Siren (21 page)

He stumbled forward a few steps but didn’t quite make it to the ground where dozens of seagulls lay freshly interred. Instead, something hard slammed into the back of his head, and he went down. He had a faint glimpse of a white rock and two eyes glinting yellow in the moonlight and teeth as sharp as a shark’s before the night overtook him, and Evan slipped away with an angry song coiling around his neck like an invisible noose. For a split second he saw Sarah’s face superimposed over the feral edges of Ligeia’s and his true heart cried and struggled to ask the Siren, “What did you do?” But his lips never quite managed to open before the night came down.

She swam in a dark blue ocean. She didn’t worry about breath; somehow it didn’t seem necessary. But there was urgency in her tread. Vicky kicked hard with her feet and pushed with her hands. She needed to find its home. It was important that she got there before it knew she was near. The dark timbers of the old shipwreck came slowly into view amid the murky turquoise of the depths of the sea. This was the place, she knew in her heart. Looking behind her, she only saw the faint disturbance in the water left by her feet. Vicky kicked harder and swam toward the old wreck. Evan needed her.

The deck of the old wreck was black with age and dark green with the anchors of algae and seaweed that trailed and shivered in the waves like a mirage. Vicky swam past the old captain’s wheel, looking for a way inside. Below her, she saw a dark rectangle carved in the rotten boards of the deck, and her eyes lit. Maybe there. She kicked and turned in the sea, darting toward it. But just as she reached the opening into the depths of the ship an explosion pushed her back. A hundred silver shapes leaped from the blackness of the ship’s belly to dart past her in the water. Vicky flailed in the waves, struggling to hold her position and avoid being hit by one of the foot-long torpedoes that streamed out of the hidden heart of the old wreck.

Then the school of frenzied silver bullets was past, and Vicky began to move again toward the hole. She nosed in and grabbed the edges of the rotten wood, pulling herself down.

That’s when something grabbed her by the hair.

Something yanked.

And yanked hard.

An explosion of bubbles sprayed from Vicky’s mouth, and she turned to see the glowing eyes of another woman, one who had fins for ears and fangs for teeth. A woman who pulled her close with a sudden grip on her shoulders.

And it didn’t feel like the stranger wanted a welcoming embrace. The creature’s mouth opened like a trapdoor, wider than any human should be able to open its jaws. Feral teeth gleamed in the dull light and threatened to fasten like a snake’s snap on Vicky’s shoulder.

Instead, the psychiatrist kicked with her feet and caught the creature in the chin. “Ha!” she laughed, twisting in the water. She kicked and swam hard toward the surface.
Take that.

She didn’t get far. Needles of pain lanced into her ribs and Vicky felt her flight cease, as the Siren wrapped its cold body around her like a leaden blanket and dragged her down to the cold muck of the sea bottom. She felt the seaweed twist between her legs, and the heat of teeth breaking the skin of her neck. Just before her, inches out of reach, the old planks of the ship loomed like a wall.
All this,
she thought,
and I’m not going to get inside
?

Then the Siren turned her to lie on her back in the mud of the ocean, and smiled. When she opened her mouth, Vicky’s heart stopped. Long needle teeth exposed and struck, ripping into the soft flesh of her throat…

Vicky Blanchard woke up screaming.

Her body was wreathed in sweat beneath the sheets and she threw them off, kicking the covers down.

“Whoa,” she gasped as she realized that she was not underwater, but simply lying in her dark bedroom, in her dark bed, after a dark, weird dream.

She lay there, on her back, smoothing the nightshirt down along her waist with her palms, staring at the ceiling for several minutes, willing her heart to stop pounding, and the heat of her flesh to cool.

Finally, when the sweat turned cold, she pulled the covers back up and stared into the corners of her room. Everything felt strange; the comfort of her home alien and dangerous.

“It was a bad dream,” she said aloud, trying to calm herself. “Just a bad dream.”

But as she lay there, Vicky knew that it was more than a bad dream. It was a bad worry. More than a worry, really. There was a reason that Vicky had gone into psychiatry; she was more than just a good listener, she could
feel
things. Everyone had always said she was a little psychic—she’d think of someone and twenty seconds later her phone would ring. She always seemed to “have a feeling” just before something happened.

Evan had skipped their appointment this week and, strangely, hadn’t returned her voice mail. In the year that she’d known him, he’d never missed an appointment without calling. She had worried for the past couple days that something was wrong, and now it was haunting her sleep. All of Evan’s stories about a mysterious woman by the sea, and his friend’s taunts that she was really the fabled Siren of Delilah had lodged in her subconscious. Now it was keeping her up.

Vicky shook her head. It was dangerous to get involved with a patient at that level. She’d felt sorry for Evan since the day she’d met him and, for a while, she’d thought they had made progress. But over the past month, as the story of his fantastic infidelity had unraveled in the privileged confines of her office, she’d become uneasy. Maybe they hadn’t made any progress at all, she thought. Maybe just
the opposite. Now his fear of the ocean had grown into an obsession with a woman supposedly of the ocean. It was a thin excuse for cheating on the woman who Vicky knew needed him more than anything now. Evan’s wife had become increasingly unstable over the past year as Vicky felt Evan himself was improving. But maybe nothing she’d concluded was, in fact, true.

Vicky shook away the images of the dream. She knew it was bad to get emotionally attached to a patient. She was supposed to remain detached. Aloof. Objective.

Still. She had gone into this line of work because she cared about people. And after a year of weekly sessions, she cared about Evan.

Vicky took a deep breath and forced away the images of the dark ocean. She would call Evan again on Monday. Everything was okay, she told herself. She was overreacting, and he was probably just busy. Hell, if she chilled out, he’d probably just show up for their regular Wednesday appointment like usual.

But she needed to know something before then.

“I’ll call him on Monday,” she said to the empty room, and pressed her head into the crease in her pillow, demanding comfort in the place where she should be most comfortable.

“For now,” she whispered, “sleep.”

Evan woke in the dark, held in a tight embrace. A woman’s arm wrapped around his back and kept his face pressed against the soft flesh of her chest. He knew immediately it was Ligeia. Evan tried to push away from her, but her grip tightened. He turned his head from the cushion of her breast, and saw something that made his throat close.

Ligeia held him close because…they were swimming. She was his lifeline, pulling him through the depths of the ocean, kicking steadily with her feet, and guiding them with strokes of her one free arm.

Evan started to take a breath and then stopped.
My God! How deep are we? I’ll drown!
The panic rose like a wave and he pushed away from her with both hands, at the same time kneeing her in the gut.

She let him go, instinctively grabbing at her belly, and Evan kicked away from her. But in seconds he went from escaping to flailing. He had never learned to swim; he had always been too petrified of the water to try. Ligeia’s body disappeared into the murk and suddenly Evan was completely aware of the weight of the water. It pressed his chest and he struggled not to take a breath. But he kicked with his feet and he could feel the water’s resistance. And somehow, instead of rising to the surface, he didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He pushed with his
hands and kicked and couldn’t seem to coordinate. Instead, the panic owned him, and he clawed with his hands, a spasmodic dogpaddle that succeeded only in stripping the last air from his lungs. He needed to breathe and couldn’t stop. No, his brain screamed, but his mouth opened. No, he begged himself, but his lungs took a deep pull of breath. And sucked in seawater.

It went down like salty fire and Evan screamed, only sucking in more water. “Oh my God,” 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 God,” 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 fuck? 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 saltwater 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 space 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 passed 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 lust, 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 lust 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 anchored. 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…

Crap.
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
under
water. 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.