The Siren's Tale (40 page)

The mill wheel, glittering with its string of lights, continues in its slow revolutions. The ground ominously rumbles once again, and the remaining onlookers flee. Only the two antagonists are left at the scene, both in the dangerously cold water.

“Marlena Bellum carries Satan's child! Their deaths are foretold! Thom, help me!” Gasping out her imprecations with her last breaths, Letty has suddenly emerged into the air, her body lifted up by the wheel. When the entire length of the turban is tightly wound around her neck, she makes no further sound. She drops from sight as Faith clambers out of the water.

A sudden hush comes over the scene, as death has entered it.

.

Afterward, i
n the main reception room at Mill's Creek, the sound of weeping mixes with the crashes of oncoming thunder. Chloe is comforting everyone who has stayed, moving from person to person.

The first death predicted for this night by
Letty Brown-Hawker has just occurred. Ironically, the dead, hulking body of Letty Brown-Hawker herself is lying at the side of the millpond. The shocking accident has cast a pall over the group of revelers, who are mumbling goodbyes and making a hasty exit.

Chloe is startled to hear a woman's voice in her ear.

“One down and one to go. That is, if the witch-hunter's prediction holds up.”

“
Lila?”

“
She is better off dead, that old publicity hound,” murmurs Lila drunkenly to Chloe. 

“
Can I get you anything?”

Lila continues
. “Letty was stark, raving mad, and a proper victim for her second-hand curses. By the way, have the cute doctor check out her underwear. SHE is a HE; you can bet on it. Amazing party.”

As Lila trails off in her green gossamer gown, cocktail in han
d, she might be a ghost from a roaring twenties party.

Through the windows, the gathering clouds appear
ever darker, and the lightning is continuously flickering.

“
Hawker has threatened to kill Marlena in revenge for his wife's death,” a distraught guest mutters in passing.

Chloe wonders where
Marlena and Harry are. She has not seen either of them all night. Have they chosen this crazy moment to go off by themselves? She had better try to find them and warn them about Hawker.

Thirty minutes later, in the flick
ering light of the bonfire at the east end of the pond, Harry Drake is dead. He lies at the exact spot where his grandfather had once stepped forth in response to a siren's call.

It is a few minutes past midnight when Coddie drunkenly appears at the deserted party. Lila has just accepted Chloe's invitation to spend the night. She is poised on the first step of the grand staircase as Coddie comes up behind her and crashes through the French doors into the parlor.

“
Where is everybody? You all sheem shurprised to shee me. Am I the uninvited guest to the feasht? But, no. I have an invitation right here in my hand.” He waves it, but he is so unsteady on his feet that he almost falls over from that small exertion.

From an adjoining hallway
, the late entrance is spotted by Dr. Ron, who is tending to the bandaging of minor wounds suffered by three members of the hired staff, who, while guests were fleeing for their lives, collided with each other in rushing outdoors to see the spectacular lightning show, with a resulting shower of glass.

Ron calls out,
“Steady there, Mr. Dimmer. I'll be with you in a second.”

Coddie
ignores the call-out.

“
Guess what I got here in my pocket. Five hundred smackaroos for good old Harry Drake, my good old buddy. I got 'em right here in my pocket—five one hundred dollar bills. Where is that snake? I've got his winnings. Two days ago he bested me on the pool table at his hotel. I didn't have it on me at the time.”

He
burps loudly before going on. “You shee, ladies and genulmen. You shhhhhee, me and Harry had ourselves a sporting afternoon, during which, I'm s-s-sorry to s-s-ay, I failed to perform adequately. Conshider these silver coins. Conshider whatever. The dough belongs to Harry. Not that he needs it. Winner takes all. He gets everything—hook, line, and stinker. I mean…ha ha ha…I mean wife, I mean slinker.”

No one says anything.
Lila begins to giggle uncontrollably, with tears running down her ashen cheeks.

“
You think ish funny, lady? I had an agreement with your husband, no joking matter, long time ago. We agreed on two rules. Do NOT fall in love with my lovely wife and do NOT knock her up. Naughty, naughty. Your hubbie failed to abide by the rules, Mrs. Drake. The rules are the rules, between genulmen. Hey, did I miss anything?”

Lila hiccoughs.
“Are you speaking to me, whoever you are? You didn't miss a thing except for divine retribution. Everyone's gone home. I'm going up to bed.”

Harry Drake's demise happened in this way:

C
hloe, who went looking for Marlena in her bedroom, told Harry of Thomas Hawker's murderous intent. Motivated by a belated spasm of concern for the mother of his child, Harry ran out to stop the madman from harming Marlena.

Who or what killed Harry Drake? Onlookers reported to the police there was a shouting match between the two men, and Thomas shot Harry at close range
.

However, the bullet
from Hawker's gun did not kill Harry Drake. In fact, it missed him entirely and was found lodged in a nearby tree.

The sirens will attribute Harry Drake's death to the ancestral curse. He has paid the ultimate price for consorting with a siren. 

Dr. Ron Huddleston has another theory. As he examined Drake, he found clear evidence of a catastrophic heart attack. Drake's valet would later say that his employer had been complaining of chest pains earlier in the day. Unfortunately, Harry attributed the fluttering sensations not to cardiac symptoms, but rather to “being stressed.”

In the future,
Marlena will always wonder if her lover's dying thought was that his death was her fault.  

When
Marlena is told of Letty's death, she is too dazed by the loss of her lover to think of anything else. However, the next day she begins to imagine an alternative set of circumstances. They give her more to worry about.

She has already proved her powers are strong enough to stop the mill wheel in its tracks. What if she had been with her mother at the pond, taking the brunt of
Letty's lambasting instead of hiding out upstairs in her bedroom? She might have saved Letty's life in any number of ways, including stopping the winching action of the wheel before it strangled her.

The question she continues to ask herself is this one: would she have saved
Letty's life, or would she have willed her to die?

Marlena
suspects there is a bloodthirsty aspect to being a siren in human form, a characteristic not covered in the owner's manual that was delivered to her as a bedtime story.

T
he deaths of Harry Drake and Letty Brown-Hawker quickly become front-page news. Not since 1901 have such strange events occurred in concert and in such an apocalyptic context. However, there is disparity among the stories, reported and otherwise, circulating in the new year. 

The version in the monthly district
newspaper, the
Homesteader
, reports Mrs. Letty Brown-Hawker lost her life as the result of falling off balance at a pond's edge and plummeting to the bottom; drowning was the cause of death. Not reported but tacitly understood by readers is that the weight of her heavy clothing and her flesh may have kept her at the pond's bottom, despite valiant attempts by Dr. Ron Huddleston and Apollo Nelson to save her life.      

From h
is jail cell in New Gillette, Thomas Hawker tells anyone who will listen to him that his wife was the victim of a supernatural attack orchestrated by a siren, Marlena Bellum. He claims the sorceress came to Alta to thwart Letty from opening a Pentecostal church among the heathen tribe. According to Hawker, Letty's head was spun on its axis by evil forces and snapped from her spine. He also says Marlena receives protection from an invisible source, that black magic kept him from delivering on his promise to end the red-haired siren's life. 

Some believe
a different version to be closer to the truth, that Letty was a crazy publicity hound who got her just deserts when she was strangled by the turning motion of a mill wheel in which her turban accidentally got tangled. Letty's bullying tactics, voodoo channeling, and hand-me-down curses have been going on for too long, sings the chorus of reason. But they are few in number and do not prevail.

There is another story that was never
reported: the true story of the unhappy life and inglorious end of Letty Brown-Hawker, aka Lester Brown, who grew up in the coal mining town of New Gillette, Wyoming.

Lester Brown was a troubled teen
with an attraction to homosexuality that was treated by frequent parental beatings. Lester's gender confusion and his family's repression resulted in a powder keg of explosive emotions. They also led to his eventual fascination and strong identification with a distant ancestor, old Widow Brown of Alta. 

The controversial family matri
arch was not in full possession of her mind, many said. Her supposed hexing powers were considered by some to be supernatural and others to be a fraud or a nuisance. Widow Brown was put away in a madhouse and died in 1935. Lester, who took up her cause some forty years later, didn't consider her to have been deranged. To the contrary, Lester felt Widow Brown had been correct in singling out morally loose, redheaded women and broadcasting the truth about their pernicious influence on stalwart Christians.

The world would be safer without sirens; Lester was convinced
this was true.  

Thomas Hawker III and Lester Brown first got together in
public school in New Gillette. Both, they soon realized, had Alta ancestors.

Thom
as had a family tree that included Mayor Theodore Hawker and his youngest son, pious Thomas. The first Thomas was too timid to marry, but in his long life he did manage to produce a single progeny. A drunken barmaid, on a dare, dragged him to her cabin one Fire Night and had her way with the forty-year-old virgin. The resulting child was a boy no one cared to claim, a pitiful creature who worked as a stable boy and was called Bastard Hawker until he got big enough to fight, and then he was called Bubba Hawker. Bubba grew up, got work at the electric company in New Gillette, and married a Pentecostal Christian. Bubba's wife wanted to name their son Thomas Hawker III because she thought it looked distinguished. She set about posthumously legitimizing her husband by changing his legal name to Thomas Hawker, Jr. Therefore in her eyes (and her eyes alone), when she baptized their son Thomas Hawker III, the family tree had been scrubbed clean.

Thomas and Lester were loners. G
irls of the same age instinctively shied away from Lester and made him the butt of their jokes, which only compounded his unexpressed rage. If it were not for Thomas, who was as reedy as Lester was mountainous, Lester would not have had any friends. 

Lester confided to Thom his abiding
interest in exposing to the public “a dangerous kind of creature who looks like a beautiful woman, but is masquerading for the devil, like the ancient sirens who lured sailors to their deaths.” As punishment for bullying girls, Lester had been assigned to write a report on alleged instances of witchcraft and related persecutions. He had come upon a story that made his case, springing from the old homesteading days in Alta, after Wyoming became a state.

In
looking through newspapers from the early 1900's, he came upon a story in the
Casper Star-News
about a young, red-haired woman named Cassandra Vye. She was said to have vanished after her bewitched lover was killed under mysterious circumstances on Hatter's Field. There was a charge voiced by natives, Widow Brown being foremost, that Cassandra was a female form of the Evil One and that she caused not only the demise of innkeeper Augustus Curly Drake, but also the deaths of her estranged husband and his sainted mother, Mrs. Zelda Brighton. On her deathbed, Widow Brown's last words were that “vigilance against the sirens must continue. We need a champion of rectitude.” 

In Widow Brown, Lester saw an
uncanonized saint. He felt a new sense of manly purpose when he began to fancy himself as her modern-day champion of rectitude. Discovering in his mother's attic an old trunk that contained the Widow's moldy dresses, he dressed up in them and put on a show for Thomas.

Finally there was an avenue for funneling his antagonisms. But,
when Lester followed the trail of Cassandra's descendants straight to the door of Mill's Creek, there his mission hit an early snag. Dr. Chloe Vye was an upstanding, beloved member of the community, a spinster who championed the cause of children. Reluctantly he gave up the chase, but he never abandoned the cause, feeling duty-bound to carry on the Widow's and God's work in alerting the populace to the dangers that exist when witches or sirens suddenly appear in their midst. Though the creatures are fiendishly devious, he told Thom, he was sure to spot them by the coloration of their hair.

Lester tried dying his
hair in a fiery red-gold shade to see if any magic resulted, but the effect was more Clarabelle than siren. Within six months, he became entirely bald, which made him all the more convinced of the terrible power sirens wielded.

After high school, Lester Brown and Thomas Hawker III moved to
gether to San Francisco, away from the prying eyes of those who would not understand their affection for each other and their fascination with the past. In the
Examiner
one day, Lester saw a picture that riveted his attention, a young woman whose photograph exactly matched the old press photo of Nevada Carson he kept in his closet. The young woman had the same lips, cheekbones, and hair. Her name was Marlena Dimmer, nee Marlena Bellum. She was an up-and-coming architect who had just been given the baton to lead the charge on a huge hotel project in Alta, Wyoming.

Lester (
who now was “Letty” at home) began to focus laser-like attention on Marlena and her career. Both Lester and Thomas had a theatrical bent. They signed a pledge in blood and anointed themselves the Knights of GibrAlta, Defenders of the Sacred Ways of the Natives. Otherwise, they led a fairly ordinary life. Lester worked as a bouncer in a Castro bar. Thomas was amassing a customer base in an insurance agency; people mistook his close-set eyes as evidence of reliability. The pair were devastated when their Dirty & Gerty act was booed off the stage in tryouts for the Gong Show. 

Back in Wyoming, the talk was all about a rival to the Biltmore and the
Broadmoor hotels being built in their state. The groundbreaking for the Alta Hotel took place with great fanfare and extensive press coverage, making a splash even in the San Francisco newspapers. There was a photo of Lester's nemesis, Marlena Dimmer, standing with the hotel's owner before a massive oaken bar that she was credited with procuring and naming. A private lounge off the lobby was to be called B. L. Zebub's Poolhall Saloon.

“
The nerve of her!” cried Lester. “That's pure Satanism! Alta must be warned!”

Lester and Thom agreed this was their moment to pursue their mission from God and Widow Brown.
In 1971 they moved to Alta, twenty miles from New Gillette, and began passing themselves off as a married couple, Letty Brown-Hawker and Thomas Hawker. They were quickly accepted because of their family connections and loudly professed piety. In his role of head-of-household, Thomas started up his own insurance agency. With the Hawker shingle, he was able to glean a decent share of business from the old line of natives. The pair thrived and prospered, all the while watching Marlena do the same. 

There was a small
, but strong-minded element of the citizenry who resented Harry Drake's gobbling up all the prime real estate through his goons at the bank. His showpiece hotel also had loud detractors among the very religious. Both groups needed leadership, at which no one was more vociferously effective than Letty Brown-Hawker. Decked out in her vintage turban and pioneer-era clothing, Letty volunteered for the job of reviving the local WCTU chapter presidency. Then she got herself on network television by chaining herself to a tree and demanding that Harry Drake do something about the satanic operation at the core of his famous hotel. 

Things did not
really get out of hand, some would say, until Letty got into spiritualism. By the end of 1977, she was channeling not only Widow Brown, but also Crazy Horse. The Indian spirit, so Letty said, was plenty pissed off by what land developers such as Drake had done to the Native Americans  over the years. The Crazy Horse monument and its colorful mountain-man sculptor had been featured by CBS on
60 Minutes
in October. Letty wanted in on that action as well.

As soon as she ruined Drake in Wyoming,
Letty planned to tackle his land-grabbing schemes in the Dakotas. Unaware Marlena was not at all involved in that part of Drake's complex life, Letty mistakenly assumed Marlena was in on the fix. 

Some would also say it was only a matter of time before things came to a head between
Letty Brown-Hawker and Marlena Bellum, that delusion lay on both sides. Marlena believed she was the best thing that ever happened to Harry Drake, and Letty believed that “she” was Widow Brown returned to life.

However, as one disenchanted follower of the psychic witch-hunter pointed out, “if old Widow Brown had seen her self-appointed champion of rectitude, with his bald head showing, his dress hiked up, and his hairy balls exposed, the Widow would have come screaming out of the grave and strangled the madman herself!”