The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  Was it Don calling back? Was he on the island unbeknownst to her? She quickly deleted the message and walked over towards the balcony. She pulled the net curtain across and felt something brush against her arm. A small centipede landed on her wrist. It felt cold and wet. She shook her arm, and the centipede fell to the floor. Dazed, it swivelled its head and looked towards her, its antennae flicking wildly. She crushed it with her shoe, feeling the soft sticky explosion between her feet, the shrill whine and cracking of the exoskeleton. She went back into the bathroom and put her trainers in the tub. Let hot water run over them.

  Back in the room she stared at her computer but the black pool had only widened. She needed her notebooks. She reached under the bed for her bag and pulled it out. Inside were her papers and the Lily manuscript. The bag felt light in her hands. She unzipped it, the teeth of the zip glinting like centipede legs.

  The bag was empty. She stared down into it as if it were her vision and not reality that was amiss. There was something green in the side pocket. She carefully pulled it out, shook it on the floor, but no centipedes fell out. Only two printed tickets. She picked one up off the tiles and stared at the small print. It was a ticket for tomorrow’s boat to Athens. In the space for passenger details, neatly printed, was her name.

  II

  EIGHTEEN

  He stares down at the priest’s body stretched out flat before him. He feels awkward, seeing the priest in this way. Wonders how many people ever saw him nude. He’s used to viewing naked corpses, but, after all, this is a man of God.

  They’re alone now. Together. It is almost like confession except there is no screen between them. Nikos leans down and angles his head. He wants the priest to whisper secrets into his ear.

  He reads the body like a topographic map. Lines and signs are hidden in the deep folds of skin and tissue. Words from the dead. Messages and pleas.

  The last year he’ll be doing this. Reading the dead. Making them talk again. Forcing them to reveal all the things they were too ashamed to in life. He stands back for a moment and wonders what the connection is to the missing priest, Karelis.

  He leans down towards the mouth. It is puckered and shut like the coin slot on a broken vending machine. The blood is dried to the colour of ripe plums. The priest’s hair comes off in his hands like candy floss. These things no longer make him sick, only tired.

  He starts at the head. Notes the man’s face is still there. The cuts and scars across the priest’s back are old, part of his flesh. The wounds in the priest’s stomach and groin are recent. They gape like open mouths. They grin and leer and say you will never know the answer. They are the residue of hatred. Something so intense that the priest was stabbed twenty-one times before the killer felt sated. The wounds are deep and furrowed. They suggest anger and history, a personal crime. The unleashing of pent-up animosity and bottled rage.

  But underneath all the blood and tissue there’s something far more interesting. Or rather, it’s what’s missing that draws Nikos closer, bending down, his chin almost touching the cold hard flesh. He gently lifts the priest’s penis and peers underneath. There is scar tissue, old and wrinkled like papyrus. There is nothing else.

  Nikos moves away, disgust and dread lodged like a stone in his throat. Did the priest castrate himself? Or did someone do this to him? He checks through the coroner’s report, the cramped handwriting and old-fashioned script. The castration is at least twenty years old. Nikos remembers reading about Origen and other holy men who castrated themselves to become purer for God. Who cut the source of their temptation as one would cut a balloon string, watching desire float away into the blue and endless sky.

  He smells the skin, the tang of departure, and then its sourness too. He envies the dead their stillness. Their detachment from the world. This is only the first stage. As the skin falls away and the fat melts, they will shed even this, their corporeality.

  He leans back and thinks about all the bodies he’s encountered. How he feels more comfortable with them than with the living. How they can never lie or betray you.

  He makes one last circuit, looking for anything he’s missed, but there’s only the flesh, hair and sightless eyes.

  He leans back down into the priest’s face. ‘Tell me,’ he whispers to the dead man.

  He puts his ear to the priest’s mouth, and, for a second, he’s certain he can hear the old man’s breath like one can hear the ghost of the sea trapped in a shell, but it is only his own body making the sound, and he leaves the morgue, unsatisfied as always.

  * * *

  The room was bare as a monk’s cell. Which was no surprise. Vondas may have been ousted from the monastery, but his habits hadn’t changed in the least. Nikos stands there, unable as yet to enter, taking in this scene, the smell of the dead priest still on his hands. He knew Vondas slightly, as a policeman, not a friend or parishioner. He feels he knows him better now after having seen the priest’s body, the secret folds and hidden ravines of his life.

  He takes a deep breath, pulls the notebook out of his pocket and switches on the one bare bulb dangling off-centre in a corner of the room. There’s a single bed. The sheets white and tidied, no pillow or blanket. The bed looks like an army cot, steel snakes and broken springs hanging from its underside like stalactites. The mattress sags, describing the imprint of a man no longer there.

  On the wall, next to the pillow, about two inches up, he sees something strange. He gets on the bed so he can take a closer look. The cement in this one small corner has been chipped away. The wall is pitted and caved, and there are dark smears surrounding it. The indentation is only a couple of inches deep. There is grey dust on the floor under the bed and two broken fingernails, white ellipsoids torn and cracked. Nikos scrapes some of the dried blood off the wall into an evidence bag.

  Next to the bed is a small plain table with no drawers. On it lies a bible and a half-filled cup of water. There are no crucifixes anywhere.

  There’s a desk on the other side of the room and a small, scrappy bookshelf filled with leather-bound volumes, their spines faded and torn. A wastebasket. An air-conditioning unit. No telephone. No computer. Nothing else. The room feels like a cell, and the fact it had been a deliberate choice makes it even worse.

  He stands in the silent room and asks the priest all the questions he’s too scared to ask himself. The walls don’t reply. The ceiling says nothing.

  He stares out the window at the rippled sea below. He can smell the priest’s sweat in the bed sheets and curtains. It’s sour and musty and the last thing left of him.

  He begins to examine the bookcase. The tattered covers and bent pages evince a lifetime of study and perusal; thumbprints stained black are visible on some of the pages while others hold dead ash from long-extinguished cigarettes. They are all apocrypha. The testaments that never made it to the finish line. Odd books for a priest to have, Nikos thinks, but not as odd as the things he saw in the mortuary this morning. He flicks through the books, but there’s only dense text, footnotes and printed commentary. Nothing in the priest’s hand, no secret photo of a long lost love or saint to ease the dread of night.

  His head feels heavy and tight as if he’s been up all night drinking. He moves to the window. The harbour is devoid of boats this morning and still and perfect as a postcard. He tries to imagine what it was like to live in such a room, to be encased by the heat and white walls, the emptiness of space. A prison made by the prisoner who then voluntarily served his life sentence in it.

  He gets on his hands and knees, checks the floor, under the bed, by the table. There’s nothing, not even dust. How can a man who lived so simply attract so much hatred, so much violence?

  He gets up and peers under the mattress, between the sheets. Runs his fingers along the wall looking for other indentations, secret hiding places, but he doesn’t find anything until he turns on the air conditioner.

  The switch breaks off in his hand. He looks at it lying in his palm. Sweat trickles down the bac
k of his neck. The wires dangle like loose tongues, their colour faded to a dull grey. He lights a cigarette, hoping to cover the smell of his own sweat, and picks up the broken switch. He tries fitting it back on but pushes too hard. The plastic cracks, and the unit’s face shears off and lands clattering to the tiles.

  His heart hammers in his chest. He can hear it like a drumbeat from the next room. His hands are shiny and wet, and he wipes them on his trousers before reaching in. The hole is about one foot deep and a few inches high. He extracts two cloth bound books and a green paper file. He searches carefully in the hole but there’s nothing else, and he feels a little disappointed. No guns or drugs or centipede carcasses.

  He sits down on the bed, lays the items in front of him. He picks up one of the books. It is much newer than the ones on the shelf and far less handled.

  He opens it to the title page, but he already knows what it will say. His hands shake and the pages flutter. It’s the book about the cult. He feels blood rush through his head and blackness take hold of him as he flicks through it.

  The word ‘NO’ has been scrawled on each page. Slowly, methodically, in the margins and above the text. Between the lines and under them. Through and across the letters and over the images like a black rain.

  Every page has been defaced. Even the photos of the island, of the labyrinth and the ruins, have been etched out in a series of calligraphic strokes, black and spiky as whips.

  It is impossible to read the underlying text any more. He flicks through pages, each one covered in spidery NOs, like a cancer spreading across the text, becoming more dense and intertwined as the book progresses. The last pages are a crosshatched nightmare of black on black, the original text no longer even visible.

  He puts the book to one side and reaches for the second volume.

  It is another, newer edition of the first. A library copy due back nearly a year ago. Only the first fifty pages have been filled with the scribbled NOs.

  It reminds him of the penance books the nuns at his school made them keep. A place to record all the bad things they’d done. They would be forced to look at it every day before going home, to meditate on their sins in black and white and fill the rest of the pages with what they were going to do to make up for them. A kind of karmic account book.

  The knock on the door makes him jump. The book falls to the floor. The sound of it hitting the tiles fills the room. He stares up at the face of Elias, his deputy. Nikos beckons him in, picks up the book and shows it to Elias.

  ‘You think he scribbled out the words because, somehow, they were to blame – the words themselves? Now that the actions and events were gone, the words came to stand for the things which had happened, and Vondas, by negating this history, felt he was negating the reality too?’

  Nikos looks up surprised. Since when is Elias given to abstract theorising? It’s strange, like seeing someone you know well in a set of clothes you could never imagine them in. But maybe he’s been reading up, getting prepared for his promotion.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know that,’ Nikos replies. He tells Elias about the morning in the morgue. The stab marks around Vondas’s groin. The castration scars from many years ago. The scratch marks on the wall.

  ‘You’d think God would fill their lives with light and meaning.’

  Nikos looks up. Elias’s face is like a puzzle missing the last piece. ‘I think God takes away as much as he gives.’

  They put the books to one side. Nikos picks up the green file. He carefully opens it and takes out the worn and folded clippings inside.

  ‘It’s a piece about the disappearance of Karelis. Some follow-up articles.’ Nikos picks out the last of these, stares at it, shaking his head and then hands it over to Elias.

  In the photo, Karelis’s face is totally covered by more NOs as if he were wearing a black mask of angry mosquitoes.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Seems you’ve managed to make some unsavoury friends.’ George stubbed his cigarette and snorted. He poured himself an ouzo. It was barely ten, and the sun bright as a sky full of burning angels. Jason sat slouched and hung-over across the table. He’d come down here for breakfast not bad news.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Long hair. Northern accent. You know who I mean.’ George bolted down his drink.

  What the hell was Wynn doing here, looking for him? Jason tried to keep his face steady and blank but George was too blasted to care. He sat in jeans and flannel shirt, looking like a faded version of the air-brushed John Wayne which glared down at them from the wall. He kept picking at his food, leaving cigarettes to smoulder in the ashtray. Hank Snow sang about losing his baby in a fire.

  ‘I very much hope you haven’t got yourself involved with him.’ George swallowed a piece of octopus. It looked like rubber alien spines. It smelled worse. Jason felt a swelling nausea lodge in his chest.

  ‘He’s a piece of shit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Not with what Wynn already knew about him. George swallowed another tentacle. Jason looked away, taking deep breaths.

  ‘They say he came here to take over the drug trafficking. That he killed and tortured his rivals. Made a show of force. Ruthless and devastating. The old faces that used to sell pills – we don’t see them any more. Either he scared them off, or they’re lying at the bottom of the sea. Either way, he got what he wanted. Money.’ George raised his hands in the air, a gesture of exasperation offered up to the heavens. ‘That’s all it’s about these days, and human life is just another expense to chalk up, another loss to be put against future gains. Stay away from him, Jason.’

  ‘If that’s what you think then why do you let him sell drugs at your club?’

  George looked at him, tired and weary, his eyes like slit figs. ‘What do you expect me to do? Let this business collapse as well?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m too old to fight. I came here to get away from all that. And who’s forcing anyone to buy anything? It’s what people come here for, and if they don’t find it at my bar, they’ll go to another bar and find it there. It’s their business not mine.’

  Jason swallowed his drink. He couldn’t see anything wrong with what George was saying but then again he couldn’t see anything right with it either.

  ‘No one used to care about these things. There were no problems until that new police chief came in this year. You’d think with the murders the police would have better ways to spend their time.’

  ‘The girl who was found last week, did you know her?’ He wanted to get George off the subject. There were only three hotels on the island, and George’s was the cheapest. A one in three chance.

  George nodded. ‘I saw her a bit. Here and there. She used to come to the club.’

  ‘Was she here on holiday?’ He didn’t know where he was going with this but he wanted more information, more facts he could tell Kitty when he saw her again.

  ‘They come here on holiday. This is how it begins.’ George’s hands made the universal expression for What can you do about it? ‘Then, they realise their money’s running out. That there are easy ways to replenish it.’ He swallowed an octopus eye. Liquid spurted out and landed on Jason’s hand.

  ‘You mean she was dealing?’

  ‘I only saw what I saw.’

  ‘Working for Wynn?’

  George looked at him and shrugged. ‘Or against him. I don’t know. All I know is she disappeared. Then they found her. Poor fucking girl. Her family …’

  George got up and excused himself. Jason watched him leave and thought about what he’d inferred. The dead girl had been selling drugs. It could have been a coincidence. But how many coincidences did it take before you started calling it a pattern? Was she working for Wynn or trying to undercut him? He remembered George’s comment about rival dealers kissing the sea floor. The other victims were also young. Had they been selling drugs too?

  The sun smoked and snarled ab
ove him. Police marched along the boardwalk as if on parade, stiff and blue, and so unlike the sea. But Jason could only think about Wynn. How he’d eavesdropped on them last night at the club. His leering smile and insinuating tone. Was he planning on telling Kitty? Or using it as a way to blackmail him? He’d thought Wynn an annoyance, someone who enjoyed playing mind games with other people, but he was wrong. Wynn was something much worse.

  TWENTY

  She sat by the bed and waited for the phone to ring. On the floor lay empty Glenfiddich miniatures, their caps like frozen insects pock-marking the white tiles. She hadn’t slept. She’d called the police and was told to come in the next day and make an official report.

  She’d checked the room again, on hands and knees, making sure, and then Don had phoned.

  Thinking it might be Jason, she’d answered. A momentary dizziness when she hadn’t recognised his voice.

  ‘You get my message?’

  She’d said she had. Despite herself, she apologised for not having called back. Then she told him. Everything. From the mugging to the murders to the theft of her manuscript. The silence on the other end seemed to suck her words into space. Then, finally: ‘What do you think you’re doing, Kitty?’

  She had no answer for that.

  ‘Don, last night you didn’t call twice did you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I think someone’s following me.’

  ‘Kit, you’re sounding a tad paranoid.’ His voice was snarled and tangled as if the telephone line itself had made it so. ‘You should come back. You’re no good on your own, you should know that by now.’

  She slammed the phone down and walked across the room as if the mere act could give her the distance she needed to flee from her life.

  * * *

  The police station was busier than last time. It was not something she wanted to do, but the quicker she could get it done, the sooner she would see Jason.