by Jerry eBooks
Perhaps it was that incident with the stone, and the powerful reaction I triggered in my audience that stayed with me, because by the time I was ten years old I realized I had a talent to entertain, and even startle friends and schoolteachers with my imagination—although now that was purely confined to the things I wrote, rather than gulping down rocks.
So, here I am, many years later still writing stories, and still pleased when I come up with an idea that readers find entertaining. One of my early stories that caught the attention of the public is right here in your hands, and it well and truly helped me launch my career as an author of horror novels.
‘Gerassimos Flamotas—A Day in the Life’ appeared in the British anthology Dark Voices 5 back in 1993. The inspiration came from a visit to the Greek island of Kefalonia, which is one of those potent places where story ideas grow out of its rocky landscape as plentifully as the ancient, gnarled olive trees. Tucked away in the beautiful scenery are picturesque churches dating back a thousand years or more, vineyards that produce heady wines, and there is even a mysterious ghost town that might have once been home to men like Gerassimos Flamotas, who woke up one morning to experience a day like they’d never experienced before—and one that they’d never ever forget.
Simon Clark
When Gerassimos Flamotas set off on his moped—an ancient machine pitted with rust—to cross the island’s mountains he had hope. Or at least he clung to hope as a man ruptured by tumors clings to the dream of a miracle cure.
He had set out early. Partly to beat the fierce Greek sun and partly so he could pause at each roadside shrine to piously cross himself and whisper a prayer in a way that, to him, seemed completely sincere. It was still dark enough to marvel at how the oil lamps filled the glass-walled shrines with a soft amber light. The glow winked from the gilded icons and crucifixes. The portraits of his namesake, Saint Gerassimos, gazed back with the gentle eyes of the martyred. Somewhere He sat, thought Gerassimos the mortal, and He gazed down upon the tortured Earth. Once the torture had been famine, earthquakes, epidemics, the rusty nails of bandits hammered into flesh, or Nazi bayonets disemboweling his countrymen. Now the tortures were more subtle, and infinitely prolonged. The unpaid land taxes, the overdue mortgage payments for his farm: he’d accumulated a heap of debt as high as Mount Ainos itself that rose up before him to punch solid rock through the dawn mists.
Still Gerassimos Flamotas carried hope.
He arrived in Argostoli by ten.
By eleven he sat on the marble steps of the bank. Hope gone.
Worse. What hope he had possessed had been broken, mashed, splintered. That and his spirit, too. Spirit and hope. Shattered. Gone forever.
The sun burnt his balding head. Why hadn’t he brought his hat?
Why hadn’t he hair?
He recalled himself twenty years ago. Confident, handsome; returning home from the Greek army a sergeant major; a fortune in his pocket. He remembered the evening strolls in Argostoli’s town square, enjoying the admiring glances of the prettiest girls.
Oh, and the plans he had.
Now bitterness filled him. It spiked his tongue; his eyes watered and he never even noticed the tourists he hated so much wandering aimlessly up and down the road. He climbed onto the moped for the long ride home.
Twenty years ago, he had told himself, he would be a millionaire by the time he was forty. Now he fifty-one. A sun-shriveled little man. Poor, poor, poor.
When he was two kilometers from home he stopped at the roadside. In the distance he could see his peasant’s house, which hung lopsidedly on the hill. There he was going to cultivate grapes, make wine, be the biggest wine producer in the whole of Kefalonia.
Now it was Calliga. Drink Calliga Wines announced roadside hoardings by the dozen. Calliga Wines Maintaining The 3000 Year Old Wine Making Tradition.
‘Calliga, Calliga, Galliga. Ach . . .’ he spat. His wines would have been sweeter, the reds darker, and the rosé? Ah, the rosé would have had the faintest blush of pink like a spring rose.
Even from here he could see his thistle-choked vines. One hundred acres of grief. Pure undiluted grief.
His wife’s brother had been an imbecile. Normal vines would not grow on this soil. Everywhere else on Kefalonia, yes. But not here. Not here!
He cursed. Bitterness threatened to wash away his reason. For a moment he wanted to kick over his moped, tear at his clothes, and run screaming and blaspheming down to the sea. To end, once for all, his miserable life in its salty waters.
Across the road, Saint Gerassimos stood in his glass box shrine, watching him with those big cow eyes. Those ridiculous, dopey eyes. A thousand, two thousand times he had prayed there.
For what?
For nothing, Gerassimos. For nothing. What was that phrase he had heard from the lips of a drunken Englishman? For bugger all.
Reaching down, he picked up a stone the size of a tennis ball. His arm whipped forward, the stone left his fingers. The glass exploded into splinters that flashed in the sun. Feeling hollow, emotionally flat, Gerassimos walked across to the shrine. Saint Gerassimos had fallen into the dust; his pitiful martyr’s face split in two.
* * * *
‘I am dead,’ Gerassimos Flamotas told his wife.
She was chopping at the dull earth with a pick where they grew garlic and onions. She did not look up.
‘I am dead,’ he repeated in a flat voice. ‘The bank will repossess the farm. We have nothing, no living. I am dead.’
His wife stopped hacking the concrete-hard ground and looked up. ‘We knew this would happen.’ There was no surprise; her tone matter-of-fact.
‘Banks!’ he spat.
‘The banks have been good to us. They’ve reduced payments; they’ve given us more time. We couldn’t ask for anything more. Now . . .’—she clapped the dust from her hands—‘. . . are you going to accept the job my brother offered you?’
‘Waiting tables for tourists!’ He swore and stomped his way down through the olive grove to the beach. As always, it was deserted. No tourists came here to this rocky shore.
His only daughter, Rose, had followed him. Nineteen, lumpy in her black dress, loose mouthed—and dumb. She had never uttered a word. Not so much as a single ‘Mamma’.
She followed him like a shadow.
Gerassimos disliked her.
She would never marry. Never earn a living. Useless. Dead.
Like him.
A dead man with his dead family in their dead farm.
He walked along the beach, kicking stones at the sea. Then, sitting on a rock, he lit a cigarette.
His daughter came to sit next to him and put her hand on his forearm. A mute gesture of affection. Gerassimos shrugged the hand away as if it had been an insect. Irritating, but unimportant amongst all his other worries.
The sun pressed on his hairless head like hot metal. He should have brought his hat. Ah, twenty years ago he had hair. Thick, jet black . . .
‘How much for the girl?’
The voice startled him. He looked around. Behind him the beach was empty. To his left sat Rose, picking dry eelgrass from her bare feet.
‘How much for the girl?’
Almost dazed, Gerassimos Flamotas squinted up against the sun.
A shape moved. A man certainly. Foreign, perhaps. Gerassimos shielded his eyes against the glare. The man was tall, thin. Still he couldn’t see the face. But he got the impression of wealth. Great wealth. Gentility almost.
‘How much for the girl?’ repeated the man.
Gerassimos struggled to his feet, struggling also to assume parental outrage. ‘My daughter is no whore. Clear off before I beat you into the ground!’
The tall man did not flinch.
‘Don’t you need the money?’ asked the man smoothly. ‘Everyone needs money, I would have thought.’
Suddenly it occurred to Gerassimos that perhaps the man was a tourist who needed a maid. Yes, that was it. He had misunderstood. A sane man would never tr
y and purchase sexual favors of a girl from her father.
‘Sir . . .’ said Gerassimos thinking quickly, ‘my daughter is mute, she’s not intelligent, but she can scrub floors, cook a little . . .’
The man held up his hand. ‘No. Nothing like that. All I want is her . . . company. Just for a few hours. Until five o’clock, to be precise.’
Gerassimos was bewildered. ‘Sorry, sir, I do not understand you.’ At least he pretended to sound bewildered. He’d been in the army long enough to know what men really meant when they said that they wanted the company of a girl.
The man nodded out to sea where a yacht lay moored in the bay. Gerassimos squinted against the dazzling glare of the sun. The boat was large, a millionaire’s vessel—it may have been the angle, but the boat looked black.
‘I just want her to stay with me for the afternoon.’
Gerassimos nearly asked why, but he was a shrewder man than that. ‘Eh, you said you, eh . . .’ Gerassimos plunged in: ‘How much? You said you’d pay?’
‘Indeed, yes.’ The elegant gentleman held a parcel wrapped in brown paper. It was the size of a small pillow. ‘One million Euros.’
The blood thudded in Gerassimos’s ears. ‘One million?’ That was more money than he’d ever seen in his life before.
‘So . . .’ The stranger nodded at the girl who sat dumbly on the beach watching the pair of them. ‘My man will take us to the yacht in the dinghy. There we will spend the afternoon. Don’t worry, I’ll return your daughter in one piece. What’s her name?’
‘Rose,’ muttered Gerassimos as if only half awake. Suddenly the father in him tried to assert itself. ‘You won’t hurt her?’
‘Perish the thought.’
Gerassimos now became hesitant. Rose was ugly, stupid—but she relied on him for protection. He didn’t want her hurt or frightened or . . . or violated. ‘I don’t know. I . . . I . . .’ He shook his bald head.
The stranger held out the package. ‘One million Euros. Tax free. No questions. All yours.’
Gerassimos almost snatched the package from the man and tore away the paper at the corner. Inside, tightly packed, were wads of banks notes. They smelt so good.
‘All right,’ Gerassimos said quickly. ‘Take the girl. But return her by five.’
‘In one piece,’ purred the man. ‘In one piece.’
Gerassimos ordered Rose to go with the man. Obediently, she followed the stranger with the shadow face, down to the dinghy. The oarsman had hunched shoulders, giving him the appearance of having no head. Gerassimos Flamotas shivered.
Then the headless oarsman, the faceless gentleman, and Rose looking trustingly back at her father, slowly floated out to the black yacht.
She’ll be all right, he reassured himself. She won’t be hurt. In five hours she would be back in one piece. Besides, whatever happened she would never be able to tell anyone anyway, she could neither speak nor write.
Gerassimos walked up the beach to where the gnarled trunk of a tree protruded from the stones and dirt. He lay down in the shade it offered and made himself comfortable, the packet of money resting on his stomach. There he planned his future, a warm glow rising through his body. With this money he could hire a team of workers to strip the weeds from the fields and plant more vines; specially cultivated ones that would thrive in his gravel soil. In a dizzying rush he saw it all: a new car; a fine villa; supermarkets stocking his wine with labels that bore a photograph of his face. Here is a rich and happy man, envious people would say. And first of all, the very first thing, he would repair the shrine of Saint Gerassimos that he had smashed; he’d gladly replace the glass and buy a new icon of the blessed saint. Yes, he would restore it. Make the shrine a monument to his good fortune.
One minute after five he awoke.
The dinghy with the headless oarsman was already leaving the beach for the black yacht.
Where was Rose?
Then he saw her. She lay on the beach.
Bastards!
They had killed her.
No. No. They wouldn’t have done that, surely? Probably drunk or drugged—some men like their women like that.
Holding the packet of money tightly, he hurried down the beach.
If they’ve hurt her, he thought, panicking, what will I tell my wife?
But as he approached his daughter, he slowed.
She did not look right.
Rose lay naked. But it was more than an absence of clothes. Somehow she had altered. There was still a good fifty meters between them so he could not be sure, but . . .
Then he saw what they had done to his poor, mute girl. He froze.
‘I will return her in one piece,’ the man had said.
Oh, they had done that all right. In one piece. His stomach pumped a foul taste into his mouth. He needed a cigarette.
‘In one piece.’
She was in one piece. Only they had . . . he shook his bald head in disbelief . . . they had changed her around.
His eyes absorbed their handiwork. She was dead. Cold, stone dead—thank God for that mercy.
In five hours they had hacked her to pieces. Then that sick, sick man had stitched the pieces together. The head, severed at the shoulders, had been stitched to her flabby belly. As he slid his feet nearer, he could see the hundreds of neat stitches, which sealed every cut. The face had a bruised, swollen appearance. Horrified, he looked closer still. Her eyelids were stitched together. What had they done with her eyes? The sockets were empty behind the closed skin shutters.
Her limbs had been amputated, then re-attached to the body. The arms to the hips; the legs to the shoulders. It gave Rose the appearance of being transformed into a four-legged spider. A big white spider, belly up on the pebble beach with a head jutting out from its stomach.
He couldn’t take his eyes away from the only person left in the world who shared his blood. Tortured. Violated.
Softly, he whispered, ‘My daughter.’
Then she moved.
Uncertainly at first, then it lifted and turned its face toward him. Like a blind person on hearing their name being called.
The sight knocked the breath from him. He stumbled back with a warbling cry. ‘No . . .’
How they’d created this thing he didn’t know. The limbs began to move. In a shaking, uncoordinated way at first, then they found their balance. They lifted the girl’s torso into the air, two arm, two legs working together.
Like a bloated white spider, she began to move toward him, the bare palms of her hands and feet slapping rhythmically down onto the pebbles.
‘No . . . No . . . Please . . .’ Turning, he ran, holding the precious money packet to his chest. Behind him, he heard the rapid slap, slap, slap of the hands and feet.
Good God. She could run; she could run.
Gerassimos ran along the water’s edge, the pebbles rolling, slipping, grating beneath his sandals.
Once he paused to glance back. The flesh wobbled, the sightless head set on the torso, like a turret on a tank, twisting left and right. Dear God. It listened for him—maybe it even smelt him?
Its breath came in ragged, farting crackles from its anus. There the tissue was red as tomato skin as the blood vessels strained to accommodate the rush of oxygenated blood. The now-blotching torso trembled. And, as he watched, his daughter pissed. The new internal arrangement of organs forced the urine outward and upward under tremendous pressure. It burst up into the air like breath from a whale’s blow-hole; the misty spray the same golden yellow as beer in the evening sunshine.
Gerassimos Flamotas turned and ran again, his feet slipping over the loose stones. He could no longer get a proper grip. Yet somehow he managed to scramble away, not daring to pause again.
If that thing caught him. If it touched him . . .
Oh, sweet Saint Gerassimos. Save me . . . save me . . .
And as he ran, he remembered the shrine. That morning—the stone . . . his fury. The broken glass and the portrait of Saint Gerassimos lying in th
e dirt. Those dark, spiritual eyes gazing through Gerassimos Flamotas, gazing up towards heaven, as if this small, balding man was as transparent as the glass that had once enclosed the shrine.
He ran.
Until he could run no more. Collapsing, he huddled into a ball on the beach, eyes tightly shut, clasping the money to him, and begging the monster to leave him alone.
He heard the hands and feet approach. But slowly now. There was something thoughtful in the step. Then he felt a hand (or was it a foot?) gently stroke his back. At last he had to look.
He opened his eyes and turned his face toward his daughter.
The hole left by the neck had been stitched together to form a tightly stretched rump-shaped thing. The eyeless face looked impassive—almost doll-like. From behind the creature, the rasping breathing continued louder than ever.
Where were her eyes, her pretty eyes?
Then he saw them.
Wave upon wave of revulsion battered him. Whoever had done this must despise humanity more than God loved it.
The eyes.
The breasts had been split at the nipples. A single split in each one, large enough to accommodate one eye. The breasts hung down like slack udders from where they had been stitched onto the body. The white spider had to lift the torso up so the moist, brown eyes could see Gerassimos’s tormented face.
The eye-nipples blinked slowly. A single tear fell from an eye to splash on the beach.
The mute Rosa spoke for the first time in her nineteen years of life, ‘Papa. I love you.’ The voice was a little girl’s voice.
Gerassimos rolled face down on the stones.
The little girl’s voice came again, ‘Papa. Why did you let them do this to me? Why?’
Gerassimos Flamotas wept. He would hear those words forever.
Introduction
Dear Reader,
Remember the story about me swallowing the stone? That came as a total surprise to my friends on the school field . . . well, perhaps more of a shock than a surprise. Now here’s another surprise. An Easter Egg of a story, a secret bonus that, I hope, will help ease you into the Halloween spirit.