His father was most likely dead, but that night Colby found himself missing the man more than he ever had before.
He fell asleep early on that cool summer night to the sound of his mother pleading with her husband not to be so hard on Colby, to give him some time to adjust. “He’s not used to this kind of life, Rodney. You must understand...”
But he woke up to a different voice.
It’s time.
Colby sat up in bed, his skin cold and clammy for reasons that had nothing to do with the crisp sea air.
Come meet your father, Colby. It is time.
The voice was dark and resonant, and it somehow seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
Colby expelled a big panting breath, not understanding what was happening…even as he found himself climbing out of bed and pulling the small steamer trunk he’d just unpacked a few hours ago from his closet. He packed again. Not with school memorabilia and texts this time, but pants and a few shirts. Also, the fisherman’s sweater. He’d hung a brass-framed grainy wedding picture of his parents on the wall, after discovering it abandoned in the attic. That had been the summer he’d come home to find his mother living with and married to a man who looked nothing at all like his father. He took the picture, too.
He also stopped in the kitchen and pulled everything that would not spoil out of the cupboards, jars of Marmite, tins of peas and beets. The beans he’d turned his nose up at earlier—he packed those, too, along with a few packages of the cheap butter biscuits his mother liked to dip in her morning tea. He then filled several close-top Tupperware containers with water and put those into the trunk as well.
As he closed the latch, there was stirring in the rooms beyond. “Do you hear that?” his mother’s voice asked. “I think somebody’s in the house. Moving around the kitchen.”
“Probably your son rootin’ ‘round for caviar,” his stepfather grumbled back, his voice mutinous with the desire not to get up.
Colby closed the front door behind him on any further speculation.
The steamer trunk, filled as it was with water, jars, and all manner of tinned food weighed a bloody ton. Colby had to drag it down the steep cobbled roads towards the docks, which caused quite a bit of clang.
Lights came on, and a few voices he recognized as friends of his mother’s called out to him, “Colby Kreft, is that you?
“Whatever are you up to at this time of night?”
“Why are you creating all that clatter?”
“Crikey, is that a steamer trunk you’ve got?”
“Where are you off too, then?”
“Agnes never mentioned to me about you having any holiday plans…”
So many voices asking him so many questions. But Colby answered none of them. One foot trudged in front of the other as he dragged the heavy steamer trunk behind him down to the docks. He’d only just learned his stepfather’s trade at the previous summer break, and the entire time he’d been happy to let the angry and often hungover man handle all the navigational work.
But tonight, under the light of a full moon hanging low in the sky, he launched the boat expertly, before guiding it into the Celtic Sea. With no fear. No hesitation. Just an all-consuming need to go…where? He did not exactly know.
For the next three weeks he sailed toward the voice. South, then East, with no compass needed. The food lasted him for two of those weeks. After that, he used his stepfather’s nets to procure fish.
He might have eaten the fish raw. He knew there were certain kinds one could do that with, but he wasn’t yet so good of a fisherman that he could tell the difference between the kind that was safe and the kind that would fill him with worms. And though the voice had not appeared in his head again, he had the notion that it would be awfully bad to contract a parasite. Or catch a cold. Or even so much as smell badly.
So, he cooked his fish with the small cook stove his stepfather kept on the boat. He also wore the sweater at night to stay warm, and he took care with his hygiene. He bathed with cold sea water every other day and even went so far as to clip his nails and pomade his hair, just as if he were still under the dress code at his boarding school.
Eventually he reached Greece, but instead of stopping at Mykonos or Santorini, or any of the other popular island destinations where the families of his monied schoolmates liked to spend their holidays, he instinctively steered the boat toward a smaller island, one not listed on the map he’d found in a small teak rack above the boat’s chart table.
There Colby came upon a single dock.
This island, as it turned out, wasn’t covered in houses, like all the others he’d passed. In fact, he could only see one structure other than the dock. However, that one structure elicited more awe from Colby’s confused mind than any other he’d seen so far on this trip.
Crikey! Is that a bloody castle? he wondered, looking over what could only be described as a rampart wall..
Yes…yes…it was. However, it wasn’t one of those crumbling stone ruins all Abernathy boys had to trudge through at least once or thrice during their tenure at the historical school. It had a neo-classical feel to it with tall Greek columns and a curved front. As if it had been commissioned by someone who appreciated the security of old-fashioned castles with rampart walls, but also wanted a place that looked like a temple where people could come in robes to worship their gods.
Or god. Hadn’t he read in his classical history course that the Greeks used to build separate temples for each of their gods, who apparently couldn’t share a chapel, like the Abernathy boy’s own Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
And somehow Colby knew…
This was where the voice lived. The one that had called him here to meet his father.
He turned the boat off, not caring if it was stolen. No, that wasn’t quite right. More like he was unable to care about the boat he left unsecured. It had served its purpose, and now as the sun set in the distance, Colby walked forward through the rampart walls arched entrance, dragging the steamer trunk behind him, and utterly focused on reaching that voice.
When he entered the castle through the unlocked front door, he took a moment or two to drop the steamer trunk and closed the door behind him. But after that, he kept walking forward, not even pausing to take in the grand foyer, which was filled with ivory columns and statues with a ceiling that looked like it could have been painted by Michelangelo himself.
The need to go to the voice was more urgent now, yet he bypassed the grand staircase, to walk up a much narrower and darker set of wooden ones just beyond a kitchen. Servant stairs, he guessed, remembering all the dark stairways at Abernathy that had been roped off throughout his stay there. They were too dangerous to employ now but had been in regular use by all the Abernathy staff all the way up until the current mid-century.
These stairs groaned under his footsteps but seemed sturdy enough. He wondered if he would have turned around even if they were as dangerous as the ones at Abernathy and had the stomach-churning feeling he would not. The voice, it was…
He searched for the word…compelling him somehow. Guiding him as surely as a chain, even though it had only said a few words to Colby.
Come meet your father, Colby. It is time.
A strange hissing and screeching greeted him as soon as he stepped on to the second floor’s landing. It sounded like some sort of reptile. But much, much bigger. And the terrible sound was coming from up above…
But even then, Colby could not stop walking. Like a Dr. Who Cyberman with instructions to keep moving forward, no matter what the human inside desired him to do.
He finally came to a stop outside a door. It was much larger than the ones in the castles he’d toured on school trips. Those doors had been tiny. Some little more than five feet tall. But this one was twice that, with a steel knocker. The knocker looked antique to Colby, the kind of thing commissioned by medieval kings. It was shaped like a dragon’s head, with two large yellow sapphire eyes, and a golden ring hung from
its mouth.
The door was intimidating to say the least, and Colby had the sense that the voice was behind it. But for some odd reason, instead of walking right in, he lifted his hand to the golden ring and lifted it, knocking it against the heavy wood door once, then twice.
“Come in,” a voice on the other side of the door said.
And, yes, it was the same. Dark and resonant. Could this be? Could this be his father?
With a racing heart, Colby reached down and turned the gold encrusted knob.
He entered an office even bigger than the pictures he’d seen of the queen’s at Buckingham Palace. In fact, it more resembled the black and white ones he’d seen in his history books of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. Except this room was even more impressive in color, with red velvet furniture and vaulted baroque ceilings, covered in gold.
At this point, Colby might have wondered if he really had stepped inside an episode of Dr. Who. But that show had been cancelled back in ‘89 and of course, the BBC, could never have afforded so grand a set.
Also, none of the doctors had even come close to looking quite as intimidating as the man standing behind the office’s carved oak desk. He was easily the largest man Colby had ever seen outside that Andre the Giant fellow from the American wrestling. Yet, he wasn’t bulky like that fellow or ugly. He was handsome enough to steal any fellow’s bird, and so muscular, Colby doubted that most of those bird-cheated fellows would be brave enough to fight back if he did.
“You’re here. Finally,” the man said in the same dark and resonant voice that had woken him up in his little fishing village. He gave Colby a testy look as if the boy had kept him waiting a preposterous amount of time. “Fetch me a cup of the Thessaly Tsipouro. We’re down to our last bottle from this year’s shipment and, I have no idea where your father left it.”
Colby’s eyes widened. “My father…is he here?”
The enormous man blinked, his eyelids setting down for a beat too long over his dark brown eyes before coming back up. “Yes, he’s in the garden. He shall be your second order of business after the tsipouro. Third, you will clean yourself up and see to my prisoner upstairs. He is to receive one plate of meat per day. And nothing more.”
Colby startled at the unexpected volley of commands, so many protests rising up inside his head. First of all, Colby wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the “prisoner,” something or someone he suspected might be the source of the strange screeches and hisses still echoing throughout the house. And of course, he wanted to see the father, who left when he was five. First off. Not after he fetched this mysterious stranger’s sip-oh-ro—whatever that was. Some sort of liquor, perhaps, but really, who knew. The request was just baffling.
However, none of these protests seemed to be able to make the short journey from his head to his lips. And for some odd reason, instead of asking any of the many questions that had piled up during his three-week journey to get here, he turned and left the room right away.
For reasons he could not explain to himself, he felt oddly compelled to search this estate until he found exactly what the man wanted. It took the better part of the night. He scoured the kitchen, munching on a few rolls of stale sourdough country bread he’d found in an ancient tin breadbox to sate his hunger. Then he turned around every bottle in the drawing room’s wall-to-wall heavy oak built-in liquor cabinet. There were plenty of ouzos, also scotches, brandy, tequilas, vodkas, wines, and quite a few bottles with Chinese writing on the labels. But no tsipouro.
Not finding it anywhere downstairs, he proceeded back up to the second floor, and opened every door there, save the one with the crystal knob. He found a library full of books. There was even one lying open inside a low light glass case that looked exactly like the original pressing of the Gutenberg Bible, Colby once saw on a school trip to the British Library. Though of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Could it?
He also found bedrooms, baroque and covered in gold with other priceless gems embedded in both the furniture and the walls. It might have struck Colby as tacky but not for the certainty that every single sparkling gem didn’t have even a hint of costume or zirconia in it.
However, he could not find the liquor the man behind the desk had requested. Finally, he took a deep breath and ascended another set of back stairs to the top floor.
This floor was much narrower than the first two, with only a couple of doors on either side of the stairs he’d taken up here. To the left side of the servant stairs, behind the door furthest from where he stood, Colby could hear the strange hissing and screeching, even louder than before.
Colby quickly chose to open the very first door to the right of the stairs. Inside, he found a humble bedroom. There was a cot, and one of those standing TV trays, his stepfather used to eat his tea whenever the footie was on along the back wall. And in front of the wall to his right, sat a rack, upon which hung at least ten double-breasted waistcoats, and their accompanying trousers. Not so much suits, he sensed, but some kind of uniform. A servant uniform, much like the ones in the black-and-white photos hanging on the walls of the common room in his Abernathy house—the photos that hearkened back to a time before scholarships, when each Abernathy boy came to the school with his own personal attendant.
On the left side of the room, a small television sat on top of a pinewood clothing dresser. And next to it, an ironing board was leaned against the wall. The thinnest coat of dust lay on top of the small television, but other than that, all the room’s items seemed to be simply waiting for someone to return and make use of them.
Colby walked further into the room to perform another tsipouro search but stopped when he saw the picture sitting next to the television on top of the drawer. For it was a photo of his father and his mother and Colby himself when he was only five. It was one of those cheesy studio portrait numbers from the 80s, the three of them gathered close on a green velvet couch. But nonetheless, they looked just as happy as his mother had claimed them to be…
Colby walked toward the picture, wanting to touch it, wanting to study it. Yet, he stopped short when he noticed something in the small windowsill, next to the cot. A half-drunken bottle of a white liquor. Already suspecting, Colby went over to the window and turned the long thin bottle around so that he could see its label. And yes, there were the words he’d been looking for, Thessaly Tsipouro written both in English and Greek.
Instead of going back to the picture, Colby found himself grabbing the bottle by its neck, then heading back downstairs to the liquor cabinet. He pulled out a short glass with a heavy bottom, and poured out a drink, which he placed on a small wooden tray. Then, with no thought in his head but to complete his mission, he took the drink upstairs to the strange man, setting it down in front of him with a formal bow of his head.
The man’s eyes flickered toward the glass then back up to Colby. He didn’t thank him. Or give him so much as a nod of acknowledgement. But in the next moment, Colby felt his chest lighten and the arms he didn’t realized he’d been flexing suddenly relax.
“Your father is in the garden,” the man reminded him.
His father! Colby rushed out of the odd man’s office without further comment or question. It almost felt like he’d been released from some unseen force as he ran down the stairs and out to the gardens behind his house. To where the man said his long-lost father could be found.
The man hadn’t lied, Colby soon found out. He did find his father in the garden.
His body lay upon the ground, next to a bushel of roses, a pair of sheers gripped tight in one hand, and the other hand still clutching at his chest. But as for the body itself, it had mummified, its skin completely blackened and leathered over a skeleton that seemed to still be yelling out in death.
This was his father. Not the man behind the desk, but the putrid body lying here before him in a black pool of God only knew what.
As the sun rose, Colby looked upon his father for the first time. Then he wretched, vomiting up every bit of the me
ager lunch he’d eaten while searching for the tsipouro.
Then he sobbed. Sobbed and sobbed like the little boy he’d been when his father had left and never come back.
He had no idea how long he went on like this, but eventually the large man appeared, coming to a stop just a few feet away from Colby.
His eyes flickered dispassionately over the body, then he pointed toward a nearby greenhouse enclosed in glass. “You’ll find a wheelbarrow in there. Bury him in the field beyond the east side of the garden. Next to your grandfather. It’s best to keep your lineage in a row, don’t you think?”
Colby didn’t answer with an opinion. Couldn’t answer with an opinion. His throat felt closed in a way that could not form words. Instead of answering he fetched the wheelbarrow along with some gloves and did exactly as the large man instructed. Digging a deep hole to the left of a simple grave marker that read COLBY KREFT 1917-1966 carved across it.
Colby filled in the hole, then went looking for a piece of wood. He found one easily. For someone had carved several planks and placed them under a tarp. His father? His grandfather? One of the other Colbys who’d come before him?
It didn’t matter. Colby carved the birth year from his parents wedding certificate into the piece of wood, a dash, and then the current year. He placed the marker, and returned to the house, where he cleaned himself up in a tiny bathroom just off his father’s living quarters. Then he donned one of the attendant uniforms and returned to the kitchen, where he made open the freezer to find several zip lock bags full of meat. He knew this because someone…most likely his father…had written words like venison, pork, beef, fish, and so on outside of each one.
Colby wanted to cry…but found he couldn’t. So instead he cooked and thawed a bag marked steak, and then plated it and took it to the thing still screeching upstairs.
Damianos Drákon. That was his master’s name. He was extraordinarily rich, and he remained that way, even during recessions and the kind of Black Monday-like stock market crashes that had investors jumping out of windows in Paternoster Square. His English was perfect but tinted with an accent which seemed to Colby more ancient than Greek. But the accent didn’t really matter, did it? They didn’t talk much. Damianos—or Anos as he told his business partners to call him when attempting to cast an illusion of friendship, didn’t pretend to consider Colby a partner or friend. He barely spoke to him for any reason beyond command and instruction. And Colby rarely asked him questions beyond, “Will there be anything else, sir.”
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