Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  I released Damiana’s arm. She glanced at me, then straightened her sleeve and answered. “The next tour is at noon.”

  “Grazie,” the Italian said, bowing his head slightly. He took his wife’s arm, and they slowly shuffled out the door.

  Damiana turned to me.

  I looked her straight in the eye. “Basri is dead. My brother is in jail.”

  “I cannot help you,” she said.

  “You can tell me what happened. You can tell me why. “

  She shook her head, staring vaguely. “No. No one can understand this.”

  “Please,” I said. “I have to understand.”

  She looked away.

  “Who were those women?” I asked.

  She looked back at me. “I warned you once. I will tell you again: Leave this island while you can. “

  It seemed she felt genuine concern for my safety. “My brother is in jail,” I said. “They think he killed Basri.”

  “It is too late for him. You must save yourself.”

  “From whom?”

  She looked at me with something like pity in her eyes.

  “They will kill you,” she said.

  HER WARNING reverberated in my mind like some gnawing, demonic echo. They will kill you.

  Who were these women, these choirgirls, these whores of Dionysus?

  When Damiana refused to tell me any more, I left the church in a huff and started searching through the town. There had been over thirty women on that boat; I was bound to run into one of them. I checked in shops and cafés. I walked the waterfront. I hiked out to the public beach, climbed the streets into the hills, and hung out in the squares. Scanning everyone I passed, I never glimpsed a single face I recognized from the boat. Where were these Aphrodites who had lured us into murder? I searched their twisting streets in vain. Repeatedly I found myself lost in their labyrinth, with Damiana’s baleful warning rattling through my head.

  They will kill you.

  In the late afternoon I returned to the church and waited for Damiana to leave. The sun had dropped behind the mountain, and a soft, dusky light had descended on the square. The last group of tourists gradually straggled out the entrance, and moments later Damiana emerged, locking the great doors behind her.

  She didn’t head back the way she had come, but crossed the lane behind the church and climbed a cobbled street. I followed at a safe distance, not wanting to be observed. At the top of the hill, she turned and continued down a narrow lane that wound along the hillside. She stopped at a very old stone building that turned out to be a school. I had missed it in my ramblings. Children were pouring out the doors, and one of them, a young boy, ran to grab her hand.

  Damiana offered him a gift: the toy carved bird she had purchased in the square. The boy seemed delighted. He dangled the bird from the string and spun it before his face. They walked on together. The boy was probably six years old; too old to have been her son. I decided he must be her brother.

  This proved true when they finally reached their house and their mother came out to greet them. I watched from a distance, behind a row of trees. The house was a modest, whitewashed cube like others all around it. Out front was an old, round-fendered pickup truck, its hood raised, with a man bent over the engine. When the boy came running up and wrapped himself around the man’s leg, the old guy surfaced, and the boy showed off his little carved bird. Damiana gave her father a peck on the cheek, then turned to walk back inside with her mom. The boy went charging in after them, and the father went back to his tinkering.

  After a moment I turned away and headed back down the street. I felt completely exhausted, and I could not even begin to make sense of what I’d seen.

  THAT NIGHT I checked into the Argonauta, a small hotel with a WELCOME sign I had noticed earlier in the day. It turned out the aged proprietor didn’t speak any English; she communicated by pantomime while mumbling to herself in Greek. The room I was given on the second floor was small, clean, and spare; its single window, which overlooked the street, offered a narrow view of the harbor.

  My intention was to rest for a while before continuing my search, but once I laid down, I fell fast asleep and didn’t wake until late in the night, when I heard two women talking. I lay there awhile, drowsily listening. The voices seemed to come from the floor below. When I heard the front door to the hotel shut, I got up and went to the window. A shrouded figure veiled in black moved off down the street. I watched as it disappeared into the dark.

  13

  THE FERRY from Páros was half an hour late. I waited anxiously on the waterfront, doing my best to blend into the crowd. All down the esplanade, tourists were perusing the market stalls and stopping into the tavernas and open-air cafés. Though life appeared to have returned to normal, I noticed occasional lingering stares, and nervous parents keeping a close watch on their children. Dan’s bloody dinghy had been hauled away during the night, but Basri’s yacht was now moored at the wharf, right alongside the police boat. I wondered if the Zodiac remained where I had left it. Just as I was considering hiking over there to see, a booming horn sounded, and the ferry entered the bay.

  Praying that Phoebe would be on it, I headed down toward the dock.

  Tourists waiting to leave the island were lined up there with their baggage. I noticed the two Heidelberg students standing among them, along with several tourists I’d seen in the church, and the well-dressed, elderly Italian couple.

  Suddenly I saw the police car nosing out onto the esplanade. It rolled to the foot of the wharf and stopped.

  I turned quickly away, ducking into a newsstand. Pretending to examine the baffling Greek papers, I watched the overweight, slovenly policeman huffily extract himself from his car.

  The ferry plowed its way toward the dock.

  The cop strolled over to the line of tourists waiting to depart. He stopped to exchange some friendly words with the elderly Italians, and appeared to answer a question from the blond German girl. He wasn’t checking passports or questioning anybody; it seemed he simply wanted to find out who was waiting in line.

  The ferry tied up and began disgorging tourists. A white-haired man I took to be the ferryboat’s skipper walked over and offered a cigarette to the cop. Soon they were both hidden behind the disembarking passengers, and I ventured out from the newsstand, hoping I might spot Phoebe.

  The arriving visitors looked as varied as those in line to leave, though most appeared to be Greek families and younger couples on holiday. I noticed one man traveling alone. He carried a shotgun cradled in his arm and a game bag slung over his shoulder. Trim and fit in his seventies or eighties, with a handsome, cleanshaven face and wavy gray hair under his seafaring cap, he strode swiftly down the dock, passing the slow-moving tourists. I turned to watch as he hiked up the road. Somehow he seemed familiar, but I was sure I could not have known him. He was obviously a hunter who came here often; he appeared to know exactly where he was heading in the hills.

  Many of the tourists were now passing me, rolling their bags down the esplanade. I anxiously searched the faces for Phoebe. The crowd on the dock was thinning, and the cop had reappeared. I saw him shake the hand of the skipper and head back toward his car.

  Afraid I might be noticed, I quickly turned away.

  “Jack!”

  I looked back. At first I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was tucked under a red beret, and her eyes were hidden behind rhinestone sunglasses. She had on redder lipstick than I’d seen her wear before, and a tightly wrapped silk scarf was tied around her neck. She wore calf-length khakis, a white cotton blouse, and a windbreaker. Her cheeks looked rosy from the sun and the wind, and when she took off her shades, her blue eyes dazzled.

  “Phoebe.”

  She kissed me, then had to rub the lipstick off my cheek. “You look worried, sweetie. Where’s Dan?”

  I started to tell her, then stopped. The cop was standing at his car, peering down the esplanade.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.
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  I threw her pack over my shoulder and took hold of her hand. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  WE TOOK a table near the back of a bar where I thought we wouldn’t be noticed. Phoebe ordered a frappé and something for us to eat. Then she folded her arms together and leaned back into her seat.

  “Well?”

  I told her everything. The whole story, starting with the phone call from Basri on my last night in Athens, all the way through to waking up on the yacht with his thumb in my hand, and Dan getting hauled off by the cop. I told her about the mysterious drink on the boat, and yes, I told her about the orgy. I probably told her more than she really wanted to know. It just came pouring out. I’d been puzzling over it for twenty-four hours; when I finally had someone to talk to, I couldn’t seem to stop.

  Finally I told her about Damiana, how I had followed her to the church and confronted her, and how she was unwilling to tell me what she knew.

  Phoebe asked if I’d been to see Dan.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m afraid to. My prints are all over that boat. That’s part of the reason I called you. To talk to him, find out what he knows.”

  Phoebe looked worried. “That girl…”

  “Damiana?”

  “You say you saw blood in her mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at me a second. “Let me see your wounds.”

  I glanced around at the other tables. Nobody seemed to be paying us any mind. I pulled up my sleeve and showed her a bite on my arm. It was sore to the touch, and I feared it might be infected. Lifting my shirt, I pointed out another on the side of my hip. I pulled up my leg, and showed her a bite on the inside of my thigh.

  “There’s more—on my backside. I—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “What about your joints—elbows, knees, fingers—you feel much pain there?”

  “Yes,” I said, astonished. “They’ve been aching ever since I woke up on the yacht.”

  “You don’t remember anything beyond what you’ve told me? Anything more that happened that night?”

  “No,” I said. “Just…”

  “What? What is it?”

  I shrugged. “My dreams. Last night. I think things were coming back to me.”

  “Like what?”

  A creepy, cold tingle went through me. “Things I’m not sure I want to remember.”

  Phoebe was watching me carefully. She knows something, I thought. Something about what happened. “How did you feel,” she asked, “when you finally took the plunge?”

  “How did I feel?” This was something I clearly remembered. “Fantastic,” I said. “Like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was overcome with this intense excitement. I felt totally… completely…”

  “Ecstatic?” Phoebe said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “The word comes from the ancient Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘to stand outside yourself.’ To lose yourself. It’s the ultimate goal of the orgia. “

  “I was so absorbed in it…I lost myself completely. It’s why I can’t remember.”

  “The Greeks would say you were absorbed—consumed by Dionysus. Consumed with your exuberance. ‘Enthusiasm’ comes from another Greek word: enthousiasmos, meaning ‘inside the god.’ You were completely possessed.”

  I had felt possessed, in a way. Enthusiastic, certainly. Faced with a roomful of willing females dressed in diaphanous nightgowns, what young heterosexual male wouldn’t be enthusiastic?

  “I know they got us excited,” I said. “And maybe I went a little crazy, but…I’m not sure I’m ready to believe in a god who’s been dead for two thousand years.”

  “Of course not,” Phoebe said. “But it might give us some insight into who these women are and what they believe.”

  “Who do you think they are?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But given their dress, the ritual, the orgy, I assume they’re a revival of a Dionysian cult.”

  “You’ve heard of this before?”

  “Not exactly. There are pagan groups in Athens, and in Europe and America, too. But they worship peacefully, and they’re generally not secretive. They’re denounced by the Greek Orthodox Church, but they openly proclaim their right to practice the ancient rituals. This group, this ‘Pan-Hellenic Chorus’? Obviously, they’re different.”

  “Maybe they’re not an organization,” I said. “Maybe they just came together to commit this murder.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s the only way to explain it. Look: everyone took three sips of that drink. Everyone but me—I took only two. That’s why I woke up earlier than Dan.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t think I was supposed to. I think I was supposed to be out of it on that boat—just like Dan was on shore. He was left there for the police to find—with Basri’s head in his arms. Once he was in custody, they knew the cops would come out to the yacht and find me. If I hadn’t woken up and left when I did, they would have found me. I’d have been caught at the scene of the murder and hauled into jail with Dan.”

  “So you think you were set up.”

  “The women murdered Basri. They wanted Dan and me to take the blame.”

  Phoebe didn’t seem to be entirely convinced.

  “How else do you make any sense of it?” I asked.

  “It may have just resulted from the ritual,” she said.

  “You mean the orgy?”

  “The orgy was only the beginning. The female worshippers of Dionysus were called Maenads, ‘the raving ones.’ They drove themselves into a kind of madness, a wild, contagious frenzy. Nothing was forbidden. In their ecstasy they would tear some animal apart with their bare hands and eat it raw. On some islands—Chios, Tenedos—there was a tradition of human sacrifice, the killing of a young man representing the god.”

  I pushed away the plate of lamb I’d been working on. Suddenly I wasn’t so hungry.

  Phoebe continued. “Euripides’ most famous tragedy was about Dionysus. It’s called The Bacchae. Dionysus was also known as Bacchus, and Bacchae, or Bacchantes, was another name for the Maenads. The play is about a king who disapproves of the cult and outlaws the worship of Dionysus. But he’s so curious to see the women in their frenzy that Dionysus, in disguise, lures him out into the mountains to spy on them from a treetop. When the roving Bacchae find him, they pull him down and tear him to pieces. The king’s own mother partakes in the frenzy, blind to the fact it’s her son they’re destroying.”

  “Tear him to pieces?”

  “It was called sparagmos, tearing the victim limb from limb, and omophagia, the eating of the raw flesh of the dismembered body.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t understand.”

  “For the Maenads, it was a way to worship the god in human form. The intent was to contact and commune with the divine. To be possessed, and in turn to possess the god. To be made literally full of the god.”

  “By tearing a man apart and eating him?”

  “To be like the god, you must eat the god. And you must eat him quick and raw, while the blood is still flowing. The blood is life. It’s the only way to add his life to yours.”

  “This is the twenty-first century,” I said. “Nobody could possibly believe that anymore.”

  “You were raised Catholic. Eucharist is another Greek word. The sacrament of communion is a symbolic remnant of human sacrifice. Celebrants eat the ‘body’ of Christ and drink his ‘blood’ as wine.”

  Transubstantiation—I remembered that strange idea, and I’d believed in it, too. But I couldn’t imagine believing in this. “There’s got to be another reason,” I said. “If it was simply a religious frenzy, they would have killed Dan and me, too.”

  “I think you did get caught in their frenzy. But their intended victim was Basri.”

  “Why him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There were a number of traditions in ancient Greece of s
electing victims for sacrifice. He could be a temple slave, or a captured warrior, or a condemned criminal. In some traditions, the king himself was chosen. For days or weeks, sometimes for an entire year, the anointed victim would be wined and dined and offered every pleasure, until on the final day he was sacrificed.”

  As incredible as it sounded, it seemed to fit with what had occurred. Basri had been seduced by the women in Istanbul. For days they indulged him, sexually and otherwise, then lured him to meet the rest of the group in Mykonos. Finally, at the peak of a frenetic orgy, they tore him apart and cut off his head. Dan and I may have been set up to take the blame, but there was little doubt that Basri was the chosen one.

  I marveled at Phoebe’s insight. “You really do know it all,” I said. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “My work in Crete. Some believe the Dionysian cults descended from the Minoan civilization that preceded the ancient Greeks. That double-headed ax you described? It’s called a labrys. The Minoans considered it a sacred instrument. The ancient palace at Knossos on Crete is called the Hall of the Double Ax. In the Goddess culture of the Minoans, priestesses used the labrys in sacrificial ceremonies. There’s some indications of human sacrifice among the Minoans as well.”

  We talked awhile longer, trying to figure it out. Phoebe believed the killing had been irrational and religious. I thought that it must have been a calculated murder although, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell her why. Either way we both agreed on the danger we were in. I had witnessed a murder and had managed to escape; Phoebe had arrived to help find the truth, a truth they might be willing to kill us to protect.

  She insisted I come with her to visit Dan and talk to the police. “You have to tell them everything you know,” she said. “Tell them exactly what happened.”

  I said I couldn’t, not yet. “I’m afraid I’ll be locked up like Dan. While I still have a chance, I need to find out why this happened, and prove that we weren’t alone on that boat.”

  Phoebe wanted to know what she should tell the policeman. How had she found out about Dan?