The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  It was an oversized book in a slipcase: the classic edition of The Thera Frescoes, by Nicholas Spirotiadis, a volume that had been expensive when first published, twenty years earlier. Now it must be worth a fortune, with its glossy thick photographic paper and foldout pages depicting the larger murals. The slipcase art was a detail from the site’s most famous image, the painting known as “The Saffron Gatherers.” It showed the profile of a beautiful young woman dressed in elaborately-patterned tiered skirt and blouse, her head shaven save for a serpentine coil of dark hair, her brow tattooed. She wore hoop earrings and bracelets, two on her right hand, one on her left. Bell-like tassels hung from her sleeves. She was plucking the stigma from a crocus blossom. Her fingernails were painted red.

  Suzanne had seen the original painting a decade ago, when it was easier for American researchers to gain access to the restored ruins and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. After two years of paperwork and bureaucratic wheedling, she had just received permission to return.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. It still took her breath away, how modern the girl looked, not just her clothes and jewelry and body art but her expression, lips parted, her gaze at once imploring and vacant: the 15-year-old who had inherited the earth,

  “Well, don’t drop it in the tub.” Randall leaned over to kiss her head. “That was the only copy I could find on the net. It’s become a very scarce book.”

  “Of course,” said Suzanne, and smiled.

  “Claude is going to meet us for dinner. But not till seven. Come here—”

  They lay in the dark room. His skin tasted of salt and bitter lemon; his hair against her thighs felt warm, liquid. She shut her eyes and imagined him beside her, his long limbs and rueful mouth; opened her eyes and there he was, now, sleeping. She held her hand above his chest and felt heat radiating from him, a scent like honey. She began to cry silently.

  His hands. That big rumpled bed. In two days she would be gone, the room would be cleaned. There would be nothing to show she had ever been here at all.

  They drove to an Afghan restaurant in North Beach. Randall’s car was older, a second-generation hybrid; even with the grants and tax breaks, a far more expensive vehicle than she or anyone she knew back east could ever afford. She had never gotten used to how quiet it was.

  Outside, the sidewalks were filled with people, the early evening light silvery-blue and gold, like a sun shower. Couples arm-in-arm, children, groups of students waving their hands as they spoke on their cell phones, a skateboarder hustling to keep up with a pack of parkeurs.

  “Everyone just seems so much more absorbed here,” she said. Even the panhandlers were antic.

  “It’s the light. It makes everyone happy. Also the drugs they put in our drinking water.” She laughed, and he put his arm around her.

  Claude was sitting in the restaurant when they arrived. He was a poet who had gained notoriety and then prominence in the late 1980s with the “Hyacinthus Elegies,” his response to the AIDS epidemic. Randall first interviewed him after Claude received his MacArthur Fellowship. They subsequently became good friends. On the wall of his flat, Randall had a handwritten copy of the second elegy, with one of the poet’s signature drawings of a hyacinth at the bottom.

  “Suzanne!” He jumped up to embrace her, shook hands with Randall then beckoned them both to sit. “I ordered some wine. A good cab I heard about from someone at the gym.”

  Suzanne adored Claude. The day before she left for Seattle, he’d sent flowers to her, a half-dozen delicate narcissus serotinus, with long white narrow petals and tiny yellow throats. Their sweet scent perfumed her entire small house. She’d emailed him profuse but also wistful thanks – they were such an extravagance, and so lovely; and she had to leave before she could enjoy them fully. He was a few years younger than she was, thin and muscular, his face and skull hairless save for a wispy black beard. He had lost his eyebrows during a round of chemo and had feathery lines, like antenna, tattooed in their place and threaded with gold beads. His chest and arms were heavily tattooed with stylized flowers, dolphins, octopi, the same iconography Suzanne had seen in Akrotiri and Crete; and also with the names of lovers and friends and colleagues who had died. Along the inside of his arms you could still see the stippled marks left by hypodermic needles – they looked like tiny black beads worked into the pattern of waves and swallows – and the faint white traces of an adolescent suicide attempt. His expression was gentle and melancholy, the face of a tired ascetic, or a benign Antonin Artaud.

  “I should have brought the book!” Suzanne sat beside him, shaking her head in dismay. “This beautiful book that Randall gave me – Spirotiadis’ Thera book?”

  “No! I’ve heard of it, I could never find it. Is it wonderful?”

  “It’s gorgeous. You would love it, Claude.”

  They ate, and spoke of his collected poetry, forthcoming next winter; of Suzanne’s trip to Akrotiri. Of Randall’s next interview, with a woman on the House Committee on Bioethics who was rumored to be sympathetic to the pro-cloning lobby, but only in cases involving “only” children – no siblings, no twins or multiples – who died before age fourteen.

  “Grim,” said Claude. He shook his head and reached for the second bottle of wine. “I can’t imagine it. Even pets . . .”

  He shuddered, then turned to rest a hand on Suzanne’s shoulder. “So: back to Santorini. Are you excited?”

  “I am. Just seeing that book, it made me excited again. It’s such an incredible place – you’re there, and you think, What could this have been? If it had survived, if it all hadn’t just gone bam, like that—”

  “Well, then it would really have gone,” said Randall. “I mean, it would have been lost. There would have been no volcanic ash to preserve it. All your paintings, we would never have known them. Just like we don’t know anything else from back then.”

  “We know some things,” said Suzanne. She tried not to sound annoyed – there was a lot of wine, and she was jet-lagged. “Plato. Homer . . .”

  “Oh, them,” said Claude, and they all laughed. “But he’s right. It would all have turned to dust by now. All rotted away. All one with Baby Jesus, or Baby Zeus. Everything you love would be buried under a Tradewinds Resort. Or it would be like Athens, which would be even worse.”

  “Would it?” She sipped her wine. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what it would have become. This—”

  She gestured at the room, the couple sitting beneath twinkling rose-colored lights, playing with a digital toy that left little chattering faces in the air as the woman switched it on and off. Outside, dusk and neon. “It might have become like this. “

  “This.” Randall leaned back in his chair, staring at her. “Is this so wonderful?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, staring back at him, the two of them unsmiling. “This is all a miracle.”

  He excused himself. Claude refilled his glass and turned back to Suzanne. “So. How are things?”

  “With Randall?” She sighed. “It’s good. I dunno. Maybe it’s great. Tomorrow – we’re going to look at houses.”

  Claude raised a tattooed eyebrow. “Really?”

  She nodded. Randall had been looking at houses for three years now, ever since the divorce.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Maybe this will be the charm. How hard can it be to buy a house?”

  “In San Francisco? Doll, it’s easier to win the stem cell lottery. But yes, Randall is a very discerning buyer. He’s the last of the true idealists. He’s looking for the eidos of the house. Plato’s eidos; not Socrates’,” he added. “Is this the first time you’ve gone looking with him?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well. Maybe that is great,” he said. “Or not. Would you move out here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If he had a house. Probably not.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m looking for the eidos of something else. Out here, it’s just too . . .”


  She opened her hands as though catching rain. Claude looked at her quizzically.

  “Too sunny?” he said. “Too warm? Too beautiful?”

  “I suppose. The land of the lotus-eaters. I love knowing it’s here, but.” She drank more wine. “Maybe if I had more job security.”

  “You’re a writer. It’s against Nature for you to have job security.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. What about you? You don’t ever worry about that?”

  He gave her his sweet sad smile and shook his head. “Never. The world will always need poets. We’re like the lilies of the field.”

  “What about journalists?” Randall appeared behind them, slipping his cell phone back into his pocket. “What are we?”

  “Quackgrass,” said Claude.

  “Cactus,” said Suzanne.

  “Oh, gee. I get it,” said Randall. “Because we’re all hard and spiny and no one loves us.”

  “Because you only bloom once a year,” said Suzanne.

  “When it rains,” added Claude.

  “That was my realtor.” Randall sat and downed the rest of his wine. “Sunday’s open house day. Two o’clock till four. Suzanne, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

  He gestured for the waiter. Suzanne leaned over to kiss Claude’s cheek.

  “When do you leave for Hydra?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” She looked crestfallen. “That’s so soon!”

  “The beautiful life was brief,’ ” said Claude, and laughed. “You’re only here till Monday. I have a reservation on the ferry from Piraeus, I couldn’t change it.”

  “How long will you be there? I’ll be in Athens Tuesday after next, then I go to Akrotiri.”

  Claude smiled. “That might work. Here—”

  He copied out a phone number in his careful, calligraphic hand. “This is Zali’s number on Hydra. A cell phone, I have no idea if it will even work. But I’ll see you soon. Like you said—”

  He lifted his thin hands and gestured at the room around them, his dark eyes wide. “This is a miracle.”

  Randall paid the check and they turned to go. At the door, Claude hugged Suzanne. “Don’t miss your plane,” he said.

  “Don’t wind her up!” said Randall.

  “Don’t miss yours,” said Suzanne. Her eyes filled with tears as she pressed her face against Claude’s. “It was so good to see you. If I miss you, have a wonderful time in Hydra.”

  “Oh, I will,” said Claude. “I always do.”

  Randall dropped her off at her hotel. She knew better than to ask him to stay; besides, she was tired, and the wine was starting to give her a headache.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Nine o’clock. A leisurely breakfast, and then . . .”

  He leaned over to open her door, then kissed her. “The exciting new world of California real estate.”

  Outside, the evening had grown cool, but the hotel room still felt close: it smelled of sex, and the sweetish dusty scent of old books. She opened the window by the airshaft and went to take a shower. Afterwards she got into bed, but found herself unable to sleep.

  The wine, she thought; always a mistake. She considered taking one of the anti-anxiety drugs she carried for flying, but decided against it. Instead she picked up the book Randall had given her.

  She knew all the images, from other books and websites, and the island itself. Nearly four thousand years ago, now; much of it might have been built yesterday. Beneath fifteen feet of volcanic ash and pumice, homes with ocean views and indoor plumbing, pipes that might have channeled steam from underground vents fed by the volcano the city was built upon. Fragments of glass that might have been windows, or lenses. The great pithoi that still held food when they were opened millennia later. Great containers of honey for trade, for embalming the Egyptian dead. Yellow grains of pollen. Wine.

  But no human remains. No bones, no grimacing tormented figures as were found beneath the sand at Herculaneum, where the fishermen had fled and died. Not even animal remains, save for the charred vertebrae of a single donkey. They had all known to leave. And when they did, their city was not abandoned in frantic haste or fear. All was orderly, the pithoi still sealed, no metal utensils or weapons strewn upon the floor, no bolts of silk or linen; no jewelry.

  Only the paintings, and they were everywhere; so lovely and beautifully wrought that at first the excavators thought they had uncovered a temple complex.

  But they weren’t temples: they were homes. Someone had paid an artist, or teams of artists, to paint frescoes on the walls of room after room after room. Sea daffodils, swallows; dolphins and pleasure boats, the boats themselves decorated with more dolphins and flying seabirds, golden nautilus on their prows. Wreaths of flowers. A shipwreck. Always you saw the same colors, ochre-yellow and ferrous red; a pigment made by grinding glaucophane, a vitreous mineral that produced a grey-blue shimmer; a bright pure French blue. But of course it wasn’t French blue but Egyptian blue – Pompeiian blue – one of the earliest pigments, used for thousands of years; you made it by combining a calcium compound with ground malachite and quartz, then heating it to extreme temperatures.

  But no green. It was a blue and gold and red world. Not even the plants were green.

  Otherwise, the paintings were so alive that, when she’d first seen them, she half-expected her finger would be wet if she touched them. The eyes of the boys who played at boxing were children’s eyes. The antelopes had the mad topaz glare of wild goats. The monkeys had blue fur and looked like dancing cats. There were people walking in the streets. You could see what their houses looked like, red brick and yellow shutters.

  She turned towards the back of the book, to the section on Xeste 3. It was the most famous building at the site. It contained the most famous paintings – the woman known as the “Mistress of Animals.” “The Adorants,” who appeared to be striding down a fashion runway. “The Lustral Basin.”

  The saffron gatherers.

  She gazed at the image from the East Wall of Room Three, two women harvesting the stigma of the crocus blossoms. The flowers were like stylized yellow fireworks, growing from the rocks and also appearing in a repetitive motif on the wall above the figures, like the fleur-de-lis patterns on wallpaper. The fragments of painted plaster had been meticulously restored; there was no attempt to fill in what was missing, as had been done at Knossos under Sir Arthur Evans’ supervision to sometimes cartoonish effect.

  None of that had not been necessary here. The fresco was nearly intact. You could see how the older woman’s eyebrow was slightly raised, with annoyance or perhaps just impatience, and count the number of stigmata the younger acolyte held in her outstretched palm.

  How long would it have taken for them to fill those baskets? The crocuses bloomed only in autumn, and each small blossom contained just three tiny crimson threads, the female stigmata. It might take 100,000 flowers to produce a half-pound of the spice.

  And what did they use the spice for? Cooking; painting; a pigment they traded to the Egyptians for dyeing mummy bandages.

  She closed the book. She could hear distant sirens, and a soft hum from the ceiling fan. Tomorrow they would look at houses.

  For breakfast they went to the Embarcadero, the huge indoor market inside the restored ferry building that had been damaged over a century before, in the 1906 earthquake. There was a shop with nothing but olive oil and infused vinegars; another that sold only mushrooms, great woven panniers and baskets filled with tree-ears, portobellos, fungus that looked like orange coral; black morels and matsutake and golden chanterelles.

  They stuck with coffee and sweet rolls, and ate outside on a bench looking over the Bay. A man threw sticks into the water for a pair of black labs; another man swam along the embankment. The sunlight was strong and clear as gin, and nearly as potent: it made Suzanne feel lightheaded and slightly drowsy, even though she had just gotten up.

  “Now,” said Randall. He took out the newspaper, opened it to the real estate
section, and handed it to her. He had circled eight listings. “The first two are in Oakland; then we’ll hit Berkeley and Kensington. You ready?”

  They drove in heavy traffic across the Oakland-Bay bridge. To either side, bronze water that looked as though it would be too hot to swim in; before them the Oakland Hills, where the houses were ranged in undulating lines like waves. Once in the city they began to climb in and out of pocket neighborhoods poised between the arid and the tropic. Bungalows nearly hidden beneath overhanging trees suddenly yielded to bright white stucco houses flanked by aloes and agaves. It looked at once wildly fanciful and comfortable, as though all urban planning had been left to Dr Seuss.

  “They do something here called ‘staging’,” said Randall as they pulled behind a line of parked cars on a hillside. A phalanx of realtors’ signs rose from a grassy mound beside them. “Homeowners pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a decorator to come in and tart up their houses with rented furniture and art and stuff. So, you know, it looks like it’s worth three million dollars.”

  They walked to the first house, a Craftsman bungalow tucked behind trees like prehistoric ferns. There was a fountain outside, filled with koi that stared up with engorged silvery eyes. Inside, exposed beams and dark hardwood floors so glossy they looked covered with maple syrup. There was a grand piano, and large framed posters from Parisian cafés – Suzanne was to note a lot of these as the afternoon wore on – and much heavy dark Mediterranean-style furniture, as well as a few early Mission pieces that might have been genuine. The kitchen floors were tiled. In the master bath, there were mosaics in the sink and sunken tub.

  Randall barely glanced at these. He made a beeline for the deck. After wandering around for a few minutes, Suzanne followed him.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Below, terraced gardens gave way to stepped hillsides, and then the city proper, and then the gilded expanse of San Francisco Bay, with sailboats like swans moving slowly beneath the bridge.

  “For four million dollars, it better be,” said Randall.