Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach

by Ramsey Campbell

  As Ray located the vendor distributing trinkets from her capacious shoulder-bag he wasn't certain whether he'd seen Tim relax. Some of the diners made it plain that they found her unwelcome, but at least she wasn't homeless, as Ray had decided the person he'd glimpsed in the monastery must have been. When her tour of the taverna brought her over William told her "I put the cross by my bed at night."

  She passed her fingertips back and forth in front of her lips, which left Ray wondering if this indicated muteness or an ability to read what people said. When she reached in her bag he assumed she was offering trinkets again, but she only produced a book, which she planted next to Ray's plate and then shoved towards him. "For me?" Ray said and took out his wad of Greek cash. "How much?"

  She waved it away so vigorously that the flame in the lantern on the table fluttered, and then she put her hands together to indicate the book. Ray couldn't see why she would be praying, but perhaps the gesture conveyed gratitude for how much he'd paid for William's cross. She watched him put away the money, and looked ready to watch him read. "Thank you very much for that," he said and turned the book to face him.

  The large thin paperback had an aerial view of a group of islands on the cover, an image so generic that it could have been found online. Much of it was obscured by blocky lettering—HISTORY OF GREECE ISLANDS and the author's name, Iannis Antonaides. The book had been published some years ago in Kefalonia—self-published, to judge by the prose. Ray felt all the more touched that the woman had presented it to him, but when he made to thank her again he found that she was several tables away. "Could I have a look?" Doug said.

  He leafed through the paperback, lingering over photographs and then at the start of a chapter. "You won't like this, Jules."

  "The writing, you mean?" Ray said. "Most of us couldn't write a line in Greek, never mind an entire book."

  "Not the writing." Doug glanced at William and held the open book towards Ray. "This part," he said.

  Julian leaned across the table to frown at the book. All the bulbs on wires entwined like vines around the trellis overhead were lit now, and light glaring from the glossy page erased the title of the chapter. Ray had to take hold of the book to see that the page was headed Vampire of Vasilema. As he realised that he'd inadvertently turned the open pages towards the youngest member of the family, Jonquil said "Can you say a bug, William?"

  "A bug," William said with a giggle of anticipation.

  "Keep saying it."

  "A bug a bug a bug," William said and giggled louder.

  "Say it very fast."

  "Please do nothing of the kind, William," Julian said. "Jonquil, everybody else can see exactly what you're trying to do. Kindly stop at once."

  "I think she was trying to distract him for you," Sandra said.

  "If that's genuinely the case I apologise." As Jonquil made to respond he said "All the same, I'd prefer you to find a more acceptable method."

  "I wish sometimes you'd give her more of a chance," Sandra said. "Natalie, don't you?"

  "I've told him so."

  "Well, now I am. Will you do it for me, Julian?" Ray was dismayed by the resemblance to a promise at a deathbed, and sensed that others heard it too.

  "Where it's appropriate," Julian said, and turned to Ray at once. "Perhaps you could keep your book to yourself while we're all together."

  Ray felt as if he'd taken a rebuke on Jonquil's behalf, and Doug's wink at him made him feel all the more conspiratorial. "I'll corrupt myself when you're done, dad," Doug said.

  "No need for that," Natalie said more like her husband than herself.

  "It's perfectly all right," Julian said. "I can take a joke. Now do you suppose we can close it?"

  Doug pegged his lips together with a finger and thumb, rousing Julian's frown. "The book," he said.

  As Doug shut the paperback Ray glimpsed a photograph of the monastery they'd visited. "Thank you," Julian said as he might have to an obedient child.

  "Thank you very mutts," William said.

  "Why are you speaking like that, William?" Natalie demanded.

  The boy looked abashed by the failure of his joke. "That's how the waiter talks."

  "It isn't nice to imitate people. You wouldn't like it done to you."

  "The people in the church did."

  "Which people?" Sandra said sharply enough to be expressing Ray's unease as well. "How were they imitating you?"

  "The people that the man chased out. They weren't copying me, gran. I mean they all looked the same."

  "I expect that means they're a family."

  "Not just their faces." The boy shook his head for emphasis if not in frustration. "Like they were smiling," he insisted, "but it wasn't a smile."

  "I saw nothing like that, William."

  Ray felt anxious to support Julian. "Remember there were all the candles, William. I don't think any of us could see those people very well."

  "I did. They were looking at grandma and Jonquil and Tim."

  "Well," Sandra said, "someone must think I belong with the younger set."

  "Of course you do. With all of us, and so does Ray," Pris said, only to appear to wonder if she'd said too much.

  The teenagers had taken Sandra's hands, reaching across the remains of the meal, and Ray couldn't help being put in mind of a séance if not a secret sign. Julian cleared his throat to say "Shall we call for the bill?"

  He beckoned to their waiter and mimed scribbling on his hand as if he'd had a thought he wanted to record. Once they had the reckoning and the contributions were gathered on the tray Julian added a gratuity. "Gosh, is that ten per cent?" Pris said—"They don't tip like that in Greece.

  "Then perhaps we should set an example."

  Natalie was urging William away, and Ray saw why when the waiter called "Thank you very mutts."

  Tim and Jonquil weren't alone in visibly suppressing mirth, but William looked more than serious. "See, mummy, that is what he said."

  "It's what he meant that counts, Will," Doug said. "Sometimes you have to look behind the words."

  Just now this didn't sound like good advice—at least, Ray hoped the boy would leave quite a lot that he'd recently heard unexamined. Beyond the light from the taverna the way across the beach was unlit, and the sand felt as if the darkness were dragging at Ray's feet. As he trudged into the village, up an alley that eventually left the sand behind, he saw a bunch of elongated limbs reach down from a streetlamp at the end. It was only the magnified shadow of a spider flexing all its legs at the centre of its web, but he was glad when it stopped appearing to grope for Sandra and Jonquil and Tim.

  ***

  "Do you mind if I read for a while?"

  "Of course I don't, but you won't mind if I go to bed, will you? Then I shouldn't be so likely to nod off on the boat tomorrow."

  "I'm only outside if you need me."

  "And you know where I'll be."

  "Just call if you need me for anything at all."

  By now it was clear to them both that they were prolonging their moments together. As Ray kissed her eyes, the way he often used to before he and Sandra settled down to sleep, he felt how wrinkled the lids had grown. Weren't her wrinkles and his own a sketchy record of their lives together? "Rest well," he said and wished he weren't reminded of another version of the phrase.

  Sandra switched on the balcony light for him and slid the window shut once he'd stepped out of the room. He would have liked her to leave the curtains open, but the light wouldn't help her to sleep. Did he really have to read the book right now? He wasn't even sure that he wanted to know why he felt he did. Perhaps he could glance through just the chapter that discussed the monastery. He sat by the outer wall, beyond which the waves were as slow and regular as sleeping breaths, and leafed through the book until he found the photograph.

  It wasn't by any means recent. This was made plain by the car, presumably belonging to the photographer, that was parked at the end of the road between the trees. Ray guessed t
hat the image was at least as old as himself. Why hadn't Iannis Antonaides taken a photograph of his own or chosen a more recent one? Perhaps the image was meant to illustrate a point, because it did. In the photograph the monastery was no less black than it was now, and the empty windows hinted at the deeper darkness underground, but the blackness grew paler as it spread down the ridge, and the lowest stretch of rock was no more than grey. All the nearest trees—indeed, all the trees in the photograph—were green.

  So it hadn't been a fire that had destroyed them. Whatever had reduced them to their present state had come from the ridge, which was bare of vegetation in the photograph. Could it have become overgrown in the intervening years and then caught fire? Ray would have liked to show someone the picture, but Sandra had turned out the light in their room, and nobody was audible below. Straining to hear seemed to summon the night closer and transform the sound of the sea into rather too large and insistent a succession of breaths, perhaps because he'd realised that the photograph was meant to illustrate the chapter that began over the page, Vampire of Vasilema.

  There came many years ago to the monastery of Agios Titus on the island of Vasilema a traveller from where nobody can tell...

  It would be a legend, obviously. Certainly the prose was meant to sound like one. Ray thought Sandra might be amused and even touched by the author's bid to match style to content in a language not his own, and no doubt the legend would appeal to Doug and Pris—to the teenagers as well. The only one who absolutely mustn't see was William, who might mistake it for the truth.

  There came many years ago to the monastery of Agios Titus on the island of Vasilema a traveller from where nobody can tell. He gave his name Proskynitis, means pilgrim. In all Greece a monastery must take in the pilgrim and those who seek shelter. The monks of Agios Titus offered hospitality for but a single night...

  Perhaps the tale had a moral—that you shouldn't offer only token succour to those in need. It might almost be suitable for William, though Ray would rather the boy read books for fun and in general enjoyed himself without quite so much intervention by his parents—and then Ray saw how the sentence ended.

  The monks of Agios Titus offered hospitality for but a single night, and the night Proskynitis brought them never saw the dawn.

  He was said to tell the abbot he was wandering in search of solitude where to contemplate eternal things. He vowed that on his death he would will riches to his benefactor who gave him what he sought. Some monks said that the monastery was not built to acquire fortune, but Proskynitis assured them that his riches would not be of the world but of eternity. They had put aside worldly matters, but their Vanity was spiritual. So thus he won them to his cause. He became an inmate of the monastery; taking less sustenance than any monk while he fasted as a help to meditation. As well he counselled his brethren against distractions of the world and urged the dark upon them as the most true path to seeing the eternal...

  Ray felt as if the dark was being wished on him as well. The waves on the beach might have been carrying it inland to gather below him, and he could have imagined that it was massing at his side, in the unlit room. He ought to go back to Sandra, but did the book explain why the monastery had gone underground? Perhaps once he knew that, he would be more able to sleep.

  His example won him acceptance to the order, taking the name Brother Skiá, means shadow. He prevailed upon his brethren to help him build a cell deep in the rock, where no distraction of light could reach. Here he followed his ambition to embrace eternity, which is embrace the dark. Why could he not do this in real solitude, far from any man? He was said to have once, but eternity needs life to feed upon or it is only lifeless dark. He that learns secrets of the dark is caught in its embrace. If it brings unending life it fills its vessel with its hunger...

  Ray wasn't sure how much of this he understood or cared to grasp. It didn't seem much like an aid to sleep. He wasn't far from blaming it for an impression that had begun to trouble him—a sense that more than waves were active on the beach. Of course only waves kept suggesting a lithe shape crouched almost on all fours and darting progressively closer to the Sunny View. When he peered at the beach he saw nothing restless apart from the water.

  It was the abbot who invited the dark pilgrim within his door, and now the dark answered his invitation. Now the abbot fed the dark each night Skiá came to him. What promises the dark may whisper none can say who has not heard the dark, but by the day of Agios Titus some numbers of the brethren made their habitation in the depths. Yet Skiá must learn to moderate his thirst for the reason that the victim who dies rises thirsty from the dead to multiply the hunger. But those who feed on others for the vessel of the dark and choose to feed it while they live are rewarded with great age, and the pact may extend to their victims although they have not chosen. The blood is the exchange and the seal, and who may break the pact once it is sealed?...

  As Ray turned the page he felt he was being watched. When he glanced at the window he thought he'd just missed glimpsing someone who had looked out at him. Nobody was visible between the curtains now. He stood up so fast that the plastic chair almost toppled over, and went to the window. Through the meagre gap between the curtains he was able to distinguish that Sandra was asleep, one arm upturned on the thin quilt. No doubt because of his reading, her position reminded him of someone about to give blood. He blamed the book for making him imagine a face at the window as well. He was tempted to abandon the chapter until daylight, but he might as well finish it while Sandra was asleep. He would have that much more time to spend with her once she was awake.

  Who will know what rites were celebrated each night in the chapel? Some who lived near in a village said the wind out of the trees brought a chanting in the language of the dark. Not every brethren made the dark his friend. Some few fled into the forest, but the dark brought them back to feed on, following all which they died and were burned before the hunger waked them. But Skiá's hunger had no bounds, whether being for victims or for knowledge of the dark. Did he seek the deepest blackness for his path to the eternal or for the reason he had become so monstrous none could bear to look upon him? The brethren who fed him dared to bring him no light, and in many years even their use to him was spent. Few travellers came to the monastery now, so the brethren still living must find others to feed...

  Ray had had enough. The chapter was making him absurdly nervous, too aware of the unlit room beside him, too inclined to keep glancing towards it in search of the face he hadn't really glimpsed at all. He'd only seen Sandra alone in bed, and why wasn't he there with her? Suppose she felt lonely even if asleep? The thought made him close the book and drop it on the table like the irrelevance it was. It had nothing to do with either of them, and he didn't know why he'd given it so much of his time. He eased the window open and shut and crept into bed next to Sandra, who gave a sigh so heartfelt he could very well have taken it for a rebuke.

  He'd hardly settled into bed when he heard a sound, though it didn't own up to being much of one. Was it in the room? It couldn't be Sandra, who hadn't moved in his loose embrace, unless her arm had shifted on the quilt. Surely he would have felt that movement too. No, the soft almost insubstantial activity was outside the window, and as he squinted across Sandra's silhouette Ray saw a dim shape at or on the section of the table that was visible between the curtains. In a moment it vanished, moving as fluidly as a wave. It had been a cat, of course, and to begin with he'd heard it leap onto the balcony. Now he wished he'd brought the book in with him.

  Unless he did he mightn't sleep. Suppose the clouds turned to rain? He inched out of bed and padded across the room. He was sliding the window open with as little noise as the visitor had made when his hands jerked, and the window juddered in its frame. The book was nowhere to be seen.

  Had the cat knocked it off the balcony? Ray glanced back at Sandra in case the rattle of the window had disturbed her, but she was lying as she had been, bare arm outstretched. He slid the window wide enou
gh to let him out and hurried to the outer wall, clutching at the rough cold stone while he craned over. He couldn't see the book, either on the balconies below or in the undergrowth alongside them. He kept hold of the wall as he straightened up, fighting a surge of the dizziness that came with age. He was about to look under the table—his senses must be growing even more senile if he'd missed noticing the book was there—when he saw someone on the beach.

  The figure was strolling towards Sunset Beach, practically gliding over the sand not too far from the edge of the glimmering waves. It was performing some action that seemed almost ritualistic, producing pale objects from an item in its hand before shying them into the water. Ray strained his eyes and narrowed them as well, and as the figure dodged with a sinuous motion out of reach of a wave he identified what it was holding—a book, from which it was tearing out pages to crumple them and fling them in the sea.

  "What the devil?" Ray nearly yelled, but clapped a hand over his mouth instead. He knew which book it was, however the man had acquired it—presumably by picking it up once the cat had sent it off the balcony. He'd hushed himself so as not to waken Sandra, but he padded fast into the room and shut the window before grabbing his trunks. A hopping dance that felt as savage as absurd helped him find his way into them—he almost wished William could see him play the inadvertent clown—and he thanked whoever needed thanking that Sandra's sleep was so sound. He clutched his sandals in one hand while he retrieved the key from the slot by the door and let himself out of the apartment. Having eased the door shut, he sat on the steps to don the sandals while a host of flat unblinking eyes watched him from the play area. All the round faces met him with fixed toothy grins as he made a dash for the beach.

  The road was deserted, not even a cat to be seen. The many-legged shadow that guarded the alley stirred as Ray sprinted panting under the lamp. Sand seemed to creep up the alley to meet him, and as it made him skid he bruised a hand against the spiky concrete wall. When he stumbled onto the beach the figure with the book was hundreds of yards away along the shoreline, and even harder to discern against the waves; its scrawny outline looked as unstable as the water. The man must be a reveller from Sunset Beach, quite possibly high on drugs and amused by the notion of destroying a book or else actively hostile to reading. He was still ripping pages out to throw into the sea, where numerous scraps of paper bobbed in his wake.