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 b.i.t.c.h. 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 pa.s.s 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 whispered 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.
"Yes, I thought as much," she said. Her voice couldn"t hide a cloying flavor of turnabout. "A typical man. All talk, no action."
Ligeia pulled the rope and Buckley staggered backward, forced to follow as she led him like a calf to the slaughterhouse. He knew that wherever she dragged him, his end would be the same. The tables had turned. She was no longer tied to his bed, helpless to do anything but his will. For a moment he speculated about his treatment of her. Had he been so bad? Had he made her so unhappy that she"d...
He stopped that thought when, again, he remembered the b.l.o.o.d.y feet of his men hanging overhead.
Then he thought of all the times he had come back to his cabin and forced himself upon her with no pretense of foreplay or civility. He recalled the wetness that frequently trailed across her cheeks when he was done, and the smoldering sparks that pa.s.sed across her eyes as she lay there restrained and staring at him, unmoving. Biding her time.
That time was now.
At that moment, Captain James Buckley III knew, unequivocally, that he was going to die. At the same time, he resolved that if he had to go, he was going to take her with him.
Chapter Forty-Two.
Sometimes, no matter how much you want to avoid it, you have to be the one who goes first. For Evan, this was one of those times. He had been here before; he had been here this morning. Bill could back him up, but in the end, this was his fight, and he had to step up.
Swallowing the bile in his throat, Evan kicked hard with the strange, clumsy rubber flippers on his feet, and moved ahead of his friend as they crossed the black boundary of the rotted ship"s hull. "I know where we"re going," he explained simply, and pushed his arms through the water as he"d watched his son do countless times. Josh had taught him how to swim, and he"d never even set foot in the water during his son"s life. The bile rose again, but he forced it back.
Evan swam just inside the hole in the old wreck"s hull. He was looking for something, and it wasn"t hard to find. In seconds, he saw the faint ivory of bones poking through the muck of the ocean sediment on the floor of the boat. They curved along the drift of muck, containing or conforming to it, was hard to tell. But Evan knew what they were. Rib bones. And just beyond, more evidence of yellowing death poked through a frond of wispy seaweed caught in the light strapped to his forehead.
Evan pointed out the half-buried skeletons to Bill, who grunted in his headphones.
They swam on and quickly the submerged bones became stacks of visible, layered skeletons. And then the corpses grew more recent-half-rotted, gray-chewed, flesh-somewhat-on-the-bones bodies, again, stacked gruesomely one on the other. Evan lingered for a moment at the corpse of one with nothing but a skull atop the ragged cotton of a faded black T-shirt. The dead man"s hand lay upon the remains of the shirt and there still were flecks of flesh bleached gray and dead clinging to the bone like old gristle. His mind refused to accept that this had once been a living, breathing person; this was not a Halloween prop, this was death. The real final deal. His chest grew tight, and he forced his eyes to look away.
Evan swam on, and the orange of his lamplight glinted off something near the head of another stack of bones. He started to kick past, but then something made him linger. He looked again at the metal that flashed as he turned his headlamp toward it.
"C"mon, man, we don"t have all night," Bill"s voice urged.
"Wait," Evan insisted. His hand reached out toward the medal and he prayed, prayed, prayed it wasn"t what he thought it was when the light played across it for the first time.
"Please, no," he whispered, as his hand picked up the silver chain with the ragged charm attached. "No," he said again, as he turned it over in his hand, staring both at the words broken in half by the artificial division of the jagged W rift down its center. It was a medal meant to be joined with another. As Evan stared at the empty eye socket orbs of the skeleton"s skull, he unzipped his wet suit just a hair, and pulled out the silver chain that hung around his own neck. Then he matched the edge of his ragged charm to the W cut of the one worn by the dead bones. They fit seamlessly together. The reunited medal read LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.
Tears welled up in his eyes and a sound rose in Evan"s throat-a low, pained howl of shock and disbelief and anger and a dozen other uncla.s.sified emotions that all boiled down to one horrible burning pain. "Oh my G.o.d, Bill," he whispered. "She killed Josh too. He didn"t drown. She took him."
The voice came very quietly in his mask, as a hand gripped his shoulder, trying to offer support. "Are you sure that"s him?"
"How many people wear the other half of this medal and died in the surf of Delilah Bay?" Evan asked bitterly. And then he pointed to the green-crusted remnants of the bathing suit around the skeleton"s midsection. A faintly red-striped sc.r.a.p of blue cloth still clung to the empty bones of the body. "And that sure looks like his suit. I used to joke that all he needed was a Superman S on his chest."
"But he was surfing in broad daylight," Bill argued.
"Then she was under the waves, waiting for someone to fall," Evan said. The tears welled up again and, for a moment, he couldn"t see anything at all but the shadows of anger. "She"s taken everything that ever mattered to me. And there I was f.u.c.king her like a G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot."
"She probably doesn"t even know Josh was your son," Bill suggested.
"I don"t think that really f.u.c.king matters," Evan screamed.
With that, he pushed off with both hands catching the water and swam toward the place where he knew Ligeia slept. He had slept there with her. The thought of that made his blood run cold.
"Is your gun ready?" he asked softly in the radio.
Bill answered simply, "Whenever you are."
Together they swam into the dark of the rotted ship.
Evan led them past the rotted beams of what once had probably been a cargo bay and then up past an old beam to where the Siren"s nest lodged, along the rotted broken planks of ancient wood that protruded crazily from the hull of the broken boat.
Maneuvering in the bowels of the ship was difficult; his feet slapped at the low ceiling and then he used his hands to guide him along the crumbling spongy wood of a pa.s.sageway wall. He imagined himself as an astronaut, floating through the abandoned hull of an alien s.p.a.cecraft, exploring. When he thought of an alien, tentacles whipping through the gravity-free air and catching him in the face as it leaped out from the unknown corridors ahead, his spine trembled. Perhaps his predilection for science fiction wasn"t helping at this point. No-the unknown here was the where, not the who. He knew what he faced here, but where she was...
Evan drew a startled breath as his light suddenly illuminated a billow of graying fabric floating just ahead of them in the water.
Was that her?
"What is it?" Bill asked in his ear.
"Not sure," he whispered, and forced himself to move closer. The edge of the material seemed almost to shimmer in the slight current of the water, and Evan swallowed hard as he reached out to grab the thing, to unveil whatever hid behind it.
The stuff almost slipped through his hand as he grasped at it, but then he gave a sharp tug and like a matador, he succeeded in deflating the sheet of ancient rotted cloth and then it was hanging from his arm, at his side, and nothing was revealed beyond it.
"Just some old tablecloth," Bill suggested.
"On a fishing boat?"
"Okay, an old prom dress, shed like a...prom dress," he suggested lamely.
"I repeat...on a fishing boat?" Evan hissed. He batted the thing aside and swam ahead, faster now, angry for being spooked by an old sheet.
"Ligeia was here recently, and stirred this up or left it behind," he insisted. "There"s no other reason for it."
They turned a corner and Evan pushed ahead, spotting the nest where he"d lain with Ligeia, both as her prisoner, and lover, not even twenty-four hours before. But as he reached the pile of old sheets and blankets, his heart sank. The bed was clearly empty.
"s.h.i.t," Evan breathed.
"Forget to take your vitamins again?" Bill suggested helpfully.
Evan ignored him. "This is where she sleeps," he said. "I"d hoped we might find her here again tonight. Corner and take care of her while she slept."
"Would"ve made it easier," Bill agreed, kicking past Evan to peer into the dark room beyond. "What"s down here?" he asked in the earphones, and Evan shrugged before remembering that body language didn"t work well in the dark, underwater. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him at that thought. "Didn"t go there," he answered. Bill didn"t give him time to obsess about the water.
"Whoa," his friend whispered in the headphones. "You"ve got to check this out, man. This ship did not have a happy crew when she went down."
"What are you talking about?" Evan asked, while pulling himself away from staring at the mess of sheets in the corner. He kicked off to follow Bill just ahead. When he reached him, Evan followed the point of Bill"s arm, and his headlamp joined with Bill"s. The narrow yellow cones painted a gruesome picture, as they trailed down the chains from the ceiling to the well-padlocked loops that curled around the necks of skeletons.
"Well, maybe that"s why she went down," Evan whispered. "The crew were all hanging around down here."
Bill laughed. "Gallows humor at its finest," he said. "Nice! No, I think that is why she went down." He pointed to the giant rip through the ship"s far wall.
A shattered, jumbled pile of wooden crates rested near the rift. The wood at the edge of the breach was blackened and jagged. Evan shone his light from the hole to the crates nearby, where the light picked up the glitter of broken gla.s.s. He swam closer, and reached into one of the crates, and pulled out a single, unbroken bottle. Unconsciously, he whistled.
"How much do you suppose an unopened bottle of 1887 rum is?" he asked.
"Depends who bottled it," Bill answered, with a caution. "Doesn"t matter though. After more than one hundred years in the ocean, that s.h.i.t would burn its way right through your throat, splash out on your lap and eat its way back in to arrive at your stomach from the outside," Bill p.r.o.nounced, grabbing the bottle away.
"d.a.m.n," Evan said, and then kicked past Bill to exit the room. "Have to come back for one," he said. "Meanwhile, we need to keep moving. She"s somewhere close. I can feel it."
As Evan exited the Lady Luck"s hold, something slipped around his neck and with a jolt, pulled tight. His eyes bugged at the sudden pressure, and he coughed as he tried to call out for help. With his cough, the noose only pulled tighter.
"Shhhhh, my sweet," a familiar voice whispered in his brain. "I knew you"d come back. They always come back. I"ve been waiting for you." Her voice took on a darker tone then. "But you really should have asked me before you invited a friend into my home. Let me just deal with him, and then we can talk, okay?"
The rope pulled again on his neck and Evan kicked out against her, flailing his arms and then grabbing at his neck, trying to pull loose Ligeia"s knot as she dragged him along by it. And then her hands were pushing him into a tight, dark place. She wrapped the rope around his hands and then tied the end off on a clothes hook anch.o.r.ed to the wall. And then she slipped away, closing a door behind her, locking him in. In his headphones, he heard Bill call out, "Hey, Evan. Where did you go?" before his head was filled with a hollow gasp, and then a grunt of startled pain.
"Uh-oh," Bill said. "Evan, wherever you are...I could use a hand? This fish does not look at all happy to see me." He yelped and swore, and then after a short, not very macho scream, Evan heard him say, "And the d.a.m.n b.i.t.c.h bites."
Chapter Forty-Three.
June 12, 1887, 2:07 A.M.
There were worse things than falling in love, Captain Buckley found himself thinking. He"d avoided the weakness like it were a plague after watching the varied circles of h.e.l.l that the darkest, most deceptive four-letter word had put his shipmates through over the course of a lifetime at sea.
But now, as Ligeia dragged him to tortures unknown with no love whatsoever burning in her heart, he knew that maybe love, that emotion he"d so long spurned, might have helped him this time around. If he had used her better, and brought to life that fickle flame in her breast, maybe she would have played him easier now...
No matter, he thought. His chance at winning Ligeia"s heart was long, long gone. The proof was around his neck. The rope tightened again and Buckley felt his tongue thicken. He gagged as his throat constricted and clawed first at the coa.r.s.e rope around his neck and then, when that did no good, at her hands. He had to stop her from throttling him! She slapped him back, hard, and he fell to his knees, wheezing now and holding the rope to stop it from tightening any further. His eyeb.a.l.l.s felt swollen, ready to pop. The pressure in his head was horrible; he could feel every beat of his pulse. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he gasped one word, "Please."
Ligeia laughed, and with one hand, bent to pat his head. "It"s a very different feeling when you"re on the other side of the bonds, isn"t it?" she said.
The ship rolled at that moment, and Ligeia grabbed for a crate to steady herself. Buckley fell to the deck as her hold on the rope relaxed, and as he righted himself, he also reached into his side pocket, slipping his hand over his most prized possession. The weight of his scaling knife felt good in his hand. It was the one thing he could always count on. He raised it fast, but instead of taking the opportunity to stab at Ligeia, he opted to bring it down on the rope that held him to her. Freedom was more important than revenge in that moment and there was no guarantee that stabbing at her would end in his release. If she managed to deflect him, his chance would be gone. If he were free, he would likely have more than one chance to best her.
The blade caught in the heavy fiber of the rope halfway through, and Buckley pulled it out and then brought it down again. The motion tipped her off as she recovered from her stumble. Ligeia grabbed at his knife arm, but he pushed her back with a knee, and sawed again with the knife.
A handful of dagger-sharp fingernails raked down his neck and shoulder, and then her other hand closed on his neck, finally getting a solid hold on him.
The last threads of the ropes parted, and Buckley coughed a victorious "Yes!" as her stranglehold on him was severed. He threw his whole body away from the dig of her claws and rolled across the floor with the knife, cracking his head on the wood case. The ship took that moment to roll hard again and this time the room filled with screeching sound of crates shifting and sliding across the hold"s floor.
Ligeia let out her own screech and lunged for him. Buckley was ready. He"d weathered a thousand storms at sea, and the yawing of the deck didn"t inhibit his stability at all. He was back on his feet in a crouch by the time she came; he waited cold and ready. She was a banshee. Angry as fire and beyond control, she dove at him with nails ready as her weapons and teeth bared to shred.
His knife slipped easily into her gut, as her hands clutched at his neck. The warmth of her poured over his hand as he pulled out the knife so that he could stab again. She shrieked and raked his cheeks with her nails as she pulled away to clutch at her belly. He could feel the warmth leaking down to pool at his chin.
First blood for both, though he wagered that the stab he"d given her was far closer to mortal than what she"d given him.
The noose still choked him, and Buckley took advantage of her wound, and her nursing of it, and backed up a few feet. He never took his eyes off Ligeia, who lay on the ground, cursing in a foreign tongue filled with sibilant syllables and fricative staccato rasps as she rubbed at her abdomen. As she struggled to raise herself back off the ground, Buckley held the knife in his teeth and worked on the knot of the rope with his fingers. She"d only worked one twist and then pulled when she"d captured him, and in seconds, he had it out, and dropped the loop to the floor, heaving in a giant gasp of unimpeded air.
Then he moved in for the kill. Now he was ready.
But he was too late.
Just as he stepped forward, Ligeia collapsed facedown on the deck and lay still. Buckley approached her slowly, knife in the air, poised to strike. As he stood over her p.r.o.ne form, he couldn"t do it. How could he stab someone in the back who wasn"t even moving?
His hesitation did him in. It was all a feint.
Ligeia scissored her legs and caught him in the back of the knees. He began to fall and she took the opportunity to flip and kick him, hard as could be, in the gut. Buckley lost the knife, which skittered away on the floor into the dark.
And then she was on him, all fury again. She grabbed him by the head, slipping a fingernail into his left eye and pushing, as she levered her body over his to pin him to the ground. Buckley felt her finger slip beneath and around his eyeball, her nail digging into the soft nerves and flesh just ahead of his brain. The immediate sensation was strange, uncertain, squishy...and then the pain began as the eye lifted from its socket.
Buckley screamed and thrashed away from her with manic power as the fire lit in his eye and burned its way back into the very core of his head. Tears and dark blood coursed down his face and all the pretense of civilized behavior was vanquished by the pain; he punched at her with all his fifty-six years of ship-working might, connecting with her chin. He heard bones crack, and then slugged her again. He struck again, but with the blood of his ruined eye slicking his face and blurring his remaining vision, he dealt only a glancing blow.
The force of his attack didn"t seem to affect her at all. Ligeia only came down harder on him, this time with teeth bared. She went for his jugular like a wild dog, and he screamed as she chewed into the soft flesh below his ear. Something in his neck gave, and Buckley cried out, now in true terror as he felt the blood before the pain. He began to fall, unable to hold himself up, but true to his promise, he took her with him.