Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural mystery novel, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Two of Season Two. Start Here.
{New to this story? Catch up with Season One here!}
Previously, Caroline Phelan and Captain Reyville tracked a mysterious danger in the woods, and were approached by a new acquaintance with an intriguing proposition.
In this episode, Caroline and Reyville hear Flora out for one job, but it turns out to have deeper ramifications than they first believed…
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
The radio in Caroline's car was always set to some classic pop/rock station, a tinny warbling, familiar like church, and Caroline mouthed along to the words of every song without realizing she was doing it.
A marvel, somehow, to know something without knowing that you know it. A mind-trick.
Reyville was bent over his phone in the passenger’s seat, sending a text in his careful way as Caroline drove them down the highway toward the RUMOR compound. A bank of clouds had settled over the island, low and intrusive, bringing a muggy closeness to the day and a diffuse glare to the light.
Finally, the Captain looked up, putting his phone away. “I gave Andy the heads-up about the webs in Mothwood. He said he’s game to check them out with us whenever we’re ready to head back in.”
“Can Druid join us?”
“Yeah. Druid, too.”
That was a relief. Andy Yun was quickly becoming one of the island’s foremost experts on forestry through his work at the Clinic, and Druid—a former RUMOR robotics project that had found its way to forest-dwelling freedom—was an ideal asset.
But that was another task for another day.
They pulled off the highway at the large RUMOR Laboratories sign, emblazoned with its stylized dragonfly logo, and drove into the wooded space that surrounded the facility. At the security gate they signed in, received their red VISITOR badges, and were guided on their way.
Reyville hummed under his breath as they traveled further into the compound. A nervous habit. He clearly wasn't sure about this. Caroline reached over and rested her hand on his knee.
“You with me, Captain?” she said.
He set his fingers on hers, interlaced, gave them a squeeze.
“Always,” he replied, before looking out the window. By unspoken mutual agreement, they removed their hands.
One job. Just one. Then, they would decide. Together.
The road emerged from the trees as they entered the main RUMOR campus, a sprawling facility on the edge of the island’s shoreline with a few main larger buildings in the center and clusters of smaller labs and warehouses spread out around a ring-road fringed with parking for both staff and guests. Caroline followed the signage around the circle, passing lots full of cars and staff in their lab coats and uniforms milling in the greenspaces, before they found their way to a small lot in a tucked-away corner and a box-like building labeled LAB 22.
Flora Burnside stood just outside the door of the small lab and waved as they pulled in.
Putting the car in park, Caroline turned to Reyville, affixing the red VISITOR badge to her shirt. “Ready?” she said.
He pocketed his badge, breathing deeply but giving her a wink. She still wasn't sure whether she liked that.
“Let’s just get this over with,” he said.
They left the car to greet Flora, who beckoned them with a slim hand. As opposed to the homey atmosphere of the Seavend General Store she looked much more comfortable and in her element here, properly professional in a clean white labcoat, her brown hair tied up away from her face, smiling broadly.
“So glad you could make it!” she said, shaking their hands warmly. “I’m not going to waste any of your time. I know I only have you for one guaranteed job, so I chose an important one. Let’s get to it.”
She turned and swiped her keycard on the door and it chimed to let her enter.
Within, the lab was sparsely furnished, and Caroline noted that it didn’t seem to be currently used for anything. Most of the desks and tables were empty, with only a few pieces of detritus—food wrappers, dirty coffee mugs—to suggest that anyone had been inside the building recently at all.
“Is this where Project Sea Lion is based?” Caroline asked.
Flora shook her head quickly. “Oh, no. Sea Lion is further on, closer to the water. No, I’m just…let’s say…commandeering this lab for our purposes, today.”
She led them back through the building toward a small door labeled EXAM ROOM. She scanned her card again, and opened the door.
“After you,” she said.
They entered, and Caroline was hit immediately with the smell of formaldehyde, disenfectant, and…something else. The room was small and windowless, lit with bright fluorescent bulbs when Flora flipped the switch, and there was a stainless steel table in the center with a smaller exam table beside it, covered in surgical implements.
There was a black body bag lying on the steel table. A very large one, strangely shaped.
Caroline’s stomach lurched, and Reyville looked at Flora.
“What’s all this about?” he said, quietly.
Flora said, “Your first job.”
“Is that a body?” Caroline asked, her own voice sounding hollow and strange in the little room.
“Yes,” Flora said, putting on a fresh pair of gloves from a box on the exam table. “But not a human one.”
Then, she strode forward and reached for the zipper of the body bag. She glanced at Reyville and Caroline.
“Ready?” she said.
But she didn’t wait for an answer before pulling back the zipper, and the smell that Caroline had been unable to identify moments earlier became very clear: it was the unmistakable smell of low tide, life and death, dance and dirge and decay.
Flora pulled the bag down from the top to reveal a fishmaid’s head and torso, the rest of it hidden from view. A male, if Caroline’s understanding of their proportions was accurate; his head and body were rail-thin like the typical female, but much larger. The chest had been sewn up but bore the telltale V-shaped scar of an autopsy over the place where the heart should be. The creature’s wide eyes were milky and empty, the preserved skin—usually supple, glinting, and dappled like a seal’s—was dull and gray. Though Caroline had been close to fishmaids before, this felt different. Strange, uncanny, like any moment the creature would draw a shuddering breath and come kicking back to life.
Her stomach lurched, again. She tried not to look at the face.
But Reyville’s attention had been caught by something on the fishmaid’s right shoulder. He leaned in, looking closely at the skin.
“What is that?” he said.
Flora smiled, clearly pleased. She handed him a pair of gloves from the box. “That is why you’re here. We have no idea what those markings are, and this is the seventh fishmaid corpse we’ve found with them in the past week.”
“Seventh?” Caroline joined Reyville, peering down at the fishmaid’s skin. A trail of raised circular rings—each roughly the size of a grapefruit—were scattered over the shoulder and down the side of the thin torso like scars, or welts. They were ordered in rows. Patterned.
Flora added, “From our autopsies, the cause of death for the seven we’ve found was drowning. Which is…strange, obviously. All seven had these markings. Some on the tails. Some around the belly area.”
“Were they all male?” Caroline asked.
“No. Four males and three females. All adults,” Flora replied.
Reyville examined the markings closely, his thoughts unreadable until he finally straightened up.
“Where were these corpses located when you found them?” he asked Flora.
“Scattered, but all roughly along the beach at Portview. Why?”
Reyville shook his head. “I don’t know, yet.”
“We tried to put in for funding to investigate ourselves, but we were denied,” Flora said. “The head office believes this is outside of Project Sea Lion’s purview, but as you can imagine we find this very disturbing, and we want to know what’s happening. We're fortunate that none of the deceased specimens were our tagged study participants, but…”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Caroline finished for her.
Flora nodded, soberly. “So you’ll take the job?” she said.
Caroline glanced up at Reyville, who nodded. “Oh yeah. We’re absolutely taking this one.”
*******
They returned to the harbor at Port Salish where Reyville’s blue trawler, the Princess of the Weathers, was anchored in its usual slip. Caroline made tea in the cozy rebuilt galley kitchen while Reyville spread one of his many Ferris Island maps on the small table, using a pen to mark the seven places that the fishmaid corpses had been found based on coordinates Flora had given him. Caroline had opened the portholes along the length of the trawler’s cabin to try and alleviate the stifling temperature, but the air was too still to move, and there was no breeze.
“So, Captain,” she said, bringing the steaming mugs over. It was too warm for tea, but according to Reyville there was no circumstance under which tea would not be appropriate, especially when considering a plan. “Theories?”
“Nothing concrete,” he said, taking his mug and cradling it in his calloused hands. “However…the placement is interesting.”
As Caroline sat beside him with her own mug, Reyville traced with his finger along an invisible line on the map a few miles offshore from Portview.
“If memory serves, there’s a current here,” he said, “an odd circular one that can catch up a small vessel if they aren’t careful. And it’s because there’s a large underwater rock formation down there, the very top of which is only visible above water during extreme low tides. Supermoons and the like. Most of the time it isn’t a problem, but ships with a deep draft occasionally run into trouble on it, which is why most official nautical maps of the area have it marked so that ships make a wide berth around it.”
Caroline sipped her tea, not following, but she knew to let him talk when he was in such a mode.
He continued, “That spiral current has an effect on anything that drifts, usually leading it up toward Damascus or down, away from the island toward the mainland. That’s why there’s a large driftwood log boom south of Damascus. But…” he took a sip of tea, eyes distant with thought, “if fishmaids died near that underwater rock, the spiral current around it would potentially bring their bodies to land along Portview where, under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t.”
He sat back, looked at Caroline. She blinked.
“So…you’re saying that something around that rock is killing fishmaids, and the current carried their bodies to Portview.”
“Closest thing I’ve got to a theory,” he said. “Low tide is around eight this evening. It won’t be low enough to see the rock itself above water, but still…worth taking a look around out there. Couldn’t hurt.”
Caroline sipped her tea, regarded the map, and gave him a sly glance. “I sense a fair bit of enthusiasm in your voice for a job you didn’t want to take.”
He shrugged. “A job’s a job.”
“True.”
“Besides,” he said, with a grateful shudder, “at least it's not spiders, this time.”
*******
That evening was soft and hazy, the sun hiding behind low clouds, a band of gold sliding over the horizon like the underbelly of a dark star-scaled serpent. The Princess of the Weathers left the safety of the Port Salish Harbor and traveled past the southwest corner of the island, crossing the ferry lane as they rounded the headland, the shimmering lights in the neighborhood of Portview on their starboard side. Keeping a close eye on the bearings, Reyville steered them away from land, deeper into the gilt-edged expanse of waves that led—eventually—past the Olympic Peninsula and out to the wild, rumbling Pacific.
In the middle of what felt like nowhere, the island just far enough behind them to feel like they were lost in some kind of limbo, Reyville cut the engine.
“The rock is just ahead of us, off the port bow,” he said. “Tide is low, but it’s probably still about six feet underwater, so we can’t get any closer without the risk of running aground. Better safe than sunk.”
They climbed into the white dinghy, Caroline holding the large, powerful marine flashlight in her lap, and Reyville rowed them away from the trawler toward the rock that sat lurking under the waves.
Clearly following instinct more than anything, Reyville pulled up the oars and the dinghy very quickly was caught in a current that slid it in a strange wide circle, languid yet powerful, and he looked at Caroline. “We’re definitely close,” he said. “Try the light.”
She turned on the flashlight and aimed it down into the water as Reyville slipped the oars back in and guided the little dinghy through the current, just enough not to let them get caught and pushed toward shore. Caroline peered into the gloom but the light only illuminated open water, a handful of ghostly jellyfish no bigger than her fist dancing smoothly just below the waves.
And then, without warning, she saw it as they passed over: a shadow under the water, bristling with anemones and seaweed and clutching starfish and startled kelp crabs, the tip of a spire of rock jutting up from an invisible seafloor. She swept the light over it as much as she could, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just the normal denizens of an underwater world, private and undisturbed.
“Anything?” Reyville said.
Caroline shook her head. “No. Can we pass over it again?”
With some effort, fighting against the strange current, Reyville turned the dinghy and rowed back the way they had come, trying to go slow. Caroline aimed the beam of the flashlight down, sweeping it back and forth over the small part of the rock that was visible from above.
From this angle, there was something she didn’t recognize, clinging to one side of the rock. It was too deep to see properly, but it looked vaguely long and rounded in shape, like a buoy, bobbing softly in the movement of the water. She shifted the light and saw…yes…there were more of them. A cluster. And perhaps even more, stretching away into the dark beyond where the light could reach. They looked like…
…eggs? Some kind of huge eggs?
“Reyville—”
But before she could say another word, something—something fast, something fierce—slammed the dinghy from underneath, tipping it.
Caroline couldn’t even scream before she and Reyville were plunged into the frigid, black water.
*******
All darkness, all void. Caroline felt a strong grip on her arm like a monstrous hand and nothing else, just cold. Just endless cold, a weight pressing down.
And then, images. Flashing through her mind. But they weren’t hers. Somehow, she knew they weren’t hers. Not thoughts, not memories. Someone else was giving them to her, projecting them onto the blank screen of her mind. The images were quick and alien, underwater landscapes and memories of places she had never seen before. They flew through her mind uncomfortably fast and she felt them like vertigo, nausea rising.
Then, other thoughts. Hers, drawn through her like a trick scarf through a magician's hand, one after the other, a slideshow of her memories, a series of greatest hits.
Within seconds it all went black, again. And then, a voice…of a sort. She did not hear it with her ears, but felt it thrum in her mind, vibrating, manifesting like shifting colors, unnameable.
“You should not be here,” it said. “You are near Our nest. It is not correct.”
Caroline wanted to open her mouth to reply, but found that she couldn’t.
“You cannot move. You are with Us, now. Speak with your thoughts, if you are able,” the voice said. “Your kind should.”
Caroline did not quite understand, but took a moment to think the words she wanted to ask, cutting them down from a jumble into a careful sentence:
“Who…are…you?”
A pause, and then an image in her mind, as though she was looking through eyes that weren’t her own. The vision was all wrong, distorted in ways that her mind could not comprehend, colorless arms and a full stomach, and the sudden tingling of awareness all over her body was impossible, uncomfortable; this was not what her nerves were designed for. It was not pain, but it was not good. It was too much of something, like every cell in her body was an independent brain full of thoughts, spilling over.
She whimpered. “Please, stop. Stop.”
The image disappeared, leaving another blank dark void, but Caroline realized that somehow the link between her mind and the mind of this…thing…had connected in at least one mutual understanding, leaving her with a single thought that was hers: tentacle. Image and word and thought all tumbled together with the strong grip on her arm, the welts on the fishmaids’ bodies.
The ringlike suckers of a gigantic tentacle.
Caroline thought, “What are you? Do you hunt fishmaids?”
A shuddering, more action than sound, colors whipping in menace. “Hunt. No. Not the prey you called fishmaids. We do not hunt them. When We take them, it is with honor. They are pleased to speak with Us. We are the Sisters.”
Caroline did not understand, so she decided to reframe the question:
“Do you speak with them the way you’re speaking with me?”
“Yes.”
“And do you…kill them?”
Another shuddering, and a flash of bright magenta pink, almost painful, cosmic.
“Why would We kill Our prophets? We Sisters, We would never do such a thing. If they are dead, it is not Our doing.”
As if something was drawing it out of her, the image of the fishmaid’s corpse on the stainless steel table flashed through her mind, and when the voice spoke again, it was heavy. Deeper. As though grief had pulled them down, down, away from the tide, lower toward the core of the earth, to the unknown depths where monsters roam.
“We did not do this thing,” the voice said. “Who did this thing?”
“I don’t know.”
A seething, a roiling of colors, the tightening grip on Caroline’s arm almost painful. And then, “We Sisters of the Tides, We Who Watch the Moon, We cover the world over, lingering near the heartbeat of the earth, and Our reach is vast. In Our wisdom, Our many lives, We have known horrors and death-dealers of many shapes and sizes. But none so quick to point the blame than you, you land-dwellers, you liars. Perhaps…perhaps if you are looking for a murderer, you should question the one who would show you a dead prophet in such a way. Perhaps the villain you seek is among you.”
Caroline felt the voice’s anger, seismic. But the tentacle’s grip began to loosen.
“We have already kept you too long,” the voice said, sounding distant. “We return you now. We return you with a warning: seek the villain among your own. Not here. Not here, where We Sisters Watch.”
And then, all at once, the grip released and the cold and the weight was water, dark water, and Caroline’s body flailed, lungs aching, as she pulled herself up, clawing, clawing, until she burst through the surface, spluttering.
She reached for air, grabbed for it. A shout. A man’s shout. And then a calloused hand, strong, pulling her out of the water into the safety of the white dinghy, soaked and dripping.
And the grip was arms, soft arms, and Reyville holding her as she coughed.
*******
The small woodstove in the cabin of the Princess of the Weathers crackled with surprise at being used at all in the early summer night, clothing dripping on lines strung around the small space, and Caroline sat beside it, wearing a borrowed sweater and soft trousers and wrapped in a blanket. Reyville was in the galley, dressed in dry clothes, boiling the kettle, gathering his thoughts. Caroline had told him everything she could remember about being in the water, about the Sisters, everything she could even attempt to explain.
The old trawler drifted in the dark, heavy with consideration. Heavy with failure.
Again.
Caroline squeezed the corner of the blanket in her hands. Why did it feel like these jobs were getting harder, lately? Less tidy? They used to end an assignment feeling like they did something for someone. Now they just seemed to uncover deeper problems everywhere they turned.
Finally, Reyville said, “I don’t think Flora is telling us everything.”
Caroline sighed. “You went into this whole thing suspicious.”
“Sure, but…I still think I’m right. Whatever caused those marks on the fishmaids claims that it didn’t kill them, which would mean something else did. And we know that RUMOR has killed fishmaids before, to study them. Or at least hired folks to do it.”
“That doesn’t mean Flora has anything to do with it.”
“It’s weird, though.” Reyville looked at her. “Isn’t it? It’s strange.”
He paused, added in a quiet mutter, “And I honestly don’t understand what you get out of defending a person we barely know.”
Caroline glanced into the fire, sparks flying against the glass. She felt Reyville’s words like a sting. One thing that she had always loved about him was his ability to accept things at face value, with curiosity, an open heart. This suspicion felt wrong, from him. Off-kilter. Like something about the previous experience with RUMOR had changed him, and not for the better.
Flora was a stranger, but that didn’t make her dangerous. Not for sure.
When Caroline spoke again, her voice sounded far away, even in her own ears. “Do you want to keep going?”
That was it, the one question that mattered. It had been a vicious first try, cold and frightening and eerie, and Caroline’s skin still crawled with the nightmarish feeling of being held in suspension, mind linked with another alien mind, connected to an animal aware of itself, aware of its own cosmic implications. An octopus, a squid, an old god…whatever it was, it was still lurking below them in the deeps, watching.
Watching the Moon, making prophets out of fishmaids, covering the ocean floor the world over. What could it mean? Would she ever know? Or did she have to add this to the ever-growing list of questions without answers?
Maddening. Simply maddening.
Reyville poured hot water from the kettle into the teapot—a new one, since his old chipped one had smashed when the Princess was nearly wrecked beyond repair—and rested his elbows on the counter to wait as the tea steeped.
“Yeah, I want to keep going,” he said. “But only because I think we both know that RUMOR is still up to something. Whether Flora is in on it is neither here nor there. She’s our conduit. The more she feeds us these jobs, the more we’ll know, even if she doesn’t want us to know. We can use her.”
Caroline peered at him. There were times—times like this—when she felt like Reyville sounded like someone else, when something flickered through his face that she did not recognize. And perhaps it had always been there, but now that she knew more about him—about his many pasts—she imagined that there was something that bled through, sometimes. Other souls, clinging to his shoulders. Other versions of the same man, crafted by the events of different lives. Same clay, molded, even warped, into new shapes.
But just as quickly as it arrived, it passed, and he shook his head and said, “Not use. That’s horrible…I don’t mean use. I mean…do you know what I mean?”
And she thought she did, so she nodded, and said, “So we’re in this. We keep going. Right? Together.”
Reyville looked down at his hands. The woodstove popped. He murmured, “My child, my sister, dream, how sweet all things would seem, were we in that kind land to live together…”
She gave him a quizzical look, and he smiled, shrugged. “It’s Baudelaire. I’m more cultured than you think.”
“Unlikely. I’ve known you long enough. You can’t fool me.”
A shared smile, interrupted by him pouring the tea into their mugs, handing her one, holding out his own for a toast.
“We journey on. Together, then,” he said. “You and me. Until the end.”
The mugs clinked, a delicate sound for a sentiment so serious.
Caroline nodded. “Yes. Until the end. But I’d just settle for a solid win, sometime soon."
He laughed, sweet and low, and every corner of it was Reyville. Nothing more, nothing less. “Don’t you worry. We’ve got a triumph coming. I can feel it. Trust me.”
A triumph. What a word. But Caroline gave him a smile. “Sure. Anything you say, Captain.”
Reyville set down his tea and checked on the clothes drying over the stove, then knelt to put another log on the fire. Caroline rubbed at the place under the sleeve of her borrowed sweater where red welts, rings roughly the size of a grapefruit, were already rising on her arm. Physical echoes of a strong grip, an alien conversation.
Proof of her encounter, and a small secret to keep to herself. At least for now.
Thank you for reading! 📸
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Mysterious giant creatures in dark open water are literally my greatest fear. 😬 But this was a beautifully written episode. I had to hold myself back from restacking every other sentence. 😂
S.E., what a wonderful series! Well written. Fast-paced. Strong characters. I binged season 1 and am up to date with season 2. Mystery, a nautical aura, suspense. And well-imagined characters and beings. I have been an avid reader for all of my long life. This series is so well done. The supernatural elements are not beyond the imagination. Thanks. Keep up the great work!