The Night the Mermaids Found the Attic
The portal does not always open where you expect it to. Sometimes it opens where it needs to.
It was late — the particular late that belongs to the Attic alone, when the candles have burned low and the crystals have gone quiet and the shop holds its breath between one day and the next. Chelle had already gone up. Luna was at the counter with a cup of something dark and a book she wasn't really reading, her boots up on the oak surface, Cinder a warm weight against her left side. Ash was somewhere in the back. Midnight was on the roof, as he always is, his great sapphire bulk a familiar shadow against the sky.
The portal opened at the far end of the hall.
This was not unusual. The portal opens when it opens. What was unusual was the sound that came through with it — not the normal pressure-shift, not the particular quality of air from somewhere else. Water. Moving water. The kind that has distance in it, depth, the cold memory of places where the light does not reach.
Luna put her book down.
Cinder was already on his feet.
What came through the portal was not a person. Not an artifact. Not anything that had ever come through before in quite this way. It was a current — a living thread of ocean water that moved with intention, that knew where it was going, that found the hallway and followed it with the unhurried certainty of something that has never once in its existence needed to ask for directions. And in the current, just visible in the low candlelight, shapes. Fluid. Iridescent. Moving the way things move when the water is their element and the air is merely a place they are passing through.
They were not large. They were not frightening. They were, if anything, curious — the way young things are curious, the way creatures are curious when they have found something new and are not yet sure what to make of it but are absolutely sure they want to know. They moved through the hallway and into the main room of the Attic and they looked at everything. The crystals. The tarot shelf. The candles. The bracelet trunk. The Closet doors, standing open the way they always stand open, the gap at the center breathing faintly with the movement of shirts inside.
Luna stood very still. This is not her default. It is what she does when something requires it.
Cinder stood beside her. Also still. Also watching. His tail moved once — a single slow sweep — which is as close to I am not alarmed as Cinder gets in situations that are genuinely unprecedented.
One of them came closer. It hovered at the edge of the candlelight and looked at Luna with eyes the color of deep water — not threatening, not submissive, simply present, the way the ocean is present, the way things are present when they have been alive long enough to have no need for performance. Luna looked back. Neither of them moved for a long moment.
Then it turned and went back to the others.
They left the way they came — back through the hallway, back through the portal, the current pulling itself together and retreating with the same unhurried certainty it had arrived with. The portal closed. The hallway was damp. The air smelled of salt and something older than salt.
Luna stood in the middle of the Attic for a long time after.
Midnight had lowered his head through the skylight at some point during all of this. She hadn't heard him move. He was simply there, his great head at floor level, watching the hallway where the current had been. He did not rumble. He tilted his head once, slowly, in the manner of something ancient that has just witnessed something it finds genuinely interesting and is taking its time deciding what to think about it.
Chelle came down in the morning and found Luna still at the counter, the book still open to the same page.
"Something came through," Luna said.
Chelle looked at the hallway. At the faint watermark still visible on the floor. At Cinder, who was watching the portal end of the hall with the patient attention of a wolf who expects something to happen again and intends to be ready.
"I know," Chelle said. She had felt it in her sleep — the particular shift in the Attic's frequency when something new enters its world. She had lain awake for a while afterward, listening, and then gone back to sleep because whatever it was, the Attic had not been alarmed. And if the Attic was not alarmed, she was not alarmed.
"They'll come back," Luna said. It was not a question.
Chelle looked at the watermark on the floor. At the enormous cast-iron bathtub at the end of the hall, which had arrived through the portal on a Tuesday with no explanation and which she had always assumed was simply one of those things the portal sends when it knows something you don't yet.
She smiled.
"Yes," she said. "They will."
More from the Siren's Call series: The Siren's Song Captured in Silk and Salt — the night the tide came in uninvited. | The Ones Who Came Back — they've been returning ever since. | They Left the Floor Wet on Purpose — what Chelle found the morning after.
What will you find?: Siren's Call — 3D Mermaid & Ocean Print Tee