She Wakes (3 page)

    He’d see.

    He’d have another Metaxa. Then he’d see.

    
You should call Elaine,
he thought.

    
But you won’t. Not now. Not yet.

    He lifted his drink and, impassive, watched his hand tremble. It wasn’t much to speak of, just a slight tremble sending honey-colored ripples in concentric circles over the surface of the brandy. It was enough to remind him though and to intrigue him. And he thought he knew what his decision would be.

    

    

    

    She slept in the sun and dreamed that she was not one woman, but three.

    The first woman that she was stood first in a cornfield and then in the woods beneath a cypress tree and there were deer beside her and wild goats and in the tree above a lynx or a lion and all these things- cornfield, tree, animals-she blessed, and they blessed her.

    The second woman lay peaceful and naked in full moonlight.

    The third woman stood at a crossroads at dark of the moon and howling dogs surrounded her. She walked with the souls of the dead. And blessed nothing.

    

    

    

    He paid the bill and walked up through the quiet town into the hills. There was a half moon and plenty of stars, leaching color from the landscape, turning it gray and white. The wind was gone. He heard only his own breathing and the scrape of shoe leather and the hiss of fabric on fabric-reassuring, personal sounds. He walked mechanically, thoughtlessly, his mind open and empty of fears and speculation.

    To the left of the gate there was a gap between the fence and the pebbled road large enough for him to pass through. He wriggled under. He felt composed and ready. He dusted himself off, walked up the trail and turned and ahead of him was the long wide passageway and beyond that the mountain and the tomb. All of it pale and glowing.

    For a moment he felt a sense of push and pull in equal measure, washing out from somewhere inside the mountain. He was excited now, eager to take what was given, all his earlier ambivalence put aside. He felt the energy of the place feeding him, searching him out and giving him instructions. Move slowly. Do not presume.

    He stepped out onto the passageway.

    The sounds began.

    Low at first, building.

    Finally, an electric jolt up his spine.

    At first he thought of bats-then birds, the ones he’d seen this afternoon. But neither was right. Because birds just chattered and bats- what did bats do? Well, they did not do this. This was one voice, a single sound. And he couldn’t place it. He couldn't link it to bird or animal-there was something of both. And he kept thinking bats, bats, ridiculously, because he knew it was not bats, yet thinking that was all which allowed him to go on because he wasn’t afraid of bats and he was afraid of this.

    This hissing. Howling. Screeching.

    All of these together and building. Building continually as he walked slowly forward, slowly and without wanting to but without wanting to stop either, because the sound was so obviously a warning yet it called to him too. It beckoned.

    He felt privileged, powerful, terrified.

    Farther.

    And now for a moment he did hear birds, but only the usual bright chirp of birds. Not this bizarre unearthly shrieking.

    Then it was back, jarring him. blotting out all sounds not its own, louder and more violent the closer he came, like the hissing of a snake, the snarling of a huge cat, wildly feminine somehow though he knew the tomb to be a king’s. In the still night air it seemed impossibly loud and he was trembling, the fear in him boiling swiftly to the surface.

    Go back to sleep, he thought. Whatever you are.

    And then he was standing at the entrance, eyes probing the darkness while the screeching rose higher. Warnings, he thought. Portents. Signs. His throat was dry, his stomach churning. I must be crazy, he thought. There are no gods. No gods awake. He felt a white-hot flash of pure superstitious terror. He willed his legs to move. He took a single step inside.

    And got his final warning.

    The scream broke over him like an angry fist, a naked rush of power. He flinched. Then ducked, cringing, because out of the darkness something flew at him, he felt wings brush his forehead, graze his cheek. He stood frozen while claws and feathers swirled around him. Sparrows. Tiny sparrows at the call of something huge and inhuman that commanded him now to go, commanded him imperiously to go now so that he turned and did, the screeching voice behind him driving him back, burning at him like a cattle prod while the birds flew away over his head and he asked himself -
Why? why all this?
- until finally he stood at the entrance to the dromos where he had begun.

    He turned and looked back, breathing hard, thinking - 
Whatever you want, brother
- and something washed gently over him, a heavy wave of understanding.

    He dropped to his knees.

    

    

    In the shrieking dark, all sounds stopped together.

    He closed his eyes.

    The calm was more than calm. It was something like peace.

    In the dark behind his eyes an image skittered into focus.

    A man. Himself. Climbing a mountain. Glowing with an inner light. There were ruins at the top of the mountain and ruins all around him. Delos, he thought, though he had never been there and did not know the place.

    The image changed.

    It was a woman, or something half-woman, something amorphous and cruel, a scaled winged lion with the breasts and face of a woman- the contours of the face almost blank, hazy, shapeless, yet vaguely familiar to him. Her arms were raised in triumph.

    The image shimmered, changed.

    The face remained the same but now the body was black and wholly female except that where the hair would be-on the head, in the armpits, between the legs-snakes writhed and hissed. He shuddered. The woman’s eyes dripped blood.

    It changed again.

    Now the body was pale and soft and beautiful. It reached up naked for him out of a churning sea. He felt a pure cold blast of hatred buffet him like a foul wind and knew that this was the crudest image of all, and heard his own voice whisper You will die here. The image faded.

    He opened his eyes.

    It was over.

    Kneeling there he could feel the air inside the tomb quiver like the wings of bees, pulsing outward.

    He stood and walked to the gate. He did not look back. A breeze was up and the night was cool and lovely.

    

    

    At the bottom of the mountain there were dogs barking.

    Farther along cats hissed in a closed and silent taverna. He registered them merely as sounds, familiar and unimportant.

    Days later he would realize that they were neither.

    

    

    

    Ula or Mia-whatever her name was-was tied securely to the bed.

    Naked.

    It would be that much more distressing for her when they found her.

    She wondered how long that would be. A day or so probably. Plenty of time.

    She walked to the dresser where-finally-the Swedish girl had put away some of her clothes, opened the top drawer and pawed through the t-shirts and panties until she found what she was looking for. The girl was vain. The glasses were there but she refused to wear them. She was also, in her way, orderly. She had tucked the rent money for the two of them into her eyeglass case so that neither would be tempted to spend it. A child’s idea of order. Ultimately, very silly.

    And very stupid to tell her about it.

    So stupid she almost had to steal it. It was almost a point of honor.

    She threw the glasses on the floor and heard them crack against the smooth concrete. She dug out the money and counted it. The girl was honest. It was all there-two thousand four hundred drachmas for three nights in the room, about twenty-four dollars American. It wasn’t much but that was not the point.

    The point was that the girl was unbearably dumb. She’d decided that-and decided to steal from her-the day before yesterday on the black-sand beach at Perissa. The girl had allowed two German men to sit with them and buy them beers and the men were boring, stupid. They spoke no Swedish and little English. Yet the girl hadn’t bothered to discourage them.

    Lelia had, but it hadn’t taken. How many times could you snub a man, ignore him, laugh at him even, before he got the message? Finally she could stand it no longer. She got up and said she was going for a walk and when the one with the bump on his nose and the languid smile said, 'Perhaps I too go with you she’d turned and whispered Perhaps you fucking die into his ear and that was the last she’d seen them. And that was when she decided to take the girl’s money.'

    There wasn’t much risk involved. The landlady had asked for only one passport and the Swedish girl had offered hers. The Swedish girl was very generous, very thoughtful, very nice.

    Lelia had met virtually no one on the island and no one had her address or even her full name. Even the girl knew her only as Lelia. So there would be no tracing her. By the time they found the girl trussed and gagged her hydrofoil would be long gone-the landlady only came in to clean every other day-and nobody was going to try to locate her for twenty-four dollars anyway. Nobody cared about that kind of money.

    Except the Swedish girl.

    She knew the girl would care because the girl had confided in her. She was nearly broke. She was going to try to find work on the island. Waiting tables, maybe. Unfortunately she had no papers. It was hard to find work unless you had papers because it was illegal for a Greek to hire you. but it could be done. The girl was young and she guessed that to some she was attractive and given a little time, some bar or restaurant would hire her. High season was approaching and the police tended to look the other way when the islands were mobbed with tourists-it was too much trouble not to-so as long as you kept a low profile and did not attract attention, they left you alone.

    Too bad. The girl was going to attract a lot of attention.

    Tied naked to a bed with eight hundred drachmas in the pockets of her dirty jeans. Less than ten dollars. Less than the bill for the room.

    A lot of attention.

    Her stay in Greece was going to be a short one.

    Little girl, she thought, you should pick your friends more carefully.

    She was staring now, following her around the room as Lelia packed up the last of her things, dark eyes blazing. Lelia ignored her. There was a dirty sock in her mouth and two more held it firmly in place. She could yell all day at the top of her lungs and nobody was going to hear. Her wrists and ankles were already badly chafed from struggling against the nylons that tied her spread-eagled to the bed. She’d done her worst in that area-tried and failed. Obviously they’d hold.

    Lelia zipped her shoulder bag and went to her, tugging at a lock of long blonde hair, pulling her forward so she could examine the lump on the side of her head. It wasn’t bad. The blood was matted dry. She’d done more damage to the wall than the wall had done to her. But it had been necessary to subdue her.

    Funny how quiet they got when you bashed them against the wall a couple of times.

    She reached down and stroked the girl’s body.

    “I touched these at night, you know,” she said.

    “This too.”

    The girl squirmed, trying to avoid her hand. She laughed.

    “And here I thought you enjoyed it. Live and learn.”

    She hoisted the bag to her shoulder and moved toward the door and then she stopped and turned. Her handsome light blue eyes went wide, the amusement in them gone. She stared seriously at the girl, her face strangely open and without expression.

    Frightened, the girl looked back.

    She twisted the doorknob and opened the door a crack.

    Her body shuddered. It was the dream again. The dream of power. Sliding over her vision like a second snakeskin membrane of reality.

    “Dream of me,” she said.

    And was gone.

    

    

    …the islands drowsed and dreamed. They lay in a hazy stupor of impending summer. Work was done, but slowly. There was not yet need to hurry. Tourists came and went while the islanders waited for them to arrive in more serious numbers so they could begin to take some profit from the season. They sat in open doorways and waited over rich dark coffee and talked until evening. Breezes were cool and even, the days long and warm, nights just cold enough so that sleep was restful. It was a good time of year, perhaps the best time of year, when flowers bloomed in the fields and there was a sense of fullness and regeneration.

    On the island of Delos something slept no longer. Indeed it had awakened weeks and days before. Yet it waited too, gazing off to Mykonos hungry-eyed and ancient as the spring. Watching for the shell of itself and for its consort. It was patient, knowing, avid.

    Alive again.