I saw all of this, every slightest action. And so did Julie. I felt her swell up behind me, scooping in air until she must surely burst—and then she let it out again. But silently, screaming like a maniac in the night—and nothing but air escaping her!
A rock slid away from under my foot, its scrape a deafening clatter to my petrified mind. The sound froze Dimitrios, too—but only for a moment. Then he stooped, regained his machete. He took a pace toward us, inclined his head. He couldn’t see us yet, but he knew we were there. Then—God, I shall dream of this for the rest of my life!—
He reached down a hand and stripped a handful of living, crawling filth from his loins, and lobbed it in our direction as casually as tossing crumbs to starveling birds!
The next five seconds were madness.
I stumbled out from cover, lifted my gun, and triggered it. The spear struck him just below the rib cage, went deep into him. He cried out, reeled back, and yanked the gun from my hand. I’d forgotten to unfasten the nylon cord from the spear. Behind me, Julie was crumpling to the ground; I was aware of the latter, turned to grab her before she could sprawl. There were tick-things crawling about, and I mustn’t let her fall on them.
I got her over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, went charging out onto the track, skipping and stamping my feet, roaring like a maddened bull. And I was mad: mad with shock, terror, loathing. I stamped and kicked and danced, never letting my feet stay in one place for more than a fraction of a second, afraid something would climb up onto me. And the wonder is I didn’t carry both of us flying down the steep scree slope to the valley’s floor.
Dimitrios was halfway down the track when I finally got myself under a semblance of control. Bouncing toward our end of the valley, a car came crunching and lurching across the scrub. I fancied it was Nichos’s taxi. And sure enough, when the car stopped and its headlight beams were still, Nichos’s voice came echoing up, full of concerned enquiry:
“Mister, lady—you OK?”
“Look out!” I shouted at the top of my voice, but only at the second attempt. “He’s coming down! Dimitrios is coming down!”
And now I went more carefully, as in my mind the danger receded, and in my veins the adrenalin raced less rapidly. Julie moaned where she flopped loosely across my shoulder, and I knew she’d be all right.
The valley seemed alight with torches now, and not only the electric sort. Considering these people were Greeks, they seemed remarkably well organized. That was a thought I’d keep in mind, something else I would have to ask about. There was some shouting down there, too, and flaring torches began to converge on the area at the foot of the goat track.
Then there echoed up to me a weird, gurgled cry: a cry of fear, protestation—relief? A haunting, sobbing shriek—cut off at highest pitch by the dull boom of a shot fired, and a moment later by a blast that was the twin of the first. From twin barrels, no doubt.
When I got down, Julie was still out of it, for which I was glad. They’d poured gasoline over Dimitrios’s body and set fire to it. Fires were burning everywhere: the chalets, taverna, gardens. Cleansing flames leaping. Figures moved in the smoke and against a yellow roaring background, searching, burning. And I sat in the back of Nichos’s taxi, cradling Julie’s head. Mercifully, she remained unconscious right through it.
Even with the windows rolled up, I could smell something of the smoke, and something that wasn’t smoke…
In Makelos town, Julie began to stir. I asked for her to be sedated, kept down for the night. Then, when she was sleeping soundly and safely in a room at the mayor’s house, I began asking questions. I was furious at the beginning, growing more furious as I started to get the answers.
I couldn’t be sorry for the people of Makelos, though I did feel something for Elli, Dimitrios’s wife. She’d run to Nichos, told him what was happening. And he’d alerted the townspeople. Elli had been a sort of prisoner at the taverna for the past ten days or so, after her husband had ‘gone funny’. Then, when she’d started to notice things, he’d told her to keep quiet and carry on as normal, or she’d be the loser. And he meant she’d lose all the way. She reckoned he’d got the parasites off the goats, accidentally, and she was probably right, for the goats had been the first to die. Her explanation was likely because the goats used to go up there sometimes, to the cave under the mountain. And that was where the things bred, in that cave and in the well it contained, which now and then overflowed, and found its way to the sea.
But Elli, poor peasant that she was: on her way to alert Nichos, she’d seen her husband kill George’s wife and push her over the cliffs into the sea. Then she’d hid herself off the road until he’d turned his three-wheeler round and started back toward the taverna.
As for the corpse under the tarpaulin: that was Dimitrios’s grandfather, who along with his grandson had been a survivor of the first outbreak. He’d been lucky that time, not so lucky this time.
And the tick things? They were…a disease, but they could never be a plague. The men from Athens had taken some of them away with them that first time. But away from their well, away from the little shaded valley and from Makelos, they’d quickly died. This was their place, and they could exist nowhere else. Thank God!
Last time the chemicals hadn’t killed them off, obviously, or maybe a handful of eggs had survived to hatch out when the poisons had dissolved away. For they were survivors, these creatures, the last of their species, and when they went, their secret would go with them. But a disease? I believe so, yes.
Like the common cold, or rabies, or any other disease, but far worse because they’re visible, apparent. The common cold makes you sneeze, so that the disease is propagated, and hydrophobia makes its victims claw and bite, gets passed on in their saliva. The secret of the tick-things was much the same sort of thing: they made their hosts pass them on. It was the way their intelligent human hosts did it that made them so much more terrible.
In the last outbreak, only Greeks—Makelosians—had been involved; this time it was different. This time, too, the people would take care of the problem themselves: they’d pour hundreds of gallons of gasoline and fuel oil into the well, set the place on fire. And then they’d dynamite the cliff, bring it down to choke the well for ever, and they’d never, ever, let people go into that little valley again. That was their promise, but I’d made myself a couple of promises, too. I was angry and frightened, and I knew I was going to stay that way for a long time to come.
We were out of there first thing in the morning, on the first boat to the mainland. There were smart-looking men to meet us at the airport in Athens, Greek officials from some ministry or other. They had interpreters with them, and nothing was too much trouble. They, too, made promises, offers of compensation, anything our hearts desired. We nodded and smiled wearily, said yes to this, that, and the other, anything so that we could just get aboard that plane. It had been our shortest holiday ever: we’d been in Greece just forty-eight hours, and all we wanted now was to be out of it as quickly as possible. But when we were back home again—that was when we told our story!
It was played down, of course: the Common Market, international tensions, a thousand other economic and diplomatic reasons. Which is why I’m now telling it all over again. I don’t want anybody to suffer what we went through, what we’re still going through. And so if you happen to be mad on the Mediterranean islands…well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way it was.