She Wakes (26 page)

    He saw Billie and Dodgson pale in the candlelight, both of them reaching out to something that wasn’t there, sleepwalkers in that place he’d just returned from.

    For a moment he wondered what she’d sent them.

    Giving him Tasos was a mistake. It was good to know she could make one.

    Then he saw what had happened in the interim.

    

    

    Someone was shaking him.

    The bed, the mom, the dead naked woman flew apart like shattered glass.

    He was back inside the shepherds’ hut and Chase had him by the shoulders, shaking him, hurting him.

    “All right, all right."

    "Get Billie.”

    He saw her a few feet away, a strange sort of little-girl mannequin that was only half familiar. He blinked hard and went to her. Images of Margot jumped and twisted as in a funhouse mirror. Then they were gone.

    He shook her too timidly at first. Her pupils were widely dilated. She was very pale. He shook her harder.

    “Billie!”

    “What…?”

    He saw Chase in the comer, using a lighter on a rolled-up newspaper printed in three colors-Greek.

    “We’re getting out of here. Come on.”

    There was something in the comer, some movement in the shadows, obscured from view by the heavy table. Something that seemed to feint forward and dart quickly side to side.

    Chase had the paper burning brightly. He thrust it at the thing in the shadows as though he held a knife.

    Dodgson moved her toward the door.

    Then for one frozen moment he saw it, all of it. The face of the old ragged shepherd leering at Chase like a bloodstained mask as he lunged and pulled back, daunted by the fire. The figures behind him in the flickering shadows that crouched over the bodies on the floor-the still, dead faces of the bodies turned upward, and wrenchingly familiar.

    Xenia and Eduardo.

    And the shepherds sawing, slicing with the curved blades of shearing knives, intent, expert and mundane in that surrounding as though they were shearing sheep except that they were skinning not shearing and the skin they pulled away was thin and nearly transparent where it was not bright with blood.

    Xenia. It was peasants who had gotten her after all.

    “Let’s go! Go!" shouted Chase. He was backing away, waving sparks from the burning paper.

    It was Billie who pulled him out of there.

    He saw Chase toss the paper on the bed and slam the door.

    Through the window he could see something flare inside. Good, he thought. Bum. Bum all of it.

    They ran down the path under the blue-black starlit sky.

    Danny and Michelle were exactly where they’d left them. They didn’t need to be told-they ran in silence and it was only when they were past the row of lions and could see the smoke curl rising from the hut that they stopped and Danny asked after the others in a hushed small voice that already knew the answer.

    They sat silent behind a low stone wall, smoking, thinking.

    A little time and distance had allowed him to be puzzled.

    “Why did it stop them?” he asked Chase.

    “What?”

    “Your fire. Your newspaper. They had…they were using knives.”

    Chase shrugged. “I’m not sure it did. The one, maybe. The others…they were busy.”

    He remembered the figures bent low over the bodies, the tearing, cutting sounds.

    “The fire was just reflexive,” said Chase. “What you’d do with animals.”

    He didn’t understand.

    “Dodgson, didn’t you see them?”

    “I…yes. For a moment, yes.”

    “They were dead. Every one of them. I don’t mean Eduardo and Xenia. I mean all of them.”

    And Dodgson saw a change come over the man as though some far-off battle were raging and only Chase were witness to it. The eyes were dreamy, lethargic-and pained.

    Dodgson worried for him.

    “Let’s go for the boat,” said Danny. “High seas or not. I want off this island.”

    “Yes. Please," said Michelle.

    “And go where?” said Dodgson.

    Danny shook his head. “I don’t care. Anywhere. Naxos.”

    “Naxos is miles.”

    “I don’t care, dammit! A rock in the middle of the sea. I just want out of here.”

    They looked at one another. Then got up and headed toward the dock.

    It was empty.

    They searched the water and Dodgson was the one who spotted it bobbing over a whitecap a couple hundred yards away, much too far to swim for. Xenia had tied the boat securely. Now it was floating free.

    There was no other boat in sight.

    He took Billlie’s hand.

    Danny and Michelle sat down on the dock, staring out to sea. Iordan Chase paced the old rotting boards.

    They were trapped again, he thought, just as on Mykonos. Chase had warned as much.

    Only now the trap was smaller, tighter.

    Tall as a mountain.

    

    

    So many names for what he had been in that life before.

    Smuggler. Rapist. Dope dealer. Murderer.

    Even, long ago, tenor-in a boy’s church choir in the slums of Paris.

    There was no name for him now.

    Now all he had ever been existed for him only as sand informs concrete, as wood informs fire. They were part of him but he was wholly without memory and transformed. She had done that.

    Had he anything in his past to compare it to he would have been well pleased.

    Alive he had been treacherous, cunning, casually cruel. But there were always hesitations, some measure of doubt. Now nothing existed between him and his desires but simple opportunity.

    Already he had much of what was promised. He took them fast and slow, easy and hard, some of them begging for death. And then he led them. He had known warm blood and cold inert flesh.

    The world was black and fine.

    And now he waited for another part of what was promised, a small part but infinitely desirable.

    So that it was almost with recognition that he watched the blonde woman running below and grew bloated with the urge to take her.

    

    

    She stood high above him at the top of the long steep climb. Once there had been a temple here. Now there was only rubble and broken columns. She watched them scurry like rats through the maze of the city, past the House of the Trident and into the House of Masks. Her dogs began to howl. Cats lay small and cringing at her feet. She saw into each of them and held their tiny souls in the glove of her intense and ardent longing, as she would soon hold those below.

    At every instant she was with them. Turning each comer, running, going nowhere. She felt how weak and small they were with their fear of the dead and their fear of her. only one of them with any strength at all- and she drew up out of her the infant that had died inside her and held it so it could see them, see what must be, and knew she would have to speak to this man before turning him loose to the vast rich world of the dead.

    The man was searching for her.

    He was afraid but he was man enough to search.

    She saw the grim firm set to his mouth and smiled.

    The cats crept down the mountain. Vipers crawled over her breasts and shoulders. Her dogs howled.

    She listened to the power in the marrow of her. It was old as the mountain, new as clean distillate hate. It flooded her with a supernal wine, with heartless song. In the wind she heard other, gentler voices, voices more amicable to man. But they commanded nothing. No earthly or unearthly creature. While she…

    She watched the shepherds' hut burning. She fed her power to the charred smoking bodies and rose them up.

    The vipers hissed sweetly in her ear.

    She released the Frenchman standing below her. He could go, move darkly down the mountain.

    They all could go.

    There were only two she wanted for herself, each for despising and fearing the thing she had been and for their terror now.

    Contempt was the very blood of her.

    Deliciously she felt it surging.

    

    

    His head pounded. His skin felt so sensitive he felt he’d been burned along with those in the hut. He trudged wearily along with the others, feeling old, feeling betrayed by this thing that was no gift at all but a lie and curse, which could not help them but would only allow him to sense more clearly when and how they would die there and how horribly.

    He felt the caress of a million daydreams, impressions, knowings past and present.

    He saw once again the serpent-fanged idol of the ancient Mexico, stared into its thousand wakeful eyes, alive again after a thousand years. He saw the dim mists of Avalon part to reveal a secret hiding place which to all but Chase and those like him would remain hidden for centuries yet to come. He saw an unnamed spirit in a New England forest rise up against the locust encroachment of man and blast the earth barren, shrivel the lakes and streams.

    And he saw Lelia as he had first known her in Quebec, her pale soulless eyes, the eyes of the only other man or woman on earth he had ever met to possess his own terrible gift, his curse, his sight-he saw himself drowning in a bed of power with her, a bed of dreams, annihilated, exalted, his orgasm immense and frightening, saw himself put her in a taxi later saying, Yes of course, of course I’ll call and knowing he would not, could not now that they had lived one night through in the perilous whirlpool depths of each other and saw in her eyes that naturally she knew the lie at once and hated him for it, would hate him forever for his cowardice.

    He saw these things and many others and they came like ghosts to him, drew over his senses, a drifting fierce confusion.

    
Elaine,
he thought.

    He had no choice. He slipped into them.

    

    

    They scrambled up through the narrow streets of the ancient city.

    Dodgson was watching Jordan Chase. He didn’t like what he saw. All of them were breathing hard and sweating but Chase was moving like an old man now and even in the dark Dodgson could see his pallor. When they glanced at each other there was a feverish light in his eyes that made him wonder how firm a hold Chase had on his sanity. He knew that look. He’d seen it only minutes and years before. On Margot.

    Still it was Chase who led them. He seemed somehow to know the place-so that when he stepped over the guardrail and into the ruin they followed him and found themselves standing on a mosaic floor. Dodgson lit a match. He saw a bright god riding a panther. The panther clawed the air and snarled.

    “Apollo?” said Danny.

    “Dionysos,” Chase said, “another fertility deity only male this time. Blood sacrifice. The Mysteries. Wine. The last of the gods worshipped here. We’re in the House of Masks. Let’s rest.”

    His voice was listless, dull, a recitation.

    It seemed as good a place as any, though. There was one narrow doorway but other than that it was closed off on all sides, open only to the sky. The walls were high.

    He hefted a rock. Perhaps it had been a piece of the building once. He felt a bit ridiculous.
David and Goliath,
he thought.
Who are you kidding?
But at least the rock was something. It imparted weight, substance, solidity. The illusion of security. He saw without surprise that, aside from Chase, the others held them too. When had they picked them up? He hadn’t noticed.

    He leaned against the wall facing the doorway and sat down into a crouch. Billie slid next to him, leaned over and kissed him.

    “I love you,” she said.

    “I love you too.”

    Dodgson smiled. They had whispered but sound carried here. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn who heard him.

    

    

    Lelia heard him.

    From atop the mountain her fury boiled down like lava.

    Chase didn’t.

    Leaning back against the wall he felt the blast of anger but had no idea as to its cause. It didn’t matter. He knew where it came from.

    It had been some time since the others had been wholly in the world for him. They came and went like shadows on a cloudy day. He was aware of their proximity. They were bodies that moved along beside him. Familiar but somehow distant. He realized a certain responsibility to lead them. Occasionally to speak.

    But his focus was with her, had been throughout the climb. He felt her intensely now. He was amazed at how strong she’d become. He knew she was very much at home here.

    She seemed to fill him completely.

    He sensed other things, other voices, vague, undefined and insubstantial. Things with hooks and claws. Things that commanded, that blinded in a sudden white-hot glare. He knew they were important too but he could not hold them yet-he was too much with her.

    He watched and listed. Filled, straining.

    

    

    While she burned down at them.

    While those she controlled crept down the mountain.

    
You will die here.

    Her voice broke over him.

    It was all too real, too powerful. Not a prediction but a curse. He felt a wave of nausea.