by Brian Lumley
‘A little early?’ he repeated her. ‘And now?’
She made no answer and he knew he was right. But still Trace felt like it was someone else who removed his shorts, stripped him naked and walked him under the archway.
She stood there silently laughing at him from the water, which fell over her and rivered from her like a liquid glass curtain. And her laughter confirmed it. He looked at her, enjoyed her. Her breasts looked perfect to him; they were large-nippled and hung ripe as splendid fruits. The V of the hair between her thighs was deep, the curls bushy, beaded now and glinting; she held up her arms to the source of the water and Trace was reminded of Jilly, but briefly. Jilly was Jilly, but Amira was real.
He stepped into the shower with her, gasped as the water hit him. She took his waist and turned him round, pressed herself to his back for the merest moment and then, as the water began to run warm, started to soap his back from the nape of his neck to his backside. And: ‘Now?’ she said, ‘– now you’re still a couple of hours too early.’
For a moment he felt her breasts again pressed to his back – felt waves of pleasure rushing through him, the full length of her leaning on him – and then she stepped out of the water, took up a towel from somewhere and wrapped it round herself.
‘Wha – ?’ said Trace from the shower, warm water streaming into his mouth. For he knew she had backed off, but at the same time knew he’d done nothing wrong. ‘Amira, the last thing I need right now is a tease!’ he said.
She towelled at her hair, bit her lip, turned her face away. ‘I know,’ she answered. And then, just a little desperately: ‘But if we make love now we’ll spend the rest of the afternoon, the evening and night in bed – and you know it. Oh, I think I want you, all right, Charlie Trace – but all in good time. I mean, I don’t know you, do I? Not properly. And anyway, what do you call a girl who just falls into bed as easily as that?’
‘Good fun?’ Trace suggested, getting out of the shower as she handed him a second towel. If she had noticed his foot she failed to mention it. He was glad for that, anyway.
‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘I was being serious. You call such a girl a bag, a tart, a “hot piece”. But on the other hand these are the islands of love, romance. So I suggest we split the difference.’
Trace’s disappointment made him flippant, even a little sarcastic. ‘My idea entirely,’ he growled. Then he checked himself, conjured a half-genuine wince, bit his lip. ‘A play on words,’ he said. ‘Double entendre – and a poor one.’
‘You’re annoyed with me,’ she said. ‘I can’t say I blame you. But if you don’t want to hear my plan – the way I think it should go – ?’
‘By all means,’ said Trace. ‘Let’s hear it.’ He began to towel himself dry.
‘Well, my suggestion is this: you go back to Amoupi and dress yourself for the evening, just as you would in London. Then, about 8:00 tonight, call for me here and take me “on the town”. Or take me on what there is of a town, anyway. You can wine and dine me, and try to convince me of your undying whatever. If there’s a disco we might sit under the vines and the stars and watch the dancing for a while, and we’ll drink exotic things and let the night close in on us. Then, if the spark is still there, if we’re compatible – if we’re “in love”, for however brief a moment – we’ll come back here and let things take their course. How does that sound?’
Trace nodded. ‘Like a distant tinkle of water in a desert,’ he said. ‘It’s promising – but there’s always the chance that the spring will run dry before you get there.’
‘Only if we discover that we really don’t care for each other,’ she said, sensibly. ‘In which case it would be wrong, pure lust. Simple animal sex.’
Oh? thought Trace. But sometimes there’s a lot to be said for simple animal sex, my love. Certainly it’s better than waking up all sticky from a wet dream! And then he got dressed again …
Back in town looking for a taxi, Trace was attracted by a babble of excited Greek voices, and the ‘Oohs!’ and ‘Aahs!’ of holidaymakers, to the street with the two wineshops. Rounding a corner he saw a crowd gathered outside the smaller shop, the one where he’d bought his whisky – the one owned, or silent-partnered at least, by Dimitrios Kastrouni. A man was being led away, his arms locked firmly up behind his back, by three hard-faced, official-looking types. One of the three, the eldest, cleared the way ahead as the other two manhandled their prisoner through the crowd. They could only be part-time policemen.
Trace got a good look at the protesting prisoner’s face: he was the surly, sour-looking proprietor of the larger wineshop. But what had he done; what had been going on here?
‘What happened?’ Trace asked a young British couple.
‘Dunno,’ said the man, slack-jawed and staring. ‘Somebody said there’d been a murder, so we came to see.’
Murder! And the thin-faced type obviously involved. Standing on tiptoe to look over the heads of those between, Trace saw men come staggering out of the open door to the shop. They carried a stretcher, whose length was partly stuck in the entrance by a frantic woman who cried and babbled and beat her breast, all the while running her hands up and down the body on the stretcher. The woman was red: her white face was smeared with red, her fluttering hands, the front of her dress.
Then the whole picture snapped into focus and Trace felt his own blood drain to his feet. The man on the stretcher was quite obviously dead; his head lolled strangely and was tilted back at an odd angle, as if his neck was broken. It wasn’t, but there was no longer any tension in it. The tension had gone when someone had drawn a razor across the throat, ear to ear. The body’s front was sticky and scarlet and hellish where his life had gushed out and lay upon him, quickly clotting.
It was the happy, fat man: Kastrouni’s partner …
Chapter Three
Trace was feeling greatly subdued when he picked Amira up at her villa. He had been doing a great deal of thinking and didn’t much care for the conclusions he’d come to. Kastrouni’s warning, about him being in great danger, kept coming back to him. And now the fat man from the wineshop, dead. On the other hand it seemed his murderer was another Karpathian, and that the murder itself was probably simply the result of rivalry. But it played on Trace’s mind and Amira wasn’t slow to notice it.
‘You’ve been very quiet,’ she said, as they sat in a taverna overlooking the harbour, where the lights of a handful of boats were reflected in the water like so many additional stars. ‘Is something wrong? Have I disappointed you so badly?’
‘You?’ He realized he’d been miles away. And he must have seemed very withdrawn through their meal. ‘No, you haven’t disappointed me. Actually I feel completely at ease with you, so much so that I don’t feel I have to keep trying to impress you. If that doesn’t sound very flattering, you know that’s not the way I meant it. But disappointed? – hell, if we hadn’t bumped into each other in Rhodes, I’d probably be going round the twist right about now!’
‘Oh?’ she toyed with her drink, a milky ouzo climbing over large chunks of ice, and cocked her head on one side. ‘Is that all I am, then? A playmate to amuse you and keep the boredom at bay?’
He smiled, reached across to pinch her chin between thumb and forefinger, said: ‘You know that’s not what I meant either. But see, just like you I came here for a little peace and quiet. For that and … for a couple of other reasons. And now there’s you. So you see, you’re a complication. A very sweet, very beautiful complication … but a complication anyway.’
‘You’d prefer not to have met me?’
‘You know,’ said Trace, ‘If you’re not turning my words round the other way, you’re doing it with my thoughts! Prefer not to have met you? Hell, no! No, that’s the last thing I’d wish. But I know there’ll be times – a day at least, maybe two – during this coming week, when I’ll not be here. I won’t be around. And then I’ll think about you.’
‘You mean you’ll worry that I’m being chatted up
by some other handsome young man,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I know.’
‘That, too,’ he nodded his agreement. ‘And then I’d have to rough him up, and he’d probably rough me up!’
She propped her chin in her palms. ‘I think I quite like that,’ she said. ‘The idea of men fighting over me. But what is this secret thing you have to do? Where is it you have to go?’
Trace looked at her, saw her very clearly for perhaps the first time. It wasn’t simply the attraction between strangers now, and it wasn’t the. blurred sexual impressions cast by a lovely girl in a shower. It was that he looked at a warm, live, real person. Of flesh and blood. Fragile, as all human beings are. And vulnerable. For some strange reason Death had strayed into close proximity to Trace and seemed to be following him around. He spoke to someone, and that someone died. Then he spoke to someone else, and … same story. And now he was talking to Amira. She should at least be warned. She should know something of the sinister nature of what she was playing with.
‘Do you want to know why I’m here?’ he asked. ‘Why I’m really here?’
‘If you want to tell me,’ she shrugged. ‘I imagine you’re running away from a love affair that’s caving in on you; or maybe you’re just getting out, for a little while, from under the weight of your everyday life. That’s how you’ve looked: at the airport in Rhodes, in Rhodes town itself, even tonight. Almost a fugitive, a man who can’t relax, who keeps looking over his shoulder. Not literally, figuratively.’
‘Me, a fugitive?’ Trace grinned, was on the point of denying it, impulsively decided to go straight-up. He shrugged, let the grin slide from his face.
‘Am I right?’ she pressed.
‘Maybe, partly. Sometimes it seems like I’m a fugitive several times over. To quote you: not literally, figuratively.’ And he quickly sketched in the bare bones of the story of his meeting with Kastrouni, of the Greek’s freakish death, and now of the second man’s murder just a few hours ago. He filled nothing in, painted a sketchy picture indeed, left out all the fine details.
Through it she sat listening (only half attentively, Trace thought, even fidgeting a little, as if silently urging him to get on with it; perhaps not believing him?) and when he’d finished she said:
‘And is that it? A Greek gives you a mysterious warning in London and gets killed in an accident. You come out here to check up on something he said to you, and a person you’ve spoken to gets murdered.’
‘You think it sounds weird,’ said Trace. ‘Maybe you don’t believe it.’
‘Of course I believe it!’ she snorted. ‘Actually, I’ve already heard about this murder. The whole town has been buzzing with it. But do you want to know what I think? It’s all coincidence, that’s all.’ Then a thought struck her and her eyes went wide. ‘And is that what’s been worrying you? That now you’ve met me, I too will fall under the influence? Do you think that maybe I’ll be the next victim of this … this curse of Charlie Trace?’
He gave a shrug, began to feel silly. ‘Something like that, perhaps.’
‘Coincidence!’ she insisted. ‘Listen, Charlie, let me tell you something. A few years ago when my mother died, I spent a little time in Israel. There was a young man I was interested in – in a military kibbutz. We weren’t lovers, just friends. But we were going to be lovers. We knew, you see? But one day I spent some time with him and a bunch of other young soldiers. That same night a terrorist raiding party came over and killed them all. Including the boy I hadn’t slept with yet. A week later my uncle died of cancer. Death seemed to be everywhere that year, everywhere I went. And do you think it had anything to do with me?’
‘This is different,’ said Trace.
‘How? Why is it? What exactly did this mysterious Greek tell you?’
Trace wasn’t going to involve her. He felt he’d said too much already. And, hell – she could even be right! ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re right, I’ve let my imagination run away with me. Forget it. And as for my taking time off from you – forget that, too. Put it out of your mind. I won’t be going off on my own, and you won’t be getting chatted up – except by me. Anyway, I’m not much for crumbling old monasteries at the best of times.’
He was leaning back, looking out across the water as he said this, and Amira had just taken a sip of her drink; but her spluttering and sudden violent coughing had him on his feet in a moment, thumping her back, steadying her, full of concern. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked anxiously as the bout subsided. ‘What happened?’
‘Went down … the wrong … way!’ she choked it out. Then: ‘Thanks, I’m all right now …’
Following which conversation Trace felt easier in his mind, so that the mood lightened and the night quickly became enjoyable and exciting. They left the taverna and found an open square with coloured lights strung overhead, where Greeks in local costumes danced to bozoukis and swigged ouzo from a bottle which they passed around; and finally, more than a little tipsy, they strolled back together to the Villa Ulysses.
In the morning Trace wished he could remember more about their lovemaking, but he couldn’t. It was then, over coffee, that she suggested he go and get his things from Amoupi and move in here. And Trace couldn’t think of anything he’d like better.
Already he was looking forward to tonight, but this time he intended to remember everything …
He took a taxi back to Amoupi and arrived there about 10:30. The sun was sizzling its way across the sky again, of course, and all the smart-arses were under their vine, sipping their iced drinks as usual. All except one: a lone girl, topless, so brown that the sun ignored her, splashing in the sea and fooling with a beach-ball. Trace stood watching her for a moment, then turned toward his ‘garage’ – and at once turned back again.
Watching the girl as she’d moved in the water, Trace’s eyes had settled briefly on a thin man sitting at a corner table on the taverna’s patio. He wore tinted glasses, a ‘Hawaiian’ shirt and a straw hat, but he was still Mr Laurel.
Toity poiple boids, thought Trace at once, and: What’s he doing here?
Mr Laurel didn’t appear to be looking his way, but as Trace went to his tiny room so the thin man got up, approached Trace’s taxi where it stood waiting. Trace shrugged. It could be that he’d simply been checking the place out, seeing what he could see. Now he’d probably be wanting to return to Pighadia. Trace wasn’t concerned for he’d asked the taxi driver to wait for him, and anyway he didn’t mind sharing.
Trace’s case was on the bed where he’d left it, and –
– No he hadn’t. He’d left it on the floor beside the bed. Also, he’d locked the up-and-over door. But when he’d entered just now it had been open. He looked about the tiny room. What else was different?
On the foot of his bed he saw the guidebook given him by Amira. He hadn’t left it there, open, face down like that. He could swear he hadn’t. He flipped the open book onto its back, and in the instant before the pages readjusted themselves saw the map of Karpathos – on which he’d marked the approximate location of the monastery. Someone had been in here looking at this book, had seen his mark.
He went through his suitcase. It seemed in order, and yet –
No, it was not in order. Far from it. Kastrouni’s notebook – gone!
Trace had brought just three of the ‘Demogorgon items’ here with him: the notebook, Kastrouni’s map of Karpathos, a small bible. The bible was still here but the map and notebook – both gone, disappeared. But why?
Someone had come in here, searched through his suitcase, taken the map and notebook. Then he (or she?) had seen the guidebook. It, too, carried a map of Karpathos, which Trace had also marked. The unknown intruder had seen little point in stealing the guidebook: since Trace had marked it, he obviously knew where the monastery was …
Kastrouni was dead.
And the happy fat man from the wineshop was dead.
And up there in the mountains was a man someone thought was important to Trace. And dam
n it all, he was important to Trace – in the last five minutes he’d suddenly become more important to Trace than anyone else in his entire life!
Including Amira Halbstein? he asked himself. But that was a question he couldn’t answer. Not yet. It was a question which now would have to wait. Until afterwards.
He quickly repacked the suitcase, took his key to Fodula where she worked in her kitchen. She looked surprised. ‘You leave? But you have paid, and – ’
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I stay with friends in Pighadia.’
‘OK, but – something wrong here?’
‘No, no,’ he said quickly, and forced himself to smile. ‘No, everything is great. But – tell me, has anyone been in my room?’
‘Eh? Been in – ’ her eyes went wide. ‘Something stolen?’
‘Yes – no!’ said Trace. ‘No, nothing that I can see.’ Too late he’d noticed the thin shadow just beyond the kitchen’s threshold, thrown there by the sun. The shadow with the hat. Mr Laurel’s shadow.
‘Mr Trace, I sorry if – ’ Fodula began, taking his hand.
‘No, really, it’s OK,’ he cut her off. ‘But from now on I’m staying in Pighadia. This place has been very nice – wonderful – but I have friends in Pighadia. Thanks …’ And as the thin shadow melted away he made slowly for the kitchen door.
He made sure Laurel had plenty of time to get out of the way, then strode out into the sunlight. When he got to the taxi, the thin man was already seated in the back. Trace got in the back, too, said: ‘Pighadia?’
‘Eh? What? Oh, sure!’ the thin man seemed surprised. ‘Nowhere else to go on this rock, s’far as I can see.’
‘It’s just that this is my taxi,’ said Trace, trying not to snarl. All of a sudden he hated this obnoxious bastard, wished he dared grab hold of him and turn out his pockets. But –
‘Say, gee, I’m sorry!’ the other seemed genuinely concerned. ‘Hey, I’ll wait for the next one.’ He made to get out but Trace stopped him.
