The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  When they stopped at the gates to the estate, Peter pressed the intercom box, announced himself, and they were buzzed through with no further communication. Byron had become rather quiet, impressed despite all the advance preparation, as they drove through the wrought-iron gates, and followed the winding drive past the trees, the patches of overgrown lawn, and up to the house itself. Leah was waiting on the front portico, in a red wrap-around skirt, and squatting on the steps beside her, his hands dangling between his knees, was a fat young man, somewhere in his twenties, wearing rumpled blue jeans and a tight black T-shirt. Peter drove the car up to the steps, and Leah came down to them; her companion slowly struggled to his feet, but remained where he was.

  Peter performed the introductions, and Leah, turning slightly and gesturing toward the man behind her, said, “And this is Angelos—he helps us around the grounds.” Like a trained animal dully waiting for its cue, Angelos lumbered down the steps and, without saying anything, began to undo the ropes that held the suitcases to the roof of the car. Diogenes, never before much of a guard dog, suddenly lurched from behind Byron's legs and, with his ears flattened back, barked a warning.

  “Dodger,” said Byron, surprised. “The man is helping us out.” Angelos, his hands still working at the ropes, fixed the dog with a sullen, undisturbed stare.

  “I've put your friend into the room next to yours,” Leah said to Peter. “It also looks down toward the water.” Byron raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Sounds good to me,” and they all set to unpacking the car and trailer. Angelos, as soon as he saw they were assuming the work, gradually cut back his own efforts until, by the time Peter and Byron were dragging Meg's cartons into the foyer, he had limited himself to a silent supervisory function. Meg, gathering up some ragged textbooks and paperbacks that had spilled through the bottom of a burst bag, asked him if he was related to Nikos or Leah in any way. After some consideration, he answered, in a very slow voice, that he was “sort of a cousin.” His disconnected manner, coupled with the deliberation of his speech, made her wonder if perhaps he was slightly retarded. She wondered why nothing had been said about him earlier—and if he also lived on the estate. Once she had collected all of the books and put them into one of the cartons, he did hitch up his jeans, which were suspended, almost magically, underneath the huge swell of his belly, and offer to carry it in for her. His smile was moist and simple. Meg thanked him and asked him, in passing, if Nikos was away that day.

  “No,” Angelos replied, a little more readily, “he's with the dogs, I guess.”

  Once inside, from directly above her, like the voice of God, she heard Byron saying “Can you believe that?” His head was hanging over the balcony from the upstairs hall, and he was pointing down at the pebble mosaic. “That thing belongs in a museum.”

  “It probably was,” said Peter, appearing just behind him.

  “Do you know the story?” Byron asked, his voice rebounding off the walls and floor of the open space. “Unless I'm mistaken, the lady on the right, the one in the buff, is Diana, goddess of the hunt. The guy with the dogs is Actaeon, the young hunter who accidentally stumbled into the secret grotto where Diana was about to bathe. The goddess got so pissed off at his intrusion that she threw some of the sacred water into his face, which turned him into a stag. When he tried to escape, his own dogs, unaware that this was their master transformed, tore him to pieces.”

  “Nice story,” Peter said, dryly.

  Leah, also at the upstairs railing now, seemed as uninterested as ever. Angelos scratched himself under the arm. Diogenes, timidly venturing into the house, spotted his master's head up above and started squirming in frenzied circles, trying to figure out how to get there. But even when he discovered the broad white staircase, he was reluctant to go up it. Instead, he sat on his haunches at the bottom, baying as if at a distant and sinister moon.

  Eight

  NIKOS DID NOT appear at all that day, which they spent unpacking their bags and books. Byron's room, one door down from Meg and Peter's, was furnished with a king-sized but uncanopied bed, a pair of marquetry end tables, and a huge bureau with a kneehole—Byron took one look at it and decided that he could turn it into a very serviceable desk. The only alterations he'd have to make would be to remove, or somehow cover, the ponderous mirror that surmounted it; the idea of confronting himself every time he looked up from his work was too disconcerting.

  Peter's arm had begun to hurt him again, an effect of all the lifting and carrying, no doubt, and while he was taking a shower and running the hot water over it, Meg took Byron on a tour of the grounds—around some of the serpentine pathways, to the gazebo, down to the water, where they found the boathouse sealed with a rusty padlock, and then to an area off to the west of the house that even she and Peter had not explored. Here, they found what Meg presumed must be Nikos's cottage, a small, somewhat dilapidated bungalow with dented screens in the windows, a canvas hammock hanging from a bough in the front yard, and what she guessed was a kennel, at that moment unoccupied, in back. Surrounding the house were tiny plots of well- tended garden, each section demarcated by strips of wire mesh attached to wooden posts; in one section there were tomatoes, in another lettuce, in a third several things neither Meg nor Byron could identify—herbs of some sort, they concluded. Over everything, there hung a remarkable stillness and calm.

  “Think anybody's home?” Byron whispered, deferring to the hushed atmosphere of the place.

  “I hope not,” said Meg. She felt like a character in a fairy tale who had unwittingly stumbled upon the witch's hut.

  “You've even got your own vineyard?” Byron said, directing her attention to the rows of vines ranged along one side of the cottage.

  “Nikos's private label. Don't worry,” she said, “I'm sure he'll show up with a bottle tonight.”

  But Nikos, to Meg's surprise, did not turn up at the dinner table; while Leah served a less exotic meal than she had the previous time—roast chicken, baked potatoes, fresh vegetables from the garden—Byron enthusiastically held forth on the myriad wonders of the place. In addition to the hall mosaic, he'd already turned up several other antiquities of tremendous, if somewhat arcane, interest: a polished urn on a pedestal in the upstairs corridor, depicting the flaying of Marsyas by the enraged Apollo; a fragment of wall fresco in which only a sliver of moon and a chariot wheel were still discernible; a carved capital on one of the house's interior columns which, to the best of his knowledge, showed Diana on one of her nocturnal hunts.

  “As far as I can tell,” he said to Peter, “your grandfather had a taste for myths of the moon. Diana was its goddess.”

  Peter helped himself to another potato. “I wonder why.”

  “Well,” Byron said, “I do have one theory. Arcadia was known, to its own ancient inhabitants, as Proseleni—”

  “Why didn't you say so,” Peter interrupted with a laugh. “Of course that explains it.”

  “And Proseleni, translated, means ‘before the moon.’ That's how ancient they thought their country was—the haunt, way back when, of satyrs, nymphs, and centaurs.”

  “Is that why we've got our phallic friend on the back lawn?” Meg joked.

  “Oh, the fountain,” Byron said. “Probably so. Of course, it's also a priapic fertility symbol. Supposed to make everything from crops to babies grow.”

  Meg's eyes dropped to her plate; it was no more than that, but Byron wanted to kick himself all the same. Babies and pregnancy were still a touchy subject, and he should have thought of that before he'd spoken. He quickly went on to how astonished he was at the size of the estate, and the lush, verdant look of it, until Leah, much to his relief, came in to clear the table.

  The crisp night air, and the exertions of the day, had left them all feeling tired unusually early, and after fixing up a bed for Diogenes in a corner of the kitchen, with a bowl of water and his favorite blue bath mat, Byron followed Meg and Peter upstairs. His room, illuminated only by the moonlight filtering through the ga
uze curtains, had a dreamlike quality to it, with great, pale shadows swaying across the walls and ceiling. He closed the window near the bed and then stood for a moment looking out on the dark, sweeping lawn. The bay beyond was as smooth and black as the floor of the room he'd seen at the rear of the house. The room that faced out on the statue. The priapic statue. Damn—he hated himself for giving Meg that pang. He'd have to be more careful . . . for however long he stayed. Would he really be able to settle in here for the summer? The house itself was a wonder—a treasure trove of bizarre antiquities. It was amazing to find himself living in a place where he was surrounded by objects and artifacts he'd been studying in classics textbooks for most of his life. But to remain there as a guest, a middleman, week after week . . . that he wasn't so sure about. He could hear the sound of the tap running in the master bathroom next door—was it Meg, washing up?—and already he felt more lonely than he had in ages. He put on his pin-striped pyjamas, the bottoms flapping six inches above his ankles, and got into bed.

  For a while, he tried to read a secondhand novel he'd picked up at the university store, Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. Graves was a happy compromise between bedtime reading and professional research, and usually Byron found his books absorbing. But not tonight. For some reason, his mind wouldn't take hold of the words; his eyes merely grazed the pages, and when he stopped at the end of a chapter, he realized he couldn't remember a thing of what he'd just read. He was listening instead, he discovered, to a barely audible and distant whining. At first, he'd thought it was the bathroom pipes sighing, then the wind in the eaves. But when he closed the book and paid attention, he could tell it was coming from downstairs; it was Diogenes, in the kitchen. He swung his legs out of the bed, hoping that Meg and Peter hadn't already been disturbed by Dodger, too.

  With a terry-cloth bathrobe thrown over his pyjamas, he crept out into the hallway; the floor was like ice beneath his feet, and he wished he'd put on some socks. He debated going back, then decided not to bother; it would take only a couple of minutes to see what was wrong with Dodger. Before going down the stairs, he glanced over the railing at the mosaic below; the pebble design was entirely obscured by the darkness of the foyer. All he could see, glistening faintly here and there, Were the strips of fine gold metal that outlined some of the figures. What a house.

  The stairs themselves were even colder than the second floor corridor; two French doors in the black-floored room beyond the foyer had been left partly open, and a cool draft stirred the air. Above the central fireplace, the white gowns of the beckoning naiads almost appeared to be swirling in the breeze; the red tags spun like pinwheels. From the kitchen, Byron heard another, and more troubled, whine.

  He passed through the dining room, and just as he pushed open the swinging door, he heard a frantic scratching sound. Fumbling along the wall, he found the light switch. Diogenes had been up on all fours, pressing against the door that led back toward the black room. When Byron turned on the light, the dog turned and bounded back across the kitchen to him, tail switching furiously.

  “What's the problem, Dodger?” Byron knelt down, scratching him on his head. “You having bad dreams?”

  The dog whined again, turned in a circle, tried to lead Byron to the rear door of the kitchen.

  “Shhh—you're going to wake up our hosts. Keep it down, boy.”

  Byron followed him to the door. “You want to explore, is that it?” he said in a low, soothing voice. “If I let you, will you quiet down? If we take a little walk, will you go to sleep? On your nice blue bath mat?”

  He swung the door open and Diogenes pressed his muzzle into the crack, then used his body to push it open the rest of the way. Confronted by another closed door at the end of the narrow passageway, he barked and turned to Byron for help.

  “Stifle it,” Byron said sternly. “No more barking.”

  He pushed it open, and Dodger raced through, his nails clicking across the polished black surface, and over to the pair of French doors which had been left ajar. Byron just had time to catch him by his collar before he managed to squeeze his fat body through the aperture.

  The fountain was directly below them, obscuring a portion of the lawn. But beyond that, Byron could make out what appeared to be several figures—one man and two women, it seemed—moving about between the boathouse and the water. At such a distance, and with fleeting clouds passing before the moon, it was difficult to be absolutely sure . . . though the figures, whoever they were, did seem to be weaving back and forth, their arms outstretched, as if they were awaiting something from the woods to the left.

  “Looks like a game,” Byron said, crouching down. “But I don't know who the players are.”

  Dodger panted excitedly and strained at Byron's hand. A moment later, something—an animal of some sort—shot out of the trees. It wasn't a dog, that much Byron could tell, but what was it? The figures moved to catch or trap it—Byron heard a woman's laughter—but the animal scrambled, eluding their grasp. The man—fat, clumsy, was it that Angelos character?—made a lunge, but it appeared to butt him away with its head. A goat? Suddenly, there was ferocious barking, and two large dogs bolted out of the woods. The prey made a mad dash across the lawn, toward the protection of the trees on the far side, and disappeared into them just as the dogs were about to close in. The figures followed them, joined now by one more—a second man, crooked at the waist, who loped along, his arms swinging wide at his sides, like some kind of animal himself. Even after they had all vanished into the black border of trees, Byron stood transfixed, his bare feet almost frozen to the floor. Dodger whined, his ears twitching back, and a second later Byron heard it too—a low, tremulous whistling sound, as natural and disembodied as wind itself, musical but without melody, and unlike anything he had ever heard before. Mingled with it, on the cool night air, was the faint but acrid smell of smoke.

  Nine

  IT HAD TAKEN her the better part of the week, but Meg was at last beginning to see some order emerge; when they'd finally succeeded in chipping the padlock off the boathouse door—no one knew where the key might be—she'd found the inside of the room a musty, dust-covered jumble of empty glaze buckets, sagging shelves, broken pottery, and uncleaned tools. The windows hadn't been washed in years, it seemed, and only a gray-green light from the water struggled in through the thick film on the glass. That, she decided, would have to be the first order of business. With a bucket and sponge, she cut away at the grime on the row of windows facing the bay; then, with the interior well-lighted, she went to work on the floor of rough wooden planks, sweeping up the pottery shards, crumpled rags, old newspaper. She dumped the refuse into one of the plastic garbage cans that had been labeled by some unknown hand, on a faded strip of adhesive tape, “Seasoned Clay.”

  Almost everything she'd need in the way of equipment was already there; whoever had worked in the studio before her had known what he or she was doing. In the center of the room, there was a wide stone-topped table and a wooden stool, and between two of the windows, an electric wheel that, after a little tinkering, kicked into gear. In the corner farthest from the door, and dominating the room, was a dull-green kiln the size and shape of a huge wine barrel. It rested in front of the wide, sealed boat doors, at the lip of the corrugated ramp which led down and into the water. Meg first wiped clean the metal sides of the kiln, then heaved the lid up; there was nothing inside. When she closed it again, the steel hinge refused to let go; she fiddled with the screws, the lid started to fall, then caught again. She pressed the screw harder, and this time she was just able to get her fingers clear before the support bar retracted and the top came down with a whomping thud. The machine rocked slightly on its cinder-block base. She'd have to get Peter or Byron to help her realign it securely.

  But with the exception of such minor adjustments, everything was ready to go. Taking inventory of what was there and what she'd brought with her from Mercer, she sat down on the wooden stool and made up a list of what she needed to order:
some chemicals, a new glazing brush, a spare fettling knife. She had just finished the list, and was about to turn off the lights and leave, when Angelos appeared in the open doorway.

  “Morning,” she said. Then, not knowing what to say next, added, “So how do you like the place now?”

  Angelos's eyes roamed around the room. Meg wasn't sure he knew what he was supposed to be noticing. She wasn't sure why he was there, either.

  “Are you looking for something?” she asked, hesitantly.

  “No,” he replied, his eyes returning to her. “The door was open. You will be working here?”

  Meg explained, as simply as she could, that she would be making pottery—"pots,” she actually said—and statues. Then it occurred to her that Angelos might know something about the previous tenant.

  “Do you know who put all these things in here?” she asked, and Angelos, after thinking for a moment, shrugged and said, “A girl—she worked in the house. But not anymore.”

  “And she left all this stuff?” Meg said, more to herself than to Angelos. He shrugged again and said, “She was fired.”

  That was probably as much of the mystery as she'd ever unravel with Angelos's help, she thought. Still, it was at least a start.

  She got up from the stool, stuck her list in the pocket of her blouse, and went to the door. “Enough for today,” she said, reaching for the light switch. But Angelos didn't move. His body was still blocking the doorway, and Meg suddenly stopped before turning off the overhead light. “I think I'm going to close up shop now,” she repeated. Angelos pushed a hank of greasy black hair off his forehead; then, as if what she'd said had finally registered, he slowly stepped backwards out of the doorway, and waited silently for her as she pulled the sticky door shut. To her surprise, he walked back toward the house with her, still silent and occasionally sneaking a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. What, she wondered, could be going though his mind? When they approached the fountain, he stopped and, pointing at the statue of the satyr, said, “The things you will be making—they will be like this?” There was a smile on his face now, or what might have passed for one among the fat folds of skin. Meg said, “No,” firmly, “not at all like that.”