The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  The next day, he watched as Petrakis crossed the harbour looking punch drunk and bleary. Fucking Samsonites under his eyes.

  ‘It’s over,’ he told Nikos and Michaelis. ‘The fuckers escaped our justice but not God’s.’

  He’d asked him what he meant. Petrakis said ‘Come, see. We need men to help clear up.’

  They walked in single file like a procession of the dead. They climbed slowly past the forested hills and ochre valleys. No one said anything. They had left words behind. Entered a country of silence and horror. Each footstep one closer to something they didn’t want to find.

  Petrakis had briefed him back at the station. Him and eight other policemen on loan from neighbouring islands. He was no longer the one who’d discovered the terrible crime. He’d become part of the clean-up squad.

  Petrakis had stood at the front of the main police hall. He’d been drinking. His eyes looked as cloudy as water-infused ouzo. His hands shook as he told them what had happened.

  After marking off the crime scene and wrapping the boys’ bodies, they’d marched across the island. Petrakis, his deputy, the Mayor and a doctor. They knew about the hippies. There’d been rumours going around for months. Farmers had reported mutilated sheep and cattle.

  They approached the camp with guns drawn, but there was no need.

  At first, they’d thought the hippies had fled. Realising the import of their deed, they’d packed up and hidden in the interior – perhaps were already on board boats heading for different islands, scattered like shattered glass, never to be put back together.

  But nothing had been removed. The fire still smouldered from the previous night. Dirty cups and half-drunk bottles of retsina stood like sentries around the camp perimeter.

  Petrakis’s voice choked as he continued. The air inside the station was hot and still. The policemen all sat, eager to hear more, the whine of the fan above like a constant reminder of their beating hearts.

  Petrakis told how he shouted out to the hippies, in English, he didn’t want them to think this was another rout. He told them they were policemen and had a few questions to ask. But there was no response, just the eerie crackling of dried wood in the ashes of the fire.

  Petrakis went in first.

  When Nikos got to the camp, it was exactly how Petrakis had described it. Nothing more than a few tents flapping in the wind, an old scar where countless fires had chafed the ground and a swooping view down to the sea.

  Petrakis led. Nikos followed. Others behind him. No one talked. This was unusual; policemen always talked in these circumstances. Words to ease off the dread.

  But that day there was only silence. And when Nikos followed Petrakis into the main tent, he thought this had all been a game, and, yes, the hippies must have fled, for the tent seemed as silent and empty as space itself.

  The police lights made shapes out of the gloom. Slowly his eyes adjusted. Then he saw them.

  They had been sleeping on the floor. Neat lines of sleeping bags. A poignancy in how ordered it all was. The odd paperback, a radio, some baby toys. The sleeping bags were occupied. There was silence as Petrakis walked up to the nearest bag and leant over. All the other policemen were now in the tent, and their lights illuminated the scene as if it was only waiting for a director to shout Action!

  Nikos was closest to Petrakis as he gently unzipped the first bag.

  The woman looked like she was sleeping. Her blonde hair flooded around her neck like spilled honey. A vague, uncertain smile clung to her face. Nikos was going to ask, Was this some sort of joke?, when Petrakis turned the sleeper’s head towards him.

  The bullet hole was black and big as a two-drachma piece. The hair was copper and tangled in a dark knot. The sheets were rust red.

  ‘Every one of them.’ Petrakis shook his head. ‘Every single one. One gunshot to the head.’

  Nikos peered down at the woman. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. Will always be twenty, he corrected himself.

  ‘Self-administered?’ He tried to choke down the horror and anger which suddenly flooded him like sleep. Here they lay, peaceful as old men in mid-afternoon slumber. Peaceful and dead. There would be no clink of handcuffs. No trip to shore. No trial. No justice. Just this.

  ‘No. We don’t think so,’ Petrakis muttered, ‘There’s one at the end. A man. Different angle of entry. The coroner will have to concur, but it looks like he was the leader. Looks like he killed them all and then himself.’

  The question of why was on nobody’s lips.

  ‘We need to bring them back to town,’ Petrakis added, this time to the other policemen as well. ‘We’ve taken photos. We’ve checked the ground. Now it’s up to the coroner.’

  They spent the whole day and most of the night putting bodies into bags. They didn’t have the real body bags they saw every night on the news, black cocoons coming back from South-East Asia filled with young men. As he was putting another limp dead kid into a fishing sack, Nikos thought how ironic it was: one of the main reasons the hippies had fled here was to avoid being shipped back from Vietnam in just this way.

  They bagged all personal effects. They bagged books and journals and kitchenware. They bagged cigarettes and maps and postcards from home. They bagged shoes and socks and baby’s diapers. They bagged bodies. They bagged everything the bodies left behind.

  Two men to a body. That was how they did it. The slow descent into town. Nikos was at the front. He held some woman’s head, the features still recognisable by touch through the shifting shroud of the bag.

  When they reached town, they had an audience.

  Everyone was gathering in the main square. Old men and kids, wives and butchers, fishermen and hoteliers.

  When they saw the policemen bringing in the bodies, they cheered. They clapped and sang praises to Jesus. They wept and spat on the bags, and the policemen ignored everything but the task of bringing them into the fish market which, with its abundance of ice, was doubling as a morgue.

  That night there was a party. The policemen were treated like kings. The townspeople bought them beer and ouzo and food freshly steaming from home. They sang hymns and national songs of courage and bravery. They drank through the night, and only Nikos thought about the thirty-five bodies lying on top of blocks of ice, two doors down.

  The morning came like a sigh of relief. The islanders could go about their business. The savage murderers had come to their senses. Guilt and fear had trapped them like rabbits in sparkling headlights. They knew there was no way out for them. They did what they had to do.

  And no one in town felt cheated.

  No one apart from Nikos who had been waiting for the court date. The confession and sentence. The boy’s face slowly fading from his eyelids.

  And now, thirty-three years on, in the back of his house, he knows that he was cheated.

  That it had all been too easy. Too pat.

  And that something terrible had happened that day they sent him to the mainland to pick up the detectives.

  Whether they had spared him or used him, he is yet to find out.

  TWENTY-NINE

  She loves being surrounded by books. The walls around her made of paper and glue. She enjoys the smell of them, these old volumes, the way they call to her. She could almost be at home, but she isn’t. The strange writing which embosses most of these spines reminds her that she is not at home. The moaning of pipes and scream of scooters brings her back to what it is she’s trying to do.

  Solve a mystery.

  Except she’s not doing it within the confines of her text, not sending Lily out into the streets knowing she’ll stumble upon the key that unravels everything. This is for real, and yet, however many times she reminds herself, it still doesn’t feel so different from what she does at home.

  Jason hadn’t answered when she’d tried calling him earlier. His room was empty. No message for her. He might have disappeared off the island, packed his bags and got out while he still could. She’s surprised, and a li
ttle annoyed, at how sad this makes her. How she was starting to feel things for him that were barely understandable to her. She remembers the kiss and how her lips trembled but she also remembers she’s married and the ring is still there on her finger, marking out tan lines and boundaries.

  Don feels so distant, as if she’d been stranded here for years and not days. Was it just the cigarette, the way he tried to cover up his lies? Or something deeper? Something about the island itself?

  She’d thought about calling her friends, but all they’d want to hear about would be her and Don and not the things happening on Palassos; her agent and editor would only ask how the book was going. She’d realised that Jason was the only one she could talk to about this, and it makes her smile, the way they’ve become conspirators. It’s why she’s here, digging through these books and files, looking for more things she can tell him when they next meet. In between these walls of books, she feels present. Like a part of her has suddenly revealed itself. As if her whole life up to now had been lived in the past tense.

  She bypasses the exhibits and goes straight to the library. She has her Greek crib book next to her. She’s scanning microfilms from the island newspaper, haltingly making her way through the crooked characters of this strange language. The machine whirs and clicks like another presence in the room.

  She looks towards the screen and there’s the priest. She remembers the night he came upon them at the monastery. She’d thought his bile and snap were because he was hiding something about the murders. Now she sees it could have been pure fear. Knowing he would be next; maybe wondering if Jason and her were there to kill him.

  The photo shows a younger man than the one they met, but it is unmistakably him. She always looks at men’s eyes first. It’s what draws her in. She never forgot the priest’s eyes, like dark drums pummelled into cavernous sockets.

  Kitty tries to place the information in the context of what she already knows. The admonishment that night up by the monastery. The priest’s murder.

  She wonders if the disappearance of Karelis, the older priest, has anything to do with this. It’s too tempting a coincidence to ignore, but it may also be random. Both sets of murders, in 1974 and the current ones, happened in the vicinity of the monastery and ruins. One priest disappears a month after last year’s murders and, a couple of days ago, the other priest is found dead by the monastery grounds.

  Silence descends on her again. Now she has a theory, a place to fit the clues into, she delves into the material with added urgency. She flicks through archived photos stored in large, mice-gnawed boxes. There are enough weddings here to flood a chapel. Happy men and women in white, smiles and the rest of life filling their faces with serenity and peace. There are prize hogs and sheep. Farmers holding up vegetables so large they’re no longer recognisable. Shots of houses and monuments and heroes. But there’s nothing about the ruins or the ’74 cult. Not even one photo.

  She’s disappointed. She was hoping the papers would have more information but it seems as if it’s all been expunged. It still bothers her how anyone could know that the entire cult had killed themselves. How anyone could know how many people had been up there in the first place. What if they didn’t kill themselves? What if one of their number suddenly decided to take things into their own hands?

  She sits in her own silent cocoon, reading, flicking through images, processing all this new information. Her eyes fall on the photo of Karelis on the screen in front of her. The kind of priest who’d scare children into believing in Hell. His beard and eyes wired with righteous fury. His mouth twisted in angry pronouncement. She looks up, unnerved by Karelis’s ice-cold gaze, and sees the smoke.

  The main door is closed. A thick halo of grey-black smoke surrounds it.

  She looks around. She’s the only person in here. It’s Alexia’s day off. The kid who’d let her in told her to lock up when she was done. She gets up. The papers and photos go flying to the floor. Is it already hotter or is she just imagining it? She’s not sure but she knows soon it will be. The smoke halo thickens, and she can hear the wood beginning to crack. The smell rich and pungent. The paint on the inside of the door blisters and pops. It’s this sound that makes her turn and begin running.

  She reaches the end of the room. There’s a massive explosion, and then heat and light fill the room as the door finally gives and the flames come lapping like waves rushing through a break in a sea wall.

  She’s running now, but there’s nowhere to go. Endless corridors of books. A labyrinth of books. She knows soon these volumes will be on fire and that nothing will stop this.

  She coughs and retches. Her throat feels swollen and misshaped. She tries calling out as the room fills with banners of smoke, but the sound of flames is all she can hear.

  She scans the room. Shelves and bookcases make her dizzy. Then she sees the fire escape at the other end of the room. She runs towards it.

  She reaches the door. She grabs it and screams. Her hand sizzles and burns. She feels the skin peeling off her palm. She takes off her shirt and wraps it around her fist. The smoke rips through her lungs and it feels like someone’s scraping a knife along the inside of her throat. She knows this will hurt, but it’s her only choice. She grabs the handle again and turns.

  Cool air rushes across her face. She almost says a prayer but instead she pushes harder. There’s a bang as the door hits something and stops.

  She can see the sky, the deserted street, but she can’t open the door more than a couple of inches. It feels like there’s a tank wedged in front of it. The tiny sliver of air is all she’s going to get.

  She stares for a second as if landed here from a dream. She feels the heat now, burning skin and eyes. Then she remembers. She forces herself backwards, away from the cruel sliver of sunlight and back into the black smoke.

  Everywhere around her is the sick sizzle and hiss of burning books like a thousand insects talking at the same time. The bathroom is just ahead. She used it an hour ago and remembers the feeling of the cool breeze that brushed her face as she washed her hands.

  The door, thank God, is open. She screams anyway because her shirt is not enough to dampen the heat. But inside it’s cool. The fire hasn’t penetrated this small room yet. Outside she hears the crashing of shelves as they topple to the ground.

  She looks up at the window and begins to shake. She’s trapped. There’s no way out. Though the window is big enough for her to squeeze through, it’s barred.

  Smoke floods the bathroom. The heat rises. It’s only minutes to go. She thinks of Don, or tries to think of him, because this, she now realises, could be the last few minutes of her life, and if she’s going to die she wants to see her husband’s face but, however much she tries, she can’t picture him, and for a moment the panic at this is worse than her panic about the fire. He’s just not there.

  The smoke makes her cough. Rips her out of this reverie. She climbs onto the sink hoping it will hold her weight. She can feel the breeze now, the cool rush of air. She grabs one of the metal bars and pulls. Rust flakes off in her hand. She pulls harder. Nothing happens. Then again and there’s the faintest of creaks. She uses both hands, steadying herself on the sink. She wedges her elbow to gain leverage. The bar groans, then gives way, sending her flying back down onto the floor. The room is blistering. The paint is popping and sizzling. She gets back up on the sink and pulls at the second bar. This time there’s almost no resistance. The gap it leaves is just wide enough. She squeezes herself through, the rough iron scratching and tearing at her skin.

  The fall is only one floor but she lands on rocks and garbage bags. Long thin streamers of pain shoot through her legs as she gulps the air like someone trapped in a dream of drowning. Above her, the sky is streaked with ribbons of black smoke, reaching up into the wide expanse of blue.

  THIRTY

  She’s crying again. This time she won’t let him soothe her. Nikos understands those days are over. He’s told Alexia about the fire. She was coming
back from town. She hadn’t heard. Had been at the beach all day. These coincidences and lucky escapes unsettle him. What if it had been her normal … better not to think about that.

  She hadn’t taken him seriously at first, searching his face for some indicator of jollity or elaborate ruse. But there was nothing, and he didn’t joke with her. The scope of their relationship had never allowed that. There was too much history, too many secrets. Things that kept them in the gravity of seriousness these shuttered years.

  She became silent, folded into the very deepest part of herself. He made her countless cups of tea. Listened to her sentences, broken and fragmented now, as if the fire in the library had robbed her of the confidence of language.

  He fell to lies. Hating himself but not able to help it. Those words falling from his lips: there’ll be an investigation; we’ll catch the culprits; rebuild; the library will be better than before. And then the worst lie: it must have been an accident.

  She’s in her room now. She’d asked him not to come in. It had been four hours. He sits in the storeroom, staring at the files.

  Looking through them a couple of nights ago, he felt something was wrong. The way it had all fallen so neatly into place. His trip to the mainland. Everything wrapped up by the time of his return. And then his mother had died, and he’d transferred back to Athens, and the questions had stopped coming, he slept well, didn’t even think about the island most days.

  Coming back here, he thought that was all over. Thirty-three years. Too much time. He never dreamed he’d be the one to dig back in. Unearth ghosts he’d buried. Take back all the lies he’d told himself.

  He tries not to think about it, but he knows that somewhere in here lies the answer to why his wife’s place of work now lies smouldering. Perhaps even to the bodies recently discovered on the island. There were so many things he’d left unsaid for so many years in silent supposition. How much did he actually know? More than he thought he did, or less? He flashes back to the book in the priest’s room. The word NO scrawled all across the text, across Karelis’s face. The feeling of being cheated he’d had that day coming back from Athens, the cult already dead. He knows that there is only one person on the island who can answer his questions.