He was prepared when she arrived the next night. He nodded to her coldly, and said, "I expect yer want to read me yer next verse?"
"It's good for you," she promised, with a new impish look to her face. It seemed to Davy she was changing before his eyes, one minutes shark, the next minnow. With difficultly did he keep the stigma of her gender in mind- she was more creature than woman.
She opened the ruined book, but did not begin immediately. Instead she said, "Why do you keep collecting souls? Haven't you got enough men to man the Dutchman?"
Davy stretched like a hunting octopus. "It passes the time," he murmured, "and misery loves company. The day I can make someone suffer as much as I have," and here his features stretched into a smile, "well, I might consider putting the ticker back in place."
She nodded- he noticed that the wound on her throat made this a particularly floppy process- and glanced at the obliterated verses. He suspected, or knew, that she had the poem off by heart.
"You remember we left off with Pyrrha making love to a slim boy?" she said, suddenly neutral again. Davy barely inclined his head. The use of the phrase 'off by heart', which had turned up so naturally in his head, was making him feel uncomfortable. For the first time in years, he felt the cavity in his chest keenly.
She continued in the thrilling voice. "Alas, how often he will weep at changed fates and changed gods and, young in his understanding, be amazed at the sea made rough by dark winds."
Beside his elbow, the music box started to play. She looked surprised, which he noted with passive satisfaction, and slithered closer. Despite the hours that had passed since her death, she was still soaked to the skin and dripped freezing water onto his thigh.
"It's cold at the bottom of the sea, and always wet," she said, reading his mind in the way dreams could.
"It's safe, though," Davy said, quietly. "Safe and black and empty."
"Like a womb," the girl said.
"No! Not like a womb!" Davy shouted, spraying her with sticky spit. "Not- not like any womb. Not so disgusting, It's pure there- pure and crushing. It has no mercy. I have no mercy!" he howled.
He thrust his face close to hers, thrust it closer when she did not draw back. "See these eyes?" he snarled. "Do yer see 'em? They are blue- the blue of the sea. The sea is all I see- I am the sea! I see- I am the sea... yer see? I- am- the- sea."
He slumped back, exhausted and tongue-tied. A few tentacles slipped across the ever-moist keys of his organ and played a hideous chord. In the ensuing quiet, the music box's tune seemed to take up the world. Then it wound to a halt, and the silence was suddenly pregnant.
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, apparently in preparation. "They are periwinkle blue," she said simply. "That is a kind of flower."
He stared at her, too shocked to be angry.
"Women," she continued, "now, women are a real sea. A real swamp." She grinned. "Not navigable."
"Even the best sailors know that," he said, absently. "Yer have no stars to sail by. None except what the bright eyes tell you. And even the fakest of crocodile tears cloud that over." He stirred, suddenly restless.
"Savage, dark, greedy, ruthless, fascinating." She reeled off the list like a fastidious thesaurus compiler. "Every woman has it in her to be the sea."
Davy Jones waited for the dream to end at this point. But for a good five minutes, unbearable silence was endured, she looking over the page that would have held the poem, he rocking back and forth, wanting to create noise, wanting to hear the crash of a storm, wanting to shake the girl back and forth until her head fell off. He awoke, cried out, and vowed to exhaust himself today with misdeeds and murders, so he could not dream that night.