He walked near the point now, and slowed his pace, stopping before he reached the finger of dark rock. He bent to retrieve a small, flat stone and skipped it across the quiet ocean. One, two, three, four...five.........six times! A smile creased his lips-Josh would have been proud. They used to compete on how many skips they could get out of a stone.
The memory cascaded into myriad snapshots of their times at the beach. Playing Frisbee, skipping rocks, falling together in the sand laughing, sitting out by a campfire, late, Evan strumming on the guitar...
Unconsciously, he began to sing another of their favorite songs, from the band Industrial Disease. "Let me touch you now, forever, just this one last time..." But he couldn"t complete the lyric. His throat closed. He teared up every time he sang that song anymore.
Somewhere else, as if in answer to his aborted song, a melody picked up. But the melancholy of Evan"s tune transformed to light in its mirror. The voice moved high in the sky, almost like a wordless birdsong. And then it swam deep, a contralto cresting just above the waves with a sweetness that made Evan"s knees tremble. He wanted to slip to the sand and lose himself in the perfect sound. Whoever this woman was, Ligeia had the most amazing voice he had ever heard. Why she wasted it out here on n.o.body, he couldn"t fathom. Unless she simply came out here to practice? With a range so wide and a depth so beautiful, Evan couldn"t imagine that she didn"t sing professionally. Though he didn"t know of any famous opera stars or the like living in Delilah. And he"d never heard of a singing star named Ligeia.
Evan looked for her on the rocks of the point and was about to start climbing the treacherous path to walk out into the bay, when he realized that she wasn"t on the rocks tonight. A faint smear of ivory bobbed and moved in the water beyond the point, and as he stared, Evan saw that she appeared to be lying on her back, floating in the water, and singing to the stars. Every now and then he could see her arms break above the water, or a pale knee lift out of the waves and then disappear again to allow her to maintain her dreamy swim atop the waves.
Evan moved closer to the water; his whole body yearned to be nearer to the source of the music. Ligeia"s song was hypnotic; he closed his eyes and felt her fingers play across his body like he were an instrument. The night seemed to warm around him as he surrendered to the sound, and opened his heart to the beauty of her song. The melody swam in his veins like liquor, expanding the reach of his consciousness, while at the same time rendering him numb to all distraction.
He was glad he had not followed his initial promise to himself to avoid the beach. He needed to stand next to her again. Even if he never touched her body again, Evan needed to listen to her song. His breath seemed to slow and speed up with the slipstream movement of the music, and he took another step nearer to where she sang. Evan was lost in the sound, and didn"t even open his eyes to see where he was walking. He only drank in the sound and sighed, as it filled him up and then slipped away to leave him desperately aching. Ligeia"s music played the emotions like a harp, and yet, Evan couldn"t even have defined a single word of what she sang about. There were words and familiar syllables. But she sang in some other tongue, he thought. A language that was more beautiful than any he had ever heard. Somehow, the foreign sounds still gave him meaning; he felt as if he were on a ride through a powerful story-as she sang his heart quailed in fear and then rejoiced to the point of ecstatic pain at some lost piece regained. Evan moved closer to the sound and smiled as he realized the truth of her voice, the ultimate truth of the sound-music was a communication that went beyond words, and whatever she was saying, he understood the feeling, if not the words.
And then the music stopped, and Evan felt hands slipping around his shoulders. He gasped at a sudden chill, and opened his eyes...
...to see waves all around him!
Suddenly he fell out of the dream world and realized that he was neck-deep in the ocean, the water lapping like deadly acid around his face. Ligeia swam just before him, her fingers outstretched to play around his shoulders and slip up into his hair. But in five seconds Evan went from lolling in heaven to standing in h.e.l.l. His gorge rose and his heart tripled its beat as his eyes went wide. He didn"t see Ligeia as she rose and fell with the water. He only saw beyond her-the black waves and the panic overwhelmed him as completely as her music.
Evan opened his mouth and screamed.
A wave sloshed past at that moment, and the tip of a whitecap dashed him in the face, leaving him with a mouthful of brine. His scream turned to a choking cough and he lost his balance. Evan"s head slipped beneath the waves, his eyes bulging wide and his arms flailing. Everything was dark, and his nose and throat filled with the cold seawater. He gasped for breath and only took in more water, choking silently beneath the night waves.
This was Evan"s worst nightmare. Ever since he was a child, he"d woken up some nights in cold sweat, the memory of being trapped beneath the water still frozen in his eyes. And now, after all this time, it had come to pa.s.s. He tried to reach the surface, but his feet couldn"t seem to find the bottom, and his head only poked out from the water for seconds before the current sucked him back down.
A hand found his arm, and then another slid around his waist. Ligeia. She smiled at him beneath the water, and leaned in to give him a kiss. Evan shook his head no, no, no-he was drowning!
And then her lips were on his, and Evan felt...relief.
His lungs no longer felt the fire of seawater and his throat didn"t burn with salt. Ligeia"s eyes bored into his own like brown pools of mystery, and holding him tight to her body, she swam him to the surface.
"Oh my G.o.d," Evan gasped as their heads broke the water. He clung to her like a baby and she carried him to firm ground until he could stand comfortably, the water lapping only as high as his chest. She faced him, the water moving her hair between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to cover and then unveil with a rhythmic tease. "Thank you," he said. "I thought I was going to drown. I"m so afraid of the water and I"ve always been afraid of drowning and I don"t even know what happened. I heard you singing and somehow I just kind of sleepwalked into the water, but I can"t swim, and..."
"Shhhhhh," she said, and pressed a finger to his lips. Her other hand moved beneath the ocean, and slid along Evan"s right thigh. She kissed him again, and Evan felt a surge of heat as her tongue entwined with his. Then he realized that her hands were working at the belt on his jeans, and he shook his head, breaking the kiss.
"No," he said. "I came out here partly because I wanted to tell you...what happened last night was wrong, and I"m sorry. I"m married. And she"s a wonderful woman. I love her...We can"t..."
He gripped her arms and tried to push them back, but she was already pulling down his zipper, and then dragging the pants down his legs under the water. Fingers reached between his legs to cup and caress him, and Evan found it difficult to refuse the touch. But he steeled himself again, and pressed her back. "No," he said again.
Ligeia shook her head. Her eyes questioned him, her brows raised. And then she opened her mouth and began to sing again. She sang of s.e.x and raw animal need.
She sang in a whisper against his ear, and then as she threw her head back in a scream, she urged him harder with her hand. In moments, she"d pressed him inside her, with the ocean as her lubricant.
Evan felt out of control, as if someone had put his mind in a box and shoved it on a shelf with a hole cut in the side for him to watch himself. Because this amazing, s.e.xual creature was making love to him in the ocean and he couldn"t stop his body from meeting her. The night seemed to shimmer and shift with a danger that only made the action more erotic. Ligeia"s song stilled every doubt in Evan"s head, and all he could see were her eyes, dreamy and dark. He sucked deep on her lips and then moved to taste the salt of her nipples as she clung to him and slid her body up, down and around him as if he were the pole, and she his mermaid dancer. Her o.r.g.a.s.m came while Evan was lost in his own internal fireworks, and her voice cried out with a sound that was both pure in its expression of pleasure and thick with its animal celebration of l.u.s.t.
Evan closed his eyes as she held him, and whispered to him softly of dreams. "When I was a little girl," she said at one point, "I prayed that I would meet a man like you. And now that I have, I don"t want to ever let you go."
He tried to respond, to tell her that he was taken, that she would have to let him go. But he couldn"t get up the energy. Instead he only rocked with her some more in the water, relishing the velvet touch of her skin against his and the sweet stories of desire that she told.
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 s.h.i.t," he breathed, a wild rainbow of conflicting emotions raging inside him. "What am I gonna do?"
Pulling his cold, wet pants over goose-b.u.mped 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 c.o.c.k felt thick and sated, as it always did after good, strenuous s.e.x. 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.
Chapter Thirteen.
"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 jalapenos and green s.h.i.t? Looks like a seagull just s.h.i.t 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. h.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.t, 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 f.u.c.k 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. h.e.l.l, 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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."
Chapter Fourteen.
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 Sat.u.r.day afternoon and the weather was perfect; if Delilah had been built a little closer to any other cl.u.s.ter 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. "d.a.m.n," he said, "that s.h.i.t"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. n.o.body"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 h.e.l.l," 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. n.o.body 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 ash.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 carca.s.s 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 superst.i.tion 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ash.o.r.e 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 sh.e.l.ls.
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 pa.s.sed 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-a.s.s jellyfish. One brushed across his head and then another trailed tentacles across his throat.