Siren Song

by tallsunshine12

Off in the distance. Off and on. Off and on. Twelve rings, in all. Noon.

On Sundays, exactly at 12 noon, Mr. Simpson, not a day over ninety, came out of his house to exercise a singular habit. For a total of twelve times, he rang a twenty-pound, brass ship's bell set up in an open hutch on the sea-facing portion of his yard. He had picked it up at a marine scrap shop—must have been around 1910—when he was twenty and a newly-minted sailor in the U.S. Navy.

A half-mile away, if the wind was right, you could hear the bell through the high dune grasses. It was haunting, leading a man to review his past. Wistful, it called out his lonely 'edge.'

Elegiac, like finding an old and faded matchbook, with a number on it to call, but its owner long since forgotten.

Mesmerizing, much like the sirens of old, who sang seagoing men to their doom on the rocks, and whose beauty reflected the powerful sea.

Counting the pings of the bell, already at number six, he hastily opened his mail, a single letter. He read it, twice, hardly believing it to be true. He called Angie to check the flights to Bristol. There, his friend Ben, from his Annapolis days, had been murdered. Knifed for a few bills in his wallet, a wallet which also contained his deceased wife's picture.

At her funeral—two years ago, he'd make it—Ben had shown it to him. "I wish I had gone first," he had said then.

It was like him to say that. The soul of the man had been good. Was it fair to give a man so much, he wondered, and then wipe it all out in seconds? As if the man, the goodness, had never been?

Even on her day off, Angie was his faithful right hand. She assured him that all of the arrangements would be taken care of. After he put down the phone, giving her time to call back, he had come out here, to where the cliff met the sea.

Seabirds dove in ever-tightening circles, the air popped with electricity, insects zigzagged through the grasses. Below, the sea shimmered in the bright warm light of July. Gripping the letter, he ran his hand through his hair and smiled a forlorn smile at it. The sea. It had always been his comfort.

Still in its poppy-like effect, he stood up, brushed himself off and walked up the slope to the travertine patio. With a single twist of his hand, he set a deck chair right, then proceeded through the French doors into the living room.

Relatively cool compared to the summer heat outside, it was large and well-furnished. Ornate? Hardly. It was a repository for all manner of washed-up things from the sea, shells, driftwood, stones, things this man of the sea loved.

He made himself a bourbon on the rocks. Turning, he stared at the face in the mirror behind the bar. It was his face. Craggy, weathered, but the eyes, the eyes still held the look of adventure.

At the end of the bar, his phone rang. It was Angie called back with his flight reservations. It was Sunday, and she liked to have her parents over, so he was much obliged she had made the arrangements for him in such a short time, including the London to Bristol hop.

"Thanks, Angie. Now go enjoy the rest of your day." He smiled into the phone and let his voice reflect it.

He'd pick up the tickets for the first leg of his journey at the check-in desk and be on the flight to New York an hour or so after that. Five hours across country, then another flight out of Kennedy Airport to rush him across the Atlantic to Heathrow. From there, to Bristol.

FS-1, the flying sub, on training maneuvers in the Indian Ocean, was too far away to whisk him anywhere. Having his own jet might have been worth the expense, but he could never talk himself into it. He had just bought a cabin cruiser, larger than the previous one. That was enough conspicuous consumption for a while.

Since his flight to New York would not leave until 4 p.m., and it was only just a little after noon now—the bell was through—he had a few hours to kill, so what better way to spend them than to go on board his new boat and speed recklessly over the waves?

Packing a light lunch and taking his short rain coat with him, because you never knew about the weather in the channel, Nelson checked out the boat before taking off from the dock. Everything in ship-shape order, he turned the key in the motor, started slowly, and then increased his speed as he got beyond the family boating area. After that, he never knew how fast he went. But he went fast.

The boat could do what no other boat he'd ever owned could have done—it made him forget. Not that he could forget Ben Drayton, or his funeral halfway around the world from Santa Barbara, but himself. The pain was still there, but the speed he kept up buried it temporarily.

The hot, blazing wind threw the flag on its pole at the stern into convulsions. He peered at it through the cabin window behind him and saw it in is aeolian helplessness. For the next trip, he'd remember to take it down. Just then, he heard a cry. It grew louder, more desolate, the most haunting sound he'd ever heard.

Over the sound of motor, wind, and waves dashing against the fiberglass sides of the cruiser, he heard what sounded like a woman's cry, a sobbing sound, but a beautiful one. No one who heard it could have been unmoved. Trying to pinpoint it, he idled the motor and coasted in to the rocky shore.

Putting his jacket on, he stepped out of the cabin into the wind. Gazing at the shore, he tried to see who might have been making that cry. He saw no one, but he could still hear the crying, or sobbing.

Back inside the cabin, out of the wind, he again took the wheel and slowly drove into an inlet near the rocks. He lodged the boat up beside one of the biggest rocks and threw a rope over it. It held fast. Jumping out of the boat onto the big, slippery rock, Nelson turned this way and that to try to locate the cry.

With a flashlight in hand, he stepped off the rock onto the beach, then walked towards a small cave in the battered cliff face of the headland. Without consulting a map, he didn't quite know where he was on the coast, but it didn't matter. He had, after all, been trying to get himself lost for an hour or two.

Ducking low, he looked into the cave and called out. The crying, a spider web of longsuffering, stopped for a split second, then started up again, only more fiercely this time.

A short ways into the cave, he found he could stand up. The rocks underfoot gave him some trouble, but his flashlight was strong, so he could step over them. With his other hand, he progressed along the dewy, moldy wall of the cave, following the cry. It was so plaintive, he thought it would melt every fiber of his being, starting with his heart.

Why was he doing this? How had he heard a cry over the boat motor, the waves, and the wind so far from the interior of the cave, where it seemed to hail from?

Nelson didn't know. Was it some type of Fata Morgana, or sea mirage? He only knew that there was a distress call in that cry, and he was responding to it the way that nature had made him. He couldn't have ignored the woman's cry for all of the salt in the East China Sea.

Even if he had been promised an endless truckload of supplies for Seaview, and no more wrangling over grants with the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, he would not have turned back and left the cave without tracking down that inconsolable voice!

Then he saw her. Or rather he thought he did. He shined the light upon her. Sitting on a huge boulder, in the depths of the cave, she was beautiful, dressed in a long, turquoise gown with seaweed-like ribbons hanging from neck and waist. Her hair, of the softest brown, like her eyes (or so he guessed) was held back by a tiny band of shells. She had the most delicate face he could have imagined on the planet. Turning those melancholy eyes on him, she raised a hand and then lowered it, almost like a signal to come.

He walked forward.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, incredulous. "Did your boat break down? Are you from the hill up there?" He pointed to the ceiling of the cave, but meant the cliff above their heads.

She eyed him dolefully, without replying. He couldn't help but notice that, for someone who had been doing an awful lot of crying, her eyes were quite dry.

"Are you okay? I have a boat. I can get you home."

"I am home," she said, the three words full of soft, briny harmonies. Nelson almost shook with the delight of hearing them.

"Here, in the cave? Why? How can this be your home?"

"I am home," she said again.

He looked at her, wondering if perhaps she had escaped from a mental institution. It had happened before. He suddenly tried to recall if there was an asylum or some such in these parts—then realized he wasn't at all sure where he was.

"You're crying," he said. "Again, why?"

"I am the only one left," she answered, her fingers twisting a piece of her glowing gown. The question had seemed to sadden her further.

Frankly, Nelson was glad to hear a few more words out of her than, "I am home."

"Left?"

"My two sisters are gone and they've left me here. I called you."

"Called me? Like a mayday? How did you know I was in the area?"

"I called you."

She had started repeated again. Admiral Harriman Nelson, on leave just then from the daily turmoil aboard the Seaview, sighed.

"The cave's cold. Come on out of here and I'll make sure you get a warm blanket and something hot to drink." He always kept emergency supplies on board his boats. He wouldn't have been Admiral Harriman Nelson if he didn't, he might have joked to himself.

"I am left."

"Did you hear what I said?" Nelson took a step towards the girl, a child really of only about twenty, and she recoiled slightly, her diaphanous dress rustling ever so slightly, like a breeze off the water. Then she shook her loose, seaweed-colored hair and raised her chin. Her words came out more firmly this time, as if she had made up her mind to trust him.

"I called you. You can come." She was like a broken record, the needle playing over and over again in the same groove.

He shook his head, not for the first time. Never in his time aboard Seaview, that vast, state of the art nuclear sub, even when he had been in conflict with aliens, had he seen such a strange being. He walked closer to the naiad, and sat down on the rock beside her. He reached over and felt her arm. She was stone cold.

"You're freezing. And wet. C'mon, I'm getting you back to civilization. Maybe on the way, you can tell me where to drop you off at. Where your home is." Oh no, that was a mistake.

"I am home," she intoned, a shivery sound bouncing off the wet walls of the sea-cave.

However that might be, she rose and followed him as he led her out of the cave, both ducking low at the entrance. He helped her to stand on the rock and then to step over the gunwale of the boat. Ruing the scratches he could see on the side of his cruiser where the rock had abraded it in the surf, he climbed in and opened the cabin door.

Pulling the shivery girl inside, he made her sit down on the built-in sofa and after fetching a blanket from a closet, wrapped it tightly around her. She smiled slightly up at him for his efforts. She spoke not a word to him, but did take the drink he offered her. Hot tea. He had made it on his tiny stove.

"How did you get out this far?" he asked her.

She only shook her head and sipped the tea, without blowing on it first. He thought that odd.

"I guess we'll get to all that when you warm up," he said. "Will your sisters be worried when they come back?"

She shook her head and sipped from the steaming mug, again without trying to cool it first.

"What's your name?"

She looked up at him and was about to shake her head again, but stopped, and smiled. He couldn't have characterized that smile better than to say it was a 'seaweed' smile. Loopy and free-floating on her face.

"Your name?" he asked again, a trifle exasperated with the monologue-game he was being forced to play.

"Yours?" she asked, voicing her first word in almost a half-hour.

"Nelson. Harry Nelson. I live about another hour from here."

"Nelson," she said, stroking the name with those salty harmonies. Eyes glistening, again like wet seaweed, he might have thought, she played with the name over and over, gradually lowering her voice until she was only whispering it.

The admiral felt strangely moved. He responded to those harmonies in her voice as if to a song. It was strange for him, a man of science, to be giving in, almost viscerally, to her sea chantey cadences when she said his name. He had never felt this way before with any woman.

She made him glad to be alive. And alive in a way he had never known before how to feel. There was a dirge-like melancholy in her voice. He could hear it and knew it had come from the sea. The sea—that's where she belonged. He didn't know where her sisters were—or what they were—but he knew where she had come from. The sea.

Here was one of Virgil's sirens. Of the three in his Georgics, which one was she? From his late-night reading, he recalled this line: "At that time, sweet Parthenope was nurturing me." Parthenope, meaning maiden-voiced. It fit her.

Oddly, while he listened to the beautiful naiad, as he called her, his sadness over his friend's death, though it was truly still a rock of sorrow in his heart, did not weigh him down as much as it had when he first read the letter.

Nelson smiled, turned to the wheel, and fired up the motor. Slowly leaving the rocks, he increased his speed until he was racing over the waves again—only not as fast as before, when it was just him aboard the cruiser. He didn't want to scare his passenger.

Pulling the cruiser slowly up to his dock, he left the boat to cast a looped rope on the piling. When he returned to the cabin, he wasn't surprised to find only a blanket, still slightly damp, lying haphazardly on the built-in sofa, and on the varnished table in front of it, an overturned cup of tea. He grabbed a towel, wiped up the spilled tea from the table, and then went into his house to change for his flight.

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