The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  STAV SHEREZ

  The Black Monastery

  For Dennis

  1976–2006

  Though there is a designation of priest/monk in the Greek Orthodox Church, I have used it to my own ends. Similarly, certain methods and procedures of both the Orthodox Church and the Greek Police force I have altered for the purposes of plot.

  We read signs as promises

  Donald Barthelme

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Two Months Earlier

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part II

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Part III

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Eighteen Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the same Author

  Copyright

  Two months earlier

  She wakes him with kisses. She wakes him with coffee. The slap of her feet against white tiles pulls him out of dreams and into this burning day. She’s singing now. Her voice a beat behind the words like an echo from a distant station. She tries to keep up with the lyrics, but she stumbles, and it makes him want to take her into his arms and crush her against him until neither of them can breathe.

  This is what he wakes up to every day. This is the sound of his wife making coffee and the smell of frying butter on a sun-sizzled morning. This is the taste in his mouth, left over from dreams; that sudden disorientation on waking, the not knowing who or where, the moment of panic – then relief, as memory comes tumbling back. This is like every other morning except this morning it’s his birthday.

  He goes to the bathroom. Silently watches himself in the mirror. Every year seems to take more away, as if gravity was something you forgot how to fight after a while. He puts the razor to his throat and carefully shaves around the moustache. He trails his fingers through the dry bristle and tapers the ends. It’s his one vanity, he knows, but it’s a small one, and though he suspects the other officers make fun of him, well, it’s a lot better than them making fun of his work or his wife.

  She’s hunched over the sink like a parenthesis. She contains his life. Her black hair rolling down her neck. Her arms sunk deep in the dishes, the kiss of glass against glass in the early morning silence.

  She hums under her breath. Old songs he vaguely remembers from another time. She turns, her arms glistening with water and soap, foam clinging to her dress. ‘I thought you were sleeping in?’

  ‘Headache.’ He doesn’t need to say more. It’s the shorthand they’ve developed over the long years, the way of saying things without saying them.

  ‘You’ve always got a headache on your birthday. Oh, Nikki, maybe next year will be different, no?’

  He shrugs. It’s his last year as a policeman. Back on the island again. Back where it all began. ‘I had them before I joined.’

  ‘Maybe it’s birthdays you hate.’ She places the glass of orange juice in front of him.

  He stares at the bright liquid, the constellation of pulp fragments clinging to the side of the glass. ‘It’s just another day. I don’t see why everyone makes such a fuss.’ He strokes his moustache. She looks at him, all glare and frustration. She knows this is what he does when he doesn’t want to talk about something. When his mind takes one of its frequent detours into the past.

  The country she left behind so long ago still lays its claim on Nikos. In the melody to a song, in the smell of a campfire, in the red-soaked sunset on a certain November day he will be reminded, and the whole weight of years will collapse down upon him. It’s best to leave him alone when he gets like this. She can only be another reminder.

  He watches her clean the sink. The dishes are done and piled up high. The floor is swept, apart from a few spilled drops of orange juice. The town is quiet; only the sound of birds and cicadas, the pull and crash of the sea, wind fluttering the leaves. These are moments he wishes would last for ever. But there are fewer of them every year.

  The smash of breaking glass rips him from his thoughts.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, ‘it just gave me a fright.’

  He gets up, carefully navigating around the scattered slivers of glass, like teardrops, spotting the floor. ‘What did?’

  But, before she can answer, he sees the cause of her fear.

  He’s staring down into the sink. It is empty apart from two orange centipedes rising from the plughole. Their antennae twist and flicker in the air. They turn towards Nikos, and twitch. It’s this last movement that makes him step back. Murders, bodies and bruises he’s fine with. The crescent-shaped scar made by a dagger, the shadow of fingers on a broken neck – these are his day-to-day. But insects and crawling things he’s never been good with.

  He stares at the shiny torsos, the twirling legs and black eyes. He watches as the centipedes crawl out of the drain and slither across the bottom of the sink, their legs like tiny hairs, black against the white porcelain.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’

  He nods, aware of how neatly she phrases things. Not saying, I know you’re scared of them, I know how much they make you squirm. Just telling him it’ll be OK by the time he gets home.

  ‘God. They’re huge.’ He’s transfixed. As you only are by the things which scare you. He watches them scale the walls of the sink. Their movements so precise and efficient like strings of miniature soldiers.

  ‘Go,’ she says. ‘You’ve got a big day ahead of you, and I want you all fresh when you come back for dinner.’

  He pulls his gaze away from the sink. He can still hear the scrape of their legs against the ceramic. They sound like a thousand tiny screams.

  ‘I thought we agreed, no surprises.’

  ‘Making you dinner is a surprise now?’ She smiles but doesn’t turn her head all the way towards him. She’s watching the centipedes. Her fingers tapping against her leg.

  He kisses her lips. She pulls away, her breath heavy and dry, ‘Later,’ she says, placing her finger against his mouth like a full stop only he is meant to hear.

  It takes him ten minutes to walk to the police station. It’s his favourite time of day. The tourists all asleep, the clubs and bars shut, the ferries still an hour away – it could almost be forty years ago. It could almost be the island he remembers.

  He stops for coffee. He stops to chat to the old men in the taverna. They tell him stories about what the
ir wives said to them the night before, the trouble their kids have got into, the antics of the crazy tourists. He sips his coffee and nods. It’s a small island, and he needs to be as much priest or councillor as policeman.

  Then it’s a breakfast of kourabides. Those sugar-dusted cookies that his wife’s banned him from eating in the house. More for the mess they make than the damage they’ll do to his heart. They taste of his childhood, of his father going out on Sunday morning and coming back, a tower of white boxes from the bakery in his hands. She always knows when he’s been eating them. There’s sugar dust all over his clothes. His moustache is flecked white.

  The street is quiet. The boats rock and tap each other in the current. He nods to the men walking their dogs and the fishermen sorting their catch. He looks up at the dazzling white villas hugging the western ridge, the sun breaking on their swimming pools and Japanese gardens. He’s fifty-five today, but those houses are still as far away from him as they were forty years ago when he stared at them every morning on his way to school. It’s one of many things he’s learned to adjust to. He thinks of secrets and dark years and wonders at the possibilities his life once held.

  The police station sits between the fish market and a shop that sells erotic Greek art to tourists. It used to be the smaller of the island’s two churches but no one goes to church any more. The conversion was done quickly. There are corners dark with the ghosts of whispered confessions. Empty shadowed niches that once housed crumbling saints and martyrs. Fragments of frescoes still haunt certain walls. The smell of incense has never really gone away.

  His secretary, Marianna, smiles when he enters. She’s all lipstick and face powder. She’s on the phone, nodding, chewing a pencil, checking her nails. Elias, his deputy, sits astride her desk. He’s doing something with her computer, a cigarette poking through his thin grey lips. His other hand rests on her thigh.

  ‘I’ll tell him. Just stay where you are, please.’ She swivels the chair towards Nikos. Elias’ arm gets trapped between chair and table. His face flushes red. Nikos tries to bury his smile.

  The secretary, pencil in mouth, passes over the note to Nikos.

  ‘Just tell me,’ he says.

  ‘I know it’s your birthday,’ she replies, missing the way Nikos’s forehead creases, ‘but I think you’d better check this out.’

  Elias is still moaning about his hand as they peel away from town. He’s moaning about the heat, the long climb up to the ruins, the broken window on his police cruiser. Nikos lets him kvetch. These are Elias’s last chances. In a few months, he’ll be chief, and there won’t be anyone to complain to. It’s also a necessary distraction. A way for Nikos to stop thinking. To stop remembering.

  He avoids the ruins if he can. He’s never liked them. Not even as a child when every village boy would come up here at night, flasks and torchlight, fear and excitement, sleeping bags and cookies. But there’s other history here too. A year ago and thirty-three years ago. Every bend of the mountain is a glimpse back into his younger self. Into things better left forgotten.

  The old man is exactly where he said he would be. Nikos knows him from the market but he looks smaller today, as if what he had seen had somehow diminished him.

  They can’t make out what he’s saying. His body shakes so much he looks as if he’s out of focus. His words rush out tangled and twisted in their attempt to get to the punch line. But there’s no punch line. There’s only the old man’s arm pointing towards the circle of rocks. The certainty in Nikos’s blood. The knowledge of what they’ll find.

  Nikos leaves Elias with the old man. He wants to do this himself. He wants no distractions. He walks slowly. Each footstep bringing him that much nearer. He thinks about his wife’s smile this morning. She’s drifting away from him, he knows, but he can’t find the way to bring her back. The sun burns his neck. Not yet nine, and already it’s sizzling away.

  The ruins stand before him. It’s what people used to come to the island for. Now, they lie neglected and broken, unvisited and forgotten. Better that way, Nikos thinks, so much better.

  There are stories and legends surrounding these woods, dark tales told to children on cold nights, but Nikos has never believed them.

  The stones reflect the sun back into his eyes. They seem white as bones in the morning light. Once, they were the walls of an ancient temple. Providing cool and dark shelter from the weather. Privacy and isolation. Now they lie dotted and broken.

  At the centre stands the altar. He can’t see it from where he is but it’s something he can never forget.

  The voices of Elias and the old man are almost inaudible. The birds have stopped singing. The wind has died. There is always such stillness and quiet at the ruins. It doesn’t make him calm. It only makes him tense.

  He sees the body from fifty feet away. Flashbacks spin, flicker and fade. He closes his eyes down hard. Opens them to dancing motes and shadow ghosts, but this is no illusion. This is the past come back to haunt the present.

  The boy lies on top of the altar. No amount of blinking or head-shaking will change that.

  Nikos takes out his camera and reels off several shots. Concentrate on what’s in front of you. The clues and traces. Forget everything else. Treat this as if it’s the first crime scene you’ve ever come across. The camera shakes in his hand, and he takes several more shots to be sure.

  The boy lies staked to the altar. His white skin reflects the sun as if it were made of marble. The altar is made of stone. There are carvings on it, but no one can say what they mean. Experts from Athens and the British Museum spent years trying to decode them but the islanders knew it was pointless. There’s only one meaning to an altar.

  Nikos scans the ground, the surrounding trees, anything to put off the moment he’ll have to look down at the body. He stares up at the sky as if looking for an answer, but it is only the sky. He stopped believing in God a long time ago.

  The altar is covered in orange markings, fresh and wet, daubed on the ancient stone. The skull of a cow lies on the ground next to it. Red ants and grey spiders crawl through the hatch-work of bone and tooth. Nikos’s toes curl up inside his shoes. His breath turns short and shallow. The air feels raw against his skin.

  He takes a deep breath. Waits until his heart slows down. Plants his feet deep into the soft earth beneath him. There’s a trick to this, he knows. A way of cutting off everything but what’s in front of you.

  The boy lies on his back, eyes staring up into the empty sky. A ghastly mausoleum carved in living flesh. His arms and legs have been crudely tied to stakes in the ground. His skin is more red than white. The fingers on his hands are curled in tight against the palms. The nails, broken and bloody.

  Centipedes surround the altar. Not the small, house centipedes he saw this morning but a larger, more ferocious variety. Their backs soak up the sun. Their legs susurrate in the still air. He swallows down his revulsion, the taste at the back of his throat he’s learned to associate with irrational fear.

  He recognises the boy. A local. Sixteen or seventeen years old. No one’s reported him missing yet. It’s the phone call he doesn’t want to make. The voice on the other end of the line you don’t want to hear. It’s Elias’s job in a few months’ time, but now, this is all on him.

  The rope binding the boy to the altar is thick and oily. The cuts on his abdomen are precise and professional. They traverse his stomach and groin. The stitching is jagged and rushed. The orange thread contrasting with the white skin.

  Centipedes crawl across the boy’s chest. Wriggle through the dark tangles of his hair. They snake out from under his limbs and between his feet. They seem to be coming from the body itself, as if in death it’s given life to them.

  There is no blood on the altar. None on the ground directly around it. There are splashes of red on the surrounding stones. Whether they are accidental or not, he can’t tell. They seem to describe a pattern, but they could just as well be random.

  He takes more photos, feelin
g better with the barrier of the camera pressed up against his eye, as if this were something watched late at night on television. The camera clicks and whirs in the dry air.

  Elias is shouting from the other side of the ruins, but Nikos can’t hear him any more. He can’t hear the buzzing of the flies or scratching of the centipedes. His ears are filled with screaming. Shrill and vibrant. Coming from the forest around him. From the rocks encircling. From deep inside his head.

  He places his hand on the altar to steady himself. He leans down and stares at the boy’s face.

  But there’s only the tangle of ligament and muscle. The staring eyes. The receded gums and skeleton teeth. The mess that skin hides.

  He looks up, dizzy. The sky seems closer. He breathes deep and tries to regain his balance. Elias is shouting. The wind is howling. The cicadas buzz and roar. He looks back down at the boy’s body, the mutilated skin and cracked bones, and he gets to his knees.

  There’s no mistake. No conjecture or speculation. There’s only what’s in front of him, and it’s no less shocking because he’s seen it before.

  He could be looking at a photo from last year. The boy. The altar. The centipedes. Tremors run through his arms and legs. They’d got it wrong, as he knew they had. They’d thought it was over. Looking down at the ravaged corpse, Nikos knows this is only the beginning.

  ONE

  The rain made it easier. A stroke of luck on a night so dependent on it. It was the middle of summer, but a thunderstorm crackled overhead, a muffled detonation poised above the city’s roofs. The rain rendered him invisible.

  He stood across the road, shrouded by an umbrella, pretending to talk on his phone but keeping his eyes on the doorway and the street ahead. There would only be one chance to get this right.

  He let the first group go by. Their clothes were wrong, their hair, the way they held their bodies. He could never pass for one of them. So he waited, talking into the phone, making up stories no one would ever hear. It was the action, not the words, that was important.