Siren

by John Everson

He looked up again and there were a dozen gulls now swirling around his house; one of them swooped down at his face. It came so close a feather brushed his cheek as it passed.

  “Whoa!” Evan gasped, ducking as the bird swooshed by. “What the hell!”

  Above his head, the sky suddenly darkened, as scores more gulls joined the flock. The quiet of the morning suddenly turned into a cacophony of screeches and caws, as one by one the cloud of birds grew, and more and more of them peeled off the main flock and dipped in the air to strafe Evan’s lawn. He ducked and jumped a dozen times as the birds flew around his yard, bombing his head, screeching as if their babies were being attacked.

  “Damn,” Evan said. He’d never seen the gulls like this. They normally didn’t bother to come in from the beach much, other than for a solo flyby while looking for some easy lunch. He had never seen them circle the subdivision like a flock of vultures that had spotted a kill.

  He began to edge away from the house, brandishing the shovel, intending to cart the bird body back to the compost quickly, so that he could get back into the house before too many more birds arrived.

  But it was too late.

  “Eeee-ahhh!” shouted one gray monster as it dove in the air straight for his face. Evan ducked, but it didn’t matter; the bird landed on his head, grasping at his hair with clawlike feet as its beak pecked hard at the soft flesh of his forehead.

  “What the fuck!” Evan screamed, and dropped the shovel to swat at the bird. It took off from his head in an explosion of feathers, but then two more gulls dropped from the sky and landed on his shoulders, bending in to peck at his neck almost right away. He shook them off, but the air around him was alive with gulls, shrieking and cawing like mad, and Evan felt the pinch of claws on his head and neck and back, and he didn’t stand still anymore. He turned and ran for the house.

  Something jabbed him in the back of the neck and he stumbled at the pain, flipping his arms back and flailing at the air, trying to fend them off. Another dart of pain caught him in the neck, and then something reached around and pecked hard at his cheek, just missing his eye.

  “No no no!” Evan yelled, turning around in a violent circle and spraying his hands out like a manic ninja, catching one after another heavy feathered body with the back of his hands. Beaks and claws ripped at his skin; it felt like he’d pulled his arms through a rosebush. The birds bounced off of him and pecked at his hands, and then one was in his face, cold claws grabbing at his lips and teeth for purchase.

  Evan literally punched that one midair and felt its claw rip open the inside of his gum as it tried to hold to him before falling away.

  “No!” he screamed again and regained his balance from his violent pirouette. He ran again for the door to his house, and quickly ripped it open and flung himself inside. Behind him, thud after thud after thud hit the door.

  “Eee-ahhh!!!!” the air outside screamed.

  Evan looked up to see a half dozen gulls plaster themselves against the glass, beady black eyes all staring in at him for just a second, as their bodies pounded against the transparent surface, molded to it briefly, and then fell off to pile on the ground outside. He could see wings beating feebly against the ground from the felled animals, and could hear the scrabbling of nails against concrete.

  The birds cried and wailed outside, and still more of them came, streaming out of the sky like avian kamikazes. They pounded against the door, one after the next. Each head smacked against the glass with a finality that made Evan’s skin crawl, and soon he could see trails of yellowish liquid on the window of the door, and the occasional dots of impact blood.

  “What the freakin’ hell,” he breathed, lying back on his arms on the floor, feet to the door. He could feel the warmth of blood dripping down his neck and back from where the birds had pecked him, but he didn’t pay attention. Outside, the air continued to flutter with gray feathers and shrieks of frustration as the birds pounded one and three and five at a time against his door.

  He lay there on the floor and waited, wondering if the glass would shatter and the birds would finally plow through the opening and reach him. He could have shut the wooden door, but something made him watch; he wanted to know when the birds gave up. They had to stop eventually, right?

  The crashes and thuds against the door did finally start to slow, and soon, he realized it had been a couple minutes since the last bird committed suicide against his front door. Groaning at the pinchlike wounds all over his head and arms, Evan stood and cautiously stepped toward the door. He flinched when the floor creaked as he stepped close. His heart beat faster, and he kept expecting a smack to crack against the glass right in front of him. But as he surveyed the piles of bloody feathers that littered his stoop like the remains of a serial killer pillow fight, he began to think that maybe, this attack anyway, was over. Nothing moved on his front lawn. Where his neighbors had been through all of that, he didn’t know…but nobody was outside down the street as far as he could see.

  Evan pushed open the door; it resisted at first from the weight of dead gull bodies piled against it.

  Once outside, he peered beyond the frame of the house into the sky, looking hard in all directions for some indication that there was more of a flock coming.

  The horizon was gray and roiling with quietly ominous clouds…but there appeared to be no more flocks of murderous birds ready to break free of the sky.

  He began to count the bird bodies lying all around his front door, but lost track at thirty. “That’s just not right,” he mumbled to himself, and then went to get a garbage can. He had originally come out here because he didn’t want Sarah to see one dead bird on her lawn. He couldn’t let her get a glimpse of this. It was almost biblical.

  Evan piled all the birds into the can, and then dug a deep hole next to the compost pile. He didn’t want to risk hitting the fish with the spade and this load was going to take some space to bury. The sweat was pouring down his back and chest by the time he was satisfied that he’d cleared enough dirt. He poured the birds from the can into the hole and tamped down the dirt on top of them. Then he returned the can to the garage and went inside to clean up.

  He showered for the second time that morning, as much to clean all of the scratches he’d incurred as to get rid of the dirt—and the feeling of dirt. He felt violated, he realized, as he scrubbed shampoo into his hair with extra vigor.

  He toweled off in front of the mirror and leaned in to look hard at his face. None of the scratches looked too bad, but he got out some antibiotic cream and rubbed it on all of them. No sense in risking an infection. As he applied the cream, he looked into his own eyes. They were brown and sad, and a little distant. Far away.

  “Ass,” he told his reflection, watching the bristles of his unshaved beard, now well peppered with gray, move across his cheek as he spoke. “You brought this on yourself.”

  Then he laughed at his reflection and threw the towel in the hamper. “So what?” he asked the bathroom mirror. “Are you suggesting that she can control the birds? What kind of woman do you believe she is?”

  When he didn’t answer himself, the house seemed suddenly disturbingly quiet. He could hear the hum of the refrigerator from down the hall, and the tick of a clock in the front room. The air hung expectant.

  “What kind of woman is she?” he asked the empty house more quietly.

  Shaking his head, he pulled on a fresh pair of pants and shirt and went back into Josh’s room. Then he attacked his mission with renewed intensity, piling all of the trinkets and photos and pictures into boxes and marking them TROPHIES, MOVIES, PICTURES and more in black marker on the side before sealing the tops with packing tape.

  In an hour, he had cleared the majority of the room, down to the furniture. Then he got a larger plastic bin he’d been saving in the garage, and began emptying the drawers. He pulled out Josh’s top drawer of T-shirts and pressed his face to them, trying to catch just one last whiff of the warm, huggable scent that had once meant the happines
s of his son in his life.

  But now, the clothes just smelled musty. He stifled a sneeze and dropped the pile into the bin, following it with jeans and socks. When it was full, he pressed down the lid until it clicked.

  “I’ll miss you, buddy,” he whispered, and then rolled it to rest beneath the attic stairs in the hall. Then he got another plastic bin, and brought it into the center of the room before opening the closet doors.

  He didn’t stop packing until the room was empty of everything but a dresser, desk and stripped bed.

  When he couldn’t find anything else to box up, he sat on the bed and took in a long, hitching breath. He stared at the faint mark from the bird on the window, and the horror of the morning rushed back at him; he’d been pushing so hard at packing the room that he’d all but for gotten about the birds. He realized that he hadn’t slowed down in close to three hours. His shirt was soaked, but when he reached up to wipe his eyes, he realized that it wasn’t just from sweat. His face was sopping wet too. He’d been crying the whole time.

  Chapter Thirty

  O’Flaherty’s buzzed with laughter, music and the clink of glasses lifting and resetting on the bar and dozen wooden tables. Saturday night spelled celebration in any town, and when you were the town’s main watering hole, well…a full house was nearly always a given.

  Evan’s back and legs complained from all the bending and crouching and lifting he’d done throughout the day; never mind the impromptu war of the gulls and subsequent military burial of bird carcasses. Between packing and digging, he’d put in a week’s worth of physical labor compared to his normal activity quotient.

  Sarah had come home after lunch, laden with packages from the Wal-Mart and Ace Hardware stores. “If I couldn’t help with the packing,” she’d explained, “I figured I could be focused on the redecorating. You didn’t have anything in mind, did you?”

  When Evan had shrugged, she’d smiled. “Good. Because I found this wallpaper runner and these drapes at Wal-Mart that I thought would be perfect if we wanted to go with more of a plum theme…”

  She’d proceeded to empty her numerous plastic bags of everything from decorative wall plates to paint samples on the bare mattress. By the time she was done, Evan felt more exhausted just from thinking about the coming painting and redecorating than he had from the actual process of boxing.

  At the end of the afternoon, Sarah had plans to meet her friend Melanie for dinner, but offered to cook Evan something first. He declined, opting to call Bill first to see if he wanted to do something. And not surprisingly, Bill had said to meet at the bar. By six o’clock, Evan and Sarah were kissing each other good-bye in the garage and heading in separate directions. “I should be home by ten,” Sarah promised, and Evan said the same. If they’d had any inkling of how the night would truly go, they would have kissed a lot longer.

  “Hey, Fish Lover!” Bill called from a booth at the back of O’Flaherty’s. Evan saw him through the crowded bar instantly; his friend wore a faded, ripped green flannel shirt that would have embarrassed a lumberjack. The thick wave of brown beard that he’d adopted this past winter only exaggerated the effect.

  “You applying for a job with a Pearl Jam tribute band?” Evan poked.

  “What, this?” Bill grinned, running one hand down his green- and brown-checked sleeve and rolling his eyes in mock enjoyment. “I just want to be in style, you know?”

  “Well, news to the clueless,” Evan offered. “That shirt probably wasn’t in style when it was new, and it sure as hell isn’t now.”

  Bill held up a hand, as if to motion “stop.”

  “You’re just jealous of my hot duds. I know it. I don’t blame you.” Bill nodded as if he knew the secrets of the underworld. “But it’s okay. I’ll just slip this off so that you’re not seeing the green devil all night.”

  Underneath Bill’s flannel was a T-shirt that unbelievably was in worse shape than the overshirt. This one had once been white, with a cartoon bunny adorning its chest. The rabbit held out a hand as if to shake, while the other mitt had buried a foot-long cleaver in its own chest. Beneath it, a slogan read LET’S JUST CUT TO THE CHASE.

  The shirt looked as if it had been used as a dust rag; blotchy stains marred it in a dozen places and a couple holes showed the hair of Bill’s shoulders poking through.

  “Jeez, man, do we need to take up a collection?” Evan asked.

  “Laundry weekend,” Bill explained. “Now you know why I was wearing the flannel.”

  Evan nodded. “Yeah, you can put it back on.”

  “Too late,” Bill said. “It’s getting warm in here.”

  “That’s just the embarrassment talking,” Evan suggested.

  At that point, a waitress turned up. “What can I get you guys?” she asked, bouncing from one foot to the other while smiling in a way that could only be described as plastic. Evan supposed the motion was meant to make her look perky, but instead, the resulting gentle vibration of her breasts against a too-tight black T-shirt just made it look like she had to go to the bathroom.

  “Red Hook,” Evan ordered, while Bill took a Hacker-Pschorr.

  “Leave it to you to drink a haughty beer while looking like a damn bum,” Evan laughed.

  “I’m a man of contradictions,” Bill answered. “Speaking of which, have you discovered any more fish on your porch?”

  Evan shook his head. “No, but I got a nice crop of rabid seagulls today.”

  Bill raised one eyebrow, and Evan quickly related the day’s events. By the time he was done, the waitress had returned with their beers, and Evan lifted his and took a long drink. Telling the story had reawakened the horror of the morning, and his skin felt itchy with the touch of a dozen bird feet and claws.

  Bill took a long swig of his fuzzy golden wheat beer before commenting on Evan’s gull story. But when he did, he was unsubtle and to the point.

  “Dude, you’re fucked.”

  “You have a way with words.”

  Bill shook his head and reached down into a knapsack he’d tossed on the booth bench beside him. He produced a book with three pink page markers sticking out of its pages. The cover showed a picture of an ancient Greek statue with wings and long, wicked-looking teeth. Above the art it read MYTHS & MURDERERS: A HISTORY OF DEADLY TALES.

  “After you told me about the fish the other day, I went and checked this out of the library. I know you have refused to believe anything I’ve told you about the Siren, so I thought maybe if you saw some of this, you might finally consider the possibility that you don’t actually know everything about everything in the world.”

  “And this is going to convince me…how?” Evan asked.

  Bill flipped to the first marked section of the book and began to read. “‘The Sirens were first noted in early Greek culture as three sisters who took the form of birds. These creatures sang with the sweetest song, but any man who found himself lured by their melodies soon found himself dead at their vicious hands…or more exactly, beaks. The Sirens pecked their victims to death, all the while still singing a song described as so intoxicating, nothing but the absolute pain of death could make the victims take notice of their peril. And by the time death throes had set in, it generally was too late for the victim to do anything to save him or herself.’”

  Evan nodded when Bill finished, and took a swig of his beer. Then he asked, “And that would convince me that Ligeia is in fact a mythological Siren…how? As I think I’ve explained to you, she’s a pretty sexy woman, and I’ve seen every inch of her…she isn’t sporting any feathers. She doesn’t have bird claws. She’s not hiding any vestigial wings; believe me, I would have noticed, no matter how sweet her song.”

  Bill held up a hand. “Indulge me,” he said. “The plot thickens.

  “‘Over the years, the description of the Sirens changed. While originally depicted as three sisters whose bodies were largely avian, over time the images of the Sirens changed to reflect their affinity with fish. In some accounts, the Sirens
took on all of the attributes of the attractive human female. They were described as maidens of exceptional lush beauty, with long, flowing hair, breasts that dripped with fertility and hips that drove men to the verge of insanity. Below the waist, they changed, sometimes displaying the thick black scales of bird feet and other times merging their legs into a single, sinuous fin of flesh capped with blue-green scales—much like the mermaid.’”

  “Again,” Evan interrupted. “She is certainly attractive, but she doesn’t have scales or bird feet.”

  Bill ignored him and read on. “‘Still later accounts eschew the animal aspects of the Siren altogether, simply describing them as three beautiful women who lived on the rocks at the darkest corners of a bay, calling out to weakhearted fishermen in the night and luring them and their crews to their deaths. Their attraction stemmed from their pure, unblemished beauty, and the song that they sang almost unceasingly through everything that they did. The call of the Siren is said to be one that can overcome any denial. Mortal men are doomed to answer the Siren’s call, and her call can only mean one thing for a mortal man: death. In the classic text of Homer, Jason steered his ship through the perilous pass occupied by the Sirens by having his ears packed with cotton so that he could not heed the song, and still he had himself tied to the mast until the danger was passed.’”

  “Okay.” Evan shrugged. “So the myth of the Siren went from birdbrained sisters to rock-dwelling fish women to just really good, sexy singing vixens. I still don’t see…”

  Bill flipped to his next bookmark and read some more, without comment.

  “‘While the depictions of the Siren have changed through the years, one constant has not. The Siren exists for one purpose; to bring about the destruction of man through his ultimate weakness—sexual desire. Her lure has always been song—the pure, sweet, seductive melody that pretends innocence yet, at its core, is nothing more than a heart trap. And her body, whether sometimes cloaked in animal scales and feathers, or simple, perfect woman flesh, is always described as desirable. Her song demands the attention of the man, while her body demands his lust. In the end, she ensnares him past the point of reason, and he is lost. And then her true purpose is displayed. For the Siren sings not to bring a man’s soul to ruin—she doesn’t care about such invisible twists of morality. Rather, she sings to bring his body to her for sustenance. The Siren is carnivorous, and her wiles only a means to dinner. Like the black widow spider, the Siren attracts men for the sole purpose of feeding. One famous picture shows the three Sirens lying in repose amid the carcasses of a number of dead bodies, as if sated by the flesh of the nearby dead.’”