by Stav Sherez
They walk towards the light. It’s further than it seems. The ground is rough and littered with stones. They’re careful not to trip or stumble, both knowing that a sprained ankle down here could be a death sentence.
As they approach the light, her pace speeds up. Then she stops. He can read her disappointment in the way her body slumps. He feels it in the pit of his stomach though it’s something he’d suspected.
It’s not sunlight, and it’s not an exit.
Kitty stands at the entrance to another cavern. Jason walks up beside her. He can feel her breath like hot wind on his neck. The flickering light comes from candles. Hundreds of burning candles.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Arresting him had been the easy part. The guilty were never that surprised when they were caught. He’d got there early. Dimitri was still heavy with the previous night’s drink, his movements slow and clumsy, the rattle and crash as he’d stumbled to the door. Seeing Nikos there hadn’t been a shock. Perhaps he’d been waiting for this moment since his dad ordered him to set fire to the library. Or perhaps he was still too drunk to realise what the policeman wanted with him.
Nikos took him down to the station. Explained why he was there. Locked him in one of the two small cells.
Job done, he walked slowly to Petrakis’s house.
Petrakis opens the door, and his face folds like a cheap camp bed.
‘We need to talk,’ Nikos says calmly, the voice he uses to tell relatives that someone has died, ‘about your son.’
Petrakis doesn’t move from the doorway. He’s almost as wide as the frame. ‘What about him?’ he snaps, but there’s something else there, underneath all the machismo and bluster. It’s not concern for Dimitri, Nikos can tell.
He steps forward, and, for a moment, it seems like the older man won’t budge, like this might end up in a pushing match, but Petrakis catches something in Nikos’s glare and, without a word, turns and walks back into his house.
Nikos follows. The old man slumps down on the couch.
‘What did he do?’ Petrakis finally says, his voice devoid of interest. ‘Got drunk again did he? Beat up a tourist?’
Nikos shakes his head slowly. ‘I’m afraid this time it’s more serious than that. He’s been arrested for attempted murder and arson. We know he burned down the library.’
Petrakis springs up from the seat. ‘Bullshit.’ His voice is dry and grazed, like sand blowing in a storm.
‘We have footage of him setting the fire.’ This is where the whole thing will either fly or fail. He doesn’t know when Petrakis last visited the museum. ‘You never noticed Alexia put in CCTV, did you?’
He watches Petrakis’s face take in the lie. His eyes seem to go back in his head and then his body slumps and Nikos knows he’s fallen for it.
Petrakis doesn’t even try to deny it. ‘That dumb fuck,’ he says instead, his body falling into the armchair as if it were a coat he could wrap around himself. Shaking his head. ‘That dumb, stupid fuck.’
Nikos gives him a cigarette. Lets the old man light it and go through his options. The way he’s dragging on the cigarette, Nikos knows Petrakis is making the only choice he can.
‘He’ll get fifteen years, maybe a little less depending on the judge.’ He can’t help enjoying this moment, but he doesn’t let it show. ‘Maybe they’ll let him out for your funeral, maybe not.’
‘Awww, fuck!’ Petrakis slams his hand down, unsettling the ashtray. ‘Get me a drink,’ he shouts, and Nikos gets up and goes into the kitchen. Give him time and silence. Let him think it through.
‘That’s not what I’m interested in, though,’ he says when he comes back, notices the spark of interest uncrumpling the Mayor’s face. ‘I want to know why the priest had to be killed. Why all the others?’
Now Petrakis’s face is a jumble of incomprehension and … is that relief? Nikos wonders for a moment if he’s got this all wrong.
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘I heard you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘That’s crap. I know you sent Dimitri to burn the library when Kitty was inside, and I know he killed the priest.’
Petrakis bursts out laughing. Nikos thinks the old man’s snapped. But then he quiets down, snickering to himself.
‘That? You think I did that? You were never a good cop, Nikos, only just passable. You haven’t improved either.’ The old man’s laugh bounces against the walls of the room.
‘Why then?’
Petrakis shakes his head. ‘Not that easy. First you need to promise me something, then I’ll tell you.’ He looks at Nikos, his eyes squinting, ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘Know what?’ Nikos spits, suddenly aggravated by the old man’s petulance.
Petrakis allows himself a crooked smile. ‘What happened up on the mountain thirty-three years ago.’
They stare at each other. They both have something the other needs.
‘What do you want?’ Nikos finally says, but, of course, he knows.
‘I want you to promise my boy will be all right. That you won’t press charges. I know he’s a fuck-up. I know what he is, goddamn if I don’t. You think I haven’t spent the past twenty-five years rueing the day I put my cock into his mother? But he’s my boy. And he only did what I told him to. He fucked it up, sure, but he didn’t kill any priest.’
Nikos thinks it through. Why not? After all, his word isn’t binding, and there doesn’t seem to be another way to make the old man open up. Nikos has a suspicion that this is a story Petrakis has been dying to tell him for years. As long as he thinks it’s just about the arson, he’ll talk – no point mentioning the real reason yet.
‘You remember how young you were back then?’
The question takes Nikos by surprise. For a moment, he’s not sure what the old man is talking about, and then he is. That day on the mountain. Finding the boys. Crying in front of the other cops. Two months into the job, and he makes the worst discovery in the island’s history. He remembers the way Alexia’s hair blew in the wind on the ferry. The shape of her emaciated body against the white hull of the boat.
‘Green too,’ Petrakis adds, delighted now. ‘The way you came down that mountain, it was as if you’d found Jesus Christ himself murdered. You know we had doubts about you beforehand, well, this did nothing to alleviate them. Your own sergeant called you “mainland pussy”. Doesn’t want to dirty his hands doing real work, rooting out Communists and terrorists. Came back here to take it easy.’
‘I never knew you all thought so highly of me.’
Petrakis sweeps his hand through the air as if clearing a table. ‘No one wanted you in charge of this. You were too young, and your politics were suspect. Someone needed to go to the mainland, hook up with the Athens cops. You fitted the bill.’
Nikos leans forward, grabs the old man’s hand and squeezes. ‘I know all this. Tell me what happened on the mountain.’
Petrakis pulls his arm away. Surprising strength for someone his age. He settles back into the armchair like an estranged uncle telling a bedtime story.
‘We found the boys exactly as you described them. I kind of understood your attitude then. It was, and still is, the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I was there with the Mayor, Theo, the Sergeant and the old doctor. We looked down at the boys, and we wept, yes, but not for them. They were dead. We wept for the town, for what would become of it when this leaked out. You see, we knew immediately who was to blame, and we knew it wasn’t those hippies up in the camp.’
Nikos stares at the old man, unable to say anything. His mouth starts making the right movements, but nothing comes out. His heart bumps against his chest. Sweat pours down his neck and face. He can feel its sting in his eyes but now’s not the time to wipe them. He takes two deep breaths.
‘It wasn’t the cult?’
‘Cult?’ Petrakis laughs, ‘There was no cult. That was all after the fact. But it was a good story, no? Even you believ
e it, right? To this day. It was such a good story, the kind of story people wanted to believe, so it was easy to persuade them.
‘No, they were just a bunch of hippies. Fucking reds and wasted layabouts. Good for nothing. You think that bunch of miserable drop-outs could ever belong to something as disciplined as a cult? You think they could even put a decent camp together let alone a system of belief? They were misguided idiots. Lucky for us they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Very lucky for us considering the consequences if the truth had come out.’
‘You set them up?’ Nikos grips the table’s edge, feeling his fingers sink into the wood. It’s everything he’s suspected and everything he’s denied.
Petrakis nods, ‘You did too. We all did. It was necessary. The island wouldn’t be what it is today if we hadn’t done that.’
‘You’re fucking crazy.’
Petrakis ignores him. ‘We knew you wouldn’t understand. That’s why we sent you away. You should thank us, really. We did what we had to do, but if you think it’s been easy living with that secret to take to bed every night, well … we did you a favour. We kept you innocent.’
‘You didn’t want a policeman with “dubious politics” to have one over you, you mean. You didn’t want me to be able to blackmail you later. That’s why you sent me away.’
‘Does it matter why?’
This is all wrong, and Nikos is tumbling through time, unearthing conversations long forgotten – seemingly meaningless then, now making perfect sense. That feeling that he’d been suckered in. The years of not knowing. Of suspecting. Of paranoia. All coming back to him now as he sits facing the old man.
‘Who killed the boys?’
Petrakis’s leer is as ugly as a squashed piece of fruit. Saliva leaks out the corners through thin, bloodless lips. His eyes are blazing. Nikos realises the old man’s enjoying himself.
‘We’d had problems before. This is how we knew. We were islanders not big-city people. We thought that certain things would disappear once we buried them. We never suspected they’d come back to haunt us. Remember, this was the mid-seventies. These things weren’t so well documented then. There was no way to understand them in the way we do now. To know that these people never stop. Not unless they’re stopped.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Nikos, totally confused now, trying to keep up with the old man’s scattershot narrative.
Petrakis leans forward and grins. ‘The priests liked little boys.’
THIRTY-NINE
They’re in another cavern. This one is smaller and lower than the previous ones. Three paths branch out. They all lead into darkness. But that’s not what they’re looking at.
The smell is richer here, as if it were squatting in their lungs, and they both try and breathe through their mouths. They gag and retch. It’s much hotter in this cavern. There’s the sound of buzzing flies, the click of beetles against the walls, the steady dull hum of the Earth.
In the corner, up against a wall, is something that initially they cannot make sense of.
The fact that it’s a shrine of some sort is evident, but its placing here, deep in the labyrinth, wrenches it out of context and makes them mistrust their senses.
There’s an altar. Or what passes for one. A small folding table in the centre, propped up against the wall. The candles resting on it burn and flicker. There are four photos, decayed with age, yellow and willowy as old parchment. They all show the same face.
A young boy smiling bemusedly at the camera. There is a playfulness to his face which sits at odds with the bare wall the photos are affixed to.
But it’s the teddy bear that draws them in.
At the centre of the display, just below the photos, is a well-loved, raggedy teddy bear, the kind only a kid having grown up with, and spent nights with, would cherish.
The bear is moving.
Kitty’s torchlight illuminates the centipedes. Their orange backs absorb the light. They weave in and out of the bear’s body, out of its eye sockets and into its mouth, causing it to lurch in a slow, stuttering manner.
Kitty steps back. The heat is terrible, scorching suns, dense thick air. The smell is worse. When she looks down, she sees that the ground is moving.
Jason grabs her, but there’s nothing they can do. The floor is one massive carpet of centipedes. She can feel how cold his skin is against hers. His breath sharp and punctured. She thanks God she’s wearing her trainers and not flip-flops.
Her torch light is like a scythe cutting through the centipedes. When she aims it down at the ground, they scamper, their legs scuttling in all directions. They seem larger than the ones they’ve seen before, even at the boat-burning. Kitty arcs the light, watches as the orange curtain parts to reveal the buckets placed underneath the altar.
There are three of them. Their positioning is deliberate and ritualised. Small animal skulls encircle them. The buckets are made of brass, tarnished deep and dark like Byzantine icons.
Jason catches a glimpse of the putrid mess of grey and red before it goes dark, the torch clattering to the floor, as Kitty turns and throws up in the dust behind him.
Jason picks up the torch and bends down near the buckets. The stink is almost solid, so thick it feels in the air. It’s hard to tell what’s centipede and what isn’t, but after a few seconds his eyes adjust and he realises what he’s looking at.
The torch illuminates the first bucket. He looks at the tangle of intestines and dark black chunks of organs. He remembers how all the bodies were found eviscerated, and he swallows his own vomit as it rises sharply in his throat.
‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’
She doesn’t answer. She’s trying to keep her mouth shut. She’s trying not to breathe. Dizziness sweeps through her, but she knows to faint here would mean falling into the centipedes, letting them wriggle and burrow into her.
They look up because they can’t keep looking down. The boy looks back at them accusingly. He doesn’t seem to be smiling anymore. They sweep the torchlight across the wall. Next to the photos, at the top of the shrine, there’s a postcard of a fishing boat taped to the rock. Jason reaches forward and pulls it off. On the other side there’s writing. He and Kitty scan it under the light, but it’s all smudged, a kid’s scrawl, shaky and angry, the card broken through several times.
As their hearts steady and their nausea becomes just a normal part of things, they study the other objects on the shrine.
There’s a ring, gold or bronze, it’s hard to say. A faded photo of an old man in traditional Greek costume. A torn and bleached-through section of a red dress. A bunch of flowers, still alive, left in the past couple of days. And four masks hanging as a border to the whole shrine.
Kitty points the torch at the wall. Stares at the masks. They’re dried and desiccated skin. They’re the faces of the victims. Preserved and hung for display. They’re small and shrivelled, but there’s no mistaking them. The boys hang on one side and the girls on the other. Their mouths are open in what could be a smile or a scream.
They take one more look, just in case they’ve missed anything. The candles cast shadows across the walls. The whole room seems to be in motion. They’re about to leave when they hear something from the back of the cavern.
It’s faint, at first, but in their silence it rises like an approaching thunderstorm.
It’s the sound of a man’s voice. It’s the sound of laughter.
Equal parts phlegm and bile, the sound bounces off the walls, turning the one voice into a multitude, a demented chorus that weaves its way into their heads. Kitty grabs Jason’s hand, feels it sweat-slicked and hot in hers. He looks at her, sees the squint of her mouth, and there’s no need to ask if she’s heard it too.
She hands him the torch. He holds it in his hands as if trying to ascertain its function. The laughter rises and crests like a wave.
‘Hello?’
His voice sounds weak and unravelled. He wishes he could pull it back into the cavern of his thr
oat. Kitty nods, acknowledging the things he can’t say.
There’s no reply to his greeting, only more laughter.
The switch feels soft under his finger. He slides it across, and light pools at his feet. His trainers are covered in centipedes. He can hear Kitty’s breath stop in her mouth, the slow exhale of her fear.
He raises the torch. A disc of white hits the opposite wall. They don’t see anything but the wall. They move closer, forcing themselves, one step at a time.
They see his hair first. Then the metal poles and manacles. They stop in front of the man. His laughter sounds further away now even though they’re right next to him.
The torch lights up his face, but there’s only darkness there. His beard is matted and black with dirt. His hair is ragged and dishevelled like an old mop. His laughter is high and tight, like a malfunctioning car alarm. He’s chained to the wall.
Jason takes another step, and the prisoner’s eyes flick open.
‘Who are you?’
There’s no reply. The prisoner twists his head, his eyes pinpricks punched into the shoreline of his face. He looks like a dungeon-room Jesus, but there’s no mercy in his gaze.
His arms are hoisted above his shoulders. They twist and turn as he continues to laugh. His left shoulder is dislocated, and his arm turns in an elliptical circle, the bone pushing against the sallow skin. His wrists are encased in silver hoops which are welded to a metal pole attached to the wall. His clothes are torn, and there are scabs and bites along his legs and bare feet.
It’s only when they notice what’s around his neck that they recognise him.
FORTY
‘What did you say?’
‘I said the priests liked little boys.’