by Stav Sherez
Kitty let Yanni’s arm drop back onto his lap. He seemed calmed or benumbed by the story he’d told. His hand gently stroked the dog.
‘Did you ever hear from her again?’ Jason asked.
The old man shook his head.
‘Her mother sent me a letter a couple of years later, perhaps late ’77. Rosa had hung herself in her mother’s flat. The funeral had already been and gone. I had not been invited. I went a few years later to her grave, but it was broken and lying in unconsecrated ground.’
‘What about your son’s friend?’
‘I never saw the body, but I heard he’d been killed in the same way. His mother and older brother were in the room next door when we were viewing the bodies, and I heard her scream and moan so much it almost drove me crazy. Crazy because I couldn’t scream any more, because the night in the cell had drained me of all that, and I felt guilty that she could express her grief and I couldn’t.’
‘What happened to her? Does she still live here?’
‘No, very soon after that she took her remaining son and left the island for good. I could understand that. But I could never leave. Who would visit his grave if I was somewhere else? But she had another son and didn’t want him to grow up in the shadow of what had happened to his little brother. I can understand that, and maybe, if we’d had another child, Rosa and I would have done the same too. Maybe we would have started again somewhere else and she wouldn’t have ended up… funny how life just never turns out the way you think it will.’
The streets were empty and cold. Litter blew against their feet. Jason walked Kitty to her hotel. They didn’t talk. They held hands. Yanni’s story had somehow brought them into the reality of this thing, the pain and left-behindness. The town seemed darker, occluded, as they climbed the hill. The wind came roaring down from the mountains. The streets they thought they knew disappeared or led into blind alleys filled with rubbish bags and feral cats. The buzzing of cicadas electrified the night.
Jason stopped. He put his hand on Kitty’s arm, squeezed gently. Their faces were only a few inches apart. ‘When did you lose the child?’
‘How did you know?’ Her voice sounded warped and disfigured. There was no expression on her face.
‘What you said tonight. The first chapter of Crime Novel.’ He stopped, shook his head, ‘I’m sorry for bringing it up.’
For some reason this made her smile. ‘Crime Novel was written over a year before it happened.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
She took his hand. ‘I’m fine. It’s history. Bad times better forgotten.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Thanks for coming with me tonight. I really appreciate it.’ Her voice was smoky and whispered, conspiratorial in the dark heat. He saw her as an outline in the night, a serpentine silhouette framed in black. She leaned forward and they kissed. Her lips on his. The touch of warm flesh. A Hitchcock kiss. Jason didn’t know if she’d intended it or if they’d just missed each other’s cheeks. He didn’t care. He wanted the kiss to last a thousand years.
TWENTY-FOUR
The coffee is bitter and black. The Professor apologises for not having sugar. The room is white and too brightly lit. Nikos feels his hands shake and places the cup back on the Professor’s table. He takes two deep breaths to keep his stomach from lurching, but all it does is remind him of how many cigarettes he smoked last night.
‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.’ His voice sounds unrecognisable to him, slurred and cracked, punctuated by shallow breaths.
‘It’s not often I get a detective coming to visit me,’ the Professor grins. It’s meant to be a joke, but Nikos is beyond that. He stares at the table stacked deep with manuscripts, black and white pages slashed with red ink. There are old coffee cups and at least three full ashtrays. Alex Pappageorgiou sits across from Nikos, his hands placed neatly on the table in front of him.
‘You know why I’m here, I assume?’
The Professor smiles. ‘Remind me which cult murders we’re talking about?’ His laugh is full and throaty, a man used to laughing at his own jokes.
He’d been recommended by a friend in Athens. Nikos had called someone he knew on the special task force. Pappageorgiou had been mentioned. A professor of Ancient Greek, he’d spent the past twenty years studying cults. He’d written two books on the subject and lectured across the world. ‘Lucky you found me,’ the Professor had said over the phone. ‘Next semester I’m teaching a course on desecrated utopias at Berkeley.’
He’s not at all what Nikos expected. He’s not some bearded crazy or stentorian pedagogue. He looks too ordinary, Nikos thinks, watching him across the table. A short man in a perfect navy suit, he looks more like a financier than a cult expert. His shaved head and baby face belie his age. His constant grinning jocularity and nervous energy are almost too much to take. He has a habit of rolling a pencil through his fingers like a string of worry beads.
Behind him is the map. It takes up three walls of the office. There are no bookshelves or paintings, only this map. It is a map of the world. North America to his left, Japan yawning across the wall to his right. Behind the Professor lies Europe, Asia and Africa. Black and red pins sprouting feathers are impaled at various points of the map and, next to these, on a sheet of plastic which covers the whole atlas, are dates and numbers, strings of integers like scratches pitting the surface. Nikos sits hypnotised by the map, the swirling ocean, his thoughts and the pounding presence in his head.
‘I’m stuck,’ Nikos says, the first time he’s voiced this to anyone but himself. ‘I don’t know if the recent killings are the work of a cult or someone trying to make it look like a cult. I don’t know what connection these killings have to the 1974 cult apart from the surface appearances.’
The Professor leans forward, his teeth flash white, and his gums seem bloodless and grey. ‘What do you know about cults?’
‘Not enough, obviously,’ Nikos answers. He points to the map surrounding them. ‘What’s the map for?’
The Professor sits up straight, enthusiasm bubbling under his eyes. ‘It pinpoints areas of cult activity throughout history. Timelines and deaths. There are lines you cannot see which connect each to each. This is the purpose of the map. To map out the connections we can’t apprehend.’
‘How does it work?’ Nikos leans forward, takes a sip of his coffee. The map draws him in, its dense assemblage of colour and form.
‘Look.’ The Professor points to a small outcrop of land in South America. ‘Jonestown. Perhaps the most famous cult suicide of all. November 1978. Jim Jones and a pitcher of Kool-Aid laced with Valium and Cyanide. Nine hundred and thirteen dead. This is one point of the compass. A thousand years before, give or take, another cult suicide, the same location as Jonestown. Thousand-year-old skeletons all with the same fractures in their skulls. Holes in their ribcages where the hearts were plucked out. Did Jim Jones know about this? Did he set up camp at this location because of it? Or was it something more liminal which called out to him and made him place it there? We don’t know. We can only make these comparisons once we start tracking the dates. Setting up points of intersection. Lines of death and belief.’
‘Are all the markers related to places of mass suicide?’ Nikos stares at the Professor’s hand arcing across the blue ocean. His stomach reels. This whole trip was a mistake, he thinks, there’s nothing to learn here. This is only another way to avoid the things he really needs to do. But the blue of the ocean is calming. The Professor’s mellifluous tones soothe him, make him loathe to leave.
The Professor nods. He smiles and fans his hand across the map. ‘Tenerife, December 1970.’ He points to the little dot of an island awash in blue sea. ‘Police are called to a house where the neighbours have reported hearing screaming and chanting. They discover three women. A mother and her two daughters. Killed with a coat hanger. Their genitals mutilated. In the centre of the room, a stake with the mother’s heart impaled on it. Looked like an ordinary serial murder, hor
rible in the extreme, right? But nowhere near as bad as the truth.’
Now that he was on a roll, the Professor barely stopped for breath. ‘Killed by their son/brother on command of the family patriarch, a man enchanted and possessed by the teachings of Jakob Lorber’s New Revelation which taught that all women outside the family were evil. The son was given his sisters and, later, his mother to have sex with. He sang hymns while his father played the organ, and he cut them apart and removed their sex and nailed it up on the walls.’
The Professor’s hand, like a knife, slices down towards the heart of the African continent. ‘March 2000. Five hundred and thirty disciples of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God lock themselves into a church in south-west Uganda and set themselves on fire. They believe the apocalypse is coming and that only through fire will they be saved.’ The hand sweeps again. ‘March 1995. Tokyo. The subway gas attacks of Aum Shinrikyo. They believed the apocalypse was coming too.’
Nikos watches silently as the Professor’s hands sweep over the tableau of death, detailing numbers and figures with the dry authority of a tax auditor.
‘March 1997. Heaven’s Gate. Thirty-nine dead. You know about this, you’ve read it in the papers, but did you know the majority of the men had castrated themselves?’
He follows a red line which spans across the ocean to the Middle East. ‘Modern-day Syria. The temple of Astarte at Hieropolis. Thousands of years ago, a castration cult flowered there. The cult of Attis, also a castration cult, started in what is now Turkey.’
His hand traces a thin blue line across the Mediterranean. ‘Exported to Rome and Greece where it flourished. Then back up into the Russian steppes, mid-nineteenth century, the Skoptsy, an ecstatic castration cult. Hugely popular for a hundred years. Blunt rocks their favoured method.’
Nikos takes this in, makes notes in shaky handwriting. He flashes back to the priest’s body as the Professor begins to speed up, his hand tracing lines which were so faint that only in their tracing does Nikos spot them, reeling off dates and numbers dead as if the figures would correspond in some eschatological account book where everything would make sense.
‘Centipede cults in Ecuador, Peru and the Greek archipelago. Satanic torture and ritual slaughter in Matamoros, Mexico, where kidnapped American students were strung up above a cauldron so that their blood could drip into the pot. Everywhere. At every time in our history. Always the same lines and points intersect if you know how to look at them.’
Nikos stands up and stares at the map. The brightly coloured feathers and tiny handwriting makes his head spin. What he’d thought were creases from a distance were actually more connecting lines, some dotted, some ellipsoid, stretching across the globe like a cat’s cradle holding everything together. He turns to the Professor, who’s straightening out a yellow feathered pin. Nikos looks down towards the Balkans. He has no trouble finding Palassos. Red and black pins sprout from the small island like Christmas decorations.
‘Why centipedes? Does your map tell you that?’
The Professor turns to him, smiling. He’s happy to have an audience.
‘All these islands attracted this sort of thing. They had more freedom there. The mainland was often under occupation by this or that army. Each had its own religion to impose. These islands were shelters. That’s why there’s so many monasteries there. Also look at it … the land … the way it curves up towards the heavens. You must feel it. The nature of ascent. Of reaching up. The high places. The spikes driven into the sky. Why do we believe in mountain gods? Jehovah, Mohammed, Christ? You see: deserts and mountains. These are places where people have always gone to find God.’
Nikos nods, not sure what help this can be but enthralled by the Professor’s delivery, the way he makes every sentence sound like some profound nugget of truth. His students must love him.
‘What about the centipedes?’
‘The centipede has long been a mainstay of these islands and Christianity, politics – these are all ephemeral flashes of history, gone while the centipedes are deeper, have more foundation. They were there before men even settled those shores.’
‘So the cult wasn’t a new thing? Even in 1974?’
‘Way before. And way before that too. Say a thousand years ago. It wasn’t but say it was. Dates have no real meaning. We know it happened and so the when of it just becomes academic. So, say a thousand years ago this island was isolated and besieged. That’s the meaning of the high sea walls and cannons. That’s the meaning of a city built inside a tiny horseshoe harbour whose streets wind and backtrack to confuse marauders and pirates. But these are other stories.
‘This particular story is set during a great famine. Ships from a neighbouring island had besieged the port for nine months. Nothing came in, and nothing went out. People began to believe the gods had abandoned them. Couple this with a few years of harsh sun, no rain, no crops, and this belief becomes a certainty. Why have we been abandoned so? This cry is familiar throughout history. Then there is a freak occurrence. One of those things.
‘That year, the last year of the siege, there is suddenly a huge outburst of centipedes. We know this because it was written down. Centipedes came from the forest and flooded the town.
‘Now we know this sort of thing is not too unusual – think of years when locusts descend like a black mist and blot out the African sky – we know that certain environmental circumstances lead to certain irregularities. But back then they didn’t have science or weather or ecology to help them make sense of it. They had the sky, the sea and the angry gods who no longer believed in them. That was how the world worked.
‘The island was besieged from within. Carpets of orange covered the streets. Young children died from bites. Houses and tavernas were infested. The horses all perished. This went on. A religion was born. A small, island religion. The centipedes were gods. Angry, hungry, evil gods who needed to be satiated. The local priests abandoned the gods who had left them to starve and adopted these new ones. They built altars and painted friezes. They worshipped the centipede and propitiated it.’
Nikos tries to corral this mass of information. His throat feels dry and unfamiliar: ‘human sacrifice?’
‘Yes,’ the Professor nods as if Nikos is a particularly dim student who’s finally got something right. ‘Don’t be so surprised. It’s not the only island in the Greek archipelago where such things have occurred. We know about the Minoans. We know about Crete and Thira. We know that when there are several years of famine and drought the gods are assumed to be displeased and that only human blood will herald the restoration. It’s happened everywhere, in all periods of history.’
The Professor’s voice rises in tandem with his enthusiasm. Nikos can feel his eyes bulge under their sockets, the blood vessels in his brain dilating and expanding.
‘Religions have been born out of it; whole cultures rotated around its bloody axis; wars were waged for the procurement of fuel for its hungry engine. Empires fell, cities sank in blood and many, many thousands of men and women and children died the most horrible deaths, under the blazing sun, the hateful glare of the sky, on altars in high places and in hidden ravines, all the way back to Isaac, through the blood and flesh of Jesus, to the battlefields and killing fields, the smoke and crematoria fires of our own history and on until the earth itself becomes the ultimate sacrifice to the black gaping hole of space.
‘In Palassos, it happens to be specific to centipedes. A chance spasm. A fluctuate of history and heat and breeding cycles. One of these things. Yet, a whole sub-rosa culture developed out of it.’
‘You said on the phone there were anomalies. That this cult didn’t fit the pattern.’
Nikos can see the Professor has a tendency for tangents and wants to get him back on track. This was no time for a history lesson.
‘There are always anomalies. But this is something else. Ask yourself: how did a group of hippies, running away from civilisation, from war and their parents’ expe
ctations, end up as a centipede cult?
‘Of course we know how easy it is for idealism to turn to its dark twin and become fanaticism. Look at the world around us, at many organisations which began as one thing and turned into something else. Idealism always leads to death and sacrifice because the world can never measure up to the abstractions we try and place on it. But why these hippies? Why this time? And why kill two children and then commit mass suicide? It doesn’t make sense at all. It doesn’t follow a pattern. There’s no build-up like we find in other cults, no discernible threat from the outside like at Waco. And if they all died thirty-three years ago, why are you finding bodies now?’
TWENTY-FIVE
The building of the archives of the Archpatriach stands grey and silent in the early morning haze. Businessmen rush by in crumpled suits, sweat pouring over their brows. Tourists stand eyes agape, maps in their hands and a look of awe surrendering their faces. Dogs scurry through the backstreets, their mouths clamped over this morning’s newest discovery, a day-old piece of souvlaki or a rat.
Hangovers have never been this bad.
Nikos stands on the steps of the building, massaging his temples, swigging from a bottle of warm mineral water, trying to still the persistent pounding in his head.
He’d made the appointment at the last minute. So far, for all his efforts, he’d been unable to unearth any information on the two priests. The records of the Church were notoriously sloppy and incomplete. Several phone calls had yielded nothing but promises to call back followed with sincere regrets that the material he’d asked for was missing.
He flashes back to Vondas, prone in the mortuary. The sense of relief that his body seemed to convey in death. The scars and mutilations.
He’d gone through the police records on Karelis’s disappearance, but there wasn’t much there. He’d been reported missing on 11 June of last year. His housekeeper had seen him the night before. She’d taken out his dinner and left him a cup of tea as she did every night. The next morning, when she went in to give him his lunch, he was gone. When he hadn’t come back that night, she’d called the police.