Maybe Luce had put some kind of spell on him, Dorian thought. But maybe she hadn’t. It was only fair to give her a chance to explain, wasn’t it? “Back to what?”

“I believe a psychologist might describe what you’re suffering from as Stockholm syndrome. A disorder in which the victim becomes emotionally attached to his torturer. But in your case it’s probably even more complex than that.”

“You think I’m getting attached to you?”

Ellison flashed him a hard look but didn’t take the bait. “You have heard the mermaids singing, Dorian Hurst. Each to each. Maybe they even sang to you. And it severely damaged your mind.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Dorian went completely silent after that. Dead still and dead faced, waiting for it all to be over.

Once he’d recovered from the initial horror of Ellison’s words, Dorian began putting things together. Obviously they’d talked to Mrs. Muggeridge, and she’d told them how he’d flipped out when he read those lines in class. Ellison didn’t mean what he’d said literally, obviously. He couldn’t. Instead he’d just decided to use that poem as a weapon, because he knew Dorian would find it upsetting. It was another trick, like the salt water.

After a while they gave up. A new agent, a woman this time, came and drove Dorian to a hotel and left him in a drab room with a takeout cheeseburger and a milk shake. Those things didn’t taste horribly salty. Clearly, then, he hadn’t hallucinated that awful taste in the water. After he ate he flicked on the TV and took out his sketchpad. All he wanted was to draw a new portrait of Luce. He had the feeling he’d been drawing her wrong all this time, but now that he’d seen her up close again maybe he’d finally be able to capture that weird, dark brilliance of hers.

They might take his bag, of course. Look through it. After thinking for a minute, Dorian decided it was safer to draw Luce as a human being, sitting on the beach and just looking at the sea. Nothing could be less suspicious, could it, than a teenage boy drawing pictures of a hot girl? He drew her wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt—the clothes looked really out of place, but he couldn’t help that—with a book on her knees. She seemed like, if she were human, she’d probably be the kind of girl who read a lot. Where had she learned to read, anyway? Did the mermaids like to kidnap English teachers and hold them in captivity?

The thought of asking her that made him smile to himself as he drew.

∗ ∗ ∗