Arthur slept. It was a torrid sleep, one he woke from in fits and starts, where dreams jumbled with periods of wakefulness, and stress pulled memories out of the dusty recesses of his mind and presented them back with gleeful malice. Giant dream hands prodded accusatory fingers at him from above, and a vengeful Taylor pulled at his hair, skin and clothes while howling in distress at the departure of her kids.
Worst of all was the dream where young Arthur sprawled across his seat on the coach, his flip-flops leaving a trail of fine sand and mud across its checked cloth. He was bored. His parents talked quietly to each other in the chair across the gangway and there was little for Arthur to do but stare at the scenery as it appeared and disappeared along the roadside.
His father had promised the trip would be exciting: something he would remember for the rest of his life. Young Arthur was dubious. They’d travelled for hours and he’d lost count of the number of whitewashed farm buildings he’d spied between the olive groves and plantations of citrus trees. At least there was a little thrill of excitement whenever the coach rattled beside a precipitous drop into a deep gorge. Arthur speculated on what would happen if the coach driver misjudged one of those bends and sent them tumbling to the foot of a hillside. Even to a seven-year-old the consequence of such a dreadful event was incredibly bleak.
The bus drove into a village thoroughfare where narrow-windowed buildings crammed in upon the coach. Claustrophobic, the settlement almost grasped at the bus to force it to a halt. Despite this, a wide square occupied the heart of the village. It housed a fountain in its centre that squirted water out of an amphora shouldered by a near-naked woman, which. Arthur stared at it wonder. Nearby, three sunken-eyed and weather-wrinkled men sat chewing tobacco outside a taverna, while a housewife in a black lace shawl made her way home with a basket of vegetables. Nearby, some children ran barefoot past a scrawny dog as it squared up to a large pelican. The bird with its extraordinary shovel beak was the most extraordinary thing Arthur had ever seen. Its gape, when it opened, might have swallowed the world, and the dog, in fright, bolted.
As the coach trundled past, Arthur wished to disembark. He badly wanted to keep watching the bird, or perhaps play with the youngsters. He missed his friends back in Fife. Holidays, he thought, are supposed to be fun. All his family did was laze beside the pool in their hotel complex, an activity that defined the holiday as the longest week and half ever. There was only so much swimming pool to swim, only so many books to read, only so much sunbathing to tolerate. He had become red to the point his skin ached.
Eventually his dad took pity and booked an excursion to divert Arthur from boredom, but the trip was even more tedious than sitting beside the pool. There was nothing to do but wait for their arrival at wherever it was they were going. Worse, his parents kept the destination secret, telling him he would appreciate the adventure better that way. Arthur’s patience for the surprise evaporated faster than a puddle under a blazing heat.
Their coach veered off the road not long after leaving the village. It navigated its way down a bumpy track between a stand of poplars and a steep hill filled with scrub plant and cacti, before halting in a large, empty car park. The heavy rain of the previous day remained in the park’s potholes despite the bright sun drying the rest of the ground back to rubble and dust.
The storm, at least, had been exciting. The thunderhead had rolled over their resort at mid-day, darkening the sky to a midnight purple, and cracked over-head with the sound of many cannons. Lightning shot the sky with sheets of electric blue and the rain – when it came – flung itself earthward in a deluge that surpassed anything Arthur had ever seen. It rained in Fife as much as it did anywhere in Scotland, but this Grecian rainfall had been something else. Within moments the hard ground was awash and streams of rain-spill ran to find lower ground every which way, turning the world into a giant river.
In the coach his dad smiled at him. ‘C’mon, kiddo! ‘Let’s gan see this place. It’s meant tae be immense.’
Arthur followed his parents outside, his short legs struggling with the deep steps dropping out of the vehicle. The heat struck him immediately: dry and fiery. It was hotter than it had been at the hotel, which was near the coast. This place was further inland where the temperature was able to soar unchecked and where the scent of juniper perfumed the air and the thrum of cricket wings was a steady background rhythm.
‘Can we take a picture, Dad?’
His parents stopped. ‘What of, Arthur?’ his dad asked. ‘There’s nothin tae see yet.’
‘I want a picture in ma camera,’ he told them. ‘One of us a’. Of the hale family.’ He waved his little Instamatic in the air. ‘Please?’
It was an easy photo to set up. His dad pleaded with a fellow tourist to do the deed and the three family members formed into a row with Arthur in the middle. Then they smiled, squinting towards the lens as the sun glowered at them. When it was done, the camera was handed back to Arthur, who was rebuked by his dad for not saying thank you.
Their tour guide marched along a path that skirted the base of a hill and the coach party followed along, all except Arthur who remained where he was, much to his dad’s consternation: ‘What’s up now, Arthur?’
‘I’ve forgotten ma sweeties.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, go and get them!’
Arthur ran back to the coach, bounced up the steps and sped to his seat, where he flung his camera down and picked up a small bag of belongings, the packet of sweets included. These he palmed quickly before making his way back out of the coach, stumbling over an old blind man who was shuffling past the coach door. The man staggered backwards several paces, unbalanced by the collision, his white stick falling and rolling to a halt several feet away.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, mister,’ Arthur said hurriedly as he raced to retrieve it, but the man was faster. The stick was in the man’s hands before Arthur was anywhere near where it fell. ‘Woah!’ Arthur gasped, surprised.
The old man lifted his dark glasses from his eyes, winked and grinned, before replacing the glasses. Young Arthur recoiled. The man’s eyes were milky white with no sign of an iris. They caused Arthur to gasp in horror. Those eyes weren’t right. They weren’t right, at all.
The man didn’t take offence to Arthur’s reaction, perhaps unable to see it. Instead, he simply chuckled and shuffled off, his stick rapping the earth with a steady tap, tap, tap. Arthur stood transfixed, regarding the man’s departure with a fascinated horror.
‘Arthur!’
That broke the spell. ‘Coming!’ He ran to where his parents stood, waiting.
As he went, he was startled by the raucous squawk of a bird. A crow flapped its wings and landed at his feet from a nearby tree branch. It cocked its head sideways to regard him through a dark, beady eye, its head tilted to one side. Then it hopped closer, its continued glare boring into him. Discomfited, Arthur skipped sideways to avoid the creature.
‘Hurry up, laddie!’ his dad called and suddenly the crow was forgotten. Arthur raced to his father’s side. ‘About time!’ His dad riffled his hair. ‘The temple’s around the bottom of the hill, so the guide says.’ He took Arthur’s hand. It was firm and reassuring. Safe.
They hadn’t gone much further before Arthur screwed up his nose. ‘What’s that pong, Dad?’
His father laughed. ‘Sulphur, I guess. We’re at the gates of Hades, son. Or Hell to you and me. It’s foul, isn’t it?’
‘It stinks!’ Young Arthur laughed, enjoying the honk. He didn’t know what Hell was, but he knew a properly nasty odour.
They followed the crowd around the base of a large granite boulder, the stench increasing with every step.
‘There!’ the tour guide announced ahead of them. ‘There is the Necromanteion! The gateway to Hades and the temple to the god of the underworld himself!’
Young Arthur gawped. Before him stood the remains of a crumbling shrine. It sprawled across the ground, left and right, until it disappeared amid the junipers, but at its centre massive columns of limestone rose skyward, each set of pillars supporting a gigantic lintel, while at the back, against a steep hillock, a cavernous entrance led into darkness.
‘Of course, this place isn’t to be confused with the more famous Necromanteion of Ephyra, but it is still a significant shrine. In ancient Greece the bereaved would make a pilgrimage here with gifts for the god. Those offerings, when put inside the temple and accompanied by prayers, would encourage Hades to treat the recently deceased favourably. In particular, the prayers uttered here were for those who had, shall we say, not led the most angelic of lives.
‘There was one additional feature to these offerings: those who entered the temple also offered their lives to Hades. Literally. People understood that the god preferred the souls of those who went to him of their own volition, rather than the souls of those who were old or diseased, or died in battle. So, a life given freely at the Necromanteion would give Hades even more reason to treat their beloved kindly.
‘All in all, it must have been daunting going into the temple, in the knowledge that you’d never come back out. To add extra fear to the proceedings, legend had it that the inner shrine was guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, who was Hades’ pet. For your offering to work, you had to avoid being ripped to pieces by that friendly pooch.
‘Quite a story, isn’t it? But you can see how it came about. The gas that produces that terrible smell we are enjoying increases to toxic levels within the shrine, making it too dangerous for us to enter without specialised breathing equipment, which we don’t have.
‘So, you can imagine what happened back in the day to any poor pilgrim who entered with an offering …. Expects, who were dressed up with the full hazmat gear on, found many corpses strewn across the floor of the cave once they worked out how to venture inside safely.’
The guide clapped his hands and beamed in an effort to lighten the mood. ‘Right! For the next part of our tour we’ll head down to the river which the locals likened to the river Styx. There, we will visit the place Charon reputedly moored his ancient boat.’
This was all too confusing to young Arthur, but a three-headed dog was a cool idea. He made his way behind the tour guide, his parents at either side of him, all the while trying to visualise Cerberus. He’d have loved a pet dog like that. It would have made his pals so jealous. This dreaming cut the journey to the river short. There, a wooden platform stretched a quarter of the way out into fast flowing waters. The tour guide ushered everyone onto the jetty. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a replica of Charon’s jetty. Pilgrims would come…’
Arthur lost the track of the narration. It was too complicated and adult. Besides, there was a strange rumbling coming from upstream. He found himself at the edge of the platform peering into the water. Waves that had gently lapped against the support posts were getting choppier, angrier. He tugged at his dad’s arm. ‘Dad,’ he asked, ‘what’s that noise?’
His dad was deaf to him. The rumble increased incredibly, drowned out the tour guide’s lecture. Arthur’s feet were wet. Around him, tourists regarded each another in a confusion compounded by the creaking and splintering of wood. Panic and screaming started. Arthur lost sight of his parents as the jetty succumbed to a surge of water that spewed out of the hills.
He was in the water, struggling amid a tangle of limbs and wood and belongings. Bits of tree and bush and other detritus swept passed, taken away from the Necromanteion. He spun in the current, one minute with his head above the water, the next submerged. Something hard hit the back of his head, forced him to gasp in surprise. His mouth filled with water. He choked and spluttered and took in yet more of the river. The pain of it hurt his chest, made his eyes water, until the agony of it overcame his senses.
Somewhere a crow called loudly through his semi-consciousness and it was answered by another, and then another. Young Arthur counted three separate birds calling nearby, or perhaps their cries came from inside his head. But their squawks faded into the blackness and Arthur’s awareness fled into nothing.
Leave a Reply