Siren. Part 17

It went down like salty fire and Evan screamed, only sucking in more water. "Oh my G.o.d," he cried out underwater, but no sound emerged.

He kicked and motioned with his arms and took another heave of breath that gagged him fully. His stomach threatened to puke, and he struggled to gain some kind of control. His greatest, deepest fear had come true.

He was going to drown. Just like Josh.

"Oh G.o.d," he cried.

Two hands gripped him around the waist, and Ligeia swam up from beneath him until she stared at him, eye to eye. She leaned in and pressed her lips to his. Evan began to push her away; but then he felt the pressure in his lungs disappear. Ligeia wrapped herself around him and Evan coughed, choking out seawater. He couldn't hold his breath though, and opened his mouth to suck it right back in.

Only...he sucked in air. What the f.u.c.k? Cautiously he breathed in again, and he felt his lungs fill with warm, wonderful oxygen. Impossible.

"Stay with me," Ligeia said. "I'll take care of you." He could hear her inside his head, under the water. Impossible!

"How can I hear you?" he asked, feeling the water fill his mouth as he tried to speak. He couldn't hear his own voice, but she answered him.

"I am in you," she answered. "I always have been. I've never spoken a word to you out loud."

Evan didn't think, but tried to speak again through the ocean. Ligeia put a finger to his lips halfway through his sentence as he tried to say, "But we've talked, I heard you..."

She shook her head at him, and pressed her forehead to his. "I've talked to you inside your mind. You never had any reason to question it."

Ligeia ran her hand up and down his chest, and Evan could feel the pain and burn of the salt.w.a.ter in his lungs dissolve with her touch. "With me, you can breathe beneath the waves," she said. "And if you speak in your head, I will hear you, if you're close. We are mated."

She put an arm around his waist and kicked out with her feet, while pushing the ocean aside with one hand. "Let's go home," she said. Evan heard the happy lilt in her voice, and struggled to grasp how she could be talking in his head; her voice seemed so real. So...musical and beautiful. He turned her words around and around in his head, trying to fathom how they could sound like...sound, but were, in fact, words never spoken.

He let her guide him through the water; what choice did he have-he had already proven that he would drown without her help. Quickly.

As they moved through the waves, the occasional fish darted out of their way in fright. Evan could feel the gentle roll and swell of the current push them gently one direction, while Ligeia dragged him through the invisible wall of water in the opposite.

Something loomed ahead-a dark, shadowy hulk of rock or something; Ligeia seemed to be angling them toward it, and Evan strained to see.

It was an old shipwreck, he realized. The front beams of an old hull curved up and cut into the water like crossing scythes from out of the mud of the ocean floor. The wood that once had held out the water from the s.p.a.ce beneath the ship's skeletal beams had rotted away, and Evan could see through the ship to the black water beyond. The ship lay on its side, and Ligeia swam toward a blacker spot in the dark boards that remained of its hull. A school of long, ghostly silver fish swam in a slow zigzag as Ligeia approached the breach in the ship's hull. Then they broke apart like a shower of silver bullets, each speeding in its own deadly course away from them. They opened the way to her.

Ligeia swam into the dark cave of the ship, and Evan held fast to her; a spectator in a surreal episode of some National Geographic undersea explorers show. Only, when they filmed those, they used spotlights. Evan strained to see through the underwater night, and caught glimpses of fish slipping just into and out of sight. He could just make out the rotted hull of the ship beneath them. The boards were covered in mud; the timber only periodically peeking through the buildup of a hundred years of surf debris.

Ligeia kicked and dragged Evan through the water just above the sunken floor of the ship. Lying on the mud beneath them, Evan saw the white of bones amid a tangle of sea fronds. His blood chilled. Was it the remains of one of the wreck's crew, left here who knew how many decades ago to be eaten by the fish? To lie here, forever, never to be properly buried and laid to rest by his family? Like Josh, Evan's inner voice whispered.

They pa.s.sed over the ribs of the body, and then Evan saw another set, just barely risen above the silt. The skull lay faceup in the mud, the empty black holes of eye sockets stared at Evan like an accusation. Or a warning.

Another member of the crew, Evan supposed. And then the skeleton was past, and Evan saw the bones of a hand just beyond. And another rib cage. And another. Ligeia swam over an underwater cairn; the jumble and stacks of bones was amazing. Evan swore under his breath as he tried to count the skeletons and lost track at nineteen. There were too many, and the bodies had apparently been stacked on top of one another, three and four deep in some cases. They had decomposed and folded in, one upon and within the other, so it was impossible to tell where one body ended and another began. Only one thing was clear-there were a lot of bodies abandoned down here!

Then he saw one body that still had a rope of black hair attached to a clump of withered flesh on its skull. And just beyond that, fingers of bone pointed up toward the ceiling. While the fingertips were white, Evan could see the patchy remains of flesh still stuck to the emaciated half-eaten corpse's arm bones.

A thick twist of seaweed shivered in the water ahead of them, but as Ligeia swam through it, Evan saw a whole new crop of bodies stacked in various states of decomposition. Those at the bottom of the pile were nothing more than bones. But the bodies stacked at the top of the watery graveyard still had skin on those bones. As they swam over one, Evan could have sworn he saw a viscous cloud of blood disperse like smoke from the corpse's chest.

"Ligeia, who are all these people?" he asked finally.

The Siren didn't answer.

She swam instead farther into the depths of the ship, and finally entered a room with a half dozen bunks that pointed out from the side of the sunken ship like room dividers; because the side of the ship was now its floor. She swam around one of the old bunks and in the faint light that leached in from the holes in the hull, Evan could just make out a mess of tangled green sheets and blankets piled in the crook of the bunk in what once had been the ship's starboard hull. She laid him down on the rumpled, watery cushion, and gently pressed herself on top of him. Her eyes bored into his as she held him there, at the bottom of the ocean, at last in her own bed.

"Now you are home," she said. Evan swore that her voice seemed to come from all around him, not from inside.

Evan shook his head to protest, but then there was a sound so beautiful, so warm, that his words stopped before he could finish thinking them. Her music rang again in his head, and she sang of undying, unending love. Of beauty and sadness. Of days that stretched into months and years and centuries of loneliness. And then her song turned to the baser strut of l.u.s.t, and Evan felt himself instantly respond. Ligeia straddled him and wrapped algae-slick sheets around them as she sucked his tongue into her mouth with the brine.

In his mind, her song changed from l.u.s.t to selfishness, and seemed to whisper "mine, mine, mine."

And true to her music, it seemed as if she would never let go. When at last she finished with him, Evan had spent himself three times, and his waist ached with the effort, though she had done nearly all of the work. Her sweet soprano whispered a lullaby to him then, and it only took seconds before Evan closed his eyes and accepted the darkness that permeated the old crew quarters into his mind. He slept. And in the soundless, slow current of the bay, ironically, he snored.

Shadows cloaked the room where Evan woke. Shadows and strange gravity. He felt his arms move, almost of their own accord. His body felt weak and heavy at the same time. Fluid and anch.o.r.ed. He knew he'd drank a lot with Bill, but he didn't think he'd toasted himself this bad. But then the fleeting memory of making love to Ligeia in his own bed returned in a flash, and the memory of running from her through his backyard flashed across his mind as well and of bodies at the bottom of an old shipwreck and Ligeia just above him in the tangled sheets of her watery bed...

c.r.a.p. Evan turned his head and his eyes widened. He was definitely not in his bedroom. What he saw was impossible.

The air loomed dark and thick. Around him, shadows covered everything in a dark light, but the more Evan stared, the more he could make out. And what he made out was...that he was, indeed, in a bed of sorts-a rumple of silken fabric cascaded beneath him, and covered his legs and waist. Just out of his reach stretched a wall of dark wooden planks, ascending to a ceiling of equally dark and stained corroded wood.

Everything seemed dark, cloaked in the deepest shadows of night. Evan struggled to make out more details of the room where he awoke, but all he could seem to see were the wooden planks of the wall and the sheets that wound around his legs. And...the legs of Ligeia, he realized.

Next to him, hidden in the murk of the room, he followed the curve of a pale thigh up past an indented waist and broadened breast to her thin, aristocratic face.

Her eyes were closed, but it was she. And it was she as he had seen her in his own bed not so long ago. Without the glamour and perfection she normally showed him. Her face and nose looked thin and her belly was covered with tiny but obvious white slashes; scars perhaps from fights that he never wanted to know about.

Evan followed the lines on her belly up the small swell of her chest. He smiled, briefly, at the rounded lush flesh he'd kissed numerous times over the past month or two, but here, now, it didn't seem quite as enticing as before. And the flesh of her neck looked...not "old" per se...but...weathered. He remembered her skin being perfect-smooth and creamy white. Yet, as he lay here in this strange bed with her and stared, he realized that she was not all that.

He reached out a hand to touch her cheek, and saw the hair of his arm pull back, as if in a wind tunnel. And yet, he felt nothing. His arm moved heavily through the...

It finally hit him again as he looked beyond Ligeia, and saw the old wooden bunk hung from the side of the wall and the strangely blurred vantage between here and there. He wasn't here with Ligeia in her house, with some jealous husband potentially lurking outside. He was here with her in her real home. A home that just so happened to be underwater.

How was he able to be here? Evan wondered, his eyes widening at the realization. His heart threatened to pound in machine-gun panic. He opened his mouth to gasp for air, but felt the cold of water slip inside, and forced it closed again. Still, somehow he breathed as he lay beside her, in this place where no man should be able to breathe.

He was underwater. The very idea of that sent something shooting into Evan's nerves that felt a lot like ice, only colder. He was petrified.

Water. All around him. For a second he convinced himself that he was hallucinating; she had slipped him some kind of drug, and everything just seemed slow and waterlogged. That would explain the whole dream sequence of her talking in his head too, he thought. Evan reached out and tried to swish his hand through the "air," but his rationalization was fractured. It was not air and he was not drugged. No way. He slipped out carefully, slowly from beneath the twisted, algae-stained sheets that Ligeia dozed beneath and looked around the room. Evan followed the faint light that filtered in from the moon above the waves outside out of the room. Moving felt strange; kind of like walking through foam. Everything resisted him, yet, he could move through it. As he slipped through the doorway at the far end of the room, Ligeia still slept, and he shifted his feet carefully along the mud-slick floor, hoping not to do anything to wake her. Evan guessed that she wouldn't allow him to leave. After the near-drowning incident last night, he wasn't sure he could leave. Still...he had to try. So far he could still breathe.

Evan pushed his way through the water and walked slowly down the dark deck of the old ship. He realized that this was very likely the same ship that Bill had seen while diving off the point last month.

He tiptoed slowly away from Ligeia in a surreal slow motion. He didn't understand how he was able to breathe, and the panic of being under the water was making him so upset he wanted to collapse to the ground and cry. But Evan forced himself to hold it together, and to move.

Move was the name of the game. Sometimes life-and the fear of its loss-trumped all other fears. He had to get out of here and get home. He had to help Sarah, who had no doubt returned home by now, and was wondering where he was.

He stepped along the deck and looked out through holes in the hull of the ship to an ocean sky; dark shadows rippled and surrounded him, but still he walked, guiding his way by following the line of the decayed planks. They led him to something that looked like an old kitchen, with plates and bowls stacked w.i.l.l.y-nilly on a counter, seaweed wavering out of them in the slow movement of the water, as if cultivated in the old bowls like potted plants. A handful of chairs lay on the floor near toppled square tables. Evan walked past these, and that's when he saw the line of bodies.

He had pa.s.sed over them quickly last night, and the darkness of midnight dozens of feet below the waves had not helped illuminate them well. But now, somewhere above them, dawn was breaking, and the faint light streamed in stronger.

Now he could see the flesh that hung off the bodies and fluttered in the softly oscillating current like so much tissue paper. Evan stepped closer and could see the face of one body-a man. A fuzz of blue-black stubble shadowed his jaw all the way to the ragged hole gored into his neck and shoulder. Evan stared at the violated flesh, wondering what had eaten its way into this man. Had he been attacked by a shark and stacked here by Ligeia for burial? Or had she placed him here and he had been eaten by fish?

Evan refused to think of the obvious.

Refused until it was forced in his face. He walked past the dead man and the moldering bones stacked beneath him to see the nude, gored body of a woman. Her belly had been opened and emptied; Evan could see the yellow bone of her spine through the skin that fluttered just past the edge of her rib cage. Her neck was also mostly gone, and her eyes had been eaten out. She stared with sightless, bloodless pits toward the sun she would never see again.

Evan shivered and stepped past her to see another man's corpse, also half eaten. He gulped at the fleshy hole where the man's s.e.x had once protruded; a tunnel of rippled, faintly pinkish meat ascended beneath the man's hairy skin and met the emptiness that had been dug out of his belly. The body was missing its lips among other things, and Evan had to look away. The a.s.sociation was too jarring.

He looked away to the next in the line of bodies. There he saw the long, curved, still-s.e.xy thighs and still-intact belly and still-desirable b.r.e.a.s.t.s and slightly tired cheeks and eyes of a woman he knew more intimately perhaps than he knew himself.

He looked at Sarah.

"Nooooo!" he cried, and tasted the salt of the ocean, but heard none of his scream. Evan pulled her up from the body she lay on, and cradled her in his arms. She was absolutely, unquestionably dead.

His Sarah was dead.

Just as surely as he had doomed his son, his weakness had killed his wife. Evan cried tears that slipped away in the ocean unseen. Her lips were cold, but still he kissed them and hugged her limp body to his chest. His breath came in huge, shivering gasps as he spent his grief soundlessly beneath the surface of his greatest enemy. The ocean had taken everything he had ever loved.

He looked behind him into the dark hole of the ship, where somewhere within, Ligeia still slept. Evan knew he had to leave fast, now, before she woke. Perhaps his cries had already roused her. He carried Sarah past the rotted boards that remained of the ship's outer hull, and set foot on the soft, sucking mud of the true sea bottom. He stepped twice and then tried to mimic Ligeia's form when she had carried him here. He hooked one arm around the body of his wife and kicked his feet off the bottom, swatting at the water with his free hand. He rose a bit from the bottom, but was off balance. He began to lose his grip on Sarah, and then something worse happened.

The weight of the water returned.

Evan shifted to balance Sarah but as he took a breath, he also took in water. He choked, and looked back toward the wreck a few feet away.

s.h.i.t! He could feel the "spell" of Ligeia waning fast. Perhaps it was because he had gone too far from her. A convenient-and effective-leash. Or perhaps she had woken and cut the cord herself to stop him from escaping.

Either way, he had to move. In his mind he apologized to Sarah and brushed his lips to hers as he laid her down on the sea bottom. I'll come back for you, he promised silently. But I need to get help.

The water trickled down his throat and Evan forced himself to stop breathing. He kicked his feet and pushed off with his arms, now too angry and determined to let the fear stop him. Instead of flailing in a panic, Evan swam, truly swam, for the first time in his life. He pushed toward the surface like a cork, and almost made it before he couldn't hold his breath anymore. He took in a big, horrible gulp of water and almost lost his tread with the shock, but then his head broke the surface, and Evan spit out the sea and heaved a wet, sputtering breath of air as he blinked away the water and took in his surroundings. The rocky black finger of the point was just to his right, and the sun hung just beyond on the horizon, a deep orange ball of dawn that would soon be burning hot with the warmth of morning in the late summer.

Evan imagined Ligeia's hands grabbing his feet to pull him down beneath the waves, and before his fear of the water could argue that he couldn't swim, he was swimming, desperately stroking toward the black rock and the line of warbling white seagulls that lined its top.

The water was calm and it only took Evan a couple minutes of floundering in raw determination before his hand reached out to touch the edge of a boulder covered in algae hair. The green strands trailed through the water like the hair of a corpse beneath the waves.

Evan pulled himself up and out of the water, scrambling over the sharp points of a jumble of rocks to reach the flat ledge. His teeth chattered in the morning breeze as he stood naked and wet, finally, at the edge of the "lookout" spot on the point.

Evan stared out at where he'd been, where Sarah lay dead, beneath the ocean. He began to cry again, but then his heart jumped when a whitecap frothed just a few yards away. For a second, he thought it was Ligeia's hand breaking the surface.

No time for tears, he pledged, and threaded his way down the path toward the beach. He needed to get away from here before she did come for him. He needed to get home, even if it was only for one last time.

Minutes later, Evan streaked along the beach. He prayed none of his neighbors were up having coffee and looking out their windows toward the waves.

But then again, at this point, he really didn't care. He needed help; he had another fish to fry. A really big, deadly fish.

A Siren.

Chapter Thirty-Five.

June 11, 1887, 12:23 A.M.

The storm pushed the Lady Luck across its surface like a bit of hollow driftwood. She rocked dangerously to starboard and then to lee, and Captain Buckley held the wheel, struggling to roll with the troughs and then turn his rudder in to catch the current to come up the other side without letting their keel break water and capsize the ship. Jensen and he took turns at the wheel; after a half hour or more of pulling and rolling the wheel, a man needed a break. Their knuckles gleamed white on the dark, wet wooden wheel as they rode out the storm.

"I'm going below for a bit, Captain," Jensen announced, and Buckley showed his agreement with a nod. His eyes never left the gray of the tossing waves and the white of their teeth. The ocean was a giant mouth to them now, doing everything it could to swallow the ship whole.

Once Jensen had slipped down the ladder, Buckley's thoughts turned to Ligeia. He realized that he'd been on the deck all night, even when Jensen held the wheel. It was a captain's job to guide them through the storm and he'd been reticent to relinquish his post, even if he didn't hold the rudder. But now he wondered how Ligeia fared through this storm. He'd left her chained to his bunk, alone in the dark. That had been hours ago. A pang of conscience struck him, as he pictured her afraid and trapped in that dark place. Perhaps she was crying. Women got emotional that way when afraid. Not that he'd ever really seen her scared. Or emotional.

An image came to mind of her lifting her blood-spattered face from the crook of Rogers's neck, sharp teeth stained in his crewman's life. It was hard to imagine that face bawling with fear. Buckley smiled, but then thought of another moment with Ligeia, this one when he had first bought her during their last docking in Delilah and brought her on board the ship. He had shown her the cabin, and told her to sit on the bunk as he opened his case to retrieve the bindings that he had purchased from her previous owner. The man had been very insistent that Buckley never remove the bindings-or the gag. "She only needs to sing you one love song and you'll be through," the jittery little Greek had said, over and over again. The man kept cotton in his ears, and so the whole time they were brokering the deal for the fine body of Ligeia, Buckley had needed to almost shout. No matter how much Buckley asked him to remove the cotton, the man refused.

"If you value your life, you will keep her mouth sealed and your ears plugged," the little man said.

Naturally, the first thing Buckley had done was to un-gag the beautiful girl's mouth when he got her back to the hotel. As soon as he had, the girl had begun to sing, but Buckley ignored the sound. He'd always been tone-deaf, and music meant nothing to him. Instead, he let her moan out her little ditty as he stripped off his shirt and pants, and then shoved her down in the bed, finally stilling her song with the force of his tongue.

He saw no danger in her music. Not until he saw her kill a man drawn to her song later that same night.

When he brought her on board the ship and showed her the bindings, she shook her head quickly, her eyes widening in panic. She had not said a word to him since he'd bought her, but now her mouth began to move quickly. Still, she didn't speak, but sang to him.

"I'm sure it's a very nice tune," Buckley said, pinning her arms above her head with the shackles. "But save your breath."

He saw the fear grow in her eyes as he straddled her, and grinned. His teeth held no humor. From what the Greek had said, and from what he'd witnessed with his own eyes, most men swooned at her song, and his complete dismissal of it seemed to bother her more than being tied. She sang louder and pushed her voice into all sorts of shenanigans. Buckley let her go on for a bit, before pulling out the gag and holding it above her mouth. "Enough already," he said.

She was quiet for the next few minutes, as he ran calloused hands over her curves with the rough attention of a man far more used to hauling in nets and managing a band of roughneck men than showing softness to a woman. Her face remained still as stone through most of the act, but as he announced his culmination, a flicker of some pained emotion shadowed Ligeia's face. After he rolled away from her, Buckley saw the trail of a tear down the soft skin of her cheek.

He wiped it off with a thick finger. "Don't worry, girl, it won't be so bad. I won't break ya. And I'll make sure you're well fed. Once we get to know each other, I bet you'll enjoy it."

Buckley shook his head as he pulled the wheel hard to starboard. Even after seeing her attack and kill the man who'd burst into their hotel room the first night he'd owned her, Buckley'd never expected that the term well-fed to the girl would mean the blood of his crew. But by the time she had gotten a hold of one of them, Buckley was too enamored of her hips to give her up. He should have thrown her overboard when her mouth had first swallowed the blood of one of his men, but, instead, he'd become her cleanup man, wrapping the bodies of his former crew in sheets and throwing them overboard when she'd eaten her fill.

Over those first couple weeks at sea, Ligeia seemed to grow used to him, and after a few desperate attempts to sing to him, she had given up that gambit. He took care of her needs, and she took care of his. They may rarely have talked but they had an understanding. What words needed to be spoken? Now, she even spoke to him once in a while when he removed the gag to allow her to feed.

Now, in the midst of the storm, he thought back to that lone tear he'd brushed from her face during their first days together, and felt guilty for stranding her below without any communication about what was going on topside. He pledged to go down and talk to her, rea.s.sure her, as soon as Jensen returned. He could leave the deck for a few minutes.

He probably ought to check on the hold as well. He prayed that the violent troughs and turns hadn't pulled loose any of the crates of their cargo, or this was going to go from being a very profitable trip to an expensive one. He'd sailed down the Mexican coast farther than usual this time to pick up what was reportedly the finest run of tequila ever produced, along with his usual run of rum. He'd paid handsomely for it, and intended to charge handsomely on the other side, when he reached Delilah. The port chief had buyers lined up for the most expensive spirits, though their ident.i.ties were never divulged. Delilah served as the clearinghouse for the underground duty-free liquor-import business, and Buckley had no doubt that he could double his money on this hold.

a.s.suming he could get it to sh.o.r.e.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

Bill's house was still dark inside when Evan pulled up in front with a screech akin to a getaway car on point for a bank robbery. He left the engine running and the driver's door open as he raced up the walk of the small green-sided ranch. He pounded a fist on the flimsy aluminum of the screen door, but then, impatient, threw open the outer door and rapped on the wooden one inside.

It still took a few minutes for a light to finally click on within and the inner door to crack open. When Bill's unshaven face peered sleepily out, his friend asked, "What the h.e.l.l's going on, man? It's five in the morning!" Bill rubbed a fist in one eye and yawned.

"Five twenty," Evan answered. "Listen, I need to borrow your scuba equipment. Can you show me how to use it really quick?"

Bill choked on a laugh. "You, the guy petrified of water who can't swim, no-who can't even step in the ocean...you are going to scuba dive? Have you lost your mind?"