“Jacks? What, are you two BFFs now?”

“Don’t change the topic, Marty. You can’t just kick us to the curb.”

“We’ll only be at sea for a few days, long enough to set up a hydrophone array and perform some preliminary sonar mapping of the sea floor. The real work is decoding the data, which we’ll start when we return to shore.”

“Why don’t we go with you?” said Jacky. “I can’t think of a better place to get started on my story. Rad, you’re not filming again until the beginning of next month. Interested in coming along?”

“A few days relaxing at sea does sound rather enticing…”

Marty shrugged. “If you two want to come, so be it. There’s plenty of room. What about you, Elsa? Care to join the party? The more the merrier.”

“No, no, not me,” she said. “But thank you for the offer.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “My, it’s late. I should be getting home. It’s been a wild day, and I think I need a good night’s rest to…get my head around everything.”

“Understandable,” he said, producing his corncob pipe from his pocket and clamping the stem between his teeth. “Let me show you to the gangway, and we’ll see you when we return in a few days’ time.”

Part 3

Demon Island

“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath...”

―Herman Melville

Chapter 14

Merfolk: From the Deep. The making-of the original Netflix documentary.

“I know it’s been a long day, Double M,” Fat Mike said, reclining in the director’s chair and sipping a can of Diet Coke from a fluorescent orange straw. “So how about we do one more scene? You good with that?”

Marty had just returned from the bathroom and was settling onto the stool in front of the green screen. “Sure,” he said. “Got something in mind?”

“What they look like. Their physical appearance.”

“Isn’t that redundant? You’ll be showing video footage of a merfolk.”

“Your exposition will lead right into that. Maybe you can explain why they look like they do. Why they have tails and all that shite.”

“They have tails so they can swim, Mike.”

Fat Mike slapped a knee. “Funny, mate! Make sure you mention that on camera. Just as deadpan as you did now. You ready?”

“Sure.”

“Roll camera!”

“Camera rolling,” Gus said.

“Marker!”

Jamie clapped the slate’s sticks together.

“Action!” Fat Mike bellowed.

“In 1758,” Marty said, “the Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus developed the two-name system—Genus and Species—for identifying and classifying all living things. Under class Mammalia, he placed Homo sapiens at the top of air-breathing vertebrate animals. He also acknowledged the existence of Siren, noting the species exhibited paradoxical biological traits. It was clearly an aquatic mammal since its hind terminated in a fish-like tail, but it lacked the blubber and thick skin of other marine mammals. Other physical traits antithetical to those same marine mammals included a neck, external ears, and forelimbs with opposable thumbs.