Now the siren kisses you, and something living that is not a tongue slides across her lips and moves slimy across your lips and between your teeth and slithers down your gagging throat. It will make a den of your belly. It will make a burrow of your soul. “But what is it I will I make of you?” the siren asks. “What will I fashion from you, little killer, little houndwife, that they will slink away and not ever trouble me again?” The thing she has vomited into your belly snickers to itself and seeps toxins that are the envy of every box jelly and blue-ringed octopus, every lionfish and cloth-of-gold cone ever spawned. Without speaking, the siren whispers, There was a little pool, curved in a smooth arc, dear to Scylla for its peacefulness. This, the goddess tainted in advance and contaminated with her monstrous poison. She sprinkled the liquid squeezed from harmful creatures, and muttered a mysterious incantation, dark with strange words, thrice nine times, in magical utterance. And where a moment ago there was a bed in a seedy room in a tawdry hotel in a crowded night-bound Southern city, there is now only a weathered slab of jasper and pillow lava beneath your naked body. Where there was the noise of traffic and hip-hop blaring from the room next door, now there is the sea slamming itself against the breakers, and jaundiced streetlight through the window has become the ivory moon gazing down from a peephole punched in the salt-dabbed sky. My own grandmother was bedded on this altar stone, the siren whispers. And my mother. It wasn’t meant for unconsecrated filth like you. And again you think, Where is the hound? Why won’t it come? And again the poisonous thing in your gut, Circe’s thrice nine times, snickers to itself and pricks at your mind. But I could make you something better, says the siren, and another wave slams the rocks and showers you in freezing spray. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, I could undo this crude terrestrial evolution. I could unzip all those inconvenient double helices and remind you where you came from. Then you would be my assassin, little killer. Then you would be my hound. A moment ago, your hands were clutching frantically at damp sheets, sheets she had you soak with water from the tub, but now your fingers scrabble at unyielding igneous stone as you play Andromeda to her Cetus. You may not have been born worthy, but you can be made worthy. You hear yourself say, “Just let me close my eyes, please just let me close my eyes,” and the siren shakes her head and kisses you again, and there’s the taste of kelp and oysters and low-tide estuary mud. Scylla comes, wading waist deep into the pool, only to find the water around her groin erupt with yelping monsters, and Maybe, says the siren, when I’m done, they’ll keep you in a great glass aquarium tank below that watchtower of theirs and show you off as a warning and feed you on fresh alewives and blueback herring. Maybe they’ll even teach you tricks. You’re scraping your fingers raw against her altar, your blood mingling with the roaring, hungry sea. Please, just let me close my eyes, but before you have even finished speaking, all the waves resounded, and a monster menaced them, rising from the deep sea, and covered the wide waters with its breadth. The thing in your belly has become an ouroboros, infinitely recursive, a pregnant Möbius strip, the strangest of all strange loops cycling you back upon yourself, and the scabby Welsh seashore comes apart, just as the hotel room came apart.
“Where are you now, little killer?” the siren wants to know, as if she needs to ask. “Tell me what you see.”
And where, indeed, but a dark place, and it is a darkness unlike any you have ever known before, unlike any you have even managed to halfway imagine, waking or asleep or anywhere in between. This is a solid darkness possessed somehow of form and substance, and you can feel it, palpable, crowding in all around. You think how you might easily reach out and grab a whole fistful, if you had the courage. If you were that careless. It feels eager, the dark; it feels impatient. And crouching helpless and afraid you think how you must have wandered alone in this lightless, echoing place for days upon days, weeks upon weeks, retreating across some vast plain of polished stone, coming finally to a corner—or something that only seems vaguely like a corner if you don’t allow yourself to think on it too hard. If you pause to consider its screwball, cockeyed geometry, it doesn’t seem anything at all like a corner, but more like a curve than the meeting point of convergent lines. If it were only a corner, you think, the hound could find me here and slay the dragon and take me home again. You hug yourself and shiver, naked and slick with brine and diatomaceous ooze and clinging strands of seaweed, with the siren’s gift growing fat in your belly. You know that somehow you’ve become lost beyond lost within some impossibly cavernous space beneath the bottom of the sea, without knowing how you know this. You are lost, and the hound isn’t coming, and Albany isn’t coming, and the Signalman isn’t coming. But worse and worst, you are not alone, after all. Something here is stirring. And all at once you remember how you know exactly what that something is, because the siren whispered its awful name into your ear and into your mouth and brain, and the thing that wears that name is infinitely worse than the smothering darkness, which is, in truth, only here to keep this god-thing hidden, and to keep it company and to mutter worshipful obscenities to flatter a sleeping leviathan. What an utterly insufficient word—leviathan. The serpent of Job
