The Siren's Tale (3 page)

At the sight of me, in a
dress with a high-collared shirtwaist and a bonnet plain enough for any Quaker maid (which I certainly was not), Giselle broke out into a torrent of angry tears and showered me with verbal abuse.

“
Get out, you vixen from hell, before I kill you!”

But I
had practiced my act well. I knelt before Giselle with clasped hands aloft and in soothing tones begged her to listen to what I had to say, and then I would go. I swore my intent was to right a terrible wrong. Finally, she stopped screaming.

Drilling Giselle straight through the eyes, I swore on my mother's grave that Aldo was not the man she took
him to be. “Giselle, he is innocent, and he loves only you.” 

When I saw I had her full attention, I launched into my story.

“While I was practicing Mozart, a wasp flew through the open window and stung me through my thin summer skirt, directly on the buttocks. I cried out in terror, for I am fatally allergic to insect stings. With his eyes firmly shut, Maestro LaRosa calmly suggested I take off my pantaloons and locate the wound, then point at it with one finger. I did as he ordered. Not until then did he open his eyes.

“
'Right here?' he asked. I could only nod, as I was close to death from the poisons racing through my bloodstream.

“
Then Maestro showed the great bravery he is capable of by putting his mouth directly upon the wound and seizing the toxic stinger between his teeth. He yanked, and it came directly out. That is when you came in, Mrs. LaRosa. And what you saw was your husband saving a pupil's life. Alas, it was at the expense of his own happiness.”

Giselle could not take her eyes away while I talked, willing her to believe my explanation
. She gave a resigned shrug. The injured wife had bought my story, hook, line, and stinger! I congratulated myself on the strength of my powers. But I have since come to see that my strategy would have worked even without tricks, because a coxcomb's wife will believe anything that allows her to go on with her sordid life unaltered.

I was fairly pleased with this successful trial of my abilities, until I noticed married women were
steering their husbands away from me at social functions. I had saved my lover’s skin, but not my own reputation. I foresaw I was doomed to be a wallflower in rooms where I had previously been petted and admired. I was no match for small-town gossip.  It was time to seek a new life, in a different part of the country.

On a warm October day in 1899, I left the protection of my kind aunt's home for the wilds of Wyoming. She chose that moment to entrust me with the siren's cloak.

Now, our baroque zither is my most cherished possession, but its power pales in comparison to the traveling cloak. Aunt Chloe held it out to me with a reverence suitable for the transference of ancient crown jewels.

I saw only an old, dusty coat, and I gazed at it skeptically.

“When my mother gave me this cloak, she said its great powers would protect me from any harm. I could outface my enemies, defeat evil spirits, and even postpone death by wearing it and willing myself to be undetected.”

I asked her how that could possibly be. Aunt Chloe said the cloak has the ability
to inch a siren backward or forward through time, creating a temporary invisibility. All I had to do was flash five fingers, then curl them into a fist, then flash them again: 5—0—5.

I am sorry to say I laughed aloud, believing I was being told an old wives' tale. Besides, I would have no enemies once I left Saratoga.

“Did you ever try it out, Aunt?” I asked.

“
I did, once.”

“
And?”

“
The cloak made me itch, so I took it off.”

I suppressed a smile.
“What do you propose I should do with it?”

“
Wear it on your journey, Cassandra. It will guard you. God forbid you ever need protection, but our lives tend to be challenging, as you have already discovered.”

We smiled at each other through our tears.

We both knew she did not have the same powers or the same troublesome desires I had. Aunt Chloe had graciously attributed the maestro incident to youthful exuberance, rather than any desire on my part to do harm to humans. Nonetheless, she was not entirely sorry to see me go.

At eighteen, my looks and my powers were coming into full bloom, and my nature would compel me to test them further. For a powerful siren, operating in a middle-class community where she is dependent
on relatives' charity is not ideal. Idle gossip would soon become a virulent, persistent buzz. A visit to Grandfather Vye in Wyoming seemed a providential opportunity to start my adult life in a more conducive location. Alta was not far from my birthplace, and even more remote, high in the mountains. I desired to live freely. Hopefully in Wyoming I would find that extra latitude and the passionate life I envisioned for myself.

My aunt warned
me to be careful about whom I passed the cloak along to. “One day the next rightful owner will come along,” she said. “You will recognize the proper moment, as I have. Wait until then. Evil forces lurk who wish us harm.”

To appease my aunt, who was worried about my traveling so far unprotected, I put on the cloak. Then and there, I decided I would leave behind, along with my besmirched reputation, my maiden name. If all I had been told was true, then the
Zanelli surname might invite the attention of those invisible, unfriendly forces Aunt Chloe feared.

Henceforth, I would be known as
Cassandra Vye.

After arriving at Captain
Vye's stone home in Alta in the fall of 1899, I kept my distance from the townspeople. I soon made it a point, however, to visit the graves of my mother and grandmother at the Scottish Presbyterian churchyard in Bulette, only a few miles away. Telling grandfather I needed no chaperone, I rode alone. I took my zither, and while standing before the graves, I played a love song for Kate and Mary.

It happened that as my song drew to a close, Augustus
“Curly” Drake, the Alta innkeeper, was driving by the churchyard in his gig, drawn by two black horses. He heard the music, stopped, got down, and immediately was at my side.

“
Who are you? Can such beauty exist in this wilderness?”

We stared at each other wordlessly.
The current flowing between us was mutually irresistible. I had never before felt such an electric attraction. We made love the next day, and the day after that, I experienced my first human orgasm. I was instantly hooked.

In the case of a siren, love occurs only at first sight. Destiny had ordained I would meet and fall in love with Curly Drake when I was still a reckless young woman, thus setting off a chain of human events leading to the crisis our family now faces, the threat of extinction.

Aunt Chloe had told me that both extinction and evil forces threaten our kind. She herself was not gifted, but she said skipping a generation is not the worst fate that may befall our powers. “Sometimes a siren, male or female, will use them for evil rather than good, as did the mythical sirens portrayed in Greek literature. The result is catastrophic, both for ourselves and the reputation of our lineage.”

There was a
day, four decades after the curse originated, when I came close to passing our magic cloak along but stopped short of doing so, because I feared its powers might be used for ill-gotten gain. It was April 20, 1947, shortly after I retired from acting on the stage, when my son appeared at my residence on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

Indeed I was inclined to give Caesar
the cloak. But my instincts rebelled against the idea, and I did not make the transfer. In ‘70s parlance, my “love child” was an immediate “turn-off.” I could see my firstborn was a wanderer like my father and, even worse, an alcoholic bum with no sense of responsibility toward either humans or our kind. I warned Caesar about our curse, but sadly, that was the extent of my home schooling of him. I do regret it now, as I foresee trouble ahead in the person of my untutored grandson, Dakota.

I might add it takes a
powerful siren to bring forth a male of our species upon this earth. Gifted male progeny of a siren are even rarer. In the males, the paranormal power presents as a demonic tendency at worst or a gentle genius at best. The labels do not do justice to the complexity of the character involved. Most commonly, the male will appear as a twin brother to a red-haired female and will have few, if any, special powers.

I have never regretted denying Caesar our powerful cloak.
That day, after he left, I checked to make sure that the cloak was safe in its hiding place, that an evil force pursuing him had not managed to spirit it away. I myself no longer used the invisibility cloak, and my daughter Chloe had refused to take it off my hands. My life, by that time, was exactly as I wanted it. I didn't desire to mesmerize or lure men into actions they would otherwise not take, or to pursue a sexual instinct that might lead to a man's untimely death. Indeed, by the time Caesar showed up, I was living an exemplary life that not even Widow Brown could have found fault with. I was using my powers solely for altruistic purposes. The most basic and harmless of a siren's powers, our eidetic memory, was the one I used most often. Perfect recall makes learning lines a swift operation. I can learn in a glance what it takes others days or weeks to memorize.

Chloe has this same ability.
She is a brilliant woman; I say so with total objectivity. My daughter is an erudite pioneer in Jungian scholarship and has published ten books that are translated into five languages. She travels and speaks world-wide on the arcane subjects of the collective unconscious and evolutionary psychology.

Among the
Zanelli sirens, however, I alone possess the rarest gift: second sight, as my name implies. Which is not to say I understand the pictures of the future that I see. LOL.

Now,
where did those cryptic letters come from? I have seen them in my dreams.

LOL is code of some sort.

Aha, a picture is forming; the date is December 21, 2012, thirty-six years from today. The Mayans have predicted the world will end on that date. But I know better. On that day, I see a red-haired young woman recording the three letters on a magical tablet. She will write them with a twiddle of her thumbs, if you can believe it.

I was speaking at the outset of
unintended consequences. Sirens are strong women with extraordinary skills. Many humans have paranormal gifts, if they only knew how to tap into them. There are often unintended consequences in the lives of strong women, human or siren, as they forge ahead rather than take the traditional passive role. Therefore, they make mistakes. Should they automatically be demonized and persecuted? I think not!

Our siren brains are much li
ke the tablet on which the siren of the future writes code. We receive more than we understand. For instance, the young woman's tablet appears to me to have magical powers. But in my dream, when I point that out to her, she laughs and says, “Oh, you're so funny, Cassandra. That's only my iPad.”

Funny? Our family history might be construed as a comic tale, but by necessity it is also a dire one. Behind our history of accomplishment lurks the shadow of a punishing
ancestral curse.

Fortunately,
Marlena is already half-convinced she is my reincarnation, as Faith’s daughter and I look so much alike, and therefore she might be ready at some point for a proper home schooling. A local nutcase in Alta, Wyoming, has put the reincarnation idea into her head. The idea is also firmly lodged in the noggins of Alta's religious half-wits. I foresee that these human grotesques may play into our hands one day when we need to stage a spectacle. Metaphysically speaking, I am dead but not gone, and with no help from the reincarnation camp. 

Anyway, if I were to c
ome back on earth as someone else, it would not be Mrs. Codwell Dimmer, whom I predict will separate from her husband in January and return to her maiden name of Marlena Mae Bellum. Granted, Marlena is witty and pretty and achieves much beyond human women of her age, already basking in the national limelight as a prominent architect and a promotional genius. But she is far from wise. And Marlena disappoints when it comes to sexual politics.

I
s there any other kind?

As
Elizabeth the First (a great siren) demonstrated, women must lead rather than follow. Human men, like roosters in the hen house, make the loudest noise, but they show more strut than productivity. It is a siren's job to move human society toward a more advanced form of civilization, one based on making love, not war.

Unfortunately,
Marlena, who is blessed with exceptional intellect and sex drive, has allowed herself to become besotted by a prize philandering cad, the brutally insensitive Harry Drake. Harry owns most of the choice development properties in Wyoming, but Marlena is the brains behind his greatest success, the Alta Hotel. Yet she constantly defers to him. Her siren nature is partly to blame.

She was mesmerized by her first orgasm into falling obsessively in love. Obsessive love is the only human emotion that can entrap a siren, making her a bigger fool than any ordinary female would be. Her upward course delayed,
Marlena has voluntarily become Harry's sex slave. And where has the personal relationship gotten her? For years on end, precisely nowhere. Even Chloe, who dotes on Marlena, is annoyed by our cousin's weakness, allowing matters to drift along and vainly waiting on an unlikely HEA with her arrogant, domineering lover.