The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  Nikos lets these new facts tumble through what he already knows. ‘You said the priests never got used to leaving the monastery. How so?’

  ‘Well, it was like they never did leave. They became hermits in their own abodes. Karelis in his house in the interior and Vondas in his room in town. Vondas refused to deal with parishioners, and Karelis was drunk a lot of the time.’

  ‘Karelis drank?’ This new information sets Nikos’s mind wandering through all the theories and suppositions he’s so far held.

  ‘Yes. More than he should.’

  ‘So it’s entirely possible that he was drunk one night and fell?’

  The priest looks around him as if his superiors had crept up unawares and were watching him. ‘He had passed out several times. And once he turned up with bruising all over the left side of his face but said he couldn’t remember where he’d got it.’

  ‘So maybe his “disappearance” was just misadventure?’ Nikos thinks of all the precipitous ledges and slippery cliffs on the island. Depending on the tides, his body could have floated anywhere in the Mediterranean.

  ‘I hate to say this, but that’s what we all thought when we heard he’d gone missing.’

  Nikos stands silently as the priest intones the liturgy. Deep and mellifluous, his voice carries the dolorous melody across the bleak hills and fields as if presiding over a presidential funeral. The coffin is plain and chipped. Three goats stand like tardy mourners around the hole, watching with black eyes, as Nikos and the priest winch the coffin down into the waiting ground. The priest recites a short eulogy, waves his incense and crosses himself as the coffin touches the ground with a cold, bottomless sound like a ship sunk in deep sea trenches. There was nothing left to do now but wait for the bulldozer operator to come and fill the hole. Nikos and the priest share one last cigarette in silence, their faces drawn and lined, as they watch two blackbirds circling in the endless blue above.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘You can’t keep a secret for ever,’ Nikos tells her, and though it is the wrong thing to say, it’s nonetheless true. This he knows. This he’s kept hidden from himself all these years. Thirty-three years. A whole lifetime on the point of unravelling.

  ‘You can try.’ Alexia’s eyes are like whirlpools. Eyes he’s fallen into over the years, pools of escape from the humdrum of his days. Now they’re blazing. Fear and anger make them shine.

  ‘We should leave. Mother still has her place in Athens,’ she offers, knowing he won’t but she feels the need to say this, to exhaust all their options before the inevitable end of this thing.

  She can feel it like a room closing in on her. The room of her past. She didn’t think she’d have to enter it again, but how stupid can you be Alexia? She chides herself, knowing Nikos is right. Knowing all lies eventually come to the surface stripped of what made them so seductive in the first place.

  ‘I came back here for a reason,’ he says, stirring the sugar slowly into his coffee. There was a time, a couple of years back, when he was hemmed in by the routine of his days: stirring coffee, sun-dappled mornings on watch, the boredom of a life without surprises. He thought he’d go mad, but Alexia always brought him back. Into his life, their life, this life. And now … now he’d got exactly what he wanted. Excitement and mystery. But it was not what he wanted. Not at all. The fragile lies that held them together are starting to unravel, and he wonders where it will leave them. Together or apart? Knowing, either way, that the life they knew is over and he feels a sudden stab of loss for those idle days stirring coffee, looking up at his wife, the smile on her lips telling of kisses past and future.

  ‘They won’t find out,’ he says finally.

  She sits down next to him. Her skin is tired from worry, lined and creased like the tablecloth. ‘Who won’t find out?’ She replies, and her voice is little more than a whisper. ‘The cops? The rest of the island? Or is it the writer and her friend you’re worried about?’ She tries to untangle her words from the spite and fear that produces them, but it’s still there, palpable on her tongue as last night’s alcohol.

  ‘I won’t betray you,’ he says, and this she knows. ‘For anyone. This life is more important than the truth.’ He’s made his decision. This is what his life comes down to.

  She’s washing the dishes downstairs. He hears them break and clatter to the floor. He tunes it out. He’s in the storeroom again. He thought he’d put it to use as a workout space. Now he’s here for the past. For things he’d thought long buried and forgotten.

  Even after the first two murders, he wouldn’t accept that this was the start of something that would eventually unravel his life. Coincidence and the poetry of random events seduced him, told him not to worry. But how many random events did it take before you started calling it a pattern?

  For a while, he’d managed to convince himself it was drugs and money and murder. But he’s been kidding himself. Again. The book in the priest’s room. The things he’s learned in Athens. The fear in every word Petrakis says. This is related to 1974 even though it can’t be.

  He hasn’t even thought about that week for years. Sometimes images, the sound of someone’s voice, will drift from the past and wash through him – but it’s always been easy to shove it away, to pretend that life belonged to someone else. He stares down at the loose files and dossiers he retrieved from the station. Maybe in these quiet and bland pages there’s an answer. A way to save them. He’s saved her before with lies, now maybe he can do it with the truth.

  The scribbled notes of a twenty-two-year-old. The rushed excitement betrayed by the slant of the words, their spidery connections and dense assemblage. He’d just graduated from the police academy. Life was different then. The colonels holding onto the last tendrils of power. The terrorists blowing up American businessmen in the streets of Athens. The summer of 1974.

  He’d requested Palassos. All his friends at the academy wanted terrorist detail. That’s where the promotions and connections were to be made. The fame and political leapfrogging. That was not what he wanted. Too many hands to shake, deals to make, principles to swallow. The police force was a de-facto private army the colonels used to diffuse and destroy the rising tide of leftist protest. He had no politics. He was only a kid. But he didn’t like blood. Didn’t like the rumours they’d heard at the academy about special hand-picked police death squads.

  He got Palassos. His colleagues laughed. Chasing sheep to arrest them for not being as stupid as the locals, they said. Have fun.

  The island hadn’t changed. He’d only been away three years. His mother was ill. He could look after her and do his job.

  He’d heard the rumours, of course. Teenagers in the hills. The deep interior. European and American kids. He knew the type. Had seen some in Athens. He envied them their freedom, their sense that the world held infinite possibilities in store. The American dream, he knew, was not money and success but the ability to begin again, to shed your old skin, leave your town or city and become someone else. In Greece you only became your father. That’s if you were lucky.

  He’d been manning the desk when they came in that summer day in 1974. He knew right away it was trouble. Their faces were whiter than sugar-dusted kourabides. Their breath short and raggedy. It took them several minutes to calm down enough to tell him what they’d found.

  A boy and a girl. Illicit lovers in an island of gossip hounds and prurience freaks. They’d gone out to the ruins for some peace. Kisses away from the watchful eyes of the older folk. The ruins had always been a place for lovers. They had no drive-ins on the island. No one had a car. The woods were where kids went. It was where he’d gone with his first love, Lydia, and he still can’t forget the buttery taste of her skin as he laid her down by the forest and caressed her hair, sucking in her breath like it was pure oxygen and he a man falling underwater.

  The two teenagers in front of him didn’t have a chance to kiss. They’d got to the ruins at sundown. Walked hand in hand through the forest. Whisper and ant
icipation. Blood rushing through their hearts.

  Neither screamed when they saw it. It was just not something they could take in immediately. Two boys, seven or eight years old, were staked naked to the top of the stone altar which stood at the centre of the ruins.

  They stepped closer, realised what they were looking at. The boy apologised to Nikos for throwing up all over the scene. Nikos nodded. He only wanted to know what they’d found.

  It wasn’t long before he saw it for himself.

  After taking their statements and letting them go, he marshalled a couple of part-timers and headed with them towards the ruins. He’d briefed them about what they were likely to find unless this was all some big joke being played on the new recruit – and he wouldn’t have discounted this apart from what he saw on the faces of the two young sweethearts who’d sat before him an hour earlier. This was how ghosts looked.

  They came upon the ruins in the last glimmer of day’s end. The stone monoliths blazed in the heat. The boys’ bodies shone as if they’d been varnished. He heard one of the part-timers cough, then turn and puke.

  They shone their torches on the altar. Nikos told them not to get too close in case there were still footprints or other evidence. He took off his shoes and examined the floodlit scene, a cigarette in his mouth to keep away the smell and flies.

  The altar was about six foot long and three wide. It was made of stone and stood three feet above the soil. The centipede carvings and strange hieroglyphs were well known to him. Even now, years later, he can still see every little detail, smell the heavy musk of woods and blood and smoke.

  The two boys were staked legs and arms akimbo on either end of the altar. Their legs wrapped over and under each other. Thick twists of rope binding hands and feet to the stone. There was blood all over the bodies but no visible wounds. It was as if the blood had been smeared or painted on. Their mouths had been sewn shut, the stitching faltering and ugly like a mock set of teeth. Their mouths had been stuffed with centipedes. The coroner said the arthropods had been alive when the lips had been sown shut. There was evidence of egg-laying in the warm, mucous-drenched throats of the boys.

  Their hands, bound and tied, evinced deep defensive scars along the palms and wrists. The torsos were bruised and cut, with crude orange symbols painted across the rib cages and stomachs. The symbols were identical on both boys.

  Where their genitals had been was a wide black cave. Whoever had done this had not only severed the genitals but had scooped the whole pelvic area away to leave a shallow repository for the live centipedes. They were writhing and scuttling in the depressions. He’d wanted to turn away, go back into town, drink off a bottle and forget this happened. He wanted to be anywhere else but here.

  The cry made them all jump.

  Nikos dropped his torch, and the sudden darkness swallowed him.

  ‘Christ!’ He said, turning to the blanched faces of his men. ‘One of them’s still alive.’

  Then he heard it again. Not really a cry, more a whimper, the kind a small dog might make if someone stepped on its foot. He rushed to the altar.

  Which one was it? They both looked as dead as each other. He knelt down and put his ear to each of their mouths, listening for the whisper of a breath.

  The boy’s eyes flicked open.

  Nikos jumped.

  The boy looked at him with an expression – he couldn’t say what it was, not fear, pain, panic or relief – but rather something totally stripped of any human referent. The kind of look an animal gives from its trap.

  He quickly set about untying the boy. The rope was thick with grease and centipede juice. The creatures crawled up his arm, and he could feel the tiny points of their teeth, but he didn’t care. His colleagues were untying the feet when the boy leapt up.

  His whole torso sprang like a figure in a pop-up toy. His lips moved frantically as he tried to open his mouth, eyes bulging when he realised his lips were sewn together.

  Nikos carefully put his arm on the boy’s head, stroking it in what he hoped was a placatory gesture. The boy’s eyes spun in their sockets. The part-timers alternately cursed and praised God. The boy’s chest pumped like an accordion as he struggled to breathe through his nose. Nikos took out his penknife. He would have to hold the boy still while he cut through the stitches. He turned to his colleagues and felt the boy fall from him.

  The boy’s head hit the stone of the altar with a thwack, like a cartoon sound effect on Saturday morning television. His eyes misted and rolled back into his head.

  He knew the boy was dead. The tension which had sprung his body was totally gone. The amount of blood surrounding his pelvis was deepening. It had been too late. Too fucking late.

  Later, he would think that if he’d hurried the two lovers along he might have got up there in time to save the boy. Later, he would think that he had killed the boy. The head hitting the stone, the final nail. Even after the coroner had told him the boy had been beyond saving, even then Nikos could hear, every night, when silence finally fell on him, that one lone thud like a full stop punched into the surface of the world.

  The old-timers took over after that.

  The boy was dead. They left him where he lay. Nikos didn’t say anything to his colleague, the one who couldn’t stop crying. It was something which didn’t need to be said. As if the man’s crying precluded his own. And that was good. For now, he had to go back into town and report this to his superiors. He remembered he’d only been two weeks on the job. How he’d thought the island would be quiet, pastoral police work.

  They took his statement. They took the part-timers’ statements separately. He could hear them crying in the next room along. He wanted to cry too, but he was in charge, first at the scene, and didn’t want to betray his inexperience.

  They took him off the case. He was glad and he was pissed off. Glad not to have to see those bodies again, to untie them, zip them into bags and carry them down the hill. Glad not to be the one who had to knock on a parent’s door in the middle of the night and usher them into the nightmare which they would learn to call the rest of their lives.

  But he was pissed off too. He wanted to be there when decisions were made. He wanted to see the people responsible caught, the sound of handcuffs clinking and the long journey back to the mainland.

  The last bit he got. But alone. The next day, staring out at the splashing sea, hearing the boy’s cry, heading back to Athens to meet the detectives there. Petrakis and his sergeant had sent him as liaison. Meet the detectives and coroner. Explain on the boat. Bring them back.

  Rumours of the cult were already spreading. Almost as soon as he’d reached town. As if the story had been broadcast on the massive speakers embedded in the rock surrounding the harbour.

  He’d spent the day going over his story while his superiors went back up to the ruins and sealed it off.

  He’d argued. Shouted. Screamed. Said he was the one who’d got the call. He was the one who found the bodies. ‘I’m part of this,’ he told them. I need to be part of this was what he left out.

  They told him it was procedure. He was still a rookie, on probation. This was too big a case. Any screw-ups would go straight back to Athens, and heads would roll down here. He listened. He knew they were right. But he couldn’t bear it. The sound of the boy’s final cry filled his head. The look in the boy’s eyes was there every time he closed his own. An image tattooed on the back of his eyelids. He knew it would never go away. He wanted to do something, but they told him to leave it in their hands. They had experience. They knew the protocol.

  He had no choice. He went back home. His mother lay wheezing in her bed. He didn’t tell her a thing. He didn’t need to. She saw it in his eyes, felt it in the gaps between the words he spoke. She took his hand and held it all night as he lay staring at the ceiling, putting off for as long as he could the moment when he would have to shut his eyes and face the boy again.

  He took the boat to Athens. He met the detectives. Hunched chain-sm
okers with voices that sounded like flooded engines. Cold eyes and graveyard humour. They shared coffee, cakes and war stories waiting for the ferry. They spoke of mass murders in the highlands, Communist plots, decapitated diplomats. He thought of the boy. He knew he’d have to find out his name.

  Petrakis and his deputy met the detectives at the dock, introduced themselves, smoked cigarettes and talked about the weather. He understood they needed to do this before they could do the rest.

  Petrakis took him aside. Thanked him. Then said he wanted him here, at the dock, watching who got off the island. They gave him Michaelis, an old-timer, almost seventy, normally desk-bound. They stood by the boats for two days and took photos of everyone who left. They stopped tourists and interviewed them. Took down passport details. Checked under fingernails for signs of blood or hair.

  It was boring. It was sun-smacked and useless work. They stood there and took names. They were as obvious as nuns in a mosque. No murderer would catch the ferry. There were plenty of fishing boats available at a price, or there to be stolen, to whisk anyone away to one of a thousand islands, or even further, to the beaches of southern Italy where they could disappear for ever.

  Michaelis murmured darkly. The cult, he said. Those fucking hippies. He’d already made up his mind. Nikos wasn’t so sure, but it was seductive. He wanted someone to blame. Someone to punish. He knew the boy would never leave him but perhaps if they caught the killers he could sleep easier.