No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Read online

  “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…

  THE PICNICKERS

  This story comes from a long time ago. I was a boy, so that shows how long ago it was. Part of it is from memory, and the rest is a reconstruction built up over the years through times when I’ve given it a lot of thought, filling in the gaps; for I wasn’t privy to everything that happened that time, which is perhaps as well. But I do know that I’m prone to nightmares, and I believe that this is where they have their roots, so maybe getting it down on paper is my rite of exorcism. I hope so.

  The summers were good and hot in those days, and no use anyone telling me that that’s just an old man speaking, who only remembers the good things; they were better summers! I could, and did, go down to the beach at Harden every day. I’d get burned black by the time school came around again at the end of the holidays. The only black you’d get on that beach these days would be from the coal dust. In fact there isn’t a beach any more, just a sloping moonscape of slag from the pits, scarred by deep gulleys where polluted water gurgles down to a scummy, foaming black sea.

  But at that time…men used to crab on the rocks when the tide was out, and cast for cod right off the sandbar where the small waves broke. And the receding sea would leave blue pools where we could swim in safety. Well, there’s probably still sand down there, but it’s ten foot deep under the strewn black guts of the mines, and the only pools now are pools of slurry.

  It was summer when the gypsies came, the days were long and hot, and the beach was still a great drift of aching white sand.

  Gypsies. They’ve changed, too, over the years. Now they travel in packs, motorized, in vehicles that shouldn’t even be on the roads: furtive and scruffy, long-haired thieves who nobody wants and who don’t much try to be wanted. Or perhaps I’m prejudiced. Anyway, they’re not the real thing any more. But in those days they were. Most of them, anyway…

  Usually they’d come in packets of three or four families, small communities plodding the roads in their intricately painted, hand-carved horse-drawn caravans, some with canvas roofs and some wooden; all brass and black leather, varnished wood and lacquered chimney-stacks, wrinkled brown faces and shiny brown eyes; with clothes pegs and various gew-gaws, hammered trinkets and rings that would turn your fingers green, strange songs sung for halfpennies and fortunes told from the lines in your hand. And occasionally a curse if someone was bad to them and theirs.

  My uncle was the local doctor. He’d lost his wife in the Great War and never remarried. She’d been a nurse and died somewhere on a battlefield in France. After the war he’d travelled a lot in Europe and beyond, spent years on the move, not wanting to settle. And when she was out of his system (not that she ever was, not really; her photographs were all over the house) then he had come home again to England, to the north-east where he’d been born. In the summers my parents would go down from Edinburgh to see him, and leave me there with him for company through the holidays.

  This summer in question would be one of the last—of that sort, anyway—for the next war was already looming; of course, we didn’t know that then.

  “Gypsies, Sandy!” he said that day, just home from the mine where there’d been an accident. He was smudged with coal dust, which turned his sweat black where it dripped off him, with a pale band across his eyes and a white dome to his balding head from the protection of a miner’s helmet.

  “Gypsies?” I said, all eager. “Where?”

  “Over in Slater’s copse. Seen ’em as I came over the viaduct. One caravan at least. Maybe there’ll be more later.”

  That was it: I was supposed to run now, over the fields to the copse, to see the gypsies. That way I wouldn’t ask questions about the accident in the mine. Uncle Zachary didn’t much like to talk about his work, especially if the details were unpleasant or the resolution an unhappy one
. But I wanted to know anyway. “Was it bad, down the mine?”

  He nodded, the smile slipping from his grimy face as he saw that I’d seen through his ruse. “A bad one, aye,” he said. “A man’s lost his legs and probably his life. I did what I could.” Following which he hadn’t wanted to say any more. And so I went off to see the gypsies.

  Before I actually left the house, though, I ran upstairs to my attic room. From there, through the binoculars Uncle Zachary had given me for my birthday, I could see a long, long way. And I could even see if he’d been telling the truth about the gypsies, or just pulling my leg as he sometimes did, a simple way of distracting my attention from the accident. I used to sit for hours up there, using those binoculars through my dormer window, scanning the land all about.

  To the south lay the colliery: “Harden Pit”, as the locals called it. Its chimneys were like long, thin guns aimed at the sky; its skeletal towers with their huge spoked wheels turning, lifting or lowering the cages; and at night its angry red coke ovens roaring, discharging their yellow and white-blazing tonnage to be hosed down into mounds of foul-steaming coke.

  Harden Pit lay beyond the viaduct with its twin lines of tracks glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in a heat haze. From here, on the knoll where Uncle Zachary’s house stood—especially from my attic window—I could actually look down on the viaduct a little, see the shining tracks receding toward the colliery. The massive brick structure that supported them had been built when the collieries first opened up, to provide transport for the black gold, one viaduct out of many spanning the becks and streams of the north-east where they ran to the sea. “Black gold”, they’d called coal even then, when it cost only a few shillings per hundredweight!

  This side of the viaduct and towards the sea cliffs, there stood Slater’s Copse, a close-grown stand of oaks, rowans, hawthorns and hazelnuts. Old Slater was a farmer who had sold up to the coal industry, but he’d kept back small pockets of land for his and his family’s enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of everyone else in the colliery communities. Long after this whole area was laid to waste, Slater’s patches of green would still be here, shady oases in the grey and black desert.