Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece . . . stories of magic and madness, passion, and divine intervention. Most of it I’d half forgotten till a couple of days ago, when I dug out one of the textbooks that had been sitting untouched on my shelves for at least a year and found the ancient tales waiting, fresh and familiar, ancient but edged with something sharp and urgent. I reread them with a similar urgency, a hunger I could not completely explain.
This was a land of legend, of ancient myth, of story. It was the land of King Minos and the mazelike complex of tunnels beneath his palace known as the labyrinth. Inside the maze lived a terrible monster, half man, half bull—the Minotaur—to whom victims were sacrificed annually, trapped down there in the darkness of the passages where the monster hunted . . . It was great stuff, reeking of danger and heroism and strangeness. For a second I forgot Simon, humming tunelessly next to me, forgot the inevitable partying the reunion would center around, the willful, gloriously frivolous stuff we would laugh about over the next few days, and I felt those ancient stories in the air like incense, sweet and fragrant.
I have left behind my job, I thought, my ordinary, humdrum life in an American city, and I have become Medea, a woman of magic and mystery . . .
Grinning to myself again, I watched the road signs to neighboring villages as we drove. “Georgioupoli,” “Fones,” “Alikampos,” “Kryonerida.” None of them meant anything to me, and as the roads got smaller and the gaps between habitation larger, the settlements themselves shrank till they were mere clusters of ancient houses and an occasional tiny monastery. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The last village we saw was Empresneros, and then nothing, just a slow and winding climb into the pale mountains as I tried to check my e-mail on my phone.
“Are there hotels round here? Stores? Restaurants?” I asked, hating the timidity in my voice.
“Nope,” said Simon, shooting me a wolfish grin. “Isn’t it awesome? Out in the wilds. We figured we’d done the hotel scene and were ready for something a bit more authentic, you know? This is real Greece. You may as well put your phone away. You won’t get a signal up here.”
“Right,” I said lamely. “Wow. Great.”
There were no cars on the road. No gas stations, just these endless, rubble-strewn switchbacks, the land climbing on the one side as it fell away to the ever-present sea on the other.
“Good thing it’s fall,” said Simon. “In the winter this whole area is buried in snow, and the roads all get closed. It’s why so few people live up here. The mountain range is . . . I don’t know. Forgot the Greek name, but it means white mountains, or something like that. It’s the limestone, I think.”
We had been driving through the ubiquitous olive groves, but there were fewer and fewer signs of cultivation here, and the land was heavily wooded. I think Simon picked something up in my watchful silence because, out of the blue, he remarked, “When I got the keys for the place, I asked if there were bears or wild boar we should watch out for, but apparently they don’t live here. There’s a rare Cretan wildcat and some kind of ibex, but that’s about it. Nothing to worry about.”
“Good,” I said. I’d never been outdoorsy. I doubted Simon was either, and I was as sure as I could be that Melissa was a confirmed urbanite. We might be out in the wilds, but the house—or whatever it was—would have all modern conveniences, and if Melissa came down to breakfast not dressed to the nines and made up as if she were featuring on the cover of Cosmo, I’d throw myself to the rare Cretan wildcat. Hell, I’d eat the rare Cretan wildcat.
“What?” said Simon, who had half turned and caught my grin.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just, you know . . . looking forward to seeing everyone and hanging out.”
It sounded so pathetic when put like that, deliberately so. I didn’t want him to know just how excited I really was, how delighted that I had managed to hold on to my slender connection to them. I felt the way people may once have felt in the presence of royalty, except this was better because they were my friends. I knew that was lamer still, and I privately mocked myself for being so much the devoted hanger-on. It was tiredness, I told myself, the kind of exhaustion that makes you weak and emotional. I should have slept on the plane.
Chapter Five
I lie against the wall on the bed, my knees drawn up to my chest, my back to the room. It’s a defensive posture, an animal curling, as if I’m presenting an array of spines to the world. It has the added advantage of taking the strain off my wrist since I’m now close enough to the iron ring in the wall that I can smell the rust. Unless that’s more blood. For all I know the room could be caked with the stuff.
It is still mine dark. The kind of pitch blackness I can’t recall ever experiencing before, as if my head is in a velvet bag. It is numbing. I cannot tell how long I have been awake or if I have been continuously so. In spite of my alarm, the strange amnesia weighs on me so that I feel only half-there, and I wonder if I am drifting in and out of slumber without realizing it. In the dark, when you can’t move, there is little difference between sleeping and waking. It is nightmarish either way.
You have been in darkness like this before, I think vaguely. You woke up on your side in the black, smelling of blood . . .
I run from the memory. It’s like I’m on a railroad track with the train bearing down on me. I leap aside and suddenly the train was never there, even the memory of it boiling away to nothing, so that I can’t understand why I was so spooked. What could I have forgotten that was worse than where I was now?
I have taken off my one sandal because wearing it left me feeling unbalanced, but being barefoot makes me feel naked, vulnerable.
You’re in Crete, I remind myself, hoping that will jog more from my memory. I can picture the sea, the sky. A house, strange in its mixture of old and new . . .
The memory, if it is indeed that, makes me shudder, a deep, cooling flicker that runs uneasily through my body like an earthquake and leaves my skin puckered, each hair rising. There’s something about that house that I don’t like . . .
The blood on my hands . . .
. . . something about the house that a part of me needs to forget.
So I have. I push at the memory, trying to draw it out of the shadows, but it slithers away, not wanting to be found. I am almost relieved, though I don’t understand why my memory feels so fuzzy. The bump on my head feels superficial, and I don’t believe I was concussed.
The amnesia—if that’s not too grand a word for it—also feels selective, only blacking out the last few days. Older stuff is still there, and as if to make the point, my brain dredges up something I would have happily forgotten: a book Marcus bought me, paintings and poems drawing on the Greek mythology he knew I was so attached to. And though I had loved the book, the pictures had been a little too good, some of them so dark and creepily atmospheric that I skipped over them to get to lighter, happier material. One of them was the picture of the Minotaur brooding in the shadows of the labyrinth. It brimmed with strangeness and menace so that you could almost smell the musk of the creature. I had hurried past it, jumping to the end of the tale so I wouldn’t have to look at it or—ridiculously—feel it looking at me. The isolated Cretan house in my memory is like that, a vague and unsettling dread waiting for me when I turn the page.
At last I roll onto my right side and open my eyes, though that makes no difference either until, very gradually, I see, or feel that I see, the thin variance between the wall and door, the dark patch across the room that might be a cabinet.
And something else.