Skein Island

by Aliya Whiteley

  Friedrich made no moral judgements, had no feigned superiority. I admired his tall, straight, thin body, deeply tanned, giving him a swarthy appearance that, combined with his rather large nose, could have led to suspicions of Jewishness in his home country if he had not been related to royalty. He had a deep interest in the Occult, and had spent time with Aleister Crowley and his cronies (a man I never could stand, either in polite conversation or in the bedroom), but Crowley was being kept busy at the time with MI6’s ridiculous notions of using astrology in interrogation techniques, and so I had Friedrich all to myself. He really was the most wonderful companion for me at that time in my life. We shared similar passions, including archaeology, tasting of exotic cultures and foods, poetry – he presented me with a beautiful edition of Homer’s Odyssey, on the understanding that only he should read from it to me.

  I do believe I would have married him, although I had sworn against it. Neither of us was new to love, and I had certainly come to view it as an emotion born either of convenience or desperation. His presence was teaching me otherwise, until we arrived on Crete.

  We had the intention of finding the Throne of Zeus on that war-torn island. Hitler had expressed an interest, and Friedrich made him vague promises in order to guarantee safe conduct through Crete, by then under Nazi rule, along with a ‘protection unit’ of thirty men. I am aware that the popular version of events places me on the island before war came to it. This is not the case; I arrived to dig for the Throne at Hitler’s behest. You may find this reprehensible and to that I can only repeat my earlier sentiment – back then I failed to see why I should be asked to be more morally upstanding than others on the basis of my personal fortune. If it eases the sting, I could tell you that I had no intentions of giving Hitler the Throne, if I had found it. I would have kept it for myself, as I have done with all my treasures. But we never did find it. We found something much more interesting.

  There are a number of caves in Crete, but Pythagoras had described seeing the Throne, a vast construction of ivory and gold, at Zeus’ birthplace, and only two caves laid claim to that particular honour – the Dikteon Cave and the Ideon Cave. We started at the Dikteon, our first choice; vast stalactites and stalagmites greeted us, and an eerie, pervading humidity that dampened the clothes and the spirits in minutes. After two weeks in its depths with nothing to show, we moved onto the Ideon, without much hope of success.

  Mount Ida, upon which the Ideon Cave was situated, was deserted, apart from the few remaining women in a local village. There were no men to be found; we assumed they were hiding in the mountains, as part of the local resistance, but we were never threatened directly. The women tried desperately to get us to leave, telling us it wasn’t safe. They spoke of horrors in the mountains, a monster that incited men to madness. Friedrich started to write down their stories in a black notebook he kept about his person at all times. I thought at first he was horrified, trying to make sense of such savage myths, but he took to reading the book at night, by the light of the lamp in the thin canvas tent we shared, before we made love. His body was gentle as ever but his mind was elsewhere, on a battlefield of its own making, rejoicing in blood and death. He was by no means alone. Half of the men assigned to protect us vanished during our ascent of Mount Ida. We thought we heard them shouting on the wind, from far above us, in the following days. Their words were unintelligible.

  Ideon Andron, or the Cave of the Shepherdess, as the locals called it, was not a challenging cave. The large opening, a great ragged hole torn into the rock, led down into a grand space, with crenellated formations running along its sides like liquid. The ground was easy to walk upon, in the main, and there was a sense of peaceful hospitality to the interior. I did not feel that sense of dread that sometimes pervades these places deep under the earth. I felt quite certain that the Throne of Zeus was not to be found there; there was no residue of power, of greatness, in the rock.

  The main chamber led into a series of smaller ones, just as benign, making an easy path into the mountain. I felt nothing – I have always put great store in my natural instincts when it comes to archaeology – but Friedrich seemed certain we were on the brink of a major discovery. He claimed to see colours in the rock face leading him, and he found a tunnel, barely big enough to squeeze through. His excited voice floated back to me as he emerged into a previously undiscovered chamber, describing a lake of such natural beauty, filled with red, blue, yellow and green gems, embedded into the walls. Of course, I followed him down – and found nothing of any import. The utter blackness of the chamber fought to overwhelm the flickering light of Friedrich’s dynamo torch.

  It was possible to make out a small pool into which water trickled from the smooth sides of the natural cavern. Dampness pervaded the rock, lowering the temperature, making my skin clammy. A sense of deep unease, of trespass, overtook me. I am afraid of nothing, but the memory of the feeling that conquered me then still makes my stomach clench. I knew I should not be there, but Friedrich and the men that followed me in did not share my emotion, and I could not explain it to them.

  I begged Friedrich to come with me, out of that chamber, but he did not see me, or hear me. He talked only of the colours, of the wondrous beauty he beheld. He, and the eight men remaining in our party, were in paroxysms of delight. They stripped off and plunged into the pool, although it must have been icy. Their whoops and howls, animalistic, followed me as I crawled away, back through the tunnel, and returned to our tent to wait.

  I read from my Homer for a while, wishing for Friedrich to return and speak to me of those great journeys. Then I slept, and when I awoke it seemed to me all sense of time had been lost; day, night, hours, minutes, meant nothing. I lay still and listened to the men screaming.

  Fear cuts through us, and divides humanity into two sides: those who are paralysed by the terror they feel, and those who must act. I could not have stayed in that tent any more than I could have run away. I had to know, no matter if it cost me my sanity, my life, what was happening in that final cavern. I squeezed into the tunnel, and climbed through utter blackness, too terrified to use a torch, every inch taking an eternity.

  A faint light beckoned me onwards, no more than a pinkish haze. As I grew closer it intensified into a red miasmic glow that threw grotesque shadows on the walls. As I moved into the mouth of the tunnel and looked upon a vivid, terrible tableau, I could make sense of only the smallest details: the spray of blood on the lantern, suspended above the pool; the gore that fell from it in slowed time, each droplet like the tick of a metronome to which played the music of madness; a man up to his chest in the water, beneath the flow of blood, his head flung back to catch it in his mouth. He brought his hands to his eyes and groped for the meat of his eye balls, clawing them out of their sockets and smashing them together, then rubbing the pulped remains over his cheeks as if lathering soap for a bath. I saw a group of men wrestling, grunting, writhing in a heap, biting each other, attempting to rip out throats, dismember, pull apart whatever they could find, to leave gouged, lumpen corpses.

  And Friedrich – that naked, beautiful body of his, thin and straight and golden in that bloodied light – was locked in a standing embrace with a woman I had never seen before, spilling his essence into her with intense concentration, as she sunk her fingers into his chest, broke his ribs with such ease and reached beyond, taking his lungs and pulling them out, stretching them, so that they formed great veined and patterned wings, undulating in the air, spreading out from his coupling like a butterfly on the brink of first, trembling flight.

  He came to fulfilment, an expression of blind delight I recognised, and then dropped to his knees and fell backwards. The wings fell with him, splattering the rocks and earth. His head moved; he lived, for a time.

  I moved forward, intent on running to him, but the woman—the woman—

  She looked at me.

  She was very young, no more than sixteen, an Aphrodite with limpid eyes and a mass of long white hair that flo
wed over her thighs. With Friedrich’s blood glistening on her, she held out her hands to me, and I thought it was not a summons so much as a supplication. Did she ask for help? I shook my head, crouched low; my instinct for survival held me close. I felt the power of her, and yet she wore the expression of an innocent, even as the men screamed around her and ripped each other to pieces in her presence.

  And then she changed. As I watched, she aged, to a woman in her thirties, a fuller body, plumping out into fecundity before my eyes, her breasts heavy, the line of her chin thickening. Her attention did not waver from me as she clapped her hands together, once, twice, three times, and the sound, like thunder, reverberated in the cave, so loud, so loud, that the remaining mutilated men dropped to their knees and covered their ears with their hands.

  She lifted her eyebrows at me, as if to say: You see how it is? And she smiled. There was such boredom in that smile, a terrible, tired, mirthless expression. This meant nothing to her. Friedrich meant nothing. My fear underwent a sudden transformation into rage, vast and overwhelming.

  I found myself shouting at her, shouting Friedrich’s name, what she had taken away from me, the things we had done, the love we had shared. I wanted his meaning restored to him. I came out of the tunnel and stood tall, not caring to survive in a world in which someone so fine could have been used as a momentary indulgence and then destroyed. I told the monster of that mountain – this is love. This is suffering, and this is life. This is a tale worth telling.

  And she listened.

  The men died in quiet groans, taking their time, and she listened to me with the intense eyes of a starving child. I talked on, my tongue freed by my terror, and I told her of the world outside, of the war, and before then, the men I had known and the beautiful items I had found in the earth and brought home to the quiet chill of England in autumn. I talked until my throat was hoarse, and my breath came in gasps, and still she listened. She never moved. The last man sounded his death rattle and she did not move, although she seemed smaller to me, her expression hardening, hardening, until I realised she was no longer flesh, but a statue, encrusted in my stories.

  I stopped speaking, ran my swollen tongue over my lips, felt the desert dryness of my throat. The light from the suspended lantern had turned a pure, clear, yellow, and the bodies of the men, including Friedrich, were intact, without blemish.

  I crawled away, back through the tunnel. I climbed into my tent, found my canteen of water, and took a long, long drink, until there was no water left. Then I fell asleep.

  The women of the local village tell me they found me on the slopes of Mount Ida, but I do not remember getting there. They took care of me for many weeks until I returned to sanity. They were a soothing balm on a distraught mind, and I never learned their names, or even how to tell them apart. They made up a community without men. It came to me over time that the men were not away fighting for the resistance; they did not live on this mountain, for a man who got close to the monster would most assuredly be driven to insanity. I began to understand what the monster was, and it came to me that I had found the most unique and precious artefact in the world, perhaps the one I had been searching for all along.

  I decided to capture it.

  I used only women. I waited out the war, and then I arranged, with the help of the Greek and the English governments, for my treasure to be transported to a place where I could keep it powerless, unable to affect the male sex.

  I don’t suppose anybody will understand my decision to bring the monster to Skein Island. I’ve never really cared for what people thought of me. But I do wish that I could tell the women who make their earnest declarations that I did not set up this retreat for them. I set it up so I could be alone with the monster who murdered my love, and so I would always have new stories to tell her.

  I keep her trapped in my words. I hold her prisoner, and that is what she deserves.

  I switch off the torch and the darkness reaches out to me, wraps me up. Outside, the wind blows, loud and lonely, over the emptiness of the island: the bungalows, in which a few of us, strangers to each other, sleep; the still, blue depths of the swimming pool, untouched by the wind and rain; the rough grasses that cover the cliffs, giving way to a long gravel path that leads up to a blue front door of a silent white house.

  I creep into the bedroom and undress. I slide under the duvet, and lie there, listening to my breathing, trying to make my body relax into sleep, unable to cast the images of Amelia’s story from my mind.

  A thought occurs to me.

  Someone pointed a camera at the door in front of the cupboard at the back of the library. My heart tells me it is not to stop people from getting in. It is to stop something from getting out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  David didn’t change clothes after work.

  He Googled ‘Skein Island’, read the Wikipedia entry and found a few old photos from the sixties of women holding hands in a circle, and of the outside of the chalets where they stayed. As the evening drew in, he made an omelette, then watched a documentary about the Arctic Circle. He sat very still, on the sofa, listening for sounds outside the front door such as the scrape of a key in the lock, the drag of a suitcase up the path. Eventually, he picked up his wallet and left the house.

  At The Cornerhouse, Arnie was in his usual seat, sipping a pint. David raised an arm at him, then dropped it. He walked across the room, weaving around the tables and the other men in their small, huddling groups, and was greeted with an expression of surprised dislike.

  ‘I thought this place wasn’t good enough for you.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ David said.

  ‘It’ll have to wait. Game’s about to start.’ Arnie pulled out a seat and nodded towards it. David sat down and looked back at the bar; Mags was there, her hands on her hips, and the four cubes were already lined up on the counter.

  ‘I’m not serving,’ warned Mags.

  ‘He knows,’ said Arnie.

  ‘Is he playing, then?’

  David opened his mouth, and Arnie laid a hand on his arm. ‘Course he is. Why else would he be here?’

  ‘Right.’ She fixed David with her gaze. ‘You’re after Geoff, then. Come on, Geoff, get yourself up here.’

  One of the men sitting by the bar stood up and fiddled with his striped tie. He wore thick bifocals that magnified his gaze. Even without them, it would have been impossible to miss that his attention was fixed on the cubes. He crossed to them, and stood in front of them, blinking. His hair was sleek and black; combined with the glasses, he reminded David of a mole.

  ‘Go on, Geoff, make a choice, there’s a dear.’

  ‘I, um, don’t know.’

  The tension in the room was growing. There were perhaps ten men sitting at tables, fanning out in a semi-circle from the bar, nursing their pints, leaning forward.

  Geoff moved his hand towards the cubes, then withdrew it. David heard the men’s exhalation of breath, and realised he’d been holding his own breath too. He whispered to Arnie, ‘What’s the game about?’ but Arnie flapped his hand until he was quiet again.

  ‘What did you choose last time, love?’ said Mags, crossing her arms under her breasts, displaying her cleavage in her sheer blouse like a bird fluffing out its feathers.

  ‘Blue,’ said Geoff. He had a gruff voice, but the tremor within it was easily audible.

  ‘And was that lucky for you?’

  He flinched, and said, ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, probably best to keep away from such an unlucky colour,’ she told him, with a conspiratorial raise of her eyebrows.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right. Green.’

  Mags picked up the green cube and turned it over and over between her long, painted fingernails. ‘You sure?’

  Geoff pushed the bridge of his glasses back up his nose with one finger. Nobody else moved. ‘Yeah,’ he said, eventually. ‘Yeah.’

  She handed him the cube. He held it in the palm of his left hand and touched
the top surface with his right index finger, then squeezed it between finger and thumb.

  The lid of the cube popped open.

  Geoff reached in, very carefully, and pulled out a small white square of paper.

  The room sighed, a slow release of excitement. David glanced at Arnie, and saw a strange mixture of sympathy and relief on his face as he sat back in his chair, his shoulders slumped.

  ‘Another IOU, is it?’ said Mags. She plucked the white square from Geoff’s hand, along with the green cube. Then she popped the paper under one bra strap, and gave Geoff a big smile, her teeth bared to the room. ‘I’ll have to think of something else you can do for me. Right, who did I say was next?’ David watched her head turn toward him, and she fixed him with a calm, superior gaze. Some sort of power emanated from her; the power of a High Priestess at an ancient ceremony, he thought, or maybe the power of an aging diva, on stage, certain of the undivided attention of her audience.

  He broke the gaze, and appealed to Arnie. ‘Listen, all I want to know is what happened on Skein Island. Did your wife’s letters ever mention what took place there? Why she decided not to come home?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? Marianne will tell you all about it when she gets back, won’t she? Or are you not so sure of that any more?’ He chuckled, a sound like a dry cough. ‘We’ll talk about it after.’

  Mags tapped each cube with a long fingernail, three times each, like a summoning ritual.