Siren by John Everson

was harder to be a man and live with a woman. Captain James Buckley III had found the solution.
    Love a woman. Live with a woman. But keep her bound and gagged until her services were needed. No harm. No haranguing.
    Some would have called him cruel. A horrible pig of a man.
    Buckley just called himself expedient.
    He grinned at the thought and patted his intellect on the back—expediency is the heart of brevity and brevity is the soul of wit—and fumbled his key into the lock of his quarters. A captain’s prerogative should always include a nooner , he thought. Or, in this case, a midafternooner.
    Burying Rogers, the cook, last night had given him an appetite for the cause, he thought. He would have been too ashamed to have admitted to the wooden erection he had grown as they lifted the bag of body parts and swung it over the side of the ship to sink in the depths. But admit it or not, there it was. The remains of Rogers’s body had excited him in a brutally sexual way. Buckley knew who had dined on the cook’s softest flesh. He knew because some of that flesh was still here, in his cabin. Andhe was responsible for having thrown the other pieces overboard, unfortunately just hours before they ended up back on the ship in its nets. He wasn’t excited by the bag of body parts, but any thought related to her excited him.
    And while she chewed other men to the core, she took him TO her core. In a way no other woman ever had. She was amazing—an animal. The key to being a man was acting like one, Buckley thought. You had to show the woman who was boss. Even if that meant a gag and chains. And from those tiny, frantic mewling sounds she made every time he climbed into his fish-stinkin’ bunk with her, she enjoyed it, he figured.
    Buckley entered the cabin and carefully shut the door behind him. Sometimes she got angry when he woke her from a dream. But as he stepped into his cabin, some sixth sense told him that she wasn’t dreaming. Something was wrong . Used to the small space in the dark, he stepped in four strides to the bulkhead window and drew the curtain there. The room filled with weak gray light, and Buckley swore.
    The bed he shared with her was empty. The gag lay abandoned on the stained and stinking sheets. The ropes that had bound her hand and foot this morning were unraveled.
    Where she had gone was a mystery, though there were only so many places you could hide on a ship drifting at sea. The reason for her freedom was clear enough though.
    On the floor, next to the well-gnawed thigh of Rogers, lay the openmouthed face of “Three Hands” Nelson. The thief looked as if he’d been surprised at the end, and Buckley’s first thought was good riddance .
    But now Nelson’s surprise could be the captain’s undoing. Damnitall , Buckley complained. Another deckhand gone—that was surely going to cause some talk amongthe men. More importantly, how the hell was he going to recapture the damned creature and get her back in his bed where she belonged? Some men would have suggested a tall glass of bourbon and some sweet talk to catch a woman, but Buckley was of a different stripe. And this woman wasn’t going to come back quietly. He knew that for damn certain.
    He dug into a drawer in the bureau near his bunk and tossed a series of ropes and flogs and clips and such over his shoulder, until he found the tool he’d been looking for. He uncoiled the long, wound rope of leather and ran it across his palm with a satisfied grin. Then, bullwhip in his hand, Captain Buckley stepped back onto the deck outside of the captain’s quarters and headed toward the storeroom.
    If you wanted to catch a clown, look in the spotlight. If you wanted to catch a Siren, look in the dark recesses near the sea. The captain lit a candle and walked into the ship’s hold, stacked with crates and crates of rum. The room had an almost claustrophobic feel—from floor to ceiling, wooden boxes filled the womb of the Lady Luck , and Buckley was