by Stav Sherez
‘What was it?’
‘Nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘An animal, I suppose.’ She didn’t want to tell him. She wasn’t sure what she’d seen – it could have been anything – the heat, tiredness and stress all piling against her to produce this phantasmagorical movement, this break in the mundane which was what she so hoped to have gained from the monastery.
They walked up to the gate. The sign said, ‘No Shorts, No Bare Flesh, No Photography.’ They walked past it and up the paved path to the front of the monastery. They could see the twinkle of blue behind the stone wall and faraway islands across the illimitable span of sea.
A sign on the front door said the monastery was closed for the day. The door was locked. Jason stared at the padlock. Rust clung to it like scabs. It didn’t look like it had been used for a long time.
They walked around the building’s perimeter, trying to get a glimpse of inside, but the windows were all shut; old wooden slats where once there’d been stained glass.
He watched as she leant against the door, ear pressed up to the wood. Her face tightened in concentration. In profile, she looked like a different woman, as if there were two Kittys sharing the same body.
‘Listen.’ She grabbed his shoulder, pulled him closer. ‘Did you hear it?’ They’d circled back to the front again.
Jason leaned up against the door. At first, all he could hear was the rush of wind and roar of sea. Then … yes, there was something. Voices? Or just the wind again?
He knocked on the giant wooden door. Felt the sound echo through the interior. There was no reply. They looked at each other. Jason nodded. Thumped on the door again.
Nothing. He turned back. Kitty was gone. Only the sound of wind and far-off surf crashing against black rocks.
He looked down the hill. He could see her silhouette against the trees and distant mountains. He walked towards her.
‘There’s another path.’ She was pointing to a scuffed dirt track that led from the back of the monastery.
Jason stared at the path, the way it led into the darkness and then the face of the mountain which cleaved the island in two.
‘Let’s follow it.’
He was about to say No, that’s stupid, and then realised well, what the hell, it wasn’t worth arguing about and the path would just tail off a couple of hundred yards into the trees anyway.
But it didn’t. They followed it for a couple of minutes until they reached a large wrought-iron gate, eight foot tall, wedged into the rock of the mountain. The padlock was old and cracked but wouldn’t budge.
‘The footsteps disappear into a cave.’ Kitty pointed past the reinforced entrance into the darkness beyond.
‘It’s not a cave.’ He was reading the faded sign on the gate. ‘It’s the entrance to a labyrinth.’ He tried the gate again but though it creaked and wavered, the lock held tight.
‘Dead end,’ she said, a smile parting her lips.
He nodded and stood in front of her.
He wanted to reach forward and kiss her. To hold her in his arms. To let the wind blow their hair into one another’s until it was impossible to disentangle. Now was the moment. The suspense. The isolation. The view. The flirtatiousness of mystery. He moved a step towards her, expecting her to step back. She didn’t. She looked into his eyes. He stared into hers. Took another step. One more and their lips would touch. He would only have to …
‘Yes? Can I help you?’
They both jumped. Tore away from each other as if caught in some illicit act.
A tall man was striding towards them. Where had he come from? They hadn’t heard his footsteps at all.
‘You’re trespassing. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘We came to see the monastery,’ Kitty replied.
The man was dressed in black jeans and an old black shirt with a white collar. His beard dark and tangled. His body was stooped by his height as if ashamed to be closer to heaven than the rest of us. His hands were rough and dark around the nails where he’d cut himself many times. His eyes seemed lost in his face, like drowning stones.
‘I’m sorry, it’s closed. You will have to go back.’ His voice seemed unused to speaking, as if he were still trying it out.
‘Because of the murders?’ Jason looked the priest in the eye. The priest didn’t flinch. Didn’t betray any emotion or reaction.
‘Long time before that. No need for these things any more. Not enough believers to keep the place going.’
‘Where does the path lead to?’
‘Nowhere,’ the priest replied, his words clipped and final. He crossed his arms, and his gaze became detached. ‘I’m afraid the monastery is closed until further notice.’
‘But we just wanted to look around.’
‘Then go to a museum. This isn’t a place for tourists. This isn’t a place for you to snap photos and read guidebooks.’ He uncrossed his arms and stared at Kitty.
‘But I thought that’s exactly what it was,’ she replied, pointing to the signs in English.
The priest looked disgusted, as if he’d just taken a mouthful of something he didn’t expect. ‘You have no respect for God. I can see it in your eyes. This monastery is hereby given back to God. There will be no more tourists. Only worship and abstinence. These are the twin poles of life. Everything else is distraction.’ He turned and walked off in the direction of the woods.
They sat on the stone wall which fenced the monastery from the great emptiness that stretched out to the sea below. The courtyard was built into the edge of the cliff, and a two-foot stone wall had been erected to mark the division between the place they stood and the yawning reach of the sea. Jason didn’t want to think about the drop behind him. His stomach fluttered.
‘They could have thrown her over.’
Jason looked around, startled. He almost lost his balance. ‘What?’
‘I said they could have thrown the girl’s body over. Would have been a more efficient way of hiding it. It could have landed anywhere inside the canopy of trees. Or they could have buried her. There’s something weird about just leaving her here. It’s like they wanted her to be found.’
‘Wow. You really do think like a crime writer.’
Kitty stared at him, then turned away. The silence loomed bigger than the sky. ‘You know who I am?’ Her voice was cold, lost on the breeze.
Jason couldn’t believe he’d let it slip, cursed himself, looked away. And just when they had been so close to … he realised he had to say something quickly, and it had to be good. ‘I recognise you from those Tube posters,’ he stammered.
What could he do? Tell her the truth? That he’d stalked her, that he’d been following her all along? And what would she think then? Stranded here in the memory of another murder, lost and so far from the rest of the world. ‘It took me time, I didn’t think so at first, only when you started showing such an interest.’
‘That obvious, is it?’ She replied, and something changed in her look. He saw her muscles relax and jaw unclench.
They didn’t realise they were on the wrong path until they came across the trap.
There had been two paths leading back from the monastery. They’d argued over which was the one they’d originally taken. They walked through the dark forest, side by side, run out of words, both trying to allay the creeping dread.
‘Oh my God!’
Something in her voice stopped him cold. He looked to where she was pointing and saw the trap.
He moved closer to it. It was an old-fashioned animal trap made of steel, rusted and flaking, its teeth clamped down hard. Inside the trap was a single shoe. He stopped and looked around. Thought he heard something. Shadows danced through the gaps in the trees.
It was an old trainer. A woman or a child’s, caught in the jaws of the trap. There was still enough light to see the blood smearing the white canvas.
He bent down by the trap. The shoe was gripped by its middle, and there was a small pool of blood on the ground below. The earth around it was
darker. He’d expected to find a foot, tatters of flesh, but what he saw was worse.
Centipedes were winding their way in and out of the shoe, through the eyeholes and openings like living spaghetti. He looked up at Kitty. She’d seen them too. Her face was white and drawn. ‘We need to get out of here.’
‘We’re on the wrong path.’
He shook his head. ‘I think this was here all along, we just didn’t notice it coming up.’
‘No way,’ she said. ‘We saw it now, we would have seen it on the way up. I knew it was the wrong path.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ He was shouting now, quickly losing his composure, feeling the night weave its way into his bones.
‘You were so sure.’ Her voice raised too. ‘You wouldn’t have believed me. Men always think they know better about these things.’
‘Bullshit. Don’t bring that into it. We made a mistake. I made a mistake. But it doesn’t matter now. We can either go back up and take the other trail or we can keep following this one. It’s got to lead somewhere.’
She stared at him and didn’t say anything. She was ashamed for screaming at him, blaming him. But she was spooked. The trainer caught in the trap had made her feel like running, and the reality that there was nowhere to run to made her feel worse. ‘OK,’ she finally consented. ‘Let’s follow it. It’s going down. At least that’s the right direction.’
He’d nearly lost Kitty when they heard the scream.
It came ripping out of the night, bursting it open, a cry of terror, somewhere to the west, the unexplored terrain, and they stopped dead in their tracks, and then it was gone like it had never existed.
‘Jesus.’
Kitty turned to him. Her face white. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘What if someone’s in trouble?’
Kitty hung her head. Fright turned her face bone white.
‘Kitty? Shouldn’t we—’
‘No.’ Hard as a thunderclap. ‘Let’s just go back to town.’
She turned away and looked towards the dark stain of the sea. ‘Let’s go,’ she repeated, and Jason nodded, his heart heavy with relief.
THIRTEEN
The laptop hummed. Its screen as blank as the hotel walls surrounding her. She felt bad about not having done any writing yet, not even having thought about it. Life had suddenly become more interesting than fiction. Certainly more so than the book she was stuck on. A string of tea masters poisoned in the middle of traditional Japanese tea ceremonies, all the rage in West London, with Lily pretending to be a student, unravelling the whole mystery. Pointless, she thought, so damn pointless, and once again felt the urgent desire to trash the manuscript, wipe the discs and start from scratch. Her finger hovered over Delete as if by pressing a button she could change her life.
She couldn’t stay in her room. The silence felt like drowning. The blank screen was everything she hadn’t done. She checked her guidebook. Flicked through photos of fishing boats and churches. There was no mention of a cult living on the island in the seventies. She scanned the text again, fingers running through the pages, until she found what she was looking for. A small paragraph describing the island’s historical museum.
She packed her notebooks and sunscreen and strolled down to the café. Sipping her tea, she watched groups of policemen alighting from the ferry. Or were they soldiers? It was hard to tell, even in countries like Greece. They were dressed in a dark blue that seemed almost military, and their expressions were as grim and sombre as any stranded soldier’s. She wondered what the murders did to an island this small, a community closed onto itself like a fist. The tiny fractures and changes that would take years to fully surface.
In the café, only a small group of old men sat drinking cloudy ouzo and talking, their arms flapping, a conversation only intelligible through the shapes they cast in the still air. Kitty thought the waving of their arms was like the lapping of birds, as if they were desperately trying to regain the power of flight and were shocked to find they could no longer do so.
She finished her tea, but it left her unsatisfied. Surprised, she found herself wanting coffee and could almost smell the rich aroma, feel its bitter kiss on her tongue.
But no, she’d promised herself this morning, and, even though she wanted it, she would abstain. There was strength in that she knew, strength and a certain comfort in denying your desires.
She walked through town and disappeared behind its twisting streets and overhangs. The alleys seemed to close in around her, the brilliant white cliffs of houses rising out of the cracked earth. She continued climbing, past windowless houses, the hum of air-conditioners and buzz of cicadas. She was in a part of town she didn’t recognise. No shops here, only houses, asleep, siesta time. White squares stacked up against each other like a textbook Cubist landscape. Anorexic cats trying to cool down under parked cars. The far-off click-clack of backgammon pieces. Unexpected groves and withered trees. Children playing in the dust. Down below, the pulse and beat of a hundred bar stereos collided and juddered with a mechanical voraciousness. Up above, in the deserted town, there was silence.
* * *
The doors were made of thick, cracked wood and devoid of signs. They were locked. The guidebook said the museum was open all day, but the guidebook was proving to be wrong about a lot of things. Normally, she would have given up, the old Kitty, but the gruelling climb and the thought of her empty hotel room made her bang her fist against the wood. She heard the sound reverberate inside and waited. Nothing. She banged again, and, just as she retracted her hand, she heard the soft fall of approaching footsteps.
A woman said something in Greek. Her voice was faint and warped as if by the wood of the door itself.
‘I’m here to see the museum,’ Kitty shouted.
She heard the slow creak of a lock, and the door opened, exuding a musty smell which immediately relaxed her; the smell of old books and manuscripts.
‘Please come in.’
The woman was in her early fifties, beautiful but ageing badly, with long black and grey hair which seemed to collapse upon her neck. She wore dark framed glasses and had the serious, isolated look of someone who spends more time with books than people. The woman too had a faintly musty air, as if she slept with the books she took care of.
‘So few people come these days, sometimes I forget to unlock the door.’
Kitty followed the librarian through fake Doric arches and into a cool, marbled foyer. She saw a desk and an ubiquitous computer monitor, sheaves of rumpled paper, a pack of Chesterfields and a fashion magazine.
‘Please, look around.’ The woman returned to her table and lit a cigarette. Kitty flinched. All those books and she was smoking in here! But telling the woman off wouldn’t be a good way to start. She smiled, thanked her and turned towards the museum.
It was so nice to be away from the sun and cheap tacky delights of town. So nice to be in the cool dark spaces where books lived. She passed rows and rows of volumes, their spines crawling with weird hieroglyphs and unpronounceable names, and headed towards the far room where the exhibits lay.
She walked past bejewelled armour suits standing forlornly in glass cabinets; remnants of a different time. How useless those suits would be against modern ordnance. Past paintings displaying the island’s history: a ship being sunk at sea, a galleon half submerged, men swarming like rats in its eddy. Proud and wrinkled faces, almost folded they looked, of men wearing traditional costumes and brandishing guns or axes. The heroes of the island, the little sign said, describing how firebrands would give up their lives swimming out to Ottoman ships and setting charges in them. Primitive pre-twentieth-century terrorism at its most effective. The other exhibits repeated this theme of sacrifice and surrender like a leitmotif winding through the displays.
She walked around and let history submerge her. The argument with Jason, the scream on the mountain – everything dissolved as the old scratched and flaked paintings took her into their frames, their contents su
ggesting that, despite outward appearances, the world hadn’t changed all that much.
She walked past glass cases filled with scimitars, those strangely curved swords which looked like flashes of the moon; ancient one-loader guns, creaky and waterlogged; home-made daggers, some whose blades still evinced the dark stains of their usage.
She’d always loved how history could take her out of herself, and, in those days after the accident, when she couldn’t bear to see children huddled around their mothers in the Kew sunshine, she would walk the silent dead halls of the British Museum as if in a trance, as if needing those rooms as someone might need drugs, a quick hurtling to oblivion. She felt the same sensation now. It made her realise how tense she’d been since arriving – tense about what she’d left behind as much as what had occurred here. Something about coming unanchored from Don had allowed her to realise it, as if he’d been a lid which had kept her pressed down. She had a sudden flash of realisation that it was only in un-Kitty-like acts that she would find herself.
She spent an hour as if in a dream, gliding from room to room and, having started backwards, she felt the weird slippage of time as she went from mass-produced clothes and weapons to handmade, from empire to rural enclave, from Christ to the Ram.
She stared at the massive map of the island which covered one wall. Almost a perfect triangle. The long strip of beach to the south, the tavernas and clubs, and rising from it, the old town, the weathered houses and creaking doors. Then the deep forest climbing up to the promontory at the top of the mountain. It looked like a map of some fabled land, something you would find in the fly leaves of a Tolkien book.
She read about the Occupation, the reign of the generals, the coming of the leisure age. There was a wall devoted to the labyrinth. She stared at the faded photos of dark, umbilical tunnels. The sign said the labyrinth had been built sometime in the era of the Minoans. That, over the centuries, walls and paths had been added. It had been used as a meeting place for islanders during the time of the Ottoman occupation. Then by Partisans in the early 1940s. Since then, the sign said, it had been closed. Floods and earthquakes had made it dangerous. So many paths had been added, no one knew any more which was the one that led out into the sunshine.