by John Everson
“She hasn’t once tried to bite me,” Evan suggested, smirking.
Bill flipped to his third mark and continued.
“‘The chosen habitat of the Siren is the rarely trafficked rocky cliffs near the sea. Here, she is free to commune with the birds and fish by day, while at night she can lure in the unwary male passing by on the water without risk of discovery. The cool air of the sea also aids in preserving the flesh of the victim for her to feed upon longer. Because of the solitary nature of the Siren, she often extends her lure of a man over many days or weeks before ultimately bringing him in for the kill. In this way, she learns the ways of the world through their conversation, and alleviates some of the loneliness of her natural condition, living on the edge of the world. But once her hunger has grown too great, her instinct takes over and one night, the man finds himself the surprised recipient of her sharp and very deadly teeth. She will sing him to sleep one final time, and then drain his blood in the night without compunction. No matter how her tears and words display affection and sorrow, in the end the Siren is a creature without emotion, and she kills without regret.’”
“They paint a pretty foul picture of the old girl,” Evan observed, emptying his glass in a final swig. “Though again, I don’t see the connection. The ancients believed in a lot of weird creatures. All you’ve told me is they believed in a woman who lived by the sea and ate men after luring them to her arms with a good tune. Sometimes she looked like a bird, sometimes a fish, and sometimes neither. And, apparently, there are really only three of them, since they were depicted as three sisters much of the time. So are you really going to tell me that one of the three ancient wonders of the world traveled across the ocean and up the California coast to haunt this backwater town? Why?”
Bill smiled. “Come on, Evan—open your mind a little bit. Do you really suppose that after all this time, those three sisters remained the same? Even gods and goddesses have children and grow old and sometimes even die. There are later myths that talk about the children of the Sirens, and their children’s children. The Sirens spread from the ancient circle of the Tyrrhenian Sea to sing on the coast of Capri and Capo Peloro. There are stories of a Siren who lured ships to crash on the rocks of Dalkey Island near the Irish city of Dublin in the 1600s. If you pull a detailed map of the European and Asian coastlines from the 1700s, you’ll find a number of circled warning spots where captains were cautioned to keep their ships far from shore, lest they be lured in to their deaths from the song of the stones.”
“I haven’t noticed those on any modern maps,” Evan suggested dryly.
“As if,” Bill said. “Ask your average dipshit if they believe in UFOs and aliens and they’ll probably say yes, and tell you how their mom or their sister saw one last year. But if you ask them about a Siren, they’d probably think you meant the sound on a fire truck. I wouldn’t take that to mean anything but that the American populace is a crowd of foolish sheep that follow the fad of the moment, and Sirens haven’t exactly been a fad in the past couple hundred years.”
Evan shrugged. “Fad or not, you still haven’t given me any reason to believe that Delilah has a resident Siren, never mind whether or not I’ve been sleeping with her.”
Bill nodded. “Okay, here’s the thing. You know as well as anyone that Delilah started out as a port town. Kind of a renegade port town, if the truth be known, because we’ve always catered to those ships bringing in something that might just be a little left of the law. In Prohibition, this was one of the biggest rumrunner ports of the California coast. But even before that, the captains that came through here were often bringing in cargo that no other big-city port would touch. The first reports of the Siren cropped up more than two hundred years ago. You can look them up yourself, if you want to go down to the library and dig through the old local history books. There are a number of stories of ships that went down on the rocks just off Gull’s Point. And for nearly every shipwreck story that was documented, there is a story of a crewman who survived and told the tale of hearing a beautiful song that came from the point, and of a woman who beckoned them onward through the night fog to their deaths.” Bill paused. “Well, the deaths of everyone on board but the poor slob who survived to tell the tale, anyway.”
“I’m sure half the harbors in the world have some ghost story to tell of a lost ship that went down in the harbor,” Evan countered.
“Sure they do,” Bill said. “But most don’t have the same story recur again and again and again over dozens of years. And Delilah—she has a lot of hulls lying at rest out there in the bay. But after a long stretch of those stories, they suddenly quieted about a hundred and fifty years ago. The last ship that went down in the 1800s was the Lady Luck, a rumrunner up from the coast of Mexico on its way to Oregon. They went down, all hands, during a bad storm. But while there were no survivors of that ship, there were those on the shore who swore that they heard a song on the waves of the storm that night, and saw strange lights from the ship before she went down. And there are several reports from people all the way into the town that the cracks of thunder that night were punctuated by screams. Nobody knows what happened to the Lady Luck other than that she never docked that night in Delilah. And after that, there were no reports of a Siren again off the rocks of Gull Point. Not until the 1980s.”
“So what changed?”
It was Bill’s turn to shrug. “Nobody knows. But then one night, someone reported hearing strange singing while they were out on the beach after dark, and the next day, someone from the town was discovered dead on the beach with their throat torn out. Nobody connected the two until the same story turned up a few weeks later—someone called the town hall complaining that an opera singer was practicing somewhere down near the water and keeping them awake, and the next day, another body was found lodged in the rocks of the point, its neck and chest and thighs chewed as if it had been found by hungry dogs.”
“Maybe they were.”
“Maybe. And that was the theory the police put out in the media. But some of the old-timers remembered the stories that their grandparents had handed down about Delilah in the old days. And the stories sounded pretty familiar. They kept their ears out, and started putting two and two together as a string of deaths occurred down by the point. And they noticed when, after the beach started getting some more police attention, the bodies stopped turning up too, but the disappearances continued. And someone always seemed to remember hearing music the night before a disappearance was reported.”
Evan felt a shiver crawl across his spine. “So what brought her back after more than a hundred years of silence?” he asked.
Bill shook his head. “Nobody knows. The beach was quiet for a long, long time, and then all of a sudden people started disappearing there again. And there was always talk of music.”
“Well,” Evan suggested, “I’ve heard plenty of music sung by a sexy woman, but I haven’t disappeared.”
“No,” Bill agreed. “But others have. You saw one of them a couple weeks ago.”
“She probably just practices out on the beach,” Evan said. “She might be in a band or…”
Bill held up a hand again. “Spare me,” he said. “She has no home and she’s not practicing. Face it, Evan, you’ve been screwing the Siren of Delilah and, for whatever reason, she’s let you live up to now. But…now she’s angry. You told her you didn’t want to see her anymore. How do most women respond to that?”
“Not well,” Evan admitted. “Not that I have a lot of experience with that.”
“Not well,” Bill restated. “Well, I do have a lot of experience with it, and I can tell you…bitches don’t like the word good-bye.”
“Thank you for that brilliant bit of ghetto philosophy,” Evan said. “Though there’s another wrinkle to it all that I haven’t told you yet.”
Bill raised an eyebrow. “Oh good,” he said. “There’s more?”
Evan nodded. “When I broke up with her on Thursday night, she told me she was pregn
ant.”
Bill snorted into his beer, sending a white froth of foam up the side of the glass. “Tell me you’re joking,” he gasped, after pounding the glass to the table. “You wore protection, right? I mean…you’re not stupid?”
“How do you wear protection in the ocean?” Evan asked miserably.
“Oh, buddy,” Bill said. “There’s nothing like a woman scorned. Nothing but a woman who’s knocked up and scorned.” He shook his head and lifted his glass, in preparation to drain it.
“You’re fucked, man. Totally, fully, fucked.” And with that, he emptied his beer. Evan followed his lead and slammed the empty to the table.
“Okay,” he said. “You know it all about women and mythological sea creatures. What do I do now?”
Bill’s lips twitched as if considering one answer, discarding it, hatching another and discarding that one too. Finally he said, simply, “Stay away from the water?”
“The gulls didn’t attack me near the water,” Evan reminded.
Bill nodded. “I know. But I didn’t think you’d want to hear the other answer.”
“Which is?”
“Run like hell. Otherwise—and I’m totally serious about this—I think she’s gonna try her best to kill you.”
Chapter Thirty-One
June 10, 1887, 11 P.M.
The Lady Luck tossed on the sea like a cork, bobbing up and down in the waves without warning or rhythm. The waves were wild and high. On deck, holding fast to the wheel, Captain Buckley barked orders to what remained of his crew. He hadn’t heard from Travers since the first mate had knocked on his cabin, but he had no time to consider the absence. Buckley yelled to Cauldry and Jensen to take down sails, batten hatches and stow nets before they washed overboard, while he tried to follow the troughs of the storm with his rudder and keep them rolling with the march of the storm, rather than against it.
Overhead, the thunder crashed with the report of a cannon, just a second behind the jagged flashes of electric blue that cut across the roiling black clouds. The rain pelted the deck of the ship without mercy, and Buckley shivered at the cold trail of tears from the sky that streamed down his back. “Ah, Ligeia,” he murmured. “I could use your song now.”
Cauldry staggered his way across the deck, and grabbed at the mast to hold himself steady. “We’ve stowed everything we can, Captain.”
Buckley nodded. “Get below, then, and see if you can find what’s become of Travers.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” the younger man said, and then zigzagged his way back across the deck to throw himself down the ladder belowdecks. It would be the last time the captain saw him alive.
Cauldry slicked the water off his hair with his hands and shook it off on the deck. He shivered and willed his teeth to stop chattering. This was one of those rare nights when he hated being at sea. The ship was strong, but still in danger. There was no telling whether the waves would rise so high and hard that they rolled the Lady Luck over, drowning her and her crew. The captain’s struggle to guide her with the tiller was something of a token battle; in the end, the ship would either thread its own way through the waves, or perish. Human hands helped very little in the battle when the hands of Hades reached out of the sky to buffet them like a child’s toy.
Cauldry stepped through the empty galley to the corridor that led to their bunks. He passed the captain’s chamber and stepped into the crew’s quarters. “Travers,” he yelled. “Where are ya, man?”
The ship creaked and moaned in answer, but Travers didn’t reply. Cauldry shook his head and frowned. It wasn’t at all like the first mate to disappear in the heart of a storm. That was all-hands-on-deck time, and he’d been the one to roust the captain. So where had he gone since? There had been entirely too many disappearances from the Lady Luck over the past two weeks. A chill spiked through his belly at the thought. What if Travers had suffered the same fate as Rogers and Nelson?
He stepped into the dark passageway that led to the hold, and the ship lurched and rolled. Cauldry grabbed at the wall and tried not to fall. When the deck leveled off, he pushed himself onward, and stepped into the cargo hold.
“Travers?” he called again. This time, his call was answered by a creak. “Travers, are you in here? Are you okay?”
Again, the creak. It sounded like a rusty seesaw, slowly slipping from one side up to the next. Cauldry couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from, but it was unusual; normally, the hold was so quiet your voice disappeared into its dark confines as if muffled like a blanket. So the steady creak felt wrong. He threaded his way through the stacks of wooden crates, blindly following the sound, trying to get to the center of the steady sound.
Reeeeee-Rawwwwwwww. Reeeee-Rawwwww.
It seemed to be coming from just ahead of him, and Cauldry rounded the corner of one tall stack of wooden boxes and listened. “It should be here,” he said to himself. The sound should be coming from right about here.
He stood still, and listened again for the sound. Something dripped on his forehead, and he wiped it off absently. The boat apparently was leaking through the deck; not surprising given the force of the storm. The drip came again, along with the creaking sound.
The sound felt like it were right on top of him. He looked up, and something warm splattered him right in the eye. He wiped it away frantically, and then looked up once again.
“Oh my God in heaven,” Cauldry gasped. Above his head, ten bare toes hung limp, droplets of blood hanging like the residue of red rain from each of their tips. Cauldry followed the toes up to the ankles and calves and thighs and the red gash where the man once had shown he was a man; he was a man no longer. From that ravaged private place, a dozen streams of blood trailed down hairy legs to reach the toes, which dripped on Cauldry’s face. At that second it clicked that the water in his eyes hadn’t been water at all, and Cauldry stepped back and swore.
Then he looked up again and saw the face of his first mate, eyes open in seeming startlement, staring blindly at the ceiling of the hold, where the rope wound around a heavy wooden beam before cinching tight to the dead man’s wrists.
The man was naked, but his body still seemed almost clothed given the thick covering of blood that coated its bare skin. The blood seemed to be coming from the man’s neck and middle, largely, though there were gored pits on its chest where nipples had once resided as well.
“What happened to ya, man?” Cauldry whispered. Travers had always been a solid man, as far as Cauldry was concerned, and a fair first mate. He trusted him far more than he ever had the captain. His heart turned sour at the idea that somebody could have been cruel enough to torture the man this way.
Something scuffed against the floor nearby, and it suddenly occurred to Cauldry that whoever had done this to Travers was likely still nearby; after all, the captain and Jensen had both been up top for the past hour with him.
He began to back away from the center of the hold, quietly retracing his steps while looking back and forth in the gloom, struggling to make out any shadow that might be the reflection of danger. He kept backing up, while watching the gentle swaying of the first mate’s body as it followed the lolling motion of the ship. He backed right up into something soft, and as he flipped around to see what it was, he realized it was not only soft, but warm. He realized this as fingers ran up his arms and cinched around his back just as he came about to face it.
It was a woman. A nude, beautiful woman with breasts of ivory, and lips that looked rich and full, and red as the fall of Travers’s blood. Her arms encircled him before he’d even taken in her features, and as he opened his mouth to protest she whispered, “Shhhhhh,” and began to sing.
“What did you do to Travers?” Cauldry asked, as her song washed over him like a drug. “Who are you?”
Her hands ran up his ribs and massaged his chest through the cold, wet shirt. Then they slipped over the angry stubble of his cheeks, and she leaned in to plant a soft, sensual kiss on his lips.
“Don’t
be afraid,” she whispered in a pause from the seductive melody. “If you can satisfy me, I’ll set you free.”
Her hands moved from his face to his trousers, and Cauldry frowned in confusion; she had killed their first mate, but she wanted to bed him? What was this about?
But then the sweet promise of the song filled his head and all he could think about was the warmth of her touch and the scent of her. After spending so long at sea, the touch of a woman trumped all other concerns, and her song seemed to crowd out any fear from his brain. Suddenly the hold reeked of the pheromones of sex, and he felt himself growing aroused at her attentions. His pants dropped to the deck; she lifted the shirt from his body. He shivered with cold and she wrapped herself around him, breathing hot in his ear, “I’ve needed a real man like you for too long.”
He grinned at the compliment as her fingers encircled his erection and tugged to underline her point. He lost all rationality, leaning in to take her tongue between his lips as his hands kneaded at the soft warmth of her ass. As his fingers slipped down, he felt the warm, smooth skin of her upper thighs turn from a sweaty heat to the cool hardness of something else…something slippery and smooth but impenetrable; it didn’t give way under his kneading like her ass, it felt almost as if he were grasping…a fish.
