The Dead Travel Fast (26 page)

“What happened back there?”

“We met someone.”

“Someone I couldn’t see.”

“Not this time, but you have before and perhaps will again. I think you know who it was.”

“Father John?”

“If that’s what he’s called over here.”

“Why you and not me?”

“We have unfinished business. He had something to tell me and anyway Steve’s my friend, not yours.”

Giles looked into his empty glass, his face was ash grey. Theodrakis prompted,

“What did he tell you?”

“That I’ll have to do something that will hurt me very much. Not very comforting.”

“And Steve?”

“Steve‘s staying.”

“And that’s it?”

Giles stared at him a moment before replying, Theodrakis couldn’t read his expression.

“I learnt it the hard way; you need to understand the dead travel fast. So for now, yes that’s it. Can we have another drink now, please? I need one.”

Apart from an almost imperceptible whiff of something burning in the distance, it was a perfect evening. The type of beauty particularly Greek: a zephyr breeze, the softening of the light, the darkening of the sea. A vague sparkle of white sail near the ochre horizon where a yacht headed towards Patmos.

“So, Athenian policeman, you and your men knew nothing about the attack on Vassilis?”

Michales winked as he spoke, a conspiratorial wink, and raised his glass to Theodrakis.

“Stin Yassou.”

Theodrakis drank with him, noting the personal ending of the toast; Michales had come to accept him, it seemed. But the mention of Vassilis cut. Whatever his motives for guaranteeing there’d be no police guarding the Vassilis estate, it was something he would have to live with now. Have to consider whether he could stay in the police. He sat facing the sea, not wanting to look landward at the column of smoke high above on the flanks of the mountain, over Vassilis’s demesne.

“So, will you stay on our island and make an honest woman out of Hippolyta? If you don’t, Yaya Eleni will hex you.”

He was about to reply she’d be somewhere towards the back of a long queue when he realised he was no longer looking at Michales. He was face to face with Samarakis: the dead Samarakis and death hadn’t been kind to him. He tried to scramble out of his chair but couldn’t move.

“It’s no good trying to shout out either, no one can see or hear us; they just see you and the good Captain Michales enjoying a drink together.”

He stared at the slippery, putrefying mass across the table from him and heard himself squeak like a child.

“What do you want?”

“I want to be alive, I want to be out of Hell, but it seems instead I must deliver a message to you.”

The face across the table seemed fatter, with looser jowls than Theodrakis remembered; yellowish, punctuated by dark crimson lesions like the artwork in a horror comic. Unsettlingly, a turbid dripping trail of thick viscous material was oozing onto the table. The analytical part of his brain wondered why, if they wanted to scare him, they couldn’t be more sophisticated. He felt as if he was dreaming but knew he wasn’t. The mouth opposite hung open and didn’t move as it spoke.

“You will end up in a different land: a colder, clinically violent place. Better brush up on your English.”

There was something that almost approximated to a laugh, then,

“I may be dead and in Hell, but you are the one cursed.”

The voice changed; for a moment Theodrakis heard Vassilis speaking.

“An imperceptible ripple in the universe is a cataclysm in yours; these economic and environmental disasters are just symptoms of things you have yet to diagnose. Remember Lucretius: there is always ‘something bitter which gives distress even among the flowers’. Look up, the evil is moving on.”

Theodrakis looked up; in the sky above, the Thomson Holidays plane he’d watched landing had taken off and was flying over Mount Kerkis, climbing into the violet twilight, headed for England. He looked down to ask the question he desperately needed an answer to and saw the face of Michales almost shouting across the table at him.

“Policeman, what have you been thinking that makes you ignore the woman who loves you?”

He looked up and saw Hippolyta.

”Take me home.”

Captain Michales sipped his ouzo, watching them disappear down the length of the harbour front; their arms tightly intertwined as if they imagined something might try to drag them apart. Then he got up and slowly walked to his boat to lay the nets for tomorrow’s trip.

“Could you put your seatbelt on for me, at all? Will you want any perfumes or gifts later on, at all?”

Claire looked up at the stewardess and smiled. The young woman in the seat next to her put down her copy of Heat magazine to ask what brands the plane carried, then turned to Claire and said,

“My boyfriend always gives me money for some: he’s a footbawla.”

Claire smiled encouragingly and the voice continued, trilling,

“Hiyaa, I’m Kylie, that’s a pretty necklace you’ve got. Did you get it here?”

Claire nodded.

“Thought so, it’s lovely, really unusual, like different types of ivory, looks quite old, like ethnic innit.”

Claire nodded and turned to look out of the window leaving Kylie to her iPhone. She ran her fingers across the mass of little bones surrounding her neck. It felt perfect, it was made for her; nothing had ever felt as good as this necklace, this “Throat of Ages.”

Outside, down on the mountain she could see flame, buildings were burning.

In the dark and heat below, while Captain Michales steered his boat out of the harbour mouth and Theodrakis and Hippolyta tumbled into bed, a lone dolphin disturbed the calm of the sea.
Claire’s fingers played with the new bone in the necklace, the one she had added herself. It was slick, white and slippy, still smelt slightly of life but it added power. She sank blissfully into her seat as the flames on the mountain engulfed the demesne. She smiled her most beatific smile.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”

Samos/ Bramhall 2011- 12

Nick Brown has an archaeological background and is the author of
Luck Bringer
and
Skendleby
. He lives with his wife, sons and a presence on the borders of Skendleby.

The Ancient Gramarye series

Skendleby

The Dead Travel Fast

The Luck Bringer series

Luck Bringer