“I’ll follow you.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Now.”
She eyed me, then shrugged, with regret.
“Then I’m awfully sorry, but I’ll have to use the emergency exit.”
With her eyes still on mine, she called. Not very loud; to carry thirty or forty yards; as if to a dog.
“Anubis!”
I whipped round. She came and put her arm on mine. “Actually this looks better. He won’t hurt you if you stay here.”
Already I could hear someone coming swiftly down through the trees behind us. I saw a monstrous dark shape. “Rose” stood near me as if to protect me.
“Who is it?”
“Our dearly beloved watchdog.” Her tone was dry; and when I looked at her, she confirmed its dryness.
It was the figure from the death and the maiden scene of two weeks before. The jackal-head, the “nurse.” Standing against us, in black from head to foot, the long ears pointing stiffly up, the muzzle waiting.
She muttered quickly, “Don’t be afraid.” Then, in a very low whisper, “We had no choice tonight.” I didn’t know whether she meant “you and I,” or “Lily and I.”
She started to walk down past the statue. I looked back up the hill. The figure had not moved. I began to walk after her. Immediately she heard me she stopped. When I came up with her, she gave me a wide-eyed look and then she said again, “Anubis.”
The figure came and stood some six feet away. I could see that behind the macabre disguise was a big, tall man. He moved like a very fit man, too. I would be no match for him physically. I shrugged.
“Force majeure.”
“Just stay here. Please just stay here.” She turned to the figure. Her voice was cold. “And there is absolutely no need for violence. We all know you’re very strong.”
She turned back to me, touched my arm one last time as if to reassure me; then she disappeared down through the trees towards the carob under which the man and the girl had stood.
I spoke.
“I suppose you’re the Reverend Mr. Foulkes.”
He raised his arm and took off the headpiece. I was looking at a Negro. He had on black trousers, a black shirt, black gym shoes; even black gloves. He did not smile, but simply watched me. Poised yet coiled; an athlete, a boxer.
I calculated whether I could risk a dash into the trees. But it was already too late. She had disappeared; and I felt sure that her real destination was in some very different direction.
“Where you from? The West Indies?”
No answer.
“Well what are you supposed to be—the black eunuch or something?”
No answer again; but I thought there was a tiny contraction of the eyes.
“I’m going back to sit on the seat. All right?” He did not even nod. I said again “All right?” and then moved crabwise back up the hill, cautiously, watching him. He stayed where he was, and we remained like that for perhaps a minute. I lit a cigarette to try to counter the released adrenalin, and listened in vain for the sound of an engine down by the sea. Then, abruptly, the black figure came up towards me. He stood in front of me, blocking out the sky. The cigarette was snatched out of my mouth and flicked away. Then in the same movement I was jerked to my feet. I said, “Now wait a minute.” But he was strong and as quick as a leopard. Sweating a little. I could smell his sweat. An absolutely humorless face, and an angry one. It was no good, I was frightened—there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back. The edge of the seat cut into my legs and I fell half across it. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him trotting away, carrying his mask, through the trees to the north. I opened my mouth to shout something at him, then said it in a whisper. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, but it was filthy, defiled.
I went back to the gate and ran down the path to Moutsa. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea and rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.
Contracts… actresses… I was now asked to believe that they were hired to play their roles; not only that, but so in the dark about Conchis’s intentions that they didn’t even know whether I was not deceiving them exactly as they were deceiving me; trying to vamp Lily as Lily vamped me. But when I thought back to various inexplicable things Lily had said, to inconsistent looks, tentative looks, those out-of-role looks, and other doubtfulnesses beyond any she might have been acting, I began to wonder, to waver… I had long suspected that there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets… but how could they be his puppets when they knew so much about him? Or did they know so much about him?
And once again, did it matter?
As I swam out there, with the dark slope of Bourani across the quiet water to the east, I could feel in me a complex and compound excitement, in which Lily was the strongest but not the only element. I thought, I am Theseus in the maze; let it all come, even the black minotaur, so long as it comes; so long as I may reach the center.
I came ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house.
46
I woke feeling even more slugged, more beaten-steak—the heat does it in Greece—than usual. It was ten o’clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs. There was a note waiting for me on top of the muslin-mounded breakfast table under the colonnade.
DEAR NICHOLAS,
Alas, very urgent financial business connected with the “scare” of a fortnight ago obliges me to go at once to Geneva. I look forward to seeing you next Saturday, if you can dispose of your academic duties. Maria is leaving with me. She is taking advantage of my absence to visit relatives in Santorini. Hermes is returning to lock up the house this afternoon. Please enjoy your lunch, and accept my apologies for this unpardonable breach of hospitality.
I looked under the muslin. There was my breakfast. The spirit stove to heat up the coffee. A carafe of water, another of retsina; and under a second muslin an ample cold lunch. My first thought was that he had funked meeting me after the incident with his Negro thug; my second, that at least I could make some detective use of the occasion.
I carried the breakfast things round to Maria’s cottage, as if to put them out of harm’s way on her table, but the door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis’s door, then tried it. It was also locked. Second failure. Then I went round all the ground-floor rooms in the house, and pulled up all the carpets to see if there were trapdoors to mysterious cellars. There were not. Ten minutes later I gave up; I knew I was not going to find any clue to the girls’ true identity, and that was all that interested me.
I went down to the private beach—the boat was gone—and swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but jutting out from the coast just enough to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs. No way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area Lily and Rose supposedly headed for when they went “home.” There was dense low scrub on the abrupt-sloping cliff-tops before the pines started, just enough to hide in, but manifestly impossible to live in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.