Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.
There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.
The ghosts of antiquity, he thought, propelling his ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.
Olive trees lined either side of the path beneath him. The last of the tourists straggled down from the hill even as the phantom came in sight of the Propylaea, the ancient gateway with its colonnades of Doric columns to the east and west and the rows of thick, proud Ionic columns on either side of the central stair and corridor, holding up nothing but the sky. Spirits were propelled through the tangible world by force of will alone. This was one of the facts of the new science he had studied ever since he had become a part of it. And yet Dr. Graves slipped more rapidly through the veil of night without even realizing he had quickened. He moved above the Propylaea and then paused abruptly, hanging in the air, staring at the majesty of the Parthenon, the temple built to honor the virgin goddess Athena upon her defeat of Poseidon, with whom she had warred for the patronage of the city.
Perikles himself had initiated the construction of the temple in the fifth century B.C. It had been a Byzantine church, a Latin church, and a Muslim mosque in the centuries that had passed since then. When Graves had last been on the broken, bleached ground atop the Acropolis, the Parthenon had been a terrible sight, never having recovered from an explosion that had destroyed part of the temple when the Venetians laid siege, attempting to wrest control of the city from the Turks. Then that thieving bastard Lord Elgin had stolen so much of the sculptural decoration of the place and shipped it back to London to the British Museum. Leonard Graves had spent time on archaeological digs in Greece, and though it had been more than one hundred years since Elgin’s crime, the mistrust he had found among the Greeks had saddened him. But he could not blame them. That was what happened when an ignorant fool stole national treasures. He ruined it for everyone else.
Some of the sculptures remained, but the place truly was a ghost of its original glory. Even so, he was pleased to discover upon closer inspection, drifting on air currents toward the eight-columned face of the temple, that restoration was under way and appeared to have been going on for decades. Barriers were in place that would keep tourists out. And as he alighted upon the marble stairs and then passed between two of those columns and into the massive central chamber he was surrounded by scaffolding.
He felt he could almost hear the chants of the cult of Athena, could almost see them gathered there around her statue. The dust of history coated everything, both in the physical world and the ethereal one.
"Hello?" he called, standing in the center of the chamber, looking up through the collapsed ceiling at the night sky as the stars began to appear.
The ghosts came like the stars, materializing one by one in the darkness of the temple, between columns and beneath scaffolding. Some floated above him, others crouched on the marble beams around the edges of the chamber. Graves said nothing as they scrutinized him, most of them faceless shades, so long dead that they had forgotten their own images and could no longer form the details of their fleshly appearances. Some were in the helmets and garb of Grecian warriors, others in the robes of priestesses of Athena.
Yet for all of the cultures that had lived and died upon the Acropolis, the ghosts of the Parthenon seemed to number only the most ancient. Only the Greeks. Graves wondered if all of the other ghosts, the Turks and Venetians and the rest, had all been driven out.
At length one of the ghosts drifted toward him. Dr. Graves could not see if it was male or female, for this specter was little more than an upper torso clad in a robe and the rough shape of a human head. It had no face. Neither eyes nor mouth. When it spoke the words seemed to manifest upon the air much like the spirits themselves. Leonard Graves had been dead more than half a century. The ancient dead could not harm him — as far as he knew — and yet he felt a rippling chill pass through him as he heard this voice out of the ancient world.
"You are not welcome here."
The words were in another language, an ancient form of Greek, but such barriers meant little to the dead. Like other ghosts, Dr. Graves could draw the meaning of the words from the ether itself. From the substance of the spiritual realm, a tapestry woven from the souls of humanity throughout the ages.
"I apologize for the intrusion," Graves said quickly, for he had been schooled in many things during his life, diplomacy among them. "I will stay only a moment and then leave you to your peace."
The faceless dead laughed at him. Their spokesman tilted his head to one side, and the words came again, yet now Graves wondered if it was he speaking or if this was the voice of the collective.
"There is no peace here while the world treads upon this ground and admires the temple of Athena as nothing more than a relic. It would be better if it were nothing more than dust. Perhaps then we could move on."
Graves nodded, hoping he projected sympathy. He began to speak again, but was interrupted.
"And you will leave when you are instructed to do so. Or you will never leave. We shall see to that."
Fear rippled through his spectral form again, and Graves bowed his head and began to withdraw. "My apologies again. I merely thought that if the Gorgon had desecrated this temple with her presence, you might tell me."
"Wait."
Dr. Graves forced himself not to smile as he paused and glanced around. The gathered dead drifted closer, some of them emerging from among the columns and forming a tighter circle around him. There was a flicker of identity across the face of the spokesman ghost, but then it was gone.
"What do you intend for Medusa?"
"Medusa?" Graves repeated, mouth dry. So it was true. Not just a Gorgon, but the hideous monster of legend. "Only to stop her from killing anyone else."
There was a susurrus of whispers on the ethereal plane, the voices of dozens, perhaps hundreds of ghosts speaking all at once. He heard them as a single sound, the hushed noise of the wind through a cornfield. Then all at once it ceased.
The faceless spokesman slid closer to him, staring at him with no eyes, speaking to him with no lips.
"She has been here. We sent her away."
Graves nodded. "There are too many people who might see her."
"Fool!" the voice in the ether snapped. The faceless ghosts swirled closer, and Graves shivered with the cold of tombs millennia old. "We would never allow Phorcys’s tainted spawn within these walls. It would be the gravest insult to the goddess."
"Of course," Graves agreed, moving backward toward the entrance. "If only I knew where to find her, I could be sure she would never be able insult the goddess again."
Once more the temple was filled with that ripple of whispers.
"She hides among the dead, those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid."
Clay
was behind the wheel of the car. Squire had to set up a rig to reach the pedals, and they didn’t have time for such foolishness. The goblin sat in the passenger seat, still wearing his silly cap. Clay gripped the steering wheel and drove down Ermou Street, careful at each intersection. The Greek way of handling such things was to honk the horn as one approached a cross-street. Whoever beeped first had the right of way. But if two cars blared their horns simultaneously, an accident was almost inevitable.
They had followed a small map Yannis had given them. It had been simple enough to find the Monastiraki train station, despite the torn up roads. The city seemed dotted with dozens of places where the streets were being improved, and others where they were in terrible disrepair.
"Not far now," Graves said.
Clay glanced in the rearview mirror. The ghost was visible there, manifesting in the backseat. In the darkness of the night, with only the glow from the dashboard and what light came in from the buildings that lined the street, Graves seemed almost solid.
"You can feel it?" Clay asked.
Dr. Graves nodded. "Like a winter storm coming on."
"Yeah, good for you, Casper," Squire muttered, shaking the map in his hand. "That’s great and all but, hello, map?"
The hobgoblin had his booted feet up on the dashboard.Clay shot him a sidelong glare. Squire had his uses, but often the annoyance outweighed them.
"Focus on the task at hand," Clay told him. "We’re going to have to be very quiet. It may go badly for us if we cannot take her by stealth."
"What, I’m not quiet? I’m the fuckin’ soul of quiet."
Clay sighed.
"I doubt the Gorgon’s stare will affect you, Clay. You are infinitely malleable," Dr. Graves said, his voice like a cold breeze in the car.
Clay shuddered.
"I don’t like guessing," the shapeshifter replied. "You’re dead. And Conan Doyle made it clear hobgoblins were immune to certain curses. But I’m not sure in my case, so let’s just take it slowly. And —" he glanced again at Squire "— be quiet."
The hobgoblin grinned. "My middle name."
The cemetery loomed up on their right, and above it a church whose domed roof seemed the color of rust in the moonlight. The Kerameikos was closed, of course, the gates locked. And somewhere inside, among ancient ruins of Greece that few tourists and fewer Athenians ever bothered to visit, among graves and aboveground crypts and crumbling markers, Medusa was supposed to have made her lair.
"Are you certain of this?" Clay asked as he pulled the car to the curb. Dr. Graves’s eyes seemed yellow in the dark. Clay parked and killed the engine, turning around to face the ghost.
"She hides among the dead," the phantom adventurer said. "Those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid. That’s how they told it to me. The corpses of Athenians were buried here for more than a thousand years, as far back as the twelfth century B.C. Nowhere else in the city fills that bill. It’s an ancient place with far less human traffic than anywhere else in Athens."
"A good hiding spot," Squire said, peering through his window. "Nice and homey. Let’s go."
He started to open his door, and Clay grabbed his wrist. Squire twisted around to face him. Clay smiled and pulled the foolish cap from the goblin’s head.
"Quietly," he said. "Graves makes no noise. I’m going in on cat feet. If Medusa hears us coming, it’ll be you who gives us away. Please don’t."
Squire put one hand over his heart. "You wound me, buddy. To the core. And I heard you the first fifty friggin’ times."
The hobgoblin popped his door and stepped out, closing it gently behind him. Clay glanced back at the ghost in the rear seat.
"What do you think?" the shapeshifter asked.
Dr. Graves raised an eyebrow. "I think there’s a reason we’re not all going in together," he said, and then he rose up through the roof of the car, passing right through fabric and metal as though it weren’t there at all.
Clay climbed out, pocketed the keys, took one look around and then he changed. The feeling was not precisely painful, but it was often unpleasant. When he transformed into a creature smaller than himself, it was not as though he was being physically compacted, crushed down to size, but rather as though a part of him was draining away to some other place.
Fur pushed through his skin. His bones popped and reshaped and shrunk. His ears perked up. His rough tongue darted out, and he twitched his whiskers, tail waving behind him. On cat feet, fur the color of copper with a white streak along one ear, Clay darted to the gate of the cemetery and right through grating meant to keep humans out.
Graves was likely already inside, and Squire was nowhere to be seen. Clay assumed he had simply melded with the shadows outside the cemetery and emerged from some dark place within. The cat trotted across the brittle grass among the tombs.
The hunt had begun.
Kerameikos hardly looked like a cemetery at all. The tombs were mostly ancient stone arranged in long, low walls and many of the markers were simple columns. If not for the dead, it might have been an intriguing collection of ancient ruins, something that had crumbled away to nothing but those walls and the patches of grass and bare earth around them. But the names on the markers gave the place away.
Clay twitched his tail and paused on the edge of a low wall, lifting his cat-nose to the night breeze, whiskers twitching. A scent had caught his attention, yet he was certain it was not Medusa’s. Something else was here as well. Watchful, he leaped down from the wall and trotted behind a tree. In addition to ancient stones, the boneyard was filled with trees. Yet they were sparse, nowhere growing close enough to be considered a wood. And though their branches were not bare, there was something about the way they twisted at odd angles, stretching upward, that gave them a skeletal aspect.
The cat darted silently across a scrubby stretch of grass and then paused once more, crouching behind a short stone wall. He sniffed the air, purring in quiet curiosity. His rough tongue tasted the wind. Beyond that low wall was an enormous whitewashed stone monument topped with a marble statue of a bull. In the moonshadow beneath that bull’s heavy belly, Squire appeared, sliding from the deepest dark into the gray night, like a newborn from its mother’s womb.
The hobgoblin clutched the marble legs of the bull and poked his head out from beneath it, surveying as much of the cemetery as he could see from that vantage point. He saw the cat and nodded solemnly toward Clay, then slipped into the moonshadow again and was gone. The entire thing had taken only seconds and been executed with more stealth than Clay would ever have given the hobgoblin credit for. It was not that he had never worked with Squire before, but that the ‘goblin behaved like such a buffoon so often that it was easy to forget how competent he was in the worst situations.
The shapeshifter did not bother searching the sky or the treetops for Dr. Graves. The ghost would have made himself invisible on all spectrums. There was no telling how sensitive Medusa’s senses were.
Beyond the marble bull was a small hill, and Clay discovered a narrow path among shrubs and trees. Claws scratching hardscrabble earth, the cat slipped between two shrubs and made an alternate trail for himself, moving up the hill parallel to the footpath. His ears twitched, and he arched his back, barely able to keep from hissing. Wings fluttered, and several birds burst from a nearby tree. Clay could not be sure if they had become skittish because of his presence, or if something else had spooked them.
A shudder passed through his feline form, and his hackles went up. Something wasn’t right here. Some presence was fouling this place.
The Gorgon. It has to be. If anything else was here, she would have killed it.
At the top of the hill Clay moved beneath the shrubs back onto the main path and paused there. The wind died in that very same moment. No sound reached him save the distant noises of the city around the cemetery. On a broad stretched of hard-baked ground from which more of those skeletal-finger trees reached for the night sky, there were perhaps two dozen
stone crypts spread across the hilltop. They were small, barely larger than an ordinary coffin, and at first glance, it seemed they had been arrayed there with no thought to symmetry, as if a random wind had scattered them across the hill. Clay paused, staring at them, and after a moment realized he had missed the organization of the stone coffins. They formed a rough circle, not unlike the standing stones found all over the United Kingdom.
The lid was off the largest of the crypts. Beside it was a pair of dead rabbits. Clay stepped out of hiding at the top of the path and started to creep toward the circle of stone coffins. As he reached the nearest of them, his ears twitched again and he heard a sound. A wet, slick, sucking sound. And then a crack of bone.
The cat peered around the corner, fur brushing stone, and spied the open crypt with its lid slid off and propped on the ground. The copper scent of blood was in the air, and he saw the red that stained the rabbits’ pelts. As he watched, a handful of tiny bones flew up out of the coffin into the moonlight and landed in the dirt. A low hiss came from within, and something shifted and gleamed in the dark. A serpent slid its head over the stone rim, as though saddened at the discarding of the bones. A second and third followed. Clay froze, unsure if he could be seen but unwilling to make a single motion that might give him away.
The serpents receded, and the sounds of sucking and gnawing began again.
Clay hesitated for a moment. As a shapeshifter he could read living things, could replicate any human, any animal, any creature who ever lived. Almost. He focused for a moment on the horror that lay in hideous repose within that stone coffin gnawing on the bones of rabbits, and he knew with certainty that he could not take that shape. It was a mystery for another day, but he suspected it had to do with her appearance being the result of a curse and not something crafted by the Maker.
The cat slipped from one stone coffin to the next. If he tried to rush across the circle, he might well give himself away. Instead he moved on to the next, and then the next, swift but silent. Within two coffins’ distance, he paused again. There was the crunch of small bones snapping, followed by the most intoxicatingly female sigh he had ever heard. Clay froze. There came the sound of shifting limbs from within that large stone coffin. Still the cat stayed out of sight.
Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) Page 14
