The
ship was named the Palinouros. It
departed the city of Thessaloniki, in Greece, and made its way slowly across
the Mediterranean. It was January, but the weather was mild, almost warm, and
the sea was like a broad blue plate, flat and very calm.
The Palinouros, a low-slung shipping vessel,
threaded its way through the Dodecanese, the Twelve Islands, gliding past
Mikonos and Naxos, Kos and Rhodes, before pulling into dock in Pigadia, the
main town and port of the island of Karpathos.
There,
the crew of the Palinouros began to
unload the crates they had been hired to transport into a large flatbed truck.
The truck had been waiting for them at dock. All told, there were fourteen
crates to unload, the largest of which was about the size of a coffin. They
were all marked εύθραυστο, which was
“fragile” in Greek. The word “fragile” was printed in several different
languages on each of the boxes. The crates had traveled a very long way.
When
the crates had been transferred to the truck, the driver, an older gentleman
with a large bald head, waved to the sailors, who were heading off in search of
a tavern. He took a moment to mop the sweat from his brow with a
handkerchief—it was really very warm for January-- then strapped the boxes down
so they didn’t slide off the back of the truck. His son helped him tighten the
straps, then hopped into the passenger seat. His father slid in behind the
wheel, thinking of how much he’d like to go and have a beer with the crewmen of
the Palinouros. “After we drop these
crates off, maybe,” he said to his son with a smile, and then he slammed the door
and pulled his seatbelt across his chest.
The
boy, who had no idea what his father was talking about, but who was used to the
old man finishing his thoughts out loud, just squinted an eye at his baba and went back to playing Angry
Birds on his cell phone.
The
old man keyed the ignition and the truck started with a roar. He drove away
from the docks and headed south.
The
old man didn’t need to consult a map or even his shipping manifest. He had
lived on the island of Karpathos all his life. Its winding roads and rugged hills,
houses and beaches and shops, were as ingrained in his memory as his wife’s
face, with whom he’d been married thirty-two years. This was the third such
delivery he’d made to the Villa Carpathia.
He
drove up into the hills, one sunburned arm cocked out his window, passing olive
orchards and rocky, uncultivated fields. He hummed as he drove. There weren’t
many homes on the south side of the island, and once he was away from Pigadia
he had the whole road to himself.
Karpathos
hosted just 6,200 souls. That number more than doubled in the summer months, as
Karpathian expatriots and tourists came to the island to vacation, but in winter
the island was all but deserted, and that was exactly how he liked it. He’d
never been much for crowds, and couldn’t be dragged out of his house the entire
month of August, when folk flocked in from all over the world to enjoy the Panagias, the island’s most famous religious
festival.
A
couple kilometers past Lamiotissa, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, he turned off
the main road and headed up a winding private drive. There, at the top of the
hill, was the Villa Carpathia, home of the island’s most mysterious residents,
the Nikas family.
It
was a large, beautiful, white home with a red tiled roof and a colonnaded entrance.
The house sat on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea, surrounded by several terraced
gardens and a ten foot high security fence. The terraced gardens extended over 800
square meters and hosted an eclectic mix of Mediterranean plants: lemon
trees, figs, dates, crape myrtles, bay laurel, and cypresses. The security fence
ran the entire length of the property and hosted over two dozen surveillance
cameras. He knew. He had counted them.
The
old man pulled up to the front gates and stretched his arm out to press the call
button. After a few minutes, the call box emitted an insectile buzz and a
crackling voice inquired, “Yes?”
“Got
another delivery for Paulo Nikas,” he said, looking into the security camera
mounted above the call box.
The
security camera moved with a humming sound to inspect the crates on the back of
his truck, then returned to his face.
“All
right,” the box crackled. An instant later, the gates glided smoothly inwards.
Just
as she had the last time, and the time he came before that, an old crone
shuffled out to greet them. She was eighty if she was a day old, with a hunched
back and skinny, bird-like limbs. Her features were bird-like as well: eyes
small and dark, a big beak of a nose.
“More
packages?” she cawed as he climbed down from the truck.
“Yes,
ma’am,” he said. He consulted his manifest, though he did not really need to,
and said, “Fourteen crates. All shipped here from Liege, Belgium.”
The
old woman seemed exasperated, and waved vaguely toward the inner courtyard.
“Put them where you left the last ones.”
It
took the old man and his son nearly half an hour to unload the fourteen crates
and roll them on a dolly into the piazza. The old woman stood in the scant
shade of a small olive tree and watched them suspiciously, her bony arms
crossed in front of her breasts. When they were finished, the old man mopped
the sweat from his brow. He was out of breath and a bulging vein in his temple
looked like it might spring a leak at any moment. When his face was not quite
so red, he had the old woman sign his clipboard, gave her a copy of the
receipt, and bid her have a good evening.
“You,
too,” the old woman said. She folded the receipt and stuffed it into the pocket
of her apron as she accompanied the men to the driveway. She waved to the
deliveryman, sparing him one faint smile of acknowledgement, then watched the
man and his son until the truck had vanished over the hill.
The
truck appeared once more at the foot of the cliff, small with distance. It
glided past the front gates and receded steadily down the driveway. When it was
finally out of sight, the old woman returned to the crates they had delivered, made
a sniffing sound, then shuffled inside to close the gates.
The
old woman’s name was Leonora Nassa, and she was actually ninety-two years old.
She had lived on the island all of her life, and had served the Nikas family
for fifty of those years. Once she had made certain the gates were shut and her
employer’s home was secure, she shuffled back to the kitchen to finish
polishing the silver. That’s what she was doing when the deliverymen buzzed at
the gates.
She
did this work contentedly, humming along with the radio. The quiet pop music,
along with the clinking of the silver, were the only sounds in the house.
She
finished polishing the silver, did some light dusting and vacuumed the sitting
room. At five o’clock, she returned to the kitchen, took a large stainless
steel pot out of the refrigerator and carried it to the stove. The pot was
heavy and sloshed thickly as she carried it. Soon, she knew, she would be too
old to manage this trivial chore, but there was not a doubt in her mind that
the family she had served more than half her life would look after her when she
became too frail to work. After fifty years of employment, she was more a
member of the family than she was a servant.
She
set the pot to simmer, then put another pot on the stove beside it—fassolatha, left
over from the day before, a hearty white bean soup. It was about all she could
eat anymore. Her digestion had gotten so fussy of late.
She
ate the fassolatha at the small table in the kitchen, paying no attention to
the coppery smell that arose from the larger pot. Once, that sickly-sweet smell
had nauseated her, but she hardly noticed it anymore. When she was finished
eating, she washed her bowl and utensil and put them in the drainer to dry,
then took a large ladle and stirred the “soup” simmering on the stove. She
didn’t taste the other “soup”, didn’t even really like to look at it, and
turned her face away when she rinsed the ladle in the sink.
She
put the lid back on the pot and looked out the window. The shadows of the
cypresses in the east yard had grown long and attenuated while she was eating.
It would be dark soon. The sky was already deepening, assuming a richer shade
of blue.
She
went to the table, sat and opened the book she was currently reading. It was a
gothic romance, so trashy she was embarrassed to be caught reading it, but
everyone had their vices. Her husband’s, God rest his soul, had been loose
women. Hers was trashy romances.
It
wasn’t long before there was movement in the great villa. Leonora heard
footsteps, the creaking of a door. She hid her book in her purse and pushed
herself up from her seat, wincing at the pain in her joints. She was taking a
soup cup down from the cabinet when Ezra, her daughter, shuffled into the
kitchen.
“Mother,”
Ezra said in a groggy voice. Ezra was always the first of the family to rise.
Sometimes she rose before the sun had even touched the sea.
“Hello,
sweetheart,” Leonora responded. “Did you sleep well today?”
Ezra
smiled. Her small, delicate fangs showed when she smiled. She was a petite
girl, not twenty years old when Leonora’s employer, Paulo Nikas, gave her the
living blood. He had done it at Leonora’s request. She hadn’t been a widow two
years—her husband, a fisherman, had drowned that year at sea—when her daughter
was diagnosed with leukemia. He had done it to save Ezra’s life. Ezra was
really sixty-three years old, but would forever have the form of a
seventeen-year-old maid.
“Yes,”
Ezra replied, quick excitement in her eyes. “I even dreamed today! I don’t
dream often, but I did today!”
“What
did you dream?” Leonora asked.
“Oh,
that I was a living girl again,” Ezra said wistfully, running her fingers
through her long, raven hair. “I was on a beach and it was night and a handsome
young boy was chasing me! I ran, of course, as a proper girl should do, but I
wanted him to catch me, and when he did, he laid me down on the warm, wet sand
and made passionate love to me.”
Ezra,
like her mother, had a penchant for romance.
“My
goodness!” Leonora exclaimed. “What would the neighbors think?”
“Oh,
mother!” Ezra laughed. “I’ve seen those books you hide in your purse!”
“Are
you hungry?” Leonora asked, quickly changing the subject.
“Yes!”
Leonora
took the lid off the big pot and ladled some soup in the mug. It was thick and
red. Adamos Gonce, a local fellow in their employ, collected it at the
slaughterhouse, delivered it three times a week, for which he was extravagantly
compensated. On an island with just 6,000 inhabitants, vampires must be very
conservative. The family only fed on humans a few times a year, and only during
the summer when the island was thronged with foreign tourists, and then only if
they were evildoers. No harm would ever come to the innocent citizens of
Karpathos. Not from the Nikas family!
Ezra
brought the mug of warm pig’s blood to her lips and drank thirstily, her eyes
rolling back in her head. “Oh, that’s good!” she sighed. She licked her lips as
Leonora looked on adoringly.
Paulo
had offered Leonora the living blood as well. He’d offered to make her a strigoi several times in the past four
decades, but Leonora had always refused. It was a tempting proposal—of course
it was!—but despite her husband’s many failings, she had loved the man dearly
and wanted to rejoin him in heaven. He was such a wonderful lover! That had
been his only failing, really. He’d had too much love for just one woman! In
the end, the idea of delaying their reunion had outweighed her fear of death.
And if she were made into an Eternal, like her darling Ezra, she would live
forever—be separated from her Bartholomaios for all time! Better to suffer the
sting of death than be apart from Bartholomaios forever!
One
by one, the rest of the occupants of Villa Carpathia arose from their beds.
Though Leonora didn’t really notice it anymore, the house was permeated with
the smell of pig blood, and they came to drink like butterflies to nectar.
Next
up was Steve Jackson, an American blood drinker who had come for the island
festival a decade ago, not knowing the Nikas family resided here on Karpathos.
He had fallen in love with Acacia, the oldest of them besides Paulo, and stayed
on with the family.
Acacia,
his lover, came next.
Beautiful,
tall, pale, with curling blond hair that cascaded to the middle of her back,
Acacia was nearly a thousand years old.
After
Acacia came Fatima, Paulo’s wife. Fatima was a Turk. Paulo had rescued her from
a vile blood drinker named Baracka some three hundred years ago, during one of
the island’s wars with the Ottoman Empire. Fatima had skin like polished
walnut, dark almond-shaped eyes and beautiful, long, wavy black hair.
After
Fatima rose came her son, Sunduk, whom Paulo had transformed at her request.
Sunduk was, like Ezra, only seventeen when he was made into a vampire, a soldier
in one of the military units occupying the island. He was a short, stocky,
brown-skinned young man with close-cropped curly black hair. A lad who loved to
eat, he had two cups of Leonora’s “soup”.
“Delicious,”
he said gratefully, and wandered off into the house.
A
few minutes later, Leonora heard the television come on in the sitting room.
The family had not owned a television until the new “high frame rate” systems
came out. Old television sets tended to annoy immortals, who were conscious of
each advancing frame. The strigoi could watch these new televisions without
going mad with frustration, though she wasn’t really sure that was a good thing
or not. As she chatted with Ezra in the kitchen, she heard the blaring horns
that announced the beginning of the movie Star
Wars. Sunduk was obsessed with science fiction movies.
Finally,
Paulo rose.
The
master of the house strode into the kitchen, dressed in white shorts and little
else. Paulo was nearly two thousand years old, but had the form and features of
an angelic sixteen-year-old boy. He was tall, with a narrow waist and a head
full of curly blond hair. In truth, he possessed the chiseled physique of the
men who adorned the covers of the novels she so enjoyed, her trashy romances.
Of all the men she had met in her life, Paulo was the only man who might have
tempted her to be unfaithful to her beloved Bartholomaios, but she was fairly
certain her husband would have understood. If she was being completely honest,
Bartholomaios might have been tempted himself. You know what they say about
sailors!
“Good
evening, Nora,” Paulo said, grinning at her sleepily. A deep sleeper, he was
always the last to rise, and the slowest to come fully awake.
“Good
evening, Paulo,” she replied. She turned her head as he leaned in to kiss her,
his lips cold and soft on her cheek. “Are you hungry?”
“Always,”
he said. In the kitchen’s fluorescent lighting, his eyes glittered like jewels,
pale blue sapphires.
Ezra,
who was still sitting at the table reading her mother’s trashy novel, said, “I
had a dream today, Paulo!”
“Did
you?” he asked, sitting across from her.
As
Ezra told him about her dream, Leonora took a bowl down from the cabinet and
filled it with warm pig’s blood. She set it before him, placed a spoon and
napkin beside it, and waited for him to take a sip.
“It’s
good,” he said, his attention divided between the “soup”, Leonora and her
daughter. Leonora was relieved. Their “soup” tended to spoil very quickly. It
was really only good for two days, three at the most, and then she had to pour
it down the drain. Today was the last day for this particular batch. Adamos
should deliver more tomorrow.
When
Ezra had finished telling Paulo about her dream, Leonora said, “Old Vassallo
delivered more packages from your maker in Belgium.”
Paulo
turned in his seat. “More?”
Leonora
nodded. “I’m afraid so. Fourteen crates this time. One of them is very large.”
Paulo
laughed softly. “I don’t know what he’s thinking! We’re running out of room for
all his memorabilia. We’ll have to start putting it in the vaults if he sends us
any more.”
Leonora
shrugged. She was not overly fond of the ancient creature. There was something
about him that set her teeth on edge. Perhaps it was his great age. Paulo’s
maker claimed to be 30,000 years old. That was much too old for any living
being to be. Not to mention, the ancient vampire’s mementos were cluttering up
her house. They were all priceless artifacts, she was sure, but they were also
just more things for her to dust, and
she had enough things to dust now!
“I’ll
get Sunduk to help me bring them inside in a little while, then we’ll see what
Gon’s sent us this time,” Paulo said, and he returned to his soup.
Fatima
strode into the kitchen. “Steve and Acacia have gone to walk the beach,” she
announced. Fatima was the resident mother hen. She liked to keep Paulo apprised
of everyone’s comings and goings.
Paulo
nodded, told Fatima that Gon had sent them more of his ephemera.
“More?” Fatima cried, and Paulo nodded.
“What will we do with it all, Paulo? And why is he sending us all of his
belongings?”
“He
said in his letter he’s getting ready to assume a new identity. He’s been
Gaspar Valessi for… well, I forget how long. Much too long, certainly. He’s
leaving Liege, he said. He plans to travel abroad for a while. He might be
going to search for Zenzele. They haven’t been together in a very long time. He
probably misses her.”
“Yes,
but why send us so many of his belongings?” Fatima insisted, frowning. “I tell
you, Paulo, I don’t like it. It gives me a terrible foreboding.”
“I’m
sure he’s just cleaning house. I assure you, what he’s sent us so far… it is
nothing. The man is a sentimentalist. He probably has warehouses full of
historical artifacts and keepsakes. He is
thirty thousand years old!”
Fatima,
who was very fond of Gon, scowled fretfully. “I think you should go see him,”
she said, looking away at the window. It was full dark now, the window a blank
black rectangle. “You know he gets depressed when he’s been alone too long.
Bring him to the island. He is always cheered by his visits here with us. It’s
been almost ten years since he’s vacationed on Karpathos.”
Paulo,
who hated to leave the house, much less the island, frowned.
“Paulo…!”
“I’ll
think about it,” he said.
“If
you don’t, I will,” Fatima threatened, and then she turned and stalked out of
the kitchen.
Paulo
sighed and finished his soup. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then rose and
went to his bedchamber to dress. He walked past the kitchen doorway a few
minutes later, attired in white linen pants and a loose white button-up shirt.
He found Sunduk and asked the fledgling to accompany him to the courtyard.
Leonora
cleaned the kitchen. She turned off the stove, but left the pot on the burner.
The family would drink all through the night, availing themselves of her “soup”
whenever they got hungry. She would empty the pot and wash it in the morning
when she arose. That was the routine.
Normally,
she would have retired about then. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening.
But she was curious about the latest artifacts Paulo’s master had shipped to
them. She lingered in the kitchen, gossiping with Ezra, while Paulo and Sunduk
carried the boxes into the foyer. There would be a mess to clean in there in
the morning, she knew. Splinters of wood and packing material to sweep up. She
watched through the doorway as Paulo and Sunduk hauled in the last of the
wooden crates, the largest one, the one shaped like a coffin.
“Is
it heavy?” she asked, thinking perhaps it was a statue.
Paulo
glanced at her. “No. It’s actually very light.” He set it down.
Rather
than open the big crate, he started on the smaller ones. Ezra and Fatima came
to watch. The first out of its crate was what appeared to be some kind of
African tribal mask. Paulo took a sheet of paper from the crate it came in and
read it aloud to them.
“This
is a warrior’s mask from the region where Zenzele was born,” he said. “It is
from Gon and Zenzele’s visit to Africa in 1842.”
Sunduk
held the mask over his face, then lowered it with a scowl. “Smells bad.”
“I’m
not surprised. It is two hundred years old.”
Gon had
sent them paintings by artists both famous and obscure, a Chinese puzzlebox
from the Han Dynasty, a clay tablet from Uruk, statuettes of various gods and
goddesses, a pair of ancient sandals Gon claimed had once belonged to
Aristotle, a Spartan shield, a Babylonian spear, and a large assortment of
smaller nicknacks, jewelry and good luck charms, and even a double-headed
phallus made of smooth black polished stone. This, he claimed, had belonged to
a powerful queen, who had ruled an empire that predated the earliest known civilizations
of the Middle East.
“Queen
Amar,” Paulo read, holding the Stone Age dildo in his free hand, “was famed for
her sexual appetites, and was known to entertain as many as thirty men in a
single evening. She asked me once to be her king, but I declined. She died a
few months later, poisoned by the palace priests. Their religion is as dead and
forgotten as Amar now, and good riddance! I myself destroyed all evidence that
they, and their gods, had ever existed.” Paulo grinned up at them, still
gripping the phallus. “Never fuck with Gon!” he laughed.
“We
are going to have to built a new wing if he keeps sending us these things,”
Fatima said.
“We
can open a museum,” Ezra suggested. “Start charging admission!”
“Let’s
see what’s in the big one,” Sunduk said eagerly, and he pried the lid off with
his fingertips. The nails squawked as they came loose. He hefted and tossed the
lid to one side.
Everyone
crowded forward to see what Gon had sent them.
“What
is that? Some kind of statue?” Sunduk asked.
Leonora
peered into the crate. Inside, nestled in packing material, was what appeared
to be the crude likeness of a young woman. It was made of stone, lying on its
back, knees slightly bent, head craned back. Its mouth gaped, frozen in
mid-scream, and it seemed to be reaching out with one delicate hand, as if
pleading for help. The sculptor, whoever he had been, had made no attempt to
replicate hair, or any other minute detail. It was just a gray, lumpy, ugly
little statue—one of a young woman writhing in agony.
There
was a hole in the breast of the artifact, its ragged edges curled slightly outwards,
as if her heart had burst from her breast.
No, Leonora
thought. Not a statue. It was a casting of some sort. The old servant could see
through the hole in the chest that the figure was hollow inside, like a
porcelain doll.
She
looked up at Paulo, was about to ask him who had made the casting, or if the
casting was of some historically significant figure, and that’s when she saw
the horror in his eyes.
Not
just horror. There was pain there, too. Despair, sadness, love, guilt and
anger, all mixed together in his glinting blue eyes.
“Julia!”
he cried.
To be Continued...
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