by Jack Ketchum
They huddled together now. They moved up the hill. She let go of Dodgson’s arm. She wanted both hands free-just in case.
If only she could stop shivering.
They reached the door, old white painted wood. Chase knocked.
They waited. There was no answer.
He opened the door and they stepped inside.
She had time to register three small candles burning amid a shadowy jumble of tools, pots, pans, icons, clothing-and to realize that they were not alone but that someone was very near them, nearest to Xenia, when something shifted in the far comer of the room beyond the sputtering candles.
And she recognized her mother.
“Billie! Billie, come and help me, mil me over. It hurts, Billie! Please. Be a good girl.”
The woman lay in bed, face ashen, and Billie remembered that she was crippled with cancer. How could she have forgotten? “Yes, of course,” she said and moved toward the bed. It was the bedsores, naturally, that were hurting her. Even the morphine wasn’t much help anymore. She was always in pain now and would be till the end. The doctor had made that very clear.
“Billie, help me.”
She wished the nurse were here. It was really very hard to move her all alone. Even at seventy-five pounds there was a curious heaviness about her. As though she were already dead. Dead weight, they called it. She didn’t like to think that way but it was true. Besides, when she moved her alone she inevitably hurt her.
The withered hand reached out to her.
She moved closer to the bed, wondering why her movements should be so dreamlike, so slow, why her feet felt so heavy. Her mother was calling her.
“Billie…”
There was so much pain in her voice now. It had been a lovely voice once, rich and musical. Now it was all rasp and rattle. She would move her and then get her a glass of crushed ice. That would help some.
“Please, Billie… ”
“Yes, Mother,” she said but it was terribly hard to move, she actually had to struggle as though she were falling asleep on her feet-so she reached up for the gray mottled claw of a hand, knowing that if she touched it first she could get there, could cross the distance to her, could help relieve the pain, her mother’s pain, her poor dying mother who had passed away five years ago in a little green valley in Derbyshire…
The hand contracted, reached up.
DODGSON
…and Dodgson got up out of bed. He had his green-striped pajama bottoms on, and there was Margot wearing the top, making breakfast in the kitchen.
Through the window he saw the East River. The morning sun was bright. He smelled ham and eggs frying and then as he shuffled closer, rubbing sleep from his eyes, the early-morning smell of her-teeth brushed, clean damp hair herbal-scented and drying.
“You’re looking woolly this morning. Look what I’m making you.”
The ham popped in the pan.
“I see.”
Dodgson yawned and reached for her. She danced away, waving the spatula, laughing. He tried to remember how it had been last night. One of their good nights, or bad? If it was bad then this was only making up to him. Otherwise it was nice. He wondered if he had to get to work later or if he’d finally finished the manuscript. He couldn’t remember.
God! he must have done some pretty heavy drinking last night. Probably that meant it hadn’t been so great between them.
Well, never mind.
“Come here.”
He reached for her again and she darted away toward the bedroom, giggling in that high silly way of hers that he somehow dimly knew would later sound so much like the broken edge of insanity. But this was much earlier than that, wasn’t it? This was the very early days of their relationship. So how could he…?
The train of thought fell apart, unresolvable.
She stood in the doorway to their bedroom. He could see the rumpled sheets behind her. She lowered her head and smiled.
“Turn off the stove," she said.
He did. The dial felt oddly unsubstantial. For a moment the lights in the room seemed to flicker.
She unbuttoned the pajama top and let it fall off her shoulders. As always the sight of her naked aroused him. She was very pale. He could see the tiny light blue veins in her thighs and breasts, a delicate reminder of mortality.
He remembered he used to kid her about her New York pallor.
She began to back into the bedroom. Slowly he followed her. At the foot of the bed she stopped and sat down, leaned back on her elbows, spread her legs wide.
He moved closer.
She seemed to shimmer in front of him, to fall in and out of focus like a camera lens adjusting. This really was the king of hangovers, he thought. Can’t remember, can’t see.
So where was the headache?
What was going on?
He felt a thread of panic. Maybe he was sick or something, feverish.
He looked at her and it didn’t make sense-she looked as though they’d already made love that morning, had just made love in fact, though he certainly didn’t remember it. Her skin was dripping wet.
Sweat? How could that be?
It glistened in her pubic hair, dripped down her arms and across her chest. And for a moment he saw the wide deep vertical slashes on the insides of both wrists, red as raw meat yet bloodless-and then he heard her laugh again, knew the laugh to be insane now as somewhere inside him he had always known, god help him, because that was his crime against her. would always be his crime, and lowered himself down to her pale white blue-veined flesh…
JORDAN THAYER CHASE
…Tasos was angry.
“You should have let me come, Chase. You are arrogant. I could have helped you.”
“I know, Tasos.”
“You are too proud.”
They sat at the bar at Lycabettus as they had so many times before, sipping the Santorini wine that was going to make them a fortune- another fortune-and looking out across the city. The sky was clear and he could see all the way to the Acropolis, lit by huge klieg lights. Athens was only good at night, he thought.
He shook his head.
“It wasn’t pride, Tasos. You get used to handling these things alone, that’s all. I didn’t want to involve you.”
“Involve me?”
He stood up. His clothing flapped in the wind. And it was not the dapper gray three-piece suit he was wearing but rags, bloody rags and Chase saw that his eyes had already sunk deep and turned a yellowish, reddish brown, the dry empty eyes of the long dead. His left arm was gone at the shoulder. From its stump maggots dropped to the table. A large piece of slate protruded from his collarbone.
“This is involved, isn’t it?”
“She…?”
“Yes, she! She did this to me!”
"Tasos, I…”
The thing before him seemed to stagger. He saw the twisted broken angle to the legs. The sunken eyes stared balefully.
The waiter placed their bill on the table.
Tasos sat down again.
Nothing could have seemed more natural.
The ruddy tan was back. Tasos tugged at the tailored jacket and turned over the check, examining it.
“Not much,” he said. “Considering.”
‘Tasos…”
“Think nothing of it, fello.” He leaned in close. “I will pick up this check for both of us. But I think you must take the next. No?”
The lights of the city began to wink and flicker. Miles across from where they sat the Acropolis was melting, dripping, beginning to crumble under the glare of the klieg lights. Chase watched.
This also was her doing.
Chase began to struggle inside himself-not to rid himself of what he saw but to augment it. He turned the lights higher. He felt them bum fiercely now.
He felt himself bum inside her.
“Yes,” said Tasos.
The Erechtheum fell. Then the Temple of Athena Nike. Then the Parthenon.
The night faded. He was standing now,
not sitting. The table was gone.
“Good,” said Tasos distantly. “Much better.”
“Good," said his afterimage…
…the room burst into focus.
He saw Billie and Dodgson pale in the candlelight, both of them reaching out to something that wasn’t there, sleepwalkers in that place he’d just returned from.
For a moment he wondered what she’d sent them.
Giving him Tasos was a mistake. It was good to know she could make one.
Then he saw what had happened in the interim.
DODGSON
Someone was shaking him.
The bed, the mom, the dead naked woman flew apart like shattered glass.
He was back inside the shepherds’ hut and Chase had him by the shoulders, shaking him, hurting him.
“All right, all right."
"Get Billie.”
He saw her a few feet away, a strange sort of little-girl mannequin that was only half familiar. He blinked hard and went to her. Images of Margot jumped and twisted as in a funhouse mirror. Then they were gone.
He shook her too timidly at first. Her pupils were widely dilated. She was very pale. He shook her harder.
“Billie!”
“What…?”
He saw Chase in the comer, using a lighter on a rolled-up newspaper printed in three colors-Greek.
“We’re getting out of here. Come on.”
There was something in the comer, some movement in the shadows, obscured from view by the heavy table. Something that seemed to feint forward and dart quickly side to side.
Chase had the paper burning brightly. He thrust it at the thing in the shadows as though he held a knife.
Dodgson moved her toward the door.
Then for one frozen moment he saw it, all of it. The face of the old ragged shepherd leering at Chase like a bloodstained mask as he lunged and pulled back, daunted by the fire. The figures behind him in the flickering shadows that crouched over the bodies on the floor-the still, dead faces of the bodies turned upward, and wrenchingly familiar.
Xenia and Eduardo.
And the shepherds sawing, slicing with the curved blades of shearing knives, intent, expert and mundane in that surrounding as though they were shearing sheep except that they were skinning not shearing and the skin they pulled away was thin and nearly transparent where it was not bright with blood.
Xenia. It was peasants who had gotten her after all.
“Let’s go! Go!" shouted Chase. He was backing away, waving sparks from the burning paper.
It was Billie who pulled him out of there.
He saw Chase toss the paper on the bed and slam the door.
Through the window he could see something flare inside. Good, he thought. Bum. Bum all of it.
They ran down the path under the blue-black starlit sky.
Danny and Michelle were exactly where they’d left them. They didn’t need to be told-they ran in silence and it was only when they were past the row of lions and could see the smoke curl rising from the hut that they stopped and Danny asked after the others in a hushed small voice that already knew the answer.
They sat silent behind a low stone wall, smoking, thinking.
A little time and distance had allowed him to be puzzled.
“Why did it stop them?” he asked Chase.
“What?”
“Your fire. Your newspaper. They had…they were using knives.”
Chase shrugged. “I’m not sure it did. The one, maybe. The others…they were busy.”
He remembered the figures bent low over the bodies, the tearing, cutting sounds.
“The fire was just reflexive,” said Chase. “What you’d do with animals.”
He didn’t understand.
“Dodgson, didn’t you see them?”
“I…yes. For a moment, yes.”
“They were dead. Every one of them. I don’t mean Eduardo and Xenia. I mean all of them.”
And Dodgson saw a change come over the man as though some far-off battle were raging and only Chase were witness to it. The eyes were dreamy, lethargic-and pained.
Dodgson worried for him.
“Let’s go for the boat,” said Danny. “High seas or not. I want off this island.”
“Yes. Please," said Michelle.
“And go where?” said Dodgson.
Danny shook his head. “I don’t care. Anywhere. Naxos.”
“Naxos is miles.”
“I don’t care, dammit! A rock in the middle of the sea. I just want out of here.”
They looked at one another. Then got up and headed toward the dock.
It was empty.
They searched the water and Dodgson was the one who spotted it bobbing over a whitecap a couple hundred yards away, much too far to swim for. Xenia had tied the boat securely. Now it was floating free.
There was no other boat in sight.
He took Billlie’s hand.
Danny and Michelle sat down on the dock, staring out to sea. Iordan Chase paced the old rotting boards.
They were trapped again, he thought, just as on Mykonos. Chase had warned as much.
Only now the trap was smaller, tighter.
Tall as a mountain.
SADLIER/LELIA - THE MOUNTAIN
So many names for what he had been in that life before.
Smuggler. Rapist. Dope dealer. Murderer.
Even, long ago, tenor-in a boy’s church choir in the slums of Paris.
There was no name for him now.
Now all he had ever been existed for him only as sand informs concrete, as wood informs fire. They were part of him but he was wholly without memory and transformed. She had done that.
Had he anything in his past to compare it to he would have been well pleased.
Alive he had been treacherous, cunning, casually cruel. But there were always hesitations, some measure of doubt. Now nothing existed between him and his desires but simple opportunity.
Already he had much of what was promised. He took them fast and slow, easy and hard, some of them begging for death. And then he led them. He had known warm blood and cold inert flesh.
The world was black and fine.
And now he waited for another part of what was promised, a small part but infinitely desirable.
So that it was almost with recognition that he watched the blonde woman running below and grew bloated with the urge to take her.
***
She stood high above him at the top of the long steep climb. Once there had been a temple here. Now there was only rubble and broken columns. She watched them scurry like rats through the maze of the city, past the House of the Trident and into the House of Masks. Her dogs began to howl. Cats lay small and cringing at her feet. She saw into each of them and held their tiny souls in the glove of her intense and ardent longing, as she would soon hold those below.
At every instant she was with them. Turning each comer, running, going nowhere. She felt how weak and small they were with their fear of the dead and their fear of her. only one of them with any strength at all- and she drew up out of her the infant that had died inside her and held it so it could see them, see what must be, and knew she would have to speak to this man before turning him loose to the vast rich world of the dead.
The man was searching for her.
He was afraid but he was man enough to search.
She saw the grim firm set to his mouth and smiled.
The cats crept down the mountain. Vipers crawled over her breasts and shoulders. Her dogs howled.
She listened to the power in the marrow of her. It was old as the mountain, new as clean distillate hate. It flooded her with a supernal wine, with heartless song. In the wind she heard other, gentler voices, voices more amicable to man. But they commanded nothing. No earthly or unearthly creature. While she…
She watched the shepherds' hut burning. She fed her power to the charred smoking bodies and rose them up.
The vipers hissed sweetly in her ear.
<
br /> She released the Frenchman standing below her. He could go, move darkly down the mountain.
They all could go.
There were only two she wanted for herself, each for despising and fearing the thing she had been and for their terror now.
Contempt was the very blood of her.
Deliciously she felt it surging.
JORDAN THAYER CHASE
His head pounded. His skin felt so sensitive he felt he’d been burned along with those in the hut. He trudged wearily along with the others, feeling old, feeling betrayed by this thing that was no gift at all but a lie and curse, which could not help them but would only allow him to sense more clearly when and how they would die there and how horribly.
He felt the caress of a million daydreams, impressions, knowings past and present.
He saw once again the serpent-fanged idol of the ancient Mexico, stared into its thousand wakeful eyes, alive again after a thousand years. He saw the dim mists of Avalon part to reveal a secret hiding place which to all but Chase and those like him would remain hidden for centuries yet to come. He saw an unnamed spirit in a New England forest rise up against the locust encroachment of man and blast the earth barren, shrivel the lakes and streams.
And he saw Lelia as he had first known her in Quebec, her pale soulless eyes, the eyes of the only other man or woman on earth he had ever met to possess his own terrible gift, his curse, his sight-he saw himself drowning in a bed of power with her, a bed of dreams, annihilated, exalted, his orgasm immense and frightening, saw himself put her in a taxi later saying, Yes of course, of course I’ll call and knowing he would not, could not now that they had lived one night through in the perilous whirlpool depths of each other and saw in her eyes that naturally she knew the lie at once and hated him for it, would hate him forever for his cowardice.
He saw these things and many others and they came like ghosts to him, drew over his senses, a drifting fierce confusion.
Elaine, he thought.
He had no choice. He slipped into them.