The Siren's Curse Read online

  The Siren’s Curse

  Tales from the Deep - a YA Short Story

  Angharad Thompson Rees

  Copyright © 2017 by Angharad Thompson Rees

  Originally published by The Passed Note Literary Journal

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. The Siren’s Curse

  About the Author

  1

  The Siren’s Curse

  You think you know the story. You've heard it before, from sailors who regale the tales in ale-made stupors. Do not believe them, for if they live to tell the tale they fail to tell you one important thing—the truth.

  Some recount her voice, the sweet angelic singing, enough to pull any hardhearted captain adrift from well-laid plans.

  Others describe her flame-like hair charming even the hardiest of rapscallion pirates away from pieces of eight and coffers aplenty.

  Her eyes, deep as the Southern Ocean are aquatic blue with the hue of heartbreak.

  Myths. Legends all. Pretty little lies and such that warn of the missing, sunken ships, breathless lungs, and submerged hearts. But I know the truth—nobody survives the siren's call.

  Whether you believe me or not is none of my concern. I ask you only to listen.

  * * *

  “It's a siren's purse. Whisper a wish in its pocket and throw it back into the sea,” said she who was my best friend and sister both. She, with the imagination and the name of Summer, which suited her perfectly.

  I handled the shriveled, dried up pocket of seaweed, no more a real siren's purse than the smile on my face. Both felt empty and lackluster and withered. She was still looking at me, so I amused her.

  “I wish we had never left England,” I said, whispering spitefully into my seaweed-filled hands. I kept my eyes on Summer. “I wish we had never been shipwrecked.”

  With a dismissive throw, I tossed my wish into the sea. It landed with an unsatisfying splash and bobbed hopelessly on the surface of the chill Welsh waters. A timid shore break brought it right back to my bare feet.

  “That's what you get for not putting any effort into it, Benedict,” Summer said. Her eyes twinkled wet with tears and sea mist as she bent down to retrieve it. The tips of her curls dampened in the frigid water.

  Benedict. Unlike her name, mine never suited me in the slightest. My parents once told me it derived from the Latin word for blessed. But I was not blessed. I was shipwrecked and marooned on a nondescript Welsh island, and it hadn't stopped raining for three days solid. We were the only survivors. We, being my sister and me, and a few boxes of cargo with our saturated belongings that should have been halfway to our Spanish boarding school. I wondered how long it would take before our family realized we were not arriving. And then how long would it take to get rescued?

  That's why I wished we had never left the English shores.

  “Ben, you can't wish for something not to happen, that's not the point,” Summer said, putting her arm around my sodden shoulder. “You have to wish for something to happen. Not even a siren with magical powers can change the past.”

  “It's my wish and I can wish for what I bloody well want. And I wish we had never left, and I wish you'd shut up about sirens and their blasted purses.”

  I knew I shouldn't have said it, let alone with such venom. She may well have been older than me, but she was gentle and playful, just like the summer. But I was making her miserable, and there's nothing more miserable than a summer storm. She was, after all, only trying to cheer me up.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “What do you wish for, then?”

  Her lips widened on just one side of her face, a dimpled, painful attempt at a smile.

  “I wish to get rescued.”

  She made a good point. She made a good wish. And I should have listened.

  She tossed the siren's purse into the sea.

  * * *

  It was another two days before the bodies started turning up. Bloated and translucent like dead puffer fish upon the shore. We tried to ignore them as we rolled our trousers up to our knees and waded into the gray waters to rescue salted hams and water sodden provisions that made their way to the island. We were hungry but not starving, not yet, not in the proper sense, at least. And not as hungry as the seagulls squawking, arguing, and circling over the fodder in a flap of white feathers and orange beaks. I chased them away, splashing water right up over my knees. I flapped my arms and roared at them to get off because it felt good to howl and scream and let off the steam brewing in my lungs. One seagull landed on the captain's head while two more bobbed on his bulging stomach as the shore waters gently rocked him. I chased them no more.

  We sat on the damp sand looking out towards the shifting gray mass of ocean surrounding our tiny island. We shared our provisions, eating without zeal despite our hunger. The rain had turned into a fine mist—the type of mist that penetrates the skin and dampens even the innermost parts of the soul. I watched the low tide receding back into itself and noticed, not for the first time, the exposed hull of the shipwreck.

  “We should swim out and see if there's more food stuck onboard,” I suggested, but Summer shook her head.

  “We could drown. Neither of us can swim well and it's a long way, even at low tide.”

  Instead, I spent hours staring at the shipwreck and the possible food inside, while wishing again I had never left the English shores. Summer watched me.

  “Don't leave me here alone,” she said, as if she could read my thoughts.

  * * *

  Eventually, the food ran out on the Island. With hunger, isolation, fear, and the constant clouds obscuring the sky, our time became a barren void without expectation. We were simply waiting—waiting to survive or waiting to die, I could not be sure which. I hoped the siren's purse would return. It didn't. I hoped the stench of the bodies would go away. It wouldn’t.

  “I think you're right,” Summer said one evening when the sun appeared for the briefest of moments. It shone across her matted hair and highlighted the shallows beneath her protruding cheekbones. Her clothes hung like rags. She looked like a tree in late autumn, hanging on to her last leaves before winter stripped them away.

  “We need to swim out and search the wreck for food,” she said.

  “We should have gone before, when we were stronger,” I said, which didn't help at all.

  The water receded, and we stripped down to our underwear, saving our rags to dry ourselves after our heist. The bitter winds assaulted my skin, wrapping itself around my ankles and legs. I clutched my arms around my body for warmth, and my sister did the same. Our teeth already chattered before our toes touched the murky shoreline. After a count of three, and half a second for courage, I dove into the sea and gasped. The chilling water took my breath away. My head hurt with the pain of cold. Summer looked like winter—deathly pale and desolate. We swam, fighting the cold, fighting the waves, fighting our fatiguing muscles that threatened to seize up altogether.

  Summer gargled and shrieked. A sound as terrifying as the wonton waves themselves.

  “It's okay, it's okay,” I lied between gulps and bubbles, “We'll swim back.”

  But I could not see the shore, for the water was dark and murky and the waves crashed over my face again and again. Salt stung my eyes and no matter how much I squeezed them shut, the water continued to seep in as if claiming me as its own. Summer screamed louder, her arms thrashing the air around her, silenced only by the gurgling heaviness of water in lung
s.

  “I'm coming,” I said, fighting the icy burn of frozen muscles as I attempted to swim towards her. Each stroke was an impossible exertion, each gasp for air a game of chance.

  But Summer was not drowning. She was waving. Her face a torrent of hopeful desperation. She glared at me, her eyes as wide as a winter moon.

  “They're coming for us,” she screamed over the raging tides.

  I saw it on the horizon for but a breath before the ocean rose again, obscuring my hope from view.

  “A ship,” I whispered, my words cast aside by whipping wind and sea fret. My sister smiled—a pathetic and heartbreaking smile full of impossible possibilities. A wave crested behind her, spraying foaming white mist backward and basking my sister in a momentary rainbow. I wanted to scream at her to stop smiling. To stop hoping. But even if I had the breath to tell her so, I had not the courage to voice my truth out loud.

  That the ship was too far away.

  That the water too destructive.

  That no siren would rise to claim her purse and grant our wish. We would not get rescued. We would drown long before the speck on the faraway horizon reached us, and they would find but two more bodies floating on the shore amongst the greedy seagulls.

  “Benedict!” My sister screamed, but I could not see her.

  The heaviness of my soul became a weight, my hopelessness a vice that gripped at my ankles. And then I felt her. I felt the tug of the siren. In one short pull, I was under. The waves crashed with such violent ferociousness that I tossed and turned like a rag-doll. My arms and legs thrashed as I tried to scramble back to the surface, but like my hope for survival, it was out of reach. I screamed then, my voice muffled underwater, and the last of the air in my lungs escaped as bubbles around my face. My chest burned and heaved as she pulled me deeper. Convulsing, I tried my hardest to fight my body’s desire to breathe, a futile attempt to save my lungs from filling with rank seawater that would condemn me to a life sentence.

  And I realized what the siren desired—life. My life. My death.

  Help, I tried to scream. The word formed in my mind but got stuck as a sob behind my clenched lips, as I fought the yearning ache to inhale.

  You’re mine, she whispered. I didn’t so much hear her words but felt them in my faltering heart. Knew them in my every cell, but with the strength of one last life-saving attempt, I kicked free from her hold and breached the surface.

  I dragged a breath from the air, which brought as much pain as joy. I heaved, panted, and snorted salt water from my nose and choked throat. She nearly had me, but I knew the siren’s fight was far from over.

  “Benedict!” Summer screamed over the sound of my pitiful splashes and ragged gulps as sea fret whipped around. “Hold on! They’re coming. They’re coming.”

  But so too was the siren, and I could no more hold on than I could breathe.

  I could not breathe.

  Her insistent pull continued, and I took one last glance at Summer’s face, Summer’s hope, and her haunting expression as she realized the inevitable... that the siren had claimed me. And down I drifted.

  The horizon disappeared. The ship forgotten as I sank into the deep.

  My muscles froze. My lungs burned. The waves continuing to pound, loud and ferocious all around me. The sea roared with anger, as did my heart pounding against my chest.

  I knew my time was up, and I searched for the siren: for a single glimpse of her supposed splendor. But there was no angelic singing. No eyes as deep as the ocean—just the ocean, as deep as it is claimed to be. A memory flooded my mind of regaled tales from sailors singing about the beauty of the siren's call. But I heard no music. I heard the terrifying fast thuds of my heart. I heard my lungs’ distraught scream. I heard the sound of my limbs thrashing underwater as a large gulp of ocean took away my last breath.

  There was no beauty. Just darkness.

  A dreadful peace enveloped me, and I felt her then. The Siren. I felt her taloned claws pulling at me, a fierce shaking as if my soul was being stripped away from my body. There was screaming, and coarse scales across my skin. A pounding pain again and again at my chest. A wailing cry, my cry—lost in the ocean. She was taking me. She was taking my heart, my lungs, my breath. I opened my eyes, one last look at life before it ebbed away, and there was only emptiness, darkness, and the nothingness that was death.

  Death. So close, and so final. With my body relaxing into its fate, I looked upwards. The sun's light lay fractured across the surface of the water. It flickered in and out of view with the turning tides like a beacon from a lighthouse. A sailor’s grace. My grace. And I fought then, reaching for the light with both hands; reaching for it despite the callous cry from the deep.

  I can die, I thought, or I can die trying.

  And try I did, splashing towards the surface as though swimming through oil and treacle.

  My fingertips felt the air, the freedom from her clutches, yet something else grabbed at me. But this time, the grasping pulled me upwards. I gasped as the cold air brushed against my face and filled my lungs. The sun shone in my eyes, and I dared to hope—like Summer—that I could survive…

  * * *

  “That's it boy, get it out,” a rough voice demanded, pushing me to my side. I coughed again and again, spewing murky sea water and feeling my lungs ache with each painful breath inhaled.

  Desolate and empty I lay upon the damp sand, the shore lapped spitefully at my feet—taunting me. I knew it wanted to take me back.

  “You're alive!” Summer cried, laughing and sobbing, falling to her knees and looking at me in a way that both terrified and mollified my heart. She wore a thick woolen blanket around her shoulders and a smile that looked like the first day of spring.

  “See, the siren listened! We have been rescued.”

  But my sister did not know the truth. The siren was not a thing of magic and wishes and life. The siren, quite simply, was death. She was drowning. She was hopelessness. I may have been wretched from the siren's clutches by weather-worn sailors on a promise of rescue, but she had called me with her dark and wicked demand. So, no matter how much salty sea-stained water I vomitted from my lungs, I shall never get her darkness from my mind. One does not look at death without being scarred.

  * * *

  The dirty white sails rippled with the prevailing wind, bulging like the stomach of the long-gone captain, whose body had been sent to the deep. Wood creaked and groaned as the ship rode the gentle waves back towards the English shore. The sun shone but did nothing to warm my heart.

  “Land ahoy!” yelled a sailor, who dashed below deck only to return with a bottle full of a foul-smelling black liquid.

  “Here, Benedict,” Summer said with a blossoming smile across her rosy, if not shallow, cheeks. “You got your wish too. We're back at the English shore—just like you whispered into the siren's purse.”

  The memory prickled my skin and forced the hairs on the back of my neck to quiver.

  “The siren's purse, eh?” said the captain with a glimmer of fairy tales and hope in his faraway eyes. “Did she sing to you down there?” he cocked his head to starboard side and the murky water below. Sailors gathered around, taking a turn to swig rum from the bottle and awaiting a story to be retold like the ones of old.

  “The siren,” I began, feeling the strain on my lungs burn with the words upon my lips. I know what they wanted, but I could no more amuse them than I could myself. And so, I began. “You think you know the story. You've heard it before, from sailors who regale the tales in ale-made stupors. Do not believe them, for if they live to tell the tale they fail to tell you one important thing—the truth... There's no angelic songs or golden hair or beautiful eyes to lull you into the deep. Just the endless depths of the ocean. The rest is just stuff of myth and legends. Pretty little lies.”

  They stared at me wide-eyed, and I continued with my tale, “Whether you believe me or not is none of my concern. I ask you only to listen…”

  The End
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  * * *

  About the Author

  Angharad Thompson Rees is a comic scriptwriter and author of children’s book series, Magical Adventures & Pony Tales. She is currently working on her debut young adult fantasy novel, Caramath, and paranormal dystopia trilogy, The Witch War Trilogy.

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  Angharad Thompson Rees, The Siren's Curse

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