Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  Damn. Pile enough bad luck on one set of shoulders, and even the most cynical person might bend under the weight. “That may be,” I insisted. “Still. She wasn’t superstitious.”

  “But she was religious, right? Even though she didn’t believe Zeus was her father? You said she worshipped Artemis?”

  “Yup,” I said. Many of the dreams from when Helen lived in Aphidna were of her traveling to worship at various shrines. “Not quite sure how much of that was devotion and how much of it was an excuse to get out of Aethra’s house for an afternoon, though.”

  “Maybe she didn’t believe that Zeus was her father, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t religious. Or even superstitious. In any case, watching a man die in front of you after he placed a curse on your entire country would probably shake anybody’s resolve.”

  “Why didn’t any of this make it into the mythology?” I asked. “You’d think a death curse by a disgraced king would make some mark on history!”

  “If I were Helen, I’d make sure nobody would repeat that story. Ever.” He wasn’t speaking just as my husband at that moment; there was a healthy helping of the Cyborg King in there. “It’d be eliminated from the public record, to keep the rumors from causing more damage.”

  I winced. I knew Aethra survived through the Trojan War, but there were no guarantees for the soldiers and the other members of court who had witnessed Theseus’ dying declaration.

  (Also? It’s never comfortable to be reminded that while your husband had never made anyone—airquotes again—“vanish,” politics is a filthy shithole of a business, and there’s always tomorrow.)

  “Well, whatever else comes of this, we know why Helen wanted me to learn about ancient curses,” I said. “Mike and Speedy both think Theseus is still out there.”

  “The beast beneath the island.”

  “Yeah. The ancient Greeks believed in the concept of a soul, sort of. They called it a shade. It was part ghost, part spirit, and it lived on after the body died. I’m definitely not looking forward to meeting one of those,” I said.

  He turned towards the ocean again. I wrapped my arms around where his body should be; I felt his energy run through me, tense and ready for whatever was coming.

  “I want to ask you to get on that plane home,” he said quietly.

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “But you saw what Helen did with those stones at the Temple. Theseus is an even older ghost than she is, and probably as powerful. How do you fight something like that?”

  “I’ll figure it out. I’ve got Mike and Speedy with me. ”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Go,” I said, pretending to bump my forehead against the green expanse of his back. “You’re probably burning up. Get in the shower, and bring down your core temp before you cook yourself.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  He turned; we kissed. Fuck you if you say he wasn’t really there.

  I grinned up at him, then pushed against the illusion of his chest until he vanished.

  My phone rang a moment later.

  “You good?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Sparky’s voice sounded very far away. “I’m okay. Listen, Sweetie—”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Call me if you need me.”

  “Always,” I said, and hung up on him before I started to cry.

  I didn’t see any reason to go downstairs, other than that’s where the liquor was. So I made another phone call.

  Twenty minutes later, Darling arrived with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a large paper bag in the other.

  “That was quick,” I said to her. “I thought you were staying at a hotel down the island.”

  “I’ve been shopping in Lindos today,” she said.

  “Shopping, as in…”

  She laughed as she settled herself beside me. “So quick to judge, yet you did not mind at all when your animal helped me to loot the library.”

  “What did you get out of that, anyhow?” I asked, as I inspected the vodka. I hadn’t heard of the brand, but there was a blue fairy on the label. I took that as an omen.

  “Ah. Well, I found it curious,” she said, “that the items the animal recommended I take did not align to the library.”

  “Come again?” I took a pull straight from the bottle. The vodka was ice cold and perfect. A good omen, then.

  “I had them examined by a man I trust. It seems those pieces were written at least four hundred years after the library would have been lost. Strange, no?”

  I groaned. “Speedy, you shithead.”

  Darling smiled. “Will you tell me the whole story now?”

  “Sorry. Can’t.”

  “That is what I thought you would say,” she replied. “I would very much like to hear why documents I personally removed from a sealed room cannot exist.”

  I took another long drink.

  “I see. Well, I also would like you to know I have enjoyed our partnership,” she said, as she passed me the brown paper bag. “I have made quite a lot of money from it, and I thank you for that.”

  “I honestly didn’t know Speedy would con you,” I said, then added: “I probably should have guessed, though. That’s my fault.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t worry. I was still able to sell them—I just could not claim they came from the newly discovered library. That decreased their value, but not by too much. There was quite a bidding war among collectors.”

  “That’s good, I guess,” I said. I opened the bag to find a jacket identical to Darling’s own amazing camouflage parka. “Oh!”

  “I noticed you were admiring mine,” she said, almost shyly. “It is custom; I hope I guessed your size correctly. A friend of mine in Athens makes them. It is waterproof, resists fire, and the fabric cannot be torn.

  “Here,” she said, as she helped me slip the jacket over my head.

  I stood and made a few quick turns and bends. The jacket fit perfectly. There were hard items on either sleeve. I examined the one on the left; the face of a digital watch stared back at me.

  “My friend believes there is no need for clutter,” she said, as she showed me the cuffs on her own jacket. “In the field, one item must do the work of twenty. There is a watch in one sleeve, and a GPS in the other.”

  “Heh,” I chuckled. “I can’t remember the last time I carried an actual watch.”

  “I know you will probably never need them, but better safe than sorry, yes?” she said, and patted the rooftop beside her. “The GPS has to be recharged every two weeks, but the battery in the watch should be good for many years. They are both shockproof and waterproof. You’ll have no cause to treat them gently.”

  “Thank you,” I said to the thief, as I sat down beside her. “I would have liked to have gotten to know you better.”

  “Then tonight, we talk,” she said, handing me the bottle of vodka. “And when you return to Greece, you will return as a friend, and not an employer.

  “Perhaps,” she added with a wink, “if I get you drunk enough, you will finally tell me how you found that library.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Helen’s mysterious island was inhabited.

  I didn’t expect that. I thought it’d be a tiny speck in the middle of the sea, but no, it was an island of about eight square miles, with a small fishing village on the east shore. Plus sheep and WiFi.

  Speedy and I hung back at our rented speedboat while Mike went to check in with the locals. He took all of the utility tools we had brought, plus a couple thousand Euros. He came back with nothing except a very strong ouzo buzz and the weird bit of trivia that nobody in the bar had ever hiked up the lone mountain on the island.

  Which was all we needed, really.

  We waited until full dark before we pulled the speedboat around to the other side of the island, and then we started walking.

  Let me tell you about hauntings.

  Real psychics laugh our collective asses off at the frauds. If yo
u’re ever invited to a haunted house or a cemetery for a séance, and a woman in purple and eighty clunky necklaces rolls her eyes back into her skull while crooning, “I sense a strong presence,” you have our permission to get up and leave. Don’t worry about breaking a circle, or upsetting the spirits. If there are any ghosts around, they aren’t strong enough to do shit to you if they cared about a circle getting broken. Which they don’t. Because that’s dumb.

  I’m not saying that haunted houses don’t exist, mind. They do. Human beings—alive or dead—are territorial buggers. You’d think we’d get over this once our physical selves stop taking up space, but our minds have more control over how we occupy the world than our bodies. Once you get rid of paltry details such as eating and sleeping, we’re free to obsess over everything else, and the dead tend to obsess over the living.

  The living have invaded their space. Worse, the living are changing it! This is offensive to the dead on a deep emotional level. It’s rather like buying a house and the previous owners get pissed because you’ve torn down their wallpaper. From their point of view, the house was fine when they left it: they spent days poring over samples to find the perfect combination of paisley, weeks getting the seams to line up correctly, and went loopy trying to find a paint color for the trim that didn’t clash. Then you went and tore their hard work down because you didn’t want to feel like you were living inside of a necktie.

  Reasonable, rational ghosts will usually recognize that they no longer own that house. They’ll stand aside and bitch amongst themselves as the wallpaper gets chucked in the dumpster, but they accept their time is over.

  Insane ghosts are a different story.

  If you walk into a so-called haunted house and you feel that something is wrong, that’s not due to the presence of a ghost. There’s a part of our lizard brain that can tell when something is wrong with a place, and this has nothing to do with an invisible dead dude waving his arms and shouting, “BOO!” Ben says that feeling of wrongness is a shift in the local energy, an atmospheric effect like a pocket rainstorm. Maybe it was caused by a traumatic event; maybe it blew in from somewhere else like a cloud. If left alone, it’ll dissipate over time.

  But? If people who expect the place to be haunted—the evil kind of haunted—keep visiting it? Their preconceived notions of how a haunted house should feel will help to fuel the negative emotions associated with that place. It’s a never-ending cycle of bad feelings, resulting in a creepy-crawly ambiance that’ll give you nightmares.

  It’s probably not because of a ghost, though. Powerful ghosts almost never haunt a place. Places are boring.

  Note how I said probably and almost.

  Some ghosts—a very small number, so small they don’t much affect the overall math—are just fucking nuts.

  Not mentally ill, mind. Mentally ill people don’t tend to cross back over into the living world once they’ve gone over. Personally, I think they stay in limbo until they decide to move on, as they’ve finally found peace. So when I say fucking nuts, I’m talking about ghosts that are just fucking nuts.

  Psychopaths, mostly.

  Fortunately, most psychopathic ghosts don’t have the juice behind them to do any serious damage. [22] If they did, there’d be unexplained massacres every other day instead of just once a decade or so.

  Now, I’m sure you’re asking what happens when a powerful sane ghost decides they want to set up territory in the living world. It happens, obviously (says the woman who found Archimedes’ private library). When it does? The living will never even notice it’s happened. When a ghost decides to set up shop, that location vanishes from the living mind.

  It’s the places that you don’t even notice that are haunted by the powerful ghosts.

  There’s that road you know by heart. You know the one, you’ve driven down it maybe a thousand times, and wham! There’s a building you’ve never noticed before. And then, you forget about it for maybe a year, until there it is again! This happens over and over and over, a building blinking in and out of the holes in your mind. That’s where you could find a ghost with some real juice behind it. If you could remember it long enough to search for it. Which you can’t.

  Someone had made an entire mountain disappear from the collective memories of those who lived a stone’s throw away.

  I was hoping that someone was Helen. The alternative was…

  Boy howdy golly-gosh, was I ever looking forward to confronting Theseus. Really.

  The mountain was shallow, not steep; it was an easy climb, and we made it to the top with plenty of time before dawn.

  Mike and I like the night. We like it a lot. If society wasn’t so hell-bent on running on daylight, I think we’d sleep until the sun went down.

  We’ve both got more energy at night, too, which is why I was shouting on a mountainside at midnight.

  “Theseus!” My voice bounced down the mountain and rolled across the valley below. “Helen sent us! We want to talk!”

  Nothing.

  I shouted until I started to go hoarse. I waved Helen’s beads around. I had Speedy translate, in case the two psychics and the talking koala on his mountain weren’t enough to wake Theseus’ ghost.

  Nothing.

  “Beneath the island,” Speedy finally said. “Beneath.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, and went into my backpack. I came out with three tactical flashlights, and passed one of these to Mike, and another up to Speedy where he was settled on Mike’s shoulders.

  Tactical flashlights are awesome, by the way. I had Sparky send me a dozen of them via express mail when we realized we had to go explore an island. They’re modular flashlights with dual heads, and can be used as a standard flashlight or a lantern, or even a glowstick at a rave, depending. We were carrying all twelve of them, in case we found ourselves in a bad situation.

  No weapons, though. Just the Puukko knife at my belt, and that would be less than useful against a ghost.

  We started searching for the cave.

  There had to be a cave, right? If we wanted to go beneath the island, there had to be a cave that would let us go inside. Either that, or we were waiting for Helen to open the door for us via straight plagiarism from Ali Baba or Gandalf…

  Nothing.

  “We’re getting pranked,” I said, as I stomped a path through a virgin thicket. I was wearing camp shorts with tall hiking boots, but some of the upper branches made it past the thick leather and my knees were getting cut to pieces. “There’s an Afterworld betting parlor, and this is some ghost version of Rat Race where Helen’s got fifty bucks riding on how far she can push us before we tell her to go fuck herself—”

  “Found it!” Mike called.

  “Oh, thank God,” I said, and turned to join the boys.

  My psychic sense twitched.

  I dropped to the ground without thinking. I landed flat in the thorns, true, but tiny scratches and punctures are a small sacrifice when bullets are involved. I heard Mike and Speedy shouting through the gunfire, and yelled at them to take cover.

  Whoever was working the gun stopped firing. “Ms. Blackwell?” called a vaguely familiar voice.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I whispered. “Smiling Goon.”

  Bullets. He was using actual bullets. Hanlon’s marching orders had changed: it was now A-OK to turn Mulcahy’s wife into a leaky corpse if he could get away with it. Or maybe Smiling Goon was just fed up with me—he wouldn’t be the first, and I’d make damned sure he wouldn’t be the last.

  “I will assume you are not dead,” came Smiling Goon’s voice from the other side of the thicket. “And there is nowhere for you to run, yes? Not through these thorns, not without making noise enough to find you. Come out, come out, and then we will talk.”

  “Fuck you, fuck you,” I muttered to myself. “And then I would die.”

  I grabbed some nylon cord out of my pack, left my flashlight lying on the ground behind me, and started to crawl towards Smiling Goon’s voice.

&nb
sp; It wasn’t hard. Smiling Goon really should have asked Hanlon what my husband and I do for fun on weekends. My best friends are soldiers and spies, and their version of entertainment comes just short of murder. Sparky and I compete in this one paintball league that should be tried in The Hague for war crimes. I know from (painful) experience that it’s actually easier to crawl through a thicket than walk through one, because down low is where the rabbits live. Slithering through a bunch of bunny poop is nasty, true, but if you’re a smallish woman who’s resigned to a little bit of filth, it ain’t even a trick. Especially not when the local warrens have been undisturbed since Helen was alive; the trails were as big around as beach balls.

  I moved through the thicket. It was easy going, and I was wearing the jacket Darling gave me so I was camouflaged with the earth. Even with that in my favor, I needed to keep slow to stay quiet, and the Puukko knife had to come out for the tight spots. Speedy and Mike covered the sounds of my progress by shouting at Smiling Goon from the cover of the cave; Speedy hurled a few insults so ripe and choice that a second goon broke cover to take a few potshots at the cave’s entrance.

  So. Smiling Goon wasn’t alone. Good to know. I changed directions and shuffled left, and after five minutes of stealthy crawling, I was peering through the archway of the bunny trail at a pair of boots. I bided my time until he was busy laughing at something Speedy said, and yanked.

  I wasn’t trying to pull him into the thicket with me; I’m too small to drag a full-grown man anywhere. Momentum, however, is my best friend, and I had him out cold and tied up before he realized he was no longer standing. Then, I dove back into the thicket to wait.

  Sure enough, a third goon came over to check on his suddenly too-quiet friend. I watched as he prodded his friend with the toe of his boot, and then I grabbed his stationary leg. This goon let out a cry as he fell, but Speedy and Mike managed to cover that up with their running commentary.

  A kick to the head to knock him out, a few loops of cord around his wrists and ankles to keep him on the ground, and I snapped his thumbs for good measure. Done.