Siren's Song

by D. L. Snow

  By the time I got home I was a wreck. My hands were shaking and I had a case of the cold sweats. I parked the car and stood in the drive, staring up at the old house. Why was I still there in Bandit Creek? Why had I taken that job at the school? Who was I trying to be? Who was I trying to kid?

  As if in reply, I heard the sound I’d been running from for the past five years, the screech of the tires, the sound of metal against metal as the Porsche broke through the guard rail, the weightlessness and then finally, the last thing I heard was the sound of my mother’s scream.

  Pressing my palms against my temples, I ran down the walk to the end of Spruce Avenue where a wooded path led down to the lake. I’d walked the path almost daily for the last month, now I ran down it, feeling like I was being chased by a mob of evil high school students carrying torches and pitch forks.

  I didn’t realize I was sobbing until I stumbled out of the woods onto the rocky beach of Lost Lake, where my cries echoed between the two mountains – Turtle and Crow Mountain - which rose up on either side of the lake. I fell to my knees at the edge of the water, covered my face and wept. The accident had happened five years ago yet it felt like it had happened only yesterday, like my grief was a fresh wound that was so deep and so raw it could never possibly heal.

  My new car, too powerful for someone who was as inexperienced driving as I was, and the fight we’d had, oh I remembered the fight. My mother had insisted that I slow down. She’d warned me of hydroplaning in the pouring rain. She’d even tried to grab the steering wheel.

  I’d despised my mother in those last few minutes before the crash. I’d grown so tired of her control over every bit of my life. I was finally putting my foot down…on the accelerator.

  Then we crashed. She died and I came away with barely a scratch.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there crying, but finally I wiped my eyes and tried to still my shuddering breaths. There was a campground nearby, and though it was the off-season people were probably still using it. Sound traveled too clearly across the water and I’d been programmed from a young age to avoid scenes at all costs.

  Suddenly I heard my grandmother’s voice as if she was standing right beside me. It wasn’t the voice of a ghost, it was the voice of a memory. She’d brought me down to the lake on that last fateful visit when I was only seven. She’d been teaching me how to skip stones when she’d said, “There’s a whole town under this lake, Joss.”

  “A town? How can there be a town under a lake?” I’d asked.

  “You’d be surprised what’s possible.” She knelt down next to me and took my face in her hands. “Your mother doesn’t understand. She’s always tried to get as far away as possible. But you? You’re more like me and your grandfather, God rest his soul. You belong here, Josslyn Jones. You belong in Bandit Creek, don’t you forget it.”

  At the time I thought she’d been trying to convince me to stay and live with her and I guess I’d always believed that the fight between her and my mother was about me – that I was somehow responsible for the two of them never seeing each other again.

  Now I would never know the real reason for them falling out.

  I rubbed my eyes and sniffed when a shadow passed over me and I spun around. The ghost of Kyle Copeland stood behind me.

  I picked up a rock. “Go away!” I yelled and threw the rock at him. It went right through. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  He tilted his head to one side and then nodded once and walked right into the lake until he disappeared. All that was left of him was a nearly imperceptible ripple in the water where he’d vanished

  From somewhere across the lake, I heard a soft, hauntingly heartbroken voice singing the same melody, the same words as the song I had written just that morning. Meet me in the Promised Land, where all our dreams come true, meet me in the Promised Land, I’ll go first and wait for you…

  I whipped my head around to try to catch the source of the voice. But there was no one there. Of course, there wasn’t. How could anyone know my song?

  There was only one explanation. I was going crazy. My hands shook as I splashed my face with the frigid lake water and then splashed again. After drying my face on the hem of my now wrinkled, cotton dress, I looked down into the disturbed water of the lake. Something was wrong. I cocked my head to one side and then the other trying to figure out what it was.

  I slowly reached out to touch the strange reflection with my fingertip.

  Instead of my face being reflected in the glassy surface of the water, it was Kyle’s. When I frowned in confusion, Kyle smiled. I gasped but before I could scramble to my feet, Kyle’s hands – his no longer transparent hands – reached up out of the water and grasped mine, locking me in his grip.

  I tried to wrench my wrists free, but he was too strong. His cold, solid flesh held me and drew me forward. Then, in one powerful heave, he pulled me under.

  Chapter 3

  The first mistake I made was opening my mouth to scream. Glacial water filled my mouth, throat and nose, searing my lungs with freezing fire. Panic made me stronger and I twisted and bucked my body in an attempt to free myself from Kyle’s grasp. Still, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t strong enough. My gurgled scream was silenced once my lungs emptied of all remaining oxygen. My body rebelled against the onslaught of water and I thought my chest was going to explode. Sirens sounded inside my head, a thousand tiny voices screaming as my brain cried out for oxygen.

  I tried one last time to pull away, but I knew it was over when the voices inside my head began to hush. My body twitched involuntarily, then my muscles went slack as my brain shut down

  I was not prepared for the sense of peace that washed over me and filled me in my last few moments before death. I felt completely calm, like death’s clutches were not the razor sharp talons I’d feared, but rather a soft blanket enfolding me, swaddling me, smothering me…

  No!

  I wasn’t ready to die! Not this way! Though my vision was closing in, I was suddenly able to see the debris that littered the bottom of the lake. Wheels, railroad tracks, bottles, rusted buckets and drums. It was the town my grandmother had told me about, drawing me down to join its watery fate.

  I tried one last time to struggle out of Kyle’s grasp, but it was too late, much too late. He’d pulled me all the way to the bottom and although he was right in front of me, he appeared far away. Kyle released my hands and cupped my face to hold me close. His eyes – the last image I saw before everything went black – returned my gaze, not with the malevolence of an evil spirit claiming another victim, but with serenity and some other emotion I couldn’t name.

  *****

  “What’s this then? Something the cat dragged in?”

  A pointed toe struck me just below the ribs and I heaved. All the water that I’d swallowed rushed out of my stomach onto the boards beneath me. Gasping for breath, I heaved again and again, coughing in the midst of it all as my lungs cried out for air.

  The boot nudged me even harder forcing me onto my back.

  I opened my eyes to find a plump, older woman staring down at me. She had the jowls of a bull dog, thick lips and watery blue eyes. She wore her grey hair in some strange braid pinned around her head.

  “What’s a bedraggled thing like you doing half-drowned in the street? Where’d you come from?”

  I coughed and groaned.

  “Cap’n! Come out here.”

  A moment later, strong hands hoisted me to my feet. “Where’d you want her?” a deep voice asked.

  “Bring her inside.”

  I was half-carried, half-dragged through a set of swinging doors and then set down in a hard wooden chair.

  “Where’d you come from, Lass? You one of Martha Sweet’s girls? Lorelei’s?”

  When I didn’t answer, my head was tilted up by a tug on the back of my hair and my cheek was slapped.

  “Hey!” I put my hand to my cheek and stared up at the woman in shock. I’d never been struck in my entire life
. “What’d you do that for?”

  “I was speaking to you. You’d better answer me if you know what’s good for you.” She pulled up a chair and sat her ample girth into it. Sighing heavily, she said, “Now tell me, what happened to you. What are you doing on my doorstep, Girlie?”

  “I-I don’t know.” I looked around in confusion. My head pounded like some gnome was playing a drum between my ears and my chest ached so that each breath made me cringe in pain. “Where am I?”

  “The Powder Horn Saloon.”

  “The Powder Horn?” I coughed. “That’s on Spruce Avenue, right?” Oh, thank God. I was only a few blocks from home.

  The woman studied me with a strange look on her face. “Spruce Avenue? This is Main Street, Dove.” She glanced over my shoulder at the big man who stood behind my chair. “Either she’s been into the sauce or she’s touched.”

  “Could be both, Missus,” the deep voice said behind me.

  “You might be right, Cap’n.” She stood, dusting her hands on her apron. “Well, she’s been ill used, there’s no doubt about it, look at her, no more than a waif-of-a-thing, barely dressed and soaking wet to boot.” The woman tsked.

  “What should we do with her?”

  “Get her back to where she belongs is all we can do.”

  The pain in my throat and chest was so bad that I paid no attention to what the two were saying. I had no idea how I’d come to end up in the Powder Horn Saloon, no idea why I was there soaking wet. The fact that I didn’t know these things only added to my torment. Whatever was wrong with me, my hallucinations, my loss of memory, all of these were bad signs. Very bad signs. I could no longer pretend, no longer deny that my sanity was leaving me.

  With effort, I pushed myself to my feet, my wet clothes clinging to me, making me shiver.

  “Where you staying, Dove?”

  I tried to clear my throat but it hurt so much I clutched at my neck in pain. I finally managed to whisper, “The Old Hawes place.”

  The room went silent.

  “You’re a Hawes?” There was awe in the woman’s voice.

  “No. I’m a Jones. I just moved in there after my grandmother died.”

  But the woman didn’t seem to hear me. She motioned to the man named Cap’n. “Get the girl a blanket from the back, will you? Let’s get her dried up.”

  A minute later I was handed a scratchy wool blanket that did very little to dry me. I handed it back to the woman but she waved me away. “Keep it. Keep it. And you tell Mr. Hawes where you got it. Make sure you tell him of Kitty Sullivan’s hospitality and kindness. You hear?”

  I frowned. “Sure.”

  “Tell him his shirts are laundered and will be delivered this evening. You got that?”

  “Oh, okay.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but I didn’t care. I just needed to get out of there. The last thing I needed was for someone to recognize me, call the paper and plaster a half-drowned Joss Jones across the front of some sleazy tabloid.

  I wrapped the blanket around my cold, wet clothes and walked back out into the bright sunshine. The minute I stepped outside I knew something was wrong. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the bright sun yet, but I could smell it. Manure, dust and smoke mixed with the unpleasantness of various other unnamed aromas.

  What in God’s name?

  With a shudder of remembrance, images flooded my brain in fast forward and I stumbled up against a wooden rail. I remembered sitting by the lake. I remembered seeing my reflection, but it wasn’t my reflection, it was Kyle Copeland’s. I remembered Kyle pulling me under and I vividly recalled the crushing pain of drowning.

  I was dead.

  I looked around in wonder and confusion. If I was dead, heaven or hell or purgatory or whatever-the-hell this was, was an old western town with dirt streets, horse-drawn wagons, wooden buildings and men. Lots and lots of men. There was an old drunk, with his hat pulled low, leaning up against the wall of the saloon, mumbling incoherently to himself. There were men in flannel shirts, floppy hats and dirty pants held up by suspenders. There were men leaning against the wooden façade of the buildings along the strange wooden sidewalk, smoking and talking and men walking down the road, weaving in and out with gunnysacks slung over their shoulders that clanged with the sound of pick axes, shovels and plates that hung from belts and straps…

  Plates? Those weren’t plates, those were mining pans. I’d seen them in an old ghost town during one of the few field trips I’d gone on as a kid – that was before I’d stopped going to school, before my long line of tutors who traveled with me on the road.

  Is that where I was? Was this some historical town in Bandit Creek I didn’t know about? It had to be – or I was dreaming, or dead. Or, I had gone completely and utterly mad.

  I rubbed my eyes. Hard. Nothing happened. I slapped my cheeks and pinched the sensitive flesh on the underside of my arm until it turned purple. It hurt like crazy – making me feel very much alive - but didn’t do a thing to change what I was seeing.

  What the hell was going on?

  Where the hell was I?

  And then I saw him.

  He was walking right toward me wearing a brown suit with a high white collar. A silver watch chain hung from his vest and on his head he wore a funny looking bowler hat. Unlike many of the others around him who sported huge mustaches, his face was clean shaven.

  I dropped the blanket and ran straight at him, giving him a good hard shove. “Kyle Copeland.”

  A small, wiry man, who’d been walking by Kyle’s side, stepped between me and Kyle. He grabbed the front of my soaked dress in his fist. “What do you think you’re doing, Missy?”

  Twisting my body, I worked myself free and grabbed Kyle’s arm. “What have you done to me? Where am I? Take me home, you bastard. Right now.”

  The small man pushed me back, making me stumble and land flat on my behind.

  “It’s okay Jenkins,” I heard Kyle say. Even though it was the first time I’d ever heard him speak, I knew his voice, the deep rich baritone with a hint of gravel around the edges. He pulled me upright and asked, “Do I know you?”

  I yanked my hand out of his. “Are you kidding me?” I sputtered. “You’ve been following me around for the last month.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, Miss, you must have me confused with someone else.” He turned and started to walk away.

  “Wait!” I shouted and then clutched at the searing pain in my neck which only served as a reminder of what he’d done to me. I ran after him and grabbed his sleeve again. “I don’t know how you did it,” I said, “but you brought me here.” I stopped to swallow painfully and take a breath. “Now you’re going to get me home.”

  The little man beside Kyle elbowed me out of the way. “She’s just a dollymop, Sir, hoping to con you. Best ignore her.”

  But Kyle’s eyes flashed with something that looked like compassion. He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a coin. After tossing it on the ground at my feet, the two men moved past, giving me a wide birth as if I was a street walker.

  I kicked the coin with my soggy shoe. “I’m Joss Jones!” I shouted, ignoring the pain in my throat. I ran after Kyle and grabbed the back of his jacket. “You tried to drown me, you bastard.”

  “Unhand me.”

  “How do I get back? Tell me! How do I get back?”

  Something thwacked the back of my legs so hard I let go of Kyle’s tweed coat and dropped instantly to my knees. I wasn’t there long before someone grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me back to my feet.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Hawes. I’ll take care of this ingrate.” I recognized the shrill voice beside me.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sullivan. But do go easy on the child. I believe she is a simpleton.”

  “Ever the merciful man. Bless you, Sir. Bless you.”

  Kyle met my gaze for the briefest of moments and then turned and walked away.

  My ragged breathing tore at my chest and I realized my mistake too late
as I watched him leave. This man’s shoulders were broader, his physique more filled out than the high school kid in the basketball picture. He had lines that radiated out from the corners of his eyes that spoke of experience born of years, more years than a high school student owned. This was Kyle Copeland and yet it wasn’t.

  Kitty Sullivan stepped in front of me blocking my view of the retreating backs of the two men.

  “You live at the Hawes place, do you?” She slapped my cheek for the second time that day. “You enjoy pulling the wool over ol’ Kitty’s eyes?” She slapped the other side of my face. “Then you go and attack one of Bandit Creek’s most prominent citizens. Shame on you!”

  “Stop hitting me!” I cringed, thinking she might slap me again just for asking her not to. When she didn’t, I asked, “Who was that man?”

  “Who was that man?” she cackled. “Did you hear that, Cap’n? She don’t even recognize Mr. Hawes when she sees him!” Bending closer to me, her jowls wavering in indignation, she said, “That was Mr. Morgan Emerson Hawes, owner of the First Citizens Bank.” She grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked. “You live in his house, or so you say.”

  I yelped in pain and fury.

  “It’s a tough life, Little Miss, and don’t I know it, but there’s only one place for miscreants like you.” She twisted my hair around her fist and motioned with her head to Cap’n indicating the coin sitting in the dirt at our feet. “Fetch that liberty head and then take this scamp to the Sheriff’s office.”

  “Now, Mrs. Sullivan, Ma’am,” Cap’n said as he kept a hand on me while he bent to pick up the coin, forcing me down alongside him. “Mr. Hawes asked us to go easy, particularly because she’s a little dim. Don’t you think the clink is awful rash?”

  “You aren’t contradicting me, are you Cap’n?”

  “No Missus.”

  “I don’t pay and house you to contradict me, Cap’n. Now, give me that nickel. And stop worrying about every wayward stray that blows through. A night or two in the clink will probably do her some good.”