by Brian Lumley
‘It’s OK, don’t bother,’ he said. ‘And I agree with you. It is a rock of an island. So few birds.’
‘Boids?’ said the other, just as Trace had thought he would.
‘Sure, girls. There’s damn few about …’
‘Goils?’ the other shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘Yeah, well goils is goils. Me, I’m here for the ozone – the smell off the sea. It helps my nose, you know? I get these blocked sinuses, see.’
‘Yes, I see,’ said Trace, and thought: I’ll block your bloody sinuses, you skinny little bastard!
That was the end of their conversation, but as they pulled into Pighadia Trace asked: ‘Tell me, do you know if it’s possible to hire a motor-cycle around here? There’s a place I want to visit in the mountains.’ He was looking directly at Mr Laurel’s face, but … not a twitch.
‘Motor-cycles?’ the other shook his head. ‘Naw, I don’t think so. Who needs one, the taxis are so cheap! So what’s in the hills, eh? More goils, maybe?’
‘No,’ Trace shook his head. ‘Just some old ruins. But I’m very interested in old ruins.’
‘Yeah? Well, goils and ruins, that’s your bag. Me, it’s the schnoz, you know?’
Trace nodded, and to the taxi driver: ‘Can you stop here? This is fine for me.’ He got out in the main street, watched the taxi drive off.
It took only a matter of minutes to find a place where he could hire a small motor-cycle. The shop was in a tiny courtyard just off the main street; crammed with bits of bikes; where an old man and his son tinkered and pottered and put together machines from the junk. And yes, there were two motor-cycles free, a red one and a blue one. Trace chose the blue one. The other was just a bit too bright, too noticeable. He would have driven the machine off there and then but the old man wouldn’t let him.
‘Brakes need fixing,’ he explained. ‘Bad brakes, you fall, get hurt. Red one got good brakes, Or I fix this one.’
‘How long?’ Trace asked.
‘Half hour?’ the oldster shrugged.
‘OK, I’ll be back.’
Trace found himself a restaurant. He had coffee, a huge slice of swordfish and a side salad. The swordfish left a taste in his mouth which he washed away with a can of ice-cold beer. Then he went back to the bike shop. The blue machine was ready but … something was missing.
‘Where’s the red bike?’ he asked.
‘Red bike gone,’ said the old man, wiping his hands on an oily rag. ‘Hired out.’
Alarm bells started to ring in Trace’s head. ‘Oh, yes? Could that have been my friend who took it?’
‘Friend?’ the old man wasn’t greatly interested.
‘Yes, a thin man with a bright shirt and a hat?’
‘Ah! That him. He want hurry, your friend,’ the old man grinned gummily. ‘I old. I not hurry.’
The alarm bells were louder. ‘How long’s he been gone?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Half hour?’
Trace felt a lump rising in his throat. Had he taken that long over his meal? He supposed he had.
He took a pair of binoculars from his case – the ones he used at the races back home – and hung them round his neck; also Amira’s guidebook, which he tucked under his belt. Then he gave the suitcase to the old man and paid him an extra hundred Drachmas to take care of it for him.
Heading his mongrel mount back out of town along the winding hill road to Amoupi, Trace tried to look ahead, see what was coming next. It was all too bizarre, too cloak-and-dagger, too incredible. And it was certainly too dangerous. As for where he was going: there was only one place he could go now. It was what he’d come here for. And he’d looked at various maps of the island often enough to know roughly where it was. No need to waste any more time on that. In fact he sensed that he daren’t waste any time at all. Time was suddenly all-important.
But half an hour’s start! How far ahead of him was Mr Laurel now? Or was it Mr Lorre after all?
This skinny, doity boid,
On his way to kill the thoid,
Not Laurel, no, but Lorre –
Or is that just absoid?
Trace was caught up in this now – guessed that he’d been caught up in it all along – and had come to the conclusion that merely half-hearted participation wouldn’t be good enough. Not good enough? – it looked like it wouldn’t even be allowed. Too much was at stake; indeed, if Kastrouni had been half-right in what he’d said, then he, Trace himself, was at stake. Those were pretty high stakes! They made tenners on the wheel at Cromwell’s Mint seem a bit tame. And Trace’s excitement, the adrenalin-inspired fever of his body and brain transmitted itself through him to his machine.
Actually it wasn’t a bad little bike. Not a bit like his powerful old Triumph, no, but nippy enough for roads like these. With a full tank – all of twelve pints! – Trace could have done a complete circuit of Karpathos, if there’d been coastal roads. There weren’t; the island was ‘unspoiled’; much of the coastline consisted of cliffs rising sheer from the sea into mountains. But he would stay on the roads until they became paths, and on the paths until they became tracks, and so on. It might even end up with him doing a bit of uphill cross-country, but he’d done some of that, too, in his time; only for his own amusement, of course, but there weren’t many who could handle a bike like Charlie Trace.
Full of confidence, he put his little machine through its clattering paces on the rough roads, and in no time at all Pighadia, then Amoupi were left behind in clouds of dust; by which time he was already climbing into the foothills. Then, too, he caught his first glimpse of the man he tracked: the brilliant flash of early afternoon sunlight glancing off a driving mirror high on a steep hillside. With practised ease Trace slammed on his freshly adjusted brakes, skidded to a halt at the side of the road, yanked up his binoculars to his eyes. The distance was probably one and a half, not more than two miles, but the glasses brought it down to mere hundreds of yards.
It was the red motor-cycle, yes, and the thin man riding like a demon, hunched over his little fuel tank. The old man at the bike shop had been wrong, ‘it couldn’t have been half an hour; more like ten minutes, if that. But the old boy’s grasp of English wasn’t much; he probably said ‘half an hour’ to any question regarding the matter of time. Trace got a decent focus going, looked closer at the rider up ahead.
He had something over his shoulder: a long cylindrical bag, like a thin golf-bag. Fishing tackle? But what sort of fish would he be after up here? Trace watched until, with a wobble and a jerk, the red machine was up the hill and dipping down the other side out of view.
Then he let the binoculars dangle, took out Amira’s guide-book, opened it to the map of Karpathos. There was a pass through the mountains up ahead. The road went right through it. On the other side it dipped down into a valley, where there were several lesser tracks off to the left, toward the sea, one of which – just one – led up into more foothills right on the coast. And it was there, between the foothills and the second range or spur of the mountain, that the ruined monastery kept its lonely vigil. Against what?
That was something Trace had to find out. And if it was at all possible he must get there first, before the other rider. He stuffed the book back under his belt, revved up his machine, went spurting up the hillside like some strange mechanical squid …
Mr Lorre must be a better rider than Trace had credited, or his machine a better machine. For as Trace crested the range of foothills some three or four minutes later, already the red bike and its rider were across the flat and into the pass, disappearing from view in a puff of dust where the way led over a hump-backed saddle. Now, however, Trace’s route lay slightly downhill for maybe half a mile, and the road was more or less straight, so that he could really ‘open her up.’ He did, and his machine responded with all of fifty-five or even sixty miles per hour; so that in less than a minute he was once more ascending, and in twice as long again was into the pass and riding in shadows.
Until now the cicadas had been ch
eering Trace on, strident as hordes of tiny fishwives in the coarse undergrowth, the heathery thyme and spiked grasses alongside the road; but now in the brooding pass, where cliffs rose up precipitously close at hand, the song of the cicadas was absent; and as the upward slope of the saddle grew steeper, so Trace’s machine began to labour and its rider to regret his choice of mounts. He dropped a gear, gradually wound up the throttle, actually gained a little speed before coming over the saddle and down out of the pass. And at last it was all brilliant sunshine and dusty roads downhill again, but very windingly, so that Trace felt frustrated that he was unable to build up any real speed. And far down in the valley a flash of red, and bright glancing shafts of light as once more the sun taunted, striking fire from the machine of the rider he so desperately pursued.
Down into the furnace valley rode Trace, the wind of his ride keeping him cool, and once more the bike in front was lost to him as the land flattened out and Mediterranean pines grew up in clumps along the winding road to block his view ahead. Precious seconds were wasted on another glance at Amira’s guidebook, following which Trace was on the lookout for tracks leading off to the left. It had seemed to him (if he could rely on the map at all) that the third or fourth such track was the one he wanted. But what was a track and what was not? There were paths galore to both sides – goat trails, probably, tracks used by local herdsmen – and all of them looked exactly alike.
Then, coming around a gentle bend and slowing down a little to avoid deep, criss-crossing ruts in a road which was now hard-packed earth, Trace passed the entrance to a somewhat wider track on his left – and at once throttled back and applied his brakes. He’d seen a snake lying there, maybe five feet long, all black and hissing and writhing in agony in the centre of the track. And its middle had been crushed and split open.
Manhandling his bike about-face on the rough surface, Trace backtracked, looked again, nodded his approval. ‘Thanks, snake!’ he said.
The agonized creature had done him a favour and now he returning it, driving the wheels of his machine directly over its darting head as he followed the track east toward the sea …
The valley rapidly narrowed down as he stood up on his machine’s footrests and jiggled the bike forward, manoeuvred the track’s ruts and rocks; and while he hardly noticed it, soon he found that he’d got himself into a second, narrower, deeper defile than the main one; which is to say that he now rode parallel to the bed of some old, dried-out watercourse. Then the track petered out completely and he bounced the bike down a rough bank to the bed of the dead stream itself.
At least it was cooler here, where trees and bushes whose growth likewise followed the stream gave shade; so Trace decided to stick with it right down to the coast, if that was possible, then see what he’d see. Which turned out to be a good plan, as plans go.
In another half-mile the stream had levelled out and merged into dry scrubland; headlands of rock jutted out into the sea to north and south; Trace found himself in a natural bay where cliffs came straight out of the water to a more or less uniform height of about twenty-five or thirty feet. But from here at least, because of the curve of the bite and his somewhat elevated position above the sea, he was able to scan right along the rocky coastline to the south. Or rather, he was able to scan its heights.
For to the south the walls of the mountains rose mainly sheer and yellow and apparently inaccessible, for all the world like great bastions of dry, crumbling cheese, all cracked and caverned, where mould was represented by clumps of dusty growth or the occasional tree whose roots had found purchase in some half-secure crevice or other.
And this secret monastery of Kastrouni’s was somewhere up there? In which case Trace might just as well give up the chase right here and –
Something glittered up there, something bright, reflecting the sun dazzlingly.
Trace snatched up his binoculars and trained them on a seemingly sheer wall of rock about half-way up the first stage of a two-tier system of tall cliffs. The distance was something a little over a mile; the picture lay crisp and clear on his eyes; it was Mr Lorre, still riding his red machine! Then for the first time Trace realized his error: he had thought that like himself Mr Lorre was looking for the monastery; but now he guessed that the other had known of its location all along, and that finally he had been forced into going for it. And he was going for it – straight for it – like a bullet to its target!
Trace stared harder through the binoculars, sought to achieve an even better focus. Ah! Yes! Now he could make out a ledge where it climbed like a shallow groove along the face of the cliff. It must be considerably wider than it looked, that ledge – at least Trace hoped so! But anyway, if the skinny American could ride a motor-cycle up there, so could Charlie Trace. He snatched Amira’s guide-book from his waist-band, tore it open to the map, found a faint dotted line leading from roughly his present location to the foot of the cliffs. Now if only that line of dots represented a path …
… It did!
Five minutes later Trace paused briefly, throttling up his machine and threateningly feeding it revs, while he stared bleakly up the ragged incline ahead. On his right hand the rock rising sheer to the sky, and on his left, soon, a dizzy drop to more rocks. And between the two the track – literally a track, cut out of the cliff itself – and no more than six feet wide at best and much narrower than that in places. This was going to be one dangerous ride. Trace gritted his teeth. Bollocks to danger! And what the hell, you can’t live forever, can you!
One slip when you’re up there, Charlie Trace, he answered himself, and you won’t have to worry about living forever. You’ll have just enough time for one good, long, loud yell!
Then he was on his way, standing up and leaning forward, balancing the bike like a circus act as he stayed dead centre in the middle of the track. And as he rode so he thought daft thoughts, like: I hope to God that old boy in Pighadia has these machines of his insured! But mercifully it wasn’t as bad as it looked; not at this stage, anyway. Not for all of two hundred yards distance and a hundred and fifty feet in height. But that was where the track doubled back on itself, and it was also where Mr Lorre had finally wised-up and ditched his machine.
There it lay, on its side under a clump of thyme, forsaken now that the race had entered its last and most deadly lap. And little wonder: Trace looked at the second section of track rising to a jagged horizon of cliff and sky. The way was steeper here, layered with dirt and scree from above, and something less than four scanty feet wide. Surely it would be madness to try and take a bike all the way up there, wouldn’t it? The American had thought so. But there again, the American was still well in the lead.
Trace manhandled the bike round the bend, glanced down over the rim of the track as he did so … and told himself not to do that again. If ever there was a place designed to induce vertigo in a man, surely this must be it. And this, too, would also be the place where Trace found out just how well he really could ride.
He sat on the bike with one foot on the track, gritted his teeth and revved-up, gradually let out the clutch. The back wheel began to turn, kicked out dust and scree and smoke, and Trace said, ‘Shit, shit, shiiit!’ as he stood up again on the footrests, leaned sharply forward, went jetting his way up that final, fatal stretch. But not fatal for Charlie Trace, not this time. There were wild moments, certainly, but then at last it was over. And at the top …
… No time to sit down and rest and wait until he stopped trembling, for that would be to waste what little time and distance he’d gained. Instead he merely sat back in the saddle, sucked air deeply into lungs that seemed starved, looked all about.
He found himself on a wide flat ledge like a penultimate plateau. Two hundred yards in front the second stage of the cliffs rose up, higher still, to what looked like a flat summit. And half-way up those cliffs, toiling headlong up a narrow footpath, there was Mr Lorre with his long black bag still over his shoulder. Even as Trace spotted him, so the man looked back and down, lo
oked directly at his pursuer. Trace couldn’t see the man’s eyes but he could feel them burning on him, their resentment, their hatred that he had put Mr Lorre to so much trouble. Oh, yes, for Trace had given Mr Lorre a real task, that much was obvious. But what was that task? And what was he carrying in that long black bag of his?
Trace jerked the bike into gear, went to move off and stalled. And in the immediate and startling silence which followed he heard from below and behind the clatter of falling rocks. He turned in his saddle, leaned toward the rim, craned his neck and looked down.
Below, just this side of the place where the track bent back on itself, another figure toiled upwards. Now who would this be?
Dressed in a black shirt and black, baggy breeches, the man looked young, unkempt, Greek. A goatherd? Some local character who’d spotted the crazy foreigners and wondered what was going on? Or a colleague of the thin American up ahead? Trace couldn’t hazard a guess and he certainly wasn’t waiting to find out! He kicked-started the bike into life, revved up, rode without further pause to where the second path or track rose narrow and crooked up the face of the cliff.
No hope of taking the bike any farther, for the route ahead was quite simply a goat-track with steps roughly hewn from the rock, some of them all of twelve inches and more deep. And already Trace’s quarry was three-quarters of the way to the top. Trace unceremoniously ditched his machine, went on afoot. And where before he had driven the bike mercilessly, now he did likewise to himself, literally hurling himself into the final stage of the ascent.
No twinges now from his left leg and foot; indeed, they seemed full of a vitality all their own, as if to make up for Trace’s previous concern. So that he scrambled up the narrow, dizzy way with all the strength and agility of a goat, recklessly ignoring the fact that death lay only the space of a misplaced foot away.
Mr Lorre was gone now, over the top, invisible; but down below the Greek youth was long-striding it across the half-way plateau, his hair flying behind him as he quite openly raced on Trace’s heels. And the sight of him – the single downward glimpse that Trace allowed himself – was sufficient to propel him upward with even greater urgency.