At the upper end of the little hamlet, by the trailhead, they tipped their heads back to see the inland range hanging above. It had been his idea to go up it and explore its interior, part of a larger plan to walk the island from east to west. This day’s march would link together sections done previous seasons, thus completing eastern Crete, an opportunity provided by doctor’s orders, after a second, work-related breakdown.
Old women, bent nearly double and swathed in black, assured them they were on the right way, no guarantee in itself, as Greeks would rather die than admit to ignorance of any subject, no matter how far removed from their normal competence. Enormous cliff faces towered to the east; they had come down from there two years back, an epic struggle to find a disappearing track.
Village noise was soon below them, growing ever more faint and distant, replaced by the always present susurrant wind. The trail, an old respectable Cretan path, wound steadily upwards in large or smaller switches. After an hour’s trudge or more in the expanding sunlight, they stopped on a shoulder, the site of some stronghold of Minoan refugees, driven to the heights after their civilisation had collapsed. While Marline put together a picnic, Martin puttered about on the partially excavated ruins above.
There was not much more to see than dry stone walls, crumbling remnants of some ’20s dig, German or Italian, he did not remember what the guidebook said. The overwhelming vista looked north over the Ægean, with Thera somewhere volcanically looming, invisible in the slight haze, on the horizon distant before him.
Only one thing distinguished the fast decaying ruins from any modern wreckage of local revolution: a flat, carved stone bowl, cut into the living rock, like some small birdbath. Cracked in several places, stains covered one side of the interior.
They ate, and before wrapping up after their little meal, Martin looked out over the scene in front of them, and without preamble, spoke out.
“You know, when I grew up in Rochester, I never felt comfortable with the sky.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there was always something, something about it that never felt quite right. D’you know what I mean?”
“Not really . . .”
“At first I thought it was the colour. Summers were warmer then, or so it seems now. I’d lie back, on the grass of a lawn in July, and stretch out, looking up at the sky. It would be cloudless, and the heavens so deep when I concentrated, I felt I was plunging into them.
“It was then I began to get a strange impression, that the vast inverted bowl I was falling into was somehow wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused, and all was silent but for the wind. “I’m not quite sure how to express it – alien, perhaps?” he continued.
“I thought perhaps it was just the flatness of hue the sky can attain on a clear day in the middle of the year. But with the notion established in my mind – I was only eleven or twelve the first time I conceived it – or rather, made it articulate, since I later realised it was a perception I had had all along, that I was only then putting into words – I came to the conclusion that the feeling was more general.
“It could come upon me other seasons of the year, when the sky had a different colour, under other conditions of time and temperature. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.
“I developed the odd notion that I was born with an instinct of how a proper sky should look, I mean, in the old days people seldom moved from the districts where they were raised. Rooted in the soil, they might just in some way become attuned, after generations, to the look of a certain latitude and longitude, so that any variation in colour of air or position of sun from that imprinted on their bones, would somehow appear odd.”
He paused. “I mean, some animals have iron in their brains, they’ve found out, onboard compasses that always point north, so . . .” His voice trailed off, and they were silent for a lingering moment.
“You’ve never mentioned that before. If you want to know,” she said with a slight smile, “I think it’s all a load of rubbish.” She flicked out playfully with her foot at his leg, as they sat.
He smiled back weakly, and continued: “I began to think so too, especially after I got older, and started travelling about, first locally, then, around the Continent, and further. I suppose I was always, at some unconscious level, thinking that if I found the right spot, the sky would brighten, things would look up, and all would be right in God’s world.”
She gave him a friendly smirk, hearing that, but he did not react.
“Y’know, at one point the whole idea came back to me, and I started to think, what if we really came from somewhere else, even from off the planet? A spaceship crashes here eons ago, seeds the place with its offspring – it would explain our exceptional place in the world.”
“But DNA.”
“Right you are, dead on. Common kinship. Once the implications of that discovery had percolated through my thick skull, I abandoned the idea. We’re here where we began, all right.”
They set about packing the remains of their picnic lunch; he wrapped the water bottle in towelling to keep it cool, while she cleaned the knife and stowed the food in her sack. Gear ready, they hoisted their packs, and stood a moment in the boiling sun, adjusting their straps and buckles.
Martin rested on his walking stick, a katsouni, store-bought, but being made of rare local wood, some protected dwarf elm that grew here and there in the high mountains, a great conversation starter in the rural districts.
“It has to do with a feeling, more than anything else, a feeling of not belonging here at all. As if . . .”
“What?”
“As if I were some kind of object, something hurled here unwittingly, against its will, like that German philosopher used to claim. To a place not my true home.”
“Oh.”
Martin did not dare mention or even hint at the experience of the night before – that, during their making love, alienation had triggered this memory of an old idea, up to now all but half-forgotten.
They started up the hill.
They reached, an hour or two later, the upper verge of the cliff, a flat ridge separating two peaks. Stalky anisette plants, tall invaders from another dimension, stood all around. Martin and Marline stopped to rest and admire the tremendous view before them.
The sea was far below; ahead lay a vast bowl, surrounded by bare and rugged peaks. The depression was partly cultivated, and they could see a few tiny dark-clad figures taking in the harvest, and few more working the vines. A dirt track threaded through it.
Martin gave Marline a hug, spontaneously, and it felt like he was hugging the air.
The trail descended into the sere arena below, desiccate but for the few irrigated plots chequering its innermost concavities. Small lizards scurried off the path. Marline and Martin headed down, pointing themselves towards the biggest of the summer houses, a massive white-washed affair with a shaded porch.
There were huge rust-coloured plastic barrels with black lids in the shadows; commonly used for storing wine, these gave promise of a kafenion. This hope was bolstered by a few rucksacks, obviously alien, resting above the steps, the bright colours an evidence of foreign wanderers or customers nearby. A peasant woman, middle-aged, in black with a grubby grey apron, walked out from inside, her cheap plastic flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor of the patio. She smiled pleasantly, shaking her head from side to side, the Balkan gesture of query. A trace of concern was in her eyes.
“Xeni. Katse, katse,” she insisted.
Thus invited, the couple seated themselves on a couple of rundown chairs with worn-through wicker seats.
“Nero thelete?”
Martin nodded, and the woman shuffled off to get water, and glasses. While she was inside, Martin looked at the nearby packs leaning on a pillar, and recognised a German marque.
The woman came out again, bearing a tray loaded with pumpkin seeds and shelled hazelnuts, a few garishly wrapped boiled sweet
s mixed in. Two glasses filled with water completed the ensemble.
They were careful to toast the woman’s health in Greek, before swallowing the cool water. There followed the inevitable questions: Where do you come from? What work do you do? Why are you here? Have you any children? followed by clucks of sympathy at the answer “none”.
It was a formula, probably being repeated dozens of times that same moment across the island, wherever tourists and Greeks were meeting for the first time. Were a man the interrogator, topics would have drifted over to money earned, and yearly wages. A delicate little probing, performed with overt politeness, with always the undercurrent of gaining information, reaping some advantage; the pull, the tug, with little exception always towards: how is this one useful to me?
Her questions tapered off once it was established that the couple were ordinary people doing the familiar if incomprehensible act of travel for its own sake. Martin then took his opportunity, with his kitchen Greek.
No, there was no kafenion. No place to overnight. The mountain over there was Effendis Christos. The people here were all from the village below, and were up to tend their summer gardens and trees; they would go down in the evening. Yes, there were other strangers here, Germans, up on the mountain.
Marline, with better eyes, saw them first. A red spot, a yellow, and two blues – chemical colours of the jackets or jerseys, up near the summit, stretched out along a fairly vertiginous route.
They’ve been up there all day, the woman said.
At which point, as if to confirm her statement, the sounds of a distant yodel echoed from far up the hill. Fun, up on the rocks, Martin thought.
At length, having questioned the woman about the track to the next village, the two set off again, early evening approaching. They went uphill through the dry landscape, east, sun to their backs, up a low pass, then up to another and finally a third, the watershed. No one had been by, and the enveloping silence was profound.
They could see down, back to the brink crossed hours before, at the foot of the northern massif. On either side of the dusty way where they stood, two ranges, here close, ran parallel. To the right, the flat ridgeline of Effendis now sat low, a hundred metres above them. The road had climbed up almost level with the long spine of the peak; it would be an easy walk to the top from here.
Like a shadow-show, Martin thought, and he felt somehow cheated realising that what was so difficult from the one side, could be done so easily from the other. This brought to mind the automata of Descartes, gliding down the streets in cavalier cloaks hiding clockwork, indistinguishable from passersby.
“They are the passersby,” Martin said aloud.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, just a thought about the mountain.”
Marline laughed, her voice echoing with a strange tinny tone.
“Effendis Christos – Jesus! They’re probably all Turks here!” she giggled.
“She didn’t even know the word is from her neighbours to the east, or is it maybe cousins?”
Still laughing, Marline suggested setting up camp. If they went on down a few minutes more, they could still see both ways, but would be shielded from the eyes of any loitering villagers behind them. The deep empty valley, next morning’s walk, opened out long ahead before turning right; beyond, they could see a fair stretch of the south coast.
Going a few metres off the rutted track that now ran over patches of bare rock, they unfurled their sleeping mats and bags. Cooking up a brew on a small gas stove, they drank it with bread and cheese, sitting wordlessly on the inflated cushions.
The view was extraordinarily clear, with every object sharp and definite in the limpid air. Objects that must have been miles off seemed close enough to touch. Shadows were being magnified and thrown vast distances. Clarity imagined, but seldom seen.
Martin felt a gnawing unease, but unable to find words to express it, remained silent.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just – I can’t say it.”
Another long pause, and then Martin said, “It’s really nothing,” and felt his eyes for no reason suddenly fill with tears. Standing up quickly, so Marline would not see, he turned to face the way they had come.
“I’m going up back a little bit,” he said to her. “I just want to see how long the shadows actually are.” She did not reply, so he began to slowly move through the low bushes, sole cover to the treeless earth, through the infinite symphonic tones of yellows and browns and black-greens that reeked of spice and animal excreta. The sky was absolutely cloudless.
Some paces uphill, back on the unmetalled track, he turned to look. The north slopes of Effendis to the right were now in shadow, but every object in the imperfect dark was still visible. He could almost hear the rocks, dusty purple in the shade, crack as they started to cool from the day’s impartible heat.
The rest of the hills, ahead and to the left, and the valley between, were filled with light that tore the heart, obsidian sharp, crystalline, clear. Marline, small and distant below, had packed the few pieces of mess gear, and was now smoking a cigarette, seated arms around her knees, looking the same direction as Martin, setting sun to their backs.
And then he saw the shadow, his own. At first he was not sure, until he moved, and the shadow moved with him. It was enormous, occluding acres of hillside below the horizon up to the valley’s end, beyond, miles away. He felt dizzy, and to steady himself, turned round and stumbled further up, hugging himself with his arms, gulping great breaths, gasping after air.
Coming to a halt, he slowly turned again.
His shadow, since he was higher, had of course moved upward with him. In the flat light, it was now taller than the lofty ridgeline of the farthest range, and covered a reasonably large part of the sky above, darkening the air, which still remained transparent.
Stunned, Martin slowly lifted an arm, and its umbra eclipsed the blue, almost to the zenith.
He began to hyperventilate sharply, and with vertigo and nausea washing over him, panic took hold. He ran down to his wife, stumbling once, falling, cutting open a pant leg at the knee, so he bled, but paid no heed.
She was waiting, with her arms stretched wide, waiting to catch him, to enfold him. He wept, eyes closed, as she held him, crooning, soothing her lost child.
“Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong, you’re here, with me, there now . . .” she said.
“But you saw it, didn’t you?” he repeated over and over again, without her any reply, only the soft caress. Eventually, shaking still, he left her embrace, and stood up.
The shadows were gone now, the sun down at last behind them. At the spot where the world had turned to the dimensions of a shoe box minutes before, the sky was evenly shaded.
It must be my eyes, he thought, the macular degeneration, those spots that float across. He saw one now, thread-like in the air before him, and blinked to make it go away. When he opened his eyes, the hanging string, like a piece of thick shimmering cord, was larger, wriggling in front of him, a dark blue transparent plastic worm vibrating at an impossible rate. He blinked furiously; with each blink, the writhing blue rope gained in definition, and his breathing stopped.
Speechless, mouth hanging open in supplication, he looked back at Marline. But it was no longer her, but the grinning thrust-jawed demon of the night before who looked back at him. Teeth gleaming, this creature shook her head in quick small jerks from side to side, like someone palsied, and small, brilliant blade-like rays of green and blue outlined her silhouette, streaming off her.
Despairing, Martin turned round a last time, and faced the now motionless protuberance. Its hue, he noted on the abstract, complemented, but did not match, that of the air. He heard Yes, yes, come from behind him, but he did not know whose voice.
Reaching out, using his nails, he worried the limp thing loose, except for one solidly emplaced end, embedded in the air.
With a firm grip and a single wrap around his fist, using great force, he
jerked the cool and wet object straight down, ripping open – to the applause of his wife behind him, with the satisfying roar of torn canvas and rock-broken waves in his ears – the mountains to their root, and the sky, the traitor sky he always knew was wrong.
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Houses Under the Sea
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN IS A FOUR-TIME recipient of the International Horror Guild Award and a World Fantasy Award finalist.
Her novels include Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels and Daughter of Hounds, and her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Alabaster and To Charles Fort With Love. She is currently working on her next novel, Joey LaFaye, and a collection of science-fiction stories, both of which will be released in 2008. The author lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her partner, doll-maker Kathyrn Pollnac.
“ ‘Houses Under the Sea’ was written in February and March 2004, and was only my third attempt to write a short story as a first-person narrative,” Kiernan reveals. “For many years, I’d avoided fp, for a number of reasons, some perfectly valid and some admittedly questionable. But beginning with ‘Riding the White Bull’ and The Dry Salvages in 2003, I finally became intrigued enough with its possibilities that I began to experiment.
“When I finished ‘Houses Under the Sea’ on March 5th, I was still somewhat sceptical, though, as evidenced by this comment from my online journal entry from March 6th regarding the difficulty I was having finding a title for the piece: ‘If I had my druthers, it would have no title at all. In most cases, giving titles to first-person narratives only compounds the problems of disbelief. Not only am I to believe that Character X sat down and wrote this story for me to read, I’m to believe that she gave it a title.
“ ‘And if she didn’t, then who did? The author? No, Character X is the “author”; to believe otherwise defeats the illusion.’ Finally, I took a line from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ for the title, as it seemed appropriate and the poem had served as one of the story’s central inspirations.”
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