Siren

by John Everson

  His friend’s face blanched. “Turn off your car and come inside,” Bill directed. “I’ll make coffee. I want to hear the whole story before we do anything.”

  “Not we,” Evan said. “She’s too dangerous, and this is all my fault. My problem. I have to take care of it.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Friends don’t let friends scuba dive after deadly Sirens alone. If I loan you my equipment, I’m going with you.”

  Evan started to argue but then thought better of it. One problem at a time. He retrieved his car keys and then let himself into the house.

  Bill ground the beans and poured the water into the coffeemaker before returning to sit across from Evan, who nervously moved the pepper shaker around and around the salt in a slow orbit. After the fifth scraping, clinking turn, Bill put his hand on the shakers to still them.

  “Start at the beginning.”

  Evan stared up at the ceiling and took a breath. When he met Bill’s gaze again, he talked fast, his voice a monotone. “She was waiting for me in the house last night. I thought Sarah was still out and I was alone, but then she came out of the bathroom. She was still wet. I think she killed Sarah and then just laid there in the bath, waiting for me to come home.”

  “The bed would have been a more traditional choice,” Bill observed.

  “She apparently had been waiting there before,” Evan said. “The sheets were wet and there were scales all over them. I had just gotten into bed and found that out when she came for me.”

  “Scales?” Bill asked. “What, like fish scales? Did she make some sushi there or something?”

  “The scales were hers,” Evan said. “Tonight she let me see her true form.”

  Bill’s eyes widened. “Then…she really is the Siren?”

  “Haven’t you been trying to tell me that all along?” Evan’s laugh was bitter. “I’m the one who wouldn’t believe you.”

  Bill took a slurp of his coffee. He kept nodding to himself, processing it all. Finally, he said, “Let’s go downstairs. I’ve got an extra suit you can use, but I need to show you how.”

  A couple hours and many dials, tubes and explanations later, Bill and Evan climbed back up the stairs to the kitchen. Evan sank into a chair, and ran his hand through hair rank with sweat and saltwater. He needed a shower. And sleep.

  “Here, drink this,” Bill said, turning from the fridge with an Anchor Steam in his hand.

  Evan laughed. “It’s like seven o’clock in the morning!”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got the whole day to kill.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve showed me everything you can with the equipment. We can pack it up and go.”

  “Evan—Sarah is dead.”

  Evan blinked at the sting of that sentence. It felt as if Bill had slapped him.

  His friend nodded.

  “Then what you want to do is retrieve a body. How do you expect to explain to the police that you went scuba diving after a lifetime of being petrified of the water, AND that you just happened to learn to scuba dive on the same day that you dredged up your wife’s recently murdered body from the ocean?”

  “But we can’t just leave her…”

  “We’re not going to leave her. But we can’t go walking out of the ocean with her body in broad daylight either. This has to be played right. We’ll get Sarah. We’ll get your revenge. But not during the day.”

  Bill took a long swig of his own beer, and then belched.

  “Tonight.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  June 11, 1887, 12:51 A.M.

  Captain Buckley couldn’t wait anymore. He didn’t know what the hell his crew was up to down there, but apparently none of them were ever going to return to relieve him. He spit a wad of anger on the deck and shook his head in disgust. Damn louts. The rain was coming down sideways in the dark, and no slicker was going to keep out its cold fingers. His spine trembled with the icy cold and his hands looked frozen in their white-fisted hold on the wheel. The discomfort was made worse because it was something of a pointless hold. With the sails down and the storm in full swing, there wasn’t much steering a wheelman was going to be able to do anyway; he simply tried to keep the ship moving with the waves instead of against the troughs. But for a few minutes, it wouldn’t really matter if anyone was at the wheel.

  Buckley rescued a twine of rope from the wheelhouse, wound one end of it around a spoke of the wheel and lashed the steering wheel to a beam. He grasped the wheel and tried to push it up and down; the thing barely budged. Nodding at the job, he stepped across the slick deck to the shaft leading down to the crew’s quarters and holds. Time to get some explanations.

  Belowdecks was quiet; or as quiet as could be with a storm raging above. Everything creaked and moaned. Buckley pulled the leather cape over his head and dropped its sodden weight to the floor. He slicked back his hair, pressing the excess water out with his hands to drip to the deck. His hair drooped then in heavy black ringlets around his neck, and he shook them involuntarily with a shiver. It was, without a doubt, a miserable night.

  Buckley stepped into the galley, and noted the remains of dinner still present on the tables. Not only were the damn fools cowards, they’d turned into slobs! He considered the proper punishment to exact for leaving the galley in disarray as he walked back toward the crew quarters. He reached his cabin first though, and paused. He’d be more effective in doling out a tongue-lashing if he weren’t shivering in the process. Plus, part of the reason he’d wanted to come down was to reassure Ligeia.

  Buckley let himself into his cabin, and after shutting the door to the gangway, he stood at the entry to his tiny quarters for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. “Ligeia,” he called out softly.

  She didn’t answer. Normally she at least groaned an acknowledgment from behind her gag if he called.

  Buckley stripped off his soaked shirt and breeches and pulled fresh ones from the drawers built into the cabin wall. He stepped into his pants as he moved toward the dark shadow that was all he could see of the bed.

  “Ligeia,” he said again, his voice barely above a whisper. “Are you okay? Are you sleeping through it all?”

  He saw her lying there in the bed, a darker stain in the dark air of the cabin, and reached out to touch the smooth skin of her shoulder.

  Or what should have been her shoulder. His hand met something that didn’t feel at all how Ligeia did beneath him when he decided to indulge. He ran it up the incline of flesh to meet the softer crook of her neck. Only…the neck didn’t feel soft at all. It felt rough against his fingers, stubbly.

  What the…

  Buckley reached up and grabbed the hair of the man who lay naked in his bed. He pulled on it hard, to force whichever crewman had invaded his most private space to meet him eye to eye, but the body didn’t bend or try to meet him. Still, he turned the face and pulled the man close. In short order he realized two things.

  One, the man was cold, and very dead.

  Two, the identity of the corpse.

  “Reg,” he whispered.

  Call the captain slow, but it was only then that it finally registered that Reg was alone in his bed. The bonds that once held the captain’s secret concubine hung loose and free.

  Ligeia is loose! The thought hit like a lightning bolt.

  “Damn you to a cold, everlasting hell,” Buckley cursed at Reg, releasing the man’s hair to let the dead head thump back to the bed. “What have you done?”

  Buckley pulled the almost forgotten fresh shirt over his head and then back-stepped his way out of the cabin and into the hall again, this time intent not to yell at his men, but to find out if any of them remained. He prayed that they hadn’t all met Ligeia.

  But he didn’t have much hope in his prayer.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The ring of the phone woke Evan from where he dozed beneath a warm afghan on the couch. He blinked in a moment of ambiguity when he wasn’t quite sure where he was. And then it all hit him. He’d spent th
e day with Bill, learning the workings of scuba equipment in the basement, drinking in front of the television and then crashing on the couch to rest until nightfall.

  “Hello,” a gravelly voice said from the easy chair in the corner. Bill had grabbed the phone.

  “No, I haven’t seen him…Sure, of course I will. Yeah, I’m sure everything’s fine; he and Sarah probably just went out somewhere today.”

  The phone clicked back into its holster on the end table, and Bill announced, “Your shrink is looking for you. Seems you didn’t show up for your appointment or return her calls.”

  “Shit,” Evan said, pulling himself into a sitting position on the couch. “I totally forgot. Should I call her?”

  Bill tossed a blanket aside and shook his head. “She’ll keep. After tonight I don’t think you’ll need to worry about shrink appointments anyway.” He stepped out of his chair and sauntered into the kitchen, rumpling his hair.

  “Yeah, maybe not,” Evan agreed. “When do we leave?”

  Something popped with a hint of fizz in the kitchen and a moment later Bill returned, holding out a beer to Evan. He took a swig and then set it down next to the four empties on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room.

  “As soon as you finish your fortitude,” Bill answered.

  Bill parked the Range Rover on Fifth Avenue, just past The Sand Trap. The street basically dead-ended into a dune of sand, perfect for two guys who intended to drag scuba equipment from the road to the beach. Bill got out and popped the back door, loading down Evan’s arms with flippers, suit, air tank…and then grabbing an armful of the same for himself. Bill closed the back door with a shoulder to the metal, and then hurriedly moved toward the ocean.

  “Let’s not get seen, huh?” he hissed.

  The beach was empty when Evan and Bill crested the last dune and began to stumble down the sand toward the water where, just a few weeks before, a woman named Kylie had disappeared after being dumped by her boyfriend.

  When they dropped all of the equipment to the sand, Bill turned to Evan and took his friend by the shoulders.

  “I can handle this part,” he offered. “You don’t have to go down there again.”

  “Yes, I do,” Evan insisted. “For Sarah. I owe her that much.”

  Bill nodded and began to put on the suit and equipment. When he was done zipping and clipping, he helped Evan, who was fumbling with his own. An afternoon of training doesn’t breed expert familiarity. Bill turned a knob on the tank, touched a button on the suit hood and something crackled in Evan’s ear.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Evan nodded.

  “Then say something. You can’t hear nodding underwater.”

  “What?” Evan answered.

  “Two-way radio,” Bill explained in his ear. “It’s dark down there…we need to stay in contact the whole time.”

  A hand clapped Evan on the shoulder, and then something hard slammed against his rubber-gloved hand. He held it in front of his face and saw the steel tube of a speargun. Bill began to walk toward the dark line where the ocean met the sand. “Are you ready, hunter?”

  Evan felt his heart trip as he looked at the cruel, hooked steel barb on the end of his speargun.

  “Yes,” he said simply and followed his friend toward the water.

  He was two steps in when the vertigo hit. “Oh shit,” Evan breathed, as he stared at the quiet surface of the water, threatening to suck him down. He teetered on one foot as something inside him struggled to find balance.

  Bill’s voice echoed through his face mask and into his ear. “I can do this, Evan. You don’t have to go.”

  Rage built in Evan’s heart as he thought about that offer. “No!” he wanted to scream. Instead, he gritted his teeth and said, “This is my fight and I should be handling it by MYself.”

  But he couldn’t handle it by himself. The very acknowledgment of that made him feel like sinking to the sand.

  “Then handle it,” Bill’s voice said quietly in his ear. “But if you can’t, you’re only going to stop me from doing what needs to be done. It’s not my fight…but I’ll fight it for you, if you need me to.”

  Evan’s stomach trembled in shame. He stared out at the quiet black water and forced himself to stand taller. He shook his head and whispered into the microphone, “This is my fight. This is Sarah’s fight. I’ll take care of it. Just help me to get there.”

  Bill didn’t answer, but Evan saw his friend’s rubber-capped head nod before his feet began to move forward, and his waist sank deeper into the dark of the waterline.

  Evan felt his gorge rise in his throat at the idea of stepping another foot into the murk of the ocean. But then his memory focused on the image of Sarah, dead beneath the waves. And suddenly that nausea passed, and he gripped his fingers tight against the steel holster of the deadly speargun.

  The ocean had taken his son, the most important person in his life. Ligeia had taken that which was most dear to him after his son.

  What did Evan have to be afraid of anymore? He deserved to die, having failed to protect and save his own family.

  His stomach flipped as he forced his feet to walk farther into the water. The familiar paralysis began to threaten in his calves, but instead of giving in to it, he closed his eyes and thought of Ligeia, and of how easy it had been for him to walk into the waves when she was near. Now…he was walking into the waves to kill her. But invoking her image still made it easier for him to enter that forbidden place. Her spell had broken the ocean’s stranglehold on him. Now he drew on the memory of her to give him the strength to do it again. He called on her to give him the strength to kill her. It was twisted, but it worked.

  Somehow, Evan forced his feet to walk behind Bill, and step by step, they both disappeared into the surf.

  Evan’s chest threatened to implode as his face mask dipped below the waterline. But for once in his life, the only time without outside “aid,” he was able to go underwater without sucking in brine and nearly drowning.

  This time, the thought barely flickered across his mind. This time, his mind was solidly on one thing. Finding the lady of the underwater graveyard. Finding the murderer of his wife.

  Finding Ligeia.

  Despite the security of the mask and the hiss of the air tank, Evan took a deep breath and let his head slip beneath the waves.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  June 11, 1887, 12:59 A.M.

  The crew’s quarters were empty. A blanket hung down from Cauldry’s cot, and Buckley’s militant side made a note to talk to the crewman about cleanliness. A man’s bed bespoke his mind. Disorderly linens defined a poor companion for a life-and-death mission; they spoke of a man not paying attention to the details. As far as the captain was concerned, every day on the ocean was a life-and-death endeavor. If you weren’t paying attention, the hooks of the deep would catch you unawares.

  Captain Buckley moved slowly through the center of the ship, knowing that Ligeia could be waiting in every shadow. A part of him loved her, but none of him trusted her. He knew what she could do to a man. He’d watched her jaws in action, and afterward, had had to dispose of the bodies of men who were much stronger than he himself. If they could not resist her unbound hunger, could he hope to?

  He might not succumb to her song as the others did, but still, the woman possessed a power, a violence, that he feared.

  Buckley stepped on planks that creaked with his weight, as well as the tossing of the ship. His heart screamed at him to move faster, to get back to the wheel above. But his spine insisted on creeping through the guts of his ship like a thief; he wanted to surprise her, not be surprised by her.

  The dark shadows of the crates of liquor flickered like black ghosts against the wooden walls of the hold, and Buckley stepped inside the crowded room, holding a lantern high. The light would give him away here, he knew. But he would not enter the otherwise black hold without it.

  He stood at the entry, watching the orange glow slip back
and forth across the wooden slats of the crates. Buckley watched for any movement at the side of the rows of cargo, and his shoulders started, twice, when the shadows themselves seemed to shift. But he quickly saw that those shifts were only tricks played by the light.

  Ligeia was not here. Or, if she were, she was still and silent somewhere in the back of the hold. He knew he would have to walk through the room, peering at every crevice to assure himself that she weren’t secreted within. But despite his initial belief that she had gone from this place, if she had ever been in the hold at all, his feet were reluctant to step any farther forward.

  Something cool dripped down his cheek, and Buckley absently wiped it away. He held the lamp out and tried to tease its light around the corner of the stack of crates nearest him, diminishing the shadow inch by inch.

  She did not appear in the disrobed dark.

  Something dripped again against his forehead, and this time, he wiped it away and looked up. The storm might be bad, but it shouldn’t have opened a breach in the upper deck.

  That’s when he saw the bloody toes.

  Buckley gasped as he took in the hairy legs of his first mate, hanging just a foot above his head. The thick black hair of the man’s calves was covered in streams of rich red blood, which ran in rivulets around the curve of his ankles and down the foot to his toes. As Buckley looked up, he saw that the blood stemmed from ragged gashes in the man’s belly and neck; his naked torso had been much violated before being strung up by the wrists from a beam on the ceiling.

  But the first mate wasn’t the only one. Next to him, strung up from the rafter were the naked bodies of Jensen and Cauldry. Their heads all lolled at their chests, tongues protruding from angry mouths, congealed blood coating the thick hair of their chests in a sheen of death. How had he walked into the room without seeing their corpses hanging there?