I began to dip a finger. Hesitated, thought: What the hell! It’s nothing harmful. It couldn’t be, or he wouldn’t be putting it in the water tanks. Would he? I snorted at my mind’s morbid fancies. Surly was one thing, but homicidal—?
I dipped, held my finger up to the sun where that great blazing orb slipped down toward the plateau’s rim. Squinting, I saw... just a blob of goo. Except—black dots were moving in it, like microscopic tadpoles.
Urgh! I wiped the slime off my finger onto the rough concrete of the wall. Wrong bucket, obviously, for something had gone decidedly wrong in this one. Backing uncertainly away, I heard the doleful bleating of the white kid.
Across the garden, he was chewing on the frayed end of a rope hanging from the corner of a tarpaulin where it had been thrown roughly over the chair under the olive tree. The canvas had peaked in the middle, so that it seemed someone with a pointed head was still sitting there. I stared hard, felt a tic starting up at the corner of my eye. And suddenly I knew that I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want it one little bit. And I wanted Julie to be here even less.
Coming round the house to the seating area under the vines, it became noisily apparent that I wasn’t the only disenchanted person around here. An angry, booming female voice, English, seemed matched against a chattering wall of machine-gun-fire Greek. I stepped quickly in under the vines and saw Julie sitting in the shade at the ocean’s edge, facing the sea. A book lay open on her table. She looked back over her shoulder, saw me, and even though she wasn’t involved in the exchange, still relief flooded over her face.
I went to her, said, “What’s up?” She looked past me, directing her gaze toward the rear of the seating area.
In the open door of the house, Dimitrios made a hunched silhouette, stiff as a petrified tree stump; his wife was a pale shadow behind him, in what must be the kitchen. Facing the Greek, George’s wife stood with her fists on her hips, jaw jutting. “How dare you?” she cried, outraged at something or other. “What do you mean, you can’t help? No phone? Are you actually telling me there’s no telephone? Then how are we to contact civilization? I have to speak to someone in the town, find a doctor. My husband, George, needs a doctor! Can’t you understand that? His lumps are moving. Things are alive under his skin!”
I heard all of this, but failed to take it in at once. George’s lumps moving? Did she mean they were spreading? And still, Dimitrios stood there, while his wife squalled shrilly at him (at him, yes, not at George’s wife as I’d first thought) and tried to squeeze by him. Whatever was going on here, someone had to do something, and it looked like I was the one.
“Sit tight,” I told Julie, and I walked up behind the furious fat lady. “Something’s wrong with George?” I said.
All eyes turned in my direction. I still couldn’t see Dimitrios’s face too clearly, but I sensed a sudden wariness in him. George’s wife pounced on me. “Do you know George?” she said, grasping my arm. “Oh, of course! I saw you talking to him when I was in the sea.”
I gently prized her sweaty, iron-band fingers from my arm. “His lumps?” I pressed. “Do you mean those swollen stings of his? Are they worse?”
“Stings?” I could see now that her hysteria had brought her close to the point of tears. “Is that what they are? Well, God only knows what stung him! Some of them are opening, and there’s movement in the wounds! And George just lies there, without the will to do anything. He must be in agony, but he says he can’t feel a thing. There’s something terribly wrong ...”
“Can I see him?”
“Are you a doctor?” She grabbed me again.
“No, but if I could see how bad it is—”
“A waste of time!” she cut me off. “He needs a doctor now!”
“I take you to Makelos.” Dimitrios had apparently snapped out of his rigor-mortis mode, taken a jerky step toward us. “I take, find doctor, come back in taxi.”
She turned to him. “Will you? Oh, will you, really? Thank you, oh, thank you! But... how will you take me?”
“Come,” he said. They walked round the building to the rear, followed the wall until it ended, crossed the scrub to a clump of olives, and disappeared into the trees. I went with them part of the way, then watched them out of sight: Dimitrios stiff as a robot, never looking back, and Mrs. George rumbling along massively behind him. A moment later there came the clattering and banging of an engine, and his three-wheeler bumped into view. It made for the packed-dirt incline to the road where it wound up the spur. Inside, Dimitrios at the wheel behind a flyspecked windscreen, almost squeezed into the corner of the tiny cab by the fat lady where she hunched beside him.
Julie had come up silently behind me. I gave a start when she said: “Do you think we should maybe go and see if this George is OK?”
I took a grip of myself, shrugged, said: “I was speaking to him just—oh, an hour and a half ago. He can’t have got really bad in so short a time, can he? A few horsefly bites, he had. Nasty enough, but you’d hardly consider them as serious as all that. She’s just got herself a bit hot and bothered, that’s all.”
Quite suddenly, shadows reached down to us from the high brown and purple walls of the plateau. The sun had commenced to sink behind the island’s central hump. In a moment it was degrees cooler, so that I found myself shivering. In that same moment the cicadas stopped their frying-fat onslaught of sound, and a strange silence fell over the whole place. On impulse, quietly, I said: “We’re out of here tomorrow.”
That was probably a mistake. I hadn’t wanted to get Julie going. She’d been in bed most of the time; she hadn’t experienced the things I had, hadn’t felt so much of the strangeness here. Or maybe she had, for now she said: “Good,” and gave a little shudder of her own. “I was going to suggest just that. I’m sure we can find cheap lodging in Makelos. And this place is such—I don’t know—such a dead and alive hole! I mean, it’s beautiful, but it’s also very ugly. There’s just something morbid about it.”
“Listen,” I said, deciding to lighten the atmosphere if I could. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You go back to the taverna, and I’ll go get the fish. We’ll have the Greek girl cook them for us and dish them up with a little salad—and a bottle of retsina, as we’d planned. Maybe things will look better after a bite to eat, eh? Is your tummy up to it?”
She smiled faintly in the false dusk, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss. “You know,” she said, “whenever you start worrying about me—and using that tone of voice—I always know that there’s something you’re worrying about yourself. But actually, you know, I do feel quite hungry!”
The shadows had already reached the taverna. Just shadows— in no way night, for it wasn’t properly evening yet, though certainly the contrast was a sort of darkness—and beyond them the vast expanse of the sea was blue as ever, sparkling silver at its rim in the brilliant sunlight still striking there. The strangeness of the place seemed emphasized, enlarged ...
I watched Julie turn right and disappear into the shade of the vines, and then I went for our fish.
~ * ~
The real nightmare began when I let myself into the chalet and went to the sink unit. Doubly shaded, the interior really was quite dark. I put on the light in the arched-over alcove that was the kitchen, and picked up the two fish, one in each hand—and dropped them, or rather tossed them back into the sink! The ice was all melted; the live-looking glisten of the scales had disappeared with the ice, and the mullets themselves had been—infected!
Attached to the gill flap of one of them, I’d seen a parasite exactly like the ones on the big grouper; the second fish had had one of the filthy things clamped half over a filmed eye. My hair actually prickled on my head; my scalp tingled; my lips drew back from my teeth in a silent snarl. The things were something like sheep ticks, in design if not in dimension, but they were pale, blind, spiky, and looked infinitely more loathsome. They were only—crustaceans? Insects? I couldn’t be sure, but there was that about them which ma
de them more horrific to me than any creature has a right to be.
Anyone who believes you can’t go cold, break out in gooseflesh, on a hot, late afternoon in the Mediterranean is mistaken. I went so cold I was shaking, and I kept on shaking for long moments, until it dawned on me that just a few seconds ago, I’d actually handled these fish!
Christ!
I turned on the hot tap, thrust my hands forward to receive the cleansing stream, snatched them back again. God, no! I couldn’t wash them, for Dimitrios had been up there putting something in the tank! Some kind of spawn. But that didn’t make sense: hot water would surely kill the things. If there was any hot water ...
The plumbing rattled, but no hot water came. Not only had Dimitrios interfered with the water, introduced something into it, but he’d also made sure that from now on we could use only the cold water!
I wiped my trembling hands thoroughly on sheets from a roll of paper towel, filled the kettle with water from a refrigerated bottle, quickly brought the water toward boiling. Before it became unbearable, I gritted my teeth, poured a little hot water first over one hand, then the other. It stung like hell, and the flesh of my hands went red at once, but I just hugged them and let them sting. Then, when the water was really boiling, I poured the rest of the contents of the kettle over the fish in the sink.
By that time the parasites had really dug themselves in. The one attached to the gill flap had worked its way under the gill, making it bulge; the other had dislodged its host’s eye and was halfway into the skull. Worse, another had clawed its way up the plug hole and was just now emerging into the light! The newcomer was white, whereas the others were now turning pink from the ingestion of fish juices.
But up from the plug hole? This set me shuddering again, and again I wondered: what’s down there, down in the slop under the ground? Where does everything go?
These fish had been clean when I caught them; I’d gutted them, and so I ought to know. But their scent had drawn these things up to the feast. Would the scent of human flesh attract them the same way?
As the boiling water hit them, the things popped like crabs tossed into a cooking pot. They seemed to hiss and scream, but it was just the rapid expansion and explosion of their tissues. And the stench that rose up from the sink was nauseating. God!—would I ever eat fish again?
And the thought kept repeating over and over in my head: what was down below?
I went to the shower recess, put on the light, looked in, and at once shrank back. The sunken bowl of the shower was crawling with them! Two, three dozen of them at least. And the toilet? And the cold-water system? And all the rest of the bloody plumbing? There’d be a cesspit down there, and these things were alive in it in their thousands! And the maniac Dimitrios had been putting their eggs in the water tanks!
But what about the spinsters? They had been here before us, probably for the past three or four days at least. And what about George? George and his lumps! And Julie: she wouldn’t have ordered anything yet, would she! She wouldn’t have eaten anything!
I left the door of the chalet slamming behind me, raced for the taverna.
The sun was well down now, with the bulk of the central mountain throwing all of the eastern coastline into shadow; halfway to the horizon, way out to sea, the sun’s light was a line ruled across the ocean, beyond which silver-flecked blueness seemed to reach up to the sky. And moment by moment the ruled line of deeper blue flowed eastward as the unseen sun dipped even lower. On the other side of the island, the west coast, it would still be sweltering hot, but here it was noticeably cooler. Or maybe it was just my blood.
As I drew level with the garden at the back of the house, something came flopping over the wall at me. I hadn’t been looking in that direction or I’d have seen her: Julie, panic-stricken, her face a white mask of horror. She’d seemed to fly over the wall—jumped or simply bundled herself over I couldn’t say—and came hurtling into my arms. Nor had she seen me, and she fought with me a moment when I held her. Then we both caught our breath, or at least I did. Julie had a harder time of it. Even though I’d never heard her scream before, there was one building up in her, and I knew it.
I shook her, which served to shake me a little, too, then hugged her close. “What were you doing in the garden?” I asked, when she’d started to breathe again. I spoke in a whisper, and that was how she answered me, but drawing breath raggedly between each burst of words:
“The little goat... he was bleating ... so pitifully... frightened! I heard him ... went to see ... got in through a gate on the other side.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Oh God, Jim!”
I knew without asking. A picture of the slumped figure in the chair, under the olive tree, had flashed momentarily on my mind’s eye. But I asked anyway: “The tarpaulin?”
She nodded, gulped. “Something had to be dead under there. I had no idea it would be a ... a ... a man!”
“English?” That was a stupid question, so I tried again: “I mean, did he look like a tourist, a holiday maker?”
She shook her head. “An old Greek, I think. But there are— ugh!—these things all over him. Like ... like—”
“Like crabs?”
She drew back from me, her eyes wide, terror replaced by astonishment. “How did you know that?”
Quickly, I related all I knew. As I was finishing, her hand flew to her mouth. “Dimitrios? Putting their eggs in the tanks? But Jim, we’ve taken showers—both of us!”
“Calm down,” I told her. “We had our showers before I saw him up there. And we haven’t eaten here, or drunk any of the water.”
“Eaten?” her eyes opened wider still. “But if I hadn’t heard the kid bleating, I might have eaten!”
“What?”
She nodded. “I ordered wine and... some melon. I thought we’d have it before the fish. But the Greek girl dropped it, and—”
She was rapidly becoming incoherent. I grabbed her again, held her tightly. “Dropped it? You mean she dropped the food?”
“She dropped the melon, yes.” She nodded jerkily. “The bottle of wine, too. She came out of the kitchen and just let everything drop. It all smashed on the floor. And she stood there wringing her hands for a moment. Then she ran off. She was crying: ‘Oh Dimitrios, Dimitrios!’ “
“I think he’s crazy,” I told her. “He has to be. And his wife— or sister, or whatever she is—she’s scared to death of him. You say she ran off? Which way?”
“Toward the town, the way we came. I saw her climbing the spur.”
I hazarded a guess: “He’s pushed her to the edge, and she’s slipped over. Come on, let’s go and have a look at Dimitrios’s kitchen.”
We went to the front of the building, to the kitchen door. There on the floor by one of the tables, I saw a broken wine bottle, its dark red contents spilled. Also a half-melon, lying in several softly jagged chunks. And in the melon, crawling in its scattered seeds and pulpy red juices—
“Where are the others?” I said, wanting to speak first before Julie could cry out, trying to forestall her.
“Others?” she whispered. She hadn’t really heard me, hadn’t even been listening; she was concentrating on backing away from the half-dozen crawling things that moved blindly on the floor.
I stamped on them, crushed them in a frenzy of loathing, then scuffed the soles of my flip-flops on the dusty concrete floor as if I’d stepped in something nasty—which is one hell of an understatement. “The other people,” I said. “The three sisters and... and George.” I was talking more to myself than to Julie, and my voice was hoarse.
My fear transferred itself instantly. “Oh Jim, Jim!” she cried. She threw herself into my arms, shivering as if in a fever. And I felt utterly useless—no, defenceless—a sensation I’d occasionally known in deep water, without my gun, when the shadow of a rock might suddenly take on the aspect of a great, menacing fish.
Then there came one of the most dreadful sounds I’ve ever heard in my life: the banging and
clattering of Dimitrios’s three-wheeler on the road cut into the spur, echoing down to us from the rocks of the mountainside. “My spear gun,” I said. “Come on, quickly!”
She followed at arm’s length, half running, half dragged. “We’re too vulnerable,” I gasped as we reached the chalet. “Put clothes on, anything. Cover up your skin.”
“What?” She was still dazed. “What?”
“Cover yourself!” I snapped. Then I regained control. “Look, he tried to give us these things. He gave them to George, and to the sisters for all I know. And he may try again. Do you want one of those things on your flesh, maybe laying its eggs in you?”
She emptied a drawer onto the floor, found slacks, and pulled them on; good shoes, too, to cover her feet. I did much the same: pulled on a long-sleeved pullover, rammed my feet into decent shoes. And all in a sort of frenzied blur, fingers all thumbs, heart thumping. And: “Oh shit!” she sobbed. Which wasn’t really my Julie at all.