Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  “Phoebe…” I hugged her tightly to make her still, and whispered into her ear. “Phoebe, wait.”

  She resisted and pulled me toward her and tried to kiss me again.

  “Wait,” I said. “We can’t. Not now…”

  I held her still until she stopped. Gradually, her frantic breathing slowed. The mania melted from her eyes. Her lids fell shut and she let out a cry, a sound like a mournful plea. All the fire and steam went out. She seemed to physically crumple, like the grapes she’d released from her grip. Slowly she turned her face away and rested her head on the ground.

  For a long moment she was silent. She turned her body away. I heard her sniffle, and tears were flowing. When she finally spoke, it was in a whisper I could barely hear, as if she were talking to herself.

  “I killed her,” she murmured. “I killed that woman.”

  Her body seemed to curl in on itself, as if she were trying to shut out the world.

  I wrapped myself around her. “You did what you had to do,” I whispered. “You didn’t have any choice.”

  She lay in my arms without speaking.

  “Your clothes are in your pack,” I said. “Let’s get dressed and go down and get Dan.”

  She nodded sadly and wiped away her tears.

  We pulled on our clothes in the dark. Neither of us spoke about what had just occurred. I wrapped Phoebe’s foot with the bandage, then I wrapped the bandage with a strip from her chiton, tying it off at her ankle. We used Band-Aids to stop the bleeding from her ear and to close the other cuts on her body. The kykeon episode appeared to have passed, but still she seemed a little twitchy and distracted, as if she were hearing voices in her head. It reminded me uneasily of Delphi.

  We took a final drink of water before we headed off. There was no sign of the Bacchae anywhere around us, and we didn’t hear their screams or shouts. But ten minutes after we had left the vineyard, as we made our way down a grassy slope, we heard the resounding blast of a gun.

  22

  THE SOUND had come from farther down the mountain. It echoed out into the still night air. A second shot quickly followed the first, which gave us a bead on the direction—beyond a ridgeline of trees to our right. We hurried to the ridge and just beyond found a view over a shallow valley, but nothing could be seen in the darkness.

  “You think it was him?” Phoebe asked.

  “If it was, he may need our help.”

  We headed down into the valley.

  Half an hour later, we found ourselves peering over the edge of another bluff, staring down at yet another upland pasture. This time, out on a golden, moonlit field, beside a dark tower and a black grove of trees, was a large, shimmering horde of Maenads. They seemed to be running about and playing in the field.

  I found the scene incredible. “There must be at least a hundred down there! Where the hell are they coming from?”

  “The women on the mountain,” Phoebe said. “They’re all joining in with the Bacchae.”

  “It looks like they’re playing some kind of game,” I said.

  They flew beneath the trees like a shifting flock of birds. It appeared they were throwing things and chasing one another for them. This went on for several minutes, with peals of laughter and howls of delight. Then, abruptly, with wild screams of joy, they all ran off, swarming down the grassy slope and vanishing into the woods.

  “I hope they’re not heading for town,” I said.

  In seconds they had disappeared entirely.

  We descended from the bluff, and several minutes later we were crossing the field. Ancient, gnarled olive trees reached up toward the moon. The dark stone tower loomed before us. In the middle of the golden expanse, at the place where the women had been swarming, Phoebe stumbled on something.

  “It’s an amphora,” she said. She lifted the handled vase and examined it. It was smaller than the one that held the kykeon in the cave, but the shape was exactly the same. Phoebe heard liquid sloshing inside and lowered her nose to the opening.

  “Is it—?”

  “Yes,” she said, handing it to me. “I’m fairly certain it is.”

  I recognized the mint smell of the elixir.

  We glanced around. The place had a creepy stillness. Several more amphorae lay scattered on the ground.

  “They must have been refueling,” Phoebe said. “Its effect has already begun to wear off of me. They want to sustain their mania.”

  “And I bet it was given to the Maenads that joined them—the women who live on the mountain. They’ll all be mad for us now.”

  A weight of foreboding fell over us. The thick black trunks of the surrounding trees were pockmarked with holes like mouths.

  Carrying the amphora, we started toward the tower. I had thought the tall structure was the remnant of a church, but Phoebe informed me it was a dovecot, a dwelling for carrier pigeons.

  The tower was cylindrical and roofless, and the black-gray stone of its rounded wall was mossy and crumbling with decay. The entry door had long ago vanished, leaving nothing but a black, rectangular hole.

  As I approached it, Phoebe held back. I noticed something glistening on the wall by the door.

  “Jack…Please don’t go in there.”

  I reached out and touched the glistening spot. The blood on the stone was still wet.

  I turned to Phoebe. She was backing into the shadow of a large olive tree. “Let’s please just leave this place,” she said.

  My curiosity could not be controlled. “Wait there,” I said. I turned from her and cautiously entered the tower.

  The sound of fluttering wings startled me. My eyes rose up in the blackness. Birds fled out the open top of the tower into the moonlit sky. They left the inky space below in a still, uncanny silence.

  The dank air held an odor I recognized at once: acrid, coppery, copious blood.

  Straining into the darkness, I noticed a pale, glowing light, high up in the wall to the side. I stepped toward it and immediately stumbled into something on the floor. As my eyes adjusted, I saw it was the body of a Maenad. Her ivory chiton was barely visible in the dark, but she lay so utterly still and silent I knew at once she was dead.

  Waves of emotion rippled through me: fear, anger, disgust, and with a sad twinge of guilt, a feeling of relief.

  I stepped over the body toward the glow in the wall. It turned out to be a small flashlight lying inside a square niche, just at a height where I could reach it. The batteries were low, and the beam was aimed at the side of the niche, blocking its feeble light. I took it in hand, and as I did the light flared wide, and I noticed another niche right beside it, stuffed with a canvas bag. Then I noticed that the entire wall—that the whole inside of the structure, in fact—was honeycombed with these niches, square indentations built into the stone that went all the way up the length of the tower. It looked like the inside of a gigantic beehive.

  I aimed the flashlight at the dead Maenad. She lay on her back against the wall, just inside the entry. Her torso and her head were twisted to the side. At her chest the chiton was soaked in blood, released from the gaping wound just above her heart. With her face turned away, I couldn’t see who she was, but I didn’t want to move her to take a closer look. Knowing that the woman was dead was enough.

  A rat passed through my light beam, skirting the edge of the floor. I followed it with my light for several feet, and suddenly I was staring at a man’s severed arm.

  It had been violently ripped out from the shoulder. Bloody muscle and ligaments hung ragged from the bone. The hairy forearm had been chewed on, and several fingers were missing from the pallid, wrinkled hand. The floor around it was covered with blood.

  I felt suddenly lightheaded. Steadying myself at the wall, I slowly moved to the door for some air.

  Phoebe was standing under the tree, hugging her arms, waiting. “Are you all right?”

  It took me a second to gather my voice. “Yeah,” I said. “One more minute.”

  I noticed that where
my hand was resting, the stone had been recently blasted away. There were chunks of shattered rock on the floor.

  I turned back inside and scanned the room with the light. The rest of the man’s body was scattered over the floor, along with the bloodstained shreds of his clothes. A leg from the knee had been severed clean off with the blade of a knife or an ax. Portions of the calf muscle had been gnawed on. I spotted discarded fingers and a long fleshy ear. The pinecone of a broken thyrsus lay beside the rags of an empty chiton.

  Near the center of the room, surrounded by the stubs of several burned-out torches, I came across the man’s lank torso. It still had a leg and an arm attached, though much of the flesh was ripped open and bloody.

  I aimed the light at his chest, and felt a sudden surge of vomit rising in my throat.

  The man’s ribs had been torn out. A hideous cavity of blood and guts remained.

  I staggered back to the wall, and that’s when I finally stumbled onto the man’s severed head. It lay on its side at the edge of the floor, where it had rolled and settled in a pool of black blood. It, too, appeared to have been hacked off with several blows of an ax. The eyes and nose were missing, and blood ran over the leathery face, but when I saw the man’s thick gray hair and the broken shotgun lying nearby, I knew at once who it was.

  The hunter’s gun had been smashed against the wall; the barrel was bent and the stock was shattered. Cartridges lay strewn across the floor. Among them sat the man’s bloody seafaring cap.

  The Maenads must have been chasing him. Perhaps he’d tried to hide or to rest in the tower. He’d shot the first one that came through the door, but by the time he took aim at the second, they’d gotten a grip on his gun, and the blast went into the wall. Then they’d piled on him like a swarm of killer bees.

  Phoebe called to me. I started for the door. Then I remembered the canvas bag in the niche. I reached up and grabbed it. It was the hunter’s game bag.

  When I turned, I stumbled on another corpse, one I had not seen earlier. A young woman sheathed in a bloody chiton. Gurpinar’s dagger had been thrust into her chest. Her eyes were frozen in horror. With sudden shock I recognized the face of the farmer’s wife.

  OUTSIDE, PHOEBE was crouched down under the tree, poking at something in the grass. “Look at this, Jack.” I walked over and aimed the feeble flashlight at the ground. It illuminated a gently curving, bloody white bone. There were strands of ligaments attached.

  Phoebe looked incredulous. “It dropped out of the tree,” she said.

  I aimed the light up into the tree and after a moment’s searching

  spotted two similar bones dangling from the branches. “It’s what they were tossing around out here.” I looked at Phoebe. “They’re his ribs.”

  “Gurpinar?” Phoebe looked stricken. “He saved our lives.”

  “More than once,” I said.

  I handed her the flashlight and started searching through his bag. She aimed the beam into it as I dug inside the various compartments. I found shot cartridges, several tins of sardines, a small digital camera, a near-empty bottle of Loutraki water, and wrapped in the rags of a white chiton…

  A human skull. Cleaned of flesh and boiled white.

  I gaped at it. “I bet he took it from the altar in the cave,” I said. “He must have gone in after they left.”

  Phoebe stared. “Do you think…?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I lifted it before my eyes, trying to imagine Basri’s face. “The bone does look pretty fresh.”

  A small sack tied with a string had been wrapped along with it. I set down the skull and opened it. The sack was filled with a black-gray powder. I handed it to Phoebe.

  She gathered some in her fingers. “Ashes,” she said. “From the sacrificial fire.”

  “I saw them filling the baskets with it. What do you suppose they wanted it for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Phoebe said. She dug her fingers in and found charred remnants of bones and cinders of wood. “They’re the remains of an offering to a god. They’re probably considered sacred. You and Dan were raised as Roman Catholics—you know about Ash Wednesday?”

  “First day of Lent,” I said. “The priest wipes ashes on your forehead.”

  “Those ashes are from the burned palm fronds that were used on Palm Sunday the previous year.”

  I recalled the words the priest would speak as he applied the ashes in the shape of a cross: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It was intended to remind you of your ultimate fate and encourage you to repent for your sins.

  “I wonder what Gurpinar wanted with them,” Phoebe said.

  “Evidence to show the police,” I said. “Like that skull. I bet he took pictures with his camera, too.”

  In a zippered inside pocket I found the man’s billfold and passport. The passport showed his picture and appeared to be from Cypress. The billfold held a newspaper clipping.

  I unfolded it. The paper was yellowed and falling apart. The article displayed a black-and-white snapshot of Gurpinar standing with a much younger man. Both of them held shotguns and appeared to be on a hunting trip. The article was written in Greek. “What’s this about?” I asked, handing it to Phoebe.

  The print was faded and the flashlight was dim, so she had some trouble deciphering it. “This article is a year old,” she said. “Apparently the young guy disappeared on a bird-hunting trip in the Aegean. He was traveling with his grandfather, Mantolu Gurpinar. The old man has been looking for the boy ever since.”

  “Does it say where he last saw him?”

  Phoebe searched the article. “Mykonos,” she said. She slowly translated: “Gurpinar reported that the boy went out to a nightclub for the evening and”—she raised her eyes to me—“he never came back.”

  “What day, what month was it?”

  Phoebe scanned the page until she found it. “Oh my God.” She looked at me again. “September eighteenth.”

  “A year ago yesterday. Same day of the year that Basri was taken.”

  “And the same time of year the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated.”

  “This man’s grandson was another one of their sacrificial victims,” I said. “The old man must have somehow traced him to Ogygia. But how did he know about the nuns? How did he know it would happen again?”

  “No idea,” Phoebe said. “But he must have come back to find out what goes on.”

  I looked up at the bones dangling from the tree. “Well, he found out, all right.”

  Phoebe pointed the beam of the light at my belt. “What’s that?” “Gurpinar’s dagger,” I said. I’d stuck the long blade under my belt like a sword.

  Phoebe grimaced. “I hope you’re not going to need it.” We put the camera into her backpack, along with Gurpinar’s passport, his wallet, the skull, and the sack of ashes. We drank the water in the bottle, then filled it with the remaining kykeon from the amphora—a little evidence of our own, and a sample for Dan to analyze. While doing this, we debated whether the old man had figured out that Vassilos was in on the murder, and whether he’d planned on taking his case to the authorities in Athens. We had to start thinking about all that, too—how would we get anyone to believe us?—but first we had to get off the island.

  “Let’s hurry,” I told Phoebe as I threw on the backpack. “We’ve got to beat Vassilos to the jail.”

  WE DESCENDED onto another plain of fallow fields. Eventually, we found ourselves hiking down a narrow lane flanked by loosely piled stone walls. This lane led to a dirt road that meandered down the mountain for a mile or so before reaching the highway, the main road that wound down the mountain to the village.

  It was the middle of the night, and the black ribbon of road was silent and empty. We had not seen or heard the Bacchantes since they’d disappeared into the woods, which led us to hope they were staying on the mountain and not heading into the town. But we feared they were still on the prowl for us. As we hiked down the open highway, we kept our eyes peel
ed for their ghostly chitons and listened for their exuberant voices. At one point Phoebe thought she heard their cries, but it turned out to be a flock of geese flying past the moon overhead.

  We passed several farmhouses scattered over the slopes. I wondered how many had disgorged their resident Maenads to join in the nocturnal hunt. The houses were dark and shuttered, and we did not attempt to approach them, but hugged to the shadows of the trees by the road. It was under one of these moonlit trees that Phoebe came to a sudden halt, staring down the slope of the mountain.

  “Oh no!”

  I searched the darkness below and quickly spotted the teeming horde. Like a flowing mist or a stream of white water, they cascaded down through a shallow ravine and out over the variegated fields. Even at a distance, their excitement was palpable. Their gleeful voices rang through the stillness of the air, and their flowing gowns, in countless numbers, shimmered like the scales of a snake.

  “They are heading for town,” I said. “They know that’s where we’re going.”

  “They’ll beat us to the jail,” Phoebe said anxiously.

  She’d been walking more slowly, and now I noticed why: the strip of cloth I’d wrapped around her foot had worn into shreds. I could see blood seeping through the remains of the bandage.

  “I’ve got another strip of cloth in the pack,” I said. “We better wrap that foot, or you’re never going to make it.”

  “There isn’t time,” Phoebe said.

  I pulled off the pack. “There won’t be time if you can’t walk.” In the bag I found the second strip I’d torn from her chiton. I crouched down and started wrapping her foot.

  Phoebe steadied herself against the trunk of the tree. “They’ll kill Dan,” she said. “They’ll tear him apart.”

  “Then we’ve got to catch up to them, somehow.”