Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  I suddenly knew where we were.

  “I’ve been here before,” I told Phoebe. “This alley leads to the square.” It was Damiana’s shortcut, the one I’d followed her on the day before.

  From above us on the hill came a frightening chorus of voices. We turned to see a white-winged flock of Furies madly swooping down the street.

  We raced into the alley, Phoebe limping ahead of me. The high walls of the narrow lane left us in a murky darkness. We passed under the flying buttresses arching overhead. Soon the Furies’ raving voices were echoing through the canyon. The twisting lane narrowed tightly, then turned inky black. We were moving beneath the arched top that covered it like a tunnel. As we emerged, the lane jogged, then turned sharply again. Phoebe’s bare foot splashed through a puddle. Finally, we rounded the last bend and came out onto the street.

  Across the way was the square with the bubbling fountain. At the end of it stood the great Byzantine church. As Phoebe and I rushed toward it, gazing up at the golden dome and the soaring belfry tower, I understood why Damiana would have chosen it as a refuge. With its rugged stone infirmary building, and its lack of ground-level windows, the church had the look of a medieval fortress. The only way in was through the heavy front doors or the side exits; no doubt they could be bolted. Locked inside, we might have a chance to hold the Furies at bay.

  Seconds before we reached the entrance, the horde emerged from the alley. There were still at least twenty or thirty in the pack. Their voices shattered the silence, railing insanely as they streamed across the square. Phoebe and I pounded the locked double doors, calling for Dan and Damiana. No one came. Could it be they’ve taken refuge somewhere else—Damiana’s house, perhaps! I turned in terror as the Furies advanced, racing madly toward us. How can we possibly fight them offH My limbs were turning to stone.

  The door suddenly opened. Phoebe and I leapt inside. Damiana slammed it shut and dropped the massive bolt in place. Within seconds, Furies crashed against the doors. We stepped back as they tried to force them open.

  The doors bulged as they rammed up against them, their shouts a muffled roar. We watched the lock and waited without a word; there was nothing we could do but pray.

  Finally, the Furies ceased their banging. We heard them shout and laugh as they ran off around the church.

  “How many other doors?” I asked.

  “Three to the church,” Damiana said. “Two to the infirmary. They’re strong. I’ve locked them all.”

  “Where’s Dan?” Phoebe asked. I hadn’t even noticed he was gone.

  Damiana glanced anxiously between us. “I tried to stop him,” she explained. “He wouldn’t listen. He insisted on going out to find you.”

  “Dan is out there?” Phoebe asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Damiana said. “He thought you would need his help.”

  Phoebe turned to me. She looked as if she were about to faint. When I stepped forward to hold her, I noticed blood running from her foot to the floor. It was draining down the side of her leg from the slash in her upper thigh.

  “We need bandages,” I told Damiana. “We have to stop her bleeding.”

  “There are some in the infirmary,” she said. “The operating room has been kept as it was during the wars.”

  I walked Phoebe into the nave and sat her down on a pew. “I’ll go look for the bandages,” I said. “You stay here with Phoebe.”

  But Damiana was heading toward the other end of the church. “Just give me a moment,” she said. “I told your brother if you showed up, I’d ring the bell in the tower. I must let him know you’re back.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But hurry.”

  Damiana scurried off. I knelt down beside Phoebe. She seemed increasingly drowsy and numb. I feared she’d fall unconscious. “Stay with me, Phoebe. Okay?”

  She nodded vaguely.

  I placed her hand over the gash in her thigh. “Try to stem the bleeding,” I said. When I looked at her foot, I cringed. The pain should have been unbearable. Mercifully, she was still under the residual analgesic effect of the kykeon.

  We listened to the cries of the Furies outside. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  I peered up at the high, narrow windows in the dome. “Sooner or later,” I said, “they’re going to find a way in.”

  A sudden banging startled us. I rose to my feet, searching the shadows. The pounding resounded through the vastness of the nave.

  “They’re trying to force open a door,” I said.

  We listened for an endless minute. Finally, the pounding stopped.

  In the silence that followed, the bell began to ring. One, two, three soft tolls.

  We listened, hoping that Dan would hear. Praying he’d make it back.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” I said finally. “We can’t just sit here waiting.”

  Phoebe lifted her drowsy eyes. “We’re like them,” she said. “When the Ottomans came for the slaughter, the townspeople hid in this church.”

  I found the parallel disturbing. “Lot of good it did them,” I said. “It’s their bones collecting dust in the tower.”

  Phoebe didn’t hear me. She seemed caught in a descending spiral of thought. “Now it’s the Ogygians doing the slaughtering,” she said. “One atrocity leads to another. People carry grudges for centuries.”

  “It’s absurd,” I said. “Absurd that we got caught up in their bloody mad history.”

  Phoebe stared off vaguely. “Eleutheria,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “People are afraid,” she said cryptically. “People are afraid of freedom.”

  I wasn’t sure who she meant. Ottoman Turks battling a rebellion? Pagan nuns locked up in a monastery? Ogygians chained to their tragic past?

  Maybe she was thinking of all of them. She might have been thinking of me. After the experience I’d had on the yacht, I was ready to check into a monastery!

  The harsh and splintering voices of the Furies seeped through the entrance doors. It sounded like the whole vast horde of the Bacchae was gathering together in the square.

  “We’ve got to figure out how get out of here,” I said. “They’ll kill us if we don’t get off this island.”

  ICOULDN’T wait for Damiana to get back. I ran to go find Phoebe some bandages. We wouldn’t be going anywhere if we didn’t fix her first; she was losing too much blood.

  I crossed the nave to the far apse and looked for the door to the infirmary. Only a few lamps were lit in the church; the walls fell off into shadow. In the darkness, I found the doorway Damiana had taken us through on the tour. A short corridor led directly into the main hall of the old infirmary building.

  I found a switch on the wall and turned on the lights. The long, vaulted chamber was devoid of windows and built entirely of stone. Elaborate crisscrossing stone arches supported the broad expanse of the ceiling, and light from electrified chandeliers gleamed on the polished marble floor. The cots, which had once lined the length of the room, had long ago been removed, leaving a stretch of open space that looked like a mausoleum.

  At the far end was a wooden double door, the entrance in from the square.

  The operating room I’d seen on the tour was located down in the cellars. It had been adapted from a large, vaulted storage room at the start of the Greek revolution. I went down the zigzagging stone stairwell that led to a closed set of doors. These opened into a dark and dank subterranean corridor. The feeble illumination from the open doors allowed me to see only a few feet down the hall. I searched but couldn’t find the light switch.

  Moving off into the dark, I felt my way along the rough-hewn wall in the direction of the operating room. If I could find the door, I was sure I could find that room’s light switch. I remembered how strange it was to see an O.R. lit with chandeliers, just like the ones in the infirmary.

  The corridor was utterly silent. Even the clamor of the Furies had faded. I could hear the sound of my own breathing and the rapid
pounding of my heart. Something was making me uneasy. Maybe nothing more than the silent dark, and the fact that the Furies were close. The doors were locked. Damiana had seemed fairly certain they would hold. The horde would probably need a battering ram to break the main doors open.

  She had said the infirmary had two entry doors; I hadn’t yet seen the second. I wondered now if it came in through the cellar. I wondered if it really was secure.

  For a brief moment I considered turning back, but suddenly I came across a doorway. I felt my way inside the inky darkness of the room, searching the wall with my hand. After stumbling into a piece of furniture, I turned back to the other wall and finally found the light switch. It lit up a bare bulb that dangled from a wire to the ceiling.

  This was a crowded storage room. It was stacked floor to ceiling with the metal frame cots collected from the infirmary. Bedpans, buckets, and an assortment of old medical gear were piled up over in a corner. I took a cursory look through the room and saw no gauze or bandage packs anywhere.

  I left the light on and ventured back into the hall. The operating room was directly next door, and I found the light switch easily. This was the room we’d been shown on the tour. A large, high-ceilinged chamber with four electrified chandeliers, it featured two metal operating tables, a row of sinks against the wall, and a collection of antique medical equipment, arranged exactly as it once had been during the heat of the Second World War.

  I went to the storage closets at the back of the room and began searching their shelves and boxes. I found a large glass bottle of alcohol disinfectant, a leather case of old surgical tools, a medicine chest filled with pharmaceuticals left from the 1970s, and—to my delight—a veritable treasure trove of bandages, compresses, plaster, and gauze.

  Phoebe’s wounds would be dressed in style.

  Hurriedly, I packed a box with the alcohol and bandages. As I started for the door, I nearly tripped over a batch of steel tanks. One of them toppled over, clanging so loudly it frightened me. I bent to set it upright and was shocked at what I saw.

  The tank was labeled “Ethylene.”

  For a moment I just stared at it. This was the same stuff Dan had used at Delphi, the vaporous earthly “soul” of Apollo turned into a surgical anesthetic. Two more tanks, one labeled “Ethylene,” another labeled “Oxygen,” stood beside the anesthesiology cart. These tanks were probably left over from the 1970s, when the O.R. had last been used during the Greek civil war.

  Amazing, I thought. The coincidence of that—

  A sudden noise in the corridor startled me. I froze, staring at the open door. My fears about the Furies came rushing back; for a moment I’d forgotten all about them. Now I was certain I had heard them in the hall. The noise had been quick and distinct, like the opening or closing of a door. Maybe from an outside entry to the cellar. There had to be an entry; I was sure of it; I’d seen only one set of doors upstairs.

  I set the box down softly on the operating table and quietly crossed the room to the storage bins. On a shelf beside the pharmaceuticals sat the leather surgery case. I opened it and lifted out a scalpel. It had a long steel handle and a short, thin blade. I carried it back to the doorway and peered out into the hall.

  The corridor lay in total darkness. In the storage room next door, the light had been turned off.

  I pulled back inside. My heart was pounding like a fist in my chest. I felt a fluttering tingle in my gut. Impulsively, I flipped off the light in the room. Now the entire cellar lay in darkness.

  Standing with my back up tight against the wall, I waited. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my upstretched throat. The Furies hadn’t made a sound since the noise of the door; I figured there couldn’t be very many. But even if it turned out there was only one, I knew she would try to kill me.

  I listened. For a moment I thought I could hear her breathing. She seemed to be moving closer down the hall. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark. Now I heard footsteps, light as a feather, slowly creeping closer toward the door. Like an icicle, the steel scalpel burned in my hand. The sound of her breathing grew louder.

  Suddenly a thyrsus pinecone struck my chest. My head flew back and cracked against the wall. I was stunned by the blow, but threw myself against the Fury, knocking her to the floor. I raised the scalpel and reached for the light switch.

  The chandeliers burst into brightness.

  I stopped. Lowered the knife.

  Dan was sprawled on the floor half-naked. He had a look of terror in his eyes. His shorts and his shirt had been torn into shreds. His arms had been clawed, and his face was bleeding. He looked like some tortured phantom of Death.

  “You could’ve killed me!” I shouted. “I almost killed you!” I flung away the scalpel; it clanged across the floor.

  Dan was startled by the sound of it. He looked jittery and scared. There was blood all over his clothes.

  “You look like hell,” I said. “Are you okay? “

  Staring at me, he nodded.

  I picked the thyrsus up off the floor. The pinecone seeds were razor-sharp. They’d ripped through my shirt, and my chest was bleeding. “These goddamn things are lethal,” I said.

  Dan’s eyes darted nervously. “I thought you were them,” he said. “I thought they must’ve gotten inside.”

  “How did you get in?” I asked.

  “Damiana gave me the keys to the doors. The cellar was the only one I could reach without the Furies seeing.” He looked around. “Is Phoebe here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Upstairs.”

  He heaved a huge sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he said.

  “She cut herself badly on a piece of glass,” I said. “And her foot is all torn up from the climb off the mountain. I came down here to find her some bandages.”

  Dan looked utterly despondent. “I can’t believe I dragged her into all this,” he said.

  I didn’t remind him it was actually me that asked her to come to the island. I reached out to help him to his feet. He looked as if he’d barely escaped with his life. “What happened to you out there?”

  He shook his head despairingly, as if in disbelief. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way to get out of here—now.”

  He seemed to feel a special urgency. “How many are out there?” I asked.

  “There must be at least two hundred. I saw them all gathering together in the square. They were passing the sacrament again.”

  “The kykeon?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re tanking up to take another run at us. They’re not going to quit until all of us are dead.”

  I knew he was right. If we’d learned anything at all this night, it was that these goddamned Furies were relentless. One way or another, they’d find a way into the church. Damiana, Phoebe—we’d all be torn to pieces, our bones stashed away with the others in the cave. Nobody in the outside world would ever know what happened, and the Furies’ yearly harvest of blood would continue to go on forever.

  Unless…

  I scanned the room. The ethylene tanks. The two standing upright by the anesthesia cart.

  “Dan,” I said. “I think it’s time to ask for a little help from Apollo.”

  26

  DAMIANA WAS washing Phoebe’s bloody foot in a bucket. When we set down the tanks, it startled them. “Dan—thank God!” Phoebe stepped out of the water and hugged him.

  “He almost killed me down there,” I said. I leaned his thyrsus against a pew.

  Phoebe stepped back from Dan’s embrace. “You look horrible. What hap—?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. He pulled out the bandages. “You’d better wrap that leg.”

  I turned to Damiana. “I’m going to need a long, sturdy rope. Have you got anything? “

  “There’s a rope in the janitor’s closet,” she said, running off to get it.

  “What are those?” Phoebe asked, eyeing the tanks.

  “There’re filled with ethylene,” Dan said. “Same as I
gave you at Delphi.”

  “We’re going to knock the Furies out with it,” I said. “All of them, all at once.”

  “Isn’t it too dangerous?” she asked. She had lifted her foot up onto a pew and was wrapping her bloody thigh with the gauze. “It can take the oxygen out of the air. And you said it was explosive.”

  “The volume of air in here is huge,” Dan said. “It shouldn’t be a problem if we don’t release too much.”

  Outside, the Furies were stirring. We could hear their voices growing louder.

  “Everyone should hide down in the infirmary,” I said. “I’ll stay up here and—”

  “I’ll stay here,” Dan said. “You go down with—”

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said. “It was my idea. I’ll open the door and lure the Furies up into the tower while you guys sneak out the back.”

  “The tower?” Phoebe said. “How will you get down?”

  Dan answered. “I’ll climb down,” he said.

  Phoebe stopped wrapping. “You’re going to climb down the tower from a rope?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  Damiana raced up, out of breath, holding a massive coil of rope in her hands. “They’re coming,” she said.

  A violent pounding resounded from the doors. Shouts and shrieks arose from everywhere at once. The Furies were surrounding the church.

  A chill rippled through me. I recalled the panic I’d seen in Dan’s face when I’d turned on the light in the cellar. What the hell had happened to him out there!

  “Dan?” I said. “That door you came in. Do you remember locking it?”

  My brother slowly turned to me. His face was ashen white.

  I grabbed the coil of rope from Damiana. “Hurry,” I said. “I’ll let them in the front. Hide until they all follow me in, then everybody exit out the back. I’ll meet you at the boat.”