What Goes

Down
by Don Tumasonis
(from Ghosts & Scholars 32)

On the road leading east out of Kalundborg,

with its church of five brick-red towers like rockets, medieval art deco,
Michael felt the bicycle get heavy. Lisa, his wife, glided effortlessly
past him while he pushed
harder, legs pumping more and more each minute
for a kilometre or two, until his speed slowed to a drag.

He had quit smoking so that he could manage

this late summer tour through Sealand, but the evidence of his increasingly
difficult-to-pedal five-speed showed that the years of nicotine had had
a profound effect
on his energy and physique. He was surprised, since he
had managed yesterday so well, and now they were on the flat. In the end,
limbs like lead, he was forced to stop altogether, straining to catch his
breath.

It's all the camping gear plus being out of

shape and tired from the day before, he thought, panting, arms on dropped
handlebars, before he hung his head down to stretch his stiff neck muscles
and saw the
flattened tyre. He was in the midst of changing it when his
wife rolled up beside him by the tree where he had stopped.

"You could have called out - I was miles

ahead before I noticed you were gone," she exaggerated.

"I tried, but you were off in your own

world, not listening to anybody but yourself, as usual."

Already, two days into the holiday, the sharp

edges were showing.

She knew well enough to let him smoulder while

he silently carried on with the repair, not once looking up at her.

The change effected, the cycle still upside

down, bags and tools spread around him on the motorway verge, he spun the
repaired wheel to see if it ran true before tightening the wing nuts. Angry
at himself, he
ignored his wife's call for attention.

"Okay, don't bother. It was just something

I thought you'd like. In fact, I know you would have."

Curious in spite of his ire, he looked up a

bit too late, in slow comprehension, at the bare bodies of two fellow cyclists,
young blonde women glowing in the sunshine. Blithely zooming past along
the highway,
they were clad only in bikini bottoms, obviously topless, and
oblivious to the heavy morning traffic, which was, however, not oblivious
to them. In their twenties, Lisa said later, when they were on speaking
terms.

Ah, Denmark, he said half-aloud to himself,

wishing for a cigarette.

Their goal for the day was a camping place that took in cycle tourists,
a leisurely fifty kilometres to the south-east. They made good time once
the tyre was replaced, and an hour after midday found themselves
in the
basin of what in other countries would be called a creek, but here in Denmark
was dignified with the title of river.

An inn or kro was just off the road that

bridged the tree-lined stream. A couple of late-model cars stood parked
before the large building. Lisa, in the lead, slowed abruptly, pulling into
the gravelled drive.
Michael braked behind her and walked his bike, still
straddling it, over to the glassed-in menu displayed outside, which was
already under his wife's intense scrutiny.

"Michael..."

"I know. You've told me so much about these

places that I've got to see one, even if we only have a coffee."

Lisa, grown up in Norway, had been taken as

a child by her parents to the neighbouring land in the south on holiday
several times. Twice, the family had stayed a few days at these inns. Old
post stages and
hostelries for the most part, they had survived the transition
to motorised traffic by converting to posh accommodations, with grounds
to wander in, and fancy regional food served for guests and visitors, all
at a
premium. They had clearly impressed her - something special in what
Michael suspected was a lonely childhood. Whenever the subject of Denmark
came up, that of the kro, and the possibility of staying at one,
invariably
followed.

They dismounted, carefully locking their bikes,

and, taking the small bags they had for valuables with them, entered the
establishment, leaving the rest of their luggage strapped on. In the foyer
dividing the hotel
from the restaurant, they saw an open guest book, and
the framed portrait of the Queen above it, surrounded by several group pictures
with her at the centre of each. One of the labels below the photographs
indicated that she had visited, eating dinner here five years before.

Inside, the place was oak beams and plate glass.

Grubby in their cyclists' clothes, they chose a table near the door. Feeling
somewhat more than vaguely out of their depth, particularly after having
been put in
their place by the hallway display, they watched the approach
of the waiter with some trepidation. This tall man, with a Danish nose rivalling
that of Hans Christian Andersen, did not however seem at all put out
by
their appearance. Perhaps because it was after lunchtime and there were
so few others in the place, Michael thought.

Having greeted them politely, and handing them

their menus, he left them to make their choice.

Their budget did not allow for much luxury,

and a quick glance down the menu reconfirmed that there was little they
could afford other than coffee and a dessert. When they ordered, a look
of slight disapproval
flew like a fast-moving cloud over the waiter's face,
but he remained polite, and without comment went to the kitchen in back.

In the idle interval between ordering and the

arrival of their peach melbas, Michael turned through the pages of the brochure
describing the inn, a copy of which was on each table.

"Look here: it says that this place was

founded in 1466, and it has its own section of the stream where guests can
fish."

Lisa's reaction was to look towards the back

to see if their order was on its way; Michael was liable to these fits and
displays of instant expertise every time he came across a piece of glossy
tourist literature. She
easily could have done without his pedantry but,
for the sake of peace, let out a noncommittal grunt, and kept her head turned.

Awaiting the next outburst of didactic commentary,

she was therefore surprised when nothing further issued from her husband's
lips. Curious in spite of herself at the unexpected hiatus, she turned back
in her
seat to face him.

He sat there still absorbed, reading the text

diligently, even when the waiter came with the coffees and fancy ices. Having
left these on the table, the man was about to move away when Michael halted
him with
a word: Kirkehøj. In fact, Lisa thought, he stopped
dead in his tracks, perhaps even blanching momentarily, before pretending
to ignore what had been said, and walking away.

"What's that? From the look of him you

would have thought you'd just told him he'd gotten the boot."

"I dunno. It's a place nearby. I saw it

mentioned in one of the tourist mags we got from the travel show last year,
but it was so fuzzy on details that I thought I'd note it down, and get
better directions later. Then I
forgot about it, until now." He shoved
the open brochure over to her, pointing at a paragraph halfway down the
page.

"It's a place like that one in Portugal

we read about in the old Rough Guide. You know, that spot down in
the Algarve where cars come to a hill, and roll up it of their own power,
if they cut their motors. They
don't have it in the new edition; anyway,
there's supposed to be a place nearby here where the same thing happens.
There's something like it in Australia too, I think."

Lisa did in fact remember the Portuguese description;

sometimes, grudgingly, she had to admit that Michael came up with interesting
things.

"Wasn't it to do with an optical illusion,

something like the natural lines of perspective making you think
you were looking up a hill when in fact it runs down?"

Michael was in the middle of a spoonful of peach,

and she waited for his answer.

"Yeh, that was one of the explanations.

Another was that there was some magnetic anomaly underground, which pulled
the cars uphill, but you could hardly believe that - too much plastic and
aluminum in those
today for that to happen."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Only that we get directions from the waiter

and take a look for ourselves. It could be fun to see. None of the material
I've read locates it precisely. This little bit does make it sound more
than just a local legend
- let's ask the waiter and see if he can tell us."

Having signalled, they waited while the man

came over with the bill.

Michael, switching from the English he and Lisa

used between themselves, threw the question at the man in his best Norwegian
without even waiting for the reckoning. The Scandinavian languages were,
at
least in theory, claimed to be mutually intelligible.

"We want to see Kirkehøj. Can you

tell us how to get there?"

The waiter, no longer nonplussed, stood staring

at Michael as if he had been addressed in Martian.

"It's your Anglo-Norwegian. He doesn't

understand it. Let me handle this."

Relieved, Michael listened to his wife reframe

the question in her native Norwegian. The answer, in an impossible dialect,
sounded to him to be an offshoot of Hawaiian, seemingly devoid of consonants.
Only
after years in Scandinavia could Michael make out Copenhagenese, of
all of Denmark's multitudinous dialects, and then only if clearly and slowly
enunciated. This brogue had defeated him.

Lisa seemed to have no problem with the thick

local accent, but a frown crossed her brow when the man marched off, obviously
relieved to have left the couple.

"He says he really has no idea where the

place might be; the owner wrote the pamphlet, and he's not here today. I
get the feeling he knows more than he's letting on. But I have an idea:
get the map."

Michael lifted his eyebrows, but dug out the

topo, cycle-ways marked in, and spread it out on the table between them,
opening it to that part of the route where they now were.

Lisa reached into her blouse and pulled out

a little blue pendant he had not seen before. It was on a thin gold chain
which Lisa lifted over her head, handing it to him. Examining it, he saw
that the jewel was a
clear aqua blue plumber's bob in miniature, made out
of paste or plastic; it was hard to tell these days, with all the new materials.

"Well?"

"It's something I bought at the shop in

Sankt Peders Stræde in town, when we were beginning our tour. The
one that sells crystals and pyramids, New Age stuff."

Michael thought she had given up these enthusiasms

long ago. At this news, he rolled his eyes, forbearing comment. Lisa appeared
not to notice; she was evidently fired with the thought of seeing the place
with
the odd uphill trait.

"What then?"

"You're supposed to take it by the chain

and hang it over the map, letting your thoughts concentrate on the place
you want to find. It's called map dowsing. When you come to the right place,
you'll get some kind
of signal - it's different for each person."

"Christ," Michael muttered half under

his breath. "Why don't you do it, since you're the expert."

Lisa blushed slightly, looking down. "It's

supposed to have warmed itself between a woman's breasts; they contain the
power of the earth and fertility. But the person the jewel has accumulated
power from can't
use it. I didn't buy it for this anyway," she added.
"I only thought it looked nice, and wanted it for jewellery."

"I don't believe it! I thought you were

over this mumbo jumbo!"

However, he held the dangling bit of glass over

the map for the sake of family peace. Their relation was fraying already,
and the point of the holiday, besides saving money, was to shore up their
seven-year
marriage. He had got the idea from a magazine article, about
a family in the western United States who had re-cemented their ties through
a horse-back ride under harsh conditions. The theory was that being
forced
to work together would make people appreciate the positive qualities of
co-operation that come out under stress.

Musing over his ability to delude himself, he

saw that nothing was happening to the pendant. It neither swung nor sung
nor vibrated of its own volition, nor did any sudden shock or jolt run up
his arm. He was
taking it in his own precise fashion, paper quadrant by
paper quadrant, each representing a square kilometre on the ground.

Then he stopped, looking bemusedly at the map,

chain still depending from his fingers. Lisa saw it right off, and lifted
her eyebrows in question.

"It's nothing really, just that I got the

illusion the chain had warmed. Probably a pinched nerve from leaning on
the handlebars." His tone did not sound convincing.

"Move it away. Is it getting cooler?"

Reluctantly, "Yes".

"Move it back again. Well?"

Pursing his lips, as if unwilling to say anything,

Michael finally mumbled, "The chain's warm when it goes over here."

"Here" was an unnamed spot on the

map that showed an area of a square kilometre or less, a small plateau bounded
by a stream in the middle of rolling farmland. The place was devoid of standing
structures,
displaying only the symbol for a medieval ruin, without caption.
It lay a little way off their route; they would have to climb up from the
small valley of the kro, and head east a few minutes to get there.

Putting the chain down, Michael looked thoughtfully

at the map for a full minute, before folding it. He counted out the exact
amount due, placing it on the plate with the bill. As was their custom,
they watched
until all staff were momentarily gone, and then stood up and
walked out. This way they were spared the embarrassment of being seen not
to have left a tip.

In the hallway, Michael stopped for a second,

peering closely at one of the photographs on the time-darkened wall. He
recognised their waiter, here in formal dress, standing next to the Queen.
The label
identified him as the proprietor. Michael followed Lisa out, fuming.

"We're going to the place, aren't we?"

she queried.

"Absolutely. I have to see what that twit

in there is covering up."

Lisa took the map and fastened it to the clamp

on her handlebars. She was navigator, by mutual agreement. They settled
on their bikes, tightened their toeclips, and were off.

They backtracked a few tens of metres to the

other side of the way, where a road came out, and took that. It climbed
gradually, then steeply, uphill. That Denmark is flat is true only in relative
terms, and the
couple were soon huffing and sweating until, with much relief,
they topped out at the edge of the tableland.

Spread before them was a wide panorama, blocked

only here and there by stands of trees and one small forest with a round
white tower sticking out, the sole structure observable on the flat. Attainment
of even
small heights here repays the effort in vistas. They could see far
about them, to the valleys and fields below.

The place was utterly quiet; they seemed cut

off from all noise of traffic and the busy world about them. School had
begun, and the local holiday-makers were back at their jobs. Far in the
distance to the north, a
car was visible on a highway. An acrid smell hung
in the air; this late in the season, farmers were burning stubble, and the
smoke of these small fires was visible in several directions, a long way
off. The feeling
was of total isolation.

The day was, in other words, as perfect as one

could expect for the non-motorised traveller in a land so crowded as Denmark.

The road on top seemed exceptionally level;

they could see it continue ahead clear to the other end of the flatness,
without any sign of variation in the vertical.

"This can't be the place - look at it -

it's as flat as could be. So much for your dowsing."

"Just a moment, Michael. What about that

over there?"

Lisa pointed in the direction of the small wood,

off to their right. Between that spot, a few hundred metres off at most,
and the road on which they rested, was a low, but continuous rise. A small
unsurfaced track,
probably a farm road, led up it through the cut wheat
between them and the trees. The tall, massive tower, with its conical roof,
loomed there, its lower portion hidden.

"It's the only place where a road goes

up - let's try it."

On these words from Lisa, they rolled off the

paving and onto the track. Just before the incline upward, Michael halted,
signalling Lisa to stop.

"Just a min, there's something I want to

see."

Reaching into a pocket, he took out a large

orange, bought in Kalundborg that morning. Getting off his bike, he walked
a few metres closer to the woods, set the fruit upon the surface of the
track, and stepped
back.

At first there was hardly any movement, then

slowly, and then with increasing momentum, the orange began to roll unevenly
up the hill, its flight disturbed now and then by a small piece of stone
or gravel, until
it finally bounced off the way, lodging in front of a large
rock.

"Incredible! I wanted to see if the action

was magnetic, but it can't be. Let's try it with our bikes."

Astraddle, they half-kicked and half-walked

a few paces forward and then halted. With a look to each other, they lifted
their feet, and the bicycles started rolling, to all appearances up,
gaining speed, going
faster, and then faster still, coming to a stop at
the top of the incline, just before reaching the wood.

They were both giggling in reaction to their

short trip, made apparently in defiance of gravity's law, their sour mood
replaced by hilarity.

"It has to be optical; it can't be anything

else."

Lisa grinned back.

Laughter subsiding, Michael gazed about him

for a while, then waddled over with his bike between his legs to Lisa, so
he could see the map. Taking it up, he looked it over closely, turning it
at one point to
orient it to the landscape.

"That's odd. I'm sure we're where we're

supposed to be, but that tower isn't marked on the map."

"Perhaps it's been built since?"

"Hardly likely. The map's dated this year.

Look at it, it has to be a rundkirke."

"You mentioned a ruin here; maybe they've

rebuilt it."

"If so, they've done it in the wrong place

- the ruin is on the other side of the road, according to this. Look closely
- all the groves and fields are in place, just where they should be."

A perplexed snort was Lisa's only comment.

Michael got off his bike and dug about in the

handlebar bag, finally pulling out a guidebook. Paging through it, he stopped
and began to read. Lisa was used to this; Michael could never let things
be and enjoy
an experience - he always had to have his reality strengthened
and bolstered by something printed; for anything to exist, it had to be
confirmed by a line on a map, or the printed word. She began to look about
her, listening to the few birds in the trees, while steeling herself for
another dollop of rapidly acquired and all-too-willingly-shared learning.

Her husband had stopped reading, she saw, but

for the second time that day, he acted against pattern by not saying anything.
Instead, he sat quietly on his saddle, a frown on his brow, staring intently
at the
church.

"What's wrong now?"

"Mmm. The book says there's only one round

church left remaining in all of Sealand. It's not here. It's miles away
at Bjernede. They doubled as fortresses, you know - I reckon when the kingdom
was
consolidated, they tore down those associated with local vassals with
too much power. I know some say they were defence against pirates, but that
was early on. Think Bornholm - it's far away from the seat of
power, and
has most of those surviving, probably because the central authorities hardly
knew they were there."

"So what is this? If you're right, why

is it still standing?"

"I'm not sure. It does look like a round

kirk, with a witch's hat roof."

"So it must be one, you're saying."

"I didn't say that. There's only one way

to find out - let's go over and look at it."

With that, they pushed their cycles through

the short stretch of thick forest, before coming out in a clearing dominated
by the structure.

Stopping at the gravelled park in front of it,

they left their transportation there, and walked around the large building.
Walls that must have been impregnable in their time were supported at several
places by
thick buttresses of brick, whitewashed and roofed with tiles like
those on the cone-shaped roof of the tall tower itself. At the north door,
they saw a bare imbedded stone by the portal, covered with runes.

"Well," Michael pontificated; "it's

old enough by the look of it. There's no graveyard that I could see, but
that protrusion out back must be a nave. It's got to be a church of some
sort."

"Hmm. If it's a church, then it must be

open - let's go inside; I've got to use the loo. If it's a proper church,
then it must have one - all Danish churches do."

Before they went in, Lisa hesitated for a moment,

thinking that they should have seen a cross, although there was none. Perhaps
this edifice was something other than it appeared to be, something in private
hands. She broke her mood with a cough, and reached for the door handle
of blackened iron, which turned easily.

Entering through a small room, perhaps a våbenhus,

where burghers left their swords and pikes behind when going in to the holy
precinct, they passed through a second door set in the thick walls of the
tower
itself. Before them, in the dim illumination from the few windows,
a number of massive round pillars were arrayed in a circle, bearing the
weight of the floors above them. To the right, the hall that Michael had
identified as a nave was visible through a large square doorway.

With the thickness of the walls, not a sound

from the world outside penetrated the dark chamber. There were wooden chairs
set about in rows, and Michael took this as confirmation that it was indeed
a house of
worship, although it had every appearance of being a fortress
in addition.

They drifted over towards the pillars, and saw

that the smooth upward-flaring capitals were covered with frescoes of a
primitive medieval type.

"See here!" Lisa exclaimed. "There's

a mermaid! And look to the right of it - it's the Paradise myth."

Michael came over to the pillar she was admiring.

There was a fruit-laden tree, indeed, and a snake twining upwards between
a nude couple, painted in washed-out ochre tones on the curving surface,
long
medieval faces in thick outline, upon a sickly yellow-green ground.
The frontality, unusually, was devoid of any decorous hand across a breast,
any modest fig leaf.

"It can't be that - this has to be showing

something else." He pointed to the next panel, on the right of the
tree, where the nude pair, and several others of both sexes, were suspended
in the air, in the act of
tumbling through space. A crenellated building
to the right, rudely drawn, perhaps a tower, served like the tree to separate
this panel from yet another further on.

"You've read it wrong - they're the souls

of the damned, falling into Hell like in that Signorelli painting."

"Oh? Then why no flames or demons below?"

Michael paused, opened his mouth as if to reply,

but stayed silent.

"I know you want to explore this place.

Well, it's musty, worse than that Lithuanian cathedral last year, and I'm
not interested. I'll go and try to find the ladies'. Go potter around -
I know you will. I'll meet you
back here." With that, Lisa set off
on her search, and Michael entered the short nave.

Hanging low, depending from wires on the ceiling,

was a model of a ship. These were not uncommon in Danish churches, but Michael
thought it odd that one should be in a house of worship so far from the
sea.
It was hard to tell what period the ship was from, since the model
seemed more like a wreck than anything else - its masts were broken and
down, the sails and rigging torn, ribbing broken. Not what one
expected
in a land where neatness was a cult, and cleanliness an obsession.

Looking down and before him, he saw through

the afternoon gloom a raised dais at the apse. The floor was slightly tilted
in that direction. There was, he realised, no altar at the place where there
should have
been one. Maybe Lisa was right; this was no church. Perhaps
it had been taken out of service long ago. That would explain why there
was no indication of one on the map. On the other hand, any structure
historically
important, with period paintings from almost a thousand years back, by the
look of their style, should have been shown.

As he pondered this explanation, or lack of

one, he returned slowly to the entrance to the nave, coming upon a little
door set into the thick walls of the tower at its end. Trying this, he found
it open. A narrow
passage with stairs going upward, and a faint glimmer
from above. Lisa was not yet back, so he went up it, hands on the cold stone
walls to either side. The gentry's passage, he thought, coming out on the
next
floor. These churches, he knew, represented in stone the divisions
in society; this floor was meant for the local ruler and his retainers,
who by having their service a stage above the ground level might avoid
mixing
with the common mass.

The pillars came up right through the floor:

with all the heavy stonework about, he began to see the need for these and
the enormous outside supports. A few square windows illuminated the area,
but one,
unglazed, was dark. Looking through it, he saw down into the interior
of the nave. From above, it was possible to see the outline of a round structure,
a base on the raised dais, where he had thought the altar
should have been.
Perhaps he'd got it all wrong, and a pillar had stood there instead.

But the prominent feature of this level was

its decoration, echoing that of the floor below, but in greater profusion,
ringing the wall as a frieze. The subject was decidedly un-churchlike: battle
scenes right out of
Bayeux, men and horses attacking, flailing, no attention
paid to perspective; read from left to right, the violence increased, with
bodies in chain mail flat against the painting's field, animals and their
riders
thrown in the air in all possible contortions, as if wildly fallen
into space. In the background, in the only part of the picture given any
sense of depth, there was a tower that, except for the lack of a peaked
roof,
would have passed for the building he stood in.

At that moment, a distinct feeling of ill ease

came over him, perhaps at the notion that he was violating private property,
but he controlled it with the thought that no monument of such importance
could have
avoided the 'heritage' wave which was the plague of Scandinavian
lands just as much as it was in England. With that reassurance, he continued
his progress through the large round room.

Following the frescoes, he discovered another

narrow arched doorway with stairs leading up, these also spiralling like
a corkscrew through the immense walls.

I'll go up there, he thought, for the view.

There was almost no light, until just before

he came out. The exit was without railings; a thick and heavy iron-bound
trap door stood upright to one side. This he grasped as he heaved himself
through.

He dusted his hands, and then nearly fell from

the shock, the explosion of noise as the trap slammed down behind him. Immediately,
he went back to try it; he could think of nothing worse than being locked
in
an elevator, a ship's room. Imprisonment was his nightmare. Grabbing
hold of the large ring that was the latch handle, he twisted and pulled,
but the cover would not budge. Either it was too heavy, or some
mechanism
had set, locking it when it fell. He fought to control the panic welling
up within him, and just barely succeeded.

Lisa's below; all I have to do is get her attention

through a window. The two of us, one heaving, the other pushing, should
be able to lift this thing if it's simply a matter of weight. If it's locked,
she can undo it,
and in the worst case, she can go to get help. Calm down,
and see where she is, for starters.

Looking about him, he saw that this room, in

any case, was more well-lit than the others. Four large windows were placed
equidistant from each other. Here, there were only four slim pillars forming
a square in
the centre of the room. These were evidently enough to carry
the ultimate floor, the ceiling above; with the cone-shaped roof resting
on the outer stone of the tower. On the walls and on the floor, red and
blue
arcane symbols were chalked in, many of them arrows of varying lengths
and thicknesses and design, pointing in the main towards the windows, forming
corridors of passage along the ground and wall.

He went to the window closest to the now-shut

and only entrance, coincidentally following a path outlined by the odd symbols.
The opening had bars on the inside, and beyond the barrier was glazed with
yellowish panes of irregular thickness that cast a sickly light on the interior.
Viewing through them was difficult because he could not get close enough
to the glass: a good deal of space - the thick walls again -
divorced it
from the bars. What little he saw suggested that there was only forest on
that side.

He walked to the window opposite, to find the

parking lot, and - he hoped - Lisa. Panic under control, if not wholly gone,
Michael noticed for the first time, while going over, that the floor was
definitely quite
uneven. The whole surface was like a slightly tilted dish.
To the right it rolled downward, ending perhaps a foot lower than where
he was standing, but to the left, where the weak sunlight shone through,
the
floor was an equal distance higher than the spot at which he stood,
on the axis of the slant.

At this other opening, by standing on his toes,

he was just able to see the two bicycles in the gravelled lot. Of Lisa there
was no sign. Perhaps she was on her way up, wondering where he had been
for so long.
Michael walked back to the central area bounded by the four
slender columns, unwilling now for some reason to stray off to the sides,
away from the demarcated chalked path.

He stopped there for a moment, realising that

Lisa was sure to discover him within a very short while, and, calmed by
the idea, further examined the chamber from this vantage point. He saw,
after short scrutiny,
that there were odd dark stains on the stone ceiling
at the side of the room where the floor tilted down: some of these appeared
to have been whitewashed over, and were seeping through, whilst others,
quite
large, seemed to be fresh, encrusting the surface exterior of the
paint. Perhaps some sort of fungus which, once established, was almost impossible
to be rid of in old buildings it infested.

Turning about, he saw that by the opposite wall,

where the floor slanted up, the flagging was covered with similar splotches.

It was as he was contemplating this that he

noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a slight flickering. It could have
been a nervous tick of the eyelid; he had been having these lately, and
they had now and then
affected his vision with odd flashes. Eye migraine,
his doctor had called it; nothing to worry about.

But this was moving, while he was still: a slim

green-grey smokiness with a tint of yellow, almost man-high, just out of
the line of his direct vision. Could it be an effect of the dimming light,
coming through the
irregularly thickened old window glass? Again, a strong
sense of unease came over him.

With the thought of dispelling the waxing gloom

for a closer look, he fumbled with a shirt pocket flap to get at a small
credit-card-thick torch he carried; a gimmick Lisa had bought him last year.
As he did so,
the button, which was hanging loosely by its thread, popped
off and rolled onto the floor past the arrows, landing just beyond them
on the side of the room tilting down.

Always a creature of habit and thrift, Michael

reached down for it with the intention of recovery for future attachment,
and, in the act, clumsily gave it a kick that sent it spinning further away
from him, closer to
the wall. Cursing to himself, he lunged for it, crossing
the rows and ranks of arrows, smudging a few.

Just before his fingers closed on the thing,

he saw it start sliding from its inert state, first slowly, and then exponentially
quicker, smashing into bits - on the ceiling. As Michael began his own inexorable,
irreversible slide after it, he had an inkling - no more - of his fate.
In the sickening second he had left to him, he saw the shadow, now in clarified
outline, close in on him from the right.

Having resorted perforce to the woodland when she found the church or fortress
without amenities, Lisa was at this time approaching her bicycle. Just reaching
it, she felt a flash of heat touch her skin, then
warmth go through her,
seeming to come from above. This is always the case, of course, when matter
is rapidly converted to energy.

A feeling of lassitude and strangeness came

over her, and she wondered if her time of the month had arrived. She felt,
in any case, odd, and had difficulty remembering why she was here at all.

Getting on her bicycle, she noticed for the

first time that another matching hers was parked next to it; alike in model
- even the carrier bags were of the same make.

What a coincidence, she thought to herself as

she pedalled away, that another tourist should be in the same place, isolated
as it was, at the same time as her. Curious that she had not seen the person.
Her head
was slightly achy and spinning, and she was glad that she would
soon be leaving this flat and lonely farmland, that she was now on her way
to the camping-ground. The solitude was annoying to her.

She followed the road in the low rays of the

evening autumn sun, tasting the faint trace of smoke still in the air, finally
arriving at the lip of the plateau, where she set one foot down and stopped.
Below she saw
the small river the map had indicated, glinting in the distance
like yellow glass. Away to the left was the road which would lead in another
half hour to her end-point of the day.

Kicking to give momentum to her bike, she expertly

slipped her foot into the toeclip, looking forward to the downhill freewheeling.
The going was somehow slow here at the beginning, and Lisa began to pedal.
With the ground dropping more and more steeply in front of her, she pedalled
harder and harder.

And harder again.

Copyright
(c) 2001 Don Tumasonis

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Bar by Syruss
 DON TUMASONIS

The Wretched
Thicket of Thorn

DON TUMASONIS, IN THE SHORT SPACE of his tarnished, yet

louche career as a writer of speculative fiction, has established a
name – what sort, he will not say – through the publication of a
number of short stories, reviews and articles in various magazines,
including All Hallows, Supernatural Tales and Ghosts and Scholars,
not to mention the anthologies Shadows and Silence and Dark
Terrors 6. His translation of Christopher Hals Gylseth and Lars O.
Toverud’s book Julia Pastrana: The Strange Life of the Victorian Ape
Woman was recently published by Sutton UK, and more of the
author’s stories are due to appear in All Hallows and John Pelan’s
third Darkside anthology.
As Tumasonis recalls: “ ‘The Wretched Thicket of Thorn’ was
written as part of a yet-unfinished cycle of speculative fictions with
the working title Seven Modern Deadly Sins. Two previously
published stories, ‘The Graveyard’ and ‘What Goes Down’, dealt with
infidelity and acrimony, respectively.
“The title remotely derives from hearing Harlan Ellison once hold
forth on his short story ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’, which, not
understanding West Coast, I took to be ‘The Whipper of Whipped
Dogs’. The perceived malapropism had me bursting publicly into
laughter, alone of an otherwise polite audience of a hundred or so.
Which crime had Mr Ellison attempting my assassination by paper
airplane. Being younger then, I artfully deflected the missile,
foreshadowing the parrying skills of Bill the Butcher, but wisely left
the room before the talk was finished. Long after, having found out
my mistake, pace Ellison, I realized that alliteration might have its
use in titles after all.
“The setting and events of the story are for the most part true; the
island exists, as does the thicket. Having taken one look inside, I
never entered, but always wondered what I would have found had I
done so.”

THE LITTLE ISLAND harbour below, so enclosed from the winds by

cliffs, was sickeningly hot and humid. Here above, where they had
their small hotel, a breeze played constantly across the hilltop and
made life bearable. Anticipating the plunge into the furnace, Charles,
still acclimatizing to the bright Greek sun after a cold and rainy
summer at home, stopped for a moment, wiped the accumulated
sweat from his forehead, and looked about him.
His gaze wandered to a nearby building under construction. He
had stopped here the day before, in an effort to find out whether a
luminous rectangle on a wall in the roofless second floor was sky
through a real window or light so intense that it had pierced the
solidity of concrete, dissolving it, turning matter to light and light to
substance. In the end he took out his binoculars and, focusing on the
spot, saw it resolve into the granulated surface of thrown plaster.
Looking down, he caught sight of Elizabeth’s tanned bare legs:
she was already well along on the way down to the dock and the
restaurants lining the quay. He sighed, and then began to pick his
way along the zigzag path, shaded by a plane tree and tamarisks,
hoping his body would soon adjust to the heat.
But entering the basin where what life there was on this outlier to
the bigger, more heavily trafficked tourist islands had concentrated
was equivalent to entering a steam bath. A few beadlets had already
re-formed on his brow in the short while since he had started down.
One supposed that the clammy humidity, unusual this far north in
Greek waters, was a result of the place being so heavily wooded. It
was green, even greener than Thassos. Most Ægean isles were sun-
scorched rocks with rare, if any, natural shade; Charles and
Elizabeth had chosen this place just because it promised change
from the eternal sun-bleached landscapes that had begun to form
the habit of their travel each year.
Before reaching the asphalted bit connecting the path to the main
shore road, Charles saw that Elizabeth was, in her impatience to get
out of the sticky pre-noon haze, entering post-haste the air-
conditioned office of Poseidon Travel. Across the street from that
agency, on the narrow town beach, its little flotilla of rental boats was
neatly lined up, waiting for the next customer to make a choice for
the day’s excursion.
Today was the first of September, Elizabeth’s birthday, and the
climate was still molten in these parts, as Charles had found out to
his extreme discomfort the day before. The two had separated:
Charles determined to reach the island’s highest point, his variant on
Munro-bashing developed over repeated visits to the Ægean, whilst
his spouse had settled for relaxation on the strand, Sybaris ahead of
the local Olympus.
His walk had started well, but the lack of shade had left him
exposed to the sun and broiling before too long. Later, alone, with
metalled road turned to track, local resin-collectors and any traffic far
behind, he had left the cutting for the peak. The place was silent but
for the wind.
Charles had never seen brush so dense as on those lower slopes,
a thick, barely penetrable maquis. Treelike bushes, plants whose
baking in the sun erupted forth with aromatic, pungent odours. And
bushlike trees bent by the wind, with thick exposed roots, so rocklike
themselves that the stones between their twistings appeared to have
grown there, organic intrusions studding and enveloped by the worn
mineral bark.
The only way was along animal trails, literal tunnels through the
steamy thorny mass, that made passage a travail of clothing and hair
caught in spiky and desiccated vegetation. When he saw his
progress to be a few tens of metres that hour, he had given up,
disgusted.
 Resting on a block of stone in a rare clearing, he had sat facing
the nearby island to the east. Gulping water from his plastic canteen,
he had regarded the place between swallows. It was greener even
than Tiflos.
With half the bottle finished, he had taken out his map, matching
names to the prospect in front of him, a favourite private game. The
island was Aghios Mikhailis, Saint Michael. The chart showed it to be
about half the length of the main island and divided into two distinct
sections, each with its own pronounced summit, separated by a
narrow saddle-like neck of land at the middle.
The peak on the left was called Frangòberga – something to do
with the Franks, a presence here in the Middle Ages? – and the one
on the right was Stefáni, which he vaguely remembered from Greek
classes to mean “bridal wreath” or “crown”. Through the binoculars,
he had explored the visible parts of the opposite shore, four or five
kilometres out. There was a white spot high up that hill, probably
some herd of sheep eking it out in the sparse shade of afternoon.
On the long return to town, Charles had suffered near-heat stroke,
and took an icy shower to recover. Stretched out nude on the sheet,
he had a sip of their duty-free Scotch and read a few pages of
Symonds’s Michelangelo. He had then put the book down and
broached the idea of taking a boat out to Aghios Mikhailis,
suggesting the outing as the perfect day-trip for a birthday.

By habit, Charles avoided the area of the harbour promenade that he

knew was covered with what looked to be a permanent oil slick. As
he came up on the spot, he saw a weathered old man, face gnarled
and darker than tanned, forcefully throwing something like the head
of a wet mop on to the pavement. A rusty three-pronged harpoon,
shaft like a weathered broom handle, lay at his feet.
Charles stopped to see, and then realized that the object being
thrown was an octopus. The man repeatedly dashed it against the
concrete, the hard slaps resonating throughout the seaside
neighbourhood. That was the explanation: no motor oil wilfully
dumped here, but a slick that was the sudsy juice of cephalopods.
 Why did the people do it? The claim was that the animal was only
edible if made tender in this fashion. Charles thought, however, that
there was more to it than that: some form of revenge, or beating out
of a devil, or the liberation of a form, forced unwillingly to leave its
mortal habitat for a new round on the wheel of all existence.
Unable to say why, he abhorred the practice. There was
something nasty and unpleasant about it, connecting at some
illogical level in his thoughts with fantasies of furtiveness, and
impotence.
When he entered the agency, he saw his wife already seated,
chatting and joking with the proprietor, who was related to the
owners of their hotel.
“Panagiotis,” she said with a small smile on her face “has been
telling me how his boats are the best in the Sporades.”
“It’s true,” the Greek interjected, standing up to move to the other
side of his desk, where Elizabeth sat. He was bearded, bulky and
dark, with a gold chain that swung from his neck, like some faux
crack dealer.
Leaning over her shoulder, the man placed a thick, hairy hand on
her bare arm, ostensibly for balance, as he reached with his other for
a folder that lay in front of her. He opened it to a section showing
coloured photographs of boats, calling Charles over to see. Charles
thought that they could as easily have gone to the window, from
which the boats could be seen perfectly well.
While Panagiotis pointed to the various models, extolling their
individual virtues, Charles saw that he had not removed his hand
from Elizabeth’s upper arm. Voluble and vociferous, the words rolled
out of him in a friendly bass boom. However, there was a look of
stealthy challenge in his eyes each time he glanced at Charles, a
look like that of a pickpocket caught in the act, daring a bystander
who has discovered him to blow the whistle; a sort of smirk, full of
arrogance blended with contempt.
All the while, he kept his grip on Elizabeth, while Charles, too
polite to react while still unsure about what after all might only have
been effusive Greek friendliness, thought he saw the man’s thumb
stroke his wife’s bronzed skin lightly, as she imperceptibly leaned in
to the Greek.
“Now this boat, it’s the one you should have. Only ten thousand
drachmas for the day, until sunset, with gas in the tank. A special
price for you, my friends, on this, your wife’s name-day.” So she had
told him of her birthday.
The boat indicated was a quasi-inflatable, a Zodiac-type raft, with
rubber pontoon sides and a plywood floor, that took a heavy
outboard motor.
“What about that one?” queried Charles, intruding his pointing arm
between the two in such a way that Panagiotis was forced to
relinquish his grip on Elizabeth. A pout formed on his face like that of
a child denied extra sweets.
“Which one?”
“That one, there.” Charles had placed his finger on the picture of a
small cabinless inboard with a sunshade, made of plastic or
fibreglass. He had the vague notion of touring the sea rocks a few
miles out in the water, visible beyond the office window, that the
large-scale map showed strung out in a line, like beads on a chain
from here to Syros. Perhaps, he thought, we could even get to Syros
and back, and dive for fish at each of the uninhabited islands along
the way.
“My friend, how much time have you spent in boats? Have you
ever driven one before, huh?”
Charles was forced to admit to little knowledge of things nautical;
his maritime experience was limited to a few pulls of the oar in
rowboats, and a turn or two at the rudder of pleasure craft owned by
friends.
“Well, then, don’t think about a big boat like that. It will only get
you into trouble, my friend. Besides, it costs too much for you.”
It grated to realize how easily the islander had sized up their
economic status, as did his contempt for their boat-handling abilities,
and his constant use of the word friend when his relation to them
was that of a shopkeeper. Charles nonetheless acquiesced on the
choice of vessel, noticing at the same time that Panagiotis had again
insinuated his hand on to Elizabeth’s upper arm, now massaging it
openly between his thumb and fingers as if it were a piece of cloth
he were testing before deciding on purchase. Was she luxuriating
under the attention, or was it his imagination? If she were a cat,
would she be purring now?
A contract in Greek and French was signed, something about
insurance; money changed hands; and suddenly the man was all
business, the cloying affection turned off like a tap. He yelled through
the door to a colleague or employee, or, most likely, a family
member, “Dimitri, take these nice people over to number four, and
show them how the boat works.” He turned back to the couple.
“Dimitri will take care of you. Where are you thinking of going today?”
Before Charles could frame his answer, Panagiotis continued.
“Maybe you stay away from Aghios Mikhailis. There’s rocks along
the shore you can’t see. They can tear the bottom off the boat.
Especially around the middle of the island. And the police don’t want
anyone around the south of the place – the archaeologists are
working on a wreck there. Byzantine. Too many people going over to
watch them, someone might get hurt. Much nicer beaches here, on
Tiflos. Stay here.” That last almost coming out as a grunt, he turned
on his heel and ambled back to his desk.
And the devil to you, sir, thought Charles. He had already had
enough of the Greek’s thinly veiled sneering and half-disguised
fondling of his wife. They would go where they pleased, now that
payment had been made.
Dimitri, a somewhat sullen young man of twenty or so, got up from
lubricating a motor he had taken apart, and led the couple down to
the inflatable, which was drawn on to the brownish sand. In English
more broken than that of his chief, he gave them running instructions
for the operation of the motor and its refuelling. He drilled them
through starting and stopping the motor a couple of times, until he
was satisfied they could handle the job. He was more serious than
Panagiotis, more concerned with doing his work, and more distant.
With Dimitri gone back to his motor, the two loaded their picnic
and gear, and Elizabeth shoved off, nimbly jumping in just after the
boat left shore. When the water was deep enough, Charles lowered
the motor and started it according to the instructions he had received
moments before. He was pleasantly surprised when it took life just
as easily as it had during Dimitri’s demonstration, although there was
no reason why it should have behaved otherwise.
He opened the throttle and, going slowly, they exited the harbour
in a few minutes, entering the chop, before swinging to port to follow
the coastline northwards. They had discussed their intended route
over breakfast at the hotel, and had decided to visit the several bays
strung out along the shore of Tiflos, where beaches were promised
by the parasol symbols on their crude map. With confidence built by
several landfalls, stops and starts, and the boat holding up, they
would cross the channel between the two islands at its narrowest
point, and visit what was perhaps a settlement that Charles had seen
with his binoculars the day before, at the middle of Aghios Mikhailis.
Rounding the point, their cruise along the coast continued
uneventfully; that was to say, it went well, and they each handled
their own end of the routine of landfall and launch in a way that made
them begin to feel that they were well suited to the sea. Putting in at
the small yacht basin at Steni Vála, away from the bigger boats, they
were not displeased with the lack of attention paid to them, since it
meant that they had handled themselves in a passably honourable
nautical fashion, which was what they had hoped. Beaching the
craft, they went ashore and had an iced drink on the verandah of the
small marina café before starting out again.
The next stretch was longer, past the middle of the island to
Aghios Dimitros. Its umbrella on the map called forth undue
optimism; the triangular cape was loose shingle of large rounded
stones. A pair he recognized as French, from having exchanged a
few words with them in town, occupied one end of the enormous
strand. Elizabeth and Charles saw no reason to linger; at the
narrowest point between Aghios Mikhailis and Tiflos, they were
eager to get on with their odyssey of one day and cross the strait to
terra incognita.
The sun was out as they crossed over but, with the breeze, the air
was cool. Elizabeth removed her top and let her naked breasts catch
the sun and spray. Charles, hand on the throttle, watched her with a
mixture of admiration and exasperation. He did not share the typical
sunseeker’s disdain for local custom, and was afraid that even on
this deserted stretch of sea someone might see them and try his
hand at pestering them afterwards, justifying the unwanted attention
with the excuse that Elizabeth was a loose woman.
She, for her part, did not care a bit what the locals might think.
They were only here for a week, and the chances they would be
remembered when they came back – if they came back – were
minimal. Charles was a prude in any case, and she would do as she
pleased, Greek sensibility be damned. Besides, she thought the
local men nice, and was not averse to the idea that more attention
might be paid to her if she was, in her desert innocence, reported
back to Panagiotis by some rumour-monger shepherd hidden in the
hills, watching through binoculars.
The northern part of the island loomed before them; the water
seemed deep enough to manoeuvre in close to the cliffs. Charles,
without a hat, was feeling the effects of the sun and wanted the few
yards of shade that the steep slope could provide. They entered the
narrow shadow and Elizabeth, sighing, drew her top back on, and
watched the depth as they sped on. Hugging the coast for a quarter
of an hour, they burst into sunshine again when the cliffs turned to
low hills. The middle of the island broadened to contain the sheltered
bay of Vassiliko, where Charles had seen some traces of habitation
from his perch the day before.
They eased around the northern point of the opening and he cut
the boat’s speed, seeing numerous low-lying jagged rocks that broke
the surface on the approach to shore. Carefully navigating past
these, they saw an arm of the bay appear and grow to port; a small
homestead or summer farm lay at its head. Because of the rocks,
and also on account of his unwillingness to expose their craft and
selves to the curious pokings and proddings of local adults and
children bound to assemble if they landed nearby, Charles pointed
the prow at a sandy flat a hundred yards or more away from the
buildings.
There was only one main whitewashed house, meaning that no
more than a single family lived here. Some olive-oil cans, tops
removed, sported wilting geraniums; a few unpainted rails and
drystone walls topped with dried-out thorns were corrals for sheep or
goats. The area immediately around the structure, long grassless,
was dusty and bare.
“It would be nice if there was a kafenion there,” Elizabeth
commented forlornly, having already given up hope.
“Mmm. It looks deserted to me,” Charles answered. “But I agree –
help me pull this thing up on the shore and let’s have a look.”
What they had taken from a distance to be sand was mostly
rotting seaweed and dried-out mud, cracked tan plates curling at
their edges. Its breakage as they walked on it, evidently the first to
do so in months, made a crisp noise, like flatbread broken at the
breakfast board.
“No chapel,” he commented, half to himself.
“It’s probably on the other side of the island; there’s likely ten of
them about.”
They had visited Greece often enough to have developed an
amateur passion for the place, even having studied the language at
local evening courses; both were aware that the smallest of rocks in
the sea would have its little ecclesia, or at least a ruin thereof, built
by mariners in grateful devotion, as thanks for rescue from the sea’s
travails or for some favour granted by a saint.
Here, obviously, there was no little church, the expected adjunct to
any such lonely house, protection against the terrors of isolation and
night, and the demon that walks at noon. It must be, as Elizabeth
had said, invisible from where they were; there was certainly enough
bush about to hide one in, or ten of them, for that matter.
“If there’s anyone around, we can inquire,” she said, watching the
place for signs of life as they approached. A few ducks and geese
waddled towards, and then around them, hoping to be fed. Charles
thought he heard a dog bark, from not so far away, but was not sure
and so said nothing to his wife. A faint smell of smoke, as from a fire
burned out the day before, would now and then waft their way. Of
people they saw no trace.
“Clearly there’s no one here, and I think we can forget the café, let
alone human contact,” he ventured, stating the obvious.
 “They’re all back on Tiflos, and probably come out here every
other day to water the goats and feed the birds,” Elizabeth replied.
They stopped, nearly on top of the house, realizing that to go any
further would be a violation of the owner’s private space, even with
the hospitality of the local countryside and the relaxed Greek attitude
to invasion of the blurred division between public space and private
property taken into account.
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 seasides.
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.
The powerful hand, or paw, or appendage – it was hard to say,
really, what it was, although it was depicted with clear sharp lines –
was decidedly huge, grotesque, and malformed. The painter had,
with a few hints of the brush, perfectly suggested a pale, mottled
skin, covered with welts and half-burst blisters, bubbled as if
diseased. It had its victim in an unbreakable hold, and was dragging
him towards the unseen owner of the monstrous limb. She
shuddered, glad that there were no more fragments to show what
the ugly thing was attached to.
Studying her find a bit more, Elizabeth saw that the painter had
even tried to give a hint of depth, by clearly indicating, with only a
few economical strokes, a background of thorn-bush. Perhaps it had
something to do with a mystery religion; the Greek world was so full
of those in the olden times. She put her find into the boat.

Charles was thoroughly lost. That is to say, having taking the wrong
way, he had no clear sense of where he was in the thicket, other
than a vague impression that he was approaching its edge
somewhere in the general direction of the beach where Elizabeth
waited. It was hard to tell – the light was gradually weakening, and if
he was not to spend the night amid the thorny jungle, he would have
to leave it soon.
As he crouched, stumbling over rocks in the waxing dimness, he
found growing within himself a faint perception of someone walking
parallel with him. The illusion took the form of a faint echo of his own
footsteps, and was so strong that he stopped at one point to see if it
would continue on its own. But there was nothing save the humid
stillness and the choking clouds of dust that he had kicked up in his
progress down.
He came to an intersection of tunnels that he took to contain a
subtle hint, triggering a weak memory of having been there before.
Perhaps, unknowing, he had rejoined his original trail. One thing was
certain, though: there was something tracking alongside him, in the
seemingly impossible snarl to his left, the uphill side. From the time
he had started again, the faint echo had grown louder; he was
convinced that some curious beast was following him, although he
could not imagine what it might be. But from the sound it made, it
was large. How anything could manage in the impenetrable brush,
so thickly grown together, was beyond his comprehension. The
uncomfortable feeling that he was being herded glimmered through
his mind, and lingered faintly. He found himself feeling faint, and on
the edge of panic, wishing more than anything else that he was
through the thicket jungle and out on the hillside on the way down to
Elizabeth and the boat, which they could row out, if they had to.
Just then, Charles suddenly saw the tunnel widen ahead of him,
and, seeing the light beyond, hoped that it was the end of his trials,
the end of the impenetrable brush.
The narrow throat of greenery opened to a wide mouth, and he
tumbled into the open, having to climb up a metre or more over a
solid tangle of bleached small branches. Dazed by the heat, salt in
his eyes, he dully registered that these were broken into bits,
perhaps the result of coppicing or cutting, covering entirely what he
now saw was only a large clearing, about as wide as a football pitch,
with no other exit. His despair at not having broken out was mixed
with relief on realising that whatever had been following him was
now silent, perhaps having given up its stalking.
Out of the dark interior of the thorns, he could see that there was
still a surprising amount of light, making for good visibility, even
though twilight was not too far off. There was still a glare from the
sun, which had not yet departed the ridge of Tiflos, now visible
across the strait to his left. Although light and colour were here in
sufficiency, his impression of the clearing was shades of black and
grey.
Looking about, Charles saw in the middle of the open space a thin
blackish stone, upright and flat, a little taller than the height of a full-
grown man, standing in position on some kind of platform, loosely
supported in its vertical position by a couple of small rude boulders
at its base. He walked towards it, the cracking twigs and branches
under his feet making an odd sound, something like the wind-chime
noise that comes when walking on beaches made of broken coral
branch.
Going around the object, he saw that it was roughly
anthropomorphic. What could have been wide shoulders now came
into view, along with a narrowing at the top that perhaps was meant
to represent a head. The whole plan of it suggested the smoothly
polished Cycladic figures he had seen with his wife two years before
in Athens. But when he came to the base of the menhir-like object,
he saw that where the museum figures had folded arms and breasts
and genitals incised, this figure was more rough, and whatever was
meant to be represented by the crude hacking of the basaltic rock
departed from the canonical in a suggestive, frightening and ugly
fashion. He was not sure what was being shown, but he did not like it
at all.
Looking from the base of the platform, he could see that a long
section of the hedge on the far side of the clearing was full of
openings, through which the light showed. Perhaps only a bush
thick, it was woven into a meshlike net: he had reached an edge of
the tangle after all. The gaps between the twisted interlocking vines
were too small to crawl through without enlargement. The glint of the
sea below was beckoning; if need be, he could use the saw on his
pocket tool to cut through the few tough branches and wiggle
through. He would not, under any circumstance, consider trying
further maze-wandering with the daylight diminishing so quickly.
Just then, starting towards the thin remaining barrier and freedom,
Charles kicked something, and looked down. By the tip of his right
toe, amidst the carpet of broken wood, rested a round object, looking
somewhat like a blanched fragment of rubber beach ball that had sat
too long out in the sun. Reaching down and picking it up, he was
stunned to see that it was a piece of a human cranium.
This focused his thinking sharply for the first time since he had
entered the clearing. Looking around him, seeing details he had
ignored, he felt sickened to realize that what he had thought was
stripped wood was, in fact, bone. The entire open area was covered
with cracked splinters of it, and the pit of his stomach dropped when
this simple fact sank in.
Nauseated, he stumbled, and his hand reached out for support
towards the primitive statue behind him. He leaned on to it, only to
have it move under the pressure. Charles jumped back, and saw it
crash and crack across its middle on the rim of the platform.
At which moment, from the edge of the clearing by the single
entrance, a clatter arose. Something big had somehow forced its
way under the blanket of bones, and was moving smoothly and
rapidly along, like a shark on land, throwing out a visible ripple along
the axis of its movement, which was towards Charles. The clacking
was more resonant than the chimelike sound he had made crossing
to the sculpture. Something was rising through the loose whitened
mass as it approached, with a small bow-wave of skeletal remains
and pieces being tossed out to either side.
As the white bulk beneath the bony sea neared him, Charles
broke, screaming, and ran for the far tangle.
* * *
Elizabeth shivered with the sudden coolness as the sun disappeared
behind the ridge, at a loss for to what to do. Going up into the thicket
in the darkness would be no good whatsoever. She was better off
waiting below, in case Charles made it out soon. Nothing would be
worse than his coming down, finding her gone, and then running up
into the impossible bushes again in an effort to find her.
While rationalizing this choice, the sound of a motor behind her
intruded into her thought. Full of unease, she wheeled around, and
saw a boat similar to theirs approaching. Splashing into the shallows,
she saw at the throttle a single figure that resolved into Panagiotis as
the inflatable neared the strand. She stumbled backwards as he ran
the craft up on to shore, cutting the motor and lifting and locking it
into an angled position in one neat motion, to protect the propeller
from the bottom rocks. A young goat, a kid, was trussed up in the
bow, bleating poignantly.
With the man’s appearance, Elizabeth’s reserve broke down. She
grabbed his thick hairy arm by the wrist even before he set foot on
land. “Thank God you’re here! Charles has wandered up on to the
hillside, and I’m afraid he’s lost. Is there anything you’ve got that we
can use to signal him, to help him find his way down?”
The Greek, who had been smiling slightly, was suddenly grim.
“Where on the hillside did he go? Up by the olives?”
“No, higher. He was trying to get up on top, to see if he could find
a path or help. You see, our motor stopped and we couldn’t get it
started again, so—” Her breathy explanation was interrupted by
some loud but distant sound from above, at the edge of the green
wall nearest them.
A tear ran down Elizabeth’s cheek. Panagiotis peered into the
gloom, and then more noise came to them, something like a loud
ripping of leaves mingled with a splintering sound. He turned his
gaze to Elizabeth, and she saw that he had begun to sweat. A look
was in his eyes that she had never seen in anybody’s before. It was
extreme fear, with undertones of greed and awe commingled, and a
hint of undisguised lust. She could not, in her building panic, interpret
its import.
He turned as the intensity of the racket from the distant thicket
increased, and dragged the kid roughly from the boat, tossing it on
the pebbles where it rested, supine, tongue hanging from its mouth,
slitted eyes bulging with fear. The sound from high up now changed,
both like and unlike the roar of a lion.
“Get in the boat.”
“We— I can’t. Charles is up there, he’s in some kind of trouble.
We can’t leave him!”
Panagiotis said nothing more while she protested, but took the
line of the disabled vessel and knotted it to a cleat on his boat. About
to shove the couple’s disabled transport out into the water,
something caught his attention, and he reached down into the raft,
taking something out. Stepping briskly up to her, he shoved the
ancient pottery into her face, demanding loudly, “What is this? What
is this?”
“It’s nothing, nothing, it’s only pottery I found here by the shore!
What does it matter? Can’t you help Charles?” By now she was
nearly screaming, while the sounds above them increased.
 Between clenched teeth, anger having got the better of fear
momentarily, the Greek muttered, “I told you not to come here! What
fools!” and flung the two sherds from him.
Elizabeth started away, going up, inland, when something totally
unexpected happened. Panagiotis took her by the shoulder, swung
her around, and slapped her across the face so hard that she saw
stars.
She was stunned, and stood motionless while he shoved the
boats into the shallows. Without any prelude, he walked back,
grabbed Elizabeth by the wrist, and dragged her out to the bobbing
Zodiac. She tried to dig in her heels, but his bulk and strength made
her effort futile, and he effortlessly threw her into the vessel before
jumping aboard himself. He started the motor and the two craft
began to draw away swiftly, their prows swinging around towards the
darkening channel that separated them from Tiflos.
Limp, drained of all resistance, all thinking gone from her mind,
Elizabeth slowly lifted her gaze to where the sounds still came from,
and saw, for the first time, something very large, and white, tearing
uselessly at the barrier of thorn from inside. It threw itself again and
yet again at the shaking net of roots and branches, but could not
penetrate it. The barrier yielded, sagging beneath the impact, but did
not give. It was as if the massive thing was trapped, and was raging
inside, casting itself against the wall of vines that held it in.
Something wet was being slapped against the thicket, and then
being picked up and dashed against it again. Now and then she
thought she saw a splotch or two of red against the huge paleness,
but she was not sure. Half in shock, she remained passive when she
felt Panagiotis’s grip high up her thigh, kneading it in his oversized
paw, stroking the inside of her leg.
She knew that whatever it was saw them in the boat, and that its
rage was somehow connected with this. At that knowledge, she
broke down and finally began to weep, collapsing onto the gunwale,
as the pulsing motor unwaveringly pushed them across the channel,
into the night.
 dark5
 
The Prospect
Cards
 
DON TUMASONIS
 
 
Dear
Mr Cathcart,
 
We are happy to provide, enclosed with
this letter, our complete description of item
no. 83 9 from our recent
catalogue Twixt Hammam
and Minaret: 19th and Some Early 20th
Century-Travel in the Middle East,
Anatolia, Nubia, etc.,
as requested by yourself.
 
You are lucky in that our former
cataloguer, Mr Mokley, had, in what he thought
were his spare moments, worked
to achieve an extremely full description of this interesting
group of what are
probably unique items . Certainly no others to whom we have shown
these have
seen any similar, nor have been able to provide any clew as to their ultimate
provenance.
 
They were purchased by one of our
buyers on a trip to Paris, where, unusually -
since everyone thinks the bouquinistes were mined out long ago - they were
found in a
stall on the Left Bank. Once having examined his buy later that
evening, he determined to
return the following day to the vendor in search of
any related items. Alas, there were no
others, and the grizzled old veteran
running the boxes had no memory of when or where he
purchased these, saying
only that he had them for years, perhaps since the days of
Marmier, actually
having forgotten their existence until they were unearthed through the
diligence of our employee. Given the circumstance of their discovery (covered
with dust,
stuffed in a sealed envelope tucked away in a far corner of a green
tin box clamped onto a
quay of the Seine, with volumes of grimy tomes in front
concealing their being), we are
lucky to have even these.
 
Bear in mind, that as an old and
valued customer, you may have this lot at 10% off
the catalogue price,
postfree, with insurance additional, if desired.
 
Remaining, with very best wishes
indeed. Yours most faithfully,
 
Basil Barnet
 
BARNET AND KORT,
ANTIQUARIAN TRAVEL BOOKS AND EPHEMERA
 
****
 
No. 839
 
Postal
view cards,
commercially produced, various manufacturers, together with a few
photographs
mounted on card, comprising a group of 74. Mostly sepia and black-and-
white,
with a few contemporary tinted, showing scenes from either Balkans, or Near or
Middle East, ca. 1920-30. The untranslated captions, when they occur, are
bilingual, with
one script resembling Kyrillic, but not in Russian or
Bulgarian; the other using the Arabic
alphabet, in some language perhaps
related to Turco-Uighuric.
 
Unusual views of as yet
unidentified places and situations, with public and private
buildings, baths,
squares, harbours, minarets, markets, etc. Many of the prospects show
crowds
and individuals in the performance of divers actions and work, sometimes
exotic.
Several of the cards contain scenes of an erotic or disturbing nature.
A number are typical
touristic souvenir cards, generic products picturing
exhibits from some obscure museum or
collection. In spite of much expended
effort, we have been unable to identify the locales
shown.
 
Entirely unfranked, and without
address, about a third of these have on their verso a
holographic ink text, in
a fine hand by an unidentified individual, evidently a travel diary
or journal
(non-continuous, with many evident lacuna:). Expert analysis would seem to
indicate 1930 or slightly later as the date of writing.
 
Those cards with handwriting have
been arranged in rough order by us, based on
internal evidence, although the
chronology is often unclear and the order therefore
arbitrary. Only these cards
- with a single exception - are described, each with a following
transcription
of the verso holograph text; the others, about 50 cards blank on verso, show
similar scenes and objects. Our hypothetical reconstruction of the original
sequence is
indicated through lightly pencilled numbers at the upper right
verso corner ol each card.
 
Condition: Waterstain across top
edges, obscuring all of the few details of date and
place of composition. Wear
along edges and particularly at corners. A couple of cards
rubbed; the others,
aside from the faults already noted, mostly quite fresh and untouched.
 
Very Rare. In our considered
opinion, the cards in themselves are likely to be
unique, no others having been
recorded to now; together with the unusual document they
contain, they are
certainly so.
 
Price:
�1,650
 
****
 
Card No. 1
 
Description: A dock, in some Levantine port.
A number of men and animals, mostly mules,
are congregated around a moored boat
with sails, from which large tonnes, evidently
containing wine, labelled
as such in Greek, are being either loaded or unshipped.
 
Text: not sculling, but rather
rowing, the Regatta of �12, for which his brother
coxswained. Those credentials
were good enough for Harrison and myself, our credulity
seen in retrospect as
being somewhat naive, and ourselves as rather gullible; such,
however, is all
hindsight. For the time being, we were very happy at having met fellow
countrymen
- of the right sort, mind you - in this godforsaken backwater at a time when
our fortunes, bluntly put, had taken a turn for much the worse. When Forsythe,
looking to
his partner Calquon, asked �George, we need the extra hands - what
say I tell Jack and
Charles about our plans?� To that Calquon only raised an
eyebrow, as if to say it�s your
show, go and do as you think fit. Forsythe,
taking that as approval, ordered another round,
and launched into a little
speech, which, when I think back on the events of the past weeks,
had perhaps
less of an unstudied quality than his seemingly impromptu delivery would
have
implied. Leaning forward, he drew from his breast pocket a postal view card,
and
placed it on the table, saying in a lowered voice, as if we were fellow
conspirators being
drawn in, �What would you think if I told you, that from
here, in less than one day�s
sail and a following week�s march, there is to be
found something of such value, which if
the knowledge of it became common,
would
 
****
 
Card no. 2
 
Description: A view of a mountain massif,
clearly quite high and rugged, seen from below
at an angle, with consequent
foreshortening. A fair amount of snow is sprinkled over the
upper heights. A
thick broken line in white, retouch work, coming from behind and around
one of
several summits, continues downward along and below the ridge-line before
disappearing. This evidently indicates a route.
 
Text:�ania and Zog. Perfidious folk!
Perfidious people. Luckily, our packet steamer had
arrived and was ready to take
us off. A night�s sailing, and the better part of the next day
took us to our
destination, or rather, to the start of our journey. After some difficulty in
finding animals and muleteers, we loaded our supplies, hired guides, and after
two difficult
days, arrived at the foothills of the mountains depicted on the
obverse of this card. Our
lengthy and labourious route took us ultimately up
these, where we followed the voie
normale, the same as shown by the
white hatched line. Although extremely steep and
exposed, the slope was not
quite sheer and we lost only one mule and no men during the
1500-yard descent.
Customs - if such a name can be properly applied to such outright
thieves -
were rapacious, and confiscated much of what we had, including my diary and
notes. Thus the continuation on these cards, which represent the only form of
paper
allowed for sale to the
 
****
 
Card no. 3
 
Description: A panorama view of a Levantine
or perhaps Balkan town of moderate to large
size, ringed about by snow-covered
mountains in the distance. Minarets and domes are
visible, as is a very large
public building with columns, possibly Greco-Roman, modified
to accommodate
some function other than its original religious one, so that the earlier
elements appear draped about with other stylistic intrusions.
 
Text: vista. With the sun setting,
and accommodation for the men and food for the animals
arranged, we were able
to finally relax momentarily and give justice, if only for a short
while, to
the magnificence of the setting in which the old city was imbedded, like a
pearl in
a filigreed ring. I�ve seen a lot of landscapes, �round the world, and
believe me, this
was second to none. The intoxicating beauty of it all made it
almost easy to believe the
preposterous tales that inspired Calquon, and
particularly Forsythe, to persuade us to join
them on this tossed-together
expedition. I frankly doubt that anything will come of it
except our forcing
another chink in the isolation which has kept this fascinating place
inviolate
to such a degree that few Westerners have penetrated its secrets over the many
centuries since the rumoured group of Crusaders forced their
 
 ****
 
Card no. 4
 
Description: A costume photograph,
half-length, of a young woman in ethnic or tribal
costume, veiled. The d�colletage
is such that her breasts are completely exposed. Some
of the embroidery and
jewellery would indicate Cypriote or Anatolian influence; it is clear
that she
is wearing her dowry in the form of coins, filigreed earrings, necklaces,
medallions, and rings. Although she is handsome, her expression is very stiff.
[Not
reproduced in the catalogue]
 
Text: Evans, who should have
stuck to Bosnia and Illyria. I never thought his snake
goddesses to be anything
other than some Bronze Age fantast�s wild dream, if indeed the
reconstructions
are at all accurate. Harrison, however, has told me that this shocking - i.e.
for a white woman (the locals are distinctively Caucasian: red hair, blue eyes
and fair skin
appearing frequently, together with traces of slight
Mediterranean admixture) -
d�shabill� was common throughout the Eastern �gean
and Middle East until a very
short while ago, when European mores got the
better of the local folk, except, it seems,
those here. I first encountered
such dress (or undress) a week ago, the day after our late
evening
arrival, when out early to see the market and get my bearings, and totally
engaged
in examining some trays of spices in front of me, I felt suddenly bare
flesh against my
exposed arm, stretched out to test the quality of some turmeric.
It was a woman at my side
who, having come up unnoticed, had bent in front of
me to obtain some root or herb. When
she straightened, I realised at once that
the contact had been with her bare bosom, which, I
might add, was quite
shapely, with nipples rouged. She was unconcerned; I must have
blushed at least
as much
 
****
 
Card no. 5
 
Description: A naos or church, on a large
stepped platform, in an almost impossible
m�lange of styles, with elements of a
Greek temple of the Corinthian order mixed in with
Byzantine features and other
heterogeneous effects to combine in an unusual, if not
harmonious, whole. The
picture, a frontal view, has been taken most probably at early
morning light,
since the temple steps and surrounding square are devoid of people.
 
Text: light and darkness, darkness
and light� Forsythe said. �With this form of dualism,
and its rejection of the
body, paradoxically, until the sacrament is administered, the
believers are in
fact encouraged to excess of the flesh, which is viewed as essentially evil,
and ultimately, an illusion. The thought is that by indulging mightily, disdain
is expressed
for the ephemeral, thus granting the candidate power over the
material, which is seen as
standing in his or her way to salvation.� �What does
that have to do with your little trip
of this morning?� I remonstrated. We had
agreed to meet at ten o�clock to see if we
could buy manuscripts in the street
of the scribes, for the collection. Paul reddened and
replied �D�you know the
large structure on the square between us and the market? I was
on my way to
meet you, when I happened to pass through there. It seems� - and here he
went
florid again - �that in an effort to gain sanctity more quickly, parents, as
required by
the priests, are by law for two years to give over those of their
daughters on the verge of
womanhood to the temple each day between 10 and noon,
in a ploy to quicken the
transition to holiness. Any passer-by, during that
time, who sees on the steps under the
large parasols (set up like tents, there
to protect exposed flesh) any maiden suiting his
fancy, is urged to drop a coin
in the bowls nearest and
 
****
 
Card no. 6
 
Description: A quite imperfect and puzzling
picture, with mist and fog, or perhaps steam,
obscuring almost all detail. What
is visible are the dim outlines of two rows of faces, some
veiled, others
bearded.
 
Text: poured more water on the coals.
By now it was quite hot, and I could no longer see
Forsythe, but only hear his
voice. The lack of visibility made it easier to concentrate on his
words, with
my eyes no longer focused on details I had found so distracting. �The
incongruity of it all makes my head reel - how could they have maintained all
this in the
face of the changes around them? After all, a major invasion route
of the past three
millennia lies two valleys to the west. . .� Nodding in
unseen agreement, my attention
was momentarily diverted by the sound of a new
arrival entering the room, and seconds
later, a smooth leg brushed for a second
against mine; I assumed it was a woman, and durst
not stir. �Not that they�ve
rejected the modern at all costs - they�ve got electric
generators and some
lighting, a fair amount of modern goods and weaponry find their way
in, there�s
the museum, that Turkish photography shop, the printing press, and - oh, all
the rest. But they pick and choose. And that religion of theirs! All the Jews
and Muslims
and Christians here are cowed completely! Why hasn�t a holy war
been declared by their
neighbours?� With Paul ranting on in the obscuring
darkness, I grunted in agreement, and
then, shockingly, felt a small foot rub
against
 
****
 
Card no. 7
 
Description: Costumed official, perhaps a
religious leader or judge, sitting on the floor
facing the camera. He is
bearded, greying, with a grim set to his mouth. One hand points
gracefully
towards a smallish, thick codex held by the other hand. From the man�s breast
depends a tall rectangular enamelled pendant of simple design, divided
vertically into
equal fields of black and white.
 
Text: Sorbonne, three years of which,
I suppose, could explain a lot, as for example, his
overpowering use of garlic.
�Pseudo-Manicheeism� he continued, �is solely a weak
term used by the
uncomprehending for what can only be described as perfection, the last
word
itself being a watered-out expression merely, for that which cannot be
comprehended
through the feeble tool of rational and sceptical thinking, which
closes all doors it does not
understand. Oh, I know that some of you� - and
here he eyed me suspiciously, as if I was
running muckin� Cambridge! - �have
tried to classify our belief, using the
Monophysites as opposed to the
Miaphysites of your religion in an analogy that neither
comprehends nor grasps
the subtlety of our divinely inspired thought! As if It could be
explained in
Eutychian terms! Our truth is self-evident and is so clear that we allow, with
certain inconsequential restrictions and provisos, those of your tribe who
wish, to expound
their falsehoods in the marketplace, assuming they have
survived the rigours of the journey
here. You were better to perceive
indirectly, thinking of flashing light; the colours green,
and gold; the
hundred instead of the one; segmentation, instead of smoothness, as
metaphors
that enable one
 
****
 
Card
no. 8
 
Description: Another museum card, with
several large tokens or coins depicted, which in
style and shape resemble some
of the dekadrachm issues of 5th century Syracuse. The
motifs of the
largest one shown, are, however, previously unrecorded, with a temple (see
card
5) on the obverse. The reverse, with a young girl and three men, is quite
frankly
obscene. [Not reproduced in the catalogue]
 
Text: tea. I was quite struck with
the wholesome appearance and modest demeanour of Mrs
Fortesque, who was
plainly, if neatly dressed in the style of ten years ago - evidently, they
had
been out of contact with Society in London since arrival! The Rev Fortesque was
holding forth on how they were, as a family, compelled by local circumstance,
and frankly,
the threat of force, to adhere strictly to the native code of
behaviour and mores when out in
public, the children not being exempt from the
rituals of their fellows of like age. Calquon
frowned at this, and asked, �In
every way, Reverend?� to which the missionary sighed,
�Unfortunately, yes -
otherwise, we would not be allowed to preach at all.� There was a
small silence
while we pondered the metaphysical implications of this when a young and
angelically beautiful girl of about twelve entered the room. �Gentlemen, this
is my
daughter, Alicia...� smiled Mrs Fortesque proudly, only to be interrupted
in the most
embarrassing fashion by the sudden sputtering and spraying of Forsythe,
whom we thought
had choked on his crumpet. Thwacking him on the back, until his
redness of face receded
and normal breathing resumed, I thought I saw an
untoward smirk lightly pass over the
face of the young girl. �What is it, old
man?� I solicitously enquired. Paul, after having
swallowed several times, with
the attention of the others diverted, whispered sotto voce,
breathlessly, so
that only I could hear �Yesterday - the temple
 
****
 
Card no. 9
 
Description: An odd view, taken at
mid-distance, of a low-angled pyramidal or cone-
shaped pile of stones, most
fist-sized or slightly smaller, standing about one to two feet
high. A number
of grimacing urchins and women, the last in their distinctive public
costume,
stand gesticulating and grinning to either side, many of them holding stones in
their hands. Given the reflection of light on the pool of dark liquid that has
seeped from the
pile�s front, it must be - midday.
 
Text: brave intervention, with dire
consequence. �For God�s sake, Fortesque, don�t. .
.� shouted Forsythe, as I
well remember, before his arms were pinned behind him, and
with a callused paw
like a bear�s clamped over his mouth, in much the same situation as
myself, was
forced helplessly to watch the inexorable and horrific grind of events. Eager
hands, unaided by any tool - such is the depth of fanaticism that prevails in
these parts -
quickly scooped out a deep enough hole from the loose soil of the
market square. The man
of the cloth, who had persevered in the face of so much
pagan indifference and outright
hostility for over a decade, was for his
troubles and valiant intervention unceremoniously
divested of his clothing and
dumped in the hole, which was quickly filled - there was no
lack of volunteers
- immobilising him in the same manner as Harrison, who was buried
with his arms
and upper breast free. They were just far enough apart so that their fingers
could not touch, depriving them in fiendish fashion of that small consolation.
I remember
the odd detail that Fortesque was half-shaven - he had dropped
everything when informed
of Harrison�s situation. Knowing full well what was in
store, he began singing
�Onward, Christian Soldiers� in a manly, booming voice
that brought tears to my eyes,
whilst Harrison, I am ashamed to say, did
 
****
 
Card no. 10
 
Description: Group portrait, of nine men.
Six stand, wearing bandoliers, pistols with
chased and engraved handles
protruding from the sashes round their waists, decorative
daggers, etc. The
edges of their vests are heavily embroidered with metallic thread in
arabesque
patterns. All are heavily moustachioed. A seventh companion stands, almost
ceremoniously, to their right, holding like a circus tent peg driver a wooden
mallet with a
large head a foot or so off the ground; a position somewhat like
that of a croquet player.
The eighth man, wearing a long shift or kaftan, is on
all fours in the centre foreground,
head to the left, but facing the camera like
the others. A wooden saddle of primitive type is
on his back. A ninth man,
dressed like the first seven, is in the saddle, as if riding the
victim, who,
we see, has protruding from his fundament, although discreetly draped in part
by the long shift, a pole the thickness of a muscular man�s forearm.
 
Text: no idea, being sure that all
this was misunderstanding, and could easily be cleared up
with a liberal
application of baksheesh. This was our mistake, as Calquon was led from the
judge�s compartments, arms bound, to a small square outside, where there was a
carved
fountain missed by the iconoclasts of long ago (of whom there had been
several waves),
with crudely sculptured and rather battered lions from whose
mouths water streamed into
the large circular limestone basin. We followed, of
course, vehemently protesting his
innocence all the while, and were studiously
ignored. Poor Calquon was untied, and forced
onto his knees and hands in a most
undignified and ludicrous position. A crowd of people
had already gathered
under the hot midday sun, including many women and children.
Hawkers walked
through the throng that gathered, offering cold water from tin tanks on
their
backs, each with a single glass fitted into a decorated silver holder with a
handle, tied
onto the vessel by a cord. I saw, lying off to the side, on the
steps of the fountain, a wooden
stake, bark removed from its narrow end,
smoothed and sharpened to a nasty point. A fat
greasy balding man wearing the
red cummerbund of officialdom came out of the crowd,
with a bright knife in
 
****
 
Card no. 11
 
Description: A market with various stalls
and their owners. A wandering musician is off to
the left, and a perambulating
vendor of kebabs, with long brass skewers, is on the right.
 
Text: painful for everyone concerned,
particularly George. A guard in crimson livery,
decorated with gold thread, was
sitting smoking his hubble-bubble a short distance away
from our gloomy group,
every now and then looking up from his reverie to make sure
things were as they
should be. Perhaps it was the smoke from the pipe, or sheer bravado - I
have
never known, to this day - but Calquon, poor George, asked for a cigarette,
which
Forsythe immediately rolled and put on his lips, lighting it, since this
was impossible for
our fellow, whose arms were bound. He took a puff, as cool
as if he were walking down
Regent Street to Piccadilly, and then, for the first
time noticing the women and children
seated at his feet, asked us in a parched
voice what they might possibly be doing there. I
shuffled my feet and looked
away, while Paul told him in so many words that they were
waiting for his
imminent departure, for the same purpose that women in the Middle Ages
would
gather around criminals about to be executed, in hope of obtaining a good luck
charm that was powerful magic, after the fact of summary punishment was
accomplished.
This, as we were afraid, enraged our unfortunate en brochette
companion, who became
livid as we tried to calm him. Writhing in his stationary
upright position, would after all do
him no good, given that out of his
shoulder (from whence I noticed a tiny tendril of smoke
ascending), there was
already protruding
 
****
 
Card no. 12
 
Description: A public square, photo taken
from above at a slant angle, from a considerable
distance. Some sort of
framework or door, detached from any structure, has been set up in
one corner.
A couple of dark objects, one larger than the other, appear in the middle of
that
door or frame which faces the viewer, obscuring what is going on behind. A
large agitated
crowd of men of all ages - from quite young boys to bent, aged
patriarchs, all wearing the
truncated local version of the
fez, are milling around the rear of the upright construction. A
number of local police, uniformed, are in the thick of it, evidently to
maintain order.
 
Text: wondering what the commotion
was about. I was therefore shocked to see in one
tight opening the immobilised
head of a young woman of about twenty-five, and in the
other her right hand.
Instead of the ubiquitous veil, she had some sort of black silk bandage
that
performed the same function, closely wrapped around her mouth and nose. She was
plainly emitting a sullen glare - easily understood, given the circumstance.
There was no
join or seam; for the life of me, I still do not understand the
construction. Every now and
then the frame and the woman contained by it would
violently shake and judder. The
expression under her shock of unruly red hair
remained stoic and unperturbed. Walking to
the other side (make sure that
Mildred doesn�t read this!!) I saw the crowd of men - there
were
about 80 to 100, including about twenty or so of the few negro slaves found in
these
parts - with more pouring into the square - jostling in the attempt to be
next: those nearest
had partially disrobed, and had taken �matters� in hand,
fondling themselves to arousal,
for taking her in the fashion preferred here,
which is of that between men and boys, from
behind. Despondent as I was, I had
no intention other than to continue, when I was
suddenly shoved forward into
the midst
 
****
 
Card
no. 13
 
Description: A view down a narrow street,
with the high tenements and their overhanging
wooden balconies blocking out
much of the light. The photographer has done well to
obtain as much detail as
is shown here. A cupola or dome, and what is perhaps a minaret
behind it, are
just visible at the end of the lane. Three young (from the look of their
figures
as revealed by the traditional dress, cf card 2) women in black, each
with a necklace from
which hangs a single bright large pendant, stand in the
middle of the way, at mid-distance.
They appear to be approaching the camera.
Surprisingly, for all that they are bare-headed,
etc., they are wearing veils
that conceal their features utterly. There are no others in the
street.
 
Text: said to Forsythe that there was
no point to it, that we would have to, at some moment,
accept our losses and
the futility of going any further. With the others gone, I argued, it
was
extremely unlikely that we could continue on our own; we should swallow our
pride,
and admit that we had come greatly unprepared for what we had in mind.
It was best, in
other words, that we make our run as soon as backs were turned.
Forsythe disagreed
vehemently, and meant that on the contrary, we were obliged
by the sacred memory of our
companions to carry on, an odd turn of phrase,
considering what we had hoped to
accomplish and obtain, by any means. And then
he said cryptically, �It doesn�t matter in
any case - the deed is done.� I
immediately took this as admission that the object of our
expedition had been
somehow achieved without my knowledge; that was the likely cause
of the
troubles we had experienced, and the growing agitation of the populace I had
uneasily witnessed the past few days. As we discussed our dilemma outside the
carpet
shop, one of many lining the street, I became aware of a silence, a hush
that had
descended. People turned to face the wall, in fear, I thought, as I
saw three females
approaching. These
 
****
 
Card no. 14
 
Description: A poor reproduction of the
second state of plate VII of Piranesi�s Carceri. In
fact, the ascription
is given on the verso of the card, the artist�s name (G. B. PIRANESI)
appearing in Latin capitals
inserted amongst the Arabic and Kyrillic letters.
 
Text: less than the Carceri! What
everyone had once thought the malarial fever dreams of a
stunted, perverse
genius, I saw now only to be honest reporting. I was absolutely
astounded, once
the dragoman, smelling of garlic and anisette, had removed the blindfold
from
my eyes. A lump came to my throat, and tears threatened to engulf me, when I
thought of the others done away with through treachery, foul ignorance and
intolerance. I
suppose rumours regarding the disappearance of the sacred entity
of the valley had much
to do with the situation, too. Controlling my emotions -
here, for a man to weep is a sign of
weakness, with all the consequences such a
perception entails -I saw around me. A number
of individuals, male and female,
nude or partly so, were being ushered along the spiral
staircase wrapped around
an enormous stone column down which I myself must have
descended only a few
minutes before. Natural light played through a number of cleverly
placed oculi
in the invisible ceiling, concealed by the complex bends and angles of the
place.
Turning,
 
****
 
Card no. 15
 
Description: Another crude reproduction of a
Piranesi �Prisons� plate, this number VIII,
ascribed as above.
  
Text: I saw yet another vista of the
Italian artist before me, and began to understand, for the
first time, that the
plan of all his mad, insane engravings was a coherent whole, either
taken from
the actuality before me, or perhaps plotted out from his prints, and
converted to
reality, by some unsung architectonic genius. The Venetians had
been here, I knew, during
the mid-1700s, when things had settled down. Perhaps
one of their workmen was given the
book, and told to produce, or . . . With my
glance following the staircase from its
beginning, flanked by gigantic military
trophies, with plumed helmets much larger than
any human head, I traced the
turn upwards to the left, and saw, between two enormous
wooden doors opening on
an arch, a large rack. A series of ropes hung down from the
supporting wall,
and I could see the faint glow of a brazier and hear the distant screams of
the
poor women and men, white bodies glistening with the sweat of fear, who hung
 
****
 
Card no. 16
 
Description: tinted, clearly a display of
gemstones, perhaps from a museum of natural
history or local geology. One of
the larger groups, arranged separately from the others,
with green colouring
obviously meant to indicate emeralds, appears to be the fragments,
longitudinally shattered, of what must have been a single enormous stone.
 
Text: subincision being the technical
expression. As you can imagine, I was wildly
straining against my bonds, in
fact, you could say I was struggling to the point of extreme
violence, to, as
it turned out, no avail. In spite of all my agitated effort, I was clamped to
some sort of heavy metal framework or stand that immobilised me more or less
completely. Naked, helpless, dreading whatever was in store, I saw the same
three young
women approach into the torchlight from the encircling darkness.
Without a word, my
gaolers and the others left and I was alone with the unholy
trio. As if at a signal, they
simultaneously removed their veils and I was
momentarily stunned, almost drugged, by the
sight of their incredible beauty.
Remember, this was the first time I had ever seen one of
the local women
unmasqued - if these were representative of the rest, it would easily
explain
any number of puzzling local rituals and customs. In spite of my extreme
situation,
I could not help myself - the ravishing faces, the fulsome breasts
with their shapely
crimsoned nipples, the long black glistening hair
 
****
 
Card no. 17
 
Description: A market place, with many and
various stands and displays. An ironmonger, a
merchant of brass teapots, a
seller of cured leather are all easily discerned. In the centre,
arms like a
Saint Andrew�s cross before his chest, holding a large knife in die one hand, a
two-pronged fork in the other, is a seller of grilled and roasted meats. On the
small portable
gridiron in front of him, a number of sizable sausages are
warming, split neatly lengthwise.
 
Text: darted out with the tip of her
tongue, and then slowly extended it again. To my
horror, I saw it was no
tongue: it was a long razor-sharp dagger or splinter of green glass or
stone; a
smaragd dirk that was somehow attached or glued to the root of what remained of
her tongue. The other two, kneeling close on either side of her, each
reverentially held,
both with two hands, the one heavy breast nearest them of
their chief colleague, as if
ritually weighing and supporting these at the same
time. This observation was made on the
abstract, detachedly, as if I were
outside my own body. More mundanely, I was screaming
and thrashing - or
attempting uselessly to thrash. Praise to the gods that be, I passed out
completely, and awoke with the foul deed done, blood running down me and pooling
on
the cold flagging, and the three dark sisters gone. Looking down, as my
original captors
reentered the chamber, I saw that the operation had been
carried out, just as had been
described to me by the temple priest, and I
fainted once more. When
 
****
 
Card no. 18
 
Description: Not a postal card, but rather a
half-length portrait photograph mounted on
thick pasteboard, of a family group
from about the 1920s. The two parents are quite young,
and formally dressed:
the father in a dark suit, to which is pinned an unidentified order or
medal.
He holds a small Bible clasped to his breast. The woman is handsome, in a white
lacy blouse buttoned to the top of her graceful neck, with masses of hair piled
high on her
head. The young daughter is quite simply beautiful, an angel.
 
Text: would not have recognised, but
for the signal distinctive wedding ring on her finger.
�Mrs Fortesque,� I
blurted out, as we stood amongst the milling crowd in the shade of
the souk. �I
had no idea�� but stopped when I saw the blush originating from beneath
the
missionary wife�s veil spread to her ample and attractive sun-browned bosom (a
pendant black enamelled cross its sole decoration), with the attendant rush of
blood turning
the aureoles - modestly without cinnabar - to the precise same
shade of red so favoured by
the local women. I saw, at the same time, the
fleshy peaks slowly stiffen and stand, that
motion drawing forth a
corresponding response on my part, something I hardly had
conceived feasible,
after the trauma of the operation of four days ago, with the insertion of
the
papyrus strips to prevent rejoining of the separated parts while the healing
occurred.
�I should perhaps explain myself,� she said, regaining her composure.
�The local rules
are very strict; were I not, when attending to my public tasks
and duties outside the house,
to attire myself with what we consider wanton and
promiscuous display, it would be here
viewed as flagrant immodesty, and
punishable, before the crowd, by the
 
****
 
Card no. 19
 
Description: An ossuary chapel, where the
style of the classic Romanesque interior is
partly obscured by the encrustation
of thousands of skulls and skeletal parts, that form, or
cover, the interior
architecture. This photograph taken at the crossing, facing the nearby
altar,
where, instead of a crucifix or a monstrance, an enamelled or painted
rectangular
metal plaque stands upright, its left side white, its right black.
 
Text: that the crucifix was now
exchanged for a small pendant medallion, half black, half
white, the symbol of
the local cult. The thought of Mrs Fortesque having gone, so to speak,
over to
the other side was shocking, and at the same time extremely piquant and
arousing,
with my recently acquired knowledge of what that fully
entailed for the woman involved.
Having just come to the rendezvous from my
daily session with the local doctor, who was
treating me with that disgusting
metallic green and gold powder, the source of which I was
loath to ponder on, I
scarcely thought myself physically capable of what was to follow,
given my
general and peculiar state. Nonetheless, when the missionary�s widow, after
furtively glancing about only to find the chapel empty - no surprise, since it
was midday
and most families were at home, doors shuttered for the day�s
largest repast - reached for
and embraced me, the last thing I had awaited, I
found myself responding in a most
unexpected fashion. �But the children - your
late husband�� I stammered, as she
pushed me back against a column, so the
decorative knobs of tibiae and the like bruised
my spine, with her bare breasts
crushed against my chest and her hot searching lips
 
****
 
Card
no. 20
 
Description: A statue, whose dimensions are
given as 13 by 5 by 5 [in, it is assumed], these
last representing the base. A
female goddess, in flowing robes, very much gravid, standing
in a bronze boat
formed like the body of a duck, whose head is the prow. Within its open
beak it
holds a cube.
 
Text: certain? It�s only been a month...�
I lingered at these, my own words, astonished
at the assertion. �Of course I
am,� she snapped back, then containing herself with
difficulty, lowered her
tone, and continued, �I�ve not been with anyone, before or
since,� she said,
bitterly smiling. She was very much enceinte, astoundingly so, in a way
that
would have been impossible had I been responsible for her state. I kept on
looking at
her in bewilderment. My first thought was �propulsive force - perhaps;
generative
principle - never!!� Still holding my hand lightly, she followed up,
saying, �It does seem
impossible, doesn�t it? Not just the time - I
mean, given what had happened to you, in
addition. Think, though, was anything
odd done to you then, or about that time? I mean . .
.� At that, the thought of
the daily calls to the doctor snapped into mind. Once I had
found out the
disgusting source of the gold and green powders, I had ceased from visiting
him
again. Had our meeting in the ossuary been before or after the �treatment�s�
short
course? I could not remember, for the life of
 
****
 
Card
no. 21
 
Description: Another souvenir card assumed
to be from the local natural history collection,
exhibiting a quite large
centipede of unknown type, with several interesting and anomalous
features. The
scale beside it a quarter-inch stick, since inches would make the creature
ridiculously large.
 
Text: smooth and horrendously
distended vulva with a disgusting plop. The three witches -
I cannot think of
them as being other than that -hurried to the trestle immediately, clicking
the
emerald daggers they had for tongues excitedly against their teeth. The
multitudinous
onlookers and priests held their distance. Mrs F seemed to be in
a state of shock, but was
still breathing with eyes closed. Horrified, I cast a
look at Alicia, who stood imperturbed in
her youthful nakedness, motionless,
still holding the thick black candle cool as you like, as
if she were in
Westminster Abbey. The bloody caul and afterbirth were snipped at and cut
with
glassy tongues, and I saw, when the three stepped back, a foul, thick,
twitching,
segmented thing, snaky, glinting green and gold, thick as a moray
eel, writhing between
the poor woman�s bloody legs. The chief witch nodded to
Alicia, who slowly moved
forward, setting her candle carefully at her mother�s
feet. At another signal, she picked
up the glistening demonic shape, which
unwound itself into a heavy, broad, segmented
centipede-like beast of
dimensions that left me gasping. Alicia uncoiled the slimy monster,
gleaming
with ichor, and draped the hellspawn �round her shoulders, just as if it was a
feather boa. Pausing only for a moment, she turned to me with a thin leer, and
asked
�Want to hold it? It�s yours too!� Revulsed, I turned, while she
shrugged and set off
on the ceremonial way, the crowd bowing to her and her
half-brother, sister, or whatever,
the belt of hollow birds� eggs - her only
adornment - clicking around her slim hips,
brown from hours on the temple steps
- as she swayed, during
 
****
 
Card no. 22
 
Description: A shining centipede probably of
gold, coiled upon a dais of ebony, or some
other dark wood, this last encrusted
with bejewelled precious metal of arabesque form. The
central object�s size may
be inferred from the various items imbedded in it: Roman
cameos, Egyptian
scarabs, coins from crushed empires and forgotten kingdoms, some
thousands of
years old, the votive offerings of worshippers over the millennia we infer the
sculpture to have existed. The object is fabulous: an utter masterwork of the
goldsmith�s
art rivalled only by the Cellini salt cellar and one or two other
pieces. It almost seems
alive.
 
Text: almost worth it. Calquon and
Harrison are dead, what has become of Paul, who
thought up all this, I have no
idea. I have been subjected to the most hideous torture, and
seen the most
awful sights, that few can have experienced without losing their sanity. It is
deeply ironic after all I have been through, that I by chance only yesterday
discovered the
object, hidden away in my belongings. What remains to be seen is
whether I can bring it
back to civilisation with myself intact. I cannot
trust Alicia, who has clearly let her
elevation to high priestess and chief
insect-keeper go to her head. During my last interview
with her, whilst she
dangled her shapely foot provocatively over the arm of her golden
throne, I, in
a vain effort to play upon her familial bonds and old self, reminded her of her
younger brother, who had not been seen for days. At that she casually let drop
that he had
been sold on to Zanzibar (where there is, I believe, an active
slave market) to ultimately
disappear into one of the harems of the Arabian
peninsula (Philby may be able to inform
more fully). �I never could stand the
little pest,� was her remark, so it would be foolish
to hope for any sympathy
from her quarter. I am being watched quite closely, with great
suspicion. Can
it be they know? If I ever leave here alive, it will be an absolute sensation.
Biding my time, I cannot do anything now, but I can at least try to smuggle
these
surreptitiously scribbled notes out to the French vice-consul in the city
where we bought
the mules. He is a good fellow, though he drinks to excess at
 
****
 
An
additional 52 cards remain (see photo-copies), which although of great
interest, bear
no hand-written notes, and therefore are not described here,
with the following single
exception:
 
Card: not in sequence, i.e.
unnumbered by us
 
Description: A photographic postal card of a
large exterior wall of a stone building of
enormous size. The impressive
dimensions become apparent once one realises that the
small specks and dots on
the stereobate of the vaguely classical structure are in fact people
- some
alone, others in groups, these last for the most part sheltered under awnings
set up
on the steps. What most catches the eye, however, is the magnificent low
relief work
covering most of the wall, depicting, it would seem, some
mythological scene whose
iconographic meaning is not apparent. It is in
character a harmonious mixture of several
ancient traditions: one sees hints of
the Hellenistic, Indo-Grecian, and traces even of
South-East Asian styles. The
contrasts of tone make clear that the bare stone has been
brightly painted.
 
The
relief itself:
It appears a judgement is being carried out. In the background, solemn
ringlet-bearded men draped in graceful robes, all in the same pose, all copies
of the other.
All hold a square object, somewhat in form like a hand-mirror
divided into one field black
and one field white, and watch with blank eyes the
man before them who is strapped to a
plank, while a large fabulous beast, part
man, part insect, with elements of the order
Scolopcndra predominating, tears
at him in the fashion of the Promethean eagles, and
worse. To the right, a
young priestess or goddess, nude but for a chain of beads or eggs
around her
waist, stands contrapposto, with one arm embraced about an obscene creature, a
centipedal monstrosity of roughly her own height, leaning tightly upright
against her. She
is pointing with her free hand towards the tortured man. The
expression on her empty face
has affinities with several known Khmer royal
portrait sculptures. She faintly smiles, as if
in ecstasy.
 
****
 

dark5
 
Don Tumasonis, after a largely
picaresque and misspent youth, settled down, he thought, to
a quiet life on the
outskirts of a Scandinavian capital, with a charming, if Norwegian wife;
lively, if rambunctious cats; and interesting, if space-consuming books. Little
did he
anticipate the chain of events awaiting, forcing him into the mendicant
life of a writer with
little more than a bronze parachute to protect him. He
has since published stories in Ghosts
& Scholars, All Hallows,
Supernatural Tales and the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shadows
and Silence.
As he explains: � �The Prospect Cards� draws its inspiration from many
sources:
stuffy booksellers� catalogues, volumes of 18th and 19th century Levantine
travel,
a walk along the Seine, Kipling, Rider Haggard in his usual more perverse mode,
and anthropological literature. Its mood was influenced by the books of George
MacDonald Fraser, Glen Baxter and the character of John Cleese. It was meant to
be
humorous, but seems to have got out of hand.�
 
 EYE OF THE STORM
Don Tumasonis

We remember. We forget.
The older you are become, the harder it is to distinguish
the nature of past experience, to separate reality from dreams.
With years, the two modes blend in a way that almost requires
dedicated research to sort out what really was resting at the
basis of memory. If you ever manage at all.
One thing I do remember, that I am absolutely certain of,
was the power of my memory when I was young-young being
those first few years of childhood, when impressions are
strongest, when mentation has begun churning its powerful
wheels, and with self already formed, attention fastens on each
and every object of the whirlwinds of sensation that mediate
between us and existence.
Until I was seven or eight, I could have told with fair
detail the events of any day of the prior two years-who had
said what in school, what lessons our teacher had assigned,
who fell out of which tree and broke what arm-to the day,
almost to the hour.
I think all children share this ability to greater or lesser
degree, and lose it when they find that no one cares very
much about the experiential treasures they had carefully
hoarded up, now and then pulling one out for display like
some small, bright colourful gem from the soft leather bag of

259
 S !range Tales

remembrance. Once the realisation hits that their own unex-

ceptional histories, although unique, share a commonality that
renders them trivial for others, they forget. Or rather, they
lose the will to remember, and the square-cut, rawhide
drawstrings to the pouch of Memory dry and stiffen, and then
clench shut.

I grew up west of a city that liked to style itself 'America's

Binningham', basing the thin boast on weak likenesses in
nineteenth-century industrial prosperity. If ever that claim had
common currency, it was long ago relegated to the dustbin of
worn-out adages of everyone except the inhabitants of that
smug Upstate town, who for the most part had no real
conception of their putative English prototype. Jane Jacobs
helped things along, mentioning the conceit in one of her
books. Or maybe the conceit grew from the mention itself.
True, a tenuous analogy could be drawn: for at least a
few decades after the war; jobs were for the taking and
industry bubbled and bustled in a place that imagined itself
continuing the industrial revolution, the torch passed on from
Britain. The area seemed impervious to depression, inflation,
slumps, cracks-whatever happened outside, things chugged
along famously, probably due to the paternalistic habits of
local industrial magnates who, as one labour organiser put it,
'made feudal barons look like paladins of socialist liberality'.
The myth was strong enough to draw my parents there
from the shores of Lake Michigan, with me in tow, all of us
quite young.
I never really knew my father well, and because I easily
sensed the barrier that had been at one point erected between
us, never pushed the issue very far-the issue being who he

260
 Eye of the Storm

was, and what he thought, and why he acted the ways he did.
The surface of the story was conventional, I suppose.
Tough streets, Chicago, migrant ghetto, brothers band to-
gether for self-protection, grow up poor, bright enough kid,
the Depression. Exam-based uptake for the Coast Guard-
gets one of two plum slots allotted monthly for Cook County
in the depths of the slump, when everyone wanted any job,
even military, or so the family folklore went.
He fed his Jack London fantasies, perhaps even Melville-
ian ones, for two years, with storms on Lake Michigan or
hunting down rumrunners on the Atlantic. And going ashore
with white lightning thrust upon him by relieved moonshiners
who wrongly thought, with their lights spotted from the sea
some dark Carolina coastal night, they were under arrest.
Had he wanted real adventure, he would have stuck it
out a few years more, when his ship, the Escanaba, went down
with all but two hands while on convoy duty in the North
Atlantic.
The job was not permanent, however, and with his two-
year contract up, and other eager aspirants snapping after the
longed-for berths, he went ashore, marrying his neighbour, my
mother, a waitress then who worked for a dollar a day.
They remained childless for ten years before I was born.
Only long after did I appreciate how my arrival had marked
an end to a chapter in their lives. Better said, an end to a style
of living, an attitude.
Their house was full of books, a haven in the intellectual
desert of other nearby titularly middle-class homes, all essent-
ially printless. Domestic book-buying pretty much stopped
when I came on the scene, so until I started plunking down
my hard-earned, or hard-filched dollar-whatever the case
may have been-the only new books making their entree into
the household were from the public library.
The books on loan were different than those on our

261
 S !range Tales

shelves, something even I as child could see. \X'here postpartal

parental reading was either lightweight fiction or travel, or
handbooks of various sorts, the permanent and contrasting
home library was composed of meatier stuff. Classics in
abundance, literature, some criticism, books on opera, even
musical scores. Were a sociologist to furtively examine the
place for evidence of class standing, for educational back-
ground, those books would have led him to think the level
much higher than it was.
The gilt spines weren't just for show-I had a fair idea,
from maternal bits and conversational snippets over time, that
the difficult books had been read, sometimes several times, by
my father.
Neither one was willing to explain why the content had
levelled off, then plummeted to the nadir of Reader's Digest
books and worse.

I pried. I did my very best to find out the wfD, but got no
answer. \X'henever I questioned my father, he would retreat
into Eisenhowerian noncommittality, or if directly confronted,
just stolidly say he 'didn't know'. Sometimes he would follow
that last phrase with 'what you're talking about'. I was certain
this was feigned ignorance. After a while, I figured out that no
answer, at least from his lips, would ever be forthcoming.
It was the habit of my family in those distant, newly
prosperous post-war years, with every family its car, to go out
for a Sunday drive. I think then Americans still saw driving a
car-never mind its already being some two-ton monster
heavy in steel and chrome-as an extension of bicycle trips of
their own youth to distant countryside. With the sole
difference that instead of man under his own power taking
himself and the machine along, this time the machine took the
man and itself for a ride, until it wound up owning the people.

262
 Eye of the S tonn

For as far back as I can remember, I, and then my sib-

lings in their turn, were forced to this ritual of being trundled
out to the '47 Ford, the two successive Studebakers, followed
by the Dodge, and then a Ford again, until individually we
became old enough to dig our heels in. I dug mine in early,
which is what the rest of this is about.
Itineraries consisted of different back road routes to the
west, or sometimes south, of where we lived. Those areas
were mostly rural then, almost exclusively so. My father would
vary the plan, since repetition was probably just as boring for
him and my mother as it was for myself.
The trips would normally take an hour or two, with a
break of some sort halfway, as a sop to the easily-bored
children. Unless perks of various kinds were included, we
would have made the trips unbearable for our parents. The
stops might involve watching canal locks operate as pleasure
craft drifted through, punctuated by the occasional barge, or
our halting by some landmark to read its history on a sign set
up by the state. It helped if there was an added enticement,
usually involving a treat, often in the form of ice-cream.
Bribes like these were about the only way to pacify the
small monsters I suppose we were. On the other hand, driving
for its own sake ...
Unusual landscape features ameliorated the boredom.
Our township, sited just south of one of the Great Lakes, was
notably flat and uninteresting from a topographic view. A few
tens of miles to the south west was a terrain more corrugated
and wooded than Limousin. But our lacustrine flats were
notably devoid of variations in altitude. Therefore any hill of
size-which in that area mostly meant various glacial deposits
left behind in odd forms with odder names after the melting
of the Ice: drumlins, eskers, and the like-was approached
with more than routine interest and respect by we children. A
glide down a long steep slope, gears in neutral, was almost

263
 Strange Tales

worth in equivalent terms the ice-cream cone that awaited at

the bottom.
So then: hills, car rides, ice-cream, short childhood
attention spans.

My parents never spent a day apart from each other, unless

visiting relatives, as far as I know, for the length of their long
married lives together. Except for one time.
That must have been when I was about five or so. One
day, my mother left us to spend a long weekend in Manhattan,
hundreds of miles away, with a friend, another married
woman whose husband was my father's boss. I was devast-
ated. I had no idea, with my child's sensibility, that mothers
were ever allowed to leave their responsibilities in that fashion.
I dreaded the eternity of a weekend that faced me, alone with
my father.
He, to give him his due, did what he could to keep me
happy. I had no siblings then, and was spoiled as a result.
However, when my father proposed the usual Sunday tour, I
was somehow more reluctant than usual to go. The trips were
bad enough themselves; to take one with a truncated family
was unthinkable. In the end, the realisation that the journey
would be made regardless of what I wanted or thought, had
me acquiesce-no force was necessary, since I knew that to
protest would be useless.
I remember nothing of that trip itself. What I mentioned
previously concerning the comprehensiveness of the child's
mind for events remains true. It is merely that the incons-
equential is gradually edited out, with only the significant
remaining. Then that too, fades.
I retain one main impression of the place of our arrival, a

264
 Eye of the S form

tableau or mental diorama laired in the brain like some

stealthy beast. Around that neural construct are a number of
details, perhaps encrustations since accrued, or pictures made
up to explain to myself partway, the nature of what I had
seen.
What I remember is this: a high, broad hilltop, and a
darkened sky. No view out, however, since we are parked in
the middle of tall and weathered farm buildings which, but for
the openings afforded by the road going through them, make
an enclosure, a sort of greensward plaza, walls three storeys
high. A large black oak-from its enormous size, hundreds of
years old-in the centre of things. The paved road runs
around both sides of it.
We are out of the car, and the sky is going black.
Although no rain has yet fallen, you can feel its inevitability in
the air. The atmosphere is pregnant with water's potential to
fill all space, where the air is only an intruder. The waiting for
the fall of drops, that never come, is like the blindfold second
before the executioner's axe. We are waiting, in other words,
for a change of state, not a process.
My father is standing next to the Ford, with myself at his
side. When we, on our other rides, had stopped by some farm,
it was always to see the animals. Sometimes a friendly farmer
would bring some over for us to pet and admire. There is no
friendly farmer, however, in this.
There is a woman. She is tall and thin and supple, the
opposite of my mother, and is wearing a long black dress with
full sleeves. Her eyes are green, with purple flecks-they seem
to glow. She talks to my father, smiling, as the wind whips the
dust from the road. There are no animals about. The buildings
are in disrepair, the unpainted wooden sidings almost black
with vertical age.
They each hold a glass in their hands. I remember
clinging to my father's wide pant leg, tugging, pleading to go

265
 Strange Tales

home. I know something is horribly wrong. The woman's hair

is a dark auburn red. The two converse on, smiling all the
more, and I am dreadfully ignored.
And then I am taken away by two women, who were
perhaps the sisters of my father's companion. They are each
tall, like her, and dark. They have no scent at all, and they are
neither beautiful nor ugly. I did not cry, knowing the
hopelessness of what was to come. I was being taken away, to
avoid my disturbance of the ongoing-conversation. I have no
memory whatsoever of crossing a threshold, or being inside,
or of doing anything, or of anything done to me.
Despairing of myself, I see behind me the woman and
my father, tiny figures on the green, standing closely together.
The air is thick, like treacle; it is no longer air: unbreathable.
There is a strange, sharp, familiar, but unidentifiable smell, an
ambient taint. It is not from the sisters. It is the one thing I
can recall from that moment. Nothing more remains.

I was later in the military, the army, and had come home on
leave. It was wartime, we were making friends for democracy
in south east Asia, and I was part of the machine.
My brother, who was away to college with a deferment,
had recently bought a ten-speed bike, which he left behind at
home during studies. With two weeks on my hands, about to
ship overseas, and my old circle of friends dispersed by war,
time and chance, I needed something to do. I was fit, so I
took to roaming the countryside on two wheels. With
increased suburban development, much had changed, even
during the few years I had been away.
It was sometimes hard to determine where I had cycled:
whole forests had been scythed down; streams had disappeared,

266
 Eye of the Storm

diverted to culverts and hidden in pipes; wide ponds where

the red-epauletted blackbirds had sung were now parking lots
for shopping malls. Generally, I was able to reconstitute my
former impressions of the land, mentally placing the new
impositions like some transparent overlay upon a palimpsest,
whose fundament, with so much change wrought, was at
times unrecognisable.
I didn't care-it was enough to be away, and not know-
ing where I was, was then unimportant.
On one long trip, I found myself out in the country, on
unfamiliar ground. A wide-fronted storm was coming up, and
the whole of the air was darkening. Lightning flashes started
to bum across the sky in so many places, so frequently, that
more than once I was looking directly at the branched fire as
it tore the heavens in front of me. I was unsure of precisely
where I was, having been a bit inattentive, mind wandering as
I pedalled, daydreaming.
I was in the open, on a gravelled lane, no house in sight,
with fields of grain and wire metal fences hemming me in-
surely no place to be in the middle of an electrical storm, but
there was nowhere to hide. So I kept cycling, in the vague
hope that I would soon enough find shelter.
When the rain came, it hit so hard, it stung. It blew
almost horizontally; I have never been in a downpour more
violent, with the lightning crashing around me, with little or
no interval between the bright flashes of light, and the
heart-shaking explosions, initiated by sounds like huge sheets
of canvas miles wide being ripped apart. Flash, rip, and blast
were virtually simultaneous.
To be honest, I was very frightened, unprotected as I
was. However, there came eventually a point, wind blowing
through me and a downpour so dense I could hardly see the
road, when I became resigned and fatalistic. Giving myself
over to whatever was about to happen, I got off the bike, on

267
 S trangc Talcs

which it was impossible to stay upright, and began to trundle

it along the road, drops stinging, beating upon me. There was
nothing else to be done. I looked down, to avoid being hit in
the eyes by the bullet-like rain that struck almost like hail,
thrown by the strongest of winds.
There was a slight upward slope to the track that I barely
noticed, struggling to stay upright in the gusts that hit me like
successive waves, almost pushing me over. It was like standing
in heavy surf, bracing for the next thump, the next wall of
water.
I have no idea how long this kept up-it could have
been a few minutes; it could have been a quarter of an hour
- I lost my sense of time. I only concentrated on moving
forward, tensing my muscles uselessly against the dreaded
purple flash, the final shock, which I wouldn't even see
coming.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped.
The wind lessened, and then quickly died down to a soft
breeze, to almost nothing. Sodden and shattered, I saw up to
the grey sky above; a few sunbeams were already shining
through the clouds. The one black wall of the storm was
moving rapidly away; I was in the clear, elated at having
survived.
Looking around, I saw that the way, with its wet and
gleaming surface of crushed stone, went up an isolated hill,
one quite high for those parts. I decided to ascend it, the
storm being over, rather than try to retrace my route, of
which I was now unsure.
The grade was steep to the degree that I made no
attempt to pedal up the tall mound, choosing instead to
continue rolling my brother's ten-gear alongside me. There
was a chance that on reaching the top, I would be able to
orient myself by finding some familiar and distant landmark,

268
 Eye of the Storm

enabling me to regain known territory without too much

bashing about on muddy backcountry tracks.
Small tan rivulets drained downwards over my feet as I
trudged uphill. Everything was shining, glistening. Once I
reached the top, a flat broad place, maybe an acre or two in
all, I stopped.
The view was large and encompassing. Wherever I was,
the nearby landscape had retained much of its original form
and appearance. Aside from one or two cuts for the few roads
visible, and two or three distant farms, you could have thought,
excepting the power lines, that the panorama was not too far
removed from what it had been a hundred years before.
Forested, golden fields, bucolic, ideal.
The summit was not much more than grass, barring a
large charred tree-stump of enormous girth, occupying the
dead centre of the hilltop. The tall wreck clearly had been hit
by lightning on many occasions; it was hard to guess what it
was, but given the diameter of the trunk, I would say oak.
There were not many of these big monsters left in our part of
the state, and in fact, I had only seen one other that matched
these dimensions before, tucked away in a small glade in an
obscure corner of a trackless state park. For some reason, the
pioneer ethic was inimical to letting these trees stand.
One rarity less, then, with squirrel's somewhat ill-
considered acorn placement, after several centuries, finally run
out of luck in the evolutionary draw.
While considering the loss of the tree to posterity, I idly
glanced around, a cool breeze still blowing, the skies still
mostly grey. I noticed that the track divided around the tree,
rejoining once past it, then continuing straight on. On either
side of where I stood, at some distance off, were low
hummocks or berms, some of them regular enough to suggest
foundations of former structures. Leaving the bicycle upright

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on its stand, I started over to investigate, when I felt my

hackles rise of their own accord.
It didn't take a second more before the wind slapped me
hard from behind, almost hard enough to throw me off my
feet. Rain hit, at least as solid and penetrating as before. The
gusts slammed me repeatedly as I half-stumbled, half-ran back
to the bicycle, knocked over by the winds. Without thinking at
all, I pushed the thing as fast as I could past the wreck of the
tree, seeing lightning flare again, moving up on me.
If I had a single thought, it was to get off that hill as fast
as physically possible. When you're threatened, at risk, the
mind kicks into high gear, and things seem to slow down
around you. I had in an instant seen and analysed the
situation, and was now taking evasive action. The way I had
come would be murder--out in the open, exposed, sticking
out from the flat.
The hilltop was of course unthinkable, the highest point
around. But I had seen a large stand of trees-a small
wood-at the bottom of the road beyond the hill, that might
provide some shelter, and metal or not, the bicycle was the
quickest means available, so I kept on it, in spite of the
obvious danger.
Just as I made it into the protecting woods, about a
quarter mile past the foot of the hill, tossing the wheels into a
ditch as I rushed for the cover of the trees, a deafening blast
that shook the ground like an earthquake struck, illuminating
everything around with blue and white, blinding. The lightning, I
was sure, had found the hilltop behind me not much over a
minute or two after I had left it.
I lay under a felled tree trunk, wet and muddy, until the
storm passed. Cold, drenched, I only ventured out when the
light had started to fail and the rain, although still falling, had
let up in intensity. I followed the unlit way that, after
branching several times, turned paved again, and after an hour

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or two during which I became truly lost in the dark, I finally

came onto a main road familiar to me. I was able to pedal
from there to home within the hour, as infrequent traffic
rushed past me.
Five days later I was in Los Angeles, ready to ship across
the Pacific.

I read a few weeks ago, a Gulf War veteran's interesting tale;

like each new generation of soldiers, he thought the post-
bellum alienation of his own group somehow unique. In fact,
a longer stay in gaol, in the arms of some fanatical religious
cult, or living under a totalitarian regime-any total institution,
of which the military is only one of many-leaves the victim with
a deep sense of Durkheirnian anomie.
It's not the mental damage from combat, or the de-
humanising process of submission to the will of indifferent
others that damages most, although all these help the process.
It's leaving the embrace of authority, the having to make one's
own decisions again, that is traumatic.
Being deprived of your conscience, legally, being given
the right to do things otherwise forbidden, even to kill, with
no responsibility attached is perversely liberating. The myth of
the incarcerated is that freedom is found outside. What is not
thought of, or even mentioned, is that there is no freedom
without the forced and onerous daily weight of choosing
greater or lesser evil.
So I was, those days after being demobbed, cut loose, left
suddenly to fend for myself, to decide between right and
wrong. Part of the legion of the lost who wandered, with their
increasing numbers, the streets of the city near where I grew

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up, I at times considered suicide. Such thoughts were not

uncommon amongst my peers.
You could see them everywhere-in the shops, in the
university, in bars and pubs, sitting dully on park benches, or
shuffling about listlessly, only infrequently striding with some
obscure purpose.
Common to all, other than the aimlessness coming from
the enormous burden of having to make choices, was the
wearing of some part of a uniform, be it field jacket, fatigue
shirt, or any of the odds and ends of military attire, excepting
hat or formal costume. This has probably been going on ever
since there have been armies, before any Freiko,ps looting the
backlands, before puffed silk, slashed sleeve. The remnants,
the used-up, the broken. Men, and the scraps of cloth that
once distinguished them.
It was while wearing a faded-green field shirt, badges of
rank still sewn on, that I met a young woman whom I will call
Kate. She was the receptionist and secretary of the school
from which I had graduated. Like some dog snuffling over- its
own vomit, I was revisiting former haunts, trying to pick up
loose threads, attempting to rebuild continuity. It is common
enough.
She sat at the glass-caged switchboard as I walked in. I
explained I was looking for former teachers. I didn't say I was
trying to find myself again.
These days, with office revenge and school shootings, I
would be treated as suspect from the start, especially with long
hair, unclipped for a year (another then-common post-military
response to civilian life), and the rags and tags of uniform I
wore on me. Then, however, requests like mine were classed
as usual and innocuous.
It soon became clear that most of my former teachers,
any I had felt close to, who might perhaps be able to explain
to me what I had been through, were gone over to other

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schools, moved away, or retired. That left a residue of those

to whom I was indifferent, as they were no doubt toward me.
Trying to decide what to do, feeling foolish at not having
found any real reason to contact any of the staff remaining, I
chatted idly with the woman. She had on an exceptionally
short mini-skirt that must have driven the womanless boys at
the all-male institution to distraction. Her smooth pale legs
were long and exposed, and I, thinking how they would glow
in the dark, could not help lingering, in order to glance again
at their white length whenever our little conversation was
interrupted by the telephone calls she answered.
I found myself attracted by her long chestnut hair, by her
quick comments and smart responses to my inanities. She was
tall-almost my height-slimly built, about my age, and better
still, she shared a certain commonality of attitude with me. We
both mocked the world in the same way, it seemed. I liked
her. There was, I thought, some sign of reciprocity in her eyes.
It was not long before I proposed an evening out, which, to my
surprise, she accepted.
The rendezvous turned out much better than I thought it
would, eventually with our going back to her flat for coffee,
which turned to sex. The last took some effort, in spite of
clear mutual interest. Kate was very quirky as an individual;
that quirkiness extended to her physicality, and to her habits.
She pleaded involvement with a boyfriend, all the while both
responding and initiating actions that each took us one level
deeper, one move closer, to the inevitable.
What held her back was a foible, some odd routine
without which she could not achieve her climax. Not all men
would put up with it, she said, and drunk, with most
inhibitions gone, she told me what it was. Try me, I replied,
and with that, we were on our way to becoming, as they say
these days, a number.
What ensued, over the next year plus a bit, was a

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relationship that at the time seemed ordinary, but which, with

years of embou11,eoisement, I realise now might be considered
odd. Kate, who moonlighted as a piano teacher, was loathe to
give up completely her attachment to the man she had been
with before I first met her. I saw no reason not to go along;
my attitude was that everyone lives the life they want to live,
and I could take it or leave it. The experiences in the bedroom
were exciting, almost sensational, so I took it.
That meant that I had nights off while Kate was with
Oliver, and Oliver had nights off when I was with Kate. Of
course, Kate had no nights off---or if she did, it was with
someone else unknown to Oliver or myself. It was incon-
ceivable that she would spend these alone. She was highly
imbued with her immediate urges, you see. 'When in college,
she would bring herself to satisfaction during the middle of
lectures by the mere rubbing of her legs together, whenever
she felt like doing it. That was merely one of a long catalogue
of abnormal practices she had tried.
She was capable of acting at any time, on the spur of the
moment, in outrageous fashion. Once, not too long after we
had begun, she, caught short by a momentary lack of funds,
paid the television repairman in natura, in kind. She said to
him, How embarrassing, she suddenly realised she had no
money-would he consider something else? After, I decided,
she must have known she had no money, before she had
ordered his services.
Our weekends together-she spent more of these with
me than with Oliver--consisted of visiting hypermalls on
Saturdays, then going up to her flat of the season-she was
always moving house-at late afternoon. Thereafter, a blur of
sex that would extend over the evening to the next afternoon,
punctuated only by the reading of the Sunday Times and the
Daify News, cigarettes, and the occasional improvised breakfast.
Otherwise, it was fingers into orifices, mouths around organs,

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 Eye of the Storm

licking, fucking, sleeping, then waking up in the middle of the

night or morning, groping, drawing the uncomplaining other
to oneself, and fucking once more. It was Say's Law all over
again.
Sometimes, we would go out for long drives. It wasn't
any death of desire; although at the burning point, the sex did
not consume itself and everything around. Rather, it only
increased the need for more. That more over time became
other activity, other things shared beyond the flesh. This came
gradually, since I had told myself from the start that I wanted
nothing other than those nights and days in bed together. Her
partly staying on with Oliver had pretty much comprised a
reciprocal statement about the nature of our relationship, and
so, unwilling to expose too much of myself, afraid of
vulnerability, I led a separate life of my own, something I
could fall back on, in case.
As we went on, this changed, as it naturally would, the
predictability not obvious only to someone like myself, iced
from the world by military years. Oliver began fading from
the picture, aside from the times Kate was bored with me, and
needed change. She began integrating me more into her life, as
I began to accommodate her into mine.
I worked at night, and went to university days. I slept
wherever and whenever I could, something learned in the
army. Kate and I, at first restricted by loyalty to our schedules,
later began to meet during the week, whenever a few minutes
were available. She would meet me at home, where I lived
with my parents. I might have had three or four hours of
sleep when she came by in the mornings. After quick sex, she
would drive me to university. I would attend lectures, then
sleep a couple of more hours before starting on the night
shift. Sometimes, if her job permitted, she met me between
classes, at the school's ivied library, a huge deserted pile
modelled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. There we

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would have sex standing up in some comer of the library

stacks, her back against the metal shelves.
In spite of this ever-intensifying union of the flesh, we
were very different. Kate loved language games, playing with
the sounds and structures of daily speech. For me, language
had a sacred immutability; to violate that was to invite chaos
in. She would fascinatedly warp words in a way that I
considered blasphemous, although her phonetic twists made
me laugh. She would take a familiar word or saying apart, per-
verting its sounds or meaning for the fun of it. It was as if
everything around her, the very stuff of existence, had a dis-
turbing fluidity, with nothing solid and no set boundaries. As I
said, we had a couple of laughs, but the unlawful permut-
ations made me vaguely uncomfortable.
After spending ever more time with her, I saw that the
passion she brimmed with was not sexual; this energy was
something generalised she could not contain. Every sphere of
life was an arena for giving it full play. Any situation, a venue.
Any excuse, an opportunity.
She would dare anything; it had cost her more than one
job, she told me, as we unreeled our lives' histories, bodies
melted together some night, a fly in the bedroom's stuffy
summer air, the smoke from our cigarettes doing nothing to
keep it away, attracted by the drying effluvia of our momen-
tarily faded lust.
How her passion or energy would take form was unpred-
ictable. It was like a dark black liquid under pressure in a
bucket, a closed container. It would often vent through that big
rent called sex. Other times, blocked there, it would find other
outlets. Sometimes, it was violent. I knew that she had been in
fights, and beaten at least two women badly before I had met
her.
Something small, an offhand word, say, by some in-
nocent and uncomprehending waitress, would have her burst

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in belligerence at the presumed slight, to where I would drag

her out of a restaurant for fear of the mayhem that could
ensue. We might be in a bar, and thinking one of us was being
imposed upon, she would intimidate and perhaps even
frighten tough men by her stare alone.
Once, as I rode with her, another driver triggered Kate's
rage, and there was an accident. It was really her fault, but we
got away with it on technicalities. None of us was injured, but
I wondered how much of the incident was really accidental.
And she tried to kill me once, but I won't go into that,
only saying that we were having a discussion, no more nor less
heated than some we had had before, when she went over the
cusp, and exploding, nearly, literally, took my head off.

Having explored the other's body so thoroughly, and

afraid, perhaps, of probing psyches too deeply, we for dis-
traction's sake took to exploring the countryside-or what
was left of it, instead.
At my instigation, we would visit the Finger Lakes, the
hills above them, the gorge of the Genesee, out of state, other
places. With much of the landscape of my childhood
irreparably destroyed during my absence, we would have to go
farther afield to see some greenery not smothered by concrete
or building projects. I was trying to find something, I'm not
sure what, although I'm surer now than I was then.
Part of enlivening the routine, since I hated driving for
its own sake, was to stop in small places whenever we saw an
old cemetery. We would search out the older graves, a morbid
habit I had first acquired while in the military, out of curiosity
and boredom.
In the old days it was quite common in our rural district
for farm families to have small private burial grounds, away
from any church, enclosed by fences of pickets or wrought
iron. There would be perhaps a lone tree, or maybe two, in

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the middle of these graveyards, that were typically sited on a

mound or low spur, away from the roads, in the middle of
fields still cultivated-or more likely-falling into decrepitude.
If they were far enough away from any houses, we would
get out and take a look, see what the inscriptions had to say.
Most were of the usual 'Behold this place as you pass by ...
etc.' variety. Much more poignant, and even soul-shaking were
the early deaths engraved, of young women, children, babes
-sad traces of an era with mortality a daily and familiar
visitant.
On one of these trips we became lost. Kate was never a
great believer in cartography, since she was absolutely without
map sense. This astounded me, but I accepted it, since I in
tum was unable to read the music she would play on sight,
when, if particularly moved by some bout of inspiring sex
gone just right, she would rush down, still nude, to her piano
and pound out whatever sheet music there was resting on the
rack above the keyboard. Transcribed concerti, usually. Broken
tensions were likely to express themselves in this way.
Not having consulted any map, and not having partic-
ularly cared, she had us out somewhere between strip malls
and long rows of tacky businesses, of the type that have
become all too common along our highways. It was against
her sense of honour, however, to stop and ask somebody
where we were. That would be an admission of defeat; to
press her on it could be unpleasant.
I gave myself over, and rather than quarrel-there had
been a lot of that lately-I took the coward's way, and rested
my head in her lap while she steered. It was a habit of ours
that sometime led to sex in different forms, while she drove.
Other times it was innocent.
The day was warm, and with my head cushioned on her
thighs, very willing to let her sort it out on her own, I dozed.
\X-'hen I awoke, the car had stopped, and the motor was off.

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Sitting up, I saw that we were out in the countryside, on a dirt

road that ended in the middle of ripe fields that stretched over
rolling terrain around us. There were woods here and there, a
few hedgerows, and behind the rise below which we were
parked, a small cemetery of the type I have described, but
without trees. In back of it was a large high hill.
'I took us here', Kate said, which I interpreted as her
euphemism for our being still lost.
We got out of the car, and headed through pathless
uncut wheat waist high, over to the graves. The fence around
them had in the main fallen down, so entrance to the precinct
was without obstacle. Little could be read off the markers-
the elements had erased almost everything except the largest
letters-the family names. A few of these were still barely
legible: I seem to remember Chester, Philips, Fielding, and
perhaps Stanhope--good English names, from before the
Irish invasion that came with the Erie Canal.
The afternoon was magnificent, with a deep near-
cerulean sky, cloudless, that contrasted with the golden stalks
of late summer grain in a way reminiscent of painterly wheat
fields at Ades. There was no sign of any building nearby, no
power or telephone lines cluttering the landscape. Merely
stillness, the wide cultivated swathes with stands of woods
chequered here and there between, and the hill ahead of us.
'Let's go up there,' I said, 'look around'.
It took a few minutes for us to reach the broad top of
the place, since there was no road or path. The flat summit
was wholly covered by tall grasses that rippled like waves
under the breath of the softly pulsing breeze. We could see
for miles around; other than the road where the car stood
parked, there was no other trace of civilisation visible, apart
from the fields and the patterns they made. It was as if the
hand of man, and all the inanity of modem life had been
wiped away, only the clean slate left behind.

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It wasn't long before Kate broke the silence, with some

typical mocking crack that breached the meditative mood. She
was not up to much when it came to the non-manufactured
aspects of existence. Material girl, she had once turned up her
snub nose at my daydream of migrating to Arcadian Tasmania.
Chagrined, I moved away, physical apartness meant to
send a message, a reading of my interior state. Walking about,
with my back to her, I nearly stumbled over something large,
at the middle of the hilltop. It was the charred stump, almost
level with the ground, of a large tree trunk, hidden by the
grass.
It took time for this to register, with my thoughts
clouded by dull ire at Kate's irreverent remark. I found myself
looking slowly up, examining now for a second time, the
features in the distance around us, a vague suspicion, hard to
formulate, like some forgotten word or name, beginning
gradually to take shape in my mind.
It was there, and I almost had it, when Kate called to me.
'Tom.'
I turned reluctantly, knowing that whatever she would say
would break the mood, the concentration, and that whatever I
was about to remember would slip away irretrievably gone,
vanished.
She stood further away closer to the edge of the hilltop.
She was, of course, naked. I had never seen her before like
this, body exposed to the harsh unforgiving glare of the sun.
She had both hands slightly out, as if wordlessly implor-
ing. Her clothing was neatly stacked in a small pile, glasses on
top. As the wind gusted, her long hair, brown with russet
undertones, whisped weightlessly, floating, swirling as if
underwater. I saw that her pale small breasts, the one slightly
larger than the other, were covered with goose-flesh that
could hardly have come from cold.

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 Eye of the Sform

So I joined her, on top of a flat hot rock, and we did

things, the way they must be done.
After, I stood, dusting myself off. Kate, never one for
ceremony, always ready to shock with her directness, squatted
where we had made love, bare feet on the warm stone slab,
and pissed upon it, whistling tunelessly while staring up at me,
challenging.
I said nothing when she arose and began putting on her
clothes. I was instead looking down at the stone, where the
wetness, still steaming, had revealed chiselled letters.
FULGUM CONICIDENT is what was written, the words so
odd, I committed them to memory.

I suppose I should now make one or two observations just, let

us say, for the sake of argument.
When my father died, many years after all these events, I
helped out by going through his papers. There was a long
shallow drawer of his dresser in which he kept odds and ends,
the sort of things like sports medals, military insignia, foreign
coins, diplomas or citations, the different mementoes of the
small events and periods that mark our lives. Most men have a
box or compartment to hold such junk.
Sorting through it to see if there was anything the
siblings or my mother might want to keep, I soon enough had
emptied the contents. Removing the yellowed liner, obviously
unchanged for decades, I found underneath a small scrap of
paper, folded in on itself. Opening it, I saw pencilled in my
father's neat hand, only this: FULGUR = lightning.
I would have liked to have said that together with it was
a photographic print, in black and white. With my parents
standing together, smiling, at some gathering or picnic, in the

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middle of a crowd of people. In back, to their left side, a

group of several slim women with long hair, standing sidewise
to the lens. Their faces, because of the distance, out of focus,
and they are all tall, wearing black dresses. It would have made
things so much easier. But there was no print.
I then discreetly posed a few questions to my mother, of
the sort that would never have hinted to her what was in back
of the asking. Not much in the way of enlightenment was
forthcoming. Worse, with my mention in passing of our '47
black Ford, my mother just looked up in surprise and said 'but
Thomas-we've never owned a '47 black Ford'. We went
down the list then, of all family autos owned. Her recall was
perfect, except for that one detail; she insisted that we had a
Chrysler then, and that it was grey.

Kate had dressed, as had I, and we stood silently in the long

grass. Some high thin clouds were forming in the west.
I tried then, inarticulately, to explain what I thought
about the landscape around us, the countryside I saw spread
out beneath, about the changes taking place, about the feeling
that something irreplaceable was gone, that something new was
emerging in its turn, something I wasn't sure I liked, but I
failed. Some piece was missing. Only incoherent words from
me, about finding somewhere that maybe didn't exist. She was
sympathetic, but uncomprehending. There was no way to
explain to her.
She tried, though, to understand, and stroking my hand, a
look of concern in her brown eyes, she said, 'Don't worry-if
you really want something hard enough, if you look enough
for it, you'll find it'.

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 Eye of the Sform

She was right.

I never did find the one place.
I left her, and looked for somebody else.

283
 DON TUMASONIS

Thrown
FRESH FROM AN EVENING of overindulgence on the island of Anafi some
years ago, Don Tumasonis awoke with a story in his head, and
immediately wrote it down.
Encouraged by fellow orgy survivors, to whom he shyly showed
the fragment, he realised that honour, power, riches, fame, and the
love of women were within his grasp. He acquired a Muse, as is
recommended, having already been provided with that sine non qua
of writers, a long-suffering wife. Two International Horror Guild
awards, a film option and a Hawthornden Fellowship soon followed.
He still awaits power and riches, but admits that three out of five is
not too bad.
His longish tale “The Swing” was recently published in the Ash-
Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead, edited by Barbara and
Christopher Roden. Other projects are in the works.
“Once, I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist,” Tumasonis
recalls. “I had, after all, got stinking drunk on cheap plonk with Sir
Edmund Leach, so I thought myself eminently qualified. Fired with
explorers’ tales, I fixated on northern Nepal. Months of struggle with
Tibetan put paid to that fantasy and, suddenly more realistic, I settled
for Crete.
“Field work in the glorious mountains of Sfakia produced little of
academic value. Penitent, I vowed to cross the Great Island by foot,
east to west. As may now be suspected, even that last project was
somehow thwarted short of completion. Not all was lost – the
narrative of ‘Thrown’ draws largely on events that occurred during
several legs of that journey.”
IT WAS STRANGE COUNTRY, cast into tumult by disaster.
Signs of this were everywhere, from the seaside city in the south
where they first stayed, to the northern village from whence they
would start their walk. Across the neck of the island, debris was
visible all over, through the dusty windows of their ageing Mercedes
bus, running late. The delay was a result of the massive flood of
several days past, with traffic still detoured around the washed-out
main highway bridge, to the old road a bit further inland.
When Martin and Marline had first come to Crete two days after
the deluge, quasi-urban Ierapetra was drying out from the
rampageous torrent that had wrecked its streets and invaded
buildings. The branch Agricultural Bank’s records and documents
were spread out on sidewalks and streets, stones and bricks neatly
pinning papers in place, the sun wrinkling and baking fibres. Nearby,
a flower-filled Roman sarcophagus doubling as a sidewalk planter
lent white Parian cachet to an adjacent telephone booth.
Floods came often enough on this island of canyons and gorges,
but this one had been a monster, by every local estimation. It was
the usual chain of events. Heavy autumn rains washed broken trees
and branches down a ravine, compacting with clay and gravel at a
pinched slot, forming a natural dam. Before anyone even knew, or
had time to react, millions of tons of water had built up, until the
sudden giving way, and catastrophic release.
A couple had been taken out to sea, drowned in their Volkswagen
beetle. Excepting these, and one old woman at an isolated farm,
there was no other loss of human life, amazing as that seemed in the
aftermath.
But the water, gaining speed, spewing like a jet from the mouth of
the deep cleft above the cultivated plain, took all else living with as it
ripped through the countryside, crashing to the sea in a few
calamitous minutes.
Some short hours after having checked into their room – the
cheapest they could find, with a bare concrete floor, the two followed
the lead of everyone else: they promenaded, taking in the chaos and
damage, trying to assimilate the monstrous extent of the wreckage
about them.
Crowds of foreigners from the large tourist complex near the shore
mingled with the local Greeks, walking east out of town. Hundreds,
clumped together in their scores, their pairs, were heading along the
beach, where the detritus of the flooding was spread. All were silent
and stunned, even two days after, and talked, if at all, in hushed
voices, in the descending light of the sun.
Past the hotels, a new river channel had torn through the shore
road, destroying it, and people waded across, past a parked
bulldozer there for the clean-up. On the other side, all over the long
broad beach, lay hundreds of animal corpses, wild and domestic.
Lizards rotted promiscuously with goats. Pathetic lambs, wool
matted and muddy, strewn broken amid snapped tree limbs. Snakes,
and above all, chickens, were everywhere, half-buried in the sand.
Let this their memorial be.
Back at their rundown hotel room, the couple made love. Rattled
by what they had seen, they drank to excess, and things ran wilder
than usual between them, married ten years.
Marline sat at an angle leaning forward, hands on Martin’s ankles,
facing his feet, as he lay on his back, in the reverse cowgirl,
pornographic industrial standard pose, provider of unobstructed
views. They had started prone, two layers, both face up, with her on
top. Disembodied hands stroked her, leaving her too open and
exposed, as if naked in public with some unspeakable object inside.
She slid upright and forward, into the unpremeditated position, a
natural extension of the first, really, looking upward as she rocked.
A single red light bulb, forming the sole illumination, bare, dangled
on its brown plastic wire from the ceiling, casting a garish glow
throughout the room. The double shutters were closed, and the
chamber, already damp from their showering, became even more so,
heating up.
The entire tawdriness of the situation inspired Marline to a totally
uncharacteristic frenzy. Replying in the dialogue of the flesh, Martin
grew enormous, larger than ever inside her, and imagined himself in
the cheapest of houses of prostitution, some bold and promiscuous
whore working him for all his money’s worth. The red light added to
the fantastic aspect, that of being in a Fellini film, or a Turkish camp
of ill-fame, where poor young widows, respectable and married the
one day, the next, with no one to protect them, are thrown headlong
into the wildest of debaucheries, with no escape.
Marline’s face was invisible as Martin clenched her smoothly
sculpted, heaving buttocks. Perfectly rounded, they were starting to
fleck with pigment from the hours in the Cretan sun, complementing
the rest of her freckled body, now writhing like a snake, as she and
he both gasped for breath. He held those nether spheres tightly from
behind, as it seemed otherwise she would rocket off him in her now
fierce motion.
Her short red hair was like a helmet, and under the crimson bulb,
dark. At the moment of ecstasy, she turned for the first time to face
him, from over her shoulder. Her sharp jaw was distended – like a
John dory, the thought came to him from nowhere – and her eyes
were wild. She was not looking at him. She saw beyond, to
something else. He could not recognise her again; this was the face
of an entirely different person: had he met this one in the street, he
would not know her.
The more he looked at her frenzied eyes, the more strange she
appeared, until he conceived her a demon, the devil itself, no
woman, no wife he knew. At their mutual orgasm, a chill of irrational
fright ran through him, but he closed his eyes, taking in air in huge
gulping heaves, uncaring.
Flush fading, consciousness revived, Martin saw Marline collapsed
forward across his legs. He was still inside her, the sticky wetness
draining down from his crotch and then his buttocks, turning cold on
the sheet beneath him. She rolled off, and resting on her side, eyes
closed, a smile across her mouth, murmured something about going
out again, a night-cap. Then she yawned.
“Napoleon slept here, did you know? Ierapetra’s ‘holy rock’ in
Greek,” he said.
Marline was already putting on her clothes.
Dropped off past the lines of delayed traffic still waiting to cross the
old narrow bridge, they had gone more or less straight up from the
sea, from the small settlement clinging to steep slope above coastal
highway.
At the upper end of the little hamlet, by the trailhead, they tipped
their heads back to see the inland range hanging above. It had been
his idea to go up it and explore its interior, part of a larger plan to
walk the island from east to west. This day’s march would link
together sections done previous seasons, thus completing eastern
Crete, an opportunity provided by doctor’s orders, after a second,
work-related breakdown.
Old women, bent nearly double and swathed in black, assured
them they were on the right way, no guarantee in itself, as Greeks
would rather die than admit to ignorance of any subject, no matter
how far removed from their normal competence. Enormous cliff
faces towered to the east; they had come down from there two years
back, an epic struggle to find a disappearing track.
Village noise was soon below them, growing ever more faint and
distant, replaced by the always present susurrant wind. The trail, an
old respectable Cretan path, wound steadily upwards in large or
smaller switches. After an hour’s trudge or more in the expanding
sunlight, they stopped on a shoulder, the site of some stronghold of
Minoan refugees, driven to the heights after their civilisation had
collapsed. While Marline put together a picnic, Martin puttered about
on the partially excavated ruins above.
There was not much more to see than dry stone walls, crumbling
remnants of some ’20s dig, German or Italian, he did not remember
what the guidebook said. The overwhelming vista looked north over
the Ægean, with Thera somewhere volcanically looming, invisible in
the slight haze, on the horizon distant before him.
Only one thing distinguished the fast decaying ruins from any
modern wreckage of local revolution: a flat, carved stone bowl, cut
into the living rock, like some small birdbath. Cracked in several
places, stains covered one side of the interior.
They ate, and before wrapping up after their little meal, Martin
looked out over the scene in front of them, and without preamble,
spoke out.
“You know, when I grew up in Rochester, I never felt comfortable
with the sky.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there was always something, something about it that never
felt quite right. D’you know what I mean?”
“Not really . . .”
“At first I thought it was the colour. Summers were warmer then, or
so it seems now. I’d lie back, on the grass of a lawn in July, and
stretch out, looking up at the sky. It would be cloudless, and the
heavens so deep when I concentrated, I felt I was plunging into
them.
“It was then I began to get a strange impression, that the vast
inverted bowl I was falling into was somehow wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused, and all was silent but for the wind. “I’m not quite sure
how to express it – alien, perhaps?” he continued.
“I thought perhaps it was just the flatness of hue the sky can attain
on a clear day in the middle of the year. But with the notion
established in my mind – I was only eleven or twelve the first time I
conceived it – or rather, made it articulate, since I later realised it
was a perception I had had all along, that I was only then putting into
words – I came to the conclusion that the feeling was more general.
“It could come upon me other seasons of the year, when the sky
had a different colour, under other conditions of time and
temperature. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.
“I developed the odd notion that I was born with an instinct of how
a proper sky should look, I mean, in the old days people seldom
moved from the districts where they were raised. Rooted in the soil,
they might just in some way become attuned, after generations, to
the look of a certain latitude and longitude, so that any variation in
colour of air or position of sun from that imprinted on their bones,
would somehow appear odd.”
He paused. “I mean, some animals have iron in their brains,
they’ve found out, onboard compasses that always point north, so . .
.” His voice trailed off, and they were silent for a lingering moment.
 “You’ve never mentioned that before. If you want to know,” she
said with a slight smile, “I think it’s all a load of rubbish.” She flicked
out playfully with her foot at his leg, as they sat.
He smiled back weakly, and continued: “I began to think so too,
especially after I got older, and started travelling about, first locally,
then, around the Continent, and further. I suppose I was always, at
some unconscious level, thinking that if I found the right spot, the sky
would brighten, things would look up, and all would be right in God’s
world.”
She gave him a friendly smirk, hearing that, but he did not react.
“Y’know, at one point the whole idea came back to me, and I
started to think, what if we really came from somewhere else, even
from off the planet? A spaceship crashes here eons ago, seeds the
place with its offspring – it would explain our exceptional place in the
world.”
“But DNA.”
“Right you are, dead on. Common kinship. Once the implications
of that discovery had percolated through my thick skull, I abandoned
the idea. We’re here where we began, all right.”
They set about packing the remains of their picnic lunch; he
wrapped the water bottle in towelling to keep it cool, while she
cleaned the knife and stowed the food in her sack. Gear ready, they
hoisted their packs, and stood a moment in the boiling sun, adjusting
their straps and buckles.
Martin rested on his walking stick, a katsouni, store-bought, but
being made of rare local wood, some protected dwarf elm that grew
here and there in the high mountains, a great conversation starter in
the rural districts.
“It has to do with a feeling, more than anything else, a feeling of
not belonging here at all. As if . . .”
“What?”
“As if I were some kind of object, something hurled here
unwittingly, against its will, like that German philosopher used to
claim. To a place not my true home.”
“Oh.”
 Martin did not dare mention or even hint at the experience of the
night before – that, during their making love, alienation had triggered
this memory of an old idea, up to now all but half-forgotten.
They started up the hill.

They reached, an hour or two later, the upper verge of the cliff, a flat
ridge separating two peaks. Stalky anisette plants, tall invaders from
another dimension, stood all around. Martin and Marline stopped to
rest and admire the tremendous view before them.
The sea was far below; ahead lay a vast bowl, surrounded by bare
and rugged peaks. The depression was partly cultivated, and they
could see a few tiny dark-clad figures taking in the harvest, and few
more working the vines. A dirt track threaded through it.
Martin gave Marline a hug, spontaneously, and it felt like he was
hugging the air.

The trail descended into the sere arena below, desiccate but for the
few irrigated plots chequering its innermost concavities. Small lizards
scurried off the path. Marline and Martin headed down, pointing
themselves towards the biggest of the summer houses, a massive
white-washed affair with a shaded porch.
There were huge rust-coloured plastic barrels with black lids in the
shadows; commonly used for storing wine, these gave promise of a
kafenion. This hope was bolstered by a few rucksacks, obviously
alien, resting above the steps, the bright colours an evidence of
foreign wanderers or customers nearby. A peasant woman, middle-
aged, in black with a grubby grey apron, walked out from inside, her
cheap plastic flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor of the
patio. She smiled pleasantly, shaking her head from side to side, the
Balkan gesture of query. A trace of concern was in her eyes.
“Xeni. Katse, katse,” she insisted.
Thus invited, the couple seated themselves on a couple of
rundown chairs with worn-through wicker seats.
“Nero thelete?”
Martin nodded, and the woman shuffled off to get water, and
glasses. While she was inside, Martin looked at the nearby packs
leaning on a pillar, and recognised a German marque.
The woman came out again, bearing a tray loaded with pumpkin
seeds and shelled hazelnuts, a few garishly wrapped boiled sweets
mixed in. Two glasses filled with water completed the ensemble.
They were careful to toast the woman’s health in Greek, before
swallowing the cool water. There followed the inevitable questions:
Where do you come from? What work do you do? Why are you
here? Have you any children? followed by clucks of sympathy at the
answer “none”.
It was a formula, probably being repeated dozens of times that
same moment across the island, wherever tourists and Greeks were
meeting for the first time. Were a man the interrogator, topics would
have drifted over to money earned, and yearly wages. A delicate
little probing, performed with overt politeness, with always the
undercurrent of gaining information, reaping some advantage; the
pull, the tug, with little exception always towards: how is this one
useful to me?
Her questions tapered off once it was established that the couple
were ordinary people doing the familiar if incomprehensible act of
travel for its own sake. Martin then took his opportunity, with his
kitchen Greek.
No, there was no kafenion. No place to overnight. The mountain
over there was Effendis Christos. The people here were all from the
village below, and were up to tend their summer gardens and trees;
they would go down in the evening. Yes, there were other strangers
here, Germans, up on the mountain.
Marline, with better eyes, saw them first. A red spot, a yellow, and
two blues – chemical colours of the jackets or jerseys, up near the
summit, stretched out along a fairly vertiginous route.
They’ve been up there all day, the woman said.
At which point, as if to confirm her statement, the sounds of a
distant yodel echoed from far up the hill. Fun, up on the rocks, Martin
thought.
At length, having questioned the woman about the track to the
next village, the two set off again, early evening approaching. They
went uphill through the dry landscape, east, sun to their backs, up a
low pass, then up to another and finally a third, the watershed. No
one had been by, and the enveloping silence was profound.
They could see down, back to the brink crossed hours before, at
the foot of the northern massif. On either side of the dusty way
where they stood, two ranges, here close, ran parallel. To the right,
the flat ridgeline of Effendis now sat low, a hundred metres above
them. The road had climbed up almost level with the long spine of
the peak; it would be an easy walk to the top from here.
Like a shadow-show, Martin thought, and he felt somehow
cheated realising that what was so difficult from the one side, could
be done so easily from the other. This brought to mind the automata
of Descartes, gliding down the streets in cavalier cloaks hiding
clockwork, indistinguishable from passersby.
“They are the passersby,” Martin said aloud.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, just a thought about the mountain.”
Marline laughed, her voice echoing with a strange tinny tone.
“Effendis Christos – Jesus! They’re probably all Turks here!” she
giggled.
“She didn’t even know the word is from her neighbours to the east,
or is it maybe cousins?”
Still laughing, Marline suggested setting up camp. If they went on
down a few minutes more, they could still see both ways, but would
be shielded from the eyes of any loitering villagers behind them. The
deep empty valley, next morning’s walk, opened out long ahead
before turning right; beyond, they could see a fair stretch of the south
coast.
Going a few metres off the rutted track that now ran over patches
of bare rock, they unfurled their sleeping mats and bags. Cooking up
a brew on a small gas stove, they drank it with bread and cheese,
sitting wordlessly on the inflated cushions.
The view was extraordinarily clear, with every object sharp and
definite in the limpid air. Objects that must have been miles off
seemed close enough to touch. Shadows were being magnified and
thrown vast distances. Clarity imagined, but seldom seen.
 Martin felt a gnawing unease, but unable to find words to express
it, remained silent.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just – I can’t say it.”
Another long pause, and then Martin said, “It’s really nothing,” and
felt his eyes for no reason suddenly fill with tears. Standing up
quickly, so Marline would not see, he turned to face the way they had
come.
“I’m going up back a little bit,” he said to her. “I just want to see
how long the shadows actually are.” She did not reply, so he began
to slowly move through the low bushes, sole cover to the treeless
earth, through the infinite symphonic tones of yellows and browns
and black-greens that reeked of spice and animal excreta. The sky
was absolutely cloudless.
Some paces uphill, back on the unmetalled track, he turned to
look. The north slopes of Effendis to the right were now in shadow,
but every object in the imperfect dark was still visible. He could
almost hear the rocks, dusty purple in the shade, crack as they
started to cool from the day’s impartible heat.
The rest of the hills, ahead and to the left, and the valley between,
were filled with light that tore the heart, obsidian sharp, crystalline,
clear. Marline, small and distant below, had packed the few pieces of
mess gear, and was now smoking a cigarette, seated arms around
her knees, looking the same direction as Martin, setting sun to their
backs.
And then he saw the shadow, his own. At first he was not sure,
until he moved, and the shadow moved with him. It was enormous,
occluding acres of hillside below the horizon up to the valley’s end,
beyond, miles away. He felt dizzy, and to steady himself, turned
round and stumbled further up, hugging himself with his arms,
gulping great breaths, gasping after air.
Coming to a halt, he slowly turned again.
His shadow, since he was higher, had of course moved upward
with him. In the flat light, it was now taller than the lofty ridgeline of
the farthest range, and covered a reasonably large part of the sky
above, darkening the air, which still remained transparent.
 Stunned, Martin slowly lifted an arm, and its umbra eclipsed the
blue, almost to the zenith.
He began to hyperventilate sharply, and with vertigo and nausea
washing over him, panic took hold. He ran down to his wife,
stumbling once, falling, cutting open a pant leg at the knee, so he
bled, but paid no heed.
She was waiting, with her arms stretched wide, waiting to catch
him, to enfold him. He wept, eyes closed, as she held him, crooning,
soothing her lost child.
“Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong, you’re here, with me, there
now . . .” she said.
“But you saw it, didn’t you?” he repeated over and over again,
without her any reply, only the soft caress. Eventually, shaking still,
he left her embrace, and stood up.
The shadows were gone now, the sun down at last behind them.
At the spot where the world had turned to the dimensions of a shoe
box minutes before, the sky was evenly shaded.
It must be my eyes, he thought, the macular degeneration, those
spots that float across. He saw one now, thread-like in the air before
him, and blinked to make it go away. When he opened his eyes, the
hanging string, like a piece of thick shimmering cord, was larger,
wriggling in front of him, a dark blue transparent plastic worm
vibrating at an impossible rate. He blinked furiously; with each blink,
the writhing blue rope gained in definition, and his breathing stopped.
Speechless, mouth hanging open in supplication, he looked back
at Marline. But it was no longer her, but the grinning thrust-jawed
demon of the night before who looked back at him. Teeth gleaming,
this creature shook her head in quick small jerks from side to side,
like someone palsied, and small, brilliant blade-like rays of green and
blue outlined her silhouette, streaming off her.
Despairing, Martin turned round a last time, and faced the now
motionless protuberance. Its hue, he noted on the abstract,
complemented, but did not match, that of the air. He heard Yes, yes,
come from behind him, but he did not know whose voice.
Reaching out, using his nails, he worried the limp thing loose,
except for one solidly emplaced end, embedded in the air.
 With a firm grip and a single wrap around his fist, using great
force, he jerked the cool and wet object straight down, ripping open –
to the applause of his wife behind him, with the satisfying roar of torn
canvas and rock-broken waves in his ears – the mountains to their
root, and the sky, the traitor sky he always knew was wrong.