Willowmere

The six of them moved into the old house in the winter, when the deep pool under the willows was sheened with ice and the bare branches sang across its surface in the night wind. Nate took the back room with the big gable window, and on nights he couldn’t sleep he looked out at the powdered sugar scattering of snow on the lawn and down to the brambles at the edge of the tree line. The ice on the water reflected moonlight like a mirror.

By spring, they had peeled up the faded linoleum in the kitchen and put down tile they got out back of a shop at a going out of business sale. The pattern made no sense and the colors hardly matched, but it was laid neat and the grout didn’t look too shoddy, so they celebrated their success with a bottle of vodka. The next day, Thomas came back from a yard sale with a couch and a trio of kittens. Fox fixed the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom, and Kathleen directed spring cleaning with all the domesticity of an army general in ripped jeans and an old t-shirt.

Outside, the brambles burst into bloom with little white flowers that promised blackberries, and the bent old apple tree that leaned against the kitchen window scattered pale pink petals on the lawn. The pool brimmed up against its confining shores, and the willows grew soft green leaves they kept dropping in the water. Some evenings, Nate went down to lean against the trunk of the biggest, sketch pad out on his lap, and rolled his jeans up to dip his feet in the water. It rippled out from the touch and smoothed again, limpid and cool. There were no fish in it. No frogs. Only the dragonflies that darted back and forth and hung suspended over the cattails growing along the left edge. When he leaned over to look in, it went on and on downward, reflecting the sky and the willows and his face, clear as silvered glass, its bottom lost in the shifting shadows.

He was sitting like that, intent on the image forming under his pencil, when something brushed against his foot. His sketchbook slid from his lap as he startled upright. He grabbed for it and lost his pencil instead. It sank down through the empty pool and disappeared.

In May, summer settled languidly down on their stretch of gravel road and overgrown field, and on the hill behind the house the fireflies lit up the space under the trees in shifting patterns long into the still cool nights. The scent of honeysuckle hung heavy over everything. Nate flung his windows open wide and painted landscapes that didn’t exist, and sometimes he could have sworn he heard music drifting down from the hill.

On those nights he crept to the window, anticipation tingling in his fingertips, his heart beating against his ribs like it wanted to escape the cage of bone that held it in. The moonlight pulled the color from the countryside, washing out all but the lightning bugs, still going about their errands in the long grass and around the roots of the trees. Light splashed into the pool and drifted down, down, down, and Nate thought he heard faint laughter, saw the flick of water dancing up from the black hollow in the grass as though one of the fish that wasn’t there had broken the slick surface for a taste of the green and gold flickers of the fireflies.

May slid slow and sticky into June and Nate wandered outside one morning with his sketchbook tucked under his arm. The dawn light slanted across the still wet grass and tangled in the branches of the willows, stained the pond pink and amber. Barefoot and shirtless, Nates stretched out on the bank and pulled a pencil from its place behind his ear.

Birds were singing in the apple tree. A breeze picked up, ruffling along until it teased across Nate’s cheek and brushed his brown hair into his eyes. Nate rolled onto his back and looked up at the sky, watching the wispy little clouds scudding past on their way to somewhere else. The sun was not yet hot in the shade of the willows, and the air was sweet with the scent of green and growing things. He closed his eyes.

It was warm when he woke, startled out of sleep and blinking at the branches. His cheek felt cool. Reaching up to touch it, he found it damp. The wind sighed through the cattails, and from the pool there was a faint sound, like the plonk of a stone sinking under the surface. Nate turned, heart racing. There was nothing. Only the dragonflies and a faint ripple on the water, as though one of them had landed for a moment and pushed on again, leaving only the echo of its passing behind.

That night, and almost every night after, he dreamed of falling, sinking through the blue-black darkness of the pond into green and gold light rising like the sunrise to meet him.

In the second week of June, the first set of students graduated from the self-defense class Fox had started teaching in the little town up by the highway. Thomas brought home bottles of honey wine and they spread a blanket on the grass behind the house and ate blackberries picked from the bushes at the end of the yard, passing the bottles between them. When everyone else had gone back in, Nate sat outside alone, listening to the cicadas hum in the trees.

The crescent moon hung low in a sky full of stars and the grass was cool and dry under Nate’s bare feet as he made his way down to the pond. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and it was surprisingly easy to see. Every tiny, wind-driven ripple in the water had an edge of faint light, reflected from the stars. Nate folded himself onto the shore with his legs crossed and looked up at the hill where the fireflies were still dancing, took a swallow from the bottle still in his hand.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the surface of the pond shift. He turned his head sharply back in that direction, but it was only a willow branch leaving rings in the water. Except-

Nate leaned forward onto his hands so quickly he almost toppled into the pool. For just a moment, in among the rushes, he thought he saw dark weeds drifting in the water. When he blinked they were gone, a shimmer of moonlight reflected in their wake. Music curled down from the hill on a breeze scented with something spiced and herbal. Nate got up and went inside to bed. He didn’t realize until morning that he’d left the half-empty bottle of mead beside the pool, but when he went down to get it, there was nothing there but a small green stone, water-worn smooth as glass.

On Midsummer’s Eve they all got fantastically drunk. Thomas brought in the first of the garden’s harvest and Kathleen picked peaches and cherries from the trees that grew along the left side of the house. Thomas and Fox got their guitars out and sat on the back steps playing and the other three danced. Nate leaned against the wall and drew them all with messy strokes of his pencil. By the time they swayed back inside, the sun had long since set.

Nate fell into bed and dreamed about swimming through water full of honey-colored light and a hand reaching up to guide him deeper.

He was not sure what woke him.

The music was back when he slipped out from under the thin sheet and went to the window, loud enough to pick out the sound of flutes and drums and some kind of pipe with a high, wistful note. Nate grabbed a pair of jeans from the mess of clothes and papers on the floor and wriggled into them. In the pond, the glimmering light was blue and green, and he was undeniably certain he had just seen the top of someone’s head rise from the water.

He clattered down the rickety old stairs but slipped out the front door instead of the back, closing it silently behind him and walking through the damp grass on silent feet. He rounded the corner of the house and stopped dead.

In the center of the pond, a person stood head and shoulders out of the water, hair clinging soaked to white shoulders. Moonlight glittered off constellations of tiny spots scattered like freckles across upper arms and along the dip of spine. Nate’s heart tried to stop beating in his too-tight chest.

He was a body’s length from the edge of the pool when he stumbled on a rock hidden in the grass. Quickly cut off as his gasp of shock had been, it was enough. In an instant there were only rings sliding outward on the surface of the water. Nate cursed under his breath.

He knelt at the shoreline, mud soaking through the knees of his jeans, and leaned out over the edge. The pond was deep blue-black with night, bottomless. He reached out a hand and brushed his fingers over the ripples still chasing themselves across the surface.

A slender hand closed around his wrist and yanked him in.

When he came up, spluttering and gasping, he was alone. Then, quite abruptly, he was not. Nate stared into moss green eyes, inhumanly large in a face with high, sharp cheekbones and a narrow, aristocratic nose. He realized hands were on his arms, holding him up. Under his feet, he could not feel the bottom.

The being’s—mermaid’s?—hair was cerulean blue.

“Nice to meet you too?” he said, not sure how one responded to being invited into a pond with some kind of water spirit.

The being’s head tilted, brows drawing together. Then, a smile. The canines were slightly too long, both top and bottom, sharp-looking. Nate wondered if maybe that invite had been more of a command, and if water folk ate people.

“Seek and you shall find. Is that not what they say?”

The voice was low and soft and Nate wanted to wrap himself up in it and listen to it forever and he kind of wanted to lick the drop of water sliding down the slim throat to the sharp collarbones and that was probably a bad idea.

“I. Uh.”

Eloquent, Nathaniel. Really lovely.

His new companion laughed like water falling over stones, and Nate was glad he wasn’t standing, because he wasn’t sure his knees would have been able to take it. The sound of the drums rolled down from the hill, and the only light was the little flickering flashes of the fireflies. Nate tried to remember how breathing worked.

“Is there something I can call you?” he asked.

A pause. Then, “If you like, you may call me Ninelei.”

Nate turned the name over in his mind, not sure he could pronounce it with that same liquid slide of vowels.

“Ninelei,” he attempted. “I’m Nate. What happens now?”

Ninelei’s head tilted. “That, I suppose, is up to you.”

Nate was never going to get over that voice. He wanted to kiss it from Ninelei’s mouth and swallow it. He realized he was staring and flushed hot.

Ninelei smiled. “I thought that might be the answer.”

A hand, speckled with shimmering silver, like scales or water in the moonlight, was held out to him, this time in offer.

Nate reached out and took it, and together they sank into the bottomless pool.