Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  Phoebe had found something. It looked like some sort of woodland scepter, or primitive magic wand. She held it out to Vassilos. “Do you recognize it, Captain?”

  Vassilos looked at it, but he did not take it from her, and simply nodded yes.

  To me, it looked like a walking stick with a pineapple mounted at the top. Phoebe handed it to me. “It’s a thyrsus,” she said. “The sacred wand of Dionysus.”

  The rigid stick had been neatly inserted into the base of a large, spiky pinecone, from which strands of ivy dangled.

  “They’re carried by the Maenads,” Phoebe said. “The pinecone, I would guess, is from that big fir tree in the courtyard of the monastery. The pine tree, like the ivy, is sacred to Dionysus.”

  I noticed the stick was strong, and segmented like bamboo. The pinecone, wreathed in ivy, was heavy and solidly attached. With its sharply tipped seed scales, it resembled a medieval mace. “It looks like a weapon,” I said.

  “In the Euripides play, Dionysus calls the thyrsus his ‘ivy-clad spear.’ It has a phallic connotation: the shaft that ends in the head; the pinecone seed of the tree. It’s a magical instrument of wildness and fertility.”

  She took it from me to marvel at again. “Until now,” she said, “the only ones I’ve ever seen were painted on ancient vases.”

  Vassilos scanned the heights above. “We must hurry,” he said. “I fear we are losing them.”

  In fact, their voices could no longer be heard.

  WE CONTINUED our trek at a quickened pace, with Phoebe and her magic wand leading the way, and the fat policeman windily trudging behind me. Soon the fortresslike monastery was as far below us as the Maenads had once been above us, and eventually we emerged onto a cliff top. The summit still remained out of view, but in the dark at the base of a bluff above us, we could see the snaking trail of torches and the ghostly chitons of the Maenads.

  We were closer to them than we’d ever been, but something was very different: The cavalcade was moving in an enigmatic silence.

  As the wheezing Vassilos paused to catch his breath, Phoebe and I waited in the darkness and watched the muted procession. I suddenly noticed who was leading it. “Look,” I said. “It’s the boy!”

  We couldn’t see for sure from the distance, but I felt certain it was the boy with the bike. He carried a torch, and he looked to be half-naked.

  “Iacchos,” Phoebe said. “It’s where the name ‘Bacchus’ comes from. The youthful Dionysus.”

  I didn’t care what they called him. “On top of everything else,” I said, “maybe we can nail them for child abuse.”

  Vassilos was bent over, hands on his knees, sucking wind. He didn’t have the energy to even stand up and look.

  The women carried their magic thyrses like walking sticks. A few of those toward the front of the line appeared to have something perched on their heads. I asked Phoebe what she thought it was.

  “Hard to tell from here,” she said, “but I think they must be baskets. You remember the Caryatids, from the porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis?”

  “Yes.” There had been six sculpted figures holding up the roof, women with baskets mounted on their heads. After the Parthenon temple, it was probably the most photographed structure in Greece.

  “The head baskets were used for carrying sacred objects,” Phoebe said.

  “Any idea what those objects might be?”

  “In the Mystery religions, they were always kept secret.”

  Secrets. Mysteries. I thought of Dan’s story of the virgins on the Acropolis, carrying mysterious objects down to the shrine of Aphrodite; and the “holy things” carried from Athens to Eleusis, not to be divulged under punishment of death. What was the point of all this secrecy and silence? It seemed to me the secret of the Mystery religions was to keep these damn secrets a mystery.

  “Why do you suppose…?”

  I didn’t finish my question. The boy with his torch had suddenly disappeared. The women who followed him were disappearing, too.

  “I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” I said.

  The nuns were becoming invisible. Vanishing into the night.

  “It’s almost like…” I turned to stare at Phoebe’s wand.

  “Magic?” she said. She looked to Vassilos. “What is going on up there?”

  The decrepit cop, no longer wheezing, glumly lumbered past us. “They reach a cave,” he grumbled.

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course.” She turned to watch them a moment. Then she turned to me. “Try to remember, Jack: They are only human.”

  THE PATH headed off in a different direction from where the Maenads had been on the bluff. Vassilos said it eventually led to another well-known cave, frequented by tourists. To reach the cave the women went into, we’d have to leave the path and do some climbing. Vassilos led the way.

  As it turned out, there was a meager path, of sorts. It was sporadic and meandering, but as Phoebe and I gradually got the hang of it, we passed our plodding police guide and ascended the slope fairly quickly.

  Unfortunately, not quickly enough. By the time we reached the place where the nuns had vanished, they were nowhere to be seen or heard. We scanned the wall of the cliff and saw no portal in the stone.

  “I’m sure it must have been here,” Phoebe said. “They were halfway across the base of this ridge.”

  As we waited for Vassilos to catch up, the two of us searched for the entrance to the cave. We probed into crevices, peeked behind bushes, climbed over boulders and rocks, but we couldn’t find the mouth that had swallowed the procession.

  “We’re either in the wrong place,” I said, “or those pinecones really are magic.”

  Vassilos finally showed up and slumped down on a boulder. He looked completely exhausted and was gasping for breath. I assumed that he suffered from asthma, or that tobacco had ruined his lungs.

  “Too much hard living?” I said.

  He shrugged wearily. “Smoke, drink, eat, make love—this is living. How can a Greek give up living?”

  Zorba in his golden years had turned into a wheezing wreck.

  “Keep indulging yourself,” Phoebe said, “and you’ll give it up soon enough.”

  “Where’s the cave?” I asked. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Even in the daylight, the cave is hard to find.”

  “So it is here?” I said.

  He nodded toward the cliff. “Behind.”

  I turned and looked at the steep slope of rock. “I don’t see any cave.”

  “I don’t either,” Phoebe said.

  Vassilos achingly rose from the boulder. Half of his shirttail hung out of his pants. “You are not looking right,” he said. He lumbered forward and climbed a short way up the slope. In the dark it looked like a blank wall of rock, but with a simple side step, Vassilos disappeared.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. We scrambled up after him.

  A billion years ago, a triangular section of rock had broken loose and separated from the granite wall behind it. This apparent act of a god had left an open crevice and the entry into a cave. Looking at it head-on, you couldn’t see the gap. It was a perfect optical illusion and made the entrance virtually invisible.

  “Captain?”

  Phoebe’s call was swallowed in the blackness of the hole. We cautiously stepped inside.

  The air was cool and damp and smelled of goat; it was so dark we couldn’t see a thing. I felt Phoebe touching my arm and took her hand in mine. In the quiet, I could hear her breathing.

  She called out again for Vassilos. “Captain?”

  His cigarette lighter clicked and a tiny flame erupted, illuminating his bearded profile. He searched the wall of the cave, casting a massive shadow behind him, until he found a niche that held a torch, a wrapped bundle of reeds. He picked it up and lit the end; it burst into a powerful blaze. Fueled by grease or animal fat that spat and sputtered as it burned, the torch released a sooty smoke and lit the entire chamber.

  The
cavern was surprisingly spacious. Its high ceiling was felted with spiderwebs and completely blackened with soot. No stalactites dangled down, and only one mound of rock rose up from the floor—a massive, round, flat-topped boulder. It appeared to have been chiseled into shape.

  Phoebe went immediately toward it. “It looks like an altar,” she said.

  “It’s the same kind of stone we saw in the chapel,” I said. “Only this is round.”

  “It is from the time before the Greeks,” Vassilos said. “These people live on the island many thousand years ago. They worship a goddess.”

  Phoebe was examining a relief carving in the stone, a worn and amorphous female figure.

  “Could it be Demeter?” I asked.

  “Possibly,” she said. “Why?”

  “She was the mother of Persephone. Who in turn was the mother of Dionysus.” Now I suddenly felt like the know-it-all.

  Phoebe seemed uncertain. “It might be a precursor of Demeter. It resembles figures from the older Goddess cultures of Crete and Asia Minor.”

  I turned to Vassilos, holding his torch. “How do you know about this place?”

  He took off his cap and rubbed the sweat from his forehead. “I live on this island all my life,” he said. “There is little I don’t know about it.”

  “Apparently you don’t spend much time up here, or you’d know these nuns are lunatics.”

  He smiled eerily. His hand slipped into his hat, and he pulled out the orchid bulbs he’d picked up at the monastery. “Maybe you are needing these,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You see the Sisters coming here. You think they are making the orgy.”

  Now I thought Vassilos was losing it. He seemed to be slightly delirious from all the climbing we had done. Maybe the altitude had got to him. Or the noxious air in the cave. I wondered if he had some kind of condition. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  The smile fell from his face. “I will find what is happening here.” He headed off toward the back of the cavern.

  Phoebe and I watched him carry his torch into a tunnel-like passage.

  “He’s crazy,” I said.

  Phoebe agreed. “There is something odd about him.”

  We stood watching the light recede, glanced at each other, then followed him.

  WE HADN’T gone far before we began to hear the Maenads. Their music emerged from deep in the cave and grew louder the farther we went. First came the rhythmic booming of a drum, then the noise of flutes and pipes, and finally, weaving through it all, the cry of the women’s chant.

  Vassilos walked just ahead of us. We squinted into the smoke from his torch while trying to see out in front of him. The passage narrowed in places, but frequently opened into spacious caverns that reached beyond his light. Rock formations grew more bizarre the deeper we penetrated. Riblike ripples, stalactite spikes, stones that looked like teeth. The wrinkled walls grew damp and close, like mud-wet elephant hide. The rock ceiling pressed down upon us, then rose up like a cathedral. Massive, shadowy boulders dwarfed us. Our feet sank into sand.

  My eyes kept returning to the burning torch. The flame was growing weaker and would eventually leave us in darkness.

  “We go in much farther, we won’t get out. That torch of yours won’t last.”

  Vassilos ignored me. He seemed determined to find the nuns. More curious even than Phoebe and me.

  The women’s voices echoed past. Shouts, screams, laughter. Behind it all the constant rhythm, the beat of their reverberating chant.

  We emerged into a broad, sloping space with a high, slanted ceiling. The women sounded louder and closer. Holding aloft his sputtering torch, Vassilos led us out into the chamber, and the walls came alive with our shadows.

  He brought us to a halt, leveling his arm to stop us.

  Torchlight flickered in passageways. Shouts and shrieks erupted.

  “They’re coming!” Phoebe whispered. Vassilos jammed his torch in the sand, plunging us into darkness.

  Out from the passageways, wild Maenads emerged, torches blazing. They raced through the cavern, shrieking madly, hair flowing behind them. In the blur of flames and flowing chitons, they looked like phantoms streaming through the corridors of hell.

  I reached for Phoebe and touched a wall of rock. She was gone. The Bacchae were pouring in from all directions. Vassilos had already hidden himself—I couldn’t see him anywhere. I spotted Phoebe running with a Maenad on her trail. I ran after her and came face-to-face with a grimacing witch, her eyes burning with firelight. She screamed and leapt on top of me, burying her teeth in my neck. I tumbled with her to the ground and fell on her burning torch. Grabbing a fistful of hair, I hauled her head back and threw her off, then scrambled back up on my feet. The tail of my shirt was burning.

  Other Maenads spotted me and filled the air with shrieks. I rolled to the ground to put out the fire. Then I grabbed the still-burning torch and fled into the nearest passageway. Gleeful shouts echoed behind me as I raced down a curving corridor. The passage finally opened into another cavern, and up ahead I saw the glow of torchlight and flickering shadows—the source of the chanting, the flutes, and the drum.

  I jammed my fire into the sand and hid myself in a crevice.

  Within seconds my pursuers ran past, giddy and panting, their gowns flowing as if in a dream, their flames sputtering noisily. A moment later another swarm blew by, a blur of fluttering fire and chitons.

  Then they were gone, and all I could hear was the chant. I cautiously emerged from my hiding place.

  Back the way I had come was darkness. Ahead I saw the glow of torches and heard the roar of the women’s chant. I wondered which passageway Phoebe had taken, and whether or not she’d been caught. My torch was dead; I had no match to light it. Without it, I couldn’t go back in the dark. The only way was forward, deeper into the cave.

  AS I crept along, I kept thinking of Phoebe. I feared she’d been attacked by the woman chasing her. She could easily have gotten lost in the dark; the cave seemed to have innumerable passages. And I wondered where Vassilos had fled to. He might have been afraid to use his gun, to aim it at the Sisters. Maybe he was hiding in the dark like me. Perhaps, I thought, he had grown too curious, too interested to witness their mysterious rites. Like the king in Euripides’ play, he’d succumbed to his own fascination.

  The witch had taken a bite of my neck. I wiped away the blood running down into my shirt. My back had been burned and was screaming with pain, and my knee had been bashed and was bleeding. I moved ahead cautiously toward the light and the noise, glancing nervously behind me. Hugging close to the wall, I approached the entrance and peered inside.

  It opened to an enormous space, a seemingly limitless cavern. A fire burned at its center. Around it the Bacchantes were dancing. Many held snakes in their hands. Some held torches or thryses and chanted; others blew reed flutes and pipes. One strong woman pounded a large round drum. The cacophony in the cavern was deafening.

  I slipped inside and crept along the wall until I reached an outcrop of rock. Fiery shadows danced around me. A haze of smoke filled the air. I crouched low behind the rock and peered through the whirl of Maenads.

  In front of the fire was a massive stone altar, even larger than the one at the entrance. Behind it loomed a tall stone figure, the statue of an ancient goddess. She stood stiff-backed, draped in robes to her feet. The lower half of an arm was missing. Her triangular face and tightly twisted strands of hair were simple and stylized, almost primitive in appearance. The stone had decayed and the carving had weathered, smoothing out her facial features and blurring the vertical folds in her robe. This was not the luminous marble of a supple Aphrodite, but rough stone carved into a formalized pose, rigid and austere. There was something intimidating about it.

  If the statue was the long-lost Panaghia, the ikon of the Virgin Mary, it was a very strange Mary indeed. And what she was presiding over was even more bizarre.

  Several women behind the altar were
unpacking woven baskets—the ones they had carried up so gracefully on their heads. These women, these living caryatids, were pulling out the treasured and mysterious “sacred objects” and piling them up neatly on the altar.

  These “holy things,” it turned out, were no surprise to me. Their selection seemed perfectly appropriate. They were simple, symbolic, and frightening. They were human, yet somehow something more than merely human. They were ordinary, yet exposed a glaring truth that made them extraordinary. They seemed to hold the secret of the mystery of life, a secret that can only be revealed in death.

  They were bones—human bones.

  Femurs. Scapulas. Tibias. Ribs.

  I looked at them in wonder—and in fear. To use the religious term, I looked at them in awe. They might as well have been what the Bacchae believed: the physical remains of a god.

  It was, of course, the skull that most captured my attention. The women placed it ceremoniously at the center of the altar. I was immediately convinced it was Basri’s, that in fact all the bones on the altar were his.

  They were merely the latest in a long line of offerings. Thousands more bones just like them were piled against the base of the altar. They looked as if they’d been piling up for centuries. Skulls, hip bones, clavicles, vertebrae—every human bone you could imagine.

  Through the dancing whirl of the Maenads, I saw a pair of hands grasp the skull on the altar and raise it into the air like a Eucharist.

  It was Dionysus. The epicene god. In his grinning mask and long purple robe, he towered over the whirlwind of revelers. Firelight reflected on the bronze of his mask, and the upraised skull seemed to glow above his head. With his round, gaping eyes and contorted black mouth, he looked like a gleeful deity of death.

  He placed the consecrated skull back down on the altar. Then he began gently laying bones into the fire. A femur, a scapula, a tiny bone from the foot or hand. One of each type was put into the blaze, while another was added to the pile on the floor. He dropped the jawbone into the flames, but left the skull on the altar. One was offered to the fiery god, the other would be kept for posterity.