The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  He took them in. Placed them in separate cells. Left them overnight. In the morning they were ready to talk. The sound of rats and steel doors had flushed their bravado. They told him everything. How they’d met her on the beach one night, how they’d talked. They even confessed to the drugs they’d offered her and told him how she slept with one then the other in return for a handful of pills. They were good-looking young men, and Nikos couldn’t fault her taste. But the night of the murder they’d been at the Blackout Bar and Hotel’s monthly wet T-shirt contest. They’d got drunk and loud, and people noticed them. They were alibied by five different clubbers and two bartenders. They were shocked and sick and scared when he showed them the photos, the faceless ones, trying to pry anything loose.

  Before he let them go, he made them flick through fuzzy stills, grabbed from club CCTV videos. They said they didn’t see who she was with most of the time, the club was too dark and the alcohol too plentiful. And then he caught it. A short blinking movement, a tightening of facial muscles. He pressed them and threatened them, and they admitted, yes, they’d seen the girl with this other couple. They seemed to be friendly. She often sat at their table.

  He looks at the photos in front of him again. Three nights dredging through the clubs and he was certain the couple had left the island. But there they were, fifty yards away from him, at the edge of the dance floor, a redhead crashed in the arms of her boyfriend.

  He caught up with them outside their hotel. The sun was a sliver of orange in the Eastern sky. The air finally cool and fresh. He badged them, and they giggled, still high, still drunk, thinking this was some local’s idea of a game. When he showed them Caroline’s passport photo, their faces dropped as if a plug had been pulled.

  He watches them now as they wait for their drinks. It’s an amazing thing, seeing the drugs and alcohol drain from their faces, leaving them white and scared and young again. It was easy to forget they were only kids.

  ‘We just thought she’d split.’ The girl says. Her hair is dreadlocked, red and dirty, looks like rope hanging off a fishing boat. Her accent’s slurred, East Coast American. Nikos wonders if Daddy’s a lawyer or a doctor back home. He thinks of the letter he found in the dead girl’s room, the spidery handwriting of an old man who’d never see his daughter again.

  ‘How did you meet her?’

  The girl cocks her head from side to side as if shaking her brain into action. ‘Oh, you know,’ she slurs. Her lips are chapped and cracked from too much sun, and her teeth small like a rodent’s. ‘You hang around long enough you meet everyone here. It’s not exactly Cincinnati.’

  The boy laughs. He has a straggly ginger beard clinging like moss to his cheeks and a silver hoop pierced through his bottom lip. His fingernails are bitten and encrusted with dirt.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  The boy starts to say something. The girl cuts him off. ‘It was a few weeks ago. At The Wooden Horse. She was sitting alone. Looked kind of sad. I thought maybe she’d broken up with a boyfriend or something, so I went over and introduced myself. We had a few drinks, and then Brad said let’s go back to the room and party. Caroline’s eyes lit up. I remember she nodded her head rapidly. We went back to our room and …’

  ‘That’s enough.’ The boy puts his arm on hers, a small but nonetheless effective show of who’s boss. Nikos stares at him. Stares until the boy looks away.

  ‘Listen. I don’t care what you were doing up there. I don’t care about drugs or sex or anything like that.’

  Brad shakes his head up and down, ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Nikos grabs the boy’s wrist, feels him struggle, clamps tight. The boy’s face drains of blood. ‘I don’t give a fuck about that. I only want to find out who did this to her, understand?’

  The American couple nod.

  ‘But if you won’t tell me everything you know then maybe I will start being interested in, for instance, what you’ve got in your pockets right now.’

  He sees the boy shift, uneasily flicking his eyes towards his girlfriend and knows she’s holding for both of them. Fucking coward.

  The girl leans forward. Her eyes meet Nikos’s, and, though they’re dilated and dreamy, he can tell they’re beautiful eyes, turquoise green and intelligent.

  ‘We did, you know, some stuff.’ Her head turns towards her boyfriend to see if he’s going to stop her but he doesn’t. ‘There was nothing weird. I mean, we did some crank and talked all night. There was no sex, nothing like that.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Nikos says non-committally. ‘You became friends?’

  ‘Sort of,’ the girl replies, and he can hear the tiredness in her voice, the way the words scrape through her mouth. He knows he hasn’t got long. In another half an hour the drugs will have worn off and the couple will be useless to him until they wake up again.

  ‘Explain sort of.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like at home, you know. You become friends on holiday because you keep seeing the same people in the same places. We had nothing much in common, really. Except clubbing.’

  ‘She was a geek,’ the boy interrupts.

  ‘A what?’ Nikos says, unfamiliar with the expression.

  ‘You know, man, a square. The kind of girl who likes to get fucked up but not too fucked up. And then when she’s fucked up all she can talk about is her father back home in England. How much she loved him. How she misses her mother. A real drag, if you know what I mean.’

  Nikos bites down on his tongue. He focuses on the morning he found Caroline up by the ruins. Makes that flicker on the cinema screen of his mind.

  ‘How often did you see her?’ His words squeeze out through clenched teeth and distant eyes.

  ‘After that?’ the boy replies, ‘Maybe two, three times.’

  ‘I need to know everything you know about her, and you need to know that until I know this you’re not going to bed.’

  Brad sighs melodramatically. ‘I told you not to get involved with that skank,’ he says, turning to his girlfriend.

  Before he knows what he’s doing, Nikos slams his open hand across the boy’s mouth. He inhales as the pain rips through his knuckles. The boy’s head snaps back like a cheap doll’s. The lip ring hangs half off, drops of blood staining the boy’s cheeks and shirt.

  ‘Fuck,’ the boy cries, but his voice is weak and broken.

  ‘Sit down and tell me what you know,’ Nikos snarls. He knows the boy’s a coward. He’s not going to call the manager or make a fuss. He just sits there, shaking slightly, his fingers playing with the broken lip ring.

  ‘You cut me, man.’

  Nikos smiles. ‘I’m doing you a favour. You still have that lip ring on in gaol and they’ll think you’re a faggot. First they’ll give you what they think a faggot wants, and then they’ll beat you for making them do such a thing.’

  The boy’s eyes are wider than a stuffed toy’s. ‘Gaol?’

  ‘Or you can tell me everything you know about Caroline.’ Nikos picks up one of the cocktail napkins and passes it to the boy, still surprised by his own outburst of anger. Brad takes it and wipes his chin, grimacing from the pain. ‘Thank you,’ he mumbles, and Nikos smiles because he knows this boy isn’t going to hold anything back now.

  ‘She screwed us, man, she fucking took us.’

  ‘It was our own fault,’ The girl interrupts.

  ‘Tell me,’ Nikos whispers.

  ‘She said she knew where to get good prices on crank. But she needed to get a decent amount together,’ the girl says.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of days later. I liked her. Despite what Brad says, I thought she was sweet. That’s why I was a little shocked when she made the offer. We were sitting on the beach. It was still too early to hit the clubs. Brad was complaining about how much they charged for shit on the island. I said we’re not in Cincinnati now. That’s when she told us. Said she knew someone who was willing to lay off a quantity at a great price.’

  ‘How much?’


  ‘Fifty wraps. I laughed and said man, that was way too much, what would we do with all that? She was so logical, so calm and sweet. She just laid it out for us. Keep a third and sell the rest. There were always people looking to buy at the clubs. Even if we sold them at rock bottom we’d still make a profit. I didn’t like the sound of it. The hassle, you know? Hanging around waiting for people to buy rather than dancing and having fun. I told her so.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She became quiet, sullen, like we’d just spoiled her party. Called us cowards and fakes. Eventually Brad gave her a hundred euro. After all, it was so cheap, but she never got back to us.’

  ‘You know who she was getting the drugs off?’

  The girl shakes her head.

  Nikos sits back, eyes staring straight ahead, his brain fizzing and popping with this new information. That feeling of disparate ends coming together. She’d seemed so sweet, the murdered girl, but he supposed everyone did to those who didn’t really know them. He would now have to dig back into the other victims’ lives, unearth their secrets and shadowed hours. Learn the steps they took to their fateful rendezvous. And maybe … just maybe it would mean he didn’t have to delve into his own past, the things he’s spent his whole life running away from.

  ‘I think he was English.’

  ‘What?’ Nikos feels the blood flow back to his skull. ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy with the drugs. I was hanging out at the Horse one night. I was just sitting at a table, drinking. I saw her. About a week before … before she went missing. She was talking to this corkscrew-haired guy. They were laughing and drinking together. He gave her a piece of paper, and they shook hands. That’s all I saw, man.’

  ‘How do you know he was English?’

  Brad laughed, ‘Looked like a faggot, you know? Kind of floppy. I stood next to him at the bar later on. He ordered some drinks. Had the same accent as the girl.’

  EIGHT

  The next day, Jason found out about the murders.

  He was sitting over coffee in the bar when the owner came over and introduced himself. He sat down next to Jason as if they were old friends reunited after many missing years. His name was George, and when Jason complimented his English, he explained that he’d lived in London for many years, ran an estate agency, was pushed out of business by the dirty tricks of the brand-name competitors and came back here to set up the Blackout Bar and Hotel. His hooded eyes looked serious and beautiful, and his black beard made him seem more like a priest than a bartender. He wore turquoise jewelled cowboy boots and a western styled shirt. There were photos of American Indians decorating the walls of the bar, and country music played steadily throughout the afternoon.

  By lunch, Jason was drunk on free ouzo, and the day seemed slightly brighter, the memories of the past further away, like islands left in the wake of one’s travel. He thought about last night, how Kitty’s hand felt on his, the way things had gone so smoothly and how he’d fucked it up by asking her out for a drink.

  He remembered his first sight of her up against the wall. Who were those men? Was it coincidence they were there at that particular moment? Or was it Wynn?

  He told George he was a writer. The word felt strange in his mouth. Not quite a lie but not really the truth either. They talked about books they both liked, Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, George’s favourites. Jason told him how, after he’d given up on the gallery, he lost himself in books, finding between their covers everything that was lacking in his own life.

  ‘Yes, it can be like that. Writing fills the holes that life creates. Plots plug the gaps in the world.’ George stared down into his drink as if the past still swirled there. When he began to speak again, his voice was clouded by hesitation and the faint trace of a long-suppressed stammer.

  ‘I lost someone when I was very young. Someone close. I was only ten, and suddenly childhood disappeared for me. The rest of the kids, they had a few more years before the world revealed itself to them. For me, there was no going back from that moment. You sit in church and pray to God like everyone else but you’re only mouthing the words. You’re really cursing God. Asking him why. And then you don’t even mouth the words any more. You look up at the sky, and it is only the sky.’ He crushed the cigarette out as if it were to blame. He didn’t even flinch when the fire burned his thumb. ‘Do you think there’s one moment that changes your life? That sets it off on a totally different path, like taking the wrong turn in a labyrinth?’ His eyes bored into Jason’s. ‘Or do you think it happens incrementally, a little here and there until you no longer recognise yourself?’ The cigarette disappeared into the black tangle of his beard. Merle Haggard sang about being a branded man.

  They sat in silence, listening to songs about leaving women, impossible distances, devotion and doubt. Later, George bought out a tray full of small meze dishes: pink pastes and olives crinkled like the skin of old men, little green vine leaves, beans in blood-red juices and fried seafood.

  ‘This was a good island once,’ he said. It came between the dolmades and souvlaki, while he was sucking on a cigarette. ‘Everyone says it about everywhere, but here it’s the truth.’ George shrugged, scratched his beard. ‘Who knows? Maybe it’s like that everywhere. I only know it was once good here. Tourists came and enjoyed their holidays, told their friends. Then the developers started building. Put up the big hotels, the cookie-cutter clubs. Changed the face of things. Changed deeper stuff too.’

  They ate slowly; the conversation followed suit. There was no way Jason could rush him, but the food was good and the coming blackness of night, better.

  ‘When they found the body …’ George was saying; Jason wasn’t really listening.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh,’ he waved his hand like he was dispersing a fly. ‘Not things to talk about over a good meal.’

  ‘I will fucking die of indigestion if you don’t tell me.’

  George let out a deep breath, sighed. ‘Last year, they found the body of a girl out by the ruins. A Swede. Backpacker. She’d been mutilated. Then, two months later, another one, a local boy. Now it’s happening all over again.’

  Though the heat still blazed, Jason felt a sharp shiver of goosebumps explode under his skin, his breath turn short and sharp.

  ‘There’s a serial killer here?’

  George stared at him as if deciding whether to go on. He looked over Jason’s shoulder, then back down at the table. ‘They’re saying it’s the work of a cult,’ he whispered.

  ‘A cult?’ Jason wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. ‘How do they know it’s a cult?’

  George shrugged as if the answer to all such questions was obvious. ‘They looked at the evidence, put it together and that’s what it spelled out. Ritual murder. Take the Swedish girl. All her major organs were missing. They’d been precisely removed, and then she’d been stitched back up with centipedes in place of her organs. Then there was her face.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It was gone. Not her head but only the face. Expertly peeled off as if it were nothing more than a balaclava. Exactly the same with the others. But don’t look so surprised. These islands attract this kind of thing. People come. They gather and find like-minded others. This is the way it’s always been here. A refuge for the crazy. For those who want to invent the world out of their own heads.’

  ‘What kind of cult?’ Jason’s mouth had gone dry. He knew nothing about cults apart from what he’d read in newspaper headlines. Big splashed scare stories. YOUR CHILDREN ARE AT RISK. THE WORLD WILL END TODAY.

  ‘A centipede cult. They found markings near the bodies. Carcasses inside the girl.’

  ‘A centipede cult?’ It sounded ridiculous. Jason smiled. ‘This is a joke, right? This is what you tell all newly arrived tourists?’

  George waved his arm, sweeping it across the still air. ‘Centipedes. Beetles. Ach, it’s all the same. The name means nothing. It’s the nature of the cult that draws them. Secrecy. Dark deeds
under the stars. A sense of awe. Of God. That’s what they’re trying to recapture.’ George paused, scratching hard at his beard, the sound like a thousand cicadas vibrating. ‘They arrested someone last year, but, two months ago, it started again.’

  ‘The same MO?’ Jason was surprised by his own curiosity. That quiver of fascination you get when you’re driving down a road and up ahead you see black smoke billowing from the tarmac, the cherry flash and pulse of emergency lights. He thought about cloud-streaked nights and human sacrifices upon rock formations, in circles and oracles. Sea and endless sky. Goat men and the drinking of blood under the open-eyed Mediterranean sun.

  ‘A local boy a couple of months ago and an English girl last week,’ George continued, ‘They’d been mutilated too. There are things in the deep interior no one talks about. Shadows and darkness.’ His voice disappeared as the music roared above them, some man singing about his lost and lovely girl.

  NINE

  The directions she’d got from the hotel were useless. But she found it anyway. Followed the blue uniformed cops until she arrived at a small, one-storey building with a sign in Greek and English and a broken cross on top. Cops stood smoking outside, talking amongst each other, flicking their butts into an alley already overflowing with them.

  Police stations reassured her. Made her feel back in control. But not this one.

  She walked past the murmuring policemen and into a hallway thick with smoke and unintelligible chatter. She’d spent long hours in London, hanging out at police stations, talking to detectives, asking questions, aware they deferred to her more for her long hair than her short sentences.

  But this was unlike any police station she’d ever visited. Everything looked temporary as if they were in the process of moving in or moving out. The room smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes. The walls had cracks like knife scars running across them. Faded blue angels clung to the high corners. Even with all the lights flaring, the room seemed steeped in some kind of ecclesiastical gloom as if the detectives were but figures in a faded lithograph.