She Wakes (21 page)

    And he could not believe it He had made the woman pause. He! Kostas! He felt himself blush with pleasure.

    But now he must do something.

    He smiled.

    It was not much to do.

    
Shit!

    To his surprise she smiled back. She's not even drunk! he thought. I would bet on it!

    She inclined her head, motioning him toward the door.

    He did not even finish his Metaxa. He slid off the chair and was beside her in an instant.

    She was taller than he was. He was a little dismayed. But no matter.

    He held the door for her and from behind he had a chance to look at her. Her dress was black-some sheer thin material cut almost to the waist in back and wide at her long graceful neck. She was thin, yes, but her legs were wonderful. And her ass! He would have killed his sister for that ass! Just to hold it between his hands and whisper to it in the night…

    He could think of nothing to say that was not completely stupid so he said nothing.

    She smiled at him again.

    
What a mouth! What eyes!

    His pulse was racing.

    “Let’s walk, shall we?” she said.

    A good idea. He had to sober up for her. The cool night air would help. He would walk firmly, breathe deeply. A longish walk, perhaps. Romantic, by the sea. Though of course that was up to her.

    “Yes,” he said.

    They walked silently up to the windmills. He watched her look down to the rocks below. The moon made the water sparkle.

    “Down there,” she said.

    “Yes…it’s nice.”

    He wished his English were better.

    They started down. Her shoes were not made for climbing but she was very surefooted, as sure as a donkey-better than he was because of the brandy.

    Halfway down he had a wonderful idea.

    He would have her there, on the rocks.

    He could barely contain his pleasure at the notion. Yes! his business might fail, his wife might give birth to a hundred squalling malakas, get fat and grow a mustache and a beard as well for all he cared. Just give him this woman, this night, here by the sea in the shadows of the windmills of Mykonos and he would rejoice for the rest of his life.

    It was almost as though she’d read his mind.

    “Want to go down to the rocks?”

    “Oh yes. Very much.”

    “Good,” she said and grabbed his arm.

    And her fingers were strong as a vise as she hauled him out in front of her and held him there over the drop. He whimpered once. Then she shoved him out away from her down to the rocks below.

    He fell and did not die.

    He lay there, spine cracked, brain leaking, and through blood-filled eyes saw her leap from where she stood twenty feet above him and land like a leaf within inches of his thighs and then reach down with the long sharp nails he had not noticed before but which glittered now in the moonlight and saw her tear him open and break apart his chest with her elbows askew like a hunter setting his trap.

    Then he saw nothing.

    He felt no pain.

    Perhaps, he thought, it was the seven-star Metaxa.

    

    

    They walked home past the Sunset Bar, the windmills in the distance. Water slapped at the rocks beside them. The waves were still high. They had to wait for one to break over the concrete platform where the carpenter used his saw horses during the day. They watched it recede, then they splashed across the platform to the higher ground behind the Caprice. They walked toward Spiro’s past the little stretch of sandy beach that was now almost entirely under water. The moon passed behind a cloud. It was very dark.

    She could barely make out the little boat in dry dock there. Until the cloud passed by.

    And then she saw the eyes. Watching them from beneath the hull.

    Watching them from behind the piled-up tables and chairs of the darkened open-air restaurant ahead.

    Cats.

    Dozens of cats.

    She stopped. She clutched Dodgson’s arm.

    She felt his puzzlement, then felt it turn to awareness.

    The eyes stared. Neither moved nor shifted. She could see the huddled bodies.

    And she thought what a dozen cats could do all at once, because she knew what one could do-she felt it again very vividly.

    Ten pounds of claws and teeth and speed and hard muscle that had ripped at her like some mad otherworldly weapon…

    “Dodgson.”

    “Billie, she can’t command the animals.”

    Can’t she?

    Go back, she thought.

    She turned. But now there were more behind them. Sitting there silent, waiting in the dark by the Sunset Bar.

    She shuddered-it gripped her and continued, turned to a trembling that was uncontrollable and had nothing at all to do with ocean breezes.

    “Walk,” he said. “Go slowly.”

    She held back. He tugged her gently forward.

    The eyes followed them, rippling reflected light as though in a prism.

    They passed the boat. The eyes followed.

    Nothing moved.

    The blood hammered in her face, her head.

    They moved through the tables and chairs, the stillness of the empty restaurant like a single sentient claw poised and waiting for the first show of panic. She felt the wildness of them. Cats just inches away. Cats no one had ever tamed. They walked in the shallow stillness of their own breathing.

    Past them.

    They did not look back.

    So they could not see the bodies that scampered into full moonlight along the path they had taken, that stopped and continued to watch them with a concentration normally reserved, in their species, for smaller animals. For prey.

    

    

    
Take care of one another,
Chase had said and this was the way to do it.

    The first time had lasted a good long while and now he was ready again, still slick with sweat from before and from their bodies pressed close together in the warm Mykonian night. There was affirmation here and security, a poignant sense of life and he felt it could continue this way throughout the night, their last night on the island, until they exhausted each other and maybe slept a little.

    Then she poisoned it.

    He was inside her moving slowly in the warm depths of her watching the face he already had come to love move through a kind of fabulous agony of pleasure, the tiny cobweb lines at the eyes etched more deeply by the drawn muscles of her mouth, a gleaming hint of moisture in them, watching the breast flesh tremble, her shoulder muscles lengthen as she reached for him.

    When suddenly she changed beneath him.

    The eyes flashed open.

    They were blue. Pale blue.

    The broad open lines of her face shifted, narrowed.

    On her pillow the hair grew and darkened.

    He felt a cringing horror. The wide mouth grinned and the lips were Lelia’s. He began to tremble.

    The soulless eyes stared up at him.

    Insane.

    He closed his own eyes and tried to feel her, just feel her, and she felt as she should-Billie, not Lelia. Yet when he opened them again Lelia’s face leered up at him, superimposed like a double image in a photograph. He saw the narrow hips beneath him, the pale wide nipples, the smaller breasts, the self-inflicted marks across her belly. “What’s wrong?”

    It was Billie’s voice but Lelia’s too, the first one worried, the second mocking him and dripping with venom.

    What’s wrong, asshole?

    He felt himself shrivel inside her.

    He wanted to hammer her, destroy her, filled with anger that she could do this and afraid of her too.

    He pulled away. He sat shaking, fighting for control.

    He had almost hit her, pounded at her. The way you’d destroy a snake.

    “What’s wrong?”

    It was Billie. Wholly her now.

    “Lelia.” He felt a kind of vertigo, felt himself falling. “You were Lelia.”

    “I?”

    “You were.”

    Green eyes again, a blessed green. Wide with disbelief.

    “I’m not crazy.”

    “No.”

    He saw her try to believe him, to understand.

    “It’s just that I…felt nothing.”

    And then he saw her grasp at what she’d done to them.

    “No! She can’t do that! Not here! Not here too!”

    “She did it, Billie.”

    “No!"

    It was a howl of pain and despair that raced across his spine. Her tears came suddenly and hard.

    “It’s not fair!”

    “I know.”

    He held her.

    “We did nothing…"

    “I know. I know.”

    He continued holding her, rocking her, and the tears subsided a little.

    “So long ago,” she said. “It seems so long ago. We did nothing to her. But that first night in Matala. I knew it. I knew something…even then.”

    “So did I, maybe. But not like this.”

    “No, never. Not like this.”

    She began to cry again and he held her sobbing against his shoulder, the tears warm against him, until she stopped.

    “That man. Jordan Chase. Can he help us?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “And if we leave tomorrow, can she follow us?”

    He had no answer for that.

    “I can’t lose you, Robert. Not now. Don’t let me lose you.”

    “You won’t. I promise.”

    The promise was empty. He fought back tears of his own now.

    She drew herself up, wiped her eyes.

    “Keep her out of here,” she said. It was like a spell, like magic. An incantation. And then she said, “Hold me.”

    A murmur in the shapeless alien night.

    

    

    “Elaine?”

    “Yes?”

    “It’s not a good line.”

    “I know.”

    “I just wanted to say…”

    “What? I can’t hear you, Jordan.”

    “I just wanted to say I love you.”

    “What?”

    “I love you, Elaine.”

    “I love you. I hate this goddamn line, though.”

    “Yes.”

    “Where are you-still in Mykonos?”

    “Still in Mykonos, yes.”

    “For a while yet?”

    “A little while.”

    “Come back soon, Jordan. Will you? Please?”

    “Yes.”

    “You promise?”

    “Yes.”

    “I miss you.”

    “I miss you.”

    “What?”

    “I said I miss you."

    “Soon. Jordan. Okay? All right?”

    “Yes. Soon.”

    It was less than an hour before dawn, that time when most people die who are going to die, when the temperatures of men and of the earth sink lowest, that Chase leaned sleepless out of his window to gaze at the sea and saw Lelia Narkisos standing naked in the water, holding out to him a tiny bundle of likewise naked flesh that screeched and writhed in her hands while she smiled and then moved just the slightest bit away from him so that the writhing bundle, the baby, became his own maggot-white dripping severed head.

    

    

    

    

    

    

    “We’re stuck here!” said Danny.

    It was nine-thirty in the morning and no planes were flying in or out of Mykonos and the word at the tourist office was that no ferries would be running either. Meltemi, the travel agent said-the high gale-force winds that periodically boiled the Aegean. And he sympathized because no one could remember when one had struck so early in the season or so hard.

    Perhaps tomorrow, he said and went back to pushing whatever paper there is to push in a travel agency when no one is able to travel.

    So Danny turned to the rest of them and uttered what they all were thinking in the same flat astonished voice any one of them might have used.

    “We’re fucking stuck here!”

    When the silence was over, when all the dire glances had been exchanged, Jordan Chase said, There are seven of us. From this moment on we stay together.

    It was, in its way, a declaration of war.

    

    

    They sat encased in misted glass in the restaurant by the harbor listening to the patter of rain and the howling wind, watching the boats toss and roll. The restaurant was crowded. Nobody else had much to do either.

    “Tell me about it, Chase,” said Eduardo. “What’s it like?”

    Chase seemed to listen inside himself for a moment. He smiled.

    “Sometimes it’s actually kind of enjoyable. I’ve…eavesdropped, I guess you’d call it, on some funny things. Ever wonder what goes through a lawyer’s mind when he tells you he’s billing you for one hundred eighty hours of his time? I can tell you.

    “Then sometimes it’s damn depressing. You hear the most godawful things. Cruelty, pettiness, the most incredible stupidity…

    “But then you get a real intuition, a knowing and it can be one of the most exciting things in the world. Because you get it first, before everybody else. To see things before the event, before the turn of the wheel. Though that can be unsettling too. I knew about the Iranian hostage situation-when was it, ’78?-almost a week before it happened. A company of mine was based there.”