Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (20 page)

It was the abbot who invited the dark pilgrim within his door, and now the dark answered his invitation. Now the abbot fed the dark each night Skiá came to him. What promises the dark may whisper none can say who has not heard the dark, but by the day of Agios Titus some numbers of the brethren made their habitation in the depths. Yet Skiá must learn to moderate his thirst for the reason that the victim who dies rises thirsty from the dead to multiply the hunger. But those who feed on others for the vessel of the dark and choose to feed it while they live are rewarded with great age, and the pact may extend to their victims although they have not chosen. The blood is the exchange and the seal, and who may break the pact once it is sealed?...

As Ray turned the page he felt he was being watched. When he glanced at the window he thought he'd just missed glimpsing someone who had looked out at him. Nobody was visible between the curtains now. He stood up so fast that the plastic chair almost toppled over, and went to the window. Through the meagre gap between the curtains he was able to distinguish that Sandra was asleep, one arm upturned on the thin quilt. No doubt because of his reading, her position reminded him of someone about to give blood. He blamed the book for making him imagine a face at the window as well. He was tempted to abandon the chapter until daylight, but he might as well finish it while Sandra was asleep. He would have that much more time to spend with her once she was awake.

Who will know what rites were celebrated each night in the chapel? Some who lived near in a village said the wind out of the trees brought a chanting in the language of the dark. Not every brethren made the dark his friend. Some few fled into the forest, but the dark brought them back to feed on, following all which they died and were burned before the hunger waked them. But Skiá's hunger had no bounds, whether being for victims or for knowledge of the dark. Did he seek the deepest blackness for his path to the eternal or for the reason he had become so monstrous none could bear to look upon him? The brethren who fed him dared to bring him no light, and in many years even their use to him was spent. Few travellers came to the monastery now, so the brethren still living must find others to feed...

Ray had had enough. The chapter was making him absurdly nervous, too aware of the unlit room beside him, too inclined to keep glancing towards it in search of the face he hadn't really glimpsed at all. He'd only seen Sandra alone in bed, and why wasn't he there with her? Suppose she felt lonely even if asleep? The thought made him close the book and drop it on the table like the irrelevance it was. It had nothing to do with either of them, and he didn't know why he'd given it so much of his time. He eased the window open and shut and crept into bed next to Sandra, who gave a sigh so heartfelt he could very well have taken it for a rebuke.

He'd hardly settled into bed when he heard a sound, though it didn't own up to being much of one. Was it in the room? It couldn't be Sandra, who hadn't moved in his loose embrace, unless her arm had shifted on the quilt. Surely he would have felt that movement too. No, the soft almost insubstantial activity was outside the window, and as he squinted across Sandra's silhouette Ray saw a dim shape at or on the section of the table that was visible between the curtains. In a moment it vanished, moving as fluidly as a wave. It had been a cat, of course, and to begin with he'd heard it leap onto the balcony. Now he wished he'd brought the book in with him.

Unless he did he mightn't sleep. Suppose the clouds turned to rain? He inched out of bed and padded across the room. He was sliding the window open with as little noise as the visitor had made when his hands jerked, and the window juddered in its frame. The book was nowhere to be seen.

Had the cat knocked it off the balcony? Ray glanced back at Sandra in case the rattle of the window had disturbed her, but she was lying as she had been, bare arm outstretched. He slid the window wide enough to let him out and hurried to the outer wall, clutching at the rough cold stone while he craned over. He couldn't see the book, either on the balconies below or in the undergrowth alongside them. He kept hold of the wall as he straightened up, fighting a surge of the dizziness that came with age. He was about to look under the table—his senses must be growing even more senile if he'd missed noticing the book was there—when he saw someone on the beach.

The figure was strolling towards Sunset Beach, practically gliding over the sand not too far from the edge of the glimmering waves. It was performing some action that seemed almost ritualistic, producing pale objects from an item in its hand before shying them into the water. Ray strained his eyes and narrowed them as well, and as the figure dodged with a sinuous motion out of reach of a wave he identified what it was holding—a book, from which it was tearing out pages to crumple them and fling them in the sea.

"What the devil?" Ray nearly yelled, but clapped a hand over his mouth instead. He knew which book it was, however the man had acquired it—presumably by picking it up once the cat had sent it off the balcony. He'd hushed himself so as not to waken Sandra, but he padded fast into the room and shut the window before grabbing his trunks. A hopping dance that felt as savage as absurd helped him find his way into them—he almost wished William could see him play the inadvertent clown—and he thanked whoever needed thanking that Sandra's sleep was so sound. He clutched his sandals in one hand while he retrieved the key from the slot by the door and let himself out of the apartment. Having eased the door shut, he sat on the steps to don the sandals while a host of flat unblinking eyes watched him from the play area. All the round faces met him with fixed toothy grins as he made a dash for the beach.

The road was deserted, not even a cat to be seen. The many-legged shadow that guarded the alley stirred as Ray sprinted panting under the lamp. Sand seemed to creep up the alley to meet him, and as it made him skid he bruised a hand against the spiky concrete wall. When he stumbled onto the beach the figure with the book was hundreds of yards away along the shoreline, and even harder to discern against the waves; its scrawny outline looked as unstable as the water. The man must be a reveller from Sunset Beach, quite possibly high on drugs and amused by the notion of destroying a book or else actively hostile to reading. He was still ripping pages out to throw into the sea, where numerous scraps of paper bobbed in his wake.

Or perhaps it wasn't quite his wake, for Ray had the wholly useless thought that the thief was staying well clear of the water. Ray floundered across the beach, where every step felt clogged with soft sand, to retrieve all the pages he could. Many, indeed most, were already well out to sea, too far away for him to risk paddling. He had a nightmarish vision of drowning out there in the dark, leaving Sandra alone because he'd cared more about a few bits of paper than he cared for her. Why, he'd already left her in the darkness by taking the key with him; while the fob wasn't in the slot the lights in the apartment wouldn't work. Just grab all the pages he could reach—the waves had even stranded a few on the sand—although were they worth salvaging? As he picked up the first sodden scrap he saw that the pages weren't even intact; they had all been torn raggedly in half. This was too much for him. "What do you think you're playing at," he shouted, "you damned vandal?"

He wasn't looking at the culprit, but when he straightened up from gathering a handful of crumpled scraps of paper he saw that the figure had turned to gaze at him. In a moment it shied the remains of the book into the sea and crouched towards him. He couldn't have said why he was grateful not to be able to make out its face. Its posture put him in mind of a runner at the start of a race, an idea that was all too appropriate. Before he could take a breath the figure came for him.

It moved as fast as any animal, practically flying across the soft sand. For a very short time Ray was determined to stand his ground and not be daunted, and then panic overtook him. He clutched the handful of paper so hard that moisture seeped between his fingers as he retreated towards the alley with all the speed he could achieve—not much at all. The sand felt as though his age had gathered underfoot, soft masses spilling into his sandals to grit between his toes, not merely retarding every step but weighing it down, sending heavy pains through the muscles of his legs. A backwards glance showed him that while he'd laboured halfway to the alley, where at least there was some light, the pursuer had almost halved the distance to him. Ray might have cried out if he'd had any breath to spare from struggling towards the feeble reassurance of the light. He couldn't even run, but had to take unsteady strides that came near to robbing him of balance. Another shaky stride that seemed more capable of kicking up sand than of bringing him any closer to the light, and another that let more aches dig deep into his legs, and one that nearly sent him stumbling headlong into the wall beside the alley—and then he was leaning against the prickly stone, and made himself twist around at once. As far as he could see, he was alone on the beach.

How reassuring could that be? Ray had a sudden awful notion that the pursuer might reach Sandra ahead of him. He dashed along the alley, barely managing not to collide with the walls. As he came to the end the spidery shadow reached for him, and he could have imagined the pursuer had leapt on him. He stumbled along the road to the Sunny View, where the unlit buildings and the glassy pool felt as if they were keeping quiet about an intruder, while the faces in the playground might have been sharing a secret grin. Ray hauled himself up the steps, every one of which demanded an effortful breath, and let himself into the lightless room.

He thought Sandra was asleep—she appeared not to have moved—but she spoke as he looked for somewhere to put the bedraggled pages. "Ray, where were you? I thought you'd left me."

"Just with the book," he said in the hope that she hadn't fully wakened, "that's where I was," and felt as if he'd betrayed her by leaving her. Nothing would make him do that again, he vowed. He stowed the pages in his bedside table and slipped into bed to renew his embrace, but Sandra was asleep again well before him. He kept thinking that the soft fluid sound of waves had sneaked into the room, or another presence had—the pursuer from the dark beach.

"Sorry, everyone," Natalie said. "We needn't have got up quite so soon."

While Tim and Jonquil looked as if they might have answered this not just with dull-eyed blinks behind their sunglasses, it was Sandra who said "Not your fault. It's our transport that's late."

"Relax, you two," Doug said. "That's Greece."

"Perhaps we could have been warned about it," Julian said without quite identifying the culprit.

"The sooner I'm up seeing everyone," Sandra said, "the better I like it."

Her children and their partners produced a variety of smiles before they looked away, out of the courtyard. Beneath clouds growing pale with dawn, streetlamps cast shadows like emblems of the stillness of the road. Ray glimpsed movement at the near end of the alley leading to the beach, presumably the shadow of the spider that had the light for its lure—the retreating shape had been thin enough. He remembered last night, and was trying to make more sense of it than he had so far when William said "Please may I go on the swings while we're waiting?"

"If anyone would care to go with you I should think you may."

"I'll take you, William," Natalie said.

Ray thought Sandra would have offered if she hadn't joined the teenagers in a state close to dozing. All three were seated on the wall beside the entrance to the courtyard and already wearing hats as well as sunglasses. As Natalie and William disappeared through the gap in the apartment block the boy's absence let Ray blurt "Doug, you saw the photo in my book."

"The monastery, you mean? I got a glimpse," Doug said and visibly refrained from looking at Julian. "You should see it, Pris."

Ray felt robbed of whatever question he might have asked. "I don't know if you'll be able to. I'm afraid I've lost the book."

"Oh, Ray," Sandra said and made an effort to widen her eyes. "How?"

Her concern felt worse than an accusation. "I left it on the balcony," he said. "It must have fallen off."

"Haven't you looked for it?"

"I did last night. You won't believe this, well, you'll have to, but someone had run off with it."

By now Doug had acquired some of his mother's concern. "How do you know that, dad?"

"I saw them on the beach with it." Ray had a sense of abandoning reticence as he said "They were tearing it up."

"Well, that's awful," Pris declared. "What did you do?"

"I rescued some of it. That's where I was when you didn't know where, Sandra. I haven't had a chance to see what state the bits I saved are in."

"What kind of villain would destroy someone's book?" Julian demanded. "There was nothing objectionable in it, was there, Raymond?"

"Not unless someone objected to the legend of the monastery."

Ray saw Doug and Pris ready questions, but Julian was faster. "How long have we been waiting now? I'm somewhat tired of Greekness."

"It hasn't been half an hour yet," Pris said. "Maybe other people have kept the pickup waiting."

"I suppose we could call the rep," Doug said, though not as if he meant to.

"I have her number here."

"I'll see what she says, Jules," Doug said to forestall him. "Sam, it's Doug Thornton," he told his phone, having listened at length. "We're still waiting at the Sunny View. We're wondering if there's a problem."

"I'd like to hear what's said," Julian let him know.

I'm really sorry," Sam said on the loudspeaker, "but the trip's been cancelled."

"How long have you been aware of that?"

Perhaps it was Julian's tone that made her pause. "I've just spoken to the tour operator, Mr Thornton," she said, presumably to Doug. "They say the sea's too rough. Of course you'll get a full refund."

"I think we should expect compensation for disappointment and inconvenience," Julian said.