Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  The Afterlife is a very exclusive invitation-only after-party. I had already asked Ben to find a dead dude, who knew another dead dude, who knew a Greek dead dude, who knew either Archimedes or Posidonius. I didn’t expect anything to come of it.

  So, you know. Go to the source.

  I let my mind wander. I felt a bit like Speedy’s lizard: mostly enjoying myself in the sun, but keeping an eye out to make sure something bigger wasn’t about to eat me.

  Ghosts feel like…

  I don’t know what they feel like.

  I know when they’re around. They push on my brain. They don’t do it intentionally—I think the energy they throw off hits my psychic buttons.

  Today, my buttons remained unpushed. The Parthenon was unhaunted.

  (At least, for me. I have my theories about why psychics can perceive some ghosts and not others. I’ll get into those theories later.)

  I sat up and stretched.

  “Anything?” Mike asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “If there’s anybody lurking about, they’re staying off of my radar.”

  “It was a long shot anyway,” he said.

  What Mike didn’t say was that it was probably for the best. I don’t speak Greek, let alone ancient Greek. If we had bumped into an old ghost, Speedy would have had to serve as the translator.

  How do you say ‘righteously pissed-off poltergeist lynch mob’ in ancient Greek?

  “We should go to a battlefield,” Speedy said. “You always get lucky at battlefields.”

  “Um…” I had the mental image of getting skewered on a dead Spartan’s spectral spear. “Put a pin in that idea. I want to keep trying here.”

  We played tourists for the rest of the afternoon. It was incredibly pleasant. The Parthenon has a snack stand. [2]

  The Acropolis at Athens is a wickedly arid place. Most of it is dusty and dry, but we ended up at the southern end of the ruins, in a space that was more green than brown. We were the only people in sight. The walk was rough for the average tourist, but there were plenty of signs to show we hadn’t magically discovered this place. Candy wrappers, used condoms, the occasional shoe, that sort of thing. Made sense: there was a cluster of apartment buildings down the hill, just barely visible through the tree line.

  “Where are we?” I asked. There was a set of columns sticking up from the ground. After spending the better part of a day in the old city, the magic of turning the corner and tripping over (literally) those surviving scraps of buildings was beginning to wear off.

  “The Asklepion spring house,” Speedy replied. He was back up on Mike’s shoulders, inspecting the ruins from a height. He had run afoul of a scorpion on one of his lizard chases and was done with the ground for a while.

  “I thought that was on Kos,” Mike said.

  “Asklepieia were healing temples,” Speedy sighed. “Like hospitals. The Greeks built more than one of those fuckers.”

  He inspected the rocks around us. Most of them were giant slabs of cut stone left over from when the archaeologists had tried to stick the temple back together. Behind those was the mountain, with chunks of crude caves here and there. “Try again,” he told me, as he stared into one of those caves.

  “Speedy?”

  “Healing was another form of science. The library’s gone, and so’s most of the art, but there’s still water here. Try again.”

  “I don’t see a spring,” I started to say, but caught myself when I saw all the trees. Underground water is still water. “Right.”

  I found a big flat stone, checked it for scorpions, and sat. The sun was behind the mountain, and it was getting chilly. “This entire week is going to be about me freezing my butt off on cold rocks,” I muttered quietly to myself.

  Speedy has the unbelievable hearing you’d expect from an animal whose ears take up a majority of its headspace. “Don’t care. Find ghosts.”

  “Hush,” Mike told him. He was keeping watch back the way we came. “We finally picked up a tail.”

  Speedy glanced over Mike’s shoulder, and grinned at the two men far down the trail.

  I shut my mind off as best as I could, and waited for something to push my buttons. Bird song. Bugs. What sound does a scorpion make? Do scorpions make noise, anyway? They’re not like wolves…maybe they are. There was that thing on the Discovery Channel about wolf packs and how they don’t howl when hunting. They just pick their moment and strike. Sometimes they howl. Howling’s like…I guess it’s a cheerleader thing…

  I had made the mental jump to wolves in cheerleader skirts (Rrrrah! Rrrrah! Go team go!) when I felt that unmistakable twitchy-itchy sensation I get when a ghost is nearby.

  “Guys? We’re on.”

  Mike shooed Speedy off of his shoulders, and slipped off his backpack. He had carefully wrapped the liquor bottles in sweatshirts, and they didn’t even clink as he pulled two of them from the bag.

  Let me tell you about ghosts and liquor.

  Wait, no. I don’t really need to bother with this one. It’s self-explanatory. Loooong story short? Only the most powerful ghosts can travel through time. They’re the ones with ready access to future booze. The rest of us, both living and dead, have to take our alcohol as we find it.

  I’ve yet to meet a ghost who’ll turn down a free drink.

  Mike and I had picked up an assortment of Greek alcohol at the duty free shop. We’d gotten a sharp look from the clerks when they realized we were buying all of this stuff while traveling into the country, not out of it, but fuck ’em. Ghosts are territorial buggers. A bribe is more likely to work if it’s familiar, so wine and ouzo it was.

  “Should we do this now?” Mike asked, looking down the trail.

  “Yeah,” I said. Mike and I can tell fellow psychics at a glance: we’ve got this weird blue aura. It goes away after you make physical contact, shaking hands or whatever, but it’s great if you want to find strange psychics in a crowd.

  Not that we ever did find other psychics, but I’ll get into that later.

  (Listen, I’m sorry my life is complicated, okay? I’d explain everything to you at once if I could, but for the moment we should focus on how Mike and I wanted to get ancient Greek ghosts liquored up.)

  Mike broke out the ouzo. I took the first drink.

  I’d never had ouzo before. It was…uh…

  It’s an acquired taste.

  Mike waited patiently until I stopped choking: Speedy laughed his ass off.

  “Well, that got their attention,” I said once I could talk.

  “Two psychics and me?” Speedy said. “They knew we were here from the moment we hit the hill.”

  He had a point. Ghosts are attracted to psychics, and there’s nobody, alive or dead, who doesn’t want to know the deal with the talking koala.

  “Salud,” Mike said, toasting the invisible air around us.

  “Wrong. Stin iyia mas,” Speedy corrected him.

  “Stin iyia mas,” Mike and I parroted.

  The ouzo was better the second time.

  Then we put the bottle on the table, and waited.

  Let me tell you about ghosts and memories.

  A very few ghosts, like Ben, are super-powerful. They’re remembered. Everybody knows their name. Those memories are a source of energy, and these superghosts can use it to travel through time and whatnot.

  But not everybody who dies was a legend. Most human beings are average schmucks just trying to survive. Four generations—at most!—and we’re just a blurry name on the back of a yellow photograph. The vast majority of ghosts don’t have enough energy to manifest.

  There are motherfuckin’ ghosts everywhere, guys.

  (Don’t freak out. Ghosts are like bacteria. Your body might be covered in invisible crawling things, but they don’t affect you unless you get a papercut or something. Same with ghosts. They aren’t invisible stalkers—they’ve got their own shit to do. [3])

  We were trying to attract a powerful ghost. We figured if we got lucky, we’d get a philosop
her or a scientist, somebody whose name was written down in an ancient text and remembered by resentful college students cramming for midterms.

  If such a ghost showed up, it didn’t mean we’d be able to see them. Even for the best psychics, talking to the dead is a crapshoot. It’s simple physics. Strong ghost plus strong psychic? Conversation. Weak ghost plus shitty psychics? Zilch. Zero. Zip.

  I’m really good with the dead, so if we got a strong ghost’s attention, I’d probably be able to talk to him.

  If I could see him.

  Which I couldn’t.

  Not unless he picked up the bottle of ouzo to tell me exactly where he was, so I could focus on him.

  Bribes are a time-honored method of communication between psychics and weaker ghosts. Some cultures refer to them as offerings, as in, “Hey, I offer you this bribe in exchange for favors.” It works mainly as a gesture of goodwill. As I said, ghosts have their own shit to do. A bottle of good ouzo proves we respect his time and want the conversation to be worthwhile for him.

  (People, really! The absolute worst worst worst thing you can do when dealing with ghosts is think of them as the living’s little blue minions! They’re human beings, and they deserve respect. Also, they’re invisible human beings who can walk through walls—do not piss them off. If you’re lucky, the least they’ll do to you is hide the toilet paper.)

  The bottle didn’t move.

  We waited until the sun went down. Mike had brought a deck of cards, and we played poker. It was next to impossible to win, as we always dealt out four hands instead of three, and that fourth hand stayed flat on the stone.

  No, I don’t know if long-dead Greek ghosts know how to play poker, but it never hurts to be polite.

  Every fifteen minutes, I’d do that thing where I let my mind wander. Yup. There were still ghosts nearby. They just weren’t making themselves known.

  “Fuck it,” I finally said. It was getting late, we were hungry, and the ruins looked savage after dark. Plus, the local kids would start turning up for their nightly hump-n-bump sessions. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “Maybe we’re not wanted,” Mike said, gazing around at the broken marble stones.

  “Or maybe they tried, and they’re not strong enough to lift the cards or the bottle. Or maybe it’s the culture problem and they can’t manifest to Americans. Or maybe…” I waved my hands uselessly and gave up. There were too many unknowns when dealing with ghosts.

  We dumped everything into the backpack, checked to make sure our goon buddies were still lurking around (they were hiding behind some bushes, but the glow of their phones gave them away), and left the half-empty bottle of ouzo on top of the rock. Either the ghosts would spirit it away (hah), or the local kids would have a spectacular night.

  We started down the nearest path. It wasn’t a hard walk, but it was dark, and Mike and I had to watch our footing. So we didn’t bother to look back the way we came until Speedy tapped Mike on the head and said, “Guys? The bottle.”

  Mike and I turned around.

  The bottle was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The dudes on our tail waited until we’d eaten dinner before they pretended to mug us.

  I thought it was really nice of them.

  We went out for authentic Greek food, which was ridiculously good. Or maybe Mike and I were still a little drunk on the ouzo. Whatever. Even Speedy enjoyed it, and he’s pickier than a toddler who just learned how to scream NO!

  We were walking back to our hotel when one of them popped out of an alley, and the two dudes following us tried to ambush us from behind while we were distracted. I had the one with the handgun against the wall before he knew what had happened; from behind me came the sounds of manic koala laughter and shoulders leaving their sockets.

  And crying. Lots of crying.

  “How we doin’?” I called to Mike and/or Speedy.

  “Done,” Mike grunted.

  I took a moment to check on them. Two large men in T-shirts and jeans were on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably, with Mike standing over them like an avenging Irish angel.

  Speedy was sitting on one of the men. The fur around his mouth was bloody.

  I felt an arm twitch in my hands as the man whose face was currently half flesh, half brick prepared to squirm away from me. I upped that fraction to two-thirds brick, and he relented.

  “So what is this?” I asked him. “Attempted kidnapping? I’m guessing attempted kidnapping.”

  There was a string of mumbled Greek from him.

  “Speedy?” I asked.

  “‘Filthy bitch. Queen of the maggot-infested cooches, I don’t have to tell you anything.’”

  “Speedy, we’re on the clock.”

  The koala sighed. “Just that last sentence.”

  I added some more brick to the face-plus-wall equation. The man’s eyes widened and he screamed.

  (Look, there’s a reason certain wrist locks are illegal in judo. Just because I don’t normally use them doesn’t mean I don’t know them.)

  Then I threw him.

  Speedy and Mike knew it was coming. Speedy ducked; Mike added a hammer kick. The man went from flying to flattened in a millisecond, stomped straight into the pavement by Mike’s Size 13 shoe.

  The sound of sirens had begun. I glanced around and saw we had an audience. You don’t hold a fistfight on a busy city street without attracting attention.

  “Speedy? Do what you can. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  I walked towards the crowd, shouting and waving like an absolute moron. The cell phones and their cameras turned from the koala to me, and I began asking, loudly, if anyone had seen the whole thing because we’d need witnesses and ohmyGod what is wrong with this city we were just on our way back from dinner and yes, I am Hope Blackwell, I’m here on vacation and Officer! Thank goodness you’re finally here! These men attacked us!

  The police stations in Athens aren’t that pretty. The country is in the middle of a vicious economic crisis. The main parts of the city were spruced up for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and that was the last time anybody could afford to throw paint on them. The station still had toilet facilities, so while Mike and his infinite patience described what had happened in the alley to three officers who barely spoke English, I spirited Speedy off to the women’s bathroom to rinse off the blood.

  I plopped him on a little ledge beside the sink, and held a hand beneath his mouth. “Spit.”

  He grumbled something in Greek.

  “Don’t make me go in there.”

  He opened his jaws, and two goodly-sized pieces of human fingers fell out. They had been chewed to hell, but they both still had their nails intact. This seemed…weirdly ironic.

  I threw these into the toilet, and flushed a bunch of times to make sure the fingers would never be seen again. “Jesus, Speedy, you’re the dictionary definition of an herbivore. You literally cannot digest meat.”

  “I enjoy the flavor.”

  There weren’t any paper towels, so I made do with toilet paper. Blood is hard to get out of fur, by the way. It’s sticky, and the harder you work to get it off, the more saturated the surrounding areas become. I futzed around and made things worse until Speedy got so fed up that he shoved his face under the running water and started to clean himself up.

  Tee hee.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

  The koala’s words were slightly bubbly as he scrubbed his muzzle. “Hired goons. Third-party intermediary. Probably no way to trace the initial request unless we drop everything and concentrate on tracking the source.”

  “Was it supposed to be a kidnapping?” It wouldn’t surprise me. As the Cyborg King’s wife, someone tries to kidnap me every third week. [4]

  “No,” he said. He held out a clawed paw for a clean wad of toilet paper, and began to dry himself off. “Smash and scare. Orders were to injure Mike, and tell us to get out of town.”

  “Poor hired goons.”

  “Yup.”


  Nobody has a proper appreciation for hired goons. They’re regular working dudes who weren’t hugged enough as kids, or didn’t get the chance to go to college, or don’t have the smarts or motivation to make it in a steady job. I’d feel for them, except the vast majority of people they beat up don’t have the ability to smack them back.

  We left the bathroom and rejoined Mike. He was deep in conversation with the U.S. Ambassador to Greece about Sisyphus, Tantalus, and the illusions of happiness and suffering.

  Listen, what Mike does for fun is his own business. If you choose to let him drag you into it, that’s yours. But I was getting tired, and poor Ambassador Goodwin was floundering, and I figured breaking up that particular discussion would benefit everybody.

  “Jack!” I waved, and dropped Speedy on a nearby table.

  “Hope!” The ambassador jumped up and gave me a grateful hug. He’s a grandfatherly man, decent and pudgy. We’ve sat beside each other a couple of times at various political functions back home in Washington, and those can be a real bonding experience if you and the other guy both enjoy telling dick jokes. “I’m sorry this is your introduction to Greece. Please, tell me what I can do.”

  “Aw, it’s no big deal,” I said. “Happens all the time. To me,” I added quickly, as Goodwin struggled to find a nice way to say What? and No, it doesn’t, and Perhaps you would like a tour of the inside of a locked jail cell until I can find you a responsible adult to take you home?

  “Which is why she asked me to come along,” Mike said with a big Irish grin.

  “You’ve met Mike Reilly?” I asked the ambassador. “Did he mention he’s an Hachidan in aikido?”

  “Eighth-degree black belt,” Mike offered. “I teach master classes for American aikidōka.”

  I just stood there and smiled while Goodwin reassessed the middle-aged frat boy standing in front of him. Maybe their philosophy discussion snapped into context, I don’t know, but Goodwin apparently decided I was in good hands.