Nausicaa had given up arguing with Luce about her love for Dorian. Instead she smiled, and her green-black eyes flashed with sly amusement. “I knew a mermaid once, gone utterly mad, who kidnapped an entire human family: a boy perhaps six years old, his mother and father. She plucked them one by one from the lifeboat where she found them drifting and dragged them to a cave. The cave had a deep underwater entrance, and the humans could not hope to swim through it without her help. She kept them there for years, making them pretend that she was their beloved daughter, the boy’s sister. The family had to play games with her, comb her hair, and invent imaginary memories of her childhood with them, all in endless darkness. If they tried to resist or if they confused their ‘memories’ too much, she would cease to bring them food for a day or two . . .”

Luce knew Nausicaa well enough by now to understand why she was telling this story: it was a way of implying that Luce’s sense of belonging with Dorian was just as delusional as the crazy mermaid’s pretending to have a family. Luce tensed with annoyance, but at the same time she was intrigued by the thought of this human family held captive in a cave like dolls kept in a box. “So what happened?”

“Well, the mermaid—her name was Kumiko—I was told that she died very strangely. That she was lured by a spirit in the water and followed it to a depth where she drowned. Maybe she died another way, but one day she did not come back. Then there was no one to feed these humans she had kept as her pets, of course.”

“But . . . if you know all this . . . the other mermaids around there must have known, too?” Luce couldn’t stop herself from hoping that someone might have rescued the family after Kumiko’s disappearance.

“They all knew. Kumiko was so insane that her tribe felt sorry for her. No one interfered with her games, but they hardly wished to deal with the humans she left behind. I passed by that way again some years after, and I stopped at the cave. The family’s bones were all scattered at the water’s edge. As if they had kept trying to find the courage to attempt an escape, right up to their last moments.”

Luce lost her appetite completely as she imagined the three humans exploring the margin of the water with their hands, never quite daring to dive, and gradually falling into complete despair. The perfect blackness all around them must have crept into their brains like a parasite, devouring what was left of their sanity. And the other mermaids hadn’t even cared enough to drown them out of pity . . .

“Did Dorian bring you any new books today?” Nausicaa went on dreamily.