Siren (8 page)

Evan woke on the beach again, still wearing a sodden shirt, but naked from the waist down, one pant leg still hung up on his ankle. Ligeia was gone, and the moon had slipped across the sky.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, a wild rainbow of conflicting emotions raging inside him. “What am I gonna do?”

Pulling his cold, wet pants over goose-bumped thighs, Evan felt the fingers of panic rising up again in his heart. Tears welled in his eyes as he began to walk home, praying that Sarah were safe.

When he slipped inside his house ten minutes later, still wondering how he would explain the wet clothes, it was three
A.M.
He turned off the light in the kitchen and walked down the hall to their bedroom, praying that Sarah would be there.

Her light snores filled the room as he entered. Evan let out a sigh of relief. At least she had gotten home okay without him. He stripped off his clothes and decided to let them dry in the garage…He hoped she’d never know.

Evan walked naked to the garage and draped the jeans across the back of his car. He laid the shirt on the hood.
In the morning, when they were a little drier, he could figure out what to do with them.

Evan went back inside and got in the shower. He stood under the spray for a minute, thinking about the night. His cock felt thick and sated, as it always did after good, strenuous sex. As he thought of Ligeia’s fingers in his hair, he felt his groin tingle and his manhood begin to ready itself for action once more.

“No,” he whispered, getting out of the shower and drying off. He walked back down the hall to the bedroom, where he slid between the sheets next to the woman who had made his life worth living for as long as he could remember. But right now, his body wasn’t thinking of her. He hated himself for what he felt in his heart.

What he felt was a betrayal of everything he had spent his life building, and the worst part was, he didn’t really care. It took everything in him not to get back out of bed and walk back to the point. To call her name. Even though he loved and cared for Sarah, Evan wanted only one thing now, and knew that he would go back to her tomorrow night, no matter what the cost.

As he slid into a dream of her song, he knew that at that moment, he would give up everything for this woman. With every fiber of his body, Evan wanted Ligeia.

“I think I’m in love with her,” Evan said.

Bill raised a hamburger to his lips and raised an eyebrow at the same time. He chewed, letting the silence stretch before answering.

“She feels the same?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know. We haven’t really talked much.”

“Right. She talks with her body. Didn’t your momma ever tell you to watch out for girls like that?”

Evan grinned, just barely. He had asked Bill to lunch at Cheeseburger Central because he needed to talk to somebody about last night. And his weekly appointment with Dr. Blanchard wasn’t until Monday. “I’ve never felt like this before,” he said, before biting into a South of the Border Burger. Guacamole oozed out of the bun to splat on his wrist.

Bill only stared at Evan’s burger. “That’s probably because you’re eating avocado on barbecued beef. It’s not right, you know? Burgers should be slathered in ketchup, mustard, onions, a bit of lettuce, maybe some cheese. But jalapeños and green shit? Looks like a seagull just shit on your meat.”

“I’m serious,” Evan protested. “I can’t get her out of my head. It was the most amazing thing last night. She made me feel…”

“Like a real man, I know. We’ve all been there.”

“Not like that. I mean…when she sings, everything in your head just slips away. I can’t begin to describe it. She’s got the best voice I’ve ever heard. Hell, twice now I’ve just gone sleepwalking into the ocean to get closer to her when she was singing. And you know how insane that is for me, of all people.”

“She lured you into the water again last night?” Bill put down his burger. “Tell me you didn’t go in again.”

Evan laughed. “Fully dressed. The clothes are in the backseat of my car right now; I didn’t want Sarah to find them.”

“This is bad, Evan.”

“Tell me about it. I don’t want to hurt Sarah, but I have to be with her again…”

“That’s the worst thing you could possibly do.” Bill blotted the grease from his hands with a heavy brown paper napkin, and then grabbed Evan’s arm. “Look. I know you don’t believe this shit, but think about it, huh? You’re scared to death of the water, and this woman can sing and make you go zombie and just wade right in? You think that doesn’t play along with every Siren legend ever? She’s got her claws in you now, and the next time, you may not walk out of the ocean alive. The Siren doesn’t just mate with men, Evan, she eats them, soul to skin.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Why do you think Sirens have lured sailors to crash their ships on the rocks? It’s not an accident, Evan. Read your history. Hell, read your literature. The Siren needs men. But she doesn’t want a husband. She needs us to breed. And she needs us to feed.” He punctuated his pronouncement by picking up his greasy burger and tearing off a large chunk of meat. As he chewed, Bill urged, “Tell me more about what she said to you last night.”

“It’s hard to remember, honestly,” Evan said. “It was
all like such a dream. I know she told me that now that she’d found me, she didn’t want to let me go.”

Bill choked back a laugh. “Yeah. I bet. She is going to suck you dry, man. Whether you believe she’s a Siren or just a girl on the make, they all share that part in common. She’s a woman. Tell me this—does she always show up at the same spot on the beach?”

Evan nodded. “Yeah, always right around the point. She swims in the bay just north of it. Why?”

“I’m curious,” Bill said. “I’d like to see it.”

“You’ve seen the point a million times.”

“No,” Bill said. “I want to bring my gear and take a dive out there.”

“And accomplish what?”

“Maybe I’ll find me a Siren of my own.” Bill grinned. “Maybe Ligeia’s got a sister.”

Evan rolled his eyes and finished his burger. “I’ll take you there tomorrow afternoon if you want.”

“Perfect,” Bill said. “And do me a favor? Try to keep it in your pants tonight—unless you’re at home? Take Sarah out for a date or something.”

Evan carried the black rubber flippers for Bill, who trudged down the beach with a black wet suit and an air tank flung over his shoulder. The sun blazed in the sky and there were a scattering of bathers dotted up and down the golden sand. It was a Saturday afternoon and the weather was perfect; if Delilah had been built a little closer to any other cluster of habitation, the beach would have been jam-packed. As it was, there were plenty of open spots for towels, though there was a gang of kids building sand castles right at the section of the beach Evan pointed out to Bill.

“That’s the place,” he said, looking back and forth between an invisible spot on the sand, and the black rock wall a hundred yards away. “We ended up, um…in the sand right about here both times, because she swam in from right out there.”

Bill walked past the beach towels and set down his equipment. Then he set himself down with a dull thud. “Damn,” he said, “that shit’s heavy when it’s not in the water.” He stripped off his shirt and checked a meter on the air tank. Bill pulled out some goggles and tubing from a knapsack. Then he stood back up and stepped into the wet suit.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find out there,” Evan said.

“Nothing, I guess. I just wonder if she’s got some kind
of visible ‘lair’ out there. Nobody’s ever really tried to hunt her down—everyone just talks about how she’s out there, somewhere…” Bill shrugged. “And anyway it’s a good excuse to use the equipment. I haven’t gone diving in weeks.”

“You’re not going to find anything down there, you know?” Evan said. “But if the hungry Siren decides to come after you when you find her white picket fence on the bottom of the ocean…what are you going to do?”

“Swim like hell,” Bill said. With that, he pulled the mask on over his face and trudged off, flippers flopping, into the water.

There was nothing quite like slipping below the ceiling of the ocean on a bright summer’s day. Why didn’t he do this more often? Bill smiled to himself as he kicked his long rubber pseudofeet and pushed against invisible walls with his arms to move out into the bay. Soon the rippled shadows of the surface waves evened out as the distance from air to sand grew deeper, and he moved through a blue-green window.

Fish scattered as he approached them, though some of the slower, larger ones only seemed to hang in place and watch sagely as he went by. The sand of the beach quickly gave way to a darker bottom littered with rock and fronds of seaweed. Bill kept the black shadow of the point’s base in his sights to the left. According to Evan, the woman had consistently appeared just off its edge, right about in line with where he swam now. He swam along the bottom slowly, looking for…who knew what. Bones? A deep hole?

He chuckled inwardly at this swim. At his core, Bill was a pragmatic, realistic guy. He was not the one you’d point to in a crowd and say, “Yeah, now there’s a guy who
believes in spooks.” But Bill had grown up with the deaths and they had happened too regularly to be written off as mere happenstance. This coastline had a long and desperate history, and the wild stories of a century ago were echoed in the events of the now, even if people didn’t put quite the same wild-eyed spin on it.

At least not publicly.

It wasn’t a huge surprise that Evan had never heard of Delilah’s Siren, because he hadn’t grown up here like Bill had. And…well…people didn’t talk openly about it. Nobody was going to admit that they believed in something so patently ridiculous. But those who lived through the ’80s in Delilah…they knew. They knew about the bodies. They knew about all of the missing-persons reports that had stacked up month after month, year after year, until one day after Delilah weathered a hurricane-like storm, those missing corpses had surfaced to dot the beach like the debris of broken homes that lined the streets in town.

Rotted arm bones, empty skulls, bodies only days or weeks in the watery grave—they had all washed ashore in the heart of the black scream of wind and torrential rain. They called it the worst storm California had seen in a hundred years. And certainly, where Delilah was concerned, the most gruesome.

The press blamed sharks for the deaths and a tornado-like churn of the bay for unearthing the ragged bodies of “drowned swimmers,” but Bill knew what shark teeth did to a body. The day after the storm had torn half the roof off his parents’ home, he’d been walking the beach to escape the nightmare the winds had left behind. And next to an old rotten piece of timber, he had stumbled across a dead man half buried in the sand of the shoreline. Bite marks covered his body, some of them showing
on skin bruised in a rainbow of past pain, some of them showing by omission—by the missing flesh—wet, pale pink meat gaping where the muscles had been ripped away completely from the bone. After he had gotten over the initial urge to puke, Bill had crept closer, scattering the sand crabs feasting on the stinking carcass to look closer at the grotesque thing that had once been a man. And he knew that it was no shark that had done this.

The purpling bruises on the man’s naked torso and thighs didn’t resemble the wide snout of a shark’s maw in any way. They looked to be just about the perfect size to have been created by a human mouth. Bill didn’t know of any other animal that left tooth marks like that. He still woke some nights with the sight of that mangled man in his mind. For a while, after the “Death Storm,” the Siren’s tale had been openly discussed in Delilah. The stories that went back to crazed sailors describing her with their dying breath were all rehashed. But, in the end, the stories died down as the townsfolk focused on the more immediate tasks of burying the dead and rebuilding their homes. Sometimes she was whispered about on the grammar school playgrounds, or in the backyards of Cub Scout leaders during den meetings. But those who believed didn’t risk the ridicule of those who came to Delilah after 1984, and the storm of the bodies. They kept that horrible superstition to themselves, stayed away from the beach at night and nodded to themselves when they read stories in the newspaper of another “missing person.”

When Bill had been a kid, the missing persons had all come home. And they hadn’t been pretty.

The ocean floor dropped off, and Bill suddenly hung in watery space midway between the blurry surface and the
dark ground. The shadows lengthened as he followed the slope and he realized that the drop-off also marked the edge of the far end of the point. He was out in truly open water.

Bill swam easily through the depths, enjoying the feeling of effortless motion. Scuba diving was a lot like free fall, he thought. You entered another world entirely, and gravity seemed to slip away.

After a few minutes, he turned back. The ocean floor seemed a never-ending field of rock and occasional sea frond. He decided to use the drop-off shelf as a reference; he’d swim out a couple hundred yards, swim back, move to his left a few yards and repeat the process. Not knowing what he was looking for, he wanted to crisscross the area well.

The second time he swam out, he saw nothing of interest besides occasional nosy, colorful fish. One fist-size puffer fish followed him for a long time, its almost-human blue eyes staring at him unblinking.

The third time he swam out, he began to tire of the exercise. Evan was right; this really was a fool’s errand. Even if there was a Siren, what made him think he could find her lair? What made him think he really wanted to? The image of the purpling skin of the dead naked man he’d found on the beach as a child came to mind and a shiver convulsed his spine.

He did not want to wash back ashore looking like that.

Bill was about ready to call it a day when he saw the shadow beneath him. The ocean floor had been slipping by as a murky blur of rock and plant life, with the occasional dart of fish…but all of a sudden the landscape turned dark. A black maw in the earth.

Bill kicked and turned around, circling the dark. Then he began to swim down, into the shadow. As he drew
closer, he could make out the outline of irregular, jutting shapes. There were rocks and plants masking his view, but as he touched the bottom and ran a hand along one twisted piece of timber, the object of his examination suddenly took clear shape.

He had found one of the wrecks of Delilah’s Hidden Bay. His hand touched the splintered, overgrown remains of the bow, while the open blackness that had drawn his attention was actually a gaping hole in the ship’s midsection. It had sunk and settled sideways, with its breach to the sky. The wreck looked older than the ocean itself; Bill would never have been able to tell it was a ship if he hadn’t put his hand on a piece of its timber. The ocean floor had closed in around it, digesting it a foot at a time, until every broken plank had been steadily overgrown and changed shape in a coating of plants and rock, silt and shells.

If Bill had been on land, he’d have whistled. Instead, he kicked his feet back off the silt and swam along the hidden lines of the wreck, nodding to himself as he saw where it emerged from the mud of the seafloor and where the seafloor grew around it.

He ducked under an overhanging rock—the last finger of the point that extended deep below the surface—and began to swim toward the hole in the ancient ship’s hull. He couldn’t tell what kind of boat it had once been, but it surely wasn’t a pleasure ship. Its hull was too broad, the curve of its mostly hidden deck too long. Maybe the finger of rock he’d just passed had been the death of this boat; a treacherous underwater knife to the heart. A ship in a storm that buffeted up against that?

Bill aimed straight for the center of the wide black hole in the boat, and was halfway through when something slipped through his legs. He felt the tickle before he saw
the cause; just a brief, seductive brush against the inside of his wet suit. He flipped around in the water and saw the cause.

The water around him filled with the shimmer of pink and purple translucent shapes. They hung and shifted around his body like a cloud.

A cloud of jellyfish. Big-ass jellyfish. One brushed across his head and then another trailed tentacles across his throat.

“Shit,” Bill mouthed. He gently moved his arms back and then swooshed them forward, trying to push his body slowly through the water without angering the cloud. They looked beautiful—ghostly explosions with arms that hung like alien wraiths in the water.

All you needed was a bunch of jellyfish stings and you could kiss that next cheeseburger at Cheeseburger Central good-bye. Good-bye for good. A school of large, poisonous jellyfish was death to a diver. Deceptive, slow-moving death.

Bill moved his flippers slowly, carefully, trying not to kick the school up and along with him. A globe of pinkish flesh slid around the side of his breathing mask, and Bill stopped breathing for that moment, eyes gone wide and scared.

He wasn’t afraid of
a
jellyfish. He was afraid of an
army
of jellyfish.

Carefully he kicked out his feet, and the black hole of the wreck drew away to become nothing but a shadow near the ocean’s floor again.

A handful of the poisonous school followed the swirl of his feet, but once he’d drawn a few yards away Bill kicked out in earnest, and in seconds had left all of the creatures far behind.
That’d be rich
, he thought.
Man found dead of jellyfish stings; priceless wreck discovered nearby.

Bill kicked his legs harder, aiming at the shore where he knew Evan waited. There were very few things he’d found that were worth risking your safety for.

Irrefutable proof of the legend of a deadly sea creature who chewed men up for fun was not one of them.