“No,” I said. “It couldn’t happen.”
“It could. I’ll bring Chris here, if I can find him. In any case I won’t be gone longer than I can help. Lock the place up tight. And you might ask Keller if he’s got any firearms.”
With that shocking suggestion he was gone.
I turned slowly back into the house. Earlier that day I had wondered whether anything more could happen to complicate my life. In one sense the cataclysm had simplified the situation. An order of priority had been established. Survive. That was the first problem. Survive an erupting volcano, complete with earthquakes, and a potential mob. After that we could worry about lesser difficulties.
The sight of the two men exasperated me almost beyond endurance. They were sitting and drinking their brandy like two old gents in a club.
“Aren’t you going to do something?” I demanded of the shadowy figures.
“What is there to do?” Keller asked remotely. “We can only wait. What will come, will come.”
“How about Kore?”
“Leave her alone. She is sleeping. I gave her a sedative, she was disturbed.”
“Jim said I should ask you if you had a gun in the house,” I said, hoping to shake him out of his fatalistic mood.
“As you saw,” Keller said indifferently. “They are in that cabinet.”
I found the arsenal, with the help of the flashlight. The.22 Kore had used was there. It had several shells in the chamber. There was another rifle, a heavier one, and a couple of handguns, all loaded and ready to go.
Nobody seemed to care what I did, so I went exploring. The house was deserted; no doubt the servants had gone to the village to see if their families were all right. There was a fine drift of ash over every flat surface. Moved by some obscure impulse, I wrote my name: Sandy, on the top of the dining-room table, and then stepped over a pile of broken crystal on my way to the stairs. The house itself had stood, but there were a lot of broken dishes lying around. Pictures had fallen from the walls, too. I started to pick one up and then dropped it again. This was no time to clean house.
The upstairs looked like a hotel in the off season-dark, silent, dusty. I looked into the room I had occupied and saw the book I had been reading lying open on the bedside table. It gave me an eerie feeling to think how much had happened since I left the room only a few hours ago.
I had no idea which room Kore occupied, so I tried one door after another, meeting only darkness and emptiness, until I found a door that wouldn’t open. I banged on it.
“It is locked,” said Kore’s voice, from inside.
“Please unlock it,” I said, wondering. “It’s only me.”
“I know it is you,” Kore said. “I cannot unlock. Jürgen has the key.”
“He locked you in?” It was a stupid question; she didn’t bother answering it. Then, belatedly, I realized that from the first she had spoken in English.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
From behind the locked door came an uncanny chuckle.
“I knew.”
I had been about to offer to let her out. The lock wasn’t very complicated; I could have picked it easily. The queer laugh made me reconsider. Keller might have a darned good reason for locking her up.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Not now.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “If…anything…happens, I’ll make sure you get out. You’re as safe in there as anywhere.”
“I am safe,” Kore repeated. Only it didn’t sound like a simple repetition of my reassurance; it sounded like a statement of fact.
I retreated. Even the two silent men in the parlor would be better company than that voice.
They were still sitting there when I returned. They reminded me, not of clubmen now, but of those plaster casts archaeologists have made of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption. Hardening ash made a perfect mold of the bodies before they fell into dust; centuries later, scholars poured plaster into the cavities and recreated the dead of Pompeii, men and women, children and dogs, lying as they had died in the last futile struggle for breath.
It was not the most comfortable thing to recollect just then. I poured myself a glass of brandy and drank. Then I went to the window and peered out through a crack in the draperies. I thought the air was a little clearer. It was hard to tell because the sun was setting, up there beyond the clouded skies.
I turned back to my silent companions and lifted my glass.
“Morituri te salutant,” I said. “That’s what the gladiators used to say to the emperor, remember? ‘We who are about to die salute you.’ I bet you wonder how I know that. Me, the semiliterate. Well, one of the girls on the hockey team thought that was a cute motto. She used to say it to the coach before-”
“Put that brandy down,” Frederick interrupted. “You have no business drinking at your age.”
“Ah,” I said. “It can talk. Go on, Frederick, lecture me some more. Even your croaking is preferable to silence.”
Frederick didn’t respond, so I tried again.
“You ought to show a little concern, you know. If I don’t live through this adventure, it will be your fault. You got me here.”
“You came of your own free will.” Frederick ’s voice sounded livelier.
“You conned me,” I said. “Don’t you feel a little, teeny bit guilty? Come on, Frederick. Feel guilty.”
“Guilty.” The word made me jump. I had almost forgotten Keller, silent in the shadows. “We are all guilty. Guilty of mankind.”
The reverberant pounding that followed the speech sounded like a symphonic accompaniment. Doom, knocking at the door. Then I got hold of myself.
“It’s Jim,” I said, with a long breath of relief. “I forgot, I locked the door when he left.”
I ran to open it. Jim didn’t say hello; he pushed me out of the way and bolted the door again before leading the way into the living room.
“You didn’t find Sir Christopher?” I asked.
“No. I looked everywhere. Damn it, can’t we have some light in here?”
I gave him the flashlight. It wasn’t much help.
“What is the situation?” Frederick asked, blinking as the beam focused on his face.
“The volcano is quiescent, for the moment. The air is clearing a little.”
“Good,” I said. “Then the village should be calming down.”
“No.” Jim flicked the light across his body, and I gasped. His shirt was torn and streaked with blood. “When I found no sign of Chris at the dig, I had to go back to the village,” he went on. “I had a few words with the priest. He wasn’t too coherent, but the gist of the speech was ‘Get out and stay out of sight.’”
“The priest,” I exclaimed. “But he, of all people-”
“He was trying to help,” Jim said. “If I had followed his advice, I wouldn’t have gotten these bruises. It was my old landlord, Angelos, who started the fight. He seems to blame us for the damage to his damn hotel. Half a dozen of them jumped me then. Not all the men are crazy; your foreman Nicholas was one of the guys who intervened so I could get away. The women… Thewomen are gone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t see a single female,” Jim said. “Not one.”
“In their houses, like good Greek ladies,” I said. “Tending the wounded, praying…”
“They aren’t praying,” Jim said. “At least… Where’s Kore?”
“Upstairs. Locked in her room.”
“You locked her in?”
“No,” Keller said. “I did.”
“Then you know,” Jim said. “You know what she’s doing.”
The flashlight beam struck Keller full in the face, but he made no move to shield his eyes. The pinpoint pupils, shrinking against the light, gave him a ghostly look.
“I know,” he said, barely moving his lips. “There is no harm. She does no harm, it is only a game-”
“Then why did you lock her in? You know it’s no game. It’s dangerous as hell.”
“So Kore’s fantasies have found an outlet.” Frederick ’s face was illumined now, as Jim turned the light in response to his voice. “What a fitting occasion. The old gods are angry; they must be propitiated. But Kore’s self-appointed role must have been useful all along. By convincing the women of her powers, she controlled the entire village. It always was a woman’s cult-”