There was the sound of a box opening.
Somewhere behind them, or in front of them, or to their left, or right. A large box with a large and ponderous lid was being opened. There was a heavy, wheezy breathing. A rattling, dry cough. Another wheezing breath, and then a whispered grunt and the closing of the box lid.
The man who collected boxes shuffled toward them and lifted his heavy head. His hands were veined and trembling, his bones gaunt.
He lifted his head, slowly, and looked out at them through the black shadows of his eyes.
Then he tried to speak . . .
INTRODUCTION by Charles L. Grant
In the five years since the birth of the Shadows series, a fair number of changes have taken place in the fantasy field: vampires have been supplanted by werewolves and like creatures both in print and on film, Tolkienesque High Fantasy has perhaps inevitably evolved away from its emphasis on dwarves, faeries, and elves toward a greater magical involvement with human characters, and there is the increasingly popular use of the label "Dark Fantasy" to mark those stories of horror and terror which contain, at the very least, a seductive hint of the supernatural. And the more it is used, the more it becomes exceedingly appropriate—not only does it serve to differentiate that material from High Fantasy, but it also implies that a great deal more is contained within the story than simply horror.
And in those stories which rise above the hackneyed, that is perfectly true.
From Robert Louis Stevenson to Peter Straub, Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King, there has been and is a fascination with all things dark, with all things which inhabit the far side of midnight; and it is less the idea that there are creatures out there than it is the belief that those same creatures are not necessarily inexplicable, not completely beyond our comprehension. To cast light on black creates fields of grey in shades which do far more than show us what's out there; it also shows us that what's out there can just as easily be found in here—in our rooms, under our beds, in our closets . . . and in our minds.
And that which is in our minds is assuredly no less real than that which is concealed behind our favorite chair.
Sooner or later, then, most Dark Fantasy writers take a busman's holiday from those "things which go bump in the night" to attempt in their fiction an exploration of the mind's realm which lies beyond insanity. An aberration is, after all, just an aberration, and stories about characters who have lost their minds are stories of psychological terror, not fantasy. The fascination, then, lies not in the insanity itself but in the possibility that the insanity can be so powerful as to create a new segment of reality—not just for the afflicted character, but for the others who inhabit that character's world as well.
The creatures of the mind become the creatures that walk the streets, the alleyways, the woodland, the front porch.
No less real, no less deadly.
And because the writer, in attempting such material, faces difficulties of creation only hinted at in his usual work, the stories born of such labor, when they are successful, compare unquestionably favorably to anything written in any other genre.
This is not to say that Dark Fantasy is struggling to lay claim to the designations "Art" or "Serious Literature." To lay claim implies an outsider attempting to sneak in where he doesn't belong, or where he once was and from which he has been ousted by the so-called literary mavens. Dark Fantasy has never been on the outside. The best of it, as in the best of mainstream literature, sets real people disguised as fictional characters onto a plotted road to see what may be discovered through trial and/or triumph, discoveries not only about the characters themselves, but also about the readers, and all the rest of us.
Whether one meets windmills, psychoses, and/or Mr. Hyde along the way should be of less concern than what happens (in all senses of the word) when these crises complete their developments and the characters move on—one way or the other.
In that respect, "Dark" itself carries with it much more weight than simply midnight.
And "Fantasy," like a shadow, is not always what we think it is.
Charles L. Grant Budd Lake, New Jersey 1981
Tanith Lee, winner of the British Fantasy Award for her novel Sabella, has written numerous children's books, radio and television plays, sf and fantasy novels, all with a dedication and fervor which puts many of her colleagues to shame. She is meticulous about her work, demanding much both of herself and her readers. She also understands better than most that shadows of the soul are just as terrifying as shadows on the wall.
THE GORGON by Tanith Lee
The small island, which lay off the larger island of Daphaeu, obviously contained a secret of some sort, and, day by day, and particularly night by night, began to exert an influence on me, so that I must find it out.
Daphaeu itself (or more correctly herself, for she was a female country, voluptuous and cruel by turns in the true antique fashion of the Goddess) was hardly enormous. A couple of roads, a tangle of sheep tracks, a precarious, escalating village, rocks and hillsides thatched by blistered grass. All of which overhung an extraordinary sea, unlike any sea which I have encountered elsewhere in Greece. Water which might be mistaken for blueness from a distance, but which, from the harbor or the multitude of caves and coves that undermined the island, revealed itself a clear and succulent green, like milky limes or the bottle glass of certain spirits.
On my first morning, having come onto the natural terrace (the only recommendation of the hovel-like accommodation) to look over this strange green ocean, I saw the smaller island, lying like a little boat of land moored just wide of Daphaeu's three hills. The day was clear, the water frilled with white where it hit the fangs in the interstices below the terrace. About the smaller island, barely a ruffle showed. It seemed to glide up from the sea, smooth as mirror. The little island was verdant, also. Unlike Daphaeu's limited stands of stone pine, cypress, and cedar, the smaller sister was clouded by a still, lambent haze of foliage that looked to be woods. Visions of groves, springs, a ruined temple, a statue of Pan playing the panpipes forever in some glade—where only yesterday, it might seem, a thin column of aromatic smoke had gone up—these images were enough, fancifully, to draw me into inquiries about how the small island might be reached. And when my inquiries met first with a polite bevy of excuses, next with a refusal, last with a blank wall of silence, as if whoever I mentioned the little island to had gone temporarily deaf or mad, I became, of course, insatiable to get to it, to find out what odd superstitious thing kept these people away. Naturally, the Daphaeui were not friendly to me at any time beyond the false friendship one anticipates extended to a man of another nationality and clime, who can be relied on to pay his bills, perhaps allow himself to be overcharged, even made a downright monkey of in order to preserve goodwill. In the normal run of things, I could have had anything I wanted in exchange for a pack of local lies, a broad local smile, and a broader local price. That I could not get to the little island puzzled me. I tried money and I tried barter. I even, in a reckless moment, probably knowing I would not succeed, offered Pitos, one of the younger fishermen, the gold and onyx ring he coveted. My sister had made it for me, the faithful copy of an intaglio belonging to the House of Borgia, no less. Generally, Pitos could not pass the time of day with me without mentioning the ring, adding something in the nature of: "If ever you want a great service, any great service, I will do it for that ring." I half believe he would have stolen or murdered for it, certainly shared the bed with me. But he would not, apparently, even for the Borgia ring, take me to the little island.
"You think too much of foolish things," he said to me. "For a big writer, that is not good."
I ignored the humorous aspect of "big," equally inappropriate in the sense of height, girth, or fam
e. Pitos's English was fine, and when he slipped into mild inaccuracies, it was likely to be a decoy.
"You're wrong, Pitos. That island has a story in it somewhere. I'd take a bet on it."
"No fish today," said Pitos. "Why you think that is?"
I refrained from inventively telling him I had seen giant swordfish leaping from the shallows by the smaller island.
I found I was prowling Daphaeu, but only on the one side, the side where I would get a view—or views—of her sister. I would climb down into the welter of coves and smashed emerald water to look across at her. I would climb up and stand, leaning on the sunblasted walls of a crumbling church, and look at the small island. At night, crouched over a bottle of wine, a scatter of manuscript, moths falling like rain in the oil lamp, my stare stayed fixed on the small island, which, as the moon came up, would seem turned to silver or to some older metal, Nemean metal perhaps, sloughed from the moon herself.
Curiosity accounts for much of this, and contra-suggestiveness. But the influence I presently began to feel, that I cannot account for exactly. Maybe it was only the writer's desire to fantasize rather than to work. But each time I reached for the manuscript I would experience a sort of distraction, a sort of calling—uncanny, poignant, like nostalgia, though for a place I had never visited.
I am very bad at recollecting my dreams, but once or twice, just before sunrise, I had a suspicion I had dreamed of the island. Of walking there, hearing its inner waters, the leaves brushing my hands and face.
Two weeks went by, and precious little had been done in the line of work. And I had come to Daphaeu with the sole intention of working. The year before, I had accomplished so much in a month of similar islands—or had they been similar?—that I had looked for results of some magnitude. In all of fourteen days I must have squeezed out two thousand words, and most of those dreary enough that the only covers they would ever get between would be those of the trash can. And yet it was not that I could not produce work, it was that I knew, with blind and damnable certainty, that the work I needed to be doing sprang from that spoonful of island.
The first day of the third week I had been swimming in the calm stretch of sea west of the harbor and had emerged to sun myself and smoke on the parched hot shore. Presently Pitos appeared, having scented my cigarettes. Surgical and government health warnings have not yet penetrated to spots like Daphaeu, where filtered tobacco continues to symbolize Hollywood or some other amorphous, anachronistic surrealism still hankered after and long vanished from the real world beyond. Once Pitos had acquired his cigarette, he sprawled down on the dry grass, grinned, indicated the Borgia ring, and mentioned a beautiful cousin of his, whether male or female I cannot be sure. After this had been cleared out of the way, I said to him, "You know how the currents run. I was thinking of a slightly more adventurous swim. But I'd like your advice."
Pitos glanced at me warily. I had had the plan as I lazed in the velvet water. Pitos was already starting to guess it.
"Currents are very dangerous. Not to be trusted, except by harbor."
"How about between Daphaeu and the other island? It can't be more than a quarter mile. The sea looks smooth enough, once you break away from the shoreline here."
"No," said Pitos. I waited for him to say there were no fish, or a lot of fish, or that his brother had gotten a broken thumb, or something of the sort. But Pitos did not resort to this. Troubled and angry, he stabbed my cigarette, half-smoked, into the turf. "Why do you want to go to the island so much?"
"Why does nobody else want me to go there?"
He looked up then, and into my eyes. His own were very black, sensuous, carnal earthbound eyes, full of orthodox sins, and extremely young in a sense that had nothing to do with physical age, but with race, I suppose, the youngness of ancient things, like Pan himself, quite possibly.
"Well," I said at last, "are you going to tell me or not? Because believe me, I intend to swim over there today or tomorrow."
"No," he said again. And then: "You should not go. On the island there is a . . ." and he said a word in some tongue neither Greek nor Turkish, not even the corrupt Spanish that sometimes peregrinates from Malta.
"A what?"
Pitos shrugged helplessly. He gazed out to sea, a safe sea without islands. He seemed to be putting something together in his mind and I let him do it, very curious now, pleasantly unnerved by this waft of the occult I had already suspected to be the root cause of the ban.
Eventually he turned back to me, treated me once more to the primordial innocence of his stare, and announced:
"The cunning one."
"Ah," I said. Both irked and amused, I found myself smiling. At this, Pitos's face grew savage with pure rage, an expression I had never witnessed before—the facade kept for foreigners had well and truly come down.
"Pitos," I said, "I don't understand."
"Meda, " he said then, the Greek word, old Greek.
"Wait," I said. I caught at the name, which was wrong, trying to fit it to a memory. Then the list came back to me, actually from Graves, the names which meant "the cunning": Meda, Medea, Medusa.
"Oh," I said. I hardly wanted to offend him further by bursting into loud mirth. At the same time, even while I was trying not to laugh, I was aware of the hair standing up on my scalp and neck. "You're telling me there is a gorgon on the island."
Pitos grumbled unintelligibly, stabbing the dead cigarette over and over into the ground.
"I'm sorry, Pitos, but it can't be Medusa. Someone cut her head off quite a few years ago. A guy called Perseus."
His face erupted into that awful expression again, mouth in a rictus, tongue starting to protrude, eyes flaring at me—quite abruptly I realized he wasn't raging, but imitating the visual panic-contortions of a man turning inexorably to stone. Since that is what the gorgon is credited with, literally petrifying men by the sheer horror of her countenance, it now seemed almost pragmatic of Pitos to be demonstrating. It was, too, a creditable facsimile of the sculpted gorgon's face sometimes used to seal ovens and jars. I wondered where he had seen one to copy it so well.
"All right," I said. "OK, Pitos, fine." I fished in my shirt, which was lying on the ground, and took out some money to give him, but he recoiled. "I'm sorry," I said, "I don't think it merits the ring. Unless you'd care to row me over there after all."
The boy rose. He looked at me with utter contempt, and without another word, before striding off up the shore. The mashed cigarette protruded from the grass and I lay and watched it, the tiny strands of tobacco slowly crisping in the heat of the sun, as I plotted my route from Daphaeu.
Dawn seemed an amiable hour. No one in particular about on that side of the island, the water chill but flushing quickly with warmth as the sun reached over it. And the tide in the right place to navigate the rocks....
Yes, dawn would be an excellent time to swim out to the gorgon's island.
The gods were on my side, I concluded as I eased myself into the open sea the following morning. Getting clear of the rocks was no problem, their channels only half filled by the returning tide. While just beyond Daphaeu's coast I picked up one of those contrary currents that lace the island's edges and which, tide or no, would funnel me away from shore.
The swim was ideal, the sea limpid and no longer any more than cool. Sunlight filled in the waves and touched Daphaeu's retreating face with gold. Barely altered in thousands of years, either rock or sea or sun. And yet one knew that against all the claims of romantic fiction, this place did not look now as once it had. Some element in the air or in time itself changes things. A young man of the Bronze Age, falling asleep at sunset in his own era, waking at sunrise in mine, looking about him, would not have known where he was. I would swear to that.
Such thoughts I had leisure for in my facile swim across to the wooded island moored off Daphaeu.
As I had detected, the approach was smooth, virtually inviting. I cruised in as if sliding along butter. A row-boat would have had no m
ore difficulty. The shallows were clear, empty of rocks, and, if anything, greener than the water off Daphaeu.
I had not looked much at Medusa's Island (I had begun jokingly to call it this) as I crossed, knowing I would have all the space on my arrival. So I found myself wading in on a seamless beach of rare glycerine sand and, looking up, saw the mass of trees spilling from the sky.
The effect was incredibly lush—so much heavy green, and seemingly quite impenetrable, while the sun struck in glistening shafts, lodging like arrows in the foliage, which reminded me very intensely of huge clusters of grapes on a vine. Anything might lie behind such a barricade.
It was already beginning to get hot. Dry, I put on the loose cotton shirt and ate breakfast packed in the same waterproof wrapper, standing on the beach impatient to get on.
As I moved forward, a bird shrilled somewhere in its cage of boughs, sounding an alarm of invasion. But surely the birds, too, would be stone on Medusa's Island, if the legends were correct. And when I stumbled across the remarkable stone carving of a man in the forest, I would pause in shocked amazement at its verisimilitude to life. . . .
Five minutes into the thickets of the wood, I did indeed stumble on a carving, but it was of a moss-grown little faun. My pleasure in the discovery was considerably lessened, however, when investigation told me it was scarcely classical in origin. Circa 1920 would be nearer the mark.
A further minute and I had put the faun from my mind. The riot of waterfalling plants through which I had been picking my way broke open suddenly on an inner vista much wider than I had anticipated, While the focal point of the vista threw me completely, I cannot say what I had really been expecting. The grey-white stalks of pillars, some temple shrine, the spring with its votary of greenish rotted bronze, none of these would have surprised me. On the other hand, to find a house before me took me completely by surprise. I stood and looked at it in abject dismay, cursing its wretched normality until I gradually began to see the house was not normal in the accepted sense.
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