and bends over the strings. You probably couldn't tune as fast by ear as he does in his deafness.

When he's done, he scoops up the beast and holds it out to you like a toddler, archtop gleaming under the worklights. It's strung left-handed, and you wonder how he knew.

He says, "Care to try her?"

Your cold-stung fingers itch for it. "Give them away?" you ask. "How can you afford that?"

He gestures around and grins. "It doesn't take a lot of money to live like this, and I made some when I was young. When I still played myself, a little. Go on, take the guitar."

He has a point there. So you lift the guitar off his palms and stroke it for a second, finding where your hands should fall. You glance up, about to ask him what he wants to hear, and find him staring at your fingers. Oh, of course.

So you pick out a Simon and Garfunkel tune, because it's easy and fun and suits the instrument. And then you play a little Pete Seeger something, until your cracked fingertips start to more-than-sting. You don't bother singing: Marty's not listening, and you want to hear the guitar. You'd give it back, but it feels good in your arms, close and friendly, so you let it sit there and puppy-snuggle for a minute while you chat. You play a couple of bars of "Peggy Sue" and a couple of bars of "I Wanna Be Sedated," and it all sounds good. You expect a little buzz at the bottom of the neck, but it's clean all the way down.

"Who do you give them away to?"

"Deserving folks," he says. "Folks with music people listen to. Folks whose music makes a better world. That one's yours."

Your right hand locks on the neck. "I can't take this."

"I made it for you," he says. "The siren called you, Missy. There's no two ways about it. That there's your guitar."

You'd have expected to be too ill and exhausted to continue your vest-pocket tour, but you wake up rested and strong on Thursday, and in fine voice as if in spite of having been half-drowned in ice water and left on the stones. You hum to yourself in the mirror while you fix your hair, and you pick out a white button shirt and patchwork vest with swingy glass bead fringe across the chest to pull on over threadbare jeans. Spiked up hair and too much makeup gives you cheekbones that will read from stage. You're getting too old for the scapegrace gamine schtick.

At the last minute, as you're packing up the Toyota, you decide to bring the new guitar.

Boston and Albany are great, better than good, CDs flying out of the booth, and in Albany you pick up a gig in Portsmouth for May and a business card from a booking agent who sounds six kinds of excited and impressed.

"You're a lot better live," she says, tossing bottle-red hair behind her shoulder. "We need to get you into bigger venues, get some quality production on those CDs."

You think you like her.

Two weeks later, when you make it back to play for the Eddies again, you've figured out something is up. The crowd treats you differently since the mermaid. It's not about the guitar, nice as the guitar is, because you experiment with using other instruments and it doesn't seem to change anything.

You have to stop yourself from scanning the crowd for the mermaid. She won't be here, you tell yourself, wondering why it's so hard to believe.

It's no surprise when Little Eddie sidles up after the second set and asks you for a return booking in another four weeks, at the same fee. You tell him you have to check your calendar and your booking agent will call him. You make a note to negotiate him up, and sharply.

But when he walks away, you catch Big Eddie looking over the bar at you and you can see the shine in her eyes. That rattles you. Big Eddie doesn't get like that. She never lets anything get under her skin.

You walk over on the excuse of a beer-the second set ends and the café closes before last call, so it's still legal to serve-and drape yourself over a stool.

Big Eddie slides it in front of you and says, "What did you do to your voice?"

"Does it sound bad?" You clear your throat, sip beer, and try again. "I kind of fell in some water and wound up with hypothermia on a hike, and it's sounded funny since."

You didn't miss the way your voice has changed, and not just the timbre: it's your phrasing and your range as well. It took a little while and some messing around with a digital recorder to understand what you were hearing. The tentativeness, the derivative garage-band sound the mermaid commented on, have been washed from your music, leaving something etched and rough-edged and labyrinthine as sea caves.

You love it. You haven't been able to stop singing-to the cat, to yourself, in the shower, walking down the street-since she kissed you. Your new voice fills you up, clothes you in bright glory. You know how everyone else who hears it feels, because you feel it too.

Eddie says, "No, no. It sounds great. But it doesn't sound like you."

You have to bang on the door of Marty's shop to get his attention. When the door creaks open on sawdust-clogged hinges, he blinks at the brightness of sun off snow and covers it by pushing up his safety glasses. "Problem with the guitar, Missy?"

"Actually, just the opposite," you say, shaping the words so he can read them on your lips and tongue. "The guitar is wonderful. It's something else I need to give back, and I was hoping you'd come with me. Because I don't know what I'll do if I hear her singing. I'd really-" You look down in embarrassment, force yourself to look up again. If he can't see your face, he can't understand what you're saying. "-I'd really owe you one."

You already owe him one. More than one. Closer to a dozen. Your impression that he's a good guy is reinforced by the fact that he hangs the goggles on a nail inside the shop threshold, pulls his coat and gloves on without a word, and only pauses long enough to padlock the door.

You go down into the earth like pilgrims, making obeisance to the gods of deep places, sometimes scraping on your bellies over rough stones. Marty takes you deeper and by different passages than you went before, and all you can do is follow. You can't talk to him in the dark, not unless you make him turn and shine his light into your face, and so you listen to what he has to say instead.

"I had a daughter your age," he says, and you notice the verb tense and don't ask, just let your fingers brush the back of his wrist. In the cave, echoing from stone, shimmering from the moving surface of the underground river, his voice takes on the resonances and harmonics that have come to invest your own.

But then he adds, "She was a guitar player too." And, after another moment, "Kids are stupid. And maybe God protects fools, drunks and musicians, but all three at once is a bit much to ask of anybody."

You touch his shoulder in the dark, and realize it wasn't the deafness that made him give up playing. He leans into it for a second before walking forward, placing feet carefully on the rippled stones, ducking sideways to bend under a low roof. Water's worn scallops on the floor of the cave; they look like ripples in sand where a river's flowed over it. Wave patterns, sine patterns, like sound.

Water and music are the same thing, at the core.

You stop at the edge of a pool deeper and wider and even more pellucid than the one in which you met the mermaid before. The water moves only where slow drips scatter into it from the ceiling, the beams of your flashlight and Marty's scattering where they're reflected.

You half-expected the mermaid to be waiting, maybe even for her to sing you in, but the only sound is the arrhythmic plink of droplets. She's taken what she wanted and given what she chose to give. She's done and the rest is yours now.

Except you want it all to be yours, earned, not borrowed glory. You wonder if Marty-if anyone-can get her to let you go this time, let you come up out of the darkness again. You wonder if she'll be angry that you're rejecting her gift. You wonder what she'll say, and if she'll curse you.

You breathe deep of wet air to fill yourself up, and nerve yourself to call her up with your song. Because even if it's quick and easy, even if you've already paid for it, even if it's the most beautiful sound you'll ever make, you don't want to echo her voice forever.

You want to grow your own.