The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  The geese and mallards, giving up on the couple, went back with honks and quacks of disappointment to the shade from whence they had come. Motionless for a while, the two regarded a dovecote behind the house, and then, without speaking, turned to their boat.

  “I think if we continued around the bay, to the south, we might find a picnic spot.”

  “Yes, I thought I saw something that way when we came in.”

  The two of them shoved the boat off the shelf of decaying plants, Charles boarding first and Elizabeth hopping on board with the mooring line afterwards. When the water was deep enough, Charles dropped the motor to its upright position and started up. Cutting across the rough half-moon of the bight, they found, as they had hoped, a small beach at its further end. The map gave the place’s name as xilo – wood. It was backed by an open grove of olives that climbed the steep surrounding hillside.

  Behind the silvery-bladed trees was a thicket that seemed to cover the hill up to the ridge line, and to the summit somewhere at their right. It stretched in both directions, seemingly impenetrable, swinging across the narrow neck of land back towards the distant house, now barely visible. No paths ran from or along the shore; the olive harvest would necessarily be taken to its pressing by boat, on account of the difficult and broken ground on both sides of the solitary cultivation.

  With no one about, they landed and took the craft up on the shore. Spreading a large towel as a picnic blanket, they laid out the bread, tomatoes, and cheese that they had brought from town. Elizabeth washed the tomatoes in the salt water of the sea, and Charles got busy with the bottle and two metal cups from home. They were out in the open, away from any shade, and the sun beat down violently upon their little feast.

  “I saw that bit, with Panagiotis, in the shop.”

  “What bit?”

  “Don’t be naive: the way he was pawing you under the pretence of showing us that brochure.”

  “What? Oh, he was just trying to impress himself. You don’t think for a second . . . ?”

  Charles, surly from his sense of unavenged wrong, the sun, and the wine, which was acting quickly, said nothing. Instead, he locked his hand around Elizabeth’s ankle, pulling her slowly across the rucking towel towards him.

  “Come off it, now; you don’t think I’m about to do it out here in broad daylight, do you? Don’t you have a book to read?” she teased lazily, with a half-suppressed giggle, making no effort to defend herself.

  They awoke, sated and indolent, in the shade of the enormous fig tree to which they had removed an hour before. The figs, overly ripe with no one to collect them, lay half-burst and rotting under its branches. Wavelets were coming in slightly higher, a sign of shifting breeze. The sun still rode high in the heavens, and a profound stillness infused the air about them.

  “Come on, get a move on,” Charles yawned, throwing Elizabeth’s tank top at her ruddy head as she stretched, arching her back. She flicked off the corner of the towel that had covered her in her sleep. Something about sleeping under a fig tree, Elizabeth thought, but she could not remember the bit of folklore associated with it; only that for Greeks it portended something or other.

  Nude, she lifted herself to her feet and stretched out a leg, bending it, to pull on her shorts. She left her shirt off, tucking it partly into a pocket, so it trailed her from behind. They packed up the remains of their picnic for loading on the boat.

  Everything aboard, they went through the drill of setting off: Charles aft, shirtless himself now, ready to lower and set the motor, only the nose of the raft remaining on the strand, waiting for Elizabeth’s push. She shoved and jumped in, and they drifted out into the clear water, which deepened quickly. The particoloured stony bottom was exquisitely visible, like pebbles in the bottom of a fish tank, and the boat rocked slightly as Charles commenced his routine. A few pulls to clear the vapour, a short rest, and try again. Only this time, instead of faithfully catching, the outboard refused to start.

  “It’s been out in the sun unprotected so long, it’ll need a few more turns before it starts up; it’s vapour lock,” he told Elizabeth unconcernedly. A few more turns, and the result was the same. Charles rested a moment, and motioned for her to move forward, in case he fell backward pulling the cord. He clenched his fist around the curved plastic handle, and yanked powerfully, almost viciously, at the line, but the only sound was the spin of the disengaged rotor in the quiet air. Sweat was beading on his face as the boat began to drift out slowly.

  “If I open the tank cover, it’ll get some air,” he said, screwing off the top for a moment before replacing it. With the beach near one corner of the bay, they would soon drift out of it, into water that was becoming more disturbed by the rising puffs of wind. He pulled once more, and almost fell over backwards, as the cord spun freely in the direction of his pull.

  “Christ, we’ve got to get it back to shore, and hold it steady while I work on it.”

  Elizabeth did not reply. She was the superior rower of the two; without saying anything, she took up the plastic oars provided and began the task of pulling them back to the shallows. Beads of perspiration rolled down her freckled breasts, while Charles, in black anger, cursed Greek maintenance.

  When they had re-entered their picnic cove, Elizabeth, taking off her shorts and donning her plastic sandals, entered the water to hold the raft steady while Charles repeatedly tried to start the engine. Once or twice, during the next half-hour, it gave a weak cough, in promise of something more substantial; but after that the machine’s cooperation stopped. He tried the various knobs and buttons, without any effect. Tugs on the cord became more infrequent; finally, nearing exhaustion, he sat down in disgust, Elizabeth regarding him curiously, her eyebrows raising in her question-mark expression.

  “What next?”

  “I don’t know. It’s impossible to go along the shore in either direction – perhaps go up and look about, try to get up on the ridge. There must be a trail or path through it, it can’t be as bad as it looks from here. Maybe I can get the attention of the archaeologists diving at the wreck: I’m sure that once they finish, they’d help out and tow us back. Might be a path along the top, where I could get back to the house we saw, and see if anyone is there now. They might have a way of signalling back to Tiflos. Then again, perhaps someone is anchored around here. The main thing is to go up, where I can see.”

  “Well, one thing’s sure, I’ll never be able to row us across: it must be two kilometres back, and I’d never outdo the current. You go up, if you’re so keen on it, and I’ll stay here and swim and watch our things.”

  “At worst, if we have to overnight here, I’m sure Panagiotis will come out looking in the morning,” Charles said; then, seeing the hint of contempt forming in Elizabeth’s eyes, hastily decided then and there to do as much as possible to get help from anyone who happened to be on or near the island. Anything but have his own incompetence put on display for the leering boat-concession owner.

  So they pulled the boat in, and Charles started up the hill towards the encompassing bush. He had put on a shirt and long pants to protect against the snagging burrs and thorns. Elizabeth tied the inflatable firmly to a solid onshore stump with the boat’s long mooring line; still nude, she swam out to the craft and climbed into it, to use it as a diving platform-cum-floating sun deck.

  In fifteen minutes, Charles had nearly reached the wave of greenery and its precursor, an almost tangible wall of humid heat. The route through the olive grove had steepened quickly, the pebbly orange-brown soil changing to gravel, except where, beneath each tree, the small stones had been cleared. Footing was difficult because of the slope; he would have to watch it on the way down, or he would be in for a nasty slide and tumble. He stopped for a couple of minutes in the shadow of a tree, catching his breath, and viewed his wife far below, a small brown figure diving yet again from the useless boat. Her plunge into the water carried no sound at this height. Wiping the sweat, which was quickly condensing on his face now that he
was out of the sun, he struggled to his feet and dusting the seat of his pants, trudged up towards the thicket.

  He saw then that he was following the faintest of narrow tracks, with fewer pebbles to roll on, the only route where he could be reasonably sure of his balance Had he not been forced on to it by the nature of the terrain, he doubted he would have spotted it.

  Almost at the lower edge of the enormous thicket, which was twice his height and unbelievably dense, he saw with relief an opening in the thorny barrier. Even more than the maquis on Tiflos, this was almost solid – so grown together that the tangled bush would tear to shreds anyone daring the leafy mess. He was all the more thankful then that his path continued into some sort of tunnel pointing uphill into the heart of the jungly vegetation.

  He turned once more, looking back at the raft, and could only vaguely make out the sprawled form of his resting wife basting in the sun, limbs spread out. Swinging round, he bent his head and entered the dark tube that ran through the plants.

  Almost immediately, his nostrils were struck by a rank smell, confirming his suspicion that this was an animal track which, although it lacked the distinctive sweet smell of their excreta, might have been made by goats. The reek was stronger when he went a few yards further in. A few long hairs of different colours were twisted among the nearest branches; these he could not identify as belonging to this beast or that. The light was largely filtered out by the intermingled boughs that formed a solid roof above, although here and there a clear beam shone through, showing innumerable dust motes dancing in the pillars of light.

  Only a little bit further on, Charles hesitated; once into this maze, he was on his own. If something happened, it would be impossible for rescuers to spot him from the air, assuming that the passage through the thicket was totally enclosed, as it seemed to be.

  Beyond that thought, there was a deeper reluctance – he did not like the word “fear”, it was too unmanly – that held him back from immediately continuing. Something that was not quite right, probably only an impulse in the limbic stem, the reptilian brain, Aristotle’s dragon, warning against a place where he might suddenly come up against – what?

  This is the physical world, he thought to himself, and there is no reason to be frightened. It was only natural to react to dark, enclosed spaces smelling of animal; it probably had something to do with deep-based instinct. The point of it was to suppress the irrational notion that something other than a goat was lurking in the tangle of greenery: worrying would do no good. The main thing was to attain the summit of Stefáni, perhaps three to four hundred feet above him now. He seemed to remember it as being clear of shrubbery from his distant survey of the day before. Once up, he could orient himself, spot any trails, and conceivably even get help. In spite of any nagging doubt, he would have to carry on.

  Charles went up, suddenly feeling damp and clammy. Sometimes he had to duck low as the path twisted along, even to the point of moving on all fours now and then. The height of the passage allowed only an inconvenient crouch that left his back aching after a few minutes. He kept lower than was necessary, after having scraped his uncovered scalp on some thorns and losing a few hairs that way.

  Not long after, that which he had hoped against happened: the game trail split. Charles reached down at the junction, plucked up three flattish stones, and piled them on each other, marking the path by which he had come. It was most unlikely they would be disturbed: from the look of the many spider webs hanging down, it had been days, or longer, since any beast had wandered through.

  Not much further on, he saw the turds of some largish animal. No sheep, goat or dog had left the pile. From its size, it must have been something bigger, but Charles was baffled when he tried to match it to any animal he knew. Whatever it was, it ate meat: bits of white bone, undigested, poked through the fecal mess, which from its dryness must have been there weeks, if not months.

  Beyond that, still plodding uphill, the going often like climbing up a narrow staircase, he came to another junction in the trail. He did not mark it, since the spoor he had seen would be sufficient for that purpose. Not far from there, no more than a few yards, was a place where the dusty tunnel divided into three; again, he did not blaze it – with only the one way down, he was sure that was unnecessary.

  From there, things were a bit more straightforward, although the dust, thick on the ground between the exposed roots and long undisturbed, irritated his lungs. He stopped at least twice, his sides heaving from coughing fits. Once, while hawking, he heard a sharp crack deep in the brush, as if a large object or animal had moved through it; but that was impossible. Nothing bigger than a cat could manage, he was certain. Whatever it had been, it was impossible to judge its distance. He had frozen at the noise, and feeling foolish at that, went on.

  With stones piled on one another, Charles marked three or four more turn-offs before the proverbial light at the end appeared and he popped out of the labyrinth of thorn and brush. He emerged on to a slightly rounded top, open and clear to all sides—Stefáni, without question. A trig-point marker, a concrete column about three feet high, set up by the mapping authorities, stood at the highest point, a few yards in front of him. He wobbled over to it, straining to straighten out his sore and stiffened spine.

  Finally upright, he stretched a foot on to the bronze medallion implanted on the top, and with both hands flat on either side of it, he carefully lifted himself up. There was just enough room to balance on both feet. With the extra height, he could see in all directions, establishing by sight what was already known in the mind: that all land is surrounded by sea.

  To the south, the Byzantine diving operation was clearly visible, and he could make out two black dots in the water, the divers, no doubt, now heaving themselves on to the floating dock that must have been excavation headquarters. He thought of taking off his shirt to wave at them to attract their attention, but knew that he was too far off to see, unless they were looking directly at him. Even then, it was unlikely they would interpret any such action from that distance as a plea for help.

  Pivoting slowly, he looked back to the main axis of the island. The ridge spanning the waist of the island to the north was absolutely bare of paths. This half of Aghios Mikhailis showed no trace of trails or roads. Except for the tiny cove where they had landed, and the olive grove and one or two others like it, the entire southern part was covered by the same thicket in which he stood. Nor was there any sign of the predicted chapel. There was nothing to do but turn back, and wait it out until rescued.

  It was at that instant that Charles, looking back the way he had come, realized that there was something decidedly wrong. Focusing for a moment after hopping down from his perch, it slowly came to him. There were three openings in front of him, each more or less identical in appearance to the others. He simply had not thought of this possibility when, tired and half-blinded by sweat, he had entered the clearing, and so had not bothered to note his exit. And now he had no way of telling which path would lead him back below, where Elizabeth waited.

  One thing was certain: he had no desire at all, none whatsoever, to remain at the top until someone came to fetch him. The bareness of the place, the isolation, and the solitude, were beginning to weigh on him, even after the short while he had spent on the hilltop. It was evident that the trails were interconnected: as unpleasant as getting lost momentarily might be, the paths were sure to rejoin as long as he kept following the trend of the slope downward.

  Hesitating in front of the three openings for only a second longer than a moment, and with the distinct feeling that something was watching him, Charles chose the middle way on impulse, and began his descent.

  Elizabeth, by this time, was getting bored. She hauled herself on shore using the line, and with a bit of struggle, beached the boat. The light was getting longer now, and she wrapped a thin rectangle of cloth around herself, sarong-style, the way lightly packed young Antipodeans did on their rites-of-passage pilgrimages around the world’s seasi
des.

  Squatting on her heels, and wondering what was taking Charles so long, she idly contemplated the flowers that grew from the edge of the eroded low cliff backing the shore. Something in form like a hummingbird was feeding from a bloom, and, interest aroused, she went over to look at it more closely. Its movements were so rapid, together with the motion of its wings, that she could not say at first whether it was insect or bird. Then, vaguely remembering that Trochilidae were restricted to the New World, she opted for the first, and moved up slowly to inspect it more closely.

  It was then, only a foot or two away, that Elizabeth noticed the large thin sherd, its inner concavity projecting out of the red dry soil. Forgetting the creature in front of her, she tugged at the piece of pottery, freeing it with some difficulty. When she turned it over in her hand, she saw to her surprise that it was decorated.

  The glazed fragment showed a black limb upon a red background, with its muscles, defined by white line, straining against something pulling at it. Part of whatever that was was just visible where the break ran across the figure’s ankle. She looked up to the place where she had found it, but there was no other sherd protruding. Glancing down the vertical face towards her feet, she discovered among the stones a few more bits of fired clay, which she picked up. One or two were worn smooth by the sea, and had obviously been washed up from there. But another, sharp and unworn, was decorated. Turning it in her hand, she matched it perfectly to the first piece. Sun-dazzled retinas slowly adjusting to the dull glaze of the pottery, Elizabeth tried to make sense of the story it depicted. Black skin, she knew, was a convention used by ancient Greek artisans to indicate the male. All the skill of the artist had gone to convince the viewer of a great struggle: a dark moulded leg, tendons straining through the flesh in a futile effort to escape that which was wrapped around the man’s ankle.

  Whatever was holding him, was horrific, and matched no noble proportions that she had seen through all their Greek museum wanderings. Of course, she knew the old Greeks had their darker side: many a little hybrid monster or grotesque was hidden away in smaller local collections, unknown to any sanitized mythology smoothed out by a Bulfinch or a Hamilton.