She Wakes Read online

  ***

  Across the island at Paradise Beach the campground still slept. There had been a party the night before and with no one around to enforce the four o’clock curfew the taverna had stayed open till dawn. So there was no one yet awake to see that the waves were still high on this side of the island, the winds still strong.

  ***

  Two kilometers from the main beach, in a damp sea cave brushed by the waves at high tide, the body of Lelia Narkisos lay naked and rotting, faceup, in a shallow pool of stagnant water.

  Crabs had found her face and body. Her eyes, lips, ears and nose were gone. So were most of her internal organs. What was left was white and bloated and lay with legs crossed together at the ankles and arms spread wide, like a Christ crucified and left to the mercy of the sea.

  In front of the cave the water was deep and crystal-clear in most weather but today it boiled with sea-life-with crabs and fishes who could see that over the narrow lip of rock there was death nearby and good feeding.

  ***

  By mid-afternoon the dockside cafes were bustling. Two cruise ships were anchored in the harbor, one full of middle-aged Germans and the other, retired Americans. Always pragmatic, shop owners who had previously piped out rock ‘n’ roll into the square now switched to gay bouzouki to encourage the older tourists’ purchases of sailor caps, shawls, jewelry, retsina and painted china.

  When the Nais docked around four it brought with it by far the largest group of tourists that season-mostly kids making their first stop on the islands out of Pireaus.

  The cafes switched to rock ‘n’ roll again.

  No particular notice was taken of a tall muscular American businessman in a lightweight summer suit who got off the ship carrying a single large leather shoulder bag and a briefcase. He was conspicuous only to the old Greek woman who had rooms to let back near the windmills and who knew a good bet for a reliable quiet tenant who would pay a slightly inflated price when she saw one.

  Jordan Thayer Chase stepped off the Nais at just about the time that Gerard Sadlier, Ruth and Dulac awoke from their nap at their campsite at Paradise Beach, not very far at all from where Billie Durant, Robert Dodgson, Michelle Favre and Danny Hicks lay on their beach mats tanning in the sun.

  The day drew on to disgorge its night.

  ***

  At 5:25 Billie Durant turned off her shower and peered through the pebble-glass bathroom window.

  She felt she was being watched.

  There was nobody in the bedroom and the front door was securely locked. Not even Dodgson had a key.

  She went back to her shower, uneasy.

  ***

  Michelle Favre and Danny Hicks were walking past a rack of color postcards near bar Montparnasse when each of them felt someone walking directly behind them, practically touching their elbows. They stopped and turned at exactly the same time.

  There was nobody there.

  ***

  At 5:45 Xenia Milioris napped in her bedroom. She dreamed that someone came into her room off the porch through the glass double doors and went through her pocketbook. The dream was very vivid.

  So much so that when she awoke the first thing she did was reach for it on her nightstand.

  It was impossible to know exactly how much money had been in the change purse because it had been three days since she’d been to the bank to deposit her tips. But she estimated that 3200 drachmas, the equivalent of about forty American dollars, was gone.

  She tried to recall the dream that now, it seemed, was not a dream at all, to recall the shape of the intruder. Male or female? Short or tall?

  She couldn’t remember.

  She showered and dressed. The room was hot and steamy now. She opened the glass doors to the porch and glanced outside. By the railing she saw a small pile of charred paper. The bottom paper had not burned away entirely.

  It was a fifty-drachma note.

  It was probably the harsh brown soap but the bums on her face started aching badly.

  JORDAN THAYER CHASE

  He still felt ill. The goddamn cold hadn’t gone away.

  He walked down past Remezzo through the gauntlet of expensive stores. Elaine would have liked the shopping. In the windows he saw fox and mink and sable, one-of-a-kind gold and silver jewelry, dresses with Rome and Paris labels. Even the window-shoppers were chic-the men out of GQ, the women out of Vogue and Elle, most of them quite young.

  He barely noticed them.

  He was looking for something. Someone.

  I’ll know you when I find you, he thought.

  And then what?

  It was only around seven and he’d already showered and shaved, changed clothes and hit the streets. The room in Little Venice was fine. Spacious, clean and private. Its windows overlooked the sea, jutted out right above it. At high tide the water would rise to five or six feet up the foundation of the building-he could see the waterline. Outside of the real Venice he’d never seen anything like it. Lying on his bed he’d be able to watch the sundown.

  According to the landlady only one other room was tenanted and that was three floors up. He assumed that price had something to do with that. The room was expensive. He knew he could do better on price but he liked sunsets.

  And now there was about an hour to this one and instead of sitting in his room enjoying it over a bottle of wine or finding a little waterfront taverna by the sea where he could get something to eat he was roaming the streets, psychic antennae turned up to high. He’d have liked that bottle of wine, in memory of Tasos.

  He walked past the Harlequin and saw a young Greek woman there smoking a cigarette, alone on the terrace. It was still very early for the bars. It came to him that the woman worked there.

  There were bandages on her cheek.

  The woman looked hard and angry.

  He felt something from her. Not what he was looking for, but something. He decided she’d be one to watch.

  He walked through the narrowing streets to the harbor.

  He was hungry. He walked across the square to the little snack stand and ordered a souvlaki-five smallish cubes of meat on a skewer, topped with a thick slice of bread. He tasted the meat. It was pork. It was nearly impossible to find a lamb kabob these days.

  He walked back across the harbor and stopped in front of a thirty-four-foot cruiser, painted white and nearly new. The Balthazar. A woman of sixty or so was sitting on the deck sipping a drink. Her blouse was a floral print, a very cheap material for a woman with so much boat under her. American, he thought. There was another deck chair beside her but at the moment it was empty.

  Her distress signal was loud and clear.

  Chase winced. He didn’t like coming across something like this but every so often you did. Troubles with the husband. Lurid doubts about her marriage. Sometimes you felt it from a friend. The friend could be smiling but inside he was screaming. It happened. And then what did you do? Hi, I see you 're having some trouble here.

  No, you shut up and let it go if possible. At least here he could just keep walking.

  He was passing the overseas telephone office when a man walked by.

  Every alarm system in his body started shrieking.

  Middle to late twenties. Long blonde hair, small dark eyes. His clothing Indian and ratty. Built like a steamroller.

  The man had just done something shocking.

  He tried to focus, to make it out, but his reading of the man was incomplete, jumbled, a cataract of sliding, twisting emotions. He read pleasure, expectation, lust-and at the same time death and despair and some sick perverted sexual energy that seemed to inform all the rest of it like a kind of twisted superego, as though in some way it were not even part of him.

  The man was…contaminated.

  Chase followed him.

  Waves of feeling thrashed off him like snakes writhing. Chase felt sure he was insane, but something more than that too. The man’s intensity staggered him. Broken thoughts flew off him like sparks, like pieces of
a shattered, exploded building.

  He rubbed his temples. The headache had come on suddenly and it was not his cold.

  He felt pain, horror and a wallowing in death, in blood. He stopped and turned away, trying to end the welter of impressions pouring over him, a physical pain now throughout his body. "Stop!” he said aloud, fingers pressed to his eyes. A teenage girl with a backpack glanced at him as though he were nuts.

  The man turned a comer, out of sight. But not out of mind.

  The pressure continued. Images hit him like hammers.

  A dead, bloated female body. Dragging it. Bending over it. Open pale blue eyes. The face unrecognizable. Hands on damp cold thighs. Then another woman-this one alive. Dragging her too. The woman screaming. Then the corpse again, his hands on her cold breasts. His mouth going down…

  Jesus!

  He turned and ran. Away from the man. Back through the streets, back to his room.

  And it was only when he’d opened the bottle of wine and stood sweating in the sunset by his open window that he remembered the Greek girl with the angry face on the steps of the Harlequin Bar. The man was a killer. She was a victim.

  Somehow they were connected.

  CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS

  Linda McRae was roaming the sparsely wooded hillside above the campsite gathering sticks and twigs for their fire when she saw the woman in a copse of trees.

  She had just rolled over a promising-looking log but it was all rotted underneath-there were maggots under there, dirty-looking pale white things. So she stomped them. And then got mad at herself.

  Because look what she’d done to her sandals.

  Revulsion and the fact that she’d just killed something again made her almost want to cry. She didn’t know why she had the urge to stomp on things, to break things. She wasn’t a bad person. It just happened. Will said she was angry at her parents and that was why. Sure she was angry. But so was Will and you didn’t see him smashing stuff all the time.

  She scraped her sandals along the sandy earth.

  Then she looked up and there was the woman.

  A really lovely woman dressed all in white, in some white flowing thing, and it was almost perfect, the woman standing on the hillside amidst all these tender young trees, a picture-book image of some beautiful Greek goddess, so beautiful it made her catch her breath for a moment. She wished Will were here to see her. She wished she had a camera. She wished…

  The woman smiled at her.

  The smile was so…physical! Like a push!

  It jolted her. She dropped the load of twigs and sticks she was carrying. And then felt foolish. She knew she was blushing.

  The woman laughed.

  And that was better because then Linda could laugh too and it wasn’t so embarrassing to be blushing anymore. Probably the woman was used to reactions like that, as lovely as she was. Maybe she got them all the time.

  The woman nodded. Come on up.

  They were leaving tomorrow. She didn’t really need to make new friends but it was hard to resist her, an older woman that drop-dead gorgeous who seemed at least passingly interested in her-and what could she do now anyway, after staring and then dropping the wood and everything, just ignore her?

  “Hi,” she said. And walked up the hillside.

  The woman did a sort of half-turn, still looking at her and Linda could almost see the soft outlines of her body through the flowing white material. And she did look like a goddess standing there, like something out of a movie and she resolved to tell her that no matter how embarrassing as soon as she got up there even if it did sound kind of funny because seeing her so lovely was making her heart pound and bringing tears to her eyes, it was that moving, she was actually almost crying again just like before.

  She wondered for a moment why that should be.

  She hadn’t hurt anything.

  Will was damn near ready to call out the troops when he saw her coming down the hill.

  By then he had the fire going. Just a small fire because fires on the beach were illegal. But he was going to need some more wood.

  And along she comes, empty-handed.

  Sometimes it was hard being patient with her. She could be incredibly cranky sometimes or else she’d just forget things, like birthdays or even dates they’d arranged and it made him wonder just how committed she was. He was sure he loved her. He wasn’t sure how much exactly, but he was sure he did. The how much part got to be a problem at times like this.

  Not a stick of wood. Not a twig.

  He looked up at the sky. It would be dark soon. And it looked as though if he didn’t go get some wood himself there wasn’t going to be any. What had she been doing up there? Women could be an intense pain sometimes, they really could.

  He got to his feet and walked toward her.

  “So where's the firewood, Lin?”

  No answer.

  And what the hell was she smiling about? Maybe she’d been toking on a joint up there.

  Great, he thought. Smile. Meantime there’s a real good fish down here waiting to be somebody’s dinner.

  “Hey, what’d you do, break an arm or something?”

  Then he got closer and realized it wasn’t a smile at all. Her bps were pulled back, yes, but something was wrong. It looked more like she’d been crying.

  All at once he wasn’t mad at her anymore.

  “Hey, hon. You okay?”

  And he thought for a moment that she was going to pass him by without even saying something which would have been weird even for moody Linda and he had just time for a glimpse of a woman in white way up ahead of them on the hill when Linda turned to face him and he saw she hadn’t come totally empty-handed, not entirely, that she had one short stubby stick in her hand, a stick with a sharp pointed end to it-and had no time to scream at all but only gurgled and looked at her face bathed in tears, pink tears because of the blood from the crushed bloody dome of her skull as she drove the stick into his neck just above his Adam’s apple and twisted it.

  Then a moment later he was dead too.

  SADLIER

  She stood before him naked, her skin glowing in the dim flickering light of his candle.

  He made no attempt to reconcile her presence there with the sprawl of rotting flesh and bone that lay between them on the floor of the cave. They were one and the same aid yet they were not The high reek of decay did not faze him. He was aware of a faint odor, of a running slime beneath his sandaled feet But the corpse meant nothing to him. He did not even remember bringing it there from the church. Certainly not what he’d done to it afterward.

  She spoke to him. The lush wide mouth seemed to move just a split second behind the words.

  “Say what you want.”

  He said nothing, only stood there, yet she nodded.

  “It’s yours,” die said. And he understood her to mean, but not for free.

  She told him her price.

  He agreed.

  For what he asked the price was small indeed. Her lips moved again, the voice just barely proceeding it. It rolled with resonance inside him.

  “Do that,” she said, “then come back to me.”

  He nodded, backed away, his erection grinding at the thin loose trousers.

  “I will make you new."

  He saw the cave wall sweating.

  Suddenly she was gone.

  He saw the crabs swarming over the body, carrying away bits of flesh between their pincers, scuttling all around, blue-black and shining in the candlelight.

  Cupping his hand to the flame he moved quickly to the far side of the cave, heard shells crack beneath his feet, ran up the goat path to the top of the hill.

  The moon was bright. He paused there, breathing heavily. He blew out the candle. He saw the moon glinting on the waves, the bright white clouds overhead.

  Beside him, she turned and smiled. She was naked as before.

  He watched as she drew herself up and the muscles of her calves and shoulders pulled b
ack off bare white bone, the smile the long wide grimace of a skull, the muzzle of an animal. She dove down and out like a graceful slow-flying bird into the sea.

  Nothing disturbed the water.

  He turned, cold, and walked back to the campground to do what he had promised.

  JORDAN THAYER CHASE

  The woman’s glance appraised him and did not appear to find him wanting.

  It was 11:30 and the Harlequin Bar was crowded so all he could get from the waitress, the Greek woman, was a fugue of drink orders, faces of customers and a kind of general struggle against running down-so that when this one stared so openly he decided to pursue it for a while. Maybe he could learn something.

  She was beautiful. Thick red hair. Light blue eyes. Spectacular.

  Only twice in their sixteen years together had he been unfaithful to Elaine. Once the year before their marriage. He saw that as a last-ditch attempt to cut the growing ties to her and continue going it alone, which up to then was all he knew. He thanked god it had failed. The second time was recent, aberrant and very, very brief and beyond the fact that it had happened at all, meant nothing-certainly nothing to what he felt for Eliane-and the wild bitter memory of that was nearly faded now.

  It would never happen again. He was secure in that.

  Though this one could tempt the saints.

  He was flattered, really.

  Miraculously the seat beside her had just opened up. He took it and ordered a drink.

  He could guess a few things about her. The glance was just a little too open, as though she were undressing him with her eyes-an obnoxious male gesture that was only slightly less offensive in a woman perhaps because it was less familiar. The smile had a calculated sardonic quality that was like a challenge. The tough-girl pose. I’ve been around, said the smile. And I’m still here. Care to find out why?

  Beyond that he couldn’t read her. Nothing more than what she gave him on the surface. If she were drunk or nearly so that might account for it. Or maybe he’d just hit a blind spot again.