Kindle Edition
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Amazon
Amazon
Category:
Horror
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1500410217
Type: Fiction
Pages: 296
Copyright: Aug 18, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781500410216
Price: $2.49 (eBook)
There is nothing as terrifying as horror on a bright sunny day. It is out of place. It is unimaginable, and evil is alive and well. Demons exist. I know, for I have seen them. I have fought them and they are very real.
On the advice of his doctor, Allan Collins, an over-worked executive takes a sabbatical at the monastery of Agios Dimitrios on the lonely Grecian island of Melanos.
Collins meets Vincent Marat; a balding, middle-aged man of great wealth, impeccable taste and magnetic personality who has surrounded himself with a strange assortment of house guests, including the beautiful Alberta, the saturnine Diego and the self-absorbed twins. It is a menagerie of the unordinary, even the displaced, as Collins feels he has walked through the looking glass into some fanciful and erotic land.
Brother Evangelos, the Abbot of Agios Dimitrios, warns him that he should not be taken in; that Vincent Marat is a dangerous man, a diabolist and he should be on his guard at all times. Collins heeds his advice but still finds it hard to see Marat, who calls himself Ipsissimus, the highest grade of magician, as more than an egotistical and hedonistic deviant.
And then it all starts to go terribly wrong. What was intended as a retreat to recharge his drained batteries turns into a wild nightmare as he finds himself allied with the monastery’s Abbot in a deadly battle against Marat.
Excerpt
There is nothing as terrifying as horror on a bright sunny day. It is out of place. It is unimaginable.
I should have laughed, at least smiled at the sheer impossibility of it all, but there was nothing to laugh at, and anyway, I knew romance had long-deserted that place, and that it was not true that horror lurked in dark places, shunning the light.
It was not true then, and is not now, for in that place with the Mediterranean sun blazing, the buzz of crickets and the laughter from the beach below, the devil had stalked, elegant and urbane, with the welcoming smile of the perfect host.
Melanos was that kind of place. Melanos: black, not because of its past or what happened, but for the colour of the volcanic sand on its beaches. Coincidence? Maybe. But I know that what happened in that idyllic place changed my life beyond measure. What started as a holiday, a temporary retreat from the harsh realities of business life, to cleanse the poisonous detritus of city living from my soul, evolved into a nightmare. I shall never forget it. I will never be the same again, for the impossible happened, and those things which normal, sane people take to be no more than fantasies, or at worst the sick imaginings of psychotic minds, actually occurred.
The last time I had looked on that scene the sun had shone from the washed-out blue sky that is unique to the Greek islands. But now it was night, and I had come back for reasons even I was unsure of. Maybe it was to lay the ghosts of the past, to erase the last vestige of hope, to recapture something that I might not have held at all. I wasn’t sure why, only that there had been a compulsion that wouldn’t be denied.
I felt a chill despite the warmth of the night, and looked down on what lay spread out below, falling to the moon-blazed sea. It was an impossible postcard, a scene stolen piecemeal from a romantic Hollywood film.
Every cliché imaginable sprang to mind. The moonlight like quicksilver on the water, reflecting almost hurtfully bright from the whitewashed walls, the dark silhouettes of the cypress trees, an owl swooping across the sunken gardens making for the pines on the headland. I watched as it settled with practiced ease on a branch, and then its single hoot echoed.
I turned away from the moonlit perfection and saw the Villa Thelema crouching as if asleep. Only it did not sleep. It was dead. The monstrous creature had been slain. The dead eyes of its barred windows would no more open, would no more flood the gardens with yellow light, and never again would the sound of music and laughter drift into the soft Aegean night.
I walked slowly up the meandering flag-stoned path, rank weeds sprouting from the cracks, pushed aside the untended overgrowth of oleander, and stood before the great, iron-studded main door. I reached out a hand, a reflex action, and tugged the wrought iron bell pull. It gave a rusty clank, a sound as dead as all else.
The Villa Thelema would never rise again. The hand of God had blasted it, and rightly so. I stood back, looking up and along the whitewashed walls, and saw the cracks and pock-marks revealed like the raddled face of an aging whore.
And yet I had to know. There was a compulsion. I had not got this far to go back with the final questions unanswered. And so I turned the handle, its rusty creak unnaturally loud in the night stillness, and pushed the great door open.
No chimera rushed out, there was no Cerberus guarding the entrance to that particular gate to hell. Instead I felt an ineffable sadness, heard a sound like the sighing of one in great sorrow, and a fitful gust of night wind sprang up, swirling dead leaves around the courtyard in a ghostly dance.
Marat was no more, dumped like garbage in an unmarked grave, and if there was justice in the afterlife, his eternal resting place would be as cheerless and uncomfortable as the dark cellar beneath the villa where one of the last terrible acts in that appalling drama had been played.
I looked slowly around, half expecting to see a parade of ephemeral shades, grave-clothed, seeking rest. But there was nothing. Just the night wind softly moaning in the tall pines outside the walls.
Marat was dead these five years. And Diego, who came from somewhere in northern Spain. He looked and behaved like one of those dark souls in an El Greco painting. Diego was an enigma, even towards Marat; towards the rest of us he appeared coldly arrogant.
The figure of Aphrodite wandered in from stage left, dark and sensuous, her eyes and hands continually seeking assurance and love from her brother. And her brother, Adonis - they really must have been twinned, for they were as like as children from the same womb could ever be - wrapped in unhealthy union with each other that at times disgusted but always fascinated.
Then there was Alberta: tall, elegant, beautiful and of what is politely called a certain age, which I suppose meant she was on the wrong side of forty, though why there should be a wrong side I never fathomed as she oozed sexuality and used it like a weapon. Had she been Marat’s mistress? Possibly, even probably, though what any woman could have seen in him I cannot say as he was not physically attractive, although he exuded a magnetism that is tritely called animal. She was English, and there was a touch of the demimondaine about her that suggested he had collected her somewhere along the way and perhaps she stayed out of gratitude as the lifestyle she enjoyed in his company was good.
Whatever her relationship with Marat, it did not appear to have prevented her using her attractions on the other men who passed in and out of that strange world at Thelema, myself included, and perhaps because he owned her, considered her his creature, he made no obvious objections, but had treated her escapades with a kind of amused tolerance. After the awful events of that never-to-be-forgotten night she quite simply vanished, for when I had returned to the villa, her room was empty. There was not even a vestige of a personal possession to suggest that she had ever been, save the lingering scent of Joy.
It was a surreal scene. In the centre of the open space, a courtyard, one side fronted by a narrow colonnaded walkway that gave onto the living rooms, squatted the bulk of a neo-classical fountain, cherubs frozen and dolphins halted in mid flight. At one end, near the great room, the scene of so much I still cannot fully comprehend stood the scattered and fallen wicker chairs where Marat had on occasion held evening court. A large umbrella, dust-covered and starting to tatter, leaned at a drunken angle, and the table, wrought iron and glass, still had an algae-greened pitcher and glasses that held the pathetic corpses of dead insects and a layer of pigeon droppings. It required little imaginative effort to re-people the scene and watch the play of tensions and antagonism generated by Marat’s cat-like cruelty.
I crossed the colonnade, and pushed open the door to the great room. It still hung from one hinge, blasted by the storm, and screeched protest.
It was exactly as I remembered it. The flag-stoned floor, each piece a yard square, the great fireplace carved from a slab of marble that must have taken a dozen men to move, the dark ebony furniture still assembled in a half circle around one larger chair as if before a throne. And indeed a throne it was, Marat’s throne, for he was the lord and master of Thelema and those who came to rest by accident or design within its walls, his subjects.
It was like the rest, dead, the fabrics rotting, surfaces dust-covered, the cold ashes of a fire still in the grate, and no phoenix would rise from them. And as I moved from room to room in a kind of slow voyage of exorcism, I felt snake-like skins sloughing away, each one a tight-held memory that until then I had not been able to let go. Even so I knew the catharsis could not be complete without a ceremonial visit to the last two places.
Apart from the atrium, the single story building extended back from the great hall in a wing that included kitchen and store rooms, but between them was a shadowed corner where the dark figure of the housekeeper presided like the three-headed dog at the gates of hell. Black-garbed, black-visaged, and probably black-hearted, Mrs. Karolides had kept the unwanted and uninvited from her domain with the skill of a maximum security jailer.
To the right, just before the desk and high chair at which she seemed to sit all day, and for all I knew all night, was a heavy wooden door, leather-covered, sound-proofed and as such out of place, that lead down a flight of time-worn steps to a huge vaulted cellar, a chamber that could have stored provisions enough to withstand a siege.
It was empty. My flashlight showed no bales, no casks of salt meat and no butts of canary. Just, forlornly in one corner near the steps, the tipped remains of a wine rack and the shattered green glass evidence of many wasted bottles. Out of curiosity I picked up a piece, the half torn label still attached and readable. It was a moderately decent Medoc, nothing special. The glass tinkled and smashed as I dropped it, a small discordant sound that somehow had its own finality.
But it was not for wine that I had come into this place of horrific memory. The flashlight played around the walls, a bright probing beam trembling in my suddenly agitated hand. What I looked for was confirmation that what I remembered had in fact happened, and was not the product of a dream conjured by the black bile and melancholy humours of those long-ago days.
It was not to be. The evidence remained, for against the wall, a patina of red corrosion rusting them hung the chains, mute reminders of what had happened, of Marat’s true psychotic self. I strode to them in a fit of uncontrollable anger, tried to wrench the evidence from the wall, snapping the chain again and again until the flashlight dropped, breaking the bulb and plunging the chamber into blackness relieved only by a thin streak of starlight where the ceiling had partly caved in during the frightful storm and earthquake.
For one throat-constricting moment I stood, a silent scream welling, then I turned, stumbled to the stairs and half tripping, half falling, fought my way to the top and out of the door. At Mrs. Karolides’ desk I stopped, doubled over, gasping with both fear and effort, and then hurried out into the atrium and the blessed, cleansing moonlight.
I can’t imagine what I thought I’d get out of revisiting that place at night other than a hope that darkness would cancel out the daylight horror, that a plus and a minus would cancel each other and the balance return. Whatever the intention, it had failed, for the villa of Thelema still had me in its grip and I knew that unless I took the final steps to the white-washed building at the top of the grounds among the tumbled rocks and dark pines, the grip would not be broken and I would not be free.
The path, crushed gravel now weed-spotted, and bordered with white-washed stones wound upwards from the back of the house to a rock-strewn knoll a hundred yards or so behind the villa. Scrubby pines, branches grown out like clutching fingers, would have offered a face lashing for the unwary if the moon had not shone so harshly, a brilliant light that turned white to electric blue, and shadow to the deepest black.
The building at the top, four-square, windows like arrow slits and topped by a small campanile, stood in a clearing, lurking it seemed to my over-wrought imagination, waiting as a pitcher plant waits for the unsuspecting fly.
I stopped twenty yards short, heart hammering though not from the exertion of the short climb, mouth dry as I summoned the nerve to take the few last steps.
Anger rose again, not at what had happened, but at myself, my own timidity. It was a building, just that, nothing more, with no more mystery than the gardener’s shed, for the people who had used it were gone and would not return. I made an impatient gesture, bent to pick up a stone and hurled it at the white walls. It clattered, rebounded and trickled harmlessly down the slope, and the noise disturbed a roosting bird that itself clattered fearfully from the dark surrounding pines, screeching alarm.
The door opened stiffly, creaking on dry, unoiled hinges, and for long moments I stood in the opening, my eyes adjusting to the gloom until the moonlight filtering through the arrow slit windows cast blue-white bars across the floor and the interior was revealed.
It was a temple. It had been a temple; for the same deadness prevailed with a patina of dust covering all. In the centre of the floor a pentagram was inlaid into the stone, strips of black mosaic marking the outline of the five pointed magical star that when first seen had given me the feeling that I had stepped into some kind of adolescent nastiness, that Marat was the deluded leader of one of those cults dedicated to fleecing its suggestible members. Later I had revised that first impression. Deluded he most certainly was, but also what he did was in deadly earnest.
At the far end, above a raised platform on which stood an altar, were inscribed the words “Do What Thou Wilt”, the first sight of which had given me a sick feeling and a strong desire to turn and walk away until I had seen Marat’s amused reaction to the revulsion that must have crossed my face. He had taken my arm in an avuncular way, a man of the world calming the fears of one less worldly.
“It is not what it seems,” he had said, adding. “At the very least, join us for dinner.”
And so I had stayed, out of curiosity, and later when the rain began to beat a heavy tattoo I had accepted his offer of a bed for the night.
The next morning, with the sky a brilliant blue and the earth new-washed it all seemed so normal as I joined the others for breakfast on the terrace. Marat proposed a trip to a ruined temple at the other end of the island, by horse-drawn carriage as there were no cars on Melanos, and called for Mrs. Karolides to prepare a picnic. He seemed genuinely disappointed when I had regretfully declined to join them, pleading the necessity of getting back to the monastery.
“It has been there for a thousand years,” he said. “And no doubt will be for another thousand. What difference will a day make?”
I had left after breakfast despite his offer, promising to return, and an hour later was making my way over the inland track that led to the small port of Maleas. I had paused for a moment and looked back. The villa, sparkling white in the morning sun looked so normal, so inviting, that for a second I almost retraced my steps. Some inner prompting told me that very normalcy was a disguise, but for what?
I turned away again, not knowing how the Villa Thelema was to so drastically change my life in the weeks to come.
And so there I was again, exorcizing my demons, and the temple in which I stood suddenly ceased to be the place of evil it had once been, to become no more than a sad, deserted building, slowly decaying like the rest.
As I turned to go, my foot struck something. I looked down and saw the broken remains of what had been a statute: arms, legs, torso scattered like body parts after some horrendous accident, and remembered with a jolt the obscene, almost life sized Priapus that had stood beside the altar; leering, a monstrous satyr with its huge, swollen member thrusting out. I kicked the pieces aside in disgust, memories of that night flooding back, so intensely vivid that I found myself scrabbling on hands and knees among the debris for the one offensive piece. I found it in a corner, buried beneath a detritus of brown leaves and kicked it into the open the same way one would kick some repulsive or dangerous insect. I stamped on it, again and again until it was reduced to unrecognizable plaster chips.
For a few moments I stood, panting with effort, a final exorcism made, and then left, closing the door softly, wary of disturbing whatever might still slumber, and followed the same track I had taken, knowing I would never return; and that in some strange way I had undergone an anabiosis. Marat and his acolytes were gone, and I had a life to return to.
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