Then it hissed.

The man fell backward. Gasping, he scrambled away, gained his footing, and ran a short distance before swinging around. He focused the camera on the creature. It was twenty or so meters away, flopping across the sand toward the ocean in the awkward, clumsy way of a seal on land. It reached the foaming surf and splashed through the shallow water. A wave crest crashed over it. When the water flattened in the subsequent trough, the creature was gone.

A thousand thoughts had run through Marty’s mind while he’d watched the astounding footage, and for the next hour he bombarded the filmmaker with questions. When the man pitched Marty a Netflix documentary based on the footage, and asked if Marty would be interested in narrating it, he agreed without hesitation.

That decision turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

“Dumb bastard,” he muttered to himself, catching his reflection in an ornate mirror. The middle-aged man looking back had skin the color of copper, craggy yet cultured features inherited more from his grandfather than either of his parents, and dark stubble. There was a tiredness in his blue eyes these days, a weariness borne from a dwindling lack of purpose and the recognition that his best days were behind him. He still believed wholeheartedly that merfolk existed in the planet’s oceans and seas; he simply no longer believed he would be the one to ultimately uncover the evidence. Years of fruitless searching could erode even the most determined man’s optimism, and despite being only forty-five, he felt as though time were running out. The world was turning without him, moving inevitably forward, while he remained trapped in a bubble, longing for the past and a life that no longer existed.

Setting aside his pipe to burn out, Marty withdrew a bottle of Scotch from the liquor cabinet below the mirror and allowed himself a generous pour. He went to the baby grand piano in the corner of the salon, sat on the padded bench, and stared at the sheet music propped on the rack before him without seeing the notes.

He set the glass on the piano’s glossy top board and tapped a white key. The solitary, mournful note carried eerily in the darkening twilight.

∆∆∆

An hour and four drinks later Marty’s spirit was buoyed, and his fingers danced over the piano keys as he played Dire Strait’s “Walk of Life,” singing along in a nobody-is-listening, gruff baritone.

He didn’t realize his phone was ringing until it had gone silent. He looked around the salon, waiting for it to begin ringing again. It didn’t.

He got to his feet—and almost fell flat on his face as he lost his balance while lifting a leg over the piano bench. He found his phone atop a stack of National Geographic magazines piled haphazardly on an Edwardian writing desk. He was surprised to see the missed call was from Jacqueline DeSilva, a reporter for the Daily Mirror.