Nightspawn Read Free

introduced us. And I know your work, of course.’
    Erik was a journalist, and was well known as a political commentator, whatever that may be.
    ‘My work?’ he murmured, baffled. He turned and peered through the window, and absently stuck his finger into a small brown-rimmed cigarette burn in the curtain.
    ‘I was twice sick on that boat,’ he said sorrowfully.
    Andreas came back into the room and sat down slowly on one of the hard chairs.
    ‘Well?’ I asked.
    The cripple smiled at me.
    ‘In Greece, Mr White, we have an old saying …’ At least that was what he should have said, he looked so wise and darkly Levantine. But he turned away from me without speaking, and his gaze settled on the German.
    ‘There are turkeys, Erik, in the garden below. You will have no rest.’
    As though to corroborate his words, one of those revolting birds sent up an hysterical outraged squawk.
    ‘This room is the best I could find,’ I said coldly.
    Andreas grinned, and Erik flapped a mollifying paw in my direction. There was a small silence. Erik lit a cigarette. His hands trembled, and he looked at them reproachfully. I unfolded my arms and turned to go, but Erik’s voice, with a new ringing note of authority in it, stopped me.
    ‘White.’
    ‘Yes?’
    For a moment he stroked his cheek with three blunt fingers and a thumb, considering me the while.
    ‘When are we to meet this man?’ he asked.
    ‘Tonight, on Delos, at the festival.’
    ‘The festival?’
    ‘Yes. We won’t be noticed in the crowds.’
    ‘Ah. Very cloak and sword.’
    ‘Dagger.’
    ‘Dagger.’
    He sucked his teeth, and then abruptly slumped back upon the bed. The springs of the mattress groaned miserably.
    ‘Good.’
    The word seemed to rise, black and bleak, from a pit in the ground below us. Andreas smiled his smile, and bade me adieu. Downstairs, the landlord had begun to slap his wife around the walls.
5
    I wandered without purpose, listening to the teeth grinding in my head. Cataleptic noon pressed down upon the village out of a hot white sky, bruising the parched earth, torturing the trees, pouring light like acid through the streets. I thought of going home, but home was an armchair with ape-tufts of horsehair under its arms, a broken bed, and a window looking down upon the rear of a café. In the open at least, it was possible to join battle with the sun. There, in the violet splashes of shadow, one could find release. High in the heavy air a bell tolled slowly, and a pale man with horn-rimmed glasses, hovering by a gift shop window, peered owlishly at me as I went past. Sweat ran unheeded into my eyes, and my hair was hot and damp. I came to a little square with dusty olive trees. The tiny bright white houses were closed against the day. The sun came down there at its angle like a burning blade, and to cross from one side to the other was to feel the hot sky fall. I shuffled to a halt in the shadow of a balcony, and stood with my mouth open, panting slowly. In the hills, the cicadas throbbed relentlessly. An ugly black bird with a sick look in its little eye stumbled from the roof tops into the tree beside me. Thunder crepitated faintly in the distance, and then the silence returned. Something began to happen in my ears, a strange sensation, as though the minute fur of hairs inside them were stirring, realigning itself to a variation in the silence. I realized that I was listening intently for a sound, a word; I knew only that it was about to reach me. I was rewarded. A sharp crack set the air aquiver like a dancingnerve, a little noise that was, in its crisp precision, oddly at variance with the plump moist heat, the crystal light, that cat asleep on the windowsill, and for a moment I thought that I had imagined it. I looked across the square, and the mouth of an alleyway revealed momentarily a fat man in a red shirt dancing a jig. He hopped out from behind the angle of a wall, lifted his knees in a few high-kicking steps, and then retreated