by John Everson
The purpling bruises on the man’s naked torso and thighs didn’t resemble the wide snout of a shark’s maw in any way. They looked to be just about the perfect size to have been created by a human mouth. Bill didn’t know of any other animal that left tooth marks like that. He still woke some nights with the sight of that mangled man in his mind. For a while, after the “Death Storm,” the Siren’s tale had been openly discussed in Delilah. The stories that went back to crazed sailors describing her with their dying breath were all rehashed. But, in the end, the stories died down as the townsfolk focused on the more immediate tasks of burying the dead and rebuilding their homes. Sometimes she was whispered about on the grammar school playgrounds, or in the backyards of Cub Scout leaders during den meetings. But those who believed didn’t risk the ridicule of those who came to Delilah after 1984, and the storm of the bodies. They kept that horrible superstition to themselves, stayed away from the beach at night and nodded to themselves when they read stories in the newspaper of another “missing person.”
When Bill had been a kid, the missing persons had all come home. And they hadn’t been pretty.
The ocean floor dropped off, and Bill suddenly hung in watery space midway between the blurry surface and the dark ground. The shadows lengthened as he followed the slope and he realized that the drop-off also marked the edge of the far end of the point. He was out in truly open water.
Bill swam easily through the depths, enjoying the feeling of effortless motion. Scuba diving was a lot like free fall, he thought. You entered another world entirely, and gravity seemed to slip away.
After a few minutes, he turned back. The ocean floor seemed a never-ending field of rock and occasional sea frond. He decided to use the drop-off shelf as a reference; he’d swim out a couple hundred yards, swim back, move to his left a few yards and repeat the process. Not knowing what he was looking for, he wanted to crisscross the area well.
The second time he swam out, he saw nothing of interest besides occasional nosy, colorful fish. One fist-size puffer fish followed him for a long time, its almost-human blue eyes staring at him unblinking.
The third time he swam out, he began to tire of the exercise. Evan was right; this really was a fool’s errand. Even if there was a Siren, what made him think he could find her lair? What made him think he really wanted to? The image of the purpling skin of the dead naked man he’d found on the beach as a child came to mind and a shiver convulsed his spine.
He did not want to wash back ashore looking like that.
Bill was about ready to call it a day when he saw the shadow beneath him. The ocean floor had been slipping by as a murky blur of rock and plant life, with the occasional dart of fish…but all of a sudden the landscape turned dark. A black maw in the earth.
Bill kicked and turned around, circling the dark. Then he began to swim down, into the shadow. As he drew closer, he could make out the outline of irregular, jutting shapes. There were rocks and plants masking his view, but as he touched the bottom and ran a hand along one twisted piece of timber, the object of his examination suddenly took clear shape.
He had found one of the wrecks of Delilah’s Hidden Bay. His hand touched the splintered, overgrown remains of the bow, while the open blackness that had drawn his attention was actually a gaping hole in the ship’s midsection. It had sunk and settled sideways, with its breach to the sky. The wreck looked older than the ocean itself; Bill would never have been able to tell it was a ship if he hadn’t put his hand on a piece of its timber. The ocean floor had closed in around it, digesting it a foot at a time, until every broken plank had been steadily overgrown and changed shape in a coating of plants and rock, silt and shells.
If Bill had been on land, he’d have whistled. Instead, he kicked his feet back off the silt and swam along the hidden lines of the wreck, nodding to himself as he saw where it emerged from the mud of the seafloor and where the seafloor grew around it.
He ducked under an overhanging rock—the last finger of the point that extended deep below the surface—and began to swim toward the hole in the ancient ship’s hull. He couldn’t tell what kind of boat it had once been, but it surely wasn’t a pleasure ship. Its hull was too broad, the curve of its mostly hidden deck too long. Maybe the finger of rock he’d just passed had been the death of this boat; a treacherous underwater knife to the heart. A ship in a storm that buffeted up against that?
Bill aimed straight for the center of the wide black hole in the boat, and was halfway through when something slipped through his legs. He felt the tickle before he saw the cause; just a brief, seductive brush against the inside of his wet suit. He flipped around in the water and saw the cause.
The water around him filled with the shimmer of pink and purple translucent shapes. They hung and shifted around his body like a cloud.
A cloud of jellyfish. Big-ass jellyfish. One brushed across his head and then another trailed tentacles across his throat.
“Shit,” Bill mouthed. He gently moved his arms back and then swooshed them forward, trying to push his body slowly through the water without angering the cloud. They looked beautiful—ghostly explosions with arms that hung like alien wraiths in the water.
All you needed was a bunch of jellyfish stings and you could kiss that next cheeseburger at Cheeseburger Central good-bye. Good-bye for good. A school of large, poisonous jellyfish was death to a diver. Deceptive, slow-moving death.
Bill moved his flippers slowly, carefully, trying not to kick the school up and along with him. A globe of pinkish flesh slid around the side of his breathing mask, and Bill stopped breathing for that moment, eyes gone wide and scared.
He wasn’t afraid of a jellyfish. He was afraid of an army of jellyfish.
Carefully he kicked out his feet, and the black hole of the wreck drew away to become nothing but a shadow near the ocean’s floor again.
A handful of the poisonous school followed the swirl of his feet, but once he’d drawn a few yards away Bill kicked out in earnest, and in seconds had left all of the creatures far behind. That’d be rich, he thought. Man found dead of jellyfish stings; priceless wreck discovered nearby.
Bill kicked his legs harder, aiming at the shore where he knew Evan waited. There were very few things he’d found that were worth risking your safety for.
Irrefutable proof of the legend of a deadly sea creature who chewed men up for fun was not one of them.
Chapter Fifteen
June 4, 1887
It was hard to be a man and not love women. But it was harder to be a man and live with a woman. Captain James Buckley III had found the solution.
Love a woman. Live with a woman. But keep her bound and gagged until her services were needed. No harm. No haranguing.
Some would have called him cruel. A horrible pig of a man.
Buckley just called himself expedient.
He grinned at the thought and patted his intellect on the back—expediency is the heart of brevity and brevity is the soul of wit—and fumbled his key into the lock of his quarters. A captain’s prerogative should always include a nooner, he thought. Or, in this case, a midafternooner.
Burying Rogers, the cook, last night had given him an appetite for the cause, he thought. He would have been too ashamed to have admitted to the wooden erection he had grown as they lifted the bag of body parts and swung it over the side of the ship to sink in the depths. But admit it or not, there it was. The remains of Rogers’s body had excited him in a brutally sexual way. Buckley knew who had dined on the cook’s softest flesh. He knew because some of that flesh was still here, in his cabin. And he was responsible for having thrown the other pieces overboard, unfortunately just hours before they ended up back on the ship in its nets. He wasn’t excited by the bag of body parts, but any thought related to her excited him.
And while she chewed other men to the core, she took him TO her core. In a way no other woman ever had. She was amazing—an animal. The key to being a man was acting like one, Buckley thought. You h
ad to show the woman who was boss. Even if that meant a gag and chains. And from those tiny, frantic mewling sounds she made every time he climbed into his fish-stinkin’ bunk with her, she enjoyed it, he figured.
Buckley entered the cabin and carefully shut the door behind him. Sometimes she got angry when he woke her from a dream. But as he stepped into his cabin, some sixth sense told him that she wasn’t dreaming. Something was wrong. Used to the small space in the dark, he stepped in four strides to the bulkhead window and drew the curtain there. The room filled with weak gray light, and Buckley swore.
The bed he shared with her was empty. The gag lay abandoned on the stained and stinking sheets. The ropes that had bound her hand and foot this morning were unraveled.
Where she had gone was a mystery, though there were only so many places you could hide on a ship drifting at sea. The reason for her freedom was clear enough though.
On the floor, next to the well-gnawed thigh of Rogers, lay the openmouthed face of “Three Hands” Nelson. The thief looked as if he’d been surprised at the end, and Buckley’s first thought was good riddance.
But now Nelson’s surprise could be the captain’s undoing. Damnitall, Buckley complained. Another deckhand gone—that was surely going to cause some talk among the men. More importantly, how the hell was he going to recapture the damned creature and get her back in his bed where she belonged? Some men would have suggested a tall glass of bourbon and some sweet talk to catch a woman, but Buckley was of a different stripe. And this woman wasn’t going to come back quietly. He knew that for damn certain.
He dug into a drawer in the bureau near his bunk and tossed a series of ropes and flogs and clips and such over his shoulder, until he found the tool he’d been looking for. He uncoiled the long, wound rope of leather and ran it across his palm with a satisfied grin. Then, bullwhip in his hand, Captain Buckley stepped back onto the deck outside of the captain’s quarters and headed toward the storeroom.
If you wanted to catch a clown, look in the spotlight. If you wanted to catch a Siren, look in the dark recesses near the sea. The captain lit a candle and walked into the ship’s hold, stacked with crates and crates of rum. The room had an almost claustrophobic feel—from floor to ceiling, wooden boxes filled the womb of the Lady Luck, and Buckley was always surprised at just how much liquor they managed to squeeze into his hold before he left Mexico and pulled out the fishing nets to mask his true trade from the port authorities.
He stepped into the deep shadows of the crates and whistled. He tried to hum a tune his mother had once sung to him as a child. He’d found it soothing, though it hadn’t ever quite been up to par for those on the outside of the relationship. They said she couldn’t carry a tune. But he’d wanted his momma to know that what she did mattered. In the end, it didn’t really matter what his momma had sung to him. It all sounded pretty much the same to Buckley.
Some said he was tone-deaf, but he just figured that he really didn’t appreciate music. That’s why he’d found it such a beautiful irony when just a few weeks before, the Greek man had led him to the hidden room that he’d stashed the singing woman in. Supposedly the woman had been taken in the middle of the night from where she wandered along Delilah’s beach and would never be missed.
“Don’t take that gag off, whatever you do,” the wizened dark-skinned man had insisted. “The sound…it is death to a mortal man. Mark my words.”
Buckley had marked them, but not surprisingly, hadn’t listened. On the other hand, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He had released the bonds on the beautiful woman’s mouth and instead of hearing the litany of verbal abuse he was used to from a female, he’d instead heard a long, tremulous ululation that, he supposed, seemed like the thing that others called music.
For him, it was only noise. A hair-raising exercise in interruption that prevented him from reaching the reason he’d bought the woman from the Greek in the first place. When she sang, he found he couldn’t complete the deed with her. His exertions simply stretched out in a frustrating infinity until he grew tired of the effort. Certainly her song had an impact on his manhood, but really, enough was enough. He quickly found out about the impact her song had on others though. On the first night of her new captivity he’d slept with her in a hotel in Delilah before they’d broken port, and a man had smashed down the door in the midst of Buckley’s rutting. The captain had leaped for his gun, but he quickly saw that the man meant no harm—his eyes looked vacant and he only stood there, rapt at the hotel bed while she sang.
In moments, her mouth had been on the poor fool’s neck, and blood drenched both the bed and voluptuous body Captain Buckley had so recently been enjoying. He watched with shock and awe as she chewed out the man’s throat. There was nothing he appreciated more than the danger of savagery—Buckley had always longed to be a big-game hunter. Instead, he used his lust for blood as a means to keep a group of ruffians to work.
He tied a leather strap around her head and made sure it fully covered her mouth as soon as he got her back to the ship and stripped off the robes they had draped her in.
She needn’t sing to him, or play coquette behind the pretense of civilized clothes. She was brought to his ship with only one purpose in mind. Robes would only slow that purpose.
But her insistence at singing caused the captain to ultimately keep her mouth in check. Aside from its impact on slowing the arrival of his orgasms, he couldn’t have the men wondering who was in the captain’s cabin besides the captain. The answer of “a woman” would have torn the ship apart. Nor could he afford for them to be smitten with the strangely euphoric effect her song seemed to have on other men.
And so she remained gagged and tied to his bed for hours on end until he returned to release her.
But, apparently, someone else had gotten wind that she was there and decided to release her without the captain’s orders.
Buckley thought of the remains of Nelson and laughed.
Some men could handle their women. And some couldn’t.
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” Buckley growled, threading his way among the crates of liquor. In his hand, the whip itched to be swung.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he said again.
Buckley laughed and licked his lips. He loved nothing more than the chase. And when you lived on a ship in the ocean, there were only so many places the prey could hide.
Chapter Sixteen
It was more than sex, Evan told himself as he walked down the beach. He stifled a yawn; tonight he’d tucked Sarah in bed before he took his walk, so it was already past 10:30. She had an early morning meeting and had wanted to turn in by ten. He had toyed with the idea of not walking the beach tonight but…he couldn’t stay in his family room. On the couch trying to watch the ten o’clock news, he’d just kept fidgeting.
Evan couldn’t say he loved her; he’d hardly spoken to her, despite the intense animal sex they’d had on the beach twice. Yet, when he thought of Ligeia, Evan’s whole body warmed. He needed to be with her, with every cell in his body. After arguing with himself for fifteen minutes, he finally shut off the TV, slipped on his sandals and slipped out the sliding glass doors off the kitchen.
The surf was gentle and quiet tonight, and Evan didn’t dally on his way to the point; he walked fast and with purpose; no stone skipping.
When he reached the place where he’d awoken naked at three A.M. just a couple nights before, he stopped and looked out at the dark horizon. Water stretched as far as the eye could see, merging into the black of the nighttime sky. The point blotted out the stars to his left like a hole in the world.
“Ligeia?” Evan said softly. His voice barely seemed to carry past his lips. He hoped that she would come tonight. Last night, after Bill’s dive, he had not walked down here. While he told himself that Bill’s was a fool’s errand, and Ligeia was just some exotic singer living down off the beach somewhere nearby, he had to admit that he was starting to be sucked into Bill’s irrational explanation for the power of her mu
sic. And her affinity for water. Did he really believe that the woman he came here to meet lived at the bottom of the ocean?
Evan laughed at his own internal question. Uh, no. But then why had he been worried that Bill’s dive near the point would somehow make her angry at him?
“Ligeia?” he called again, a little louder.
Of course, he thought to himself, if he didn’t believe there was something more than human about her, why did he just assume she would show up whenever he decided to walk the beach? As if she were some kind of genie he could invoke by his mere presence?
He frowned, suddenly fearful that maybe she wouldn’t be here tonight. After all, it was later than the past couple times he’d found her, and he hadn’t come at all last night. Bill had come to their house for dinner, and then the three of them had gone down to O’Flaherty’s for a couple hours. They had taken over the lone ratty pool table in the back of the bar and played the night away, laughing and enjoying the company in a way they rarely did anymore. Sarah hadn’t gotten drunk either—her eyes still sparkled with humor, not liquor, on the walk home. For once, she had been the one to have to wake Evan in the morning; he’d been groggy half the day.
“I missed you,” a voice whispered in his ear.