Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  I called to Vassilos. “Wait a minute.”

  He and Phoebe stopped and turned. I went to the entrance of the building and, struggling with my handcuffs, opened up the door.

  It was dark inside, but not completely dark. Moonlight leaked through the slender sapling trunks spanning overhead. Still, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw it wasn’t a lavatory at all, and I wondered where the hell I’d even gotten that idea. The long room was filled with aisle after aisle of narrow tables holding small potted plants. There were hundreds of them.

  Phoebe and Vassilos entered behind me.

  “It’s some kind of greenhouse,” I said.

  Phoebe came up next to me. We took a closer look at the plants. They were all the same: between one and two feet tall, with thick, spiky leaves and elaborate, bizarrely shaped flowers.

  “An orchid,” Phoebe said. “But I couldn’t begin to tell you what kind.”

  I leaned down and took a sniff; the flowers were sweetly pungent, and reminded me immediately of the women on the yacht, the wild, floral aroma that had scented their skin. A thrill went through me, a visceral memory of the excitement I had felt. The feeling sent me racing back to that night, to the overwhelming lust… and the bloodlust.

  “What is it, Jack?” Phoebe was tilting her head to catch my eyes.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Nearby, on an open tabletop with a brass watering pitcher and a rusted pair of iron scissors, lay a pile of orchids with their flowers clipped off and their roots exposed. Phoebe picked one out from the pile and examined a pair of small, round tubers attached to the roots.

  She held them up for me to see. “Remind you of anything?”

  “Yeah, something very precious to me.”

  “The name ‘orchid’ comes from the ancient Greek orkhis, meaning ‘testicle.’ Dan told me they’re named after a genus of orchids in ancient Greece that had twin roots resembling the human scrotum.”

  I looked at her skeptically. “Sounds like a desperate attempt to seduce you.”

  She grinned. “He never quits.”

  I asked her to put one of the cut plants into her rucksack to show to Dan. As she did so, Vassilos tried to stop her.

  “This is private property,” he said.

  I held up the root and showed him the gonads. “See this? It’s an aphrodisiac. What do you think the nuns would be doing with that?”

  Suddenly he looked interested. “Aphrodisiac?”

  I pointed to a pail full of the tubers on the floor. “A thousand nights of bliss,” I said.

  He backed off, and as we were leaving, I saw him slip a couple of the tubers into his hat.

  OUTSIDE, WE continued down the alley to the large cloistered courtyard with the giant pine tree in the middle and the church at the other end. “They were singing in there this afternoon,” I said.

  Now the square was silent and the church looked dark and empty.

  “This way,” I said, taking the lead from Vassilos. “I want to show you something.” We proceeded along the ruins of the colonnaded walkway to the chapel I had visited earlier.

  I led them inside. The interior was completely dark, and Vassilos didn’t have a flashlight, but fortunately he did carry a lighter. Ignoring my handcuffs, I pulled a beeswax candle from a stand near the entrance. Vassilos lit it and we proceeded toward the altar. The dead birds hanging overhead drew a gaping stare from Phoebe.

  I nudged her. “According to the Sheriff here, those are love charms. And this is a wedding chapel.”

  “How romantic,” she said.

  At the altar I lit a few more candles. Phoebe seemed intrigued with the massive block of stone and ran her hands over its surface. “It’s very unusual,” she said. “I’ve never seen a Byzantine altar quite like it.”

  “That’s nothing,” I said. “Get a load of this.” There were enough candles lit now to illuminate the icon panel. I unfastened the swivel clamps and gave a little demonstration: Holy Virgin on one side; Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus on the other.

  Phoebe moved in for a closer look. The pagan painting was badly corroded; whole sections of the image had been abraded or burned, or had simply faded away. As she studied it, Phoebe grew intensely curious. “This is amazing,” she said.

  Vassilos airily dismissed her excitement. “It is not as you think. This is St. Demetra, the patron saint of agriculture. The people here have prayed to her for centuries.”

  “It’s possible,” Phoebe mused, as her eyes roved over the painting. “Many of the old gods and goddesses were replaced by Christian saints. It was a common way of bringing pagans into the Church. Simply incorporate their deities. Like St. Brigid in Ireland—her traits were based on a Celtic goddess. But this… I don’t know how…” She was so intensely focused on the painting she couldn’t seem to finish her thought.

  To me, the image was more than obvious. “Demeter, Demetra. What about the other woman? Persephone. And the boy Dionysus?”

  Vassilos shrugged. “They are all saints,” he said dismissively.

  “I don’t see any haloes.”

  Vassilos turned and gave me a look; he was clearly losing patience. “I see no halo on you, my friend. Why do you show me these things?”

  “These are ancient pagan gods,” I said. “These nuns are not what you think.”

  Phoebe closely studied the painting, running her fingers over the wood. She seemed to be struggling with something.

  “What is it, Phoebe?”

  She slowly drew back and stood upright. “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s just that…This looks much older than the Byzantine era.”

  “You mean it’s from the ancient Greeks?”

  “The only paintings we have from the ancient Greeks are what they put on their pottery. They also made paintings on wood panels, but…we only know about them from their writings. None of the panels has survived. If this is an actual ancient Greek painting…it’s the only one of its kind. “

  She looked at me, stunned. “It would be absolutely priceless.”

  The two of us turned to stare at the painting. Then I turned to Vassilos. “What do you make of that, Sheriff?”

  He glanced at Phoebe, then glared at me. “This is not your Wild West, and I am not your ‘Sheriff.’ You say you can show me the head of your friend. Show me now. Where is it?”

  Some people just can’t appreciate art. “Right this way,” I said, and headed for the door.

  IN ANCIENT Greece, hubris was a punishable offense. They even invented a goddess to deliver retribution: Nemesis, daughter of Night and Darkness.

  I got lost trying to locate the calefactory. The buildings all looked different in the dark, and without the smoke from the chimney to guide me, I had trouble finding my way. Two wrong turns and a circling back to the starting point had Vassilos ready to strangle me; but eventually, more by accident than design, we found ourselves stepping into the overgrown courtyard where earlier that day I’d been attacked.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight, but again I felt we were being watched. I stood for a moment and listened. Except for the astounding vocal performance of a lone nightingale, the place was completely silent.

  We crossed toward the hexagonal warming house. In the moonlight it looked even more funereal. A cat cried out from the shadows. The black chimney loomed against the starry night sky. I turned to see Phoebe lagging behind us, carefully scanning the ground. I wondered if she might be watching for rats.

  Vassilos ambled along beside me. I pointed out to him the locations of my various terrors. “Here’s where I tripped when they chased me. See the broken flagstone? And look! Here’s the spot where one of them tried to kill me with the poker. You can see the chip in the stone.” Vassilos looked, but he seemed to be merely tolerating me, an effort that made him more exasperated with every point I made.

  “Jack—look at this.”

  Phoebe was crouched to the ground several yards behind us. As we walked over, she was pu
lling up some grass and weeds around a large, rectangular stone set amid the irregular pavement.

  “These blocks are fitted tightly together, unlike the flagstones. They form a line, you see? Right across the courtyard.” She walked along the row of rectangular blocks, moving forward toward the calefactory. “They appear to be limestone. I think they’re foundation blocks.”

  She found more and continued tracing the outline of the foundation. I joined in with her, searching the grass-covered puzzle of stone. Even Vassilos seemed to take an interest, casually scanning the ground.

  “It looks like the remains of an ancient temple,” Phoebe said at last. She pointed to the original line she had found. “These blocks must have supported the wall of the naos, the inner sanctum that held the statue of the god. Look at how incredibly tight they’re fitted. Ancient Greek architects were obsessed with perfectly fitting stones.”

  “What’s this out here?” I pointed to a massive, square-shaped stone a couple yards away from the foundation line.

  “It’s a base stone for a column,” Phoebe said. “The colonnade ran along the outside of the naos, right along here.” She pointed down the line toward the calefactory. Then she paused for a moment, staring at the hexagonal building. “That’s interesting,” she said. She turned to Vassilos. “Which way is east, do you know?”

  He glanced around and saw the dark mountain looming over the chapel behind him. He turned and pointed in the opposite direction, toward the calefactory. “There is east,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Phoebe said. She walked to the end of the foundation line, just in front of the calefactory. “Here’s where the front of the temple was. Most temples faced east, so the priest would be facing the direction of the rising sun when offerings were made to the gods.”

  Now Vassilos was losing patience. “And so what of this?” he steamed. “I am Greek—I hear this since I am a child!”

  “Then you know that religious rites were held outside the temple, not inside as in churches. The sacrifices were burned on an altar that stood out in front of the temple.”

  We all turned and faced the calefactory with its towering central smokestack.

  “The altar would have been right there,” she said.

  I was still trying to figure out just what this meant when a cat screeched behind us, and the three of us spun around to the sound of footsteps echoing across the courtyard.

  The dark figure of a man was disappearing into an alleyway.

  “Wait!” I shouted. I went running after him. It had to be the person who’d been watching us, I thought, the presence I’d felt since we’d arrived. With my hands still in cuffs, I couldn’t run fast, but I loped across to the alley into which he’d disappeared.

  Phoebe followed. Vassilos called after us, lumbering behind. I glanced back and saw he was unfastening his handgun.

  The alley ran alongside the ruins of the chapel and led out into a tiny, open courtyard. No one was there. I ran to another narrow lane, but that was empty, too. At the end of it, I looked either way. No sign or sound of the man.

  Phoebe appeared behind me.

  “Not here!” I said.

  She hurried to the other courtyard exit. I followed her, but it was only an archway; it ended at the edge of the cliff.

  The two of us stared down the sheer wall of rock to the moonlit valley below.

  The man had vanished.

  “Who do you think it was?” Phoebe asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I could take a guess.”

  The Sheriff’s voice echoed from the courtyard behind us. We turned to see him enter the archway with his gun.

  He looked out of breath. “You will not run from me again,” he commanded.

  “We weren’t running from you,” I said. “We were chasing that man. Do you have any idea who he was?”

  Vassilos eyed me suspiciously. “I should ask you this question.”

  I traded a glance with Phoebe, then looked back at him. “My brother and I were the only other men on that boat. Except for the man in the mask.”

  “Yes. The Dionysus. So you have told me.” He strapped his pistol back into his holster.

  “Do any men live at this monastery?” Phoebe asked. “No,” he said. “Only the Sisters.” “Then don’t you want to find that man?” I asked. “Our island is small. I will find him. But first I will find if you are telling me the truth.”

  VASSILOS OPENED the door to the calefactory and plunged into an inky darkness. Phoebe and I tentatively followed him inside. The air was dry and smelled of a stale, tangy smoke. We peered into the darkness until Vassilos flared up his lighter and ignited a handful of straw. He threw some kindling onto the hearth and jammed the burning straw underneath it. In seconds, a fire was blazing.

  He stepped back and glanced around. The pokers and tongs stood upright in a rusted iron rack. Beside them was a shovel, a broom, a mop, and a dustpan, all tidily arranged. A fresh stack of cut wood was neatly piled nearby. The big wooden table had been cleared off and scrubbed, and the water pail with its dangling ladle had been scooted underneath. On the other side of the hearth, sitting alone in the middle of the stone floor, was the giant cast-iron cooking pot, the one in which the fastidious nuns had boiled Basri’s bones.

  The three of us approached it. With a sinking feeling, I found myself eyeing—not the pot, which by now I knew had to be empty—but Vassilos’s belt loop, where the ring full of lock-up keys jangled temptingly. I wanted to snatch them, run off, and steal his car. But I couldn’t help noticing, clear over on the other side of his considerable waist, the policeman’s handgun strapped in its holster. Do I dare to go for the one, knowing he’d go for the other! Can I—wearing handcuffs—try to go for both? And if I do, and pull it off, could I really, actually, credibly point a pistol at a cop!

  This was going to be as close as I came to trying to escape. Vassilos was right—he was not a Sheriff, and this was not the Wild West. As the big man rounded to face me, and Phoebe turned away, I suddenly felt as empty as the inside of the pot.

  The nuns had pulled off a murder. Dan and I were screwed.

  IBEGGED and pleaded with Vassilos all the way back to the squad. “What about the man? Why not search the rest of the place? Where are all the nuns?”

  He was having none of it. The place was clearly empty. Apparently the Pan-Hellenic Chorus had left the island again.

  Phoebe followed glumly behind us, lost in a maze of thought. The only way out, she must have assumed, was to find ourselves a lawyer.

  When we reached the car, Vassilos opened the rear door and started to usher me in. I was still babbling, pleading my case, when suddenly he raised his hand to shush me.

  He’d heard something. “Listen,” he said.

  Until then, the mountain had been deathly silent. The only sound we’d heard on the monastery grounds was the liquid song of the nightingale. Now, out of the silence, we heard a distant sprinkling of voices, tiny bits and pieces of sound floating through the air. Joyful cries and screeches. Shrill cackles and caterwauls. Wild shrieks and screams. Mixed in with this far-off clamor was a tiny tumult of pipes and drums and tambourines, and high-pitched voices singing.

  “There!” Phoebe said, pointing up the mountain.

  I turned and searched the vast, ominous darkness of the dome. Far up, on a shadowy bluff, was a winding procession of fiery torches and figures dressed in white.

  “The Bacchae,” Phoebe said.

  18

  ACCORDING TO Vassilos, it was called Mount Nysa, and it reached a summit of nearly three thousand feet. The monastery stood roughly halfway to the top. Driving up from the town, the lower slopes had been gradual and green, but hiking up from the monastery the terrain was rocky and steep, with deep fissures and gorges, and sheer cliffs and promontories jutting into the sky. Scaling it in the dark now reminded me of Parnassus, and what Dan had called Kaki Skála, the “Evil Stairway.” There, of course, we had been descending into trouble
; here we were eagerly climbing toward it.

  Somehow, Vassilos had managed to find a footpath up the mountain. How he did this without a flashlight I couldn’t begin to imagine; he either had better night vision than me, or he had climbed the route before. Then again, he may have simply stumbled onto the path. According to Phoebe, who’d done a lot of hiking in Greece, these twisting lanes up mountainsides were common all over the country.

  “The trick,” she said, “is to be able to distinguish between animal paths and human paths. If the path is full of goat tracks, it’s likely to end up nowhere. But the man-made routes have been developed over millennia. Trial and error eventually settled the most favorable course from one place to another. They can usually be depended on to get you where you’re going.”

  Where we were going appeared to be the summit of the mountain. We caught occasional glimpses of the ghostly monachai, but mostly the only trace of them was their song descending with the breeze, or the racket of their instruments, or their high-pitched squeals of delight. We tracked them the only way we could, by following the trusty path. It wound through scattered, windswept bushes that clung to cracks in the rock, and rose up narrow cliff-side steps ascending like a stairway to heaven. The path had a feel of great age about it, as if indeed its well-worn stones had been trodden upon for centuries. Although the way was steep, the cleverly calculated switchbacks kept us climbing at a moderate grade.

  Phoebe took the lead. The overweight Vassilos lagged behind, and I struggled along in my handcuffs. Following my repeated complaints, he finally agreed to remove them.

  He unlocked them with a key from his jangling key ring. “If you try to run away,” he said in his soft, gravelly voice, “I think it very possible you will fall.” He glanced over the precipice and looked me in the eye.

  Phoebe called to us. She was waiting up ahead.

  I broke the stare with Vassilos and started up the path. He followed closely behind.