“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.
“Eh?” She was heading for the small room at the back.
“Toilet!” she said. “I have to.”
“No!” I jumped across the space between, dragged her away from the door to the toilet-cum-shower unit. “It’s crawling with them in there. They come up the plugholes.” In my arms, I could feel that she was also crawling. Her flesh. Mine, too. “If you must go, go outside. But first let’s get away from here.” I picked up my gun and checked its single flap-nosed spear.
Leaving the chalet, I looked across at the ramp coming down from the rocky spur. The clatter of Dimitrios’s three-wheeler was louder, it was there, headlight beams bobbing as the vehicle trundled lurchingly down the rough decline. “Where are we going?” Julie gasped, following me at a run across the scrub between clumps of olives. I headed for the other chalets.
“Safety in numbers,” I answered. “Anyway, I want to know about George, and those three old spinsters.”
“What good will they be, if they’re old?” She was too logical by half.
“They’re not that old.” Mainly, I wanted to see if they were all right. Apart from the near-distant racket Dimitrios’s vehicle was making, the whole valley was quiet as a tomb. Unnaturally quiet. It had to be a damned funny place in Greece where the cicadas keep their mouths shut.
Julie had noticed that too. “They’re not singing,” she said. And I knew what she meant.
“Rubbing,” I answered. “They rub their legs together or something.”
“Well,” she panted, “whatever it is they do, they’re not.”
It was true evening now, and a half-moon had come up over the central mountain’s southern extreme. Its light silvered our way through thorny shrubs and tall, spiked grasses, under the low grey branches of olives and across their tangled, groping roots.
We came to the first chalet. Its lights were out, but the door stood ajar. “I think this is where George is staying,” I said. And calling ahead: “George, are you in?”, I entered and switched on the light. He was in—in the big double bed, stretched out on his back. But he turned his head toward us as we entered. He blinked in the sudden, painful light. One of his eyes did, anyway. The other couldn’t…
He stirred himself, tried to sit up. I think he was grinning. I can’t be sure, because one of the things, a big one, was inside the corner of his mouth. They were hatching from fresh lumps down his neck and in the bend of his elbow. God knows what the rest of his body was like. He managed to prop himself up, hold out a hand to me—and I almost took it. And it was then that I began to understand something of the nature of these things. For there was one of them in his open palm, its barbed feet seeming poised, waiting.
I snatched back my hand, heard Julie’s gasp. And there she was, backed up against the wall, screaming her silent scream. I grabbed her, hugged her, dragged her outside. For of course there was nothing we could do for George. And, afraid she would scream, and maybe start me going, I slapped her. And off we went again, reeling in the direction of the third and last chalet.