“Thank you for the bedside books.”
“If you see anything more interesting on the shelves, take it up. Please.”
There was a strange call from the dark trees to the east of the house. I had heard it in the evenings at the school, and at first thought it made by some moronic village boy. It was very high-pitched, repeated at regular intervals. Kew. Kew. Kew. Like a melancholy transmigrated bus conductor.
“There is my friend,” said Conchis. For an absurd and alarming moment I thought he must mean the woman of the glove. I saw her flitting through the island trees in her Ascot gloves, forever searching for Kew. The call came again, eery and stupid, from the night behind us. Conchis counted five slowly, and the call came as he raised his hand. Then five again, and again it came.
“What is it?”
“Otus scops. The scops owl. It is very small. Not twenty centimeters. Like this.”
“I saw you had some books on birds.”
“Ornithology interests me.”
“And you have studied medicine.”
“I studied medicine. Many years ago.”
“And never practiced?”
“Only on myself.”
Far out to sea to the west I saw the bright lights of the Athens boat. On Saturday nights it went on south down to Kythera. But instead of relating Bourani to the ordinary world, the distant ship seemed only to emphasize its hiddenness, its secrecy. I took the plunge.
“What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Spiritualism?”
“Infantilism.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Of course.”
I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round and sat against a column.
“You haven’t really answered my question.”
“Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.”
I swilled the last of the ouzo round in my glass. “Isn’t it your century too?”
“I have lived a great deal in other centuries.”
“In literature.”
“In reality.”
The owl called again, at monotonously regular intervals. I stared out into the darkness of the pines.
“Reincarnation?”
“Is rubbish.”
“Then…” I shrugged.
“I cannot escape my human life span. So there is only one way I could have lived in other centuries.”
I was silent. “I give up.”
“Not give up. Look up. What do you see?”
“Stars. Space.”
“And what else? That you know are there. Though they are not visible.”
“Other worlds?”
I turned to look at him. He sat, a black shadow. I felt a chill run down my spine. Not at the supernatural, but at the now proven realization that I was with a madman. He took the thought out of my mind.
“I am mad?”
“Mistaken.”
“No. Neither mad nor mistaken.”
“You… travel to other worlds?”
“Yes. I travel to other worlds.”
I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking.
“In the flesh?”
“If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that.”
“You um… you have some evidence of this?”
“Ample evidence.” He allowed a moment to pass. “For those with the intelligence to see it.”
“This is what you meant by election and being psychic?”
“In part.”
I was silent. I was thinking that I must make up my mind what course of action to take. I sensed a sort of inherent hostility to him in myself, which rose from beyond anything that had passed between us; a subconscious resistance of water against oil.
I decided to pursue a course of polite scepticism.
“You do this… traveling by, I don’t know, something like telepathy?”
But before he could answer there was a soft slap of footsteps round the colonnade. Maria stood and bobbed.
“Sas efcharistoume, Maria. Dinner is served,” said Conchis.
We stood and went in to the music room. As we put our glasses on the tray he said, “There are things that words cannot explain.”
I looked down. “At Oxford we are taught to assume that if words can’t explain, nothing else is likely to.”
“Very well.” He smiled. “May I call you Nicholas now?”
“Of course. Please.”
He poured a drop of ouzo into our glasses. We raised and clinked them.
“Eis ‘ygeia sas, Nicholas.”
“Sygeia.”
But I had a strong suspicion even then that he was drinking to something other than my health.
The table in the corner of the terrace glittered, an unexpectedly opulent island of glass and silver in the darkness. It was lit by one tall lamp with a dark shade; the light flowed downwards, concentrated on the white cloth, and was then reflected up, lighting our faces strangely, Caravaggio fashion, against the surrounding darkness.
The meal was excellent. We ate small fish cooked in wine, a delicious chicken, herb-flavored cheese and a honey-and-curd flan made, according to Conchis, from a medieval Turkish recipe. The wine we drank had a trace of resin, as if the vineyard had merely been beside a pine forest, and was nothing like the harsh turpentine-tasting rotgut I sometimes drank in the village. We ate largely in silence. He evidently preferred this. If we talked, it was of the food. He ate slowly, and very little, but I left Maria nothing to take away.
When we had finished, Maria brought Turkish coffee in a brass pot and took the lamp, which was beginning to attract too many insects. She replaced it by a single candle. The flame rose untrembling in the still air; now and again a persistent insect would fly around, in, around and away. I lit my cigarette, and sat like Conchis, half-turned towards the sea and the south. He did not want to talk, and I was content to wait.
Suddenly there were footsteps below on the gravel. They were going away from the house towards the sea. At first I took them for Maria’s, though it seemed strange that she should be going down to the beach at that time. But a second later I knew that they could not, or could no more plausibly than the glove, be hers.
They were light, rapid, quiet steps, as if the person was trying to make as little noise as possible. They might even have belonged to a child. I was sitting away from the parapet, and could see nothing below. I glanced at Conchis. He was staring out into the darkness as if the sound was perfectly normal. I shifted unobtrusively, to crane a look over the parapet. But the steps had passed away into silence. With alarming speed a large moth dashed at the candle, repeatedly and frantically, as if attached to it by elastic cord. Conchis leant forward and snuffed the flame.
“You do not mind sitting in darkness?”
“Not at all.”
It occurred to me that it might after all have really been a child, from one of the cottages at the bay to the east; someone who had come to help Maria. I was just about to ask when Conchis spoke.
“I should tell you how I came here.”