Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (18 page)

Conan Doyle took a breath, glancing at them each in turn. "The
Olympians were so furious with the Maenads that they turned them into trees."
His gaze surveyed the petrified forest. "And as for Orpheus . . . they
threw his head into a river, and the river fed the ocean, and in time his head
came to rest on the shore of the island of Lesbos."

Only the wind broke the silence. They stared at him. Danny
shook his head.

"No way."

"You’re saying —"

Conan Doyle waved them to quiet. "Indeed. I believe the
skull in that grave to be that of Orpheus. Gull had need of it, and used us as
a diversion to appropriate it."

"But he left it behind," Ceridwen said.

"Because he found out what he wanted." Conan Doyle
explained. "The ash all around the grave, even beneath our feet now, is
wet." He plucked at the knees of his pants, which were damp. "The
girl, Jezebel, is a weather witch. We have seen her work this magick already. She
made it rain here, just in this place."

"I am so not following this," Danny sighed,
reaching up to scratch the flaking leathery skin around his horns. "Wake
me up when we get to the ass-kicking part."

Eve thumped him on the arm. For once, Conan Doyle approved.

"Why would she need to make it rain?" Eve asked. "Come
on, seriously. Every second you take enlightening the terminally dense here is
another second between us and them. Assuming we do want to catch up to them?"

"Oh, we do," Conan Doyle assured her. "But
I’ll attempt to be brief."

"Far too late for that," Ceridwen noted, violet
eyes flashing in the sun.

"I’ve told you of Gull’s work with ancient magicks. Dark
magicks that no one in their right mind would ever work for fear of how it
might taint them. He sacrificed his face for that power, and other things as
well, I should think. One of the rituals he practices allows him to . . .
borrow the voices of the dead. If he drinks rainwater from the mouth of a
corpse, he can speak in its voice."

"That is hideous," Ceridwen whispered. "Desecrating
the dead in such a way."

"But useful at times, I’m sure," Conan Doyle
conceded. "For instance, if you wanted to open the gates to the ancient
underworld, to the home of whatever might remain in that realm from before the
dawn of the Third Age of Man, and you knew that —"

"The voice of Orpheus," Eve said. "This is
just too much. You’re saying this guy can speak in the voice of Orpheus now,
and that’s somehow the key to some ancient netherworld."

Conan Doyle sighed."Precisely. But more than that, Gull
will be able to
sing
in Orpheus’s voice. And few will be able to resist
him."

"What the hell does he want in the netherworld?"
Danny asked.

The four of them stood there in the midst of the petrified
forest, the sun beating down on them, and Conan Doyle raised the Divination Box
in his hand.

"That, I do not know. But I have no doubt we will soon
discover the answer, and to our misfortune. Gull might have left this behind
because he expected me to follow. Or he might simply have flung it away now
that he needed it no longer, so arrogant that he could not conceive of my being
able to use it."

Ceridwen reached for the box and raised it up, studying it
in the sunlight. "But won’t you need some piece of Gull? Something of his
flesh?"

"Not necessarily flesh. And not Gull, either." He
withdrew from his pocket a lock of hair bound with red string. Red hair. "From
Jezebel. With this, we can locate her. And when we find her, we find Gull."

"And when did you collect
that
little sample?"
Eve asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Last night, while she slept, I gathered it from her
hairbrush." Conan Doyle turned from them and started toward the Range
Rover. "Come. I’ve got to prepare the Divination Box, and then we’ll see
where we are headed next."

They followed, but as they did, Danny spoke up. Though he
had the face of a demon, the hideous visage of some hellish thing, there was
still somehow something of a human teenager in his expression. At time’s this
phenomenon was comical. At others, it was chilling.

"Hold up. So Mr. Doyle had this all figured from the
start, right? All of it."

"Not all," Eve said, striding along, and plucking
at the tears in her clothing, clearly more displeased with the damage to her
outfit than anything else. "He took the girl’s hair as a contingency. Probably
one of a hundred backup plans he’s got in his head. And as for Orpheus, he only
just figured that out since all of this happened, and even now he’s not
completely sure."

Conan Doyle paused at the Range Rover with his hand on the
door. He turned and regarded his three companions. Ceridwen came to him,
standing intimately close. It made his heart light to have her near, but he
refused to let it affect him now. His love for her had almost cost them dearly
in this fight, and he would not allow it again.

"Is that true, Arthur? Are you unsure?"

"On the contrary. I’m entirely certain for any number
of reasons, not the least of which being that there’s nothing else in that
grave. Only the head. And when I held it . . . it seemed to hum."

Conan Doyle climbed into the Range Rover but paused before
he shut the door. He leaned out again.

"Eve. Danny. A small favor, if you will?"

They had been about to get into the vehicle but now waited,
eyeing him curiously.

"I’m going to deal with what’s left of the Hydra. Before
I do, could I trouble you to go back and remove its teeth and bring them to me?"

Eve frowned. "Do I even ask?"

Danny seemed thoughtful for a moment, searching his mind for
something familiar, for the story. Conan Doyle saw the process, saw the moment
when the demon boy’s eyes lit up with realization. He had remembered. He
grinned at Conan Doyle.

"The Hydra’s teeth. That just rocks." The boy
bumped Eve affectionately. "Come on. You’re going to love this. I’ll tell
you the story while we work."

Conan Doyle nodded and slid back into the Range Rover’s
seat. Ceridwen climbed in beside him. Together they began to work with the
Divination Box, and all the while his curiosity ate at him.

What are you after, Nigel? What could be so vital to you
that you would dare disturb the tomb of an entire age?

The blue sky over Athens had deepened to a rich indigo, and
a hint of the moon was visible above the Acropolis. Tourists walked the long
path down the hill from the Parthenon, surrendering at last to exhaustion after
a long day exploring the city. On their way down, none of them glanced up into
the darkening sky, but even if they had they would not have been able to see
the ghost of Dr. Graves as he floated back the way they had come, an errant
cloud in the shape of a man.

As night crept across the city, Dr. Graves looked up at the
outline of the Parthenon silhouetted in the dark and was humbled by its beauty.
This is a ghost
, he thought.
You, Leonard, are merely an afterthought.
An echo
.

Graves had first visited Athens in 1927. His memories of the
Acropolis were what brought him there tonight. In those days he had been a
living, breathing man, a thing of flesh and blood. Now he was a wisp of smoke,
nothing more. Yet even then he had sensed the ancient soul of this place, all
the lives and cultures that had thrived and died there, all the souls that had
cried out to their gods for succor. The destruction the Venetians had wrought. The
blood that had been spilled upon the stone and earth of that hill. If there was
a better place for him to go and try to commune with the phantoms of Athens, he
could not imagine it.

The strange part was that in those days of flesh and blood
and adventure he had not believed in such things. He had told himself that what
he felt was merely awe and respect for the achievements of that ancient
society. But that had been foolish. The specters of ancient Greece still
lingered atop the Acropolis.

Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It
had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans
whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent
hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The
passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown
fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling
gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of
human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had
crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating
the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of
their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were
disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.

There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place
that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to
maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here
long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.

The ghosts of antiquity
, he thought, propelling his
ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the
Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped
that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.

Olive trees lined either side of the path beneath him. The
last of the tourists straggled down from the hill even as the phantom came in
sight of the Propylaea, the ancient gateway with its colonnades of Doric
columns to the east and west and the rows of thick, proud Ionic columns on
either side of the central stair and corridor, holding up nothing but the sky. Spirits
were propelled through the tangible world by force of will alone. This was one
of the facts of the new science he had studied ever since he had become a part
of it. And yet Dr. Graves slipped more rapidly through the veil of night
without even realizing he had quickened. He moved above the Propylaea and then
paused abruptly, hanging in the air, staring at the majesty of the Parthenon,
the temple built to honor the virgin goddess Athena upon her defeat of
Poseidon, with whom she had warred for the patronage of the city.

Perikles himself had initiated the construction of the
temple in the fifth century B.C. It had been a Byzantine church, a Latin
church, and a Muslim mosque in the centuries that had passed since then. When
Graves had last been on the broken, bleached ground atop the Acropolis, the
Parthenon had been a terrible sight, never having recovered from an explosion
that had destroyed part of the temple when the Venetians laid siege, attempting
to wrest control of the city from the Turks. Then that thieving bastard Lord
Elgin had stolen so much of the sculptural decoration of the place and shipped
it back to London to the British Museum. Leonard Graves had spent time on
archaeological digs in Greece, and though it had been more than one hundred
years since Elgin’s crime, the mistrust he had found among the Greeks had
saddened him. But he could not blame them. That was what happened when an
ignorant fool stole national treasures. He ruined it for everyone else.

Some of the sculptures remained, but the place truly was a
ghost of its original glory. Even so, he was pleased to discover upon closer
inspection, drifting on air currents toward the eight-columned face of the
temple, that restoration was under way and appeared to have been going on for
decades. Barriers were in place that would keep tourists out. And as he
alighted upon the marble stairs and then passed between two of those columns
and into the massive central chamber he was surrounded by scaffolding.

He felt he could almost hear the chants of the cult of
Athena, could almost see them gathered there around her statue. The dust of
history coated everything, both in the physical world and the ethereal one.

"Hello?" he called, standing in the center of the
chamber, looking up through the collapsed ceiling at the night sky as the stars
began to appear.

The ghosts came like the stars, materializing one by one in
the darkness of the temple, between columns and beneath scaffolding. Some
floated above him, others crouched on the marble beams around the edges of the
chamber. Graves said nothing as they scrutinized him, most of them faceless
shades, so long dead that they had forgotten their own images and could no
longer form the details of their fleshly appearances. Some were in the helmets
and garb of Grecian warriors, others in the robes of priestesses of Athena.

Yet for all of the cultures that had lived and died upon the
Acropolis, the ghosts of the Parthenon seemed to number only the most ancient. Only
the Greeks. Graves wondered if all of the other ghosts, the Turks and Venetians
and the rest, had all been driven out.

At length one of the ghosts drifted toward him. Dr. Graves
could not see if it was male or female, for this specter was little more than
an upper torso clad in a robe and the rough shape of a human head. It had no
face. Neither eyes nor mouth. When it spoke the words seemed to manifest upon
the air much like the spirits themselves. Leonard Graves had been dead more
than half a century. The ancient dead could not harm him — as far as he
knew — and yet he felt a rippling chill pass through him as he heard this
voice out of the ancient world.

"You are not welcome here."

The words were in another language, an ancient form of
Greek, but such barriers meant little to the dead. Like other ghosts, Dr. Graves
could draw the meaning of the words from the ether itself. From the substance
of the spiritual realm, a tapestry woven from the souls of humanity throughout
the ages.