Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach

by Ramsey Campbell

  At first he thought Vasilema Town had been illuminated to welcome the newcomers. A multitude of white buildings tinged with red clung to a hill as haphazardly as shells on a rock, and window after window shone crimson. As he and Sandra hauled their cases onto the dockside the lowest; windows darkened, and before Ray could take much of a breath the next highest row of lights went out. He saw the light retreating from him and Sandra, and glanced behind him to confirm that it was just the sunset, the horizon having sliced the red orb in half.

  The darkness crept uphill as they followed their fellow passengers along the wharf to a coach attended by a girl in a Frugogo uniform. "Take your time," she called. "You're important to us."

  The driver seized each case and swung it into the compartment full of luggage while the cigarette between his lips kept hold of at least an inch of ash. Ray cupped Sandra's elbow to help her up the steps and felt how thin her arm had grown. She scrambled onto the seat immediately behind the driver's not unlike an excited youngster. As soon as he joined her Ray tugged the belt across himself to encourage her to be equally safe. He was trying to riddle the mechanism that would lock the arm of the seat in position when a young man leaned across the aisle to fix it by raising it above the horizontal and easing it down. "No probs," he said, and Ray felt mean for reflecting that the generation to which all the passengers except him and Sandra belonged seemed increasingly to speak in the language of their text messages. He'd often said so to his pupils at school, but the thought left him feeling even more out of date.

  The driver took a last drag at his cigarette and squashed it out between a finger and thumb varnished with nicotine as he climbed aboard. While he eased the coach forward the Frugogo girl picked up a microphone and stood with her back to the windscreen, beneath an icon of a Greek saint with a spear in his hand. "Kali mera," she said and, having explained that it meant good evening, repeated it until the passengers echoed it loud enough to suit her. "I'm Sam, and welcome to our island. Who hasn't been before?"

  "We haven't," Sandra murmured.

  "I'm promising some of you will be back. Lots of our guests say they've had the best nights of their lives." The travel representative blinked at Ray and Sandra as though she'd almost overlooked them, but her broad roundish suntanned face stayed placid. "If you've come for a rest," she said, "you'll get that too."

  She handed out envelopes that contained invitations to tomorrow's welcome meeting, together with an island map that Ray thought could have been more detailed. By now the coach was speeding along the coast road, beside which a ruddy afterglow was sinking into the ocean. Sam returned to the microphone to mention local drawbacks—mosquitoes, bathroom plumbing—which were so familiar from previous Greek holidays that Ray stopped hearing them. She'd said he could rest, and Sandra had as well.

  This time light and uproar wakened him. The coach was at a standstill and almost empty too. Both sides of the teeming street blazed with colours he might have expected to find in a nursery or else a cocktail. A neon jester pranced above a bar while a neon cat leapt back and forth across the entrance to another, as though it kept losing if not playing with some invisible prey. All the bars and clubs seemed determined to blot out whatever music their neighbours were emitting. Ray could see nobody older than the passengers Sam was ushering to an apartment block beside the coach. The driver had one foot on the lowest step while he sucked at another cigarette. "Soon be quiet," he said.

  "It's Sunset Beach," Sandra told Ray. "I wouldn't like to try to sleep here."

  "They don't," the driver said mostly to himself, "when it's dark."

  Ray wondered if the resort ever was, except out of season. He'd resumed nodding before Sam reappeared. The turmoil of light and noise took some time to fall behind, giving way to a deserted road where moths fluttered into the headlamp beams. In a few minutes the beams found a sign for Teleftaiafos, and then the village itself. Beyond a handful of tavernas the coach halted outside a stone arch overgrown with flowering vines. "Sunny View," Sam announced.

  As Ray stepped down into the hot night he heard the distant pulse of Sunset Beach, reduced to a single insistent repetitive beat. He was taking Sandra's arm to help her down the steps when a woman bustled out of a house across the marble courtyard beyond the arch and practically ran to the coach. "Here you are at last," she cried. "Mr and Mrs Thornton."

  "This is Evadne." Although Sam was presumably used to the spectacle, she seemed a little overwhelmed. "She'll look after you," she said.

  The large woman embraced Sandra like an old friend and gave Ray an equally vigorous hug, not so much patting as thumping his back. A wide smile dug creases into her loosely lined brown face. "What shall I call you?" she was eager to establish.

  "Ray," he said or at any rate gasped.

  "Sandra," Sandra said, having regained her breath.

  "You must call Evadne if you need anything at all. If ever I am not here, call Stavros."

  As if she'd given him his cue a man even brawnier than Evadne crossed the courtyard to engulf the handles of the cases in his extravagantly hairy hands. A cat fled not much more loudly than its shadow across the marble flagstones and hid behind a pot of purple blossom while Evadne led the Thorntons into the house. Except for a counter and the pigeon-holes behind it, the office just within the doorway might have been a parlour. As Evadne lifted a key off a hook Ray said "Do you want our passports?"

  "Give them tomorrow. You can't go anywhere, can you? Now we take you to your room."

  Behind the house four white two-storey apartment blocks boxed in a swimming pool. A gap through the middle of the left-hand block led to three further sets of apartments surrounding a play area, where rotund faces painted on the swings and slides and roundabouts displayed toothy grins to welcome children. "Your young ones come tomorrow," Evadne said.

  "Only one of them is this young," Sandra said as a shadow leapt off a swing—another cat, Ray saw.

  "We could not put you all together. You all have the view, but you are at the top and the rest are down below," Evadne said and gave her a concerned look. "Both of you are good for climbing up, yes?"

  "I've a bit of life in me yet."

  Ray had to swallow as an aid to saying "And I'm fine."

  Stavros was waiting with the luggage by a flight of marble steps, and the Greek couple tramped up to the balcony alongside the top floor with a suitcase each. By the time Ray and Sandra caught up with them Evadne had unlocked an apartment and inserted the key fob in a socket to rouse the lights in a large white room. It contained a double bed, a wardrobe and a dressing-table attended by a sketchy chair, a hob and a microwave beside a sink at the far end of the room, where a refrigerator burbled to itself. Whoever made the beds had left a flower on each pillow. "They're lovely," Sandra said as Ray was put in mind of laying down a flower.

  While Stavros wheeled the cases in Evadne crossed the room and slid the floor-length window open. Beyond a balcony on which a pair of chairs matched a round white plastic table, the hem of the dark sea drifted back and forth across a dim beach planted with drooping umbrellas. The distant lights of Sunset Beach seemed to be keeping time with a disco beat. The blurred sound was no louder than the sea, but Sandra said "Does that go on all night?"

  "They sleep in the day. It is such a place." Evadne sounded apologetic, and Ray had the odd idea that her animation was designed to compensate. "You should not let them trouble you," she said.

  "I was only wondering if we could have kept it up, even at their age."

  "They take life from the night."

  "That's one way to put it," Sandra said, switching on the bathroom light. "Oh, isn't there a mirror?"

  Above the sink opposite the toilet and beside a shower was a human frieze—a photograph of dancers with their arms on one another's shoulders. "Nobody will mind how you look on holiday," Evadne said.

  "I'd still like a mirror, and I'm sure Ray would for shaving."

  "I can bring one," Evadne said, though not before she'd gazed a
t both of them. "Will you want air conditioning? It is five euros every day, but your safe, that is free."

  She seemed more apologetic than ever. "At that price we'll have air conditioning," Ray said.

  "I will bring you control." Evadne paused in the doorway to add "Any of us who want to come in, we knock twice and wait for you to answer."

  Sandra unzipped her case, and Ray set about unpacking his. "I'm already glad we came, aren't you?" she said.

  "In that case I couldn't be gladder."

  He didn't know how much he was playing with words. Sandra opened the wardrobe, revealing the safe and a hidden chest of drawers. She was transferring dresses onto hangers when somebody knocked at the door. "Come in," Ray called.

  "No."

  Evadne sounded more admonitory than he understood. She knocked again, and Sandra called "Come in."

  "That is right," Evadne said and opened the door. "We knock twice and then you say."

  She switched on the box on the ceiling opposite the beds, and metal slats rattled apart to fan out a chill. She showed the Thorntons how to operate the remote control and then substituted the mirror she'd laid on a bed for the photograph in the bathroom. "May the night bless you," she said.

  Once she'd gone Sandra gave Ray her wide-eyed bemused look. "Do we think that's a local tradition?"

  "Blessing your guests, you mean."

  "That too, but I was thinking of the routine with the knocks."

  "Maybe now we know one Doug and Pris won't have heard at."

  Sandra found plates and glasses and utensils in a cupboard under the sink, and then opened the refrigerator, where a three-litre bottle of water was growing misty with condensation. "Well, nobody's going thirsty here," she said and filled two glasses. "Shall we sit out before we go to bed?"

  When they sat on their balcony the dividing wall blocked out the muffled thudding of percussion and the neon glow of Sunset Beach. Before long Ray saw the sky retreat from the sea, hinting at a vaster darkness. A star seemed to conjure forth a dozen, and then many more began to glimmer as if they were being silently born from the dark. Ray saw how intent on them Sandra had grown, and how they were bestowing some kind of peace. He could only try to count them, but he had no idea what total he'd reached when his head lurched up from nodding. "You go and catch up on your sleep," Sandra said. "I won't stay out much longer."

  "Are you sure you don't mind?" This was just a way to postpone asking "How do you feel?"

  "Honestly," she said with some surprise, "I feel better than I have for weeks. I wish it could always be like this."

  Ray thought she meant not just herself but the night as well. He planted a hand on the slippery table to help himself up and squeezed her thin shoulder, then stooped to leave her a dry kiss. As he turned away he caught sight of a distant figure on the beach. He was glad to conclude that the sand must be firm—he'd never cared for walking on soft sand even when he was considerably fitter—since the silhouette against the neon glow was approaching at quite a pace.

  He left the window open while he went into the bathroom, where he couldn't help reflecting that he could have done without the mirror or at any rate the sight of himself. Age was dangling an unreasonable amount of his face beneath the chin, dragging down his features—the baggy eyes, the wrinkled lips he had to keep remembering to hitch up at the corners, even the broad nose in which hairs too often lurked—as well as draining colour from them and his previously auburn hair. He brushed his teeth and washed his face in reluctantly lukewarm water, and then he went to the window. "I'll have to shut this," he murmured, "or the air conditioning won't work."

  "I'll know you're there. Close the curtains too."

  "Good night then."

  "It is."

  He couldn't think of any response that wouldn't betray he was loitering. He found his way to bed by the glow from the lamps in the play area, but switched on Sandra's bedside light to help her when she came in. He slipped beneath the thin quilt to discover that it hid a pair of single beds pushed together, suggesting a separation that made him unhappier than he wanted to comprehend. He thought the light would keep him awake to wait for Sandra, but it went out almost instantly, or he did.

  It wakened him as well. He blinked his sticky eyes wide to find he was alone in bed. He fumbled at the bedside table, only just saving his watch from falling to the floor. When he managed to capture it he found that he hadn't seen Sandra for nearly an hour. At once his mouth was dry as sand, and yet he felt unexpectedly resigned, a preamble to all the feelings he would have to experience. He levered himself up on his shaky arms and floundered off the bed to trudge across the chill marble floor to the window.

  Sandra was lolling half off the plastic chair. Her head was on one side and propped on the back of the chair, turning her face to the stars. Ray threw the curtain out of the way and hauled the window open. "Are you all right?" he pleaded.

  Her head took some moments to wobble erect. "You woke me," she protested. "I was having such a dream."

  "You don't want to stay out here all night, do you? I went in an hour ago. What were you dreaming?"

  "It's gone." Not much less peevishly she said "All right, I'm coming in."

  She relented as he shut the window. "You must have been worried," she said. "I'm here now." She used the bathroom and then joined Ray in bed, capturing his hand to draw it around her bony waist. As she switched off her light she murmured "That was it. The dark."

  "What was?" Ray felt oddly reluctant to ask.

  "My dream." As if trying to summon it back she said "It was dark, but there was some kind of light, and it went on for ever."

  The Second Day: 21 August

  "I wouldn't want a different life." Sandra's voice wakened him. She was talking to the walker Ray had seen last night, who had sprung onto the balcony as easily as he'd come along the beach. Of course he hadn't, though Ray felt as if he was remembering it, presumably from a dream. Had the family arrived? He untangled himself from the quilt to reach for his watch. While they weren't due for hours yet, he was dismayed to find that it was nearly noon. How long had Sandra been up without him? He threw off the quilt and hurried to the bathroom.

  He could hear Sandra and their neighbour through the small high window above the shower stall. Sandra was recalling how she and Ray had met at teacher training college, where they'd been involved with other people but had always come back together; how they'd almost parted for good over whether Ray should move to Coventry to live with her or she should join him in York; how they'd compromised on Manchester when they'd both found jobs there; how they'd been heads of departments by the time they retired, Sandra running English while Ray took care of Mathematics... He didn't care to think how much this resembled an obituary, though at least her account was livelier. He tramped back to the bedside table for his morning medication, swallowing pill after pill, not to mention tablets. Once he'd pulled long-legged swimming trunks over his bulbous greying stomach he went to find Sandra. "Here's the sleeping beauty," a woman said.

  She was plump and, to judge from the locks that had escaped from the towel around her head, generously red-haired. Her bare arms rested on the dividing wall, hands clasped as if in a casual prayer. "There's just one beauty at this table, and it isn't me," Ray said.

  Sandra was wearing her new green one-piece swimsuit, and he was unhappy to think that by sleeping he'd kept her from venturing out of the shade on the balcony, since the sunlight was almost everywhere else. "I'm for the pool," their neighbour said. "Don't forget to see to that bite, Sandra."

  As the woman started or perhaps resumed a hearty conversation in the next apartment Ray said "What bite?"

  "Something must have got me when I was asleep out here last night." Sandra pointed to a red mark on the side of her neck. "It doesn't hurt," she said. "I hadn't even noticed till Jane, you just met her, told me it was there."

  Peering closer, Ray saw that the mark was swollen around a hole somewhat larger than a pinprick. "We'd better put
something on it all the same."

  "I was going to." As she made for the apartment Sandra said "Jane was saying which tavernas they recommend."

  "Are you hungry?" Ray was able to hope.

  "Do you know, I think I could be. I'm thirsty, I can tell you that." Sandra drained her bedside glass of water and fetched a tube of ointment from the chest of drawers. At Ray rubbed ointment on the bite as gently as he could and winced on her behalf, she said "Let's find a supermarket too."

  She donned a long dress over her swimsuit and planted her hat firmly on her head while Ray hid some of his less appealing aspects with a shirt and retrieved his own hat from its perch on top of the safe. She put on her sunglasses as he opened the door. The play area was deserted, but several children organised by a girl wearing a Sunny View cap were playing ball in the pool, around which older folk lay on loungers, reading electronic texts or books. A truck piled with vegetables was coasting through the village while the driver advertised his produce with a microphone, and the Thorntons followed in the dusty wake. Among the tavernas and small shops between the Sunny View and the village square they came upon the Superber supermarket. "Is that a word?" Sandra said.

  Outside the entrance a wire stand displayed English newspapers, days old. They might have been trying to cling to the past, Ray thought, to postpone some disaster. Another stand held paperbacks so faded the covers were ghosts of themselves, with pages brown as parched grass. Beyond the glass doors the air was several degrees cooler than the street, and Sandra gave a tiny sigh. A defiantly moustached old woman in black watched from behind the till as Ray followed Sandra from shelf to shelf. Each item she placed in his wire basket—a plastic bottle of retsina, a packet of olives, a hunk of feta cheese—felt like a token of her old self. "Look, there's a bakery," she said, "we can get fresh bread in the mornings," and he saw a renewed light in her eyes. "And here's a bucket and spade for William."

  When she made to pick up a bundle of six bottles of water he grabbed it with his free hand, barely managing to cross the shop before he had to dump the bottles on the counter. The old woman didn't glance at it or the basket he planted next to it, but pointed at the beach toys Sandra was carrying. "You have young," she said.