No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online Page A

eat. You like the fishing—good! Chase him, the fish—shoot, maybe kill—but no eat. OK?”
    I began to feel worried. Julie, too. She turned to stare at me. I leaned forward, said: “Nichos, what do you mean? Why shouldn’t we eat what I catch?”
    “My house!” he answered as we turned a bend through a stand of stunted trees. He grinned, pointed.
    Above us, the compacted scree slope was green with shrubs and Mediterranean pines. There was a garden set back in ancient, gnarled olives, behind which a row of white-framed windows reflected the late-morning sunlight. The house matched the slope rising around and beyond it, its ochre-tiled roof seeming to melt into the hillside. Higher up there were walled, terraced enclosures; higher still, where the mountain’s spur met the sky, goats made gravity-defying silhouettes against the dazzle.
    “I show you!” said Nichos, turning right onto a track that wound dizzily through a series of hairpins to the house. We hung on as he drove with practised ease almost to the front door, parking his taxi in the shade of an olive tree heavy with fruit. Then he was opening doors for us, calling out to his wife: “Katrin—hey, Katrin!”
    We stayed an hour. We drank cold beer, ate a delicious sandwich of salami, sliced tomatoes, and goat’s milk cheese. We admired the kids, the goats and chickens, the little house. It had been an effective way of changing the subject. And we didn’t give Nichos’s reticence (was that what it had been, or just poor communications?) another thought until he dropped us off at Villas Dimitrios.
    The place was only another mile down the read, as the crow flies. But that coastal road knew how to wind. Still, we could probably have walked it while Katrin made us our sandwiches. And yet the island’s natural contours kept it hidden from sight until the last moment.
    We’d climbed up from the sea by then, maybe a hundred feet, and the road had petered out to little more than a track as we crested the final rise and Nichos applied his brakes. And there we sat in that oven of a car, looking down through its dusty, fly-specked windows on Villas Dimitrios. It was…idyllic!
    Across the spur where we were parked, the ground dipped fairly steeply to a bay maybe a third of a mile point to point. The bay arms were rocky, formed of the tips of spurs sloping into the sea, but the beach between them was sand. White sand, Julie’s favourite sort. Give her a book, a white beach, and a little shade, and I could swim all day. The taverna stood almost at the water’s edge: a long, low house with a red-tiled roof, fronted by a wooden framework supporting heavy grapevines and masses of bougainvillaea. Hazy blue woodsmoke curled up from its chimney, and there was a garden to its rear. Behind the house, separate from it and each other and made private by screening groves of olives, three blobs of shimmering white stone were almost painful to look at. The chalets or ‘villas’.
    Nichos merely glanced at it; nothing new to him. He pointed across the tiny valley to its far side. Over there, the scree base went up brown and yellow to the foot of sheer cliffs, where beneath a jutting overhang the shadows were so dark as to be black. It had to be a cave. Something of a track had been worn into the scree, leading to the place under the cliff.
    “In there,” said Nichos with one of his customary shrugs, “the well. Water, him no good…” His face was very grave.
    “The water was poisoned?” Julie prompted him.
    “Eh?” he cocked his head, then gave a nod. “Now is poison!”
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is it—” indicated the dark blot under the cliff “—over there?”
    “The well,” he said again. “Down inside the cave. But the water, he had, er—like the crabs, you know? You understand the crabs, in the sea?”
    “Of course,” Julie told him. “In England we eat them.”
    He shook his head, looked frustrated. “Here, too,” he said.