Syren

Chapter Three

Emily MacLeod's story was short and familiar. Her family had booked passage on a ship, not unlike Bellows own. They were travelling from England through the Mediterranean to land in Greece. This trip had been necessitated by money. Emily was not specific as to what 'money' meant but Bellows had a good idea that they either lacked it and were escaping creditors or had absconded with some and were escaping the authorities. Whichever answer was the truth didn't matter. What mattered is that Emily, her father, mother, brother Peter and uncle Raiph were on the ship when it was taken by Pirates. 

Actually, these 'Pirates' were nothing more than mutinous whalers. Bellows was all too aware of this type of Pirate. The crews of whaling ships were generally made up of some of the toughest sons-of-bitches you ever might meet. A man who could stand shoulder deep in the stinking, bloody, greasy carcass of a whale and hack away giant rolls of blubber for hours on end, while mako sharked rip foot-wide crescent-shaped chunks out of its underbelly was not a man to be fucked with.

If the whaling was good, these men were happy to work and drink and fight for fun. But when the weeks piled up and whales didn't, those same men were apt to get impatient. That impatience could, and often did, lead to mutiny and piracy.

And so these men had boarded Emily's ship and killed its crew. When the killing was done the pirates took the ship's cargo including her families belongings and left the frightened passengers standing on deck, but not before they slashed the rigging, set fire to the sails and disabled the rudder.

By all rights, they should have died, helpless in the middle of the ocean with no way to steer, no sails and little to no knowledge of where they were in the first place. But lady luck was kind and after drifting for a week they saw the island... Bellows island.

The pirates had taken or destroyed the lifeboats, so instead, they hacked away at the ship itself lashing together makeshift rafts from the decking and paddled for the island. Half of them made it... Emily was one of them. They had landed on the far side of the island, where there was no beach and that saved them... at least for a while. They dragged themselves up a sheer slope and stayed there for weeks afraid to venture far. The first men that went into the jungle to search for water didn't come back.

After a month the food they had brought from the ship had run out and there was a quiet desperation setting in. Men when out to hunt, some returned, but other didn't. Her father was one of the ones who didn't.

Then the women started to disappear in the night. They all stayed close together from then on, they posted sentries and kept the fire blazing but it didn't help. Finally, only Emily and Peter were left. Starving, drinking the dew that collected in the leaves around them each morning, baking in the heat of the day and huddling together in the cold of the night, more weeks passed. They only had each other and then Peter was gone. She awoke cold and afraid, and instead of finding him lying beside her, there was nothing.

She went mad then, perhaps she was already mad with hunger and thirst. She screamed until her voice was gone and the metallic taste of blood filled her mouth, she ran into the jungle, wanting to find Peter, wanting to kill whoever had taken him.

Somewhere between the lines, Bellows caught something. It was there in the way she had said Peters name, the emotion of it all. They had comforted each other she and Peter, in those weeks alone. Comforted each other in a way that a brother and sister shouldn't have, but Bellows said nothing. People do strange things when no ones watching when no ones there to judge them and they just need human contact. He knew that all too well.

She ran blindly through the jungle, slipping on the damp mossy ground, falling but always getting back up and forging ahead. She was determined to find Peter, and she did. He was sitting on a large rock, just sitting and when she spotted him she almost fainted with relief. She called his name, but he didn't answer. She yelled louder, frantically scrambling over fallen trees, smashing her foot through a giant fungus that burst like a balloon, covering her ruined dress with reddish yellow spores. She was less than fifty feet away and yelling his name at top of her lungs but Peter hadn't even moved. Emily slowed now frightened, and as she came closer to him she saw that he was sitting at a very odd angle. She stepped around a huge tree stump and then passed its brother which was still standing, thirty feet high and three feet around. It blocked her view of Peter, and when she peered around it she screamed. Or rather she opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. Not a sound, not a breath, not even a squeak. A silent scream that was somehow worse than the screams that had left her throat raw and blood in her mouth. She would suffocate if she couldn't stop this scream, but it just went on an on without a beginning or an end.

Peter was not sitting on the rock, he was crouching just to the side of it. The spear had entered through the valley at the base of his throat, in between his collarbones. It had obviously been thrown from very high above as it had travelled at an almost ninety-degree angle, down through his chest and exited at the base of his spine. The tip of the spear was embedded in the ground holding Peter in place. 

Back in England, Peter had collected butterflies, pinning them to a large board and writing out little labels with their Latin names. Now someone had collected Peter in much the same way.

Emily had fainted then, fainted dead away and when she awoke she was in the temple... or the shrine as she called it. The naked woman was there chained to the altar and so was the monk. He fed her and cared for her, showed her where to get water. He told her she was safe, that the Island People would not harm her as long as she was with him, and that was the truth.

She didn't know how long she had been on the island, she had been twelve when they boarded the ship in England and by Bellows reconning, she was at least eighteen now so perhaps six or seven years... maybe more. No one else had ever come to the island, he was the first she said.

As far as the Island People, they were gone. She had watched from high up the mountain as they boarded their huge canoes and pushed out into the sea from the small beach. They had never done this before that she had seen and they did not return. She guessed that had been about a year ago, but again she wasn't sure.

When she was done telling the story she stopped and looked at him. She wasn't waiting for him to speak, she was appraising him as one might look at a horse they were thinking of purchasing. She was judging him, making up her mind about him and it made Bellows uneasy.

"What is it?" He asked, puffing on his pipe and staring right back at her. No little girl is going to intimidate me, he thought.

"Will you take me with you when you leave?" She asked. There was no hope in her voice, she either didn't think he would or wasn't sure she wanted him to. She was asking, but not accepting.

Bellows took another puff on his pipe and frowned. "Tell me about the girl in the temple."