Demogorgon

by Brian Lumley

  Forty or so paces to the north and rear of the taverna, a modern-style building (no-style, in fact: a double-decker oblong of white concrete with up-and-over doors, like a double row of small garages, one above the other) was set at the foot of hills that drifted back into rising terrain, and farther back yet into low mountains. In fact the mountains seemed to ring the entire scene about.

  But the sun …

  The sun bounced off everything like the inside walls of an oven. It was hard to see how anything grew here, and yet this small valley and bay supported a large field (orchard?) of gnarled olives whose branches were laden, and the vines were green and thick with tiny grapes, and the scrub and coarse grasses weren’t desiccated at all but yellowy-green and springy with sap. Like the guidebook had said, there was good water here.

  The place was worked by an energetic Greek couple in their early forties. An old lady, the mother of one of them, dressed in the inevitable black dress and shawl of the aged, sat in the patio’s shade and peeled potatoes. Later Trace would learn that she’d sit there all day; working on a lace, darning some garment or other, cleaning vegetables; normally doing something. But at other times she’d just sit, staring out across the sea …

  Gratefully he took shade under the vines, sat down at one of the tables and asked for a beer, waited to be shown his room. He was on the ground floor of the concrete block of garages, and in fact he had seen better appointed garages. He had a washbasin, a shower, a toilet. They were in the back, behind a sliding door. In front there was a bed and a wardrobe. And in front of that the up-and-over door. No windows; if you wanted light you kept the door open, which also provided shade.

  Trace didn’t even unpack his case but simply took out a pair of bathing trunks and put them on, then walked slowly back to the beach and into the sea. He’d never been much for swimming and hadn’t used the trunks for two years or more. It surprised him that they still fitted him and weren’t moth-eaten. When had he last worn them?

  - All of two and a half years ago; a girlfriend used to drag him to the swimming pool in Crouch End. She’d been crazy on swimming, and very good at it, so that Trace had looked like a clown in the water by comparison. It hadn’t lasted long. Swimming? – it was for fish and ducks!

  But here … ?

  Here it would be almost criminal to ignore the sea’s languid invitation. He couldn’t understand why there was no one else in the water. But it was true: he had an entire beachful of Aegean all to himself. There they sat, the other guests – maybe a dozen of them, total – under the vines in their bathing costumes or shorts, sipping their drinks and chatting, and Trace the only one of them in the water.

  He swam, floated, paddled himself to and fro in the warm water of that great bath for almost an hour, then noticed some activity in the taverna. A meal was being served, and Trace had worked up something of an appetite. He came out of the sea, shook the water off his body, was very nearly dry. He’d left his sandals – the ones with the enclosed toes – on the beach at the edge of the water. Now he slipped them on, stepped into the patio’s shade, found an empty table.

  It was odd, but suddenly he noted that everyone seemed to be looking at him while speaking to each other in low voices or from behind the backs of their hands. He began to feel uncomfortable. But at last Fodula, the female part of the partnership, came for his order. She was pleasant, moon-faced, quiet and polite. Trace ordered a small salad, stuffed tomatoes and spiced Greek sausages. And a cold beer.

  As he finished ordering, the young German male from the taxi came over from where he was sitting with his girl. ‘Excuse,’ he said, bending over Trace and touching his arm. ‘Is first time in Greece?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Trace.

  ‘Ah!’ said the German. He nodded his blond head wisely and Trace began to frown.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he said. ‘Am I doing something wrong?’

  ‘Wrong for you,’ said the other. ‘Please take.’ He handed Trace a brown plastic bottle of suntan lotion. The bottle was two-thirds empty, was obviously no longer required – not by the German couple, anyway. Trace looked at the label on the bottle: a high protection factor. Then, as the German went back to his own table, he looked at himself, his bare arms and legs.

  So that was why they didn’t venture out much at midday! He understood it now, why they sat in the shade like that, keeping cool and sipping their drinks. Already he was turning a blotchy red. And he remembered from somewhere a song that went:

  ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun …’

  After eating he returned to his room, shaved and showered, emptied the remainder of the suntan lotion onto his body and limbs wherever he could reach and smoothed it in. Then he dressed himself in shorts and a T-shirt, put up his door and sat there in its shade for a while. And as the soothing lotion did its work, so he began to make his plans.

  He’d noticed that taxis came down out of the hills every now and then, often two or three of them at a time. Amoupi was a popular place with the locals, possibly as a direct result of the female visitors sitting there under the vine in their skimpy little bikini tops. Well, Trace couldn’t blame the taxi drivers for that. But he decided that when the next one came he’d take a ride into town. There were two or three things he wanted to do there. Even as he made this decision, so a lone taxi arrived in a cloud of dust, its driver signalling his presence with a blast on a fancy horn that played the five-note communication sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Trace stuffed paper money into his shorts pocket, locked his up-and-over, hurried across to where the driver was sitting on a low wall smoking a cigarette. His luck was in: this was the same taxi, same driver, who had taken Amira Halbstein to Pighadia. Not only that but he also spoke half-decent English. As they motored up into the hills Trace asked his questions about Amira.

  ‘Oh, yes – she very pretty,’ the driver answered, grinning. ‘She at Villa Ulysses.’

  ‘Good!’ said Trace. ‘I’ll look her up. Also, can I buy booze in Pighadia?’

  ‘Booze?’

  ‘Drink – liquor – spirits, you know? I mean wine, whisky, er, ouzo?’

  ‘Ah, ouzo! Cocktails! The bars …’

  ‘No, not bars, shops.’

  ‘Oh, yes – sure! Good shops. Three, four of them. All sell wine, whisky.’

  ‘And can I find them easily, these shops?’

  ‘Oh, sure. Small town. You walk, you find …’

  The ride took ten minutes; they couldn’t have covered more than four or five winding miles; Trace got out in the ‘town centre’ and paid his fare. So this was Pighadia.

  A main road followed the coastline for something less than a mile, with the line of the harbour lying more or less parallel. In the central area the road sprouted several side-streets; there were shops, hotels, a handful of restaurants. In the harbour boats bobbed gently on an almost imperceptible swell. It was like a small, outlying district of Rhodes town, transplanted here. Except it didn’t have so much of the ancient stone, the steeped-in-legend aura. Take away the sea, thought Trace, and you could shoot a good spaghetti western here. And if a man didn’t want to be found, this would certainly make as good a place as any in which to disappear.

  Then he thought about Amira Halbstein. But –

  – First things first.

  Trace wandered the streets, got the general layout of the place fixed in his head. Then he began checking the shops that sold drink. There was only one that he could find which stocked booze as its main business, and this was close to the harbour. Run by a thin, sour-looking type, its metal shelves were crammed with all the best brands at incredibly low prices. Trace marvelled at a two litre bottle of Grand Marnier which was labelled at 1,700 Drachmas – a little over eleven pounds sterling!

  There were two or three customers in the place but he went on checking and comparing prices until the last of them left, then turned to the surly proprietor. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do you understand En
glish?’

  ‘Little.’

  ‘I’m looking for a wine-shop owned by a man called Kastrouni. Is this the shop?’

  ‘Eh?’ the man’s thin face revealed nothing; his eyes were half-lidded, snakish.

  ‘Kastrouni,’ Trace repeated, louder. ‘Is this his shop?’

  ‘My shop!’ the other thumbed himself in the chest. ‘Who this Kastrouni?’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said Trace. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m looking for someone, that’s all.’ He bought nothing, went out into the street, walked away from the harbour to a smaller shop. There were one or two tourists about, nothing like a crowd.

  The owner of the second shop was youngish, overweight, jolly-looking. He was handing out free sweets to village kids as Trace entered. Trace let the kids hurry off, laughing, then repeated his question.

  And yet again he was met with a blank stare. Except –

  Was that a nervous twitch he had seen at the corner of the man’s mouth? And he noted that as the man repeated that name, Kastrouni, then that his hands started to tremble until he leaned his weight on them atop his counter.

  Trace looked round the shop. It sold a lot more than just booze. There were cartons of cigarettes, cigars; sweets and candies in many varieties; tinned foods, packets of biscuits, even local eggs and cheese. Casually, as he examined the label on a bottle of Grants, he said:

  ‘Kastrouni was my friend. He came to England to see me, to tell me something. But now he’s dead.’ And out of the corner of his eye he saw the other start, saw his jaw drop as if someone had just walked up to him and slapped him. Quickly he turned fully toward the man, but already the other had regained something of his composure.

  ‘Dead? Someone is dead? That is very bad, but – ’ and he shrugged.

  Not very convincing, thought Trace as he paid for his whisky and left the shop. Not at all convincing. But that was all he had wanted from him, and now he gave a mental nod. Oh, yes. If Kastrouni had indeed been part-owner of a shop here in Pighadia, then this was that shop. It was this shop, there could be no doubting it. And certainly he had impressed his partner with the need for secrecy …

  Out in the street, not looking where he was going, Trace bumped into someone staring in through the shop’s window. This person, a fat man in a white suit, was just turning away as they collided. ‘Sorry,’ said Trace at once as the other stumbled. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  The other recovered, turned to stare at Trace from under a wide-brimmed hat. It was Mr Hardy – or Sidney Greenstreet. ‘That’s all right,’ he wheezed, his accent mildly American – or poorly disguised as American. ‘Hell, no – my fault. There’s just too damned much of me. I get in everybody’s way.’ He waved his hands for a moment, apologetically, nodded and waddled off toward the harbour. Trace hurried after him.

  ‘Er, excuse me?’

  ‘Yeah?’ the other waited for him.

  ‘That girl who shared your taxi from the plane, Amira Halbstein. I’m supposed to meet her. I know she’s staying at the Villa Ulysses, but – ’

  ‘Hey, sure!’ the fat man wheezed. ‘Yeah, right. A real looker. She has one half of the place and we have the other half.’ (Trace noted the ‘we’.) ‘You wanna know where it is, right?’

  ‘That would be very helpful.’

  The fat man gave simple directions and went on his way.

  Quarter of a mile to the north of the town and set back against a hill, where it nestled in the lee of a rocky outcrop, Trace found the Villa Ulysses. It was a modern place but tasteful in an almost Spanish hacienda style which fitted in just right with its picturesque setting. With high-walled courtyards on both sides, the place looked exclusive and expensive. Bougainvillaea bunched up in green and purple clumps along the tops of the walls, falling outside here and there in cascades of blossom and leaf.

  Less than a hundred yards away across the main road, the shoreline had been sun-blasted into a shade varying between pure white and faded yellow, where shallow shelves of rock slid like a tilted deck of cards into the sea. Trace looked at the villa, looked again toward the sea. He knew Amira had the northern courtyard and rooms, but he’d spotted a lone sun umbrella at the edge of the Aegean’s blue expanse. One umbrella in maybe a half-mile of shoreline. And hadn’t she told him she was here for peace and quiet?

  He found her under the umbrella with a book. Her bikini was just decent and she was stretched out flat on a rush mat, propped on her elbows. Her skin glistened golden with oil and the smell of coconut wafted to Trace even before he was close enough to speak without raising his voice. Before his shadow could fall in her view and perhaps startle her, he said:

  ‘Hello, there. I thought it would be you.’

  She looked up over the top of her sunglasses, sat up cross legged in a fluid movement, put down her book. ‘And I thought it would be you,’ she smiled. ‘Even if you are a couple of hours too early.’ Then she looked at him more closely, took off her glasses and looked again, said: ‘Better come under the shade. What on earth have you been doing to yourself?’

  Trace snorted. ‘No one told me the Greek islands were just big microwaves in disguise,’ he said. ‘I see you’re wearing coconut this year. Me, I’m into German stuff. Hedgehog pee, I think. The Krauts aren’t into how it smells, just if it works.’

  She laughed. ‘So what’s your place like – at Amoupi, I mean?’

  ‘I didn’t say I was at Amoupi,’ he answered.

  She shrugged, half-looked away. ‘Where else would you be? There are so few resorts on Karpathos.’

  ‘But plenty of villas and apartments in Pighadia.’

  ‘In which case I’d expect you to use the same taxi from the plane – so you’d know where I was staying. And how do you know I haven’t already checked to see if you were in Pighadia? And incidentally, how did you find me?’

  ‘A little bird told me,’ said Trace, sitting down beside her. ‘Well, a damn great fat bird, in fact!’ And he wondered if she really had checked him out. He hoped so, for he found her increasingly attractive. ‘Anyway, to answer your question, Amoupi is bloody awful. Not the place itself, the beach or the taverna. The place is idyllic. But the rooms … no windows, not especially comfortable, hardly room to swing a cat!’

  ‘You poor man,’ she said. ‘And sunburnt to boot! And here’s me at Ulysses living in the lap of luxury. Would you like to see my apartment?’

  Too right! thought Trace. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘And if you’ve ice I can offer you a drink,’ he showed her the bottle of whisky.

  She nodded, ‘Plenty of ice, yes. OK,’ she stood up, pulled on a cotton shirt, ‘you can carry my umbrella.’

  The lap of luxury, she’d said, and Trace considered it no exaggeration. The courtyard was almost a garden, with a vine, masses of bougainvillaea, flowers in Greek vases along the walls, paths and seating areas of small black and white cobbles laid on edge and set out in classical and geometrical representation of octopuses, dolphins, fishes, men and maidens. Amira’s ‘rooms’ were in fact just one huge, high-ceilinged room, but laid out in such a way as to serve the functions of three. Wooden open-plan stairs led up the back wall to an open bedroom which took up half the upper area under varnished ceiling beams; the ‘downstairs’ area was divided by an archway almost as wide as the room, the smaller side of which hid a tiny, quite separate toilet, and a shower recess with ceramic tiled ceilings, walls and floor. Beneath the stairs and behind a bead curtain there was a tiny kitchen area, with a three-ring cooker run from a gas cylinder, a porcelain sink, some cupboards and drawers in varnished wood, and a small refrigerator. The wall away from the sea, where the ceiling was at its highest, was immensely thick; recessed into it was a stone platform with a mass of cushions, above which the stone arched in a style decidedly Rhodian. Light flooded in through high windows in three walls, as well as from smaller windows looking out on the courtyard. The place was delightful.

  ‘I didn’t know there were places like thi
s,’ Trace said in open admiration as he looked about. ‘I won’t ask how much it’s costing you. And what does it matter anyway? It’s a bargain!’

  ‘There’s ice in the fridge,’ she said. ‘Make yourself a drink while I shower, else I’ll taste of salt when you kiss me. You will want to kiss me again, won’t you?’

  Trace was in the kitchen area; he stuck his head out through the bead curtains but she had already gone through the arch and presumably into the shower cubicle. Her bathing costume lay in two diminutive pieces on the polished pine floor. ‘I didn’t think you’d noticed the first time,’ he called out, and heard her bright laughter ring out a moment before the hiss of jetting water.

  ‘Oh, I noticed,’ came her voice, panting a little, shivery from the effect of cold, stinging water. ‘I thought it a little early to start a holiday romance, that’s all.’

  And Trace sensed, as some men can, the invitation. With most women merely bringing him back here would have been a signal, and certainly stripping and showering while he was here; but not with this one. No, the invitation had just been made – this minute, a single second ago. It had been in her voice, in that indefinable something which passes at light-speed between a man and a woman who know. But even so, even now, it was a tentative invitation – it would depend on his response. On the way he responded. And the last thing he must do was respond as a timid schoolboy.