by John Everson
He wove between another stack of crates in a crouch. A smile creased his cheeks as he moved. He felt like a mouser. And who knows, maybe he was on the trail of a large rat. They grew big as cats on these boats when they found easy food and no predators. But they didn’t hum, Taffy thought. And damn it if that sound just now had sounded like a light, airy, feminine bit of absentminded musing.
But there were no women on this ship, so that was impossible. Or was it?
Maybe they had a stowaway?
The creaking came again, just on the other side of the square box that Taffy stalked behind. He nodded and decided to make his move. Springing into action, he twisted around the angle of the box, arms at the ready to grab and take on anyone or anything.
He saw the shadow before he knew what it was and his hands darted out to nab. But at the same time as he reached, a heavy rope flipped over his head and caught at his lower back, and with a snap, drew him right into the figure he’d grasped at.
“You!” that figure bellowed. The pressure on the rope suddenly released, and Taffy staggered backward, his hands tingling from their brush with the captain’s shirt.
“Stand up,” Buckley hissed, and Taffy did, like a soldier, full attention. “What are you doing here?”
Taffy felt caught and yet…he’d done nothing wrong. Stifling the urge to apologize, he countered, “I could ask the same thing, Captain. Exactly who did you think you were going to catch?”
Buckley scowled, thick gray eyebrows meeting above his nose like a bitter squall. “I asked you first,” he said. “But I’ll tell you anyway. I’m trying to find the scoundrel on this ship who’s hitting our cargo. I thought it was Nelson, and maybe it was…but he’s gone now, isn’t he? Or is he? Maybe he’s just hiding out down here, drinking us dry, while the rest of us work our arses off to bring what’s left of our cargo to ground.”
Taffy couldn’t help it. He laughed. “That’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “Nelson was—is, I hope—a good man. He wouldn’t dip into the hold. None of us are going to keep our places on this ship for very long if we don’t deliver the cargo we’re paid to sail.”
“Ah, but I caught him with a bottle already,” Buckley growled. “And where there’s a sip there’s a drink, if you catch my meanin’. Now tell me why I shouldn’t include you in my list of drunken suspects. What’re ya doin’ down here in the hold when you should be pitching the mainsails for dusk?”
“I heard something,” Taffy said. “Like there was someone down here.”
The captain suddenly looked interested. “Heard something, didja? What’d ya hear, boy?”
“I’ve been hearing things ever since we last docked at Delilah. The other men, they tell me it’s the old boards, but I don’t buy it. We’ve sailed together too long, Captain. And this ship don’t sing like that in the middle of the drink. Something’s changed since we docked at Delilah.”
“All that’s changed is my crew’s interest in the cargo,” Buckley growled, pointing a thumb at the stairs. “Get above deck.”
Taffy woke in the wee hours. The crew quarters sighed with the snores of hard-worked seamen and the unmistakably nasal wheeze of Jensen. The man never drew a breath that didn’t sound vaguely tortured. Taffy didn’t know how the man worked on a sailing ship with the rasp that plagued his every exertion, but the thick seamen seemed to muddle through. Taffy didn’t know what had awakened him, but he slipped his feet over the edge of the bunk and decided to take a walk. He could use to lose a little water over the side.
He stepped down the dark corridor that led from the crew quarters to the ship’s head. He took a lantern hung in the hallway to light the way as he closed the door to the small room and released his bladder into the hole that led straight to the sea.
After, as he stepped back into the corridor, he heard a noise and paused. Something quiet, urgent and soft broke the stillness of belowdecks at night. The sound grew slow and heated and desperate. It made him smile as his crotch grew tight. It drove him, made him move toward the bow of the ship. He passed the captain’s quarters and then let himself into the storeroom just beyond. The ship’s storeroom was a tight space just at the curve of the bow, not big enough to carry cargo, but big enough to store some small supplies for their voyage. This was the odd-shaped space where odds and ends and the crew’s supplies were stowed. The front area was piled high in ripped nets and fishing supplies. The crew didn’t do much fishing—despite their official charter—but they had to have the implements available to make their case, if they were ever questioned. Every now and then they had to pull in a catch and stow some evidence to support their claim that they were a fishing rig. If the authorities ever wanted to check the hold, they were dead. So they needed to keep some fish on hand for when they docked. Reg led them in a day of trawling the depths at the end of every trip before they’d head to port. He’d grown up a fishing brat, helping his pa drive a rig in ’Frisco for years. Now he helped them fill out a token catch each time they delivered rum to the ports of California. The catch was definitely more trouble than it was worth on the face of it, but it kept their record clean as a legitimate fishing rig.
Taffy held the lamp up over the shambling stacks of supplies and stinking nets and stepped awkwardly between the mess. The light flickered in long shadows off the curved boards of the hull, and Taffy shook his head at the empty air between him and the dark crevice where the two walls of the ship met and joined. There was nobody here.
“mmmm-hmmmmmmmm”
Something moaned. Or creaked. Or…sang.
“mmmm hmmmm mmmm hmmmmm,” it came again. The sound sent shivers down his body, and Taffy closed his eyes for a moment, imagining the porch of his momma’s home back in Georgia at the turn of the war. She’d brought mint juleps to the tables there, and served the men from the troops when they came home for relief in between skirmishes. She’d been a saint, he thought.
Taffy rounded the corner of a stack of old food crates, and caught his breath. There, spread-eagle on the wooden planks, lay the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair cascaded across her shoulder in raven curls that just about kissed the pink pucker at the top of the swell of her chest. Her breasts lolled wantonly, creamy full in the orange lamplight. Taffy thirsted for a taste of them with the first glimpse of her untethered nipples. Above the soft flow of her neck, her lips swelled thick and warm, heavy as a woman just rolled over from a bout of passion. Her hands said why. They reached between her legs with obvious intent, covering her sex, or perhaps exploiting it. She moaned and whimpered like a bitch in heat, and with every low and high exclamation of pleasure, Taffy felt his spine melt. He almost collapsed to the ground at her sound. Instead he moved closer and grinned, reaching to undo the front of his pants. If there was an opportunity to be had here in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean…he was not going to pass it up.
Taffy stepped closer, the wheeze in his chest loud, but the woman seemed oblivious to his approach, despite the sound and the fact that his lamplight flickered brightly over her naked torso. She kept her eyes closed and reached deeper with her arm, calling out with louder and louder gasps as she did so. Taffy knew she had to know he was there, yet she brazenly continued to enjoy herself despite that. Clearly she wanted him to enjoy her exploration of herself, and he grinned—because he did enjoy it. He did very much, indeed. His pants were loosened and slipping down the thick muscles of his thighs as he shifted step by careful step closer, and he recognized the sound he’d heard earlier that day from the far reaches of the ship’s hold. That musical, wavering, beautiful bit of noise that said “female” and “heaven” and “take me.”
He set the lamp down on the deck and crawled between her legs, unconscious of how brazen the act may have been. She had not said a word to him, or even acknowledged his presence, and he was going to mount her? Her song drew him to her, low and quiet and needful, she hummed and whimpered and moaned—a music that seemed to fill the hold with a passio
n so thick you could mire yourself in it. Her voice was amber, and he dove in without regret knowing that he’d be trapped.
As Taffy let his body touch hers, the woman’s eyes opened, and the golden-flecked brown pools drew him in like magnets. He leaned to kiss those pouty lips, and her hands slid from between her thighs to grip his back. She pulled him closer and drew his need to her own with an ease that he respected.
This woman, whoever she was, knew what she wanted, and he was happy to oblige. He slid into her, gasping at the warmth and comfort he found there, and took one thick nipple between his teeth as he drove his hips against hers.
That song, that amazing sound that was her, began to vibrate around him and he could almost see the colors change against the wood of the ship, from scintillating purples to deep, wanting crimson flares to yellow exclamations of passion. His eyes no longer saw the real world, but only registered its shades of passion.
When her fingernails dug into his back, he arched into her, and when her teeth bared and bit at his neck, he only moaned, stupidly assuming she thirsted for a taste of him.
What she thirsted for, unfortunately for Taffy, was his blood.
He only cried out once when she ripped out his throat and drank from the fountain of his heart. With her hands she grabbed him by the head and gave a fast, furious twist. The snap of Taffy’s neck echoed through the hold like a gunshot; he was not nearly as flexible as his name implied. Ligeia relaxed as the seaman’s life flowed into her like wine. She twisted and ground beneath him, leveraging his weight against her crotch as she drank and enjoyed the weight of him against her. He had died hard, and she used him. Soon she grew slick with his blood and for a time oblivious to the musty confines of the ship, smelling only the flower of his iron and the heat of her excitement.
After her song had spent, Ligeia rolled the heavy seaman over, his eyes white and dead in the flickering oil lamp he’d left behind, and she bent at his throat to slake another need. Hunger trumped all pleasure. With teeth that hid edges sharp as razors she fed on his flesh, closing her eyes to revel in the warm, salty taste of his muscle and blood.
“Hmmm,” she moaned, as she separated the head from his spine. Strangely, this one’s body didn’t seem to hold on to his head with quite the possessiveness that she was used to, and she enjoyed the jellylike warmth that she buried her mouth on as his face fell away.
The ropes slipped around her wrists with ease. She may have been otherworldly, but she too could get lost in her passions. And not for the first time, it was her undoing.
“So…” Captain Buckley grinned, a long, wicked smile in the orange shadows cast by Taffy’s lamp.
“You thought you would stay on my ship and take my crew did you?” The captain shook his head, and the woman’s eyes widened, her blood-spattered cheeks drawing up in full comprehension of her miscalculation.
“You could have taken to the sea,” he said, hog-tying her without regard for the long, sticky pink bits of flesh from Taffy’s corpse that still clung to her. “You could have escaped. But I knew—I knew…with this many men in one place, locked at sea…you wouldn’t leave. Not right away. Like rum to a drunk they were for you. You shoulda hedged your bets, my Siren,” Buckley said. His teeth gritted against one another like chalk against a rough board. “But I have to say, milady, I am getting tired of cleaning up after your messes. And I am beginning to run short on crew.”
Buckley left her tied tight and helpless in the corner while he slung Taffy’s body over his shoulder. For once in his existence, the crewman mimicked his namesake and hung like a warm, boneless blob over the captain’s shoulder. Buckley took the steps up to the deck as fast as he could, and after a quick look back and forth, virtually ran across the boards to the edge of the ship. He let Taffy’s body fall to the dark waves below without a second thought, and then grimaced as he ran a hand across the warm stain that covered his chest.
Another shirt ruined.
Since Ligeia had entered his life, Captain Buckley had disposed of a lot of shirts thanks to her feeding habits. Cursing silently, he slipped back down the stairs to retrieve his prize. He and she had some catching up to do after spending the past couple days apart. And he intended to catch up in the worst possible way. Captain Buckley considered the leather strap that had lain abandoned near the fishy stink of his bunk for the past two nights and smiled. His girl would be home again with him. She had a nasty side, that was for sure. But they suited each other in that. And after all, he’d paid for her, hadn’t he? He intended to get his money’s worth.
Oblivious to the music in her moans, the captain carried her naked form down the black shadow of his ship to the squalid confines of his cabin.
When he closed the door, he shut out the last of her hope. Tears streamed like the spray of the ocean down the captain’s bloodied back, but he didn’t care. He only positioned her lush body on his bed and began to strip off his own ruined clothes.
“Now,” he said. “Now you will earn your place on this ship.”
Chapter Nineteen
“I think maybe we should go away somewhere,” Sarah said.
Evan looked up from shoveling a mouthful of curried rice into his mouth and gave his wife a quizzical look. They’d been having a quiet dinner at Ocean Thaid, their favorite restaurant, and Sarah had been quiet up to now. She’d been picking at her pad prik instead of attacking it.
“I know you can’t take a lot of time off right now, but maybe if we took a short vacation, even just a long weekend…”
His first thought was not for Sarah, or about the difficulty of asking Darren for time off right now, when he was on the boss’s shit list and it was their busiest port time of the year. No, Evan’s first thought was that if they went away, he wouldn’t be able to spend his nights with Ligeia. Ass, he mentally kicked himself.
“We might be able to figure something out,” he said aloud. “Did you have someplace in mind?”
Sarah shrugged. “Not really. I’m just feeling so…I don’t know the word…trapped? Like, we’re running the same maze over and over every day, and there is no exit.”
“Very Sartre of you.”
“You’ve been hanging out with Bill too much.”
He grinned and took another bite as he thought a moment. “We could take a long weekend in San Francisco if you just want to get away,” he finally suggested. “Or maybe spend a couple days in Napa?”
Her face brightened. “Napa would be good. I want to get away from water.”
Evan felt his own smile diminish.
“We don’t have to,” Sarah said, recognizing that something about the idea didn’t set well with him. “But I thought you’d like to get away from the ocean a bit too. It’s like we’re on a bad cycle and can’t stop.”
Evan nodded. “You’re right. I’ll talk to Darren about it tomorrow. Maybe we can even go this weekend.”
Sarah suddenly started eating her noodles with visible relish. “Thanks,” she said. Her eyes sparkled in the warm low light. “I really need this.”
Their conversation turned to other things, but for the first time in weeks, it seemed they were actually having conversation, and Evan realized how much he’d been neglecting her. He really did need to get her out of Delilah, away from the constant reminders of Josh. Guilt at the reason he was reticent to go caught in his throat like a golf ball, but he fought it away.
Across the table, Sarah was still talking, and he forced himself away from thoughts of Ligeia stretched out naked in front of him on the beach to pay attention. It was a difficult thing to stop thinking of her, and last night she had not appeared when he’d gone to the beach. He’d stayed there for over an hour, the panic slowly growing that he might never see her again before he returned home, disconsolate, to spend a restless night next to his snoring wife.
“…they said it was the first wreck on those rocks in more than eight years,” Sarah said. She stopped, looking at him expectantly.
Evan shook his head in agreement
, wondering what the question was he’d missed. “Yeah, it’s been a long time since they had a point accident. Ships these days have plenty of technology to make sure they don’t rip up their hulls on reefs.”
“So what did these guys do wrong?”
“Asleep at the wheel,” he said. In his mind he saw Ligeia standing naked on the top of the point, breasts jutting out in the dark like beacons of lust. A human lighthouse of doom.
“I’d guess they were just distracted,” he concluded. “They just weren’t paying attention to where they were going.”
After dinner, Sarah took Evan’s hand and led him away from the car. The night was warm, a humid night breeze ruffled the short sleeve of her shirt as she walked. Evan felt a return of his love for her, and longed to hold her, just hold her there under the stars. As it turned out, that was her intent too. She led him off Center Street to the small park in the middle of town. A bronze statue of a fishing boat and Delilah’s first founding captain dominated the small square, and Sarah pulled Evan under the canopy of a tree and put her arms around his neck.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.
He frowned. “I’ve been here.”
“Not really,” she said. “This last week or two…it’s like you’ve been somewhere else half the time. And honestly…we both have been gone for a long time.”
He couldn’t disagree with that, and didn’t have to, as Sarah kissed him. She pressed against him suggestively, and then with a wink offered, “Take me home?”
The answering machine light was blinking red when they walked back into the kitchen. Evan started across the dark floor to answer it, but Sarah grabbed his hand.
“It’ll wait,” she whispered, turning him to face her. Then she pulled her shirt over her head and smiled. “I won’t.”