She Wakes (25 page)

    There were supposed to be a handful of shepherds here, caretakers for the French archeological team who worked the island in the cooler months and when funding was available. He wondered if any of them had heard them. In this kind of stillness they should have. It ought to have caused a stir. It was illegal to be out here at night.

    No one appeared.

    “What now?” said Danny.

    “Let’s find someone,” said Chase. He didn’t seem optimistic.

    They headed out through the broken city.

    

    

    They walked along a broad flat dusty avenue past a row of pillars and broken pedestals, of porticoes overgrown with tough wild grass. Low thorny growth scraped and pricked at her ankles.

    Five marble lions crouched above them, luminous, features worn smooth by centuries of rainfall. There were empty pedestals for four more.

    She clung to Dodgson’s arm.

    
It wasn’t fair,
she thought.

    She’d come so far with him in so short a time, forgotten her fears, learned to enjoy a man again. And now here she was, reduced to a miserable insecure frightened woman again, reduced by half from what she was only days ago. Walking through a city where everything was long dead.

    It wasn’t fair because they’d done nothing to deserve this, nothing commensurate with the revenge she’d already taken much less what might lie ahead for them. Her death had been an accident. She’d brought it on herself. It was as though that greed she’d seen in Lelia from the start had flowered like some unwholesome, night-blooming thing into a monstrous gluttony that had nothing to motivate it beyond greed itself. She’d become a kind of feeding machine-feeding on the fear in them and their caring for one another.

    Long ago while she was still a girl she’d given up believing in god and thus far the world had proved her out. The world was random and capricious in the extreme. But now she wondered bitterly about a different god or gods. Now, when her happiness with Dodgson should have been a delight to her all she could feel was fear for him and for herself, all she could do was tightly grasp his arm-and she wondered about what Chase had said, if there were such things as gods, delighting in the torment of men and women. Cruel, rapacious.

    “This way,” murmured Chase.

    They climbed a low stone fence and saw a small one-story hut ahead of them on a hill.

    

    

    Inside there were candles burning. Flickering through the tiny window.

    In front of them Xenia was holding onto Eduardo and ahead of them, Michelle to Danny, mirroring her and Dodgson.

    The path was uneven and overgrown with weeds. She stumbled. Dodgson supported her. They scuffled along, unsure of their footing in the dark. Through his sweater she could feel dampness at his arm and waist, a light warm humidity.

    The path narrowed. They crested the hill. Her eyes held to the candlelight in the window as though it were a lifeline. Her pupils contracted. The rest of the world darkened.

    Michelle began to whimper.

    “What is it?” Danny said.

    Billie could just see them. Two dark figures moving back and forth ahead of her. Michelle trying to pull away, Danny holding her gently back.

    “It’s okay…Michelle…it’s okay…”

    “No!”

    “…really, honest, I swear it’s…”

    “It’s not. It’s not! No."

    Then suddenly she was running, a shadow darting past her down the path. Billie saw Xenia turn around and there was fear in her eyes too. She looked away from the candlelight and when her own eyes adjusted saw Michelle standing facing them, arms rigid at her sides.

    “Michelle!” she said and started toward her.

    "I won’t go in there!”

    It rang on the night air, echoed.

    
Snakes,
Billie thought.

    “I won’t!”

    “All right,” said Danny, moving past her. “Okay. You don’t have to. I’ll stay here with you. We’ll be fine. All right?”

    He reached for her hand and she took it hungrily. She was crying. He turned to the others.

    “We’ll stay here, okay?”

    He’d addressed it to all of them but everyone knew that only Chase could answer him. So they waited. But Chase just shook his head. She thought he looked strained.

    “I don't know…there’s so much going on here. I…I think so. I think it’s all right. But be careful.”

    Danny nodded. “We’ll stay right here on the path. That okay, Michelle?”

    “Yes.”

    Billie looked at Chase. Why? she thought. Why doesn’t he know? If Chase was blind to the place she didn’t think she wanted to go in either. Not anymore.

    She knew she didn’t.

    Why had no one come to the door?

    Michelle’s screaming had been enough to…

    To wake the dead.

    She was trembling. She supposed there was safety in numbers. She supposed they had to see.

    They started forward. This time she kept her eyes off the lighted window. That had been a mistake. It could have been a bad one.

    Pebbles danced out in front of her. She could feel the presence of Michelle and Danny behind them, watching, imagined their silent embrace.

    They huddled together now. They moved up the hill. She let go of Dodgson’s arm. She wanted both hands free-just in case.

    If only she could stop shivering.

    They reached the door, old white painted wood. Chase knocked.

    They waited. There was no answer.

    He opened the door and they stepped inside.

    She had time to register three small candles burning amid a shadowy jumble of tools, pots, pans, icons, clothing-and to realize that they were not alone but that someone was very near them, nearest to Xenia, when something shifted in the far comer of the room beyond the sputtering candles.

    And she recognized her mother.

    “Billie! Billie, come and help me, mil me over. It hurts, Billie! Please. Be a good girl.”

    The woman lay in bed, face ashen, and Billie remembered that she was crippled with cancer. How could she have forgotten? “Yes, of course,” she said and moved toward the bed. It was the bedsores, naturally, that were hurting her. Even the morphine wasn’t much help anymore. She was always in pain now and would be till the end. The doctor had made that very clear.

    “Billie, help me.”

    She wished the nurse were here. It was really very hard to move her all alone. Even at seventy-five pounds there was a curious heaviness about her. As though she were already dead. Dead weight, they called it. She didn’t like to think that way but it was true. Besides, when she moved her alone she inevitably hurt her.

    The withered hand reached out to her.

    She moved closer to the bed, wondering why her movements should be so dreamlike, so slow, why her feet felt so heavy. Her mother was calling her.

    “Billie…”

    There was so much pain in her voice now. It had been a lovely voice once, rich and musical. Now it was all rasp and rattle. She would move her and then get her a glass of crushed ice. That would help some.

    “Please, Billie… ”

    “Yes, Mother,” she said but it was terribly hard to move, she actually had to struggle as though she were falling asleep on her feet-so she reached up for the gray mottled claw of a hand, knowing that if she touched it first she could get there, could cross the distance to her, could help relieve the pain, her mother’s pain, her poor dying mother who had passed away five years ago in a little green valley in Derbyshire…

    The hand contracted, reached up.

    

    

    …and Dodgson got up out of bed. He had his green-striped pajama bottoms on, and there was Margot wearing the top, making breakfast in the kitchen.

    Through the window he saw the East River. The morning sun was bright. He smelled ham and eggs frying and then as he shuffled closer, rubbing sleep from his eyes, the early-morning smell of her-teeth brushed, clean damp hair herbal-scented and drying.

    “You’re looking woolly this morning. Look what I’m making you.”

    The ham popped in the pan.

    “I see.”

    Dodgson yawned and reached for her. She danced away, waving the spatula, laughing. He tried to remember how it had been last night. One of their good nights, or bad? If it was bad then this was only making up to him. Otherwise it was nice. He wondered if he had to get to work later or if he’d finally finished the manuscript. He couldn’t remember.

    
God!
he must have done some pretty heavy drinking last night. Probably that meant it hadn’t been so great between them.

    Well, never mind.

    “Come here.”

    He reached for her again and she darted away toward the bedroom, giggling in that high silly way of hers that he somehow dimly knew would later sound so much like the broken edge of insanity. But this was much earlier than that, wasn’t it? This was the very early days of their relationship. So how could he…?

    The train of thought fell apart, unresolvable.

    She stood in the doorway to their bedroom. He could see the rumpled sheets behind her. She lowered her head and smiled.

    “Turn off the stove," she said.

    He did. The dial felt oddly unsubstantial. For a moment the lights in the room seemed to flicker.

    She unbuttoned the pajama top and let it fall off her shoulders. As always the sight of her naked aroused him. She was very pale. He could see the tiny light blue veins in her thighs and breasts, a delicate reminder of mortality.

    He remembered he used to kid her about her New York pallor.

    She began to back into the bedroom. Slowly he followed her. At the foot of the bed she stopped and sat down, leaned back on her elbows, spread her legs wide.

    He moved closer.

    She seemed to shimmer in front of him, to fall in and out of focus like a camera lens adjusting. This really was the king of hangovers, he thought. Can’t remember, can’t see.

    So where was the headache?

    What was going on?

    He felt a thread of panic. Maybe he was sick or something, feverish.

    He looked at her and it didn’t make sense-she looked as though they’d already made love that morning, had just made love in fact, though he certainly didn’t remember it. Her skin was dripping wet.

    Sweat? How could that be?

    It glistened in her pubic hair, dripped down her arms and across her chest. And for a moment he saw the wide deep vertical slashes on the insides of both wrists, red as raw meat yet bloodless-and then he heard her laugh again, knew the laugh to be insane now as somewhere inside him he had always known, god help him, because that was his crime against her. would always be his crime, and lowered himself down to her pale white blue-veined flesh…

    

    

    …Tasos was angry.

    “You should have let me come, Chase. You are arrogant. I could have helped you.”

    “I know, Tasos.”

    “You are too proud.”

    They sat at the bar at Lycabettus as they had so many times before, sipping the Santorini wine that was going to make them a fortune- another fortune-and looking out across the city. The sky was clear and he could see all the way to the Acropolis, lit by huge klieg lights. Athens was only good at night, he thought.

    He shook his head.

    “It wasn’t pride, Tasos. You get used to handling these things alone, that’s all. I didn’t want to involve you.”

    “Involve me?”

    He stood up. His clothing flapped in the wind. And it was not the dapper gray three-piece suit he was wearing but rags, bloody rags and Chase saw that his eyes had already sunk deep and turned a yellowish, reddish brown, the dry empty eyes of the long dead. His left arm was gone at the shoulder. From its stump maggots dropped to the table. A large piece of slate protruded from his collarbone.

    “This is involved, isn’t it?”

    “She…?”

    “Yes, she! She did this to me!”

    "Tasos, I…”

    The thing before him seemed to stagger. He saw the twisted broken angle to the legs. The sunken eyes stared balefully.

    The waiter placed their bill on the table.

    Tasos sat down again.

    Nothing could have seemed more natural.

    The ruddy tan was back. Tasos tugged at the tailored jacket and turned over the check, examining it.

    “Not much,” he said. “Considering.”

    ‘Tasos…”

    “Think nothing of it, fello.” He leaned in close. “I will pick up this check for both of us. But I think you must take the next. No?”

    The lights of the city began to wink and flicker. Miles across from where they sat the Acropolis was melting, dripping, beginning to crumble under the glare of the klieg lights. Chase watched.

    This also was her doing.

    Chase began to struggle inside himself-not to rid himself of what he saw but to augment it. He turned the lights higher. He felt them bum fiercely now.

    He felt himself bum inside her.

    “Yes,” said Tasos.

    The Erechtheum fell. Then the Temple of Athena Nike. Then the Parthenon.

    The night faded. He was standing now, not sitting. The table was gone.

    “Good,” said Tasos distantly. “Much better.”

    “Good," said his afterimage…

    …the room burst into focus.