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Davy Jones sees her from the corner of his eye, a majestic figure in a gown of blue silk—or is it the very waves themselves that she wears? But when he turns, she’s gone. “Show yourself, witch!” he demands. The ship lurches, the sea’s cruel winds making the ancient ship’s moldering wood groan and creak. She is not there—of course she isn’t, he hadn’t really expected her to be. But sometimes… sometimes he sees her still.
He is only thinking of her, he convinces himself, because he had caught one poxy tar giving libations to the deep as the storm around them worsened and forced them to the surface, leaving the shelter of their reefs and wreckage at the bottom. “We,” he corrected, punctuating each word with a flourish, “govern these oceans.” ‘Now,’ he adds to himself, remembering a time when Calypso in all of her great and terrible beauty was free, unbound.
Such things matter to him not. He is not even hard-hearted for he has no heart, no need for the poetry he used to spout, or the remembrance of her splendor, her glorious, wild magnificence. And yet this storm has come on suddenly and with a fervor he has not seen in some time. And they are close—oh yes, and does he not know it—to her domain. She is a witch of some power; is it yet difficult to believe that some sort of enchantment or hex has reached its pustulent, grasping fingers toward him?
Playing the organ does nothing to placate him that night; the relentless crashing of the waves, the churning of the water, overcomes it and the tune sounds more melancholy than ever.
A scurvy wench, that’s all she is now, a wretched magician playing with chicken’s feet and lizard eyes. And yet… and yet he feels her power still, and it tugs at the empty cavity in his chest, seems to throb and expand for a moment. He must be vigilant nevertheless, for she has ever been wily. It was why first he loved her.
In the small hours of morn, everything goes deathly silent. ‘The eye of the storm,’ thinks he, and again he catches the hint of those skirts brushing past, the smooth, dark skin, and hair… hair so long, unbound it could reach her ankles. He can remember the way it felt to his rough hand, so soft but tightly rippled, kinked. It is recollection only, for he is no longer moved to yearning or desire, not for the briny taste of her skin, or her scent like sea foam.
He feels it again as he stumbles his way to his bunk, that horrid pitch in his hollow chest. A pinch. An aching. Sometimes he suspects that he is still connected to that heart, that hated, wretched organ; he knows it still beats and he feels its sorrow often a lonely night. He regrets nothing save that he could not sever those binds completely. And when he sleeps, he dreams of her as she had been, or as she had appeared to him, for she could be many things and anythings.
She wears her locket and it settled between the two enticing swells of her breasts, playing its tune, and she dances to it, her hands raised as she twirls. He can swear that her dress lets off white droplets as she moves. “Poor Davy Jones,” she says in an accent so thick, it startles him; her lips don’t appear to be moving. He has vivid dreams often but never of her, and never this lucid. “Him friendless and remote, him sleep always in him bunk alone. Would him agree to my companionship fer da night.”
“Be gone, spirit,” he mutters in his sleep, and thinks he waves a dismissive hand. “Cruel vision. Spiteful enchantress.” She gives him a saucy laugh, and the dress falls away from her in one slick movement, leaving that perfect body—high breasts with dark, dusky nipples, smooth coffee down her flat stomach to the hairless place between her legs—wet, glistening in the dank sick glow of his cabin. She climbs onto the bunk with him, and in this dream, he does not resist putting his hands on her, feeling every familiar curve of his lover’s body.
It is only when he looks at where his hand is caressing her that he sees and remembers that he has no hand: his left hand is a total loss, the claw of a crustacean; the right is more salvageable: fingers, four, yes, but his forefinger is a long, curling tentacle. It is with this that he touches her, watching in fascination as the little circles of suction along the underside grip her skin with a soft, sticky sound as it pulls away, leaving behind small, circular marks. He encloses her breast in a spiral, the tip of the tentacle resting on her puckered nipple, drawing it into a greedy sucker and pulling at it, pumping it. “You cannot be here,” he says softly, gazing into her golden eyes.
“Aye, ‘tis true that pitiful body the Brethren Court imprisoned me in does not ride the waves as I used to do.” Her voice was cool now, the accent gone. “I can’t embrace you in a tempest, and wait for you in its eye, as of old. But I know of spells, of potions to brew to cure or to kill, to break a heart or to fill it. I can even raise the dead.” She puts a finger to her lips at this last, as if she wishes it a secret. “I can even send a man a dream.”
He blows out his flat top lip as if scoffing. “You have a-come wrong, miserable madam. I no longer love you nor can I ever again.”
“But you will always love me, Davy,” she corrects, her mouth curled in an enigmatic, feminine smile. “For I am the spirit of the sea, its soul, even if I no longer have dominion over it, and the sea, she was your first love.” She places a hand over the place his heart would have been. “You have cut out your heart, but you still have your soul, as trivial and desolate as you may have made it by neglecting it. Our spirits our entwined, my love.”
‘No,’ he thinks, ‘no longer.’ But he continues to touch her, moving his inhuman caress along the curves of her body. His beard writhes in a fury of excitement. “Aye, me tinks you not missin yar heart now; you be tinkin with something else.” She grins widely, leaning into him to kiss his lipless mouth. The tangle of his wriggling tentacles surrounding his jaw and neck explore her skin, the hollows at the tips acting as his suckers did, plucking at her dark flesh. They stroke her breasts, drawing her nipples into the sticky, round cavities, constricting as if suckling.
They move across her flat stomach to the smooth skin of her thighs. She’s gasping, delighted little sounds of bliss, as the tentacles glide over every inch of her; her thighs part for him, and while his squirming beard surrounds her hips, urges her legs further apart, the tentacles also delve into the wet slit in the cradle of her thighs. His mouth follows and finds her as succulently slick as she had always been, tasting of the sea. The old barnacle that is now his tongue rasps against her swollen nub, making her thrash and call his name, even as his tentacles plunge deeper into her sweet wellspring. They’re curious creatures of their own, probing and caressing every inch of her, inside and out.
He remembers what it is for her to climax, as she does now in his mouth, rubbing her sex against him like a cat. She surges and drips with her briny juice, clutching him. And before she can catch her breath, he thrusts inside of her that part of himself which has so long been neglected, hard and rough, the skin moving curiously as if it has a thin outer shell to it, shifting in sections, though he can feel every sensation. She can feel it to, has never, in fact, felt anything like it, that crustaceous member thrusting into her again and again.
She rides him, reaching to the low ceiling of the bunk and grinning down at him as he grips her hips, that tentacle forefinger wrapping about her waist, his beard seeking out her breasts once more. The come together, Calypso grinding her sex over him and his coral-like pubis, nearly screaming in her ecstasy. He feels more relief than he has felt in some time, and a sensation of something like peace fills him.
He opens his eyes and she’s gone. He blows out his lipless mouth once more, sputtering in something between indignation and scorn. And yet… and yet he can still smell her on him, the fragrance of the deep. He pulls himself off of his bunk and returns to his organ, and he begins the tune again. The crew, who has long grown used to the sound, hear him now and some, even a few of the most hardened tars, weep tears of salt water and do not even know why.