Chapter 211 - Karpathos (I)

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. 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, a boy of sixteen with tightly curled hair of jet black, helped him tighten the straps, then hopped into the passenger seat.

The driver slid in behind the wheel, thinking how nice it would be to go and have a beer with the crewmen of the Palinouros. "After we drop off these crates, perhaps," 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 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. 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.

He hummed as he drove.

Karpathos hosted just 6,200 souls. That number more than doubled in the summer months, as Karpathian expatriates and tourists came to the island to vacation, but in winter the island was all but deserted, and that was just 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 people 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 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 fizzed. An instant later, the gates swung 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: small, dark eyes and 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 he had caught his breath, and 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 a good day.

"And you," 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 even 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. The hearty white bean soup was about all she could eat anymore. Her digestion had gotten fussy in the last five years or so.

She ate the fassolatha at the kitchen table, paying no attention to the coppery smell that arose from the larger pot. Once, that sickly-sweet smell would have 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 ladle and stirred the other "soup" simmering on the stove. She didn't taste the other soup, didn't really even like to look at it, and she 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 slender while she was eating. It would be dark soon. The sky was already deepening, the roof of day receding into the starry heavens like it was slowly being lifted on cables.

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.

It wasn't long before there was movement in the sprawling mansion. 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?"

Her daughter's delicate fangs showed when she smiled. She was a petite girl, not twenty years old when Leonora's employer 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 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 possess the form of a seventeen-year-old maid.

"Yes," Ezra replied, quick excitement in her eyes. "I even dreamed! I don't dream very often, but I had a good one today!"

"What did you dream?" Leonora asked, indulging the girl.

"Oh, that I was a living girl again," Ezra said wistfully, running her fingers through her long, raven black 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.

"Of course!"

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 wanted to be with him in heaven. He had been such a wonderful lover! That was his only failing, really. He'd just had too much love to give! In the end, the thought of jeopardizing their reunion outweighed her fear of death. If she were made into an Eternal, like her darling Ezra, she would live forever— and be separated from her Bartholomaios for all time! No, better to suffer the sting of death than be apart from Bartholomaios forever!

One by one, the rest of the occupants of the 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, unaware the Nikas family resided here on Karpathos. He had fallen in love with Acacia, the oldest of them besides Paulo, and had stayed on happily 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, a newborn vampire, 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. 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 tight white shorts and nothing 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 out. Today was the last day for this particular batch. Adamos would 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 chuckled. "I can't imagine 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 blood drinker. 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 creature 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 as it was!

"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." Fatima was their 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. "What will we do with it all, Paulo? And why is he sending us all of his belongings?"

"He said in his letter that 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 much?" 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 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. Go and see him and bring him back 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 his fledgling to accompany him out 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 item out of its crate was some kind of African tribal mask. Paulo took a sheet of paper from the crate and read it aloud to them.

"This is a warrior's mask from the region 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 that 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 appetite, and was known to entertain as many as thirty men in a single evening. She asked me once to be her king, but I, doubting I had the stamina for the position, reluctantly declined. She died a few months later, poisoned by her 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 piss off Gon!" he laughed.

"We are going to have to build a new wing if he keeps sending us these things," Fatima said.

"We can turn the house into a museum!" Ezra suggested. "Charge admission for a tour!"

"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 else Gon had sent them.

"What is that? Some kind of mummy?" Sunduk asked.

Leonora peered into the crate. Inside, nestled in packing material, was what appeared to be the likeness of a young woman.

Her face was made of gold, eyes closed as if sleeping, and her gleaming hands lay crossed upon her breast. It was a sarcophagus, the old woman realized, a gilded coffin, similar to the sarcophagi the Egyptians once buried their kings and queens in, though the young woman's face was rendered in a more realistic fashion, rather than in the Egyptian style. And her garments, too, were different. More Roman than Egyptian.

Before anyone could stop him, Sunduk reached in and removed the lid of the sarcophagus. Fatima shouted no, but her son had already done it. He scowled sheepishly, setting the lid carefully to one side.

There was no mummy inside. Inside was a girl made of stone.

She lay prone in the coffin, her knees slightly bent, her head craned back. Her mouth gaped, frozen in mid-scream, and she clutched her chest, as if her heart had broken and she died grasping it in pain. The sculptor, whoever he had been, had made no attempt to replicate hair, or any other fine detail. It was just a gray, lumpy, ugly statue of a young woman writhing in agony.

There was a hole in the chest of the artifact, its serrated edges curled outwards, as if her heart had burst out of her at the last.

No, Leonora thought. Not a statue. It was a casting of some sort. A crude plaster casting, like a death mask, only of the entire woman's body. The old woman peered through the hole in the chest. The figure was hollow, like a porcelain doll.

She looked up at Paulo, was about to ask him who had made the artifact, 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. Pain, despair, love and guilt, all mixed together in his glinting blue eyes.

"Julia!" he cried.