Metro Winds

THE STRANGER



What is it about airports? Case thought. There was something almost mythical about the level of boredom and stagnation he felt, trapped in these mazes of shining glass and plastic laid out over acres of bilious-looking carpet. Yet in movies airports were always represented as glamorous, slightly dangerous places, where pursuit scenes erupted violently in the midst of all that coming and going, the protagonist racing along moving walkways waving a gun, elbowing extras aside as he pursued the plot. Someday he would write a script that captured it all, from the dewy awe you felt at first, primed by all those movies to see airports as portals to worlds of sophistication and mystery, to the disenchantment of the jaded frequent flier who knew an airport was no more than a tatty waiting room for journeys to the same end.

Yet despite all the travelling he had done, there were times when he still experienced a furtive stab of hope that this trip would take him somewhere he had never been before. That sly bit of hope was like the cat in a story he had once read that is always getting its master to open this door and that door during winter, but refusing to go out any of them to its master’s baffled irritation. Then one day the master realises the cat is looking for the door to summer, and he keeps opening doors into winter.

He kept travelling, looking not for the door to summer, but for a gateway to somewhere or something that would stop him feeling like a stranger in his own life.

He pictured the scene: a cat stalking from door to door, tail in the air as its master turns one doorknob and then another. It would be a nice opening device for a movie without a linear structure. He imagined trying to pitch his airport movie to the money men and grimaced. Why were they always money men? Was it that women did not invest in movies? Maybe that was why the movie world was so full of men as boys. Was he a man or a boy, he wondered? Sometimes he felt as if he was some other category altogether.

Certainly he had not been man enough for his ex-wife, Stephanie. He sighed and looked at his watch without taking in the numbers. Then, as he habitually did, he thought about that as directions in a script.

Man checks time.

I am losing the plot, he thought.

What plot is that? he enquired of himself drily.

Man mutters to self, then smiles.

If life were a movie, his would be one of those European movies where everything took too long and even the smallest event was invested with a mysterious meaning that never divulged itself. Most people in the New World did not ‘get’ European movies because they saw them as metaphor. They could not imagine a level of alienation from other people so profound that almost no words or interaction were necessary or indeed possible. The first time he travelled to Europe, he had discovered that a lot of the things he regarded as metaphor were no more than simple descriptions of an unfamiliar reality. Like the way people in Russian novels lived, several different generations crammed into a two-room apartment with bookshelves and thin dividers set up to create an illusion of privacy. He had thought that a metaphor for emotional oppression, only to find that it was just how it had been behind the Iron Curtain during communism, or communism disguised as socialism, or state capitalism disguised as socialism. Privacy and space had been as unreachable as freedom.

His Czech friend Ivana had said languidly that in those times, entire sagas evolved around the attempt to get an apartment. People schemed and planned and paid bribes so they could leave home, where their grandparents, parents and siblings still lived together, sometimes even their in-laws. She herself had slept with the brother of a dead woman in order to get him to sublet his sister’s squalid bedsit. It had been illegal, of course, in a place where, for a long time, almost everything anyone could want had been illegal. Her occupation of the apartment had lasted a year before the man had evicted her for fear of being reported. And that had been in the aftermath of the fall of communism. After the aftermath.

The thing was that people like Ivana had a reason for feeling disconnected from the people around them. But he had never been poor, or politically oppressed, or even in much physical discomfort. He had never experienced the extremes of fear or anger or sorrow. His childhood had been pleasant, and when his parents died he had felt sad rather than grief-stricken, before burying them and going on to live a pleasant, even rather lucky life. He had no excuse for feeling alienated.

He glanced around the airport, feeling weary and slightly dehydrated. But not suicidal. Not over an apartment or an airport or because of being left by his wife. Not even because he was living a life in which he had taken hundreds of trips without ever feeling he had arrived. Once, years ago, he had told a guy at a party that he had never contemplated committing suicide. The guy had looked at him incredulously. How could anyone see the state of the world and not feel like killing themselves? he asked. Obviously the man thought him shallow, and Case had felt disturbed in some way he could not articulate, but when he told the story to Ivana, she laughed uproariously.

‘Petr is Hungarian! What can you expect? Hungarian is not a language in which to conduct normal conversations. It is a language only for suicide and poetry.’

Case had been fascinated by the idea of a language so tortured it could express only suicidal or poetic thoughts. He saw it as a poetic notion, until he overheard someone at a rap party say that the suicide rate among Hungarians was the fifth-highest in the world. That was the thing he liked about parties. The way you heard or misheard intriguing scraps. The way certain words got stuck in your head; this piquant phrase or that evocative awkwardness. He loved conversation – not taking part in it but witnessing it. Parties were perfect for that, because everyone wanted to talk and no one listened. He could be a stranger among them, listening and taking mental notes, and no one cared. He saw himself as a natural and instinctive witness of the world, which was perhaps why he’d been so troubled by the comment that a person who truly saw the world would be suicidal. Because Case felt like he saw far more than people who were deeply engaged in life. It was only that he did not feel suicide to be the natural or necessary consequence of his observations.

He thought of his ex-wife’s disgust at his passivity, and found himself looking at his watch. He did not want to know the time; it was a pose he often struck in an airport. It’s like I am performing for an unseen audience, he thought. He often had the feeling his life was some sort of performance. It even worked as a metaphor. You came out of the darkness of the womb into the limelight, and so began the performance that was life, which invariably ended with the curtain falling. Curtains. The only bit that really bothered him was the idea of coming to the end of the performance, without ever knowing what it was for. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble with endings in scripts. They felt contrived, because life did not come with full stops. Everything bled into everything else.

His problem with endings was why he had never made it to the big time, despite all the young playwright prizes and grants and the preliminary excitement of studios. He was known for being a very good scriptwriter who had trouble ending his scripts, to the frustration of his agent. Studios that took him on these days knew they would have to wait and wait and maybe call in another writer to finish his script or rewrite the end. The fact that he did not object to someone putting the tail on his script was why he was still working. The truth was that he was content for someone else to finish his stories.

‘So what do you want, Case?’ one of his tutors at the Binger had asked irritably a few months before in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, halfway through a three-month grant stay where he had been trying yet again to resolve the end of a script. ‘You want to just go on and on and what? Bore the audience to death?’ One woman in a session had said outright that maybe his inability to finish – to close – was tied up with his unresolved sexuality. He grimaced at the obvious circumlocution for ‘his repressed homosexuality’. Well, it was Amsterdam where window-peeping was a tourist industry and you ordered grass off a menu after discussing it with the waiter. There had been a lot of talk about performance as exhibitionism and audience voyeurism. He had kept silent because, for him, any audience that would see the movie arising from his script was irrelevant. He did not think about other people when he wrote. For him writing was an articulation of his observations, and an attempt to lay them out in a way that would make some sense of the world. The reason he had never produced a play that satisfied him, despite the credits to his name, might be the same reason he had never found an ending that felt right.

There was an announcement and he freeze-framed to listen, but could not tell whether the disembodied announcement was in English or Greek or Esperanto, much less whether the speaker was male or female. Fortunately, he could see the departure boards from where he was sitting, and make out the destinations and gate numbers if he squinted. He was searching for the Aegean Airlines flight when a tall woman stopped in front of him, blocking his view.

She was wearing a perfectly fitted, perfectly pressed, parchment-coloured sleeveless suit and a panama hat of the sort that he associated with Casablanca, tilted very slightly over one eye. Her long, thin, bare arms hung loosely by her side, the slender fingers slightly furled. She wore no varnish on her short, square-cut nails, and she was carrying nothing. That struck him as unusual, because you never saw a woman without a bag of some kind, especially now bags were as big a status symbol as cars, some of them costing almost as much. The fabric of the woman’s suit was so fine and smooth you could tell she did not have so much as a coin in a pocket. Was it possible she was carrying no more than her boarding pass and passport? She didn’t even have a book. Could anyone travel that light?

He was interested in how, by simply standing so long with her back to him, she was building dramatic tension in him. It was not so much that he felt curiosity about her face, but the relaxed fluidity of her waiting roused his interest, for she would not stand so long merely to read something that was already there. Like him, she must be waiting for her gate number to be announced. But people did not normally wait without any sign of impatience. She did not fidget or adjust her clothes or shift her weight from one slender, booted foot to the other, nor did she look away from the board. Case had never seen anyone wait so compellingly. How could anyone surrender with such grace to the necessity of waiting?

Woman in perfectly white silk suit and panama hat stands relaxed with her back to the camera as she studies departure boards. Camera watches her from point of view of man seated. She stands unmoving.

Adequate lines, but how to recast them so that they would express the profound patience evoked by her stillness? Directions should evoke mood without wasting a word in explaining it. No adjectives. A film script like Taxi Driver was the perfect example of dynamic poetry – how a violent, dark, gritty movie could be expressed so lyrically as a script! He had no desire to write that sort of film, but he would have liked his scripts to have the spare beauty that arose from real precision.

Of course, most film moguls and agents would not even notice beauty in a script. Spectacular action and an accelerated plot were the qualities that sold a movie into the cinema chains. It was all about formula and box-office take during the first week. That’s why the films being churned out were so bad. They were made to make money and that was the whole reason for their existence. No one making the movie pretended anything else. The incredible thing was that people kept going to see them.

He sighed, realising he was on the verge of an irritable inner diatribe of the sort that had irked him in his father when he was young. He had seen that edgy, impatient crabbiness settle into the lines in the faces of older people. It seemed to him that intolerance, rigidity and irritability were all signs of decay, and when he noticed the tendency in himself, first with wry amusement and then with distaste, he had vowed to guard against such rants because, aside from being a surrender to ageing, they formed a metaphorical cataract that clouded your vision. He had the feeling that ageing was not a matter of getting old physically, so much as accepting the habits of ageing.

‘Maybe if we could be distracted from going through the motions of ageing we’d be immortal,’ he muttered aloud.

The woman in the pale silk turned and looked at him.

Her eyes were pale blue diamonds and her hair was black and blunt-cut to jaw length with sharp wings that brushed her cheeks. Were there such things as blue diamonds, he wondered dazedly, unable to turn his eyes politely away. Common sense told him that she was too far away to have heard his soft words. But why would she look at him like that if she had not heard him? And even if she had heard, what had he said that had so caught her attention? Or was it merely that he had spoken in English or with an Australian accent? She was looking at him with an expression that might, in a face that lacked the strange blandness of extreme beauty, have been surprise. Her stare had the same quality of intensity as her waiting. That polar gaze was so compellingly focused that it was as if she reached across the distance separating them and touched one finger to his lips. Yet there was no intimacy in her look. She might have been studying a fascinating bug under a microscope.

She turned and walked away without haste, but she was gone from his sight in an instant. It was as if several frames had been cut from a reel of film. One minute she was walking away from him – gliding away, his mind insisted – then she was gone.

People do not vanish, he told himself, groping for balance, for her glance had been so heavy that its withdrawal had made him feel less substantial. He licked his lips and found them dry. You are half out of your head from lack of sleep, he told himself sternly. He was. He had flown non-stop from Australia to Athens, and right now it was about two in the afternoon in his head, even though it was only five in the morning in Greece. He would have got a later flight except there were only two airlines that went to Santorini, and the Olympic Airlines flight was in the evening, which would have meant hanging around all day. So he had opted for the Aegean flight, which had meant waiting four hours in transit.

He got up, slung his bag over his shoulder and strolled across to the duty-free shop, letting his eyes run over the displays: gleaming bottles of Chanel, of Glenfiddich whisky with black and gold labels, of dark red French wines, and then the stuffed children’s toys, chocolates, books and more books – three for the price of two, two for the price of one. There were long lines of bestsellers from number ten to number one, with a disproportionate number about vampires. Ostensibly he was passing time but in fact he was looking for the woman. He wanted to see her again. Or, to be more exact, he wanted to feel the weight of her gaze. There was something about how it had made him feel that he needed to experience once more, in order to understand it. It was absurd, but the desire to find her kept pulsing though his mind so that even when his legs were tired he could not bring himself to sit down.

He forced himself to stop at last, only after he had twice all but accosted tall slender women. Somehow he had failed to notice that one had been close to sixty, with white hair, and the other a redhead in a grey trouser suit. All he had noticed was that both had exhibited an echo of the remoteness and stillness that he had sensed in the woman in the white suit.

Striving for humour, he reminded himself that obsession was when everyone started looking like the person you were searching for. But he was astonished by the strength of his desire to find the woman. He was struggling against the impulse to get up and go hunting again when he heard his name announced.

‘Will passenger Casey Heath please come immediately to boarding gate six. This is a final call for Mr Casey Heath for A3 flight 54 to Santorini.’

He was shocked, because he had never heard his name announced at an airport before. He looked at his watch and saw he had fifteen minutes before the gate closed, but by the time he reached the final length of concourse, he was moving too fast and sweating heavily, his heart racing unpleasantly. He told himself to cool it. He did not normally get flustered. It was the woman.

Stepping onto one of the moving walkways, he imagined a tracking shot following him from one walkway to another until he reached his gate. He calmed down when he saw there were still people lined up. He concentrated on sliding his laptop out of his backpack before the security checkpoint, removing coat, belt and shoes in the prescribed order. Then he waited until the airport official waved him through the metal detector. It beeped as he passed through, and the official ran a portable detector over him before waving him on. He repacked his stuff, put on his shoes and passed into the waiting room where there were a few people still waiting to board.

It was only as he joined the queue that he noticed the woman in the white suit was standing at the front.

Seated on the plane as it taxied to the runway, he wondered what was the matter with him. It was not as if he had not seen his share of glowing people. The film industry was full of them. The truth was that what most people called beauty was so often really just youth and the health that naturally went with it, combined with regular features. That was why all gorgeous people looked more alike than ordinary people. On screen you had to find a way to contrast beauty, to surround it with ugliness and irregularity so that it would stand out. That was probably why, he suspected, beautiful people often chose plain or even ugly partners.

The woman had been beautiful in that same way, and yet her face had burned into his memory. It seemed to him that he could still see her when he blinked, like the afterimage of a firework. The detail of the memory was amazing. He could summon up the startling pallor of her skin, the slightly heavy, crow-black brows and lashes and the sharp angles of the framing hair. She had worn a maroon lipstick that was nearly black. His ex-wife had used a Chanel nail polish called rouge noir, the colour of this woman’s lips. The eyes in a face like that ought to have been dark and lustrous, but instead they had been twin skylights.

He wondered, bewildered, if this was l’amour à première vue. Certainly he had never experienced such intense feelings before for a woman, not even for his ex-wife. But if this was love at first sight, it was not as he had imagined. His heart did not seize with a longing to possess her or even to know her. Indeed, his desire was not so much to see the woman, but to be seen by her.

Once the plane was in the air, he strolled up the aisle, ostensibly to stretch his legs, but he was looking for her. She must have been in the washroom, he thought, disappointed after having lapped the whole plane. Returning to his seat he told himself that he was acting like a schoolboy. He lay back and closed his eyes, but the noise of the plane seemed too loud and the vibrating of the armrest too insistent to allow him to sleep. Even the soft snore of the old Greek woman next to him was too loud. He was not usually so over-sensitive, and he pushed his thumbs against the bony roof of his eye sockets and then pressed the heels of his hands hard against his forehead to ease the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. To stop himself from getting up and searching the plane again, he tried scripting a meeting with the woman on Santorini. He sited the accidental meeting on a walkway so narrow that one of them had to back up.

Man: ‘I am a stranger here.’

In his imagination, she did not answer. She only looked at him enigmatically. Maybe she was Greek? He didn’t speak the language but surely he could find what he needed in a phrase-book. He thought of her face again and it struck him suddenly that she looked more Slavic than Greek. That white skin, the high almost prominent cheekbones and heavy brows, and the way her eyes narrowed at the outer corners. They were the sort of eyes his grandmother had called sideways tears. ‘Never love a woman with eyes like that, for she will steal your soul,’ she had once told him. He smiled, but a queer shiver went down his spine.

He thought of something one of the lecturers at the Binger had once said. There was only one basic dramatic circumstance. Someone wanted something very badly and was having trouble getting it. Before this moment, he had never wanted anything much, save to understand why he was the way he was. But now his desire to meet the woman filled his thoughts. He wanted to hear her voice and feel the chilly potency of her eyes on him.

He lapped the plane twice more before the seatbelt sign came on and the flight attendant shooed him back to his seat. Fastening his seatbelt, he wondered how it was possible that he had not set eyes on the woman. He had even, in some desperation, described her to a flight attendant, explaining that he thought he knew her and wished to say hello.

He made up his mind to get off the plane quickly so he could watch the other passengers disembark, but in the end he was trapped in his seat by the old woman sitting beside him, orthodox cross hanging golden on her chest, in no hurry to get up. As passenger after passenger filed past, she conducted a rapid and voluble conversation in Greek with the woman across the aisle. By the time Case managed to get out, most of the other passengers had already disembarked. Just the same, he waited, pretending to be adjusting the strap on his laptop bag, certain that the woman had not passed him, even though she was not among the remaining passengers. She must have been seated in first class.

He headed determinedly for the baggage carousel, passing smoothly through the passport checkpoint, but the woman was not among those collecting luggage. Taking his own bag, he headed out, imagining a scene in which she was being met by the blond guy who played Jason Bourne. What was his name? He frowned, hating not being able to remember an actor’s name, but he had been having trouble with names lately. It was absurd, because he could remember that the guy had played in Good Will Hunting, and the two Bourne follow-ups, but not his name.

‘Damn,’ he muttered under his breath, because she was not in the arrivals hall.

He was met outside by the taxi driver he had booked, holding up a piece of paper with his name, and on the way up to the village of Firostefano, he had offered an extravagant but mostly incomprehensible travelogue in a combination of Greek and contorted but enthusiastic English. Case only half listened. He knew from his research that the village was on a steeper part of the island where dazzling white buildings capped rocky cliffs. The slope on one side was so steep that the roofs and terraces of one row of villas were level with the path leading to the doors and gates of the row of villas behind them. His villa had two terraces, one the roof of the outside bathroom and the other the roof of the second and detached bedroom, both offering stunning panoramic views of the caldera. It was this view that he saw from the side window as the taxi pulled up on the stony stretch of ground running from the front of a whitewashed church to the edge of a precipitous drop to the sea.

For a long moment, Case stared out across the satin sea to the distant horizon, seeing several small islands which, along with Santorini, were part of the rim of what had once been a huge volcano, while the caldera in their midst had once been the fiery cauldron atop the volcano. Now the sea filled the caldera, save for two small volcanic islands that rose up like jagged teeth.

‘Caldera!’ the taxi driver shouted, then tapped the front window of the taxi. Case looked obediently ahead and saw a line of whitewashed buildings on level ground broken by a narrow path. Gesticulating and talking in swift Greek and picturesque, fragmented English, the taxi driver went on until Case understood that the villa he had rented was to be found along this path, but that the taxi was too wide to take him further. He paid the driver and received a set of keys with the name of the villa on the tag, before the yellow Mercedes rattled away. Turning to face the view, he picked up his bag and walked towards the low stone wall that ran along the edge of the drop. The view from it was impressive, and yet it was so exactly the same view as he had seen on hundreds of postcards and coffee-table books that it was impossible to be properly impressed. What drew him to the edge was not the view, but the tall, ragged gumtrees flanking it.

The smell of eucalyptus was sharply – almost unbearably – familiar as he came to the wall, and he was filled with a fierce nostalgia that bewildered him with its intensity, for how could he experience such longing for a place to which he had only ever felt himself mildly attached? Sitting on the top of the wall, he felt as if he had never truly smelled gumtrees before, and he sat half dumbfounded until the sun had risen well above the horizon, stealing the last soft trace of dampness from the air.

Simple thirst made him stir, and as he picked up his bag and turned his back on the view, he saw the church. He had noticed it vaguely when the taxi pulled up from the steep street leading into the square, but now he saw that it was a small, whitewashed building with stained-glass windows set either side of an unusually wide timber door protected by a gilt metal security gate. The gate was locked, but the door was very slightly ajar. The ambiguity of a church that was both shut and open drew him closer, and he put his bag down and reached through the gap between the bars to push his fingertips against the door. It was very heavy and pitted with age. Indeed the door seemed older by far than the church, but beyond it he saw nothing but impenetrable darkness. Turning back to the path, he wondered what he had expected to see, and then his mind swerved convulsively back to the woman in the white suit, as he wondered where she was staying.

Dimly he noticed he had not thought of her since smelling the gumtrees, and recognised that both the woman and the gumtrees had evoked a level of feeling in him unusual enough to make him wonder if he was becoming ill. Some kinds of fever made you extremely vulnerable to sensation.

He followed the path through the oblique walls of whitewashed buildings until he came to a shop, its window crowded with groceries too mysterious and foreign to be appealing. Soon after, just as he had been told, there were steep steps leading down from the path. The name of the villa had been painted onto the wall alongside the steps, with a small arrow pointing down. He knew that the first path to the left leading away from the steps would bring him to the gated wall beyond which lay his villa.

Descending the steps, he found himself facing another dizzying view of the caldera, and that was when he heard, for the first time, the deep mournful call of a cruise ship coming to dock.

He had been told when he had first conceived of coming to Santorini that the tourist season finished at the end of August, and by the second week in September there would be almost no tourists staying on the island. But most restaurants and shops would remain open for the month of September and even some of October, because of the tour ships. These leviathans would continue to glide across the caldera and dock at the island until late in the month, because if weather was inclement they could merely adjust their course and stop elsewhere. An amount of uncertainty was, he had vaguely supposed, part of the romance of a sea journey. Unpacking his few clothes that first day in the slightly dank coolness of the main bedroom of the villa, built into the hill like many dwellings on that steep slope, he thought about the possibility of a conference. There had been so many people on the plane, and companies did stage such events in lavish locations as a perk. Except that none of the passengers on the plane had looked like delegates bound for a conference. The woman in the white suit had been the only person who had dressed well enough; the rest had been utterly nondescript. In fact, now that he thought about it, he did not think he had ever been on a plane with so many unremarkable people. He could not remember a single face. That in itself was remarkable.

His thoughts returned to the woman as he removed his clothes to sleep off his jetlag, having set his alarm for early evening. He had given himself time enough for a shower before heading out for dinner. He would walk around the area and maybe see the woman dining somewhere. He drifted to the edge of sleep and hovered there.

He dreamed of his ex-wife.

‘I love you,’ he had told her, when she announced she wanted a divorce.

‘You don’t listen. You don’t hear. How can you love? Half the time you don’t even see me. You’re like one of those people at a party who spends the whole time they’re talking to you looking over your shoulder waiting for someone else to come in. You’ve spent all of the time we have had together keeping most of yourself in reserve, and for what? For who?’

‘There is no one else!’

She had laughed scornfully. ‘I’m not accusing you of infidelity or having a roving eye, for Christ’s sake! I’m telling you that you live like you’re in a waiting room. You treat me like I am someone else in that waiting room.’

The dream changed and he saw again the woman in white, standing with her back to him for a long time, and at last, she was turning to him. Her pale eyes stabbed him and he gasped, for the pain defined him and gave him substance.

‘You looked at me,’ he whispered, and somehow the words were not absurd.

‘I had to be sure,’ she said. ‘You would not have known I looked at you, unless you were the one. You would have been blind to me, like all the rest.’

‘Who are you?’ he asked, feeling this dream was too real to be a dream.

The dream changed again and he was moving towards the white church with its strangely wide door, slightly ajar. It was not day now, but deep night, and when he touched the gate, instead of being locked, it swung open. A stinging joy rose up in him as he pushed the heavy door. It opened, and a wave of darkness flowed out at him.

He woke to his alarm, the smell of eucalyptus in his nostrils.



On his first full day on Santorini, he went for a long walk. He had decided to allow himself three days of being a tourist, not wanting to begin work when he was jetlagged. He also wanted some of the place to seep into him. All the research in the world could not tell you how it felt to be in a place, after all. But instead of unwinding or thinking about his work, he spent the whole day looking for the woman. He walked to most of the tourist destinations and even took a trip to Ancient Thera. Every wide-brimmed hat or tall woman or woman in a suit or woman with short dark hair jolted his pulse. He could not sit more than a short time in a restaurant without feeling that this was the moment when, if he were walking the streets, he would encounter her.

That night, again he dreamed of her, turning to look at him, but now they were somewhere dark and cold, and the smell of earth and stone was strong about them. She held a candle, and instead of a white suit she wore a black robe.

‘You looked at me,’ he said again.

‘I had to be sure before I could tell the others,’ she said.

‘Others?’

‘We are the Undimmed,’ she said. ‘Come to us.’

He woke again to the alarm and the scent of eucalyptus, determined to find the woman and speak to her. He told himself it was the only way to defuse his growing obsession, but as he walked through the day, the dream still whispered, Come to us.

He did not see her, and that night, he dreamed of the church facing the caldera.

The third and fourth days were the same as the first and second, but although the weather continued bright and hot the wind grew stronger, and at night in the restaurants, the blue and white tablecloths had to be pegged to prevent them flying away. There was a chill in the air which reminded him that summer had ended.

It was the seventh day before common sense forced him to accept that the woman had probably left the island. Few people would stay on a place like Santorini as long as he intended to remain. Even in the week he had been there, the number of people in restaurants in the evenings had dropped steadily, with a corresponding rise in friendliness on the part of waiters. No longer run off their feet by the tourist hordes of mid-season, they were pleased to stop and talk, happy to answer questions, especially after he bought them a Metaxa or two.

He played his usual role in these moments, asking them about themselves and their lives, listening intently, because he was genuinely interested, so that they failed to notice he had told them nothing about himself. But no one had seen the woman in white, and no matter how circuitously he brought up the question, Case got the same response: a frown, a slight look of confusion and then a shrug or shake of the head. Some would suggest she must have left on a tour ship. That did occasionally happen when a person was rich enough to pay the exorbitant price of a ticket and set off on such a journey on a whim. It was possible, for each day new tour ships came, and the town would fill up from midmorning till evening, then the liner would sound its mournful call, and gradually the shops and restaurants and streets would empty out as the visitors returned to their ship.

It was the second day of the second week, and late afternoon when he was returning from an early meal through the empty streets to the villa. He was walking across the open ground before the church and there was a strong wind. He was so busy leaning into it that he was almost on top of an old woman in black before he noticed her, standing in the centre of the stony square and looking at the church. He glanced at the church, too, and found it was stained red by the sunset. Its gate was closed, and the heavy timber door behind it as well, as on every occasion he had passed by since that first morning. He felt the eyes of the old woman on him and on impulse he turned to speak to her. She watched him come closer with black eyes set in a nest of wrinkles so thick that they hid the whites of her eyes. Her knotty fingers were working a rosary and the cross swinging from it was polished gilt and flashed sharply when it moved from her shadow into the bloody blaze of light from the dusky sky. Case asked her in a mixture of Greek and English, pointing to the church and himself, when it was open, but he might have been a stone for all she reacted. She simply went on watching him with her shiny black eyes, her sunken mouth moving slightly as if she were chewing something.

He found himself looking down at the swinging cross, flinching at the stab of red light flaring from it. Backing away from the old woman, who shook her head slightly at him, he continued to the villa on unsteady legs. That night, he drank a bottle of Boutári wine someone had left, and slept very heavily, not waking until midday the following day. He felt weary. He had dreamed all night, and yet he could remember none of it save a fleeting image of the woman in black, only instead of a swinging cross flashing with reflected sunlight, there had been a small golden knife.

He had planned to begin work that day, but having wasted part of the morning anyway, he decided to take a boat tour to the larger of the volcanic islands in the caldera, telling himself the opportunity would not exist once the weather turned. He had bought an open ticket the first day and so he had only to take the funicular straight down to the pier, and wander along it until he found the right boat. Case did not admit to himself his hope that he would see the woman, until he saw the boat and the family group who were the only other passengers. Then he realised he had been a fool. A woman who could wait like that and look at a man like that was not the sort to take cheap daytrips.

This has to be the end of it, he told himself sternly, and as a punishment, he climbed aboard the boat after handing over his ticket to the swarthy man at the little gangway, and sat down heavily on a pitted bench.

The boat had not long cast off when the matron in the group, a plump, pleasant-faced woman with abundant freckles, leaned over to speak to him. He assumed she was asking his name, or where he was from. Or maybe she was merely asking how long the tour would take, but he did not understand her. She was speaking English and he recognised the individual words she was saying, yet he could not make out what she was saying. This was so peculiar that he simply stared at her stupidly, wondering if he was the butt of some sort of joke. The woman was clearly taken aback by his response, and repeated herself. Again he did not understand what she was saying, but he forced a smile and a noncommittal shrug because he was afraid that if he spoke to her, she would hear gibberish, or some sort of animal noises. The woman’s smile vanished, for of course she had seen him address the boat attendant in English.

When they came to the larger of the volcanic islands, he took the option of walking up the hill from the beach to the top of the island in order to escape conversation with the other passengers. They were already changing into bathing clothes when he set off, removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. He was accustomed to feeling a stranger even among people he knew, but he had always been able to pass as normal. On the stony ascent, however, he wondered if what had just happened meant he was degenerating; becoming more and more of a stranger was really only another way of becoming mad.

It was a steep, surprisingly hot walk to the top of the island, though the day was cooler than the preceding days. Several small fumaroles on the way confirmed this was not an extinct volcano. He ought to have felt afraid, he supposed, but he was preoccupied by what had happened on the boat. His mind swayed like the old woman’s crucifix. He was careful on the return journey to the island not to meet the eyes of the other passengers, and he disembarked with no more than a brusque nod to the captain and crew.

It was just before dusk and he decided to eat dinner earlier rather than return to the villa and come out later, for he had been told that none of the restaurants remained open after dark. He chose an empty restaurant he had eaten in before, and tensed when the waiter approached and spoke to him in careful English, clearly remembering him. Relieved to understand the boy, he asked for a glass of wine. The waiter frowned and leaned closer, his expression puzzled.

‘Excuse?’ he said.

Case licked his lips and pointed to a wine bottle on the drinks menu, then indicated the Kleftiko on the food menu. The waiter looked confused and slightly sullen, but he collected both menus and sauntered away to fulfil his duty. Case sat there feeling shaken to his bones by the realisation that the boy had been unable to understand him.

Man in restaurant looks at hands. They are trembling.

There was a stiff breeze blowing as he left the restaurant, and by the time he walked the forty minutes to the villa, the sun had set and it was cold. He was shivering and his face tingled as if he were sunburnt. The air was clammy in the room, and the smell of the earth seemed to press on him from all sides. He had intended to shower, but he was too cold. He piled blankets on the bed and forced himself to drink some tea, reassured by the sudden certainty that he was ill. Wasn’t it possible he had been getting sick when he left Australia? The long plane trip always exacerbated any incubating illness, and it would explain his delirium.

Under a mound of blankets, he fell asleep and into a dream of walking up the stony slope to the top of the volcano. The sky was a bleared red and sulphur hung in the air, burning his nostrils and throat and making his eyes water. The heat was terrific yet he was shivering with cold because he was naked save for his shoes. This did not strike him as incongruous so much as inconvenient. He hoped he would not slip and graze himself on the black rocks. When he reached the top of the slope he saw that there was a swirl of magma turning in a slow spiral in the upturned bowl that was the top of the volcano. The woman in white stood there with her back to him, gazing into the fire. Instead of a suit, she wore a robe of cream wool with a long, pointed hood falling down the centre of her elegant back, but he knew her stillness. After a long while, she turned to look at him, and her eyes were a cool touch on his fevered brow.

‘We have been waiting for you,’ she said. Her voice was soft and deeply accented, and although the words were not English, he understood them. ‘We live among you, but we are no longer seen by you.’ She smiled and he saw that her teeth were small and sharp and very white as they pressed against the scarlet plush of her lower lip. ‘All that you know of us are dark myths and distorted tales of long ago, when we were young and savage because we were too close to human.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he murmured.

‘You are the one and the way,’ she said, and there was reverence and a profound formality in the words and her speaking of them that made him know they were ancient words of ritual.

‘The way to what?’ he asked, marvelling that such a fantastical conversation on the edge of a volcano in a dream could feel more real than all of the conversations he had heard and taken part in during his life.

But he saw that he should have no more answer than that.



He woke suddenly to impenetrable darkness, with the feeling that someone had called his name. He sat up and turned on the bedside light. He rubbed his face. It felt stiff and sore and he cursed himself for failing to think of sunscreen, especially given the country he came from.

He would have gone back to sleep but he was terribly thirsty. He realised that he no longer felt ill. The fever, if that’s what it was, had broken. His skin felt sticky with sweat, and he was repulsed at the thought of returning to the tumble of stale bedding. He rose and went to sit in a creaking wicker chair, drinking the water slowly. He finished the glass and poured himself another water, drank it off, then walked to the door and opened it. Moonlight flooded down into the yard and the bent olive tree was limned silver. As he stood there, soaking up the eldritch beauty of the little scene, he heard the woody pop of a falling olive.

The wind had dropped. He dressed and went up onto the terrace overlooking the sea. The view was bathed in the blaze of light falling from a full moon.

He recalled the sentence, all those years back, in a musty yellow guidebook to Greece he had found in the attic of his parents’ house. That weird, inexplicable sentence had been the seed for the script that had ultimately brought him to Santorini.

‘. . . bringing vampires to Santorini is as bringing coals to Newcastle . . .’

‘But what has Santorini to do with vampires?’ asked his agent impatiently, after reading a draft. ‘I have never heard anything about vampires in Greece.’

‘I know,’ Case had told her eagerly. ‘That’s what struck me. It was such a strange thing to write, and I started wondering what would cause vampires to go there.’

‘But you don’t tell us in this,’ she’d said, shaking the script. ‘It’s not finished.’



He rose and went down to put on his sandals and a coat, and walked out onto the path and up the steps. Despite the chill of the night, he could feel the heat of the day through the soles of his sandals.

He remembered the way the old woman had shaken her head at him, and then as he was coming to the square where he had seen her. He drew a startled breath because he saw that the gate and the wooden door to the church were now wide open, and there were people inside. There were others arriving, wrapped in cloaks and gliding across the moonlit ground. He was standing in the shadows at the end of the path, his heart beating very fast.

Then he saw her sitting on the low stone wall under the eucalyptus trees, the woman in white. She now wore a long white coat belted at the waist and a scarf tied over her black hair. She beckoned to him, and even from so far away, he felt her eyes on his hot, tight skin. He sighed and moved towards her, hardly aware of his own will. As he approached, the night perfume of eucalyptus filled the air and he breathed it in, relishing the pungency of it.

She held out her hand to him, and when he took it, expecting her to draw him down beside her, she rose to look into his eyes.

‘I dreamed of you,’ he said. Some of the cloaked figures gliding into the church glanced over as if they heard his soft words, but he could not see their faces or expressions.

‘A seed was planted,’ she said. ‘Many seeds were planted, but only one will summon the stranger who will be the way and the gate.’

A shiver ran through Case. ‘What will happen to me?’

‘Once our kind was closer to humanity, but we are immortal and in all the long years began to diverge. We learned how to do without blood, and to live unnoticed among humanity. We became the guardians of humanity, but as we continue to live, so we continue to diverge, and humanity becomes ever more alien to us. Once a century, a human is consumed so that we may understand humanity well enough to care what becomes of it. That human is the stranger who, once consumed, is known, and through that one, all humanity.’

‘I am the stranger?’ he asked, but he knew. Here was the answer to his long searching and all of his journeys. He had been a witness all his life, and here at last was his audience. An ecstasy of terror and exaltation welled up in him.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘They are waiting.’ She took his hand and led him across the stony yard towards the church, where he could see people sitting facing the altar.

‘A church?’ he murmured, thinking of all the stories he had researched of vampires being repelled by crosses and holy water.

‘Where else do immortals belong but in a house built for an immortal who was killed by humans,’ said the woman, ‘an immortal whose blood is symbolically drunk again and again?’

His mouth was dry as she brought him into the church and to the front, where a man stood, facing the altar. He had the same quality of stillness as the woman, before he turned to face them.

‘I am Gabriel,’ said the man, and his eyes were the same pale, dazzling blue as the woman’s.

‘Are you an angel?’ asked Case.

‘I am as an angel,’ answered Gabriel. ‘And now, you must choose.’

‘Choose?’ asked Case. His lips felt stiff and cold.

‘What we would have of you is a gift and it is yours alone to give. But this is a dark gifting, for it will end the life of the giver. I think you have guessed that. And so now, you must decide if you can give.’

‘There were others?’ Case said, after what seemed a long time.

The figure nodded. ‘There were, and in each case, they gave their gift freely.’

‘If I decide I don’t want to die . . .’

‘You will leave this place unharmed,’ said Gabriel. ‘You will never see any of us again. You will not be hunted. Think on it, but you must decide before dawn, and that is near.’

Case blinked rapidly, and felt a strange desire to weep. He turned to a looming marble statue of a saint at whose feet lay a sheaf of flowers. The scent was heavy and sickening. Case realised that he was terribly frightened, but he also felt that he had been waiting his whole life for this moment, even if he had not known it consciously. And if he turned from it, what was he to do with what remained of his life? Would he go mad looking for pale eyes to make him feel real?

‘Have you made your decision?’ asked Gabriel gently.

Case looked at him, realising there was no choice. Not really. That must have been what the others like him had understood. His life for the future of humankind. It was an exchange any fool could understand. And wasn’t this the moment towards which he had been travelling, all unknowing, all these long years? Wasn’t this the consummation he had been seeking in all those script endings he had tried to write?

He did not need to tell the immortal his decision. He saw comprehension in those clear, blue eyes. He did not know what he expected, but Gabriel nodded and the rows of seated, cloaked people rose with a soft collective movement and gooseflesh broke out on his neck as the woman in white stepped forward and laid back his collar to bare his neck.

He saw through the open door of the church that the sun was beginning to rise. A fiery crimson light lanced across the sea and in through the door to strike knives of light from every shining surface. Gabriel moved forward, bathed in red, darkness fluttering at his back in great shadowy wings. He laid his long, cold hands on Case’s shoulders. His eyes were a blaze of pale light, and Case closed his own eyes. Then he felt the lips of the immortal against his throat. For a moment, he thought that there would be only this kiss, and death, but not all of the old dark stories were false, for he felt the sharp teeth as they punctured his skin and the pain was so intense that he had to clench his teeth to prevent himself crying out. Then the immortal began to draw his life from him, and there was a terrible dragging anguish as if his heart were being torn out. The light of the dawn grew so that he could see the redness through his eyelids. The hands released him, and other hands clasped him, and again he felt the teeth in his throat. All of them, he thought. They will feed on me, and he screamed and felt himself falling away from the sound into the hot burning heart of the volcano.

His last living dream was of the moonlit gumtrees, their sharp scent piercing the alien air.

The end, he thought.



‘Wake,’ said a voice.

He opened his eyes. He was outside and it was morning. The woman in white was bending over him, and for the first time, he saw that she was little more than a girl with light, bright eyes.

His throat felt sore but when he lifted his hand to the place where they had bitten him, he could feel that his skin was smooth and unbroken.

‘Our kind heals swiftly,’ she said.

‘Our kind?’ he asked.

‘You gave your life to bestow the gift of your knowledge. But you were bitten thrice. Once is for the death of a mortal, twice is for the release of the spirit, and thrice is for the birth of an immortal.’ A tear fell down her cheek and onto his and he touched it wonderingly. She said, ‘I weep for the human who gave his life for his people. But I rejoice, too, for you are the first new immortal in a century, as I was the first in the last. That is why I was sent.’

He stared at her, and saw the diamond blue of his own eyes reflected in hers. He said, ‘I thought that was the end.’

‘It was the end of endings,’ she said, and she held out her hand to him, and he took it, immortal to immortal.