The Museum of Vanished Things was open twenty-four hours a day.

Until the night she barricaded the door, looked up at a clear sky filled with glittering stars, and walked slowly into the cool Atlantic Ocean.

                                                                                *********

-- The Keeper --

It had been centuries since the shadow of a visitor had darkened the museum's low, stone-arched doorway.

The museum was built into the hillside on the eastern edge of the island, looking like nothing other than any one of the small, forgotten, Neolithic stone ruins that dotted the slopes of these remote isles. Only this one, her museum, was more overgrown with grass, more inaccessible, and with a rectangular black doorway smaller and even less noticeable than the rest.

This was the smallest of the isles, shrouded even more in folklore than in sea-mist, inhabited only by seabirds, and guarded by roiling waves that crashed against black rocks in a constant crescendo. The few humans who still occupied the surrounding islands did not venture here, to the so-called vanishing isle, and no one ever visited the half-hidden, sepulchral museum.

And so it was entirely unexpected when the keeper looked out one grey afternoon to see a human woman, compass in one hand and holding her tawny hat to her head against the wind with the other, traversing the rocky shore directly toward the museum's long-forgotten doorway.

Her first thought, of course, was that the human woman must be dead.

                                                                                     ***

-- The Visitor --

The cool sea-spray blowing in her face was exhilarating, as had been the ride in the small boat across the choppy waters to this fabled island. She had proven time and again that she could be as daring and independent as any man. If only her father could see her now, unfettered by custom and his dour limitations.

Such was Esme's intoxication from the journey and the anticipation of exploration, that she felt neither fatigue nor cold as she clambered over the wet rocks in her sensible leather boots, with her satchel slung across her body, and scrambled up the grassy slope, following the needle of the old brass compass toward what she hoped would be the find of her career.

It should go without saying then, that it was not like her to be squeamish. But the sight of a delicate white moth fluttering helplessly in the massive web just above the tomb's lintel filled her with unexpected unease.

The spider would come along soon to end the moth's liminal misery. Wrap it, sap its essence and discard its empty husk. That was nature's way.

She glanced back once, down over the steel grey ocean. One of those sudden banks of fog the locals warned about had rolled in, and she could see neither the larger island whence she'd come nor even her little boat secured among the rocks below. She refused to worry about it.

She ducked her head low as she entered the stone chamber, holding out her torch so that light and shadows played across the ancient stonework walls and the low, low corbelled ceiling. As she took a step forward, still crouched, she listened. Even the sound of the wind and sea was muffled almost to extinction. She was aware of being utterly alone, and she felt a sense of satisfaction. That was the way she liked it.

                                                                                        ***

-- The Keeper --

The keeper had long ago stopped giving thought to whether or not she liked being alone. She just was, and had been so for a long, long time.

Her own kind had stopped coming to their ancestral isle, and slowly vanished.

She had lived among the small tribe of humans, watching them toil and celebrate, live and die, interring them here in the museum, until finally her own human costume had grown frail and weak, and that life had come to an end. The last few humans had entombed her mortal remains here with all the others like one of their own, and abandoned the island for good, taking only their stories with them.

One way or another, the humans of her tribe and her own kind, too, had all moved on. But her spirit, if that's what it was, remained to cherish them.

Someone had to be the keeper. It was the way of her kind.

                                                                                     ***

-- The Visitor --

Esme's eyes and the torch light settled on a low stone shelf, one of many in this narrow chambered tomb, upon which sat a small human skull with other disarticulated bones behind it. She held the light close and studied the delicate cheekbones, the narrow nasal cavity, the graceful brow line. A female. Small. Maybe even a child. Untouched and secured here for possibly millenia.

Her colleague, Mr. G, would easily imagine the life that once was, the presence of the girl or woman who had lived on these rocky shores, the family who had put her remains here. The story. But Esme just saw weathered bones, cold and hard, as if they had always been inanimate objects. The skull was a discarded remnant, something sanitized, a find to be catalogued and displayed, and to inadequately represent the past.

An interesting find, to be sure, but her museum in London was angling for bigger fish, so speak. She smiled at her own pun.

Other remains rested in upper and lower stone compartments, so much like artifacts on display in fact, that she imagined they should have placards to tell their provenance and a two-sentence summary of their significance.

Then she saw what she had hoped for, and her breath caught in her throat. The eye sockets were round instead of squarish, the nasal cavity slightly too small, and the curve of the head was graced with three thin delicate ridges, probably barely noticeable in life.

The rumours she'd heard in certain circles, in hushed whispers, and read in old, neglected journals, were true. She reached out a gloved hand. This was the proof she sought. These were the remains of one of the finfolk.

                                                                                         ***

-- The Keeper --

"Please don't touch that."

The human woman started at the sound of her voice, pulling her hand back, and the torch tumbled from her grasp. It settled on the dirt floor, shooting its beam of light into a dark recess, illuminating a male skull with a cracked eye socket. It was the eldest one in the chamber and even the keeper did not know when it had been placed there or how the human man had met his end.

"Who are you?" the human said, eyeing the keeper up and down with curiosity and only a hint of worry. "A ghost?" The human laughed a little.

The keeper tilted her head. "I suppose I am," she said thoughtfully. "A ghost."

                                                                                         ***

-- The Visitor --

Esme was not about to be frightened. She looked the creature up and down. It appeared as a small woman with short light hair and wide but sharp features. What little clothing it—she—wore was ragged and of an unidentifiable material.

It was her skin that suggested she was something ... other. She was too pale, her skin shimmered a bit too much even in the faint light, almost like fish scales at sunset, and her feet ... her feet were not shaped quite right, though Esme couldn't put her finger on just what was different about them. And her eyes were too round, too milky, and didn't blink in quite the manner that Esme thought they should.

It was then that Esme realized what she was looking at, whether ghost or no. A true member of the finfolk! Never in all her exploits, her adventures into mysterious places, had she expected something like this.

"This is a sacred island for my kind," the ghostly creature said smoothly. "And this," she said, gesturing with an arm that was a bit too long and floated through the air as if through water, "is my museum of vanished things, which I am beholden to mind."

Esme retrieved her torch, but did not dare shine its light directly at her strange companion, though she couldn't have said why. Was she afraid the being would disappear, prove to be but a trick of her imagination? It occurred to her that she might be suffering a hallucination from dehydration or fever.

"You needn't look after it," Esme said. "It's only a tomb,"

The creature might have smiled. Its face shifted like water and its voice reminded her of the lapping of gentle waves on sand. "Ah, a tomb, is that what you call it?"

                                                                                        ***

-- The Keeper --

She had forgotten how jagged humans' movements were. She watched the woman's eyes quickly darting and her breath rising and falling unevenly and her fingers twitching almost imperceptibly.

"Are you deceased?" the keeper asked. "For only the dead ever pass through this isle, and rarely. I see their spirits wandering, far off, on their way to... wherever they go. And," she added, "they never stay for long."

                                                                                        ***

-- The Visitor --

"Of course I'm not dead!" Esme exclaimed. "And I shan't be staying long either. I must get back by the evening, and before the tide changes."

"Indeed? Alone?" said the finwife, for that was what Esme was now sure the being was.

"Yes, indeed," Esme said. "I must report this discovery to my museum forthwith."

"You have a museum, also?" Esme thought a flicker of interest showed in the finwife's cloudy eyes.

"Yes, a real museum," Esme said. "This is a pristine find. I'm sure they'll welcome these objects for their collection."

When the finwife didn't respond, Esme thought perhaps she was not showing the creature the deference it deserved. For though she had of course encountered her share of oddities and hints of the supernatural on her explorations, she had to admit that meeting an actual creature of lore was unparalleled.

"You must be lonely here," she said, "away from others of your kind."

The finwife tilted her head and the torchlight caught her milky pale blue eyes, making them look for all the world like the rough aquamarine stones Esme had once unearthed in a pouch while excavating an ancient burial in the highlands of Colorado.

"I waited," the finwife replied in that lulling voice, "but my kind has all vanished. I might be the last."

"No!" said Esme, who always had been a true believer, if for no other reason than to spite her father and to take a stand against his admonitions to be 'sensible.'

"Stories abound of your folk," Esme said. "Not a month goes by when a sailor or a fisherman doesn't report a sighting. They must still be out there!"

The finwife's eyes widened to a seemingly impossible size. "Indeed?" she said again in her inscrutable way.

                                                                                         ***

-- The Keeper --

The keeper marvelled at the possibility. Her own kind roaming the oceans, only having forgotten or forsaken this ancestral isle as the humans had, but still in existence. Something akin to emotion stirred within the ghostly keeper.

"Why don't you go out there and search for them?" the human was saying. "Why do you stay sequestered here for all your days?"

Because a museum of vanished things needs a keeper.

                                                                                        ***

-- The Visitor --

Esme began shining her light into the dark niches on either side. Though she could not be completely sure on such a cursory look, all the rest she saw appeared to be human remains.

The finwife stayed at the end of the short, narrow passageway, watching her with those creamy eyes.

She hadn't answered Esme's question. She felt sorry for the creature, stagnating here out of some cultural obligation when she could be out there traveling the great wide expanse of ocean, where she belonged. She told the finwife so.

"The same would have happened to me," Esme confided, "if I'd followed my society's rules, if I'd listened to my father." She recalled her father, a museum curator, sitting at his enormous oaken desk, cataloguing artefacts that others had collected, that others had risked health and safety for, while telling her in his officious way that she was "too headstrong," "too flippant" in her work.

She suddenly felt self-conscious for talking so much, but the finwife said to her, "Go on..." in such a compelling, melodious voice that she continued.

"I'm only suggesting that now that my museum will certainly send people out to excavate, and these fine specimens you've taken so precious care of will be catalogued and housed and displayed as they so obviously deserve, you can move on. You must come back with me!"

                                                                                          ***

-- The Keeper --

The keeper bristled at the woman's string of clinical words—excavate, specimens, taken, catalogued, displayed. She glanced around her at the remains of her human kin, her tribe. Each gaping skull, each femur and fragment of pottery, was here because this was where it belonged.

But maybe the human was right about one thing. Maybe she could move on from here, if only...

"This one of course I must take back with me immediately," the human said as she scooped up the small ridged skull in her gloved hands, turning it round to inspect it.

A tempest rose within the keeper. She was upon the human like a squall, her powerful hands gripped tightly around the woman's throat.

                                                                                           ***

-- The Visitor --

Esme did not feel the webbed hands grasp her throat, though she struggled and gasped for breath. Instead, in her mind's eye, she saw in a flash the entire history of the island, everything the keeper knew, the sacred memories of things long vanished.

And then she saw, too, the roiling whitecaps and the edge of her capsized boat just out of reach, as she felt herself drowning, struggling against the cold water which stole her breath and forced her into darkness. 

                                                                                          ***

-- The Keeper --

The keeper released her hold upon the human, and watched its lifeless body crumple to the floor. She set her own skull back upon the stone shelf where it had rested undisturbed for countless seasons, where it belonged.

                                                                                          ***

-- The Visitor --

The human no longer needed her name. It had vanished from her mind as her breath had forsaken her body. She looked on, disoriented, as the finwife folded her lifeless corpse into a fetal position and pushed it gently into one of the few empty recesses in the chamber. She recognized her own leather boots and tawny hat and the still features of her own face, but she did not have any feelings about it. Then the creature clicked off the torch and put it with the body.

The finwife stood before the doorway and looked upon her almost kindly. "Don't worry, you'll adjust," she said in that same rippling voice. "Take your time. You can re-open the museum when you're ready."  

                                                                                      *********

The creature who was no longer the keeper reached up to free a delicate white moth that was snared in a spider's web just above the doorway. She watched it flutter into the darkening sky and felt an unfamiliar sense of relief. Then she rolled a large rock in front of the little doorway, leaving the new keeper alone and in darkness.

The Museum of Vanished Things had been open twenty-four hours a day.

Until that night when the former keeper barricaded the door, looked up at a clear sky filled with glittering stars, and walked slowly into the cool Atlantic Ocean.

Her webbed hands and her transformed legs moved lithely and her ghostly parched skin seemed to come alive in the water. She swam on her back, flipping her luminous fish-like tail above the waves. She was the color of moonlight and she was as scintillating as the stars.

She looked toward the shore, where the dark rocks almost hid the fractured remains of a small wooden boat, dashed to pieces by the surging whitecaps. Another vanished thing.

And she looked up the slope, where the moon was just rising above the Museum of Vanished Things, where the new keeper would assume her duty.

Then she looked out upon the charcoal silhouettes of the other islands, and the vast, restless expanse of ocean that had waited unchanging for her return. In a flash of ghostly moonlit scales, she flipped into the air and dove, vanishing with a soundless splash into the cold, dark depths of history.