No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

THE SUN, THE SEA, AND THE SILENT SCREAM

This time of year, just as you’re recovering from Christmas, they’re wont to appear, all unsolicited, plop on your welcome mat. I had forgotten that fact, but yesterday I was reminded.

Julie was up first, creating great smells of coffee and frying bacon. And me still in bed, drowsy, thinking how great it was to be nearly back to normal. Three months she’d been out of that place, and fit enough now to be first up, running about after me for a change.

Her sweet voice called upstairs: “Post, darling!” And her slippers flip-flopping out into the porch. Then those long moments of silence—until it dawned on me what she was doing. I knew it instinctively, the way you do about someone you love. She was screaming—but silently. A scream that came drilling into all my bones to shiver into shards right there in the marrow. Me out of bed like a puppet on some madman’s strings, jerked downstairs so as to break my neck, while the silent scream went on and on.

And Julie standing there with her head thrown back and her mouth agape, and the unending scream not coming out. Her eyes starting out with their pupils rolled down, staring at the thing in her white, shuddering hand—

A travel brochure, of course…

Julie had done Greece fairly extensively with her first husband. That had been five or six years ago, when they’d hoped and tried for kids a lot. No kids had come; she couldn’t have them; he’d gone off and found someone who could. No hard feelings. Maybe a few soft feelings.

So when we first started going back to Greece, I’d suggested places they’d explored together. Maybe I was looking for far-away expressions on her face in the sunsets, or a stray tear when a familiar bousouki tune drifted out on aromatic taverna exhalations. Somebody had taken a piece of my heart, too, once upon a time; maybe I wanted to know how much of Julie was really mine. As it happened, all of her was.

After we were married, we left the old trails behind and broke fresh ground. That is, we started to find new places to holiday. Twice yearly we’d pack a few things, head for the sunshine, the sea, and sometimes the sand. Sand wasn’t always a part of the package, not in Greece. Not the golden or pure white varieties, anyway. But pebbles, marble chips, great brown and black slabs of volcanic rock sloping into the sea—what odds? The sun was always the same, and the sea…

The sea. Anyone who knows the Aegean, the Ionian, the Mediterranean in general, in between and around Turkey and Greece, knows what I mean when I describe those seas as indescribable. Blue, green, mother-of-pearl, turquoise in that narrow band where the sea meets the land: fantastic! Myself, I’ve always liked the colours under the sea the best. That’s the big bonus I get, or got, out of the islands: the swimming, the amazing submarine world just beyond the glass of my face mask, the spearfishing.

And this time—last time, the very last time—we settled for Makelos. But don’t go looking for it on any maps. You won’t find it; much too small, and I’m assured that the British don’t go there any more. As a holiday venue, it’s been written off. I’d like to think I had something, everything, to do with that, which is why I’m writing this. But a warning: if you’re stuck on Greece anyway, and willing to take your chances come what may, read no further. I’d hate to spoil it all for you.

So…what am I talking about? Political troubles, unfinished hotel apartments, polluted swimming pools? No, nothing like that. We didn’t take that sort of holiday, anyway. We were strictly ‘off-the-beaten-track’ types. Hence Makelos.

We couldn’t fly there direct; the island was mainly a flat-topped mountain climbing right out of the water, with a dirt landing strip on the plateau suitable only for Skyvans. So it was a packed jet to Athens, a night on the town, and in the mid-morning a flying Greek matchbox the rest of the way. Less than an hour out of Athens and into the Cyclades, descending through a handful of cotton-wool clouds, that was our first sight of our destination.

Less than three miles long, a mile wide—that was it. Makelos. There was a ‘town’, also called Makelos, at one end of the island where twin spurs formed something of a harbour; and the rest of the place around the central plateau was rock and scrub and tiny bays, olive groves galore, almonds and some walnuts, prickly pears and a few lonely lemons. Oh, and lots of wildflowers, so that the air seemed scented.

The year before, there’d been a few apartments available in Makelos town. But towns weren’t our scene. This time, however, the island had something new to offer: a lone taverna catering for just three detached, cabin-style apartments, or ‘villas’, all nestling in a valley two miles down the coast from Makelos town itself. Only one or two taxis on the entire island (the coastal road was little more than a track), no fast-food stands, and no packed shingle beaches where the tideless sea would be one-third sun oil and two-thirds tourist pee!

We came down gentle as a feather, taxied up to a wind-blown shack that turned out to be the airport, deplaned and passed in front of the shack and out the back, and boarded our transport. There were other holiday makers; but we were too excited to pay them much attention; also a handful of dour-faced island Greeks—Makelosians, we guessed. Dour, yes. Maybe that should have told us something about their island.

Our passports had been stamped over the Athens stamp with a local variety as we passed through the airport shack, and the official doing the job turned out to be our driver. A busy man, he also introduced himself as the mayor of Makelos! The traction end of our ‘transport’ was a three-wheeler: literally a converted tractor, hauling a four-wheeled trolley with bucket seats bolted to its sides. On the way down from the plateau, I remember thinking we’d never make it; Julie kept her eyes closed for most of the trip; I gave everyone aboard As for nerve. And the driver-mayor sang a doleful Greek number all the way down.

The town was very old, with nowhere the whitewashed walls you become accustomed to in the islands. Instead, there was an air of desolation about the place. Throw in a few tumbleweeds, and you could shoot a Western there. But fishing boats bobbed in the harbour, leathery Greeks mended nets along the quayside; old men drank muddy coffee at wooden tables outside the tavernas, and bottles of Metaxa and ouzo were very much in evidence. Crumbling fortified walls of massive thickness proclaimed, however inarticulately, a one-time Crusader occupation.

Once we‘d trundled to a halt in the town’s square, the rest of the passengers were home and dry; Julie and I still had a mile and a half to go. Our taxi driver (transfer charges both ways, six pounds sterling: I’d wondered why it was so cheap!) collected our luggage from the tractor’s trolley, stowed it away, waited for us while we dusted ourselves down and stretched our legs. Then we got into his ‘taxi’.

I won’t impugn anyone’s reputation by remarking on the make of that old bus; come to think of it, I could possibly make someone’s name, for anywhere else in the world this beauty would have been off the road in the late sixties! Inside—it was a shrine, of course. The Greek sort, with good-luck charms, pictures of the saints, photos of Mum and Dad, and icon-like miniatures in silver frames, hanging and jangling everywhere. And even enough room for the driver to see through his windscreen.

“Nichos,” he introduced himself, grave-faced, trying to loosen my arm in its socket with his handshake where he reached back from the driver’s seat. And to Julie, seated beside him up front: “Nick!” and he took her hand and bowed his head to kiss it. Fine, except we were already mobile and leaving the town, and holiday makers and villagers alike scattering like clucking hens in all directions in our heavy blue exhaust smoke.

Nichos was maybe fifty, hard to tell: bright brown eyes, hair greying, upward-turned moustache, skin brown as old leather. His nicotine-stained teeth and ouzo breath were pretty standard. “A fine old car,” I opined, as he jarred us mercilessly on non-existent suspension down the patchy, pot-holed tarmacadam street.

“Eh?” He raised an eyebrow.

“The car,” I answered. “She goes, er, well!”

“Very well, thank you. The car,” he apparently agreed.

“Maybe he doesn’t speak it too well, darling.” Julie was straight-faced.

“Speaks it,” Nichos agreed with a nod. Then, registering understanding: “Ah—speak it! I am speaking it, yes, and slowly. Very slooowly! Then is understanding. Good morning, good evening, welcome to my house—exactly! I am in Athens. Three years. Speaks it much, in Athens.”

“Great!” I enthused, without malice. After all, I couldn’t speak any Greek.

“You stay at Villas Dimitrios, yes?” He was just passing the time; of course we were staying there; he’d been paid to take us there, hadn’t he? And yet at the same time, I’d picked up a note of genuine enquiry, even something of concern in his voice, as if our choice surprised or dismayed him.

“Is it a nice place?” Julie asked.

“Nice?” he repeated her. “Beautiful!” He blew a kiss. “Beautiful sea—for swim, beautiful!” Then he shrugged, said: “All Makelos same. But Dimitrios water—water for drink—him not so good. You drinking? OK—you drink Coke. You drink beer. Drinking water in bottle. Drinking wine—very cheap! Not drinking water. Is big hole in Dimitrios. Deep, er—well? Yes? Water in well bad. All around Dimitrios bad. Good for olives, lemons, no good for the people.”

We just about made sense of everything he said, which wasn’t quite as easy as I’ve made it sound here. As for the water situation: that was standard, too. We never drank the local water anyway. “So it’s a beautiful place,” I said. “Good.”

Again he glanced at me over his shoulder, offered another shrug. “Er, beautiful, yes.” He didn’t seem very sure about it now. The Greeks are notoriously vague.

We were out of Makelos, heading south round the central plateau, kicking up the dust of a narrow road where it had been cut through steep, seaward-sloping strata of yellow-banded, dazzling white rock to run parallel with the sea on our left. We were maybe thirty or forty feet above sea level, and down there through bights in the shallow sea cliffs, we were allowed tantalizing glimpses of white pebble beaches scalloping an ocean flat as a mill-pond. The fishing would be good. Nothing like the south coast of England (no Dover sole basking on a muddy bottom here), but that made it more of a challenge. You had to be good to shoot fish here!

I took out a small paper parcel from my pocket and unwrapped it: a pair of gleaming trident spearheads purchased in Athens. With luck these heads should fit my spears. Nichos turned his head. “You like to fish? I catch plenty! Big fisherman!” Then that look was back on his face. “You fish in Dimitrios? No eat. You like the fishing—good! Chase him, the fish—shoot, maybe kill—but no eat. OK?”

I began to feel worried. Julie, too. She turned to stare at me. I leaned forward, said: “Nichos, what do you mean? Why shouldn’t we eat what I catch?”

“My house!” he answered as we turned a bend through a stand of stunted trees. He grinned, pointed.

Above us, the compacted scree slope was green with shrubs and Mediterranean pines. There was a garden set back in ancient, gnarled olives, behind which a row of white-framed windows reflected the late-morning sunlight. The house matched the slope rising around and beyond it, its ochre-tiled roof seeming to melt into the hillside. Higher up there were walled, terraced enclosures; higher still, where the mountain’s spur met the sky, goats made gravity-defying silhouettes against the dazzle.

“I show you!” said Nichos, turning right onto a track that wound dizzily through a series of hairpins to the house. We hung on as he drove with practised ease almost to the front door, parking his taxi in the shade of an olive tree heavy with fruit. Then he was opening doors for us, calling out to his wife: “Katrin—hey, Katrin!”

We stayed an hour. We drank cold beer, ate a delicious sandwich of salami, sliced tomatoes, and goat’s milk cheese. We admired the kids, the goats and chickens, the little house. It had been an effective way of changing the subject. And we didn’t give Nichos’s reticence (was that what it had been, or just poor communications?) another thought until he dropped us off at Villas Dimitrios.

The place was only another mile down the read, as the crow flies. But that coastal road knew how to wind. Still, we could probably have walked it while Katrin made us our sandwiches. And yet the island’s natural contours kept it hidden from sight until the last moment.

We’d climbed up from the sea by then, maybe a hundred feet, and the road had petered out to little more than a track as we crested the final rise and Nichos applied his brakes. And there we sat in that oven of a car, looking down through its dusty, fly-specked windows on Villas Dimitrios. It was…idyllic!

Across the spur where we were parked, the ground dipped fairly steeply to a bay maybe a third of a mile point to point. The bay arms were rocky, formed of the tips of spurs sloping into the sea, but the beach between them was sand. White sand, Julie’s favourite sort. Give her a book, a white beach, and a little shade, and I could swim all day. The taverna stood almost at the water’s edge: a long, low house with a red-tiled roof, fronted by a wooden framework supporting heavy grapevines and masses of bougainvillaea. Hazy blue woodsmoke curled up from its chimney, and there was a garden to its rear. Behind the house, separate from it and each other and made private by screening groves of olives, three blobs of shimmering white stone were almost painful to look at. The chalets or ‘villas’.

Nichos merely glanced at it; nothing new to him. He pointed across the tiny valley to its far side. Over there, the scree base went up brown and yellow to the foot of sheer cliffs, where beneath a jutting overhang the shadows were so dark as to be black. It had to be a cave. Something of a track had been worn into the scree, leading to the place under the cliff.

“In there,” said Nichos with one of his customary shrugs, “the well. Water, him no good…” His face was very grave.

“The water was poisoned?” Julie prompted him.

“Eh?” he cocked his head, then gave a nod. “Now is poison!”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What is it—” indicated the dark blot under the cliff “—over there?”

“The well,” he said again. “Down inside the cave. But the water, he had, er—like the crabs, you know? You understand the crabs, in the sea?”

“Of course,” Julie told him. “In England we eat them.”

He shook his head, looked frustrated. “Here, too,” he said. “But this thing not crab. Very small.” He measured an inch between thumb and forefinger. “And no eat him. Very bad! People were…sick. They died. Men came from the government in Athens. They bring, er, chemicals? They put in well. Poison for the crabs.” Again his shrug. “Now is OK—maybe. But I say, no drink the water.”

Before we could respond, he got out of the car, unloaded our luggage onto the dusty track. I followed him. “You’re not taking us down?”

“Going down OK,” he shrugged, this time apologetically. “Come up again—difficult! Too—how you say?” He made an incline with his hand.

“Too steep?”

“Is right. My car very nice—also very old! I sorry.” I picked up the cases; Julie joined us and took the travel bags. Nichos made no attempt to help; instead he gave a small, awkward bow, said: “You see my house? Got the problem, come speak. Good morning.” Then he was into his car. He backed off, turned around, stopped, and leaned out his window. “Hey, mister, lady!”

We looked at him.

He pointed. “Follow road is long way. Go straight down, very easy. Er, how you say—short-cut? So, I go. See you in two weeks.”

We watched his tyres kicking up dust and grit until he was out of sight. Then:

Taking a closer look at the terrain, I could see he was right. The track followed the ridge of the spur down to a sharp right turn, then down a hard-packed dirt ramp to the floor of the valley. It was steep, but a decent car should make it—even Nichos’s taxi, I thought. But if we left the track here and climbed straight down the side of the spur, we’d cut two or three hundred yards off the distance. And actually, even the spur wasn’t all that steep. We made it without any fuss, and I sat down only once when my feet shot out from under me.

As we got down onto the level, our host for the next fortnight came banging and clattering from the direction of the taverna, bumping over the rough scrub in a Greek three-wheeler with a cart at the back. Dimitrios wore a wide-brimmed hat against the sun, but still he was sweating just as badly as we were. He wiped his brow as he dumped our luggage into his open-ended cart. We hitched ourselves up at the rear and sat with our feet dangling. And he drove us to our chalet.

We were hot and sticky, all three of us, and maybe it wasn’t so strange we didn’t talk. Or perhaps he could see our discomfort and preferred that we get settled in before turning on the old Greek charm. Anyway, we said nothing as he opened the door for us, gave me the key, helped me carry our bags into the cool interior. I followed him back outside again while Julie got to the ritual unpacking.

“Hot,” he said then. “Hot, the sun…” Greeks have this capacity for stating the obvious. Then, carrying it to extreme degrees, he waved an arm in the direction of the beach, the sea, and the taverna. “Beach. Sea. Taverna. For swimming. Eating. I have the food, drinks. I also selling the food for you the cooking…” The chalet came with its own self-catering kit.

“Fine,” I smiled. “See you later.”

He stared at me a moment, his eyes like dull lights in the dark shadow of his hat, then made a vague sort of motion halfway between a shrug and a nod. He got back aboard his vehicle and started her up, and as his clatter died away, I went back inside and had a look around.

Julie was filling a pair of drawers with spare clothing, at the same time building a teetering pyramid of reading material on a chair. Where books were concerned, she was voracious. She was like that about me, too. No complaints here.

Greek island accommodation varies from abominable to half decent. Or, if you’re willing to shell out, you might be lucky enough to get good—but rarely better than that. The Villas Dimitrios chalets were…well, OK. But we’d paid for it, so it was what we expected.

I checked the plumbing first. Greek island plumbing is never better than basic. The bathroom was tastefully but totally tiled, even the ceiling! No bathtub, but a good shower and, at the other end of the small room, the toilet and washbasin. Enclosed in tiles, you could shower and let the water spray where-the-heck; if it didn’t end up in the shower basin, it would end up on the floor, which sloped gently from all directions to one corner where there was a hole going—where? That’s the other thing about Greek plumbing: I’ve never been able to figure out where everything goes.

But the bathroom did have its faults: like, there were no plugs for the washbasin and shower drainage, and no grilles in the plugholes. I suppose I’m quirky, but I like to see a grille in there, not just a black hole gurgling away to nowhere. It was the same in the little ‘kitchen’ (an alcove under an arch, really, with a sink and drainer unit, a two-ring gas stove, a cupboard containing the cylinder, and a wall-mounted rack for crockery and cutlery; all very nice and serviceable and equipped with a concealed overhead fan-extractor): no plug in the sink and no grille in the plughole.

I complained loudly to Julie about it.

“Don’t put your toe down and you won’t get stuck!” was her advice from the bedroom.

“Toe down?” I was already miles away, looking for the shaver socket.

“Down the shower plughole,” she answered. And she came out of the bedroom wearing sandals and the bottom half of her bikini. I made slavering noises, and she turned coyly, tossed back her bra straps for me to fasten. “Do me up.”

“You were quick off the mark,” I told her.

“All packed away, too,” she said with some satisfaction. “And the big white hunter’s kit neatly laid out for him. And all performed free of charge—while he examines plugholes!” Then she picked up a towel and tube of lotion and headed for the door. “Last one in the sea’s a pervert!”

Five minutes later I followed her. She’d picked a spot halfway between the chalet and the most northerly bay arm. Her red towel was like a splash of blood on the white sand two hundred yards north of the taverna. I carried my mask, snorkel, flippers, some strong string, and a tatty old blanket with torn corners; that was all. No spear gun. First I’d take a look-see, and the serious stuff could come later. Julie obviously felt the same as I did about it: no book, just a slim, pale white body on the red towel, green eyes three-quarters shuttered behind huge sunglasses. She was still wet from the sea, but that wouldn’t last long. The sun was a furnace, steaming the water off her body.

On my way to her, I’d picked up some long, thin, thorny branches from the scrub; when I got there, I broke off the thorns and fixed up a sunshade. The old blanket’s torn corners showed how often we’d done this before. Then I took my kit to the water’s edge and dropped it, and ran gasping, pell-mell into the shallows until I toppled over! My way of getting into the sea quickly. Following which I outfitted myself and finned for the rocks where the spur dipped below the water.

As I’ve intimated, the Mediterranean around the Greek islands is short on fish. You’ll find red mullet on the bottom, plenty of them, but you need half a dozen to make a decent meal. And grey mullet on top, which move like lightning and cause you to use up more energy than eating them provides; great sport, but you couldn’t live on it. But there’s at least one fish of note in the Med, and that’s the grouper.

Groupers are territorial; a family will mark out its own patch, usually in deep water where there’s plenty of cover, which is to say rock or weeds. And they love caves. Where there are plenty of rocks and caves, there’ll also be groupers. Here, where the spur crumbled into the sea, this was ideal grouper ground. So I wasn’t surprised to see this one—especially since I didn’t have my gun! Isn’t that always the way of it?

He was all of twenty-four inches long, maybe seven across his back, mottled red and brown to match his cave. When he saw me, he headed straight for home, and I made a mental note to mark the spot. Next time I came out here, I’d have my gun with me, armed with a single flap-nosed spear. The spear goes into the fish, the flap opens, and he’s hooked, can’t slip off. Tridents are fine for small fish, but not for this bloke. And don’t talk to me about cruel; if I’m cruel, so is every fisherman in the world, and at least I eat what I catch. But it was then, while I was thinking these things, that I noticed something was wrong.

The fish had homed in on his cave all right, but as his initial reaction to my presence wore off, so his spurt of speed diminished. Now he seemed merely to drift toward the dark hole in the rock, lolling from side to side like some strange, crippled sub, actually missing his target to strike against the weedy stone! It was the first time I’d seen a fish collide with something underwater. This was one very sick grouper.

I went down to have a closer look. He was maybe ten feet down, just lolling against the rock face. His huge gill flaps pulsed open and closed, open and closed. I could have reached out and touched him. Then, as he rolled a little on one side, I saw—

I backed off, felt a little sick—felt sorry for him. And I wished I had my gun with me, if only to put him out of his misery. Under his great head, wedging his gill slits half open, a nest of fish lice or parasites of some sort were plainly visible. Not lampreys or remora or the like, for they were too small, only as big as my thumbs. Crustaceans, I thought—a good dozen of them—and they were hooked into him, leeching on the raw red flesh under his gills.

God, I have a loathing of this sort of thing! Once in Crete I’d come out of the sea with a suckerfish in my armpit. I hadn’t noticed it until I was towelling myself dry and it fell off me. It was only three or four inches long but I’d reacted like I was covered with leeches! I had that same feeling now.

Skin crawling, I drifted up and away from the stricken fish, and for the first time got a good look at his eyes. They were dull, glazed, bubbly as the eyes of a fatally diseased goldfish. And they followed me. And then he followed me!

As I floated feet first for the surface, that damned grouper finned lethargically from the rocks and began drifting up after me. Several of his parasites had detached themselves from him and floated alongside him, gravitating like small satellites about his greater mass. I pictured one of them with its hooked feet fastened in my groin, or over one of my eyes. I mean, I knew they couldn’t do that—their natural hosts are fish—but the thoughts made me feel vulnerable as hell.

I took off like Tarzan for the beach twenty-five yards away, climbed shivering out of the water in the shadow of the declining spur. As soon as I was out, the shudders left me. Along the beach my sunshade landmark was still there, flapping a little in a light breeze come up suddenly off the sea; but no red towel, no Julie. She could be swimming. Or maybe she’d felt thirsty and gone for a drink under the vines where the taverna fronted onto the sea.

Kit in hand, I padded along the sand at the dark rim of the ocean, past the old blanket tied with string to its frame of branches, all the way to the taverna. The area under the vines was maybe fifty feet along the front by thirty deep, a concrete base set out with a dozen small tables and chairs. Dimitrios was being a bit optimistic here, I thought. After all, it was the first season his place had been in the brochures. But…maybe next year there’d be more chalets, and the canny Greek owner was simply thinking well ahead.

I gave the place the once-over. Julie wasn’t there, but at least I was able to get my first real look at our handful of fellow holiday makers.

A fat woman in a glaring yellow one-piece splashed in eighteen inches of water a few yards out. She kept calling to her husband, one George, to come on in. George sat half in, half out of the shade; he was a thin, middle-aged, balding man not much browner than myself, wearing specs about an inch thick that made his eyes look like marbles. “No, no, dear,” he called back. “I’m fine watching you.” He looked frail, timid, tired—and I thought: Where the hell are marriages like this made? They were like characters off a seaside postcard, except he didn’t even seem to have the strength to ogle the girls—if there’d been any! His wife was twice his size.

George was drinking beer from a glass. A bottle, three-quarters empty and beaded with droplets of moisture, stood on his table. I fancied a drink but had no money on me. Then I saw that George was looking at me, and I felt that he’d caught me spying on him or something. “I was wondering,” I said, covering up my rudeness, “if you’d seen my wife? She was on the beach there, and—”

“Gone back to your chalet,” he said, sitting up a bit in his chair. “The girl with the red towel?” And suddenly he looked just a bit embarrassed. So he was an ogler after all. “Er, while you were in the sea…” He took off his specs and rubbed gingerly at a large red bump on the lid of his right eye. Then he put his glasses on again, blinked at me, held out the beer bottle. “Fancy a mouthful? To wash the sea out of your throat? I’ve had all I want.”

I took the bottle, drained it, said: “Thanks! Bite?”

“Eh?” He cocked his head on one side.

“Your eye,” I said. “Mosquito, was it? Horsefly or something?”

“Dunno.” He shook his head. “We got here Wednesday, and by Thursday night this was coming up. Yesterday morning it was like this. Doesn’t hurt so much as irritates. There’s another back of my knee, not fully in bloom yet.”

“Do you have stuff to dab on?”

He nodded in the direction of his wallowing wife and sighed, “She has gallons of it! Useless stuff! It will just have to take its own time.”

“Look, I’ll see you later,” I said. “Right now I have to go and see what’s up with Julie.” I excused myself.

Leaving the place, I nodded to a trio of spinsterish types relaxing in summer frocks at one of the tables further back. They looked like sisters, and the one in the middle might just be a little retarded. She kept lolling first one way, then the other, while her companions propped her up. I caught a few snatches of disjointed, broad Yorkshire conversation:

“Doctor?…sunstroke, I reckon. Or maybe that melon?…taxi into town will fix her up…bit of shopping…pull her out of it…Kalamari?—yechhh! Don’t know what decent grub is, these foreign folks…” They were so wrapped up in each other, or in complaint of the one in the middle, that they scarcely noticed me at all.

On the way back to our chalet, at the back of the house/taverna, I looked across low walls and a row of exotic potted plants to see an old Greek (male or female I couldn’t determine, because of the almost obligatory floppy black hat tilted forward, and flowing black peasant clothes) sitting in a cane chair in one corner of the garden. He or she sat dozing in the shade of an olive tree, chin on chest, all oblivious of the world outside the tree’s sun-dappled perimeter. A pure white goat, just a kid, was tethered to the tree; it nuzzled the oldster’s dangling fingers like they were teats. Julie was daft for young animals, and I’d have to tell her about it. As for the figure in the cane chair: he/she had been there when Julie and I went down to the beach. Well, getting old in this climate had to be better than doing it in some climates I could mention…

I found Julie in bed, shivering for all she was worth! She was patchy red where the sun had caught her, cold to the touch but filmed with perspiration. I took one look, recognized the symptoms, said: “Oh-oh! Last night’s moussaka, eh? You should have had the chicken!” Her tummy always fell prey to moussaka, be it good or bad. But she usually recovered quickly, too.

“Came on when I was on the beach,” she said. “I left the blanket…”

“I saw it,” I told her. “I’ll go get it.” I gave her a kiss.

“Just let me lie here and close my eyes for a minute or two, and I’ll be OK,” she mumbled. “An hour or two, anyway.” And as I was going out the door: “Jim, this isn’t Nichos’s bad water, is it?”

I turned back. “Did you drink any?”

She shook her head.

“Got crabs?”

She was too poorly to laugh, so merely snorted.

I pocketed some money. “I’ll get the blanket, buy some bottled drinks. You’ll have something to sip. And then…will you be OK if I go fishing?”

She nodded. “Of course. You’ll see; I’ll be on my feet again tonight.”

“Anyway, you should see the rest of them here,” I told her. “Three old sisters, and one of ’em not all there—a little man and fat woman straight off a postcard! Oh, and I’ve a surprise for you.”

“Oh?”

“When you’re up,” I smiled. I was talking about the white kid. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’d show it to her.

Feeling a bit let down—not by Julie but by circumstances in general, even by the atmosphere of this place, which was somehow odd—I collected the sunscreen blanket and poles, marched resolutely back to the taverna. Dimitrios was serving drinks to the spinsters. The ‘sunstruck’ one had recovered a little, sipped Coke through a straw. George and his burden were nowhere to be seen. I sat down at one of the tables, and in a little while Dimitrios came over. This time I studied him more closely.

He was youngish, maybe thirty, thirty-five, tall if a little stooped. He was more swarthy peasant Greek than classical or cosmopolitan; his natural darkness, coupled with the shadow of his hat (which he wore even here in the shade), hid his face from any really close inspection. The one very noticeable thing about that face, however, was this: it didn’t smile. That’s something you get to expect in the islands, the flash of teeth. Even badly stained ones. But not Dimitrios’s teeth.

His hands were burned brown, lean, almost scrawny. Be that as it may, I felt sure they’d be strong hands. As for his eyes: they were the sort that make you look away. I tried to stare at his face a little while, then looked away. I wasn’t afraid, just concerned. But I didn’t know what about.

“Drink?” he said, making it sound like ‘dring’. “Melon? The melon he is free. I give. I grow plenty. You like him? And water? I bring half-melon and water.”

He turned to go, but I stopped him. “Er, no!” I remembered the conversation of the spinsters, about the melon. “No melon, no water, thank you.” I tried to smile at him, found it difficult. “I’ll have a cold beer. Do you have bottled water? You know, in the big plastic bottles? And Coke? Two of each, for the refrigerator. OK?”

He shrugged, went off. There was this lethargy about him, almost a malaise. No, I didn’t much care for him at all…

“Swim!” the excited voice of one of the spinsters reached me. “Right along there, at the end of the beach. Like yesterday. Where there’s no one to peep.”

God! You’ll be lucky, I thought.

“Shh!” one of her sisters hushed her, as if a crowd of rapacious men were listening to every word. “Don’t tell the whole world, Betty!”

A Greek girl, Dimitrios’s sister or wife, came out of the house carrying a plastic bag. She came to my table, smiled at me—a little nervously, I thought. “The water, the Coke,” she said, making each definite article sound like ‘thee’. But at least she can speak my language, I had to keep reminding myself. “Four hundred drachmas, please,” she said. I nodded and paid up. About two pounds sterling. Cheap, considering it all had to be brought from the mainland. The bag and the bottles inside it were tingling cold in my hand.

I stood up—and the girl was still there, barring my way. The three sisters made off down the beach, and there was no one else about. The girl glanced over her shoulder toward the house. The hand she put on my arm was trembling and now I could see that it wasn’t just nervousness. She was afraid.

“Mister,” she said, the word very nearly sticking in her dry throat. She swallowed and tried again. “Mister, please. I—”

“Elli!” a low voice called. In the doorway to the house, dappled by splashes of sunlight through the vines, Dimitrios.

“Yes?” I answered her. “Is there—?”

“Elli!” he called again, an unspoken warning turning the word to a growl.

“Is all right,” she whispered, her pretty face suddenly thin and pale. “Is—nothing!” And then she almost ran back to the house.

Weirder and weirder! But if they had some husband-and-wife thing going, it was no business of mine. I’m no Clint Eastwood—and they’re a funny lot, the Greeks, in an argument.

On my way back to the chalet, I looked again into the garden. The figure in black, head slumped on chest, sat there as before; it hadn’t moved an inch. The sun had, though, and was burning more fiercely down on the drowsing figure in black. The white kid had got loose from its tether and was on its hind legs, eating amazing scarlet flowers out of their tub. “You’ll get hell, mate,” I muttered, “when he/she wakes up!”

There were a lot of flies about. I swatted at a cloud of the ugly, buzzing little bastards as I hurried, dripping perspiration, back to the chalet.

Inside, I took a long drink myself, then poured ice-cold water into one glass, Coke into another. I put both glasses on a bedside table within easy reach of Julie, stored the rest of the stuff in the fridge. She was asleep: bad belly complicated by a mild attack of sunstroke. I should have insisted that Nichos bring us right to the door. He could have, I was sure. Maybe he and Dimitrios had a feud or something going. But…Julie was sleeping peacefully enough, and the sweat was off her brow.

Someone tut-tutted, and I was surprised to find it was I. Hey!—this was supposed to be a holiday, wasn’t it?

I sighed, took up my kit—including the gun—went back into the sun. On impulse I’d picked up the key. I turned it in the lock, withdrew it, stooped, and slid it under the door. She could come out, but no one could go in. If she wasn’t awake when I got back, I’d simply hook the key out again with a twig.

But right now it was time for some serious fishing!

There was a lot of uneasiness building up inside me, but I put it all out of my head (what was it anyway but a set of unsettling events and queer coincidence?) and marched straight down to the sea. The beach was empty here, not a soul in sight. No, wrong: at the far end, near the foot of the second spur, two of the sisters splashed in the shallows in faded bathing costumes twenty years out of date, while the third one sat on the sand watching them. They were all of two or three hundred yards away, however, so I wouldn’t be accused of ogling them.

In a little while I was outfitted, in the water, heading straight out to where the sandy bottom sloped off a little more steeply. At about eight or nine feet, I saw an octopus in his house of shells—a big one, too, all coiled pink tentacles and cat eyes wary—but in a little while I moved on. Normally I’d have taken him, gutted him and beaten the grease out of him, then handed him in to the local taverna for goodwill. But on this occasion that would be Dimitrios. Sod Dimitrios!

At about twelve feet the bottom levelled out. In all directions I saw an even expanse of golden, gently rippled sand stretching away: beautiful but boring. And not a fish in sight! Then…the silvery flash of a belly turned side-on—no, two of them, three!—caught my eye. Not on the bottom but on the surface. Grey mullet, and of course they’d seen me before I saw them. I followed their darting shapes anyway, straight out to sea as before.

In a little while a reef of dark, fretted rocks came in view. It seemed fairly extensive, ran parallel to the beach. There was some weed but not enough to interfere with visibility. And the water still only twelve to fifteen feet deep. Things were looking up.

If a man knows the habits of his prey, he can catch him, and I knew my business. The grey mullet will usually run, but if you can surprise him, startle him, he’ll take cover. If no cover’s available, then he just keeps on running, and he’ll very quickly outpace any man. But here in this pock-marked reef, there was cover. To the fish, it would seem that the holes in the rocks were a refuge, but in fact they’d be a trap. I went after them with a will, putting everything I’d got into the chase.

Coming up fast behind the fish, and making all the noise I could, I saw a central school of maybe a dozen small ones, patrolled by three or four full-grown outriders. The latter had to be two-pounders if they were an ounce. They panicked, scattered; the smaller fish shot off in all directions, and their big brothers went to ground! Exactly as I’d hoped they would. Two into one outcrop of honey-combed rock, and two into another.

I trod water on the surface, getting my breath, making sure the rubbers of my gun weren’t tangled with the loose line from the spear, keeping my eyes glued to the silvery grey shapes finning nervously to and fro in the hollow rocks. I picked my target, turned on end, thrust my legs up, and let my own weight drive me to the bottom; and as my impetus slowed, so I lined up on one of the two holes. Right on cue, one of the fish appeared. He never knew what hit him.

I surfaced, freed my vibrating prize from the trident where two of the tines had taken him behind the gills, hung him from a gill ring on my belt. By now his partner had made off, but the other pair of fish was still there in the second hole. I quickly reloaded, made a repeat performance. My first hunt of the season, and already I had two fine fish! I couldn’t wait to get back and show them to Julie.

I was fifty yards out. Easing the strain on muscles that were a whole year out of practice, I swam lazily back to the beach and came ashore close to the taverna. Way along the beach, two of the sisters were putting their dresses on over their ancient costumes, while the third sat on the sand with her head lolling. Other than these three, no one else was in sight.

I made for the chalet. As I went, the sun steamed the water off me and I began to itch; it was time I took a shower, and I might try a little protective after-sun lotion, too. Already my calves were turning red, and I supposed my back must be in the same condition. Ugly now, but in just a few days’ time…

Passing the garden behind the house, this time I didn’t look in. The elderly person under the tree would be gone by now, I was sure; but I did hear the lonely bleating of the kid.

Then I saw Dimitrios. He was up on the roof of the central chalet, and from where I padded silently between the olives, I could see him lifting a metal hatch on a square water tank. The roofs were also equipped with solar panels. So the sun heated the water, but…where did the water come from? Idiot question, even to oneself! From a well, obviously. But which well?

I passed under the cover of a clump of trees, and the Greek was lost to sight. When I came out again into the open, I saw him descending a ladder propped against the chalet’s wall. He carried a large galvanized bucket—empty, to judge from its swing and bounce. He hadn’t seen me, and for some hard-to-define reason, I didn’t want him to. I ran the rest of the way to our chalet.

The door was open; Julie was up and about in shorts and a halter. She greeted me with a kiss, oohed and aahed at my catch. “Supper,” I told her with something of pride. “No moussaka tonight. Fresh fish done over charcoal, with a little Greek salad and a filthy great bottle of retsina—or maybe two filthy great bottles!”

I cleaned the fish into the toilet, flushed their guts away. Then I washed them, tossed some ice into the sink unit, and put the fish in the ice. I didn’t want them to stiffen up in the fridge, and they’d keep well enough in the sink for a couple of hours.

“Now you stink of fish,” Julie told me without ceremony. “Your forearms are covered in scales. Take a shower and you’ll feel great. I did.”

“Are you OK?” I held her with my eyes.

“Fine now, yes,” she said. “System flushed while you were out—you don’t wish to know that—and now the old tum’s settled down nicely, thank you. It was just the travel, the sun—”

“The moussaka?”

“That, too, probably.” She sighed. “I just wish I didn’t love it so!”

I stripped and stepped into the shower basin, fiddled with the knobs. “What’ll you do while I shower?”

“Turn ’em both on full,” she instructed. “Hot and cold both. Then the temperature’s just right. Me? I’ll go and sit in the shade by the sea, start a book.”

“In the taverna?” Maybe there was something in the tone of my voice.

“Yes. Is that OK?”

“Fine,” I told her, steeling myself and spinning the taps on. I didn’t want to pass my apprehension on to her. “I’ll see you there—ahh!—shortly.” And after that, for the next ten minutes, it was hissing, stinging jets of water and blinding streams of medicated shampoo…

Towelling myself dry, I heard the clattering on the roof. Maintenance? Dimitrios and his galvanized bucket? I dressed quickly in lightweight flannels and a shirt, flip-flops on my feet, went out, and locked the door. Other places like this, we’d left the door open. Here I locked it. At the back of the chalet, Dimitrios was coming down his ladder. I came round the corner as he stepped down. If anything, he’d pulled his hat even lower over his eyes, so that his face was just a blot of shadow with two faint smudges of light for eyes. He was lethargic as ever, possibly even more so. We stood looking at each other.

“Trouble?” I eventually ventured.

Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. “No troubles,” he said, his voice a gurgle. “I just see all OK.” He put his bucket down, wiped his hands on his trousers.

“And is it?” I took a step closer. “I mean, is it all OK?”

He nodded and at last grinned. Briefly a bar of whiteness opened in the shadow of his hat. “Now is OK,” he said. And he picked up his bucket and moved off away from me.

Surly bastard! I thought. And: What a dump! God, but we’ve slipped up this time, Julie, my love!

I started toward the taverna, remembered I had no cigarettes with me, and returned to the chalet. Inside, in the cool and shade, I wondered what Dimitrios had been putting in the water tanks. Some chemical solution, maybe? To purify or purge the system? Well, I didn’t want my system purified, not by Dimitrios. I flushed the toilet again. And I left the shower running full blast for all of five minutes before spinning the taps back to the off position. I would have done the same to the sink unit, but my fish were in there, the ice almost completely melted away. And emptying another tray of ice into the sink, I snapped my fingers: Hah! A blow for British eccentricity!

By the time I got to the taverna, Dimitrios had disappeared, probably inside the house. He’d left his bucket standing on the garden wall. Maybe it was simple curiosity, maybe something else; I don’t know—but I looked into the bucket. Empty. I began to turn away, looked again. No, not empty, but almost. Only a residue remained. At the bottom of the bucket, a thin film of…jelly? That’s what it looked like: grey jelly.

I began to dip a finger. Hesitated, thought: What the hell! It’s nothing harmful. It couldn’t be, or he wouldn’t be putting it in the water tanks. Would he? I snorted at my mind’s morbid fancies. Surly was one thing, but homicidal—?

I dipped, held my finger up to the sun where that great blazing orb slipped down toward the plateau’s rim. Squinting, I saw…just a blob of goo. Except—black dots were moving in it, like microscopic tadpoles.

Urgh! I wiped the slime off my finger onto the rough concrete of the wall. Wrong bucket, obviously, for something had gone decidedly wrong in this one. Backing uncertainly away, I heard the doleful bleating of the white kid.

Across the garden, he was chewing on the frayed end of a rope hanging from the corner of a tarpaulin where it had been thrown roughly over the chair under the olive tree. The canvas had peaked in the middle, so that it seemed someone with a pointed head was still sitting there. I stared hard, felt a tic starting up at the corner of my eye. And suddenly I knew that I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want it one little bit. And I wanted Julie to be here even less.

Coming round the house to the seating area under the vines, it became noisily apparent that I wasn’t the only disenchanted person around here. An angry, booming female voice, English, seemed matched against a chattering wall of machine-gun-fire Greek. I stepped quickly in under the vines and saw Julie sitting in the shade at the ocean’s edge, facing the sea. A book lay open on her table. She looked back over her shoulder, saw me, and even though she wasn’t involved in the exchange, still relief flooded over her face.

I went to her, said, “What’s up?” She looked past me, directing her gaze toward the rear of the seating area.

In the open door of the house, Dimitrios made a hunched silhouette, stiff as a petrified tree stump; his wife was a pale shadow behind him, in what must be the kitchen. Facing the Greek, George’s wife stood with her fists on her hips, jaw jutting. “How dare you?” she cried, outraged at something or other. “What do you mean, you can’t help? No phone? Are you actually telling me there’s no telephone? Then how are we to contact civilization? I have to speak to someone in the town, find a doctor. My husband, George, needs a doctor! Can’t you understand that? His lumps are moving. Things are alive under his skin!”

I heard all of this, but failed to take it in at once. George’s lumps moving? Did she mean they were spreading? And still, Dimitrios stood there, while his wife squalled shrilly at him (at him, yes, not at George’s wife as I’d first thought) and tried to squeeze by him. Whatever was going on here, someone had to do something, and it looked like I was the one.

“Sit tight,” I told Julie, and I walked up behind the furious fat lady. “Something’s wrong with George?” I said.

All eyes turned in my direction. I still couldn’t see Dimitrios’s face too clearly, but I sensed a sudden wariness in him. George’s wife pounced on me. “Do you know George?” she said, grasping my arm. “Oh, of course! I saw you talking to him when I was in the sea.”

I gently prized her sweaty, iron-band fingers from my arm. “His lumps?” I pressed. “Do you mean those swollen stings of his? Are they worse?”

“Stings?” I could see now that her hysteria had brought her close to the point of tears. “Is that what they are? Well, God only knows what stung him! Some of them are opening, and there’s movement in the wounds! And George just lies there, without the will to do anything. He must be in agony, but he says he can’t feel a thing. There’s something terribly wrong…”

“Can I see him?”

“Are you a doctor?” She grabbed me again.

“No, but if I could see how bad it is—”

“—A waste of time!” she cut me off. “He needs a doctor now!”

“I take you to Makelos.” Dimitrios had apparently snapped out of his rigor mortis mode, taken a jerky step toward us. “I take, find doctor, come back in taxi.”

She turned to him. “Will you? Oh, will you, really? Thank you, oh, thank you! But…how will you take me?”

“Come,” he said. They walked round the building to the rear, followed the wall until it ended, crossed the scrub to a clump of olives, and disappeared into the trees. I went with them part of the way, then watched them out of sight: Dimitrios stiff as a robot, never looking back, and Mrs George rumbling along massively behind him. A moment later there came the clattering and banging of an engine, and his three-wheeler bumped into view. It made for the packed-dirt incline to the road where it wound up the spur. Inside, Dimitrios at the wheel behind a flyspecked windscreen, almost squeezed into the corner of the tiny cab by the fat lady where she hunched beside him.

Julie had come up silently behind me. I gave a start when she said: “Do you think we should maybe go and see if this George is OK?”

I took a grip of myself, shrugged, said: “I was speaking to him just—oh, an hour and a half ago. He can’t have got really bad in so short a time, can he? A few horsefly bites, he had. Nasty enough, but you’d hardly consider them as serious as all that. She’s just got herself a bit hot and bothered, that’s all.”

Quite suddenly, shadows reached down to us from the high brown and purple walls of the plateau. The sun had commenced to sink behind the island’s central hump. In a moment it was degrees cooler, so that I found myself shivering. In that same moment the cicadas stopped their frying-fat onslaught of sound, and a strange silence fell over the whole place. On impulse, quietly, I said: “We’re out of here tomorrow.”

That was probably a mistake. I hadn’t wanted to get Julie going. She’d been in bed most of the time; she hadn’t experienced the things I had, hadn’t felt so much of the strangeness here. Or maybe she had, for now she said: “Good,” and gave a little shudder of her own. “I was going to suggest just that. I’m sure we can find cheap lodging in Makelos. And this place is such—I don’t know—such a dead and alive hole! I mean, it’s beautiful—but it’s also very ugly. There’s just something morbid about it.”

“Listen,” I said, deciding to lighten the atmosphere if I could. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You go back to the taverna, and I’ll go get the fish. We’ll have the Greek girl cook them for us and dish them up with a little salad—and a bottle of retsina, as we’d planned. Maybe things will look better after a bite to eat, eh? Is your tummy up to it?”

She smiled faintly in the false dusk, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss. “You know,” she said, “whenever you start worrying about me—and using that tone of voice—I always know that there’s something you’re worrying about yourself. But actually, you know, I do feel quite hungry!”

The shadows had already reached the taverna. Just shadows—in no way night, for it wasn’t properly evening yet, though certainly the contrast was a sort of darkness—and beyond them the vast expanse of the sea was blue as ever, sparkling silver at its rim in the brilliant sunlight still striking there. The strangeness of the place seemed emphasized, enlarged…

I watched Julie turn right and disappear into the shade of the vines, and then I went for our fish.

The real nightmare began when I let myself into the chalet and went to the sink unit. Doubly shaded, the interior really was quite dark. I put on the light in the arched-over alcove that was the kitchen, and picked up the two fish, one in each hand—and dropped them, or rather tossed them back into the sink! The ice was all melted; the live-looking glisten of the scales had disappeared with the ice, and the mullets themselves had been—infected!

Attached to the gill flap of one of them, I’d seen a parasite exactly like the ones on the big grouper; the second fish had had one of the filthy things clamped half over a filmed eye. My hair actually prickled on my head; my scalp tingled; my lips drew back from my teeth in a silent snarl. The things were something like sheep ticks, in design if not in dimension, but they were pale, blind, spiky, and looked infinitely more loathsome. They were only—crustaceans? Insects? I couldn’t be sure—but there was that about them which made them more horrific to me than any creature has a right to be.

Anyone who believes you can’t go cold, break out in gooseflesh, on a hot, late afternoon in the Mediterranean is mistaken. I went so cold I was shaking, and I kept on shaking for long moments, until it dawned on me that just a few seconds ago, I’d actually handled these fish!

Christ!

I turned on the hot tap, thrust my hands forward to receive the cleansing stream, snatched them back again. God, no! I couldn’t wash them, for Dimitrios had been up there putting something in the tank! Some kind of spawn. But that didn’t make sense: hot water would surely kill the things. If there was any hot water…

The plumbing rattled, but no hot water came. Not only had Dimitrios interfered with the water, introduced something into it, but he’d also made sure that from now on we could use only the cold water!

I wiped my trembling hands thoroughly on sheets from a roll of paper towel, filled the kettle with water from a refrigerated bottle, quickly brought the water toward boiling. Before it became unbearable, I gritted my teeth, poured a little hot water first over one hand, then the other. It stung like hell, and the flesh of my hands went red at once, but I just hugged them and let them sting. Then, when the water was really boiling, I poured the rest of the contents of the kettle over the fish in the sink.

By that time the parasites had really dug themselves in. The one attached to the gill flap had worked its way under the gill, making it bulge; the other had dislodged its host’s eye and was half-way into the skull. Worse, another had clawed its way up the plughole and was just now emerging into the light! The newcomer was white, whereas the others were now turning pink from the ingestion of fish juices.

But up from the plughole? This set me shuddering again; and again I wondered: what’s down there, down in the slop under the ground? Where does everything go?

These fish had been clean when I caught them; I’d gutted them, and so I ought to know. But their scent had drawn these things up to the feast. Would the scent of human flesh attract them the same way?

As the boiling water hit them, the things popped like crabs tossed into a cooking pot. They seemed to hiss and scream, but it was just the rapid expansion and explosion of their tissues. And the stench that rose up from the sink was nauseating. God!—would I ever eat fish again?

And the thought kept repeating over and over in my head: what was down below?

I went to the shower recess, put on the light, looked in, and at once shrank back. The sunken bowl of the shower was crawling with them! Two, three dozen of them at least. And the toilet? And the cold-water system? And all the rest of the bloody plumbing? There’d be a cesspit down there, and these things were alive in it in their thousands! And the maniac Dimitrios had been putting their eggs in the water tanks!

But what about the spinsters? They had been here before us, probably for the past three or four days at least. And what about George? George and his lumps! And Julie: she wouldn’t have ordered anything yet, would she! She wouldn’t have eaten anything!

I left the door of the chalet slamming behind me, raced for the taverna.

The sun was well down now, with the bulk of the central mountain throwing all of the eastern coastline into shadow; halfway to the horizon, way out to sea, the sun’s light was a line ruled across the ocean, beyond which silver-flecked blueness seemed to reach up to the sky. And moment by moment the ruled line of deeper blue flowed eastward as the unseen sun dipped even lower. On the other side of the island, the west coast, it would still be sweltering hot, but here it was noticeably cooler. Or maybe it was just my blood.

As I drew level with the garden at the back of the house, something came flopping over the wall at me. I hadn’t been looking in that direction or I’d have seen her: Julie, panic-stricken, her face a white mask of horror. She’d seemed to fly over the wall—jumped or simply bundled herself over I couldn’t say—and came hurtling into my arms. Nor had she seen me, and she fought with me a moment when I held her. Then we both caught our breath, or at least I did. Julie had a harder time of it. Even though I’d never heard her scream before, there was one building up in her, and I knew it.

I shook her, which served to shake me a little, too, then hugged her close. “What were you doing in the garden?” I asked, when she’d started to breathe again. I spoke in a whisper, and that was how she answered me, but drawing breath raggedly between each burst of words:

“The little goat…he was bleating…so pitifully…frightened! I heard him…went to see…got in through a gate on the other side.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Oh God, Jim!”

I knew without asking. A picture of the slumped figure in the chair, under the olive tree, had flashed momentarily on my mind’s eye. But I asked anyway: “The tarpaulin?”

She nodded, gulped. “Something had to be dead under there. I had no idea it would be a…a…a man!”

“English?” That was a stupid question, so I tried again: “I mean, did he look like a tourist, a holiday maker?”

She shook her head. “An old Greek, I think. But there are—ugh!—these things all over him. Like…like—”

“Like crabs?”

She drew back from me, her eyes wide, terror replaced by astonishment. “How did you know that?”

Quickly, I related all I knew. As I was finishing, her hand flew to her mouth. “Dimitrios? Putting their eggs in the tanks? But Jim, we’ve taken showers—both of us!”

“Calm down,” I told her. “We had our showers before I saw him up there. And we haven’t eaten here, or drunk any of the water.”

“Eaten?” her eyes opened wider still. “But if I hadn’t heard the kid bleating, I might have eaten!”

“What?”

She nodded. “I ordered wine and…some melon. I thought we’d have it before the fish. But the Greek girl dropped it, and—”

She was rapidly becoming incoherent. I grabbed her again, held her tightly. “Dropped it? You mean she dropped the food?”

“She dropped the melon, yes.” She nodded jerkily. “The bottle of wine, too. She came out of the kitchen and just let everything drop. It all smashed on the floor. And she stood there wringing her hands for a moment. Then she ran off. She was crying: ‘Oh Dimitrios, Dimitrios!’”

“I think he’s crazy,” I told her. “He has to be. And his wife—or sister, or whatever she is—she’s scared to death of him. You say she ran off? Which way?”

“Toward the town, the way we came. I saw her climbing the spur.”

I hazarded a guess: “He’s pushed her to the edge, and she’s slipped over. Come on, let’s go and have a look at Dimitrios’s kitchen.”

We went to the front of the building, to the kitchen door. There on the floor by one of the tables, I saw a broken wine bottle, its dark red contents spilled. Also a half-melon, lying in several softly jagged chunks. And in the melon, crawling in its scattered seeds and pulpy red juices—

“Where are the others?” I said, wanting to speak first before Julie could cry out, trying to forestall her.

“Others?” she whispered. She hadn’t really heard me, hadn’t even been listening; she was concentrating on backing away from the half-dozen crawling things that moved blindly on the floor.

I stamped on them, crushed them in a frenzy of loathing, then scuffed the soles of my flip-flops on the dusty concrete floor as if I’d stepped in something nasty—which is one hell of an understatement. “The other people,” I said. “The three sisters and…and George.” I was talking more to myself than to Julie, and my voice was hoarse.

My fear transferred itself instantly. “Oh Jim, Jim!” she cried. She threw herself into my arms, shivering as if in a fever. And I felt utterly useless—no, defenceless—a sensation I’d occasionally known in deep water, without my gun, when the shadow of a rock might suddenly take on the aspect of a great, menacing fish.

Then there came one of the most dreadful sounds I’ve ever heard in my life: the banging and clattering of Dimitrios’s three-wheeler on the road cut into the spur, echoing down to us from the rocks of the mountainside. “My spear gun,” I said. “Come on, quickly!”

She followed at arm’s length, half running, half dragged. “We’re too vulnerable,” I gasped as we reached the chalet. “Put clothes on, anything. Cover up your skin.”

“What?” She was still dazed. “What?”

“Cover yourself!” I snapped. Then I regained control. “Look, he tried to give us these things. He gave them to George, and to the sisters for all I know. And he may try again. Do you want one of those things on your flesh, maybe laying its eggs in you?”

She emptied a drawer onto the floor, found slacks, and pulled them on; good shoes, too, to cover her feet. I did much the same: pulled on a long-sleeved pullover, rammed my feet into decent shoes. And all in a sort of frenzied blur, fingers all thumbs, heart thumping. And: “Oh shit!” she sobbed. Which wasn’t really my Julie at all.

“Eh?” She was heading for the small room at the back.

“Toilet!” she said. “I have to.”

“No!” I jumped across the space between, dragged her away from the door to the toilet-cum-shower unit. “It’s crawling with them in there. They come up the plugholes.” In my arms, I could feel that she was also crawling. Her flesh. Mine, too. “If you must go, go outside. But first let’s get away from here.” I picked up my gun and checked its single flap-nosed spear.

Leaving the chalet, I looked across at the ramp coming down from the rocky spur. The clatter of Dimitrios’s three-wheeler was louder, it was there, headlight beams bobbing as the vehicle trundled lurchingly down the rough decline. “Where are we going?” Julie gasped, following me at a run across the scrub between clumps of olives. I headed for the other chalets.

“Safety in numbers,” I answered. “Anyway, I want to know about George, and those three old spinsters.”

“What good will they be, if they’re old?” She was too logical by half.

“They’re not that old.” Mainly, I wanted to see if they were all right. Apart from the near-distant racket Dimitrios’s vehicle was making, the whole valley was quiet as a tomb. Unnaturally quiet. It had to be a damned funny place in Greece where the cicadas keep their mouths shut.

Julie had noticed that too. “They’re not singing,” she said. And I knew what she meant.

“Rubbing,” I answered. “They rub their legs together or something.”

“Well,” she panted, “whatever it is they do, they’re not.”

It was true evening now, and a half-moon had come up over the central mountain’s southern extreme. Its light silvered our way through thorny shrubs and tall, spiked grasses, under the low grey branches of olives and across their tangled, groping roots.

We came to the first chalet. Its lights were out, but the door stood ajar. “I think this is where George is staying,” I said. And calling ahead: “George, are you in?”, I entered and switched on the light. He was in—in the big double bed, stretched out on his back. But he turned his head toward us as we entered. He blinked in the sudden, painful light. One of his eyes did, anyway. The other couldn’t…

He stirred himself, tried to sit up. I think he was grinning. I can’t be sure, because one of the things, a big one, was inside the corner of his mouth. They were hatching from fresh lumps down his neck and in the bend of his elbow. God knows what the rest of his body was like. He managed to prop himself up, hold out a hand to me—and I almost took it. And it was then that I began to understand something of the nature of these things. For there was one of them in his open palm, its barbed feet seeming poised, waiting.

I snatched back my hand, heard Julie’s gasp. And there she was, backed up against the wall, screaming her silent scream. I grabbed her, hugged her, dragged her outside. For of course there was nothing we could do for George. And, afraid she would scream, and maybe start me going, I slapped her. And off we went again, reeling in the direction of the third and last chalet.

Down by the taverna, Dimitrios’s three-wheeler had come to a halt, its engine stilled, its beams dim, reaching like pallid hands along the sand. But I didn’t think it would be long before he was on the move again. And the nightmare was expanding, growing vaster with every beat of my thundering heart.

In the third chalet…it’s hard to describe all I saw. Maybe there’s no real need. The spinster I’d thought was maybe missing something was in much the same state as George; she, too, was in bed, with those god-awful things hatching in her. Her sisters…at first I thought they were both dead, and…But there, I’ve gone ahead of myself. That’s how it always happens when I think about it, try to reconstruct it again in my own mind: it speeds up until I’ve outstripped myself. You have to understand that the whole thing was kaleidoscopic.

I went inside ahead of Julie, got a quick glimpse, an indistinct picture of the state of things fixed in my brain—then turned and kept Julie from coming in. “Watch for him.” I forced the words around my bobbing Adam’s apple and returned to take another look. I didn’t want to, but I thought the more we knew about this monster, the better we’d know how to deal with him. Except that in a little while, I guessed there would be only one possible way to deal with him.

The sister in the bed moved and lolled her head a little; I was wary, suspicious of her, and left her strictly alone. The other two had been attacked. With an axe or a machete or something. One of them lay behind the door, the other on the floor on the near side of the bed. The one behind the door had been sliced twice, deeply, across the neck and chest and lay in a pool of her own blood, which was already congealing. Tick-things, coming from the bathroom, had got themselves stuck in the darkening pool, their barbed legs twitching when they tried to extricate themselves. The other sister…

Senses swimming, throat bobbing, I stepped closer to the bed with its grimacing, hag-ridden occupant, and I bent over the one on the floor. She was still alive, barely. Her green dress was a sodden red under the rib cage, torn open in a jagged flap to reveal her gaping wound. And Dimitrios had dropped several of his damned pets onto her, which were burrowing in the raw, dark flesh.

She saw me through eyes already filming over, whispered something. I got down on one knee beside her, wanted to hold her hand, stroke her hair, do something. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want those bloody things on me. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.” But we both knew it wasn’t.

“The…the Greek,” she said, her voice so small I could scarcely hear it.

“I know, I know,” I told her.

“We wanted to…to take Flo into town. She was…was so ill! He said to wait here. We waited, and…and…” She gave a deep sigh. Her eyes rolled up, and her mouth fell open.

Something touched my shoulder where I knelt, and I leapt erect, flesh tingling. The one on the bed, Flo, had flopped an arm in my direction—deliberately! Her hand had touched me. Crawling slowly down her arm, a trio of the nightmare ticks or crabs had been making for me. They’d been homing in on me like a bee targeting a flower. But more slowly, thank God, far more slowly.

Horror froze me rigid; but in the next moment, Julie’s sobbing cry—“Jim, he’s coming!”—unfroze me at once.

I staggered outside. A dim, slender, dark and reeling shape was making its way along the rough track between the chalets. Something glinted dully in his hand. Terror galvanized me. “Head for the high ground,” I said. I took Julie’s hand, began to run.

“High ground?” she panted. “Why?” She was holding together pretty well. I thanked God I hadn’t let her see inside the chalet.

“Because then we’ll have the advantage. He’ll have to come up at us. Maybe I can roll rocks down on him or something.”

“You have your gun,” she said.

“As a last resort,” I told her, “yes. But this isn’t a John Wayne Western, Julie. This is real! Shooting a man isn’t the same as shooting a fish…” And we scrambled across the rough scrubland toward the goat track up the far spur. Maybe ten minutes later and halfway up that track, suddenly it dawned on both of us just where we were heading. Julie dug in her heels and dragged me to a halt.

“But the cave’s up there!” she panted. “The well!”

I looked all about. The light was difficult, made everything seem vague and unreal. Dusk is the same the world over: it confuses shapes, distances, colours and textures. On our right, scree rising steeply all the way to the plateau: too dangerous by far. And on our left a steep, in places sheer, decline to the valley’s floor. All you had to do was stumble once, and you wouldn’t stop sliding and tumbling and bouncing till you hit the bottom. Up ahead the track was moon-silvered, to the place where the cliff over-hung, where the shadows were black and blacker than night. And behind…behind us came Dimitrios, his presence made clear by the sound his boots made shoving rocks and pebbles out of his way.

“Come on,” I said, starting on up again.

“But where to?” Hysteria was in her whisper.

“That clump of rocks there.” Ahead, on the right, weathered out of the scree, a row of long boulders like leaning graveyard slabs tilted at the moon. I got between two of them, pulled Julie off the track, and jammed her behind me. It was last-ditch stuff; there was no way out other than the way we’d come in. I loaded my gun, hauling on the propulsive rubbers until the spear was engaged. And then there was nothing else to do but wait.

“Now be quiet,” I hissed, crouching down. “He may not see us, go straight on by.”

Across the little valley, headlights blazed. Then came the echoing roar of revving engines. A moment more, and I could identify humped silhouettes making their way like beetles down the ridge of the far spur toward the indigo sea, then slicing the gloom with scythes of light as they turned onto the dirt ramp. Two cars and a motorcycle. Down on the valley’s floor, they raced for the taverna.

Dimitrios came struggling out of the dusk, up out of the darkness, his breathing loud, laboured, gasping as he climbed in our tracks. His silhouette where he paused for breath was scarecrow-lean, and he’d lost his floppy, wide-brimmed hat. But I suspected a strength in him that wasn’t entirely his own. From where she peered over my shoulder Julie had spotted him too. I heard her sharp intake of breath, breathed “Shh!” so faintly I wasn’t even sure she’d hear me.

He came on, the thin moonlight turning his eyes yellow, and turning his machete silver. Level with the boulders he drew, and almost level with our hiding place, and paused again. He looked this way and that, cocked his head, and listened. Behind me, Julie was trembling. She trembled so hard I was sure it was coming right through me, through the rocks, too, and the earth, and right through the soles of his boots to Dimitrios.

He took another two paces up the track, came level with us. Now he stood out against the sea and the sky, where the first pale stars were beginning to switch themselves on. He stood there, looking up the slope toward the cave under the cliff, and small, dark silhouettes were falling from the large blot of his head. Not droplets of sweat, no, for they were far too big, and too brittle-sounding when they landed on the loose scree.

Again Julie snatched a breath, and Dimitrios’s head slowly came round until he seemed to be staring right at us.

Down in the valley the cars and the motorcycle were on the move again, engines revving, headlight beams slashing here and there. There was some shouting. Lights began to blaze in the taverna, the chalets. Flashlights cut narrow searchlight swaths in the darkness.

Dimitrios seemed oblivious to all this; still looking in our direction, he scratched at himself under his right armpit. His actions rapidly became frantic, until with a soft, gurgling cry, he tore open his shirt. He let his machete fall clatteringly to the track and clawed wildly at himself with both hands! He was shedding tick-things as a dog sheds fleas. He tore open his trousers, dropped them, staggered as he stepped out of them. Agonized sulphur eyes burned yellow in his blot of a face as he tore at his thighs.

I saw all of this, every slightest action. And so did Julie. I felt her swell up behind me, scooping in air until she must surely burst—and then she let it out again. But silently, screaming like a maniac in the night—and nothing but air escaping her!

A rock slid away from under my foot, its scrape a deafening clatter to my petrified mind. The sound froze Dimitrios, too—but only for a moment. Then he stooped, regained his machete. He took a pace toward us, inclined his head. He couldn’t see us yet, but he knew we were there. Then—God, I shall dream of this for the rest of my life!—

He reached down a hand and stripped a handful of living, crawling filth from his loins, and lobbed it in our direction as casually as tossing crumbs to starveling birds!

The next five seconds were madness.

I stumbled out from cover, lifted my gun, and triggered it. The spear struck him just below the rib cage, went deep into him. He cried out, reeled back, and yanked the gun from my hand. I’d forgotten to unfasten the nylon cord from the spear. Behind me, Julie was crumpling to the ground; I was aware of the latter, turned to grab her before she could sprawl. There were tick-things crawling about, and I mustn’t let her fall on them.

I got her over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, went charging out onto the track, skipping and stamping my feet, roaring like a maddened bull. And I was mad: mad with shock, terror, loathing. I stamped and kicked and danced, never letting my feet stay in one place for more than a fraction of a second, afraid something would climb up onto me. And the wonder is I didn’t carry both of us flying down the steep scree slope to the valley’s floor.

Dimitrios was halfway down the track when I finally got myself under a semblance of control. Bouncing toward our end of the valley, a car came crunching and lurching across the scrub. I fancied it was Nichos’s taxi. And sure enough, when the car stopped and its headlight beams were still, Nichos’s voice came echoing up, full of concerned enquiry:

“Mister, lady—you OK?”

“Look out!” I shouted at the top of my voice, but only at the second attempt. “He’s coming down! Dimitrios is coming down!”

And now I went more carefully, as in my mind the danger receded, and in my veins the adrenalin raced less rapidly. Julie moaned where she flopped loosely across my shoulder, and I knew she’d be all right.

The valley seemed alight with torches now, and not only the electric sort. Considering these people were Greeks, they seemed remarkably well organized. That was a thought I’d keep in mind, something else I would have to ask about. There was some shouting down there, too, and flaring torches began to converge on the area at the foot of the goat track.

Then there echoed up to me a weird, gurgled cry: a cry of fear, protestation—relief? A haunting, sobbing shriek—cut off at highest pitch by the dull boom of a shot fired, and a moment later by a blast that was the twin of the first. From twin barrels, no doubt.

When I got down, Julie was still out of it, for which I was glad. They’d poured gasoline over Dimitrios’s body and set fire to it. Fires were burning everywhere: the chalets, taverna, gardens. Cleansing flames leaping. Figures moved in the smoke and against a yellow roaring background, searching, burning. And I sat in the back of Nichos’s taxi, cradling Julie’s head. Mercifully, she remained unconscious right through it.

Even with the windows rolled up, I could smell something of the smoke, and something that wasn’t smoke…

In Makelos town, Julie began to stir. I asked for her to be sedated, kept down for the night. Then, when she was sleeping soundly and safely in a room at the mayor’s house, I began asking questions. I was furious at the beginning, growing more furious as I started to get the answers.

I couldn’t be sorry for the people of Makelos, though I did feel something for Elli, Dimitrios’s wife. She’d run to Nichos, told him what was happening. And he’d alerted the townspeople. Elli had been a sort of prisoner at the taverna for the past ten days or so, after her husband had ‘gone funny’. Then, when she’d started to notice things, he’d told her to keep quiet and carry on as normal, or she’d be the loser. And he meant she’d lose all the way. She reckoned he’d got the parasites off the goats, accidentally, and she was probably right, for the goats had been the first to die. Her explanation was likely because the goats used to go up there sometimes, to the cave under the mountain. And that was where the things bred, in that cave and in the well it contained, which now and then overflowed, and found its way to the sea.

But Elli, poor peasant that she was: on her way to alert Nichos, she’d seen her husband kill George’s wife and push her over the cliffs into the sea. Then she’d hid herself off the road until he’d turned his three-wheeler round and started back toward the taverna.

As for the corpse under the tarpaulin: that was Dimitrios’s grandfather, who along with his grandson had been a survivor of the first outbreak. He’d been lucky that time, not so lucky this time.

And the tick things? They were…a disease, but they could never be a plague. The men from Athens had taken some of them away with them that first time. But away from their well, away from the little shaded valley and from Makelos, they’d quickly died. This was their place, and they could exist nowhere else. Thank God!

Last time the chemicals hadn’t killed them off, obviously, or maybe a handful of eggs had survived to hatch out when the poisons had dissolved away. For they were survivors, these creatures, the last of their species, and when they went, their secret would go with them. But a disease? I believe so, yes.

Like the common cold, or rabies, or any other disease, but far worse because they’re visible, apparent. The common cold makes you sneeze, so that the disease is propagated, and hydrophobia makes its victims claw and bite, gets passed on in their saliva. The secret of the tick-things was much the same sort of thing: they made their hosts pass them on. It was the way their intelligent human hosts did it that made them so much more terrible.

In the last outbreak, only Greeks—Makelosians—had been involved; this time it was different. This time, too, the people would take care of the problem themselves: they’d pour hundreds of gallons of gasoline and fuel oil into the well, set the place on fire. And then they’d dynamite the cliff, bring it down to choke the well for ever, and they’d never, ever, let people go into that little valley again. That was their promise, but I’d made myself a couple of promises, too. I was angry and frightened, and I knew I was going to stay that way for a long time to come.

We were out of there first thing in the morning, on the first boat to the mainland. There were smart-looking men to meet us at the airport in Athens, Greek officials from some ministry or other. They had interpreters with them, and nothing was too much trouble. They, too, made promises, offers of compensation, anything our hearts desired. We nodded and smiled wearily, said yes to this, that, and the other, anything so that we could just get aboard that plane. It had been our shortest holiday ever: we’d been in Greece just forty-eight hours, and all we wanted now was to be out of it as quickly as possible. But when we were back home again—that was when we told our story!

It was played down, of course: the Common Market, international tensions, a thousand other economic and diplomatic reasons. Which is why I’m now telling it all over again. I don’t want anybody to suffer what we went through, what we’re still going through. And so if you happen to be mad on the Mediterranean islands…well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way it was.

As for Julie and me: we’ve moved away from the sea, and come summer, we won’t be going out in the sun too much or for too long. That helps a little. But every now and then, I’ll wake up in the night, in a cold sweat, and find Julie doing her horrible thing: nightmaring about Dimitrios, hiding from him, holding her breath so that he won’t hear her—

—And sometimes screaming her silent screams…