by John Everson
“Damnitall,” Buckley hissed. He lifted his hand and saw that it was smeared in the blood of his crew. He wiped it violently against his pants and stepped away from the men, a chill running up his spine.
“Damnitall,” he said again. Anger bloomed in his heart. Buckley was not a man with a big heart. Some said he wasn’t a man with a heart at all. But he valued strong men who were loyal and worked hard. These were good men. And they had perished because of his weakness. Because of his need for the dangerous woman who had shared his cabin these past weeks.
“Damnitall,” he whispered, and this time the exclamation brought tears from the corner of his eyes. The rocks wept. “I will kill you, Ligeia,” he whispered. And with that, he began to quicken his pace, moving around the crates of liquor with the intent to surprise a deadly killer who lurked somewhere behind them. His fear at what surprising her would mean had fled. He didn’t fear for his life any longer.
No matter how good she had made his nights feel over the past few days and weeks, now he only wanted one thing.
He wanted Ligeia dead.
Chapter Forty
The ocean was black. It surrounded him like a heavy leaden cape, threatening to close in. To smother him. Crush the breath from his feeble lungs until there wasn’t a hint of gasp left in his chest. It crept close and then darted away, a stealth assassin who, despite his quiet threat, was clearly visible everywhere. And creeping closer.
Evan blinked back his fear of the black with a thick throat. In his ears, Bill tried to offer reassurance.
“You’re doing great, man. We’re under. You’re breathing good. All we have to do is swim a little ways down, out to the edge of the point. You can do this.”
Evan didn’t think he could do this. The panic had returned in a big, bad way. His breath began to come in short, sharp gasps as he thought of where he was. In the water. Beneath the water. Covered by the water. Crushed by the…
“Evan, calm down, man. Slow the breathing. You’re going to hyperventilate. Move your arms. Follow me.”
Evan closed his eyes for a moment, blotting out the claustrophobia of the dark water. When he reopened them, he trained the faint light of his headlamp on Bill’s feet, and redoubled the kicking of his flippers. He knew his friend was right. He had to focus on the task at hand and not let the fear own him.
But…
The water.
Was.
Everywhere.
Pressing against him.
Trying to find its way into his mouth.
Trying to smother him.
To kill him.
“Evan—fucking follow me,” Bill’s voice yelled suddenly in his ear. “Think of Sarah!”
The thick suffocation that surrounded his body parted, a little, at the light he played upon it, and Evan focused on the kick of Bill’s flippers just a few feet ahead of him. “Follow,” he whispered in his mask. “Follow.”
“Yes,” Bill’s voice echoed in his ears. “Just follow. Your suit will protect you from the water. From the Siren…that’s another story. I need you for that, Evan. I don’t know what I’m dealing with here, and you do. You know her. You have to help me.”
Evan heard the slight admission of fear in his friend’s voice and realized, despite all of his pronunciations of “Siren” before, that his friend had never really believed in the existence of Ligeia. What he’d thought Evan had been doing, he didn’t know. Why he had kept insisting that this liaison was one with an immortal, he didn’t know. Maybe Bill had simply been trying to give him an “out” for the expression of lust that Bill knew Evan had needed.
Or maybe he just liked to bullshit, assuming he’d never have to face the consequence.
Either way, they were here now, fifty feet below the ocean’s waves, swimming toward the woman who Evan knew was more than a woman. She looked enough like a human woman to pass a cursory glance. But he knew that she was more than that.
This woman could breathe beneath the waves and kill men with a song.
This woman was deadly.
And they were swimming toward the very center of her power. An old shipwreck rotted with one hundred years of neglect on the bottom of the bay.
“There it is,” Bill said quietly. “This is the ship I saw the last time I was down here. Is this where she took you?”
Evan trained the yellow glow of his headlamp on the green-coated hull of an old shipwreck slowly emerging from the shadows before them. The boat was buried half in the muck of the bay, but Evan recognized it instantly as the place he had escaped from this morning.
“That’s it,” he acknowledged. “That’s where Ligeia lives. That’s where Sarah is.”
The admission gave him a new energy, and suddenly the feeling of claustrophobia receded as in its place, the anger grew.
She was there. Just ahead. It seemed like a long time since he’d been here last, and at the same time, just a little while before. Evan fingered the tube of the speargun at his side and a slow grin lit his face.
“You’re going to die, bitch,” he whispered, forgetting that Bill heard his every word.
“Thatta boy,” Bill answered, and kicked harder in the dark to descend toward the gaping black hole that their headlights defined in the ship’s hull. “Let’s go get her.”
Evan followed Bill’s legs down toward the ocean floor, but when they neared the rotted hull of the old ship, Evan slowed, and then broke away from Bill’s lead.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and kicked his feet and pushed out his palms, pushing himself close to the bottom. He looked out at the hole in the ship and tried to imagine the trajectory of his escape this morning.
“What are you doing?” Bill’s voice asked.
“She’s down here,” Evan said, and his friend didn’t have to ask what he meant. Instead, Bill turned and trained his headlamp on the ocean floor, above where Evan swam, helping to illuminate a wider surface area.
The cold white of her dead flesh was not too hard to find, even in the wide span of the ocean. Evan had known Sarah’s body rested near the hole in the hull, and once he began looking, in seconds his spotlight had found her resting place, trailed up the cool flesh of her arm, and then the pale pink hole that showed an unnatural entry to her neck. His light found the open, frightened pale blue orbs of her dead eyes, staring up still toward the sky she would never see again.
In his ear, he heard Bill’s intake of breath upon seeing the body.
“I told you she was here,” Evan said quietly.
“Let’s take care of the reason for that,” Bill answered, “and then we’ll take her home.”
Evan nodded, but still he pushed himself lower in the water, down to the ground. He swam inches from Sarah’s corpse, and pressed his face-masked eyes to hers. “I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t enough, but it was all he could say.
Then he looked up at Bill, still hanging just a few feet away. Evan pointed toward the dark opening in the broken ship’s hull, and nodded his head in the dull light of his friend’s flash. “Let’s go,” he agreed.
Vicky Blanchard couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was because she was afraid of having another nightmare thanks to Evan. She tossed and turned in her bed, alternately kicking the sheets aside, and then pulling them back to hide in the fetal position beneath their warmth. Something about Evan’s situation was really bothering her. She felt twitchy; and when Vicky felt that jumpy feeling in her legs and her gut, it usually meant one of two things: either she’d drank one too many cups of caffeine, or her sixth sense was warning her that something bad was about to happen.
And Vicky hadn’t had any coffee today.
Giving out one long, exasperated sigh, Vicky got back out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. She wished her head would either work in full “psychic” mode, or give it up entirely. She hated these feelings that she couldn’t do anything about until it was too late, and the reason for her unease became apparent. When they grabbed her like this, there would be no rest until the reason wa
s revealed.
Donning a light jacket, she left the house and decided to take a walk. Perhaps the exertion would tire out her mind so that she could finally get some rest.
She headed away from town, and in a few minutes had passed the din of The Sand Trap bar on Fifth Avenue. For a minute, she toyed with the idea of stepping inside, but she really wasn’t in the mood to be social right now, and didn’t want to run into one of her patients trying to drown their problems. There was nothing worse than playing bedside confessor to a drunk.
Vicky passed by the bar and stepped up the path of the dunes until she suddenly could see the black sliver of the bay ahead. She shivered in the cool breeze blowing in off the water, and quickly shuffled back down the sand, kicking off her shoes once she reached the flatter, harder packed beach.
Just ahead, she thought she saw a movement down by the water, and she slowed her step. She didn’t want to surprise anyone who didn’t want to be seen. But as she approached Gull’s Point, she realized that nobody was there. Maybe it had been the shadows of a cloud overhead, or the scuttle of a night bird.
Vicky stopped just short of the long, rocky finger of the point, and stared down its silent length and into the gentle surf beyond.
She considered Evan’s stories of meeting a woman here, night after night. A woman who seemed to be of the water. A woman who could have passed as the legendary Siren of Delilah. She shivered at the thought and shook her head.
No.
Vicky did not believe in folklore. The facts behind such stories had more to do with the needs of the people telling them than they did of any objective reality. She wondered if Evan’s delusion were a way for him to rationalize an infidelity, or if, and this is what she truly feared, that his fear of the water had generated some kind of suicidal fantasy that was ultimately going to end with a police report and a file photo of Evan’s corpse, facedown in the water?
She picked up a shell and tossed it into the bay. The breeze was picking up again, and after a few minutes she turned away from the water and began to walk back toward town.
If she had arrived at the point just a few minutes sooner, she might have seen Evan and Bill descending into the dark waves, beneath where her discarded seashell sank. Vicky’s sixth sense was definitely working…but it simply hadn’t woken her to action soon enough.
Behind her, and beneath the waves, Bill and Evan silently entered a sunken ship.
Chapter Forty-One
June 12, 1887, 1:57 A.M.
Captain Buckley felt the burn in his chest and couldn’t have sworn whether it was from his anger or his fear. His hands felt cold and brittle as he rubbed the circulation into them and stepped quietly around the boxes of the storeroom. His feet slid in something slippery on the floor. He knew without looking that it was a pool of the blood of his crew.
Damnitall. His crew. He had looked the other way at her first kill, and then her second. He had aided her as she began to eat her way through his men. But he’d never thought she’d take all of them. He’d never thought that she’d take Travers or Reg. The thought of that made him angry, but also chilled. Any woman who could take down Reg…was no woman.
Buckley moved back out of the hold and through the empty crew’s bunks. Jensen and Cauldry would never hide a fish beneath the other’s pillow here again, he thought.
He stopped at his own cabin and verified that the room remained populated only by the dead. She hadn’t slipped back in here after he’d walked past to wait. Buckley pulled the cabin door shut behind him and continued his quiet, deliberate walk forward.
The ship strained against the wind and waves, and every few steps the captain stopped and held the wall for support until the old boat steadied. He passed the galley, and stared into the shadows at the corner of the room. She was not there. Nobody was there. Buckley continued on down the narrow passageway that was the spine of his ship. He knew this wood by heart; his feet had walked these planks every day at every hour, for too many years to count. But now, in this moment, his ship felt alien to him. Instead of a mother, a symbiotic protector, it felt like a killer. Something waited for him in its hidden depths. Something cruel.
He opened the door to a storage compartment and saw nothing but coils of rope there. There were precious few places belowdecks where someone could hide, and he had nearly reached the end of the options. Buckley ducked his head below a beam and stepped into the smaller hold at the front of the ship. He didn’t expect that Ligeia would be here; it was just a room that arched up from the ship’s keel to the triangular point of the longest stretch of the upper deck. It wasn’t much good for storage, so all manner of odds and ends collected here, from broken crates to fishing nets, strewn along the narrowing, claustrophobic walls like traps. Buckley stepped carefully through the mess, his lamp flickering like a ghost against the stained and blackened wood.
Something moved the wrong way in the shadows on the wall.
Buckley froze.
A bucket set just at the edge of the dark fell over and rolled down the planks to rest at the toe of his boots. The captain drew in a sharp breath, but held his ground. “Ligeia,” he said quietly, in the most steely of voices. “I know what you’ve done. Come out, please.”
A shadow slipped past one of the fishnets hanging from the wall at the narrowest section of the hull. Buckley saw something flash, cat’s-eye luminescent, in the dark. He edged toward where the motion had been. “Ligeia,” he said. “Stop.”
A shuffle just ahead. Wood scraping wood. And a hollow clatter as something fell from the wall to echo on the floor. Buckley took a chance and leaped forward at the noise. His stomach caught in his throat as he took the leap, praying that his fingers would connect with flesh, and not a net full of hooks.
Instead, he connected with nothing. His hands grasped empty air, and Buckley stumbled forward off balance, before one hand touched the rough-hewn planks of the hull. And then something sharp and cool slipped along the back of his neck.
Buckley drew in a sharp breath and flipped around. The glow of his lamp reflected off the rusted metal of an old hook dangling from a rolled length of fishnet propped against the wall and crooked at its top as it reached and tried to exceed the ceiling.
He grumbled in disgust and pushed past the hook back out to the passageway. She wasn’t in the storage room. She wasn’t in the hold. Could she have decided to make a run for it, now that her meals were done here? Could she swim to shore from this far in the ocean? Did the distance matter to one such as her?
Buckley began to walk toward the galley. He’d have to go back above deck and see if she’d hidden out in the wheelhouse or some such. But he doubted it. She was gone, the wicked bitch. And she’d taken his crew with her.
He stepped forward just as the ship shook, propelled first up one watery swell and hanging almost sideways before getting sucked back down into the trough of its negative force. He had to get back up top and take the wheel again, Buckley realized, or very soon, it wouldn’t matter if Ligeia had eaten his men. Because if there were no ship…
Movement again, just ahead. The flash of skin in the dark. The swirl of black hair in black shadow.
“Ligeia,” he breathed. She was here. She hadn’t gone above. Buckley hurried after her. It was ironic that all he could see of her in the dark was the sheen of her black hair, the darkest part of her, as it caught the faint ray of his lamp and then moved, twining in the air as she ran, always just out of range.
She darted through the crew’s quarters and he saw the white skin of her fingers pass like a ghost’s over the crate nearest the entryway to the hold before all hint of her disappeared to the left of the entrance.
“Ligeia,” he said for the fourth time as he stepped over the threshold. “I demand that you come out of there at once.” He stepped cautiously into the hold once more, wishing that he still held his lantern.
A hand reached around his neck from behind, holding his chin in a vise grip. “Ah, my vile, brutal captain,” a voice whisper
ed in his head. “You cannot demand anything of me, I’m afraid. But I have a lot to demand from you.”
Buckley started to turn but something sharp dug into his neck and Ligeia’s voice gritted, “Don’t move, my sweet. Or we’ll be mopping your life off the floor and hanging you on a hook. I’ve gotten quite good at that, as you can see. But one can always improve one’s technique.”
“Release me,” Buckley demanded.
Ligeia ran a daggerlike fingernail along the soft underside of his chin and whispered again, “You don’t hold the chains anymore, my captain. I do. This time, the chains are on you.”
There were some things that Captain James Buckley I’ll could swallow. He could take the guff of a crewman one step over the line. He would dig into his wallet and pay the tariffs imposed by the port authority though he knew they were simply skimming half of his toll off the top for their own pockets. They knew what he carried in the hold and he knew they knew. He didn’t fight them, simply paid them off, a gentleman’s blackmail.
But what James Buckley (don’t ever call him Jim) could not swallow, was the threat of a woman besting him. That’s why, when self-preservation would suggest that he remain still and hear her terms, Buckley did exactly the opposite. As the tenor of her threat sunk in, the image of his men hung naked and bleeding filled his head, and Buckley lashed backward with the point of his elbow, catching Ligeia somewhere in both the flesh and the ribs—perhaps a breast?—at the same time as he threw the rest of his body forward, down to the floor to roll between the crates until he could come back to his feet in a crouch.
“We can talk,” he said, breathing hard, “but you will not hold me.”
A rope slipped under his chin from behind and pulled tight, eliciting a gasp from the captain. He gripped at its rough threat and tried to pull it looser, but it only cinched tight.
“Tell me that again,” Ligeia’s voice whispered as sweet as honey in his ear. Honey with blood in it.
His answer was a gasp.
