Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

Legends scotland water horse. Legends magic sea skin. There was nothing in the computer catalog that was getting her anywhere closer, and that was even before wasting half an hour scrolling back through her texts from Naresh and trying all kinds of different spellings of those things he'd heard from his mates from the Isles; you couldn't tell what he'd heard, and how they'd spell that in Gaelic or whatever they spoke up there. Irish water legends. Shetland folklore. Everything was running into a blind end, and that was only the stuff that she could look up without feeling self-conscious. Sonali knew what she'd experienced, what she'd seen and hadn't seen, but nobody else in the library had, or would believe her if she told them: to them she was a barely-scrubbed-down Asian teenager in a shredded tracksuit, desperately searching for the shadows of a dream like it actually mattered to real life.

The library bell buzzed overhead, five minutes to closing time, and Sonali sighed, closing up the Celtic folklore atlas that she'd gotten to the middle of the Ps on and pushing herself up to take it over to the shelving cart. No progress, the whole day gone. Tomorrow, she had work all day, and the library would be closed anyways, but the book would still be there on the reference stacks, and she could pick up again after school on Monday. The cave wasn't going anywhere – those strange piles of clothes under the rocks, they were under the rocks because they were supposed to stay put there. She had time, at least a little time – hopefully, time enough to figure out what the cave was about, and who had been in there with her, and why a fossil pumped out of an oil borehole in Azerbaijan was anything more than just that.

It didn't have to be this one cart – in fact, it usually wasn't because Sonali normally hid back up in the back of the stacks on the second floor, where no one ever came around to – but today it was, because the reference section was on the first floor, half on a corner with the young-adult section that she wouldn't be caught dead in, and carrying an armload of reference books upstairs, not knowing what she was going to need or what was even going to be useful, was a giant pain that she didn't need after the strain of climbing around to get to the cave. So it was this cart today, and because it was right next to the kid-lit section, someone had left one of those weirdo indie square-cut hardcover comic books out on it, and because that was apparently what people who read comic books at a library did, they'd left it open to the middle of the book when they left it on the shelf. Sonali shook her head and reached out to close it as she put the atlas down, the pages flipping away under her fingers, night scenes in deep blues and somber green scanning past, kids on empty streets in a desolate seacoast town, a girl pulling a sealskin tight across her shoulders till it burst.

Wait. What? The hell? Sonali opened up the comic book again, tossing the pages to get back to the scene. The texture looked right – the twee indie artstyle wasn't the most detailed in the world, but the drawings on the pages gave a feeling that matched in with what she'd felt under her fingers, down in the cave. Even if this wasn't half of anything, there might be something – there might be something in here that this artist had branched off of, something she could follow back. She turned the pages forward and back, scanning over, trying to get a sense of what was going on, where these girls in sealskins had come from and why they were going back to the water. It was a little difficult to pick up the plot, coming in cold, but she was getting an idea – if she could get a definition on this word they kept using, this thing she'd never seen before: "selkie". Sonali punched it into the search bar on her phone, being careful to spell it right, and waited for the results.

Not horses, but seals. Not just here, but all along the coasts, down the west side into the Irish Sea and the shores of Ireland. Other water maidens all the way across to Norway and beyond. Sonali shut her phone off again and spilled the atlas over the cart, throwing the pages over to get to the S. Here, too; not quite in the particulars, because this was all myths, stories that people had made up and passed down and passed on, folded and mangled in the telling and retelling, but mostly young women, coming out of the sea in the skins of seals, going back to the water when the land lost its hold on them. Something felt right – the sealskin in the cave, the woman's voice, the footsteps that came in and the splashes that went out, like she'd changed her shape and didn't have proper feet any more – and something didn't. In all of these things, the selkie wasn't a predator – not a man-eater like the water horse and the nucklavee Naresh had mentioned, the merciless demons of the deep wide seas. The selkies didn't steal children, at least not according to what this book was summarizing, so what on earth was going on here? Was there something else in the water? Or was there something else that wasn't in the legends, something she'd have to find her own self to unravel?

The buzzer rang again – the library was closing, for real, right now. Sonali straightened up and turned the books closed on the cart. Whatever she knew or didn't know, she wasn't going to learn any more here today. But she had a start, a handful of words and ideas to build on, the timber frame of an idea to work from, and if there were missing pieces and loose ends hanging straight up in the air, there was enough connected to itself that she was pretty sure she'd be able to fill in around it and figure more of this out. And if nothing else, she had a pretty fair idea of where to start looking for the selkie, if she felt she needed to ask her anything in person: with the low light, and the strain of the crazy things that had happened just before, the fear that she too would have to swim for it if the tide rose above the mouth of the cave before she could get out, she couldn't be positive, but Sonali had a definite feeling that the blazer that had replaced the sealskin under its rocks looked familiar – like the one that was on its hanger in her wardrobe. And the braid on it looked familiar, more than familiar – like the golden braid, still in its cellowrap on her desk, she'd be wearing on hers come the start of the new term.