The Selkie, by Cassie Frisbie

Lost to our modern mythologies, along with the mischievous satyr and the beloved dryad, is the creature known then as the selkie. Half human and half seal, these creatures of legend may change from either form in the light of the full moon either by the shedding or the putting-on of their seal-skin coat. Often in stories this coat is stolen by humans in an attempt to keep the selkie captive on land, since by some spell these beings are unnaturally attractive in their human form. But like any good sailor, the selkie's first love is the sea, to which they would do anything to return, abandoning spouse and children and running off into the night of the full moon to the shore, their shed skin in hand. The story which I am about to relate to you involves such a creature very closely, otherwise I need not have told you any of this; and the reason why you have not heard it before is because in its time it was a great secret, and it was only when the children of the children of those involved were very old men and women that this secret could be told in safety. By now these people are in the next life, where no man can hurt them, and I can in good conscience tell their tale.

Far on the northern shore of a distant island, nestled among craggy black rocks and soggy grasslands, there was a lighthouse. This lighthouse had been established just a century or two before the beginning of our tale, and was the old-fashioned kind that had to be lived in and tended regularly. The shoreline where it rested was perpetually cold, densely foggy, and dangerously rocky - hence the special need for a lighthouse here, where a ship could so easily lose her way. Manning this lighthouse was an elderly gentleman, whose father had also tended the light, a job which had passed to him from his own father, and so backward until you could in fact trace the ancestry of the elderly gentleman back to the very first inhabitant of the lighthouse. His son, a businessman at heart, had rejected the light, and gone to a distant city to start a family with a rich and beautiful lady, but the both of them died in a tragic bout of illness which gripped the city at the time, and so their son, a pale and scrawny boy of eleven or twelve, came to live with his grandfather.

Despite his sorrow in the aftermath of his son's death, the old man was overjoyed to have someone to pass his lighthouse to, and taught his grandson everything his father had told him about the management of the place. This grandson was an avid student, and came to know the lighthouse like the back of his hand, which grew coarser and weathered, but never lost the touch of softness. This he required for assisting his grandfather in his encroaching age and for wooing his first wife.

After the death of his beloved grandfather, he married a fisherman's daughter from the local village, the most beautiful woman in the region. They had no children, to their disappointment and eventual sorrow, and when by some tragedy she slipped from the wet rocks and into the stormy sea, the young man thought he would never love again. When her body washed up on the black sand two weeks later, he vomited across his bedroom floor and refused to go down to look at her. He spent three months crying alone in his room and asked someone else to tend the

lighthouse while he mourned his beloved wife. He emerged a changed and weakened man, who no longer sought company and remained aloof from the world. This is why no one noticed when

mysterious happenings took place at the lighthouse, for by the time our story began he had not

received a visitor or made a single social call in three years. He fished and foraged and farmed for his food, and accepted each month a box of clothes and sundries. An inspector would come round once or twice a year and check the lighthouse over, but the young man would only pour him a single glass of whisky to drink in silence before bidding him good-bye and showing him the door.

On a morning much like the one upon which his wife had met her death - for a beautiful morning it had been, all gentle fog and golden beams of sunlight - the young attendant was out walking the beach, as he was wont to do on such days that made him miss his wife so dearly. His pale skin looked delicate and sickly against the black beach, almost feminine in his slightness of form. His fisherman's sweater hung about his frame and his hands seemed to twitch as he rubbed them with his thumbs for warmth. His earnest eyes scoured the sea, as if searching forhis lost love. About him was wrapped a massive wool cape, like the kind a sea-captain would

wear in such a story as this. It had fit him when his grandfather had bought it for him, but was now much too big, and enveloped him like an afghan.

As he walked, he saw something in the distance, just where the fog ended on the horizon before him: a pale form on the sand. Picking up his pace to a run, he stopped abruptly when he had reached a distance of about twenty feet - for he had good eyes and knew that it was a woman who lay on the beach, without a scrap of clothing upon her skin. Slowly, she picked herself up, pushing herself off of the sand with thin, strong arms. She searched about her for something, arms enfolding her naked body to warm and conceal it. Just then the young man saw a dark mass just a few feet away from him and stooped to pick it up. Eyes averted, he held the coat out to the lady; it was sleek and silky in hand, but heavy, and also surprisingly dry for having washed up along the coast. Though he could not see them, for want of looking, her deep brown eyes were startled as she took the coat and flung it about herself desperately - not as one who wished to cover themself, for there were in fact great patches of her body that at the time were considered to be somewhat private that were not yet concealed, but rather as one who wished to have possession of a thing by putting as much of it into contact with their own body as possible, much like a woman holding a kitten or a beggar clutching a purse full of money. The young man dared to look up, and saw that she was, for the most part, covered up with the strange and massive coat. With all the good form of a gentleman sailor he offered her shelter and food over the roar of the waves. She seemed not to understand him until he beckoned her back up the cliffs to the lighthouse. As they walked up the steep, wet hill he threw his wool coat about her shoulders, and though again he did not see her, her eyes overflowed with gratitude and amazement. The attendant did see that there were deep circles beneath her eyes, and thick black lashes above them, and that her wet hair clung, dark and slick, against her unblemished skin, which was just as pale as his.

When they had reached the lighthouse, he lit the stove in the only bedroom and dug through a large steamer trunk for his wife's old clothes. Drawing from it some of the warmest articles, he laid them upon the bed and showed the woman to it. Grateful, but uncertain, the sea-child sat upon the very edge of the mattress, still quite wet but not seeming to mind now that she was warm. She gazed up at the lighthouse attendant with a very simple expression upon her face and, unsure of what to make of it, he left her to change. While he put on a kettle and rummaged through his cupboards for biscuits that had not yet grown stale, she wandered about the little room, running her hands over the bedposts and blankets, staring out the window, and opening and closing the wardrobe doors as if she had never seen such things before. Finally, just as the kettle was singing and her host had opened the tin of tea and pulled a teapot across the worktop, she picked up the clothes, noted the arm and head holes and decided to try them on. The tartan dress she had been given was a bit tight on her body, but she fit into it well enough and when she put a heavy wool shawl about her shoulders it was virtually unnoticeable. She emerged from the room again and by this time, the young man's panic was far behind him since he had found one last unopened tin of biscuits wedged behind some other foodstuffs in the cabinet. He greeted her with a cup full of steaming tea, which she clutched gratefully but did not drink from until she had watched him do it several times, not out of suspicion, but as if she were an apprentice in tea-drinking and he the master.

He asked her where she hailed from, she did not answer. He asked if she was warm enough, but that too was met with silence. He then asked her whether she was dumb - which at that time and still today means unable to speak - but she only continued to stare at him with the same simple smile, her large eyes hungrily taking in every beautiful sight they found. The rain upon the window had caught her eye first, followed by the steam from the copper kettle, which the young man had then transferred to the precious little clay mug and handed so graciously to her. She marveled to think that all of these things were made by water. She had seen mist and sprays and rainfall upon the sea, ran flippers over sheets of ice and ridden on glaciers, but these things she did not know were possible. That water could get so hot that it would rise in curls into the sky, or be too light for the pull of the earth to bring it to the ground that it should gather in bubbles on a surface of glass. Such was the progression of her thoughts as she stared at him, listening intently as he spoke his beautiful land-language, of which she understood not a word. But the thing which had ensnared her most, more than all the wonders of the world he lived in, more than the knits and weaves of clothing, or the curves of bedposts, or the feeling of cut wood and stone beneath her skin, what drew her to him more than all of this was his very first gesture to her: the return of her coat. Rather than steal it, as from the stories she heard human men seemed always to do, he had given it back to her. She wondered for a fleeting moment if there was a condition for its return, if she was expected to be his wife because of it. But she would have to wait until the moon was no longer full to understand what his conditions were, since before that time his words would sound like gibberish, as they did when these thoughts were running through her mind and quickening the pace of her heart.