by John Everson
But then she was pulling herself up and onto him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and forcing him to support her full weight as she moved herself up and over him, drawing his eager manhood inside, and then forcing it out again, over and over, as her lips traveled up his shoulder and neck and ear with hot, moist, panting breaths and a song that refused, it seemed, to quiet.
Cauldry backed her against a stack of crates to help support her weight, and drove his point home again and again. Around them, a cloud of music hid the truth. Ligeia grinned with teeth too sharp for an innocent, and too cruel for a lover.
As Cauldry spent himself with a growing moan inside her, she echoed his passion with cries of her own, and then finished her crescendo by burying her teeth in his neck and chomping down as hard as she could. His flesh parted beneath her teeth like bread, and Ligeia chewed fast and deep, drinking like a glutton from the fountain she opened.
In Cauldry’s head, the crimson pain bloomed like a deadly alarm, but he couldn’t seem to move as she opened him up for the easy attack of death.
In a flash he remembered the bloody feet of Travers, and for a brief moment, the cloud of her music faltered in its suffocating hold over him. Cauldry saw Ligeia as she truly was—a thin, birdlike woman with an unnaturally long face. Her eyes were brown but shot through with iridescent yellow like a fish. Her nose looked hawkish, and her black hair kinked in ratty knots across bone-thin shoulders that supported tiny knobs of brown flesh; her nipples jutted from a chest almost boyish, while the smooth flesh of her crotch gleamed marble blue with the closeness of veins to its surface. Her thighs changed from the flesh of a woman to the blue-gray scales of a fish, and her feet looked black and gnarled and strange; the claws of a giant bird, not the delicate toes of a goddess.
When she smiled, Cauldry saw the pointed weapons of her teeth. They hungered for flesh, there was no question, he thought, as she leaned into him with desire and promises of protection. “Stay with me,” she said. “We’ll make babies together.”
“But I’m bleeding,” he coughed, and something warm leaked into his mouth as he spoke. He choked, and felt weakness coming on.
“I’ll take care of you if you promise to stay,” she whispered. Her eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, and Cauldry saw the pointy tip of her nose and chin and the sickly bleached tone of her skin and suddenly felt ill. He pushed her away from him. She reached out for his arm and he kicked her, three times, until she stumbled to the ground. With one hand, he held his neck in vain, trying to keep the pump of his blood inside. He threaded his way through the boxes to the corridor beyond.
“I am not going to die in the ship’s hold,” he promised himself.
Behind him, a scream and a song erupted almost simultaneously. This time the melody seemed tribal, guttural and fast, and Ligeia staggered out of the hold, gripping her belly where Cauldry had kicked her.
“I will love you and kiss you and keep you whole,” her voice sang amid the thunder from above. “And I will bed you and wed you and swallow you whole,” she continued, her voice growing again in exotic waves. “You will feed me and follow me now ’til the end of your days, and the end of your days is now.”
Cauldry felt her claws on his shoulders as he passed the captain’s cabin, and he turned into her and kneed her in the belly once more. But Ligeia did not let go. And suddenly the words in his head changed from understandable syllables to an ancient language that he couldn’t fathom. But its beauty stopped him. It was as if his limbs were suddenly cased in amber, as she sang and slipped her arms around him, once again pressing her naked flesh to his, and brought her face up to stare into his centimeters away. He could feel the faint fishy breath of her mouth against his lips, and her hideous eyes seemed to draw his into her, inside her, into a dark, heavy place where nothing moved, especially him. He couldn’t look away from those cold-blooded eyes, even when he felt her fingernails ripping like daggers at his back. He closed his eyes to block the sight of her and gather his bearings but as he did so the pain bloomed like a gunshot in his neck, and his eyes sprang back open to see the twists of Ligeia’s hair against his face as her teeth dug into his neck and struggled to bite deeper, deeper into his very core.
The music was gone now, and all Cauldry felt was the pain and the disappointment that the woman he had briefly coupled with—coupled in a way that had been more satisfying than any girl he’d ever bedded before—had only wanted one thing from him. And despite his enjoyment of it, what she wanted hadn’t been the sex. It had been his life.
And she had won it, he realized, as he slipped to his knees, and his head fell to rest against the cold, alien fish scales of her legs.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The air buzzed. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the air, exactly, but rather the space in Evan’s head. The space now occupied with four Red Hooks and a night full of laughing, reverberating, unintelligible bar noise. He blinked heavily and walked with a clumsy tread down the sidewalk from Delilah’s main drag into his bayside subdivision. He hoped the ten-minute walk would clear his head a bit by the time he got home; as much as Sarah drank and came home to him slurred and shaky, he hated to turn the same trick for her.
When he reached his driveway, the events of the morning suddenly came rushing back; he’d managed to blot it out for the past few hours of chatter. Now the chain of events replayed in his head and his chest tightened. Evan found himself looking into the shadows for the carcasses of seagulls.
But the grass and the drive were empty. He stepped up the walk and took a deep breath before pulling out his keys and unlocking the front door. He wondered if Sarah were home yet; he hoped so, because if she weren’t…well…he might be cleaning up after her at two A.M. after she upchucked the contents of last call in their bed. And he wasn’t sure he could handle that tonight.
The living room was still as he kicked off his shoes, grabbing at the door frame for balance. The house felt empty, and Evan groaned inwardly. He knew he’d been out too late himself, and if Sarah weren’t home…
He stepped into the kitchen and noted the time on the microwave. 12:43. Wherever she was, she ought to be calling it a night soon, he supposed. He walked down the hall toward their bedroom, pausing briefly to look into the empty hole he’d made of Josh’s room…God…just this morning. He could almost see the ghosts of the posters and plaques and CDs and crap that had remained untouched for over a year until today.
Time for a change, he thought. Way past time for a change.
Evan stripped off his shirt and threw it in the direction of the hamper as he walked through the bedroom on his way to the bath. Barely blinking back sleep, he pulled up the toilet seat and let go a seemingly endless stream before flushing and then clumsily squeezing toothpaste onto the brush that didn’t want to stand still in his hand.
Finally, after some of the beer had been expunged from his mouth, he dropped his jeans and underwear, and exited the bathroom, tossing the pants in the direction of his shirt. He slipped beneath the covers of the bed, and fully expected the room to spin into motion as soon as he lay back and stopped moving himself.
The pillow felt amazing beneath his head, but as he slipped his feet in and around beneath the sheets, he felt something cold and wet against his knee. “What the hell,” he murmured, and reached down with his hand to explore the wet spot. It was cold and very wet…and he could feel small bits of…something…in the midst of the damp.
Evan reached out of the bed and turned on the lamp on the end table. Then he threw back the covers and looked at the mattress.
The sheets were definitely wet—a dark stain covered the half of the bed where Sarah normally slept, and small bits of something silver glittered in the dull yellow light. He leaned closer and picked one up with his fingertips, holding it closer to the light.
A fish scale.
“Huh?” he said to himself.
Something moved in the bathroom, and Evan looked up, pulling the sheets up instinctively to cover himself. “Wh
o’s there?”
From the shadows of the bathroom he saw a hint of movement, and then she stepped out into the warm glow of the room, skin glimmering with beads of water.
Ligeia.
“You!” Evan gasped. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled, thinly, and brushed a wet strand of black hair from her face with her hand. “I’ve been waiting for you to come home,” she whispered. “You didn’t come to the beach, so I came to you. You’re late, you know.”
“I was out with a friend…” he began to explain, and then stopped himself. “You can’t be here,” he said. “My wife will be home soon, you have to go.”
“I am your wife now,” Ligeia said, stepping to the bed. Evan’s eyes were drawn to the lush promise of her breasts, swaying just inches from his chest, and he gulped involuntarily, trying to swallow his desire and remember his anger. His head buzzed with alcohol and desire and he couldn’t stop looking at her, here in his own place, here where for the first time, he could truly take her in his own bed, comfortably intimate, as if she were his wife.
She leaned to kiss him, and he almost gave in. But just as her lips brushed his, Evan put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. “I can’t,” he began.
“I am the mother of your child,” Ligeia whispered. “You can’t deny me this. I’ve been lonely for too long.”
With that, she began to sing, a low, sensual purr of a melody that sent a shiver up Evan’s spine. From the first note he felt his resolve slip, as his desire visibly grew. Ligeia dipped her head, encouraging him to look into her eyes, as her fingers slipped up his arms, soft and tentative, begging for him not to deny her.
In the back of his mind, a voice was screaming that he had to get rid of her; Sarah would be home any minute. The last thing he wanted was for her to find him in their bedroom, naked, with an equally nude goddess of a woman. That would end everything between them, no second chances. “Make her leave,” the voice pleaded, reminding him that he also needed to strip the bed and clean the sheets before Sarah returned.
But Ligeia’s song rippled and moved like honey over his heart, slowly smothering the voice of caution, and drawing out instead the beast inside. The memories of the ecstasy of their sex on the beach overcame him, and he couldn’t say no, regardless of the consequence. His mind fogged as his cock ached—physically, throbbingly ached—to be inside her. “Just this last time,” another voice whispered in the depths of her song. “Just once here, in your own bed.”
Evan’s breathing turned involuntarily to panting, as his legs trembled with the force of the need he felt. Now Ligeia’s song trilled higher—angelic and ethereal, into the clouds, and she pressed his arms with her elbows down, off her shoulders to hold her waist. “Oh God,” he gasped, as his hands slipped along the cool, wet curves of her body. He couldn’t stop, but instead drew her tight to him, pressing his need against her groin and cupping her ass in his hands, kneading her, needing her…
In seconds she was straddling him on the bed, and Evan blinked and cried at the emotions and sensation. With every movement of her hips he felt an electricity punch through his balls and up into his belly. She didn’t only touch him with her body, she seemed to seep through his pores to touch his very soul. The room dissolved into a haze and all he could see, all he cared about, was Ligeia. He would give up his house, his job, his wife, everything, for one more moment with her. Evan lost himself in the grinding, sinuous rhythm of their sex, running his palms from the smooth point of their union up across her belly and breasts and then back down her ribs. The velvet of her skin amazed him. He couldn’t touch her enough.
She never took her eyes from his. She never stopped with her gentle, heavenly song, the soft, whispery music flying above and embracing them invisibly like an angel, and then dipping into the dark, sensual depths of wicked hell to ripple at the back of his spine like a train rumble, almost beyond the range of hearing. She never stopped singing, and Evan never stopped thrusting, struggling with all of his being to draw himself out of his own body to live completely in hers. The golden flecks in her eyes hypnotized him and he felt himself crying inside at her beauty. He needed her.
Evan could feel her rhythm increasing, and her song grew more and more violent, a hissing, animal hunger dripping from every note. He knew she was close, and his own moment threatened to crest.
“Oh God, I want you, Ligeia,” he moaned. “I want all of you.”
“I…am…yours…forever,” she cried, and pounded her body to his. Evan screamed, oblivious to everything, and closed his eyes. As the waves of orgasm slowed, he gazed into her dark eyes and smiled, seeing her in a different light as the moment began to pass.
Now he saw that her face wasn’t quite so full and perfect, as he’d imagined just moments before. She still was beautiful in her postcoital exhaustion. Black rings of hair caught and stuck to her cheeks, and perspiration beaded on her forehead, and the long tip of her nose.
He ran his hands down her waist and noticed that she didn’t feel quite so silken smooth now. There were scars and bumps on her flesh, just as there were with any woman. She was no perfect Venus, regardless of the allure of her song and her desire. Still…he took a deep breath, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. Still, he realized, he wanted her with all of his heart. He loved Sarah, but this, this…amazing woman was something unlike any he’d ever been with. He wanted to continue to explore her mysteries. He wanted to know more about her desires. He wanted to know why she’d chosen him.
Ligeia smiled and brushed her lips over his, playfully nipping at his lips with her teeth. His hands slipped across her butt again and shook her a little, shifting his diminishing but still turgid flesh inside her. She giggled girlishly with her tongue still in his mouth, and his hands continued to her thighs, and then stopped.
Just below the cusp of her ass, her skin turned cold, brittle. For a moment, he imagined she was wearing thigh-high boots. But then his memory returned. She’d been fully nude when she’d pressed him to the sheets.
His fingers explored and slipped up and down over the divide of her flesh. Ligeia’s legs melded from hot skin, with an impossibly soft down of hair to an unyielding, cold span of…scales?
“What is that?” he asked, pushing her off him enough to stare down between their bodies to look at her legs.
He gasped. Her thighs glittered silver-blue in the low light of the bedroom, and as she slowly moved one knee up his leg, he saw that her whole thigh and calf were encased in scales. Her foot ended, not in toes, but in the wispy, translucent webbing of fins. As his eyes registered the reality of her alienness, she moved her legs against him, slipping her scales up his leg and then pulling them down to catch him with a sandpapery hint of abrasion.
“This is who I am,” Ligeia whispered in his ear. “This is what your child will be. This is what you can be, if you’ll only come with me tonight.”
The chill that suddenly caught the perspiration on Evan’s skin had little to do with the room temperature. He’d laughed at Bill’s fantastic stories, even when they rang true. He’d refused to consider whether he believed in them, though in the back of his head, he supposed he had begun to believe regardless of his cynicism. But now…
He rolled away from her, rejecting the strange sensual touch of her fish legs.
“You didn’t look like this before,” he complained.
“I didn’t let you see,” she whispered, and then let her voice trail into a humming note of song. She breathed notes of slow desire into the air between them and Evan felt his abhorrence instantly slip. At the same time, her face seemed to shine with a fleshier, erotic fullness, and her breasts suddenly looked fuller, and her legs…were pale moonlight flesh, creamy womanhood begging for a man to kiss them, inch by inch to where…
Evan blinked. “What are you doing to me?” he cried.
He shook his head and Ligeia stopped singing. Her voice grew hard. “I can be whatever you want me to be,” she said. “Whatever you need
. But you have to agree. You have to say you’ll be mine. I can make you happy forever, I promise you that.”
“I have a wife,” he protested. “I need to make her happy.” He shook his head again, and her legs again looked alien; silver-scaled nylons below a pale body that seemed to have shrunk from the fertile woman who had just mounted him with the foggy lens of dream porno. “She’ll be home soon,” he said, the realization blooming like ice in his bowels. “You can’t be here.”
“She won’t be coming home again,” Ligeia said. Her eyes held his, unblinking. The flecks of gold in the depths of brown suddenly struck Evan as fishlike. And cold. “I am your wife now. I will give you back the child that you’ve lost. Maybe even a son.”
“No, you can’t replace Josh,” Evan exclaimed, pushing himself from the dampness of the bed. He realized suddenly that the room reeked of fish. He could feel his cock shriveling as the smell crept inside him along with the knowledge of what he’d just lain with. A woman who wasn’t human. Something of the sea. Something that could change shape. Something untrue.
“You aren’t my wife,” he insisted.
“The woman who used to live here will not be coming home again,” Ligeia said, and stood up on the opposite side of the bed from him. She stepped to the edge of the halo of their dim bedside lamp, scales shimmering weirdly as she walked around the foot of the bed to approach him again. She seemed smaller than he remembered, more wiry. More pointy and…somehow…coldly, immorally cruel.
The import of her words finally sunk in, and Evan asked, “What do you mean?” His heart suddenly spasmed as he thought of the wet spot in his bed, the wet spot that had been there before he’d gotten into bed. “What did you do to Sarah?”
Ligeia put her arms out, and smiled with a flash of white in the dark room. Her teeth looked sharp, sharklike in the shadows. “Come here, darling,” she whispered. “I’ll sing for you and everything will be all right, forever and ever.”
With that, her words slipped into the wrenching crescendo of a love song. The first notes sent a shimmer of lethargy up Evan’s back, but this time he was mentally prepared.
