Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  Again we heard the man’s voice, shouting a word or a name. As we settled into a hiding place amid thick brush and boulders, we heard the cry of another voice. It sounded even closer and distressingly like a scream.

  Phoebe looked to Dan and me. The scream had come from a woman.

  We waited.

  Within seconds, we heard footsteps racing up the path. I inched up to peek over the boulders and find a view through the trees. The steps grew closer, and suddenly a dark-haired woman appeared, racing up the ravine.

  The three of us rose up furtively to see her fleeing past. She was fleshy and ungraceful, and wore a simple summer dress that seemed to flow behind her. Indeed, it appeared that the dress was torn—one of her shoulder straps had ripped, and she clutched the drooping top to her chest as she hurried along the path. She came to a stop at the site fence and turned to glance behind her.

  Her skin was a morbid white, but her face was flush with fear, her mouth and eyes stretched open.

  Phoebe glanced anxiously at Dan and me.

  Now we heard the man’s footsteps pounding up the path. Lumbering far more slowly. We ducked the moment he appeared. He was older than the woman, grossly overweight, and was sweating and breathing heavily. He held a liquor bottle in his hand. He wore a cap, and the kind of uniform I had seen on park officials. Without Dan even saying so, I knew this was the nightwatchman he had earlier warned us about.

  When he saw that the woman had stopped at the fence, he paused to catch his breath. “Kassandra!” he growled angrily. He pulled off his cap and wiped his brow, cursing in exasperated Greek. Then he started after her again.

  The woman kicked off her sandals and began to scuttle over the fence. The fat man grabbed the hem of her dress as she dropped to the other side. The dress ripped and the woman shrieked.

  Phoebe stood up. Dan grabbed her arm. She shot him an angry look.

  “Wait!” he whispered.

  The woman ran up the steps to the spring, her torn dress trailing behind her. The guard clambered awkwardly over the fence and tumbled to the ground. His bottle shattered on a rock. He cursed loudly and roughly in Greek as he picked himself up and went after her, leaving behind his upturned cap.

  The two of them disappeared from view.

  Phoebe was still standing. She jerked her arm from Dan. “We’ve got to do something!” she whispered.

  Again the woman screamed. It echoed through the canyon. Then the guard hollered and we heard a splash.

  Phoebe started toward them. Dan held firm to her arm. She looked at him as if he were crazy.

  “Phoebe—wait!”

  For what? I thought.

  I charged forward, moving out from the trees.

  “Jack!”

  I ignored him and continued on, marching toward the spring. Apparently it didn’t occur to me the guard might have a gun. That he might be willing to kill us all to keep his crime a secret.

  I was nearly to the fence when I heard the woman’s shriek, followed by a thunderous splash.

  And then…she laughed.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. I was standing in the open on the path, frozen in confusion. I could hear the woman giggling now, and the guard’s voice softly chuckling.

  Dan called in a whisper, “Jack!”

  He was standing several yards behind me, strapping on his backpack. Phoebe stood beside him.

  I looked back toward the spring. We could hear their coddling voices now, murmuring to each other. Then I heard the woman moan. The moaning slowly grew louder.

  I turned to join Dan and Phoebe, and we hightailed out of the Castalian Spring.

  3

  THE SANCTUARY of Apollo lay just up the road on the slope of Mount Parnassus. With the satyric nightwatchman now amorously engaged, we assumed that—for a while, at least—we’d have the place to ourselves. Nevertheless, in case another guard happened to be on duty at the entrance, we took a more roundabout route, abandoning the road and hiking through the pines to enter from the base of the cliffs.

  The moon had risen over the mountain, casting shadows on the stone-studded slope and piercing the darkness of the woods. Dan had reconnoitered the area the previous day, and he now adroitly led us in a complicated route that crisscrossed up the mountain to the boundary of the site. There we were forced to climb another fence, but after that the way was fairly easy. An ancient road called the Sacred Way wound like a serpent through the sanctuary, and even in the shadowy moonlight our destination was clearly visible. The rising pillars of the Temple of Apollo stood out boldly amid the ruins.

  In ancient times, the sanctuary had been crowded with towering bronze and marble statues given in tribute to Apollo, and with treasury buildings of the Greek city-states, where sacred vessels and documents and smaller votive gifts were kept. A theatre was built into the mountainside, and a stadium and a Temple of Athena stood nearby. The place had been the richly thriving, spiritual heart of Greece, where once a month a crush of visitors came to seek the counsel of the sun god.

  All of that was gone now; only stones were left. Cut-stone blocks methodically excavated and piled back into place. Most were heavy construction blocks—foundation stones, pediments, retaining walls, steps. The rest had either been plundered by history or carted off to museums. This left the sanctuary bereft of life and a challenge to one’s imagination. Only one small building had been fully reassembled—the Treasury of the Athenians—but its roof was missing, its foundation had been rebuilt, and the two white columns at the entry, like a pair of false front teeth, were obvious modern replacements. Even the Theatre of Dionysus, once a boisterous bowl of laughter and tears, was now a corroded, silent shell as somber as a cemetery.

  I had walked these dead ruins in daylight. Now, in darkness, the ruins came alive. The rough texture of age and decay seemed to feed on the light of the moon, transforming its reflection into a phosphorescent glow. The great stones appeared more ethereal than rock; there was something magical about them. It was as if the secret souls of the stones, forced into hiding by Apollo’s piercing eye, were liberated by the night, enlivening the landscape with a ghostly strangeness, a kind of vibrant gloom.

  This was nowhere more apparent than at the Temple of Apollo. Like the other buildings, for the most part only the foundation remained, but this one was far larger and more intact than all the rest. An even more striking feature, however, clearly set the temple apart and made it the focal point of the sanctuary. Six stone columns had been carefully re-erected and stood above a stone ramp at the temple’s front end. Their effect was mightily impressive. On the dizzying slope of the sanctuary, where fallen blocks of stone and rubble hugged the terraced ground, these massive pillars stood defiantly upright, confident and graceful, as if proclaiming to all the world their divine right to exist. The low moon cast them in blooming yellow sidelight and painted blue shadow, and they gave a sense of depth and space against the starry night.

  The three of us stood in awe before them.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, though the word didn’t come near to describing their strangeness.

  “Ruins are always more enchanting at night,” Phoebe said.

  Dan appeared more possessed than enchanted. He put his hand to a glowing column, feeling the rough stone with his fingertips as if it were the limb of a girl.

  “It’s the light of Dionysus,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  I wasn’t sure I heard him right. “Dionysus?”

  He withdrew his hand and turned to me. “Apollo was the god of the sun; Dionysus ruled the night. The truth is, both gods shared this temple.”

  He stood back to take in the entrance. “The front of the temple faces east,” he said. “It welcomed the rising sun, when light poured in through the open doors and shone on the golden statue of Apollo. The facade was inscribed with well-known quotations from the sages of ancient Greece, like ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess.’ Apollo was the lord of light and clarity, order and understanding.”r />
  Dan stepped through the columns and looked toward the opposite end of the temple. “The west end faced the setting sun. That side was dedicated to Dionysus and welcomed the coming of the night.”

  “I thought Dionysus was the god of the grape,” I said. “Lord of drunken orgies. How could Apollo share the temple with him?”

  Phoebe said, “It was only in the late phase of Greek culture that Dionysus was made into the god of wine and revelry. He was originally much darker, more irrational and strange. The god of ecstasy and madness.”

  “All the more reason,” I said. “One god’s all about light and order, the other one’s dark and chaotic.”

  “The two were half brothers,” Dan said. “Two sides of the Greek coin. Dionysus was Apollo’s alter ego, a kind of shadow self. Apollo reigned at Delphi from the spring through the fall, but Dionysus ruled in the winter.”

  “Then why didn’t his cult celebrate here?” I asked. “Why did they hike in the freezing cold to a cave way up on Parnassus?”

  “The Greeks were never really comfortable with Dionysus,” Phoebe said. “He arrived late to the Greek pantheon, coming up from the south, from island cultures rooted in the Mother Goddess cult. He was exotic, bisexual, irrational, dangerous. The sexual chaos he unleashed in his initiates—usually women—made the patriarchy nervous.”

  I joined Dan beneath the pillars. Before us, a broad, three-tiered foundation of blue-gray limestone extended back some two hundred feet along the terraced slope. Many of its paving blocks had been fitted into place, but there were long, deep, empty gaps exposing levels of the substructure and patches of the underlying ground. These gaps and varying levels made the whole reassembly appear haphazard, as if it were an unfinished stone-block puzzle, an abandoned plaything of the gods.

  It was over these intermittent, uneven stones that the three of us now carefully walked. I felt there was something sacrilegious in our trespassing. Not only were we breaking local laws, we were treading over consecrated ground.

  I tried to imagine the marble floor the way it once must have been: bare, polished, gleaming, a serene setting for the statue of Apollo.

  Dan described it very differently. “It was cluttered with a horde of objects. Gifts and tributes left in honor of the god: shields from victorious soldiers; figureheads of captured ships; the sashes and bands of triumphant athletes. Chariot wheels hung from the ceiling. Weapons were propped against the walls. The floor was littered with statues, lyres, wine bowls, caldrons—you probably could barely walk through here.”

  “No wonder the place was plundered,” I said.

  “It was burned by Thracian invaders in 88 BC, and two years later sacked by the Romans.”

  “It looks like they didn’t even leave all the stones.”

  “Actually, the Romans later restored it,” Phoebe said. “The building wasn’t dismantled until the Middle Ages. They wanted the valuable metal clamps that held the column drums and building blocks in place. That’s what happened to most ancient buildings in Greece.”

  At the edge of a large, deep gap in the floor, Dan came to a reverent stop. “This is it,” he said.

  We had been looking for the basement chamber called the adyton, the room where the Oracle had communed with the god. It lay more than halfway back on the downhill side of the temple: a small, recessed compartment, sunk several feet into the temple floor.

  We stood over it, gaping down at the shadowy space. The cut limestone blocks had the bluish look of ice. Tufts of grass and wildflowers peeked out from the dark; I could smell their sweet fragrance. The chamber, though only a few feet deep, was too deep for the moonlight; half fell into shadow, and the lowest part looked black and fathomless, like the entrance into a chasm.

  I found this illusion mildly disturbing, but Dan’s eyes roved over the mysterious space as if he had been looking for it all of his life.

  This was the holy of holies. The inner sanctum. The most legendary sacred spot in all of ancient Greece. Adyton meant “inaccessible.” Even the petitioners of Apollo—having traveled for weeks over hundreds of miles and climbed to these heights on Parnassus—even they were not allowed into this space. They knew about it only by its reputation: it held the source of the Oracle’s power.

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” Dan said. “I can’t believe we’re actually here.“

  “Believe it,” Phoebe said.

  Dan looked at us. “You know those famous quotations I told you were engraved on the temple’s entrance?”

  “‘Know thyself,’” I said.

  “‘Nothing in excess,’” Phoebe said.

  “There were others. My favorite was the simplest. It consisted of a single letter. The Greek letter epsilon.”

  “It looks like the English letter E,” Phoebe said, looking at me as if this explained everything.

  “And…E means what?” I asked.

  “Is,” Dan said.

  “Is?”

  “Is.”

  “What does ‘is’ mean?”

  “It means: ‘You are.’”

  I glanced at Phoebe. I wanted to laugh. But Phoebe was staring down into the dark with a look of total seriousness.

  So…I didn’t laugh. Instead, I thought about the epsilon.

  E. Is.

  I am.

  The simple words reminded me of something. How I had almost died in Mexico. How afterward I had felt more alive than I had ever felt before. More conscious of being alive. And aware that every single thing around me—stones, grass, wind, trees—everything was equally alive and present. Existing here and now.

  Is.

  This awareness—so obvious, so subtle—seemed the most powerful and precious thing in the world. Yet somehow also the easiest to forget.

  “I think I know why they put it there,” I said. “I think it was a reminder.”

  Dan nodded. He seemed very much in the moment himself, gazing down into the chamber. “Is a reminder,” he said.

  He took off his pack and set it on a stone block. Then he unstrapped his tripod chair and carried it down into the adyton. He unfolded the legs of the tripod and took a seat in the center of the chamber.

  He remained sitting there for a long moment, just staring at the wall in front of him.

  I glanced at Phoebe. She looked at me and gave a little shrug.

  I gave a shrug back. Then I scanned the sanctuary, looking for the nightwatchman. I wondered how long we had before that drunk showed up again.

  Phoebe began walking along the edge of the foundation, examining the layout of the blocks. Her frazzled blond hair seemed to magnify in the moonlight; it glowed even brighter than the stones. As she stepped nimbly from block to block, I noticed a remarkable quickness about her, a graceful, limber lightness. Like one of Apollo’s fleeting nymphs.

  I joined her. “So,” I said. “Do you believe in Naiads?”

  “Of course not,” she said. She continued studying the stones.

  “Then what do you think grabbed me back there?”

  “In the spring?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing?”

  She looked at me, directly. “Nothing but your own fear.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ve heard of post-traumatic stress?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Dan told me you almost drowned in Mexico. He said you nearly died.”

  I nodded, recalling the horror of the water rising around me.

  “You don’t get over that easily,” she said. “That kind of fear can stay with you, live inside your body, physically. I think what you experienced in that freezing pool was some sort of flashback drowning. Your extremities were turning numb, the muscles were tightening. The sensation might well have felt like somebody actually grabbing you.”

  It was true I’d had nightmares of drowning since, but still I wasn’t quite convinced.

  “Ask yourself,” she said. “Do you believe in Naiads?”


  I actually had to think about it. “No,” I said finally. “I don’t.”

  Phoebe turned her attention back to the puzzle of the blocks. I glanced over at the adyton. Dan was still meditating. Only the top of his bald head was visible, as if he had sunk into the floor.

  “Look at these stones,” Phoebe said. She pointed down a row of blocks that stopped at the chamber’s edge. “The location of the adyton breaks the normal rules of temple symmetry. It sits way off to the side and interrupts the interior colonnade that normally would have run right through it.”

  I tried to see what she was talking about, but it wasn’t clear to me, at least in the dark. “So what does it mean?” I asked.

  “The normal function of a Greek temple is to provide a sanctum for the statue of a god. But here the inner sanctum is placed to the side and recessed into the floor. It clearly seems designed to accommodate some feature of the terrain.”

  “The crevice, you mean?”

  “Precisely.”

  Dan had told me about the crevice, days before in Athens, when persuading me to join him and Phoebe. The chamber, he said, had been set directly over a natural, preexisting cleft in the earth. This crevice was the reason the temple had been built here, on this precarious slope so high up on the mountain. It was in fact the reason the Sanctuary of Apollo—and probably the town of Delphi itself—existed here at all.

  Centuries before the Greeks arrived with their god of reason in tow, this cleft on the slope of Mount Parnassus had been a source of mystery and awe. Herders in the vicinity had noticed their goats suddenly falling asleep or leaping in a frenzy. When the goatherds approached, they too would be affected. They would smell a honeyed, perfumelike odor and fall into a mystical trance. Some saw visions. Others became delirious. Many would rave incoherently, as if they were possessed.

  Fumes from deep in the earth had found their way up through the serpentine fissure and floated out into the air. Sweet-smelling, intoxicating, these mysterious vapors came to be seen as the breath of Gaia, Mother Earth, or wisps of the pneuma, the vaporous souls of the gods. Breathing them became a way to commune with the transcendent. Shrines were eventually built on the site, and a local virgin recruited to play the passive role of the conduit, the mouthpiece of the divine.