The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(4)
“They are powerfully ungenerous,” her grandmother agreed. “They do not think of the future, as we do; each one keeps a little soul all locked away for himself, and once their bodies are used up, their souls go off somewhere no one else can reach and continue along in perfect isolation forever and ever.”
“But what a terrible waste that must be,” cried the girl. “I can think of a dozen better things I could do with a soul.”
“More’s the pity that you haven’t got one, for I have no doubt you could put a soul to a great deal of good use.”
“I should like to get a soul,” said the girl. “The prince has one already. I might have his. I have put my mouth on his mouth, and surely that counts for something, even among savages.”
“Getting a soul takes suffering and solitude,” said her grandmother. “We are much better off than they are, no matter how much they squander their birthright.”
“I’ve suffered already,” said the girl. “Not much, perhaps, but I should still like to get something for my suffering.”
“You could,” said her grandmother, “if the prince were to love you such that his own people were nothing to him, and if he forgot the two parents who made him, and if all his thoughts were yours, and if he were wed to you with his full heart, then his soul could become yours, and you would gain a share in his eternity.”
The girl thought of the prince, quiet and still on the sand with his dark eyes closed, and she thought about gaining something from him. She considered his soul quite her own already, minus a few necessary formalities.
The very next day the girl swam out from her father’s house to visit the sea-witch. She didn’t call her a sea-witch, obviously, because people who live there don’t go around affixing the word “sea” to everything any more than you would speak of visiting your land-doctor or your dirt-grocer. She didn’t call her a witch either, as a matter of fact, but no translation is perfect, and for our present purposes, there’s not much more you need to understand about the sort of person the sea-witch was. After all, it was true that she lived in the sea, and it was true that she could make things happen that other people couldn’t. She was a very effective and useful person, which meant, as far as the girl was concerned (although, you will remember, that you would never call her a girl, if you got a good look at her), a sea-witch was just another sort of king’s daughter.
Now here is what the sea-witch looked like: she was hinged neatly in the middle; she could jump very high by bending and straightening her great-foot; she could whistle water through her teeth and hit a swimming fish one hundred yards away; and she had no head at all. She was lovely to look at.
And here is what the sea-witch’s house looked like: it was composed of a hundred white chimneys that shot out merry little clouds of particulate all night and day. The chimneys were crusted in mottled bits of iron and long drips of sulfide and flanked with lovely pale calcium blooms. Out of this smoking corridor grew tube worms, which the sea-witch tended herself, and which had no faces at all, only pale, slender midguts and foreguts that concluded in a red mouth that danced in the current. The mouths turned and followed carefully everything that swam by. The sea-witch’s home was bounded by a dead brine pool and old dripping waterfalls, and a soft shower of marine snow was always pattering lightly against the roof of her chimney-palace. It was too hot and too cold and too wriggling for anyone else to live there, so the sea-witch owned it. She turned it out quite neatly, too.
The girl felt the worms twitching underneath as she swam, mouthing at her limbs softly as she passed over. She went faster until she came to a chimney that would have looked to you like a squat stone beehive—it didn’t look like a beehive to her, but what she thought it looked like wouldn’t mean anything to you. Anyhow, it was in this chimney that the witch lived, and so it was this chimney that the girl came to.
“Good day and well-met, girl,” said the witch, spitting a long stream of nacre on the floor in welcome. “Come in, then, and bring your business with you.”
“Good day and thanks, Mother,” the girl said (who was polite as well as efficient). “I’m off to get a soul, and a prince besides, if I can manage it.”
“Can’t see what need you have for one,” the witch said. “What will you do with it?”
“Oh, I haven’t got any plans, exactly,” the girl said. “Only I’m good at figuring out what to do with things, and the ones that have the things to begin with don’t seem interested in putting them to use, just in keeping them where they already are.”
The witch nodded, or made an approximate gesture that involved folding and unfolding herself quickly. “I can’t abide selfishness either, an it comes to that. Well, good luck to you, and if you manage to bring either one back, I’ll look forward to a good meal in your company. But better a plate of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” (The witch didn’t say “ox,” or “love” either, if it comes to that, but there are other books that better explain that sort of thing. Hadn’t you better be reading some of them?)
The witch looked the girl up and down with a critical eye. (You know, by now, I think, that the witch had no eyes, and I need not explain every little difference to you, but bear in mind that even if someone is merely in possession of a clot of photosensitive cells and a rudimentary sort of lens that is only dimly aware when a shadow passes overhead, they might be just as proud of that clot of cells and that rudimentary lens as you are of your own two eyes.)