Mandraki
By Brian Lumley
There is no sensible explanation for all of this—no sensible or scientific explanation—or if there is I’ve failed to find it. Not that I’ve really looked. But then again, where would I start? I feel that I’m in a nightmare and can’t wake up. But I know that, in fact, it’s real, for I’ve seen it all before. I’ve seen it before and didn’t believe it then, and now it’s happening again and I would definitely prefer not to believe it now. It was like the Lorelei, I know: a myth or legend, but it lured me. The weird mystery of it. And anyway, it’s too late now for I’m wrecked on the rocks. Or wrecked in the pebbles, the dirt.
What a jumble!
So let me start again, at the beginning. That way I won’t be jumping any fences before I come to them...
Unlike other children, I wasn’t a believer in ...well, things. Even Santa Claus only lasted until I was three or four. Maybe I lacked imagination, but as a youngster I never considered myths and legends as anything other than old fireside yarns translated into books to amuse and entertain; they were without foundation. Or maybe someone had explained it to me that way early on in life; my father, perhaps, who was a very much down-to-earth type. Whichever, to my young and perhaps unimaginative mind old-wives tales, adages and slogans, catch-words and phrases, they all fell within the same category: I knew that akin to folklore and fairytales, they had been created to suit situations.
My mother, from Yorkshire, was full of these things: “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Where there’s muck there’s brass. The grass is always greener on the other side...” etc. Imparted as words of wisdom—or maybe in a cautionary context prior to my putting some seemingly shaky plan or other into action—or delivered with a sad slow shake of the head when things didn’t work out; or with a smile broad as sunshine on those occasions when she was able to correct something before it went wrong—“a stitch in time saves nine.” In this way my mother, like most mothers, could be wise before and after the fact.
Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to look for sources—for the meaning behind the myth—or maybe just for answers. And for all that I’ve discovered that “there’s no smoke without fire,” still I have failed to “let sleeping dogs lie.” With the result, of course, that I’ve been bitten. A pity I didn’t pay heed to that other one: “once bitten, twice shy...”
Do you know the story of Pandora’s box? Of course you do. And haven’t we created a box of our own—a “sarcophagus”—in Chernobyl? And isn’t the African jungle just such a box, where mutant viruses we haven’t even heard of may be waiting to leap off monkeys onto us? That last is simply Nature in one of her ugliest guises, I agree, but surely the real boxes are in the laboratories where scientists study, store, and evenmake such lethal imps. “Back to Nature!” people cry. But is that really the answer?
Diseases that transfer from animal to animal to people. An awfulthing that moves from sheep to cows and mutates along the way, and won’t die when you cook it, so that eating a hamburger you risk turning your brain to a sponge. Poisons in the air and the soil and the sea, and in all manner of creatures—naturalpoisons, that is. A jellyfish whose living sting causes convulsions and death, bats that carry rabies, brightly colored Amazonian frogs whose sweat is a poison as deadly as any we know. And these are only a few of the things that wedo know about.
But what about those we don’t know about? And those we’ve forgotten or that we ignore, that came down to us as myths and legends?
What about the green things? Poison ivy and stinging nettles, and mushrooms taken in small measure that will cause you to hallucinate (and eaten freely kill you in a minute) sprouting in harmless earth; and indeedall of the green things that flourish in mire and decay. The ingredients for witches’ brews. I remember my mother had a beautiful scented rose bush—that sprang up where my pet kitten was buried...
People complain (rightly, I suppose) about the destruction of the rain forests, but I can’t help wondering. Oh, I know: we seem to delight in taking out species that aren’t even catalogued as yet, and there may be rare cures in some of them to balm the ills of the world. But what of those that aren’t so beneficial? Are there potential ills in the earth and in the forests that are beyond Man’s cures? For it seems to me there’s always a balance: for day there’s night, for black there’s white, and for good there’s evil. So what about penicillin...?
Ebola? Or is that just for starters?
Myths and legends. Whatreally happened to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah? Some prehistoric form of AIDS? Something they got from their animals and passed on to each other? Whatever it was, it sucked all the moisture out of them and turned them to pillars of salt. And vampirism and lycanthropy? Superstitions and nothing more—or were these the olden names for rabies before we knew what hydrophobia really was? Hydrophobia... isthat why the monstrous blood-suckers of so many worldwide legends were, or are, afraid of running water?
Premature babies die from fungal infections in hospital units—and the cause is found to be wooden spatulas used as tongue depressants in throat examinations. Say “Ah!” and die. Other babies suffer amputations where spatulas have been used as splints on their tiny limbs. And these… theselollipop sticks are just dead wood! But the fungus in the wood wasn’t nearly dead, obviously.
Poisons, Catalysts, and Other Biologically Transmissible Hazards: Animal-to-Man, Plant-to-Man.Or:Flora, Fauna, and Associated Fears: the Biological Interface. (Are We Returning to Our Roots?) I could write a book on it. For God knows I’ve read enough about it...
What I’m saying is, things that would have been put down to witchcraft or demonology three hundred years ago—things that rheumatic old ladies would have been burned at the stake for—now have scientific explanations. Some of them.
And so might this. But I doubt it.
The witches of the Old World knew of these things, and so did its priests. They had to, to fight fire with fire. And I’m sure that a handful of them, in certain places, still do.
But God, what a jumble! And my story still untold. Because I’ve been putting it off...
* * *
A few minutes ago the Greek Orthodox priest noticed me scribbling in my book. I saw him yesterday down on the beach, well away from the salt flats and marshy margin. He seemed unusual, I thought. But he was friendly to a girl who must be the skimpiest-clad Greek female I have ever seen in the Mediterranean. Or maybe it’s simply that the place was isolated from the more touristy areas; or she could be from the mainland, Athens perhaps, which is cosmopolitan and far more tolerant.
Anyway, the girl had been swimming around the rocks of a reef close in to shore and she’d brought back a wire basket of large black spiny sea urchins, echinoderms. I didn’t know they were edible, but she in her tiny bikini and the priest or monk in his tall black capstan of a hat and ankle-length black robe sat on a slab of rock cracking them into a basin and squeezing lemons onto them, eating them raw and with great relish, washing them down with weak, local retsina.
As I passed close to them, between the narrow dark strip of sand that passed as a high-water mark and the pitted white rock where they sat, the priest squinted at me and cocked his head on one side. Smiling, he said, “Guten Tag?” His greeting was also a question.
I shook my head but agreed, “Pleasant, isn’t it? Not too, er...zesti? ”
“English!” he grinned, and his teeth were extremely rotten. The girl, stunningly beautiful, glanced at his teeth and tried not to shrink away. And I couldn’t help thinking—with teeth as bad as that, his breath has to be bad, too.
There was something about him; I couldn’t smell him like the girlmust be able to, and so didn’t mind, well, looking at him—I was somehowdrawn to look at him. And I saw how old he was: a grandfather, definitely. Wrinkled as an olive that fails to fall from the tree. And I remember asking of myself:why do they wear black? What, in all this heat? For even on a relatively cool day it must have been hell under that black sheet.
But by then his smile had fallen away and he was frowning. As if he believed he knew me from somewhere but couldn’t remember. And as I made off along the beach, kicking at the shingle to uncover a few bleached shells, his yellowish gaze had followed me. I could feel his eyes on me...
In the shade of an olive tree whose hanging branches made a tent and hid me at least partially from view, I seated myself on a gnarly root, looked back at the beach, and wondered at the paradox of this apparently incompatible pair. And after a while a sleek white motorboat came speeding into view from behind the jagged headland and sliced toward the beach, unzipping the sea like a pair of blue jeans. The girl waved, and wonderful bronze creatures lounging behind the rail of the sundeck waved lazily back. They had come to pick her up.
A moment later, she was saying her goodbyes to the old man and running for the water. A dive took her from shallow to deep water as the boat slowed to a crawl inside the reef and settled on its bow wave. Swimming with easy, practiced strokes the girl reached the boat; hands that glittered with gold and doubtless expensive watches reached down for her; her lithe body streamed water as she was drawn from the sea. And I was jealous of whomever it was who patted her backside as her feet found the deck.
Then the boat revved up and leaned over a little as it turned for the open sea, and I saw that the old priest was already heading my way. He was still a way off, however, and I managed to avoid him—managed not to notice him—and returned to the town. I avoided himthen at least, but may not be so lucky now; though why I should want to avoid him is anybody’s guess.
Or maybe not...
* * *
Later. Two days later…
I’m writing this back in my room in town. It’s not yet noon, so I can calculate how early it must have been when I saw the priestagain , in that place this morning. Maybe that’s why he came to talk to me: because he wondered why I was there, in that place, so early.
That place. I seem to emphasize it without even trying to. But I’d better explainwhat place. And try to explain why I was there. Why it is important that I’ve found the place, Mandraki, and why the old Greek Orthodox priest thought it was important that I shouldn’t have found it, and bad that I should be there so early in the morning.
My father had been there, too, as a Special Forces Commando in World War II, when the islands were crawling with Nazis. To this day many of the Greeks despise the Germans, despite the fact that they live off their tourism. As to which islandexactly ... it doesn’t matter. You really don’t want to know. Or if you do, I’m not telling. Unlike my father, I don’t intend leaving any clues. Curiosity killed the cat.
So why am I writing this down, if not for posterity? Maybe it’s for the old Greek priest. Maybe I’m telling him about this Pandora’s Box of his, or of theirs, whoever the other guardians are. But I suspect there’s nothing much I can tell him that he, or they, don’t already know. For the box was opened during the war. Opened again, that is.
And it was then that my father was here.
He was a young man then, only twenty-four or five. Me, I wasn’t even born, wouldn’t be for another ten years. But when he started to come back here—oh, years later, when I was in my early teens—he had to bring me with him because my mother believed he was seeing another woman out here. This was after she had developed her photophobia; the Mediterranean sun would have killed her. And why else would my father, knowing her condition, insist on spending his holidays in the Greek Islands if not for another woman? Anyway, it was only a year or two after he’d started on this Greek thing of his—this odyssey?—that Ma died of cancer. And I remember he said it was a mercy. But what was a mercy? What did he mean? The fact that her cancer had taken her so quickly, or that she had been spared what was still to come?
An odyssey: we wandered from island to island, visiting all the places he still remembered from the war. As a spy, in the guise of a Greek, he had served in a lot of places, and we revisited them. This was during my holidays from school, these being the only times he could bring me with him, therefore the only times Ma would let him come. And she stayed home in England, in her dark glasses, in her shady room. And she probably fretted about his fidelity, while he was fretting about something else entirely. Fretting, and stiffening up.
...I’m stiffening, too. I tell myself it’s the Greek Islands: the heat. But it isn’t. Or if I drank ouzo maybe I could blame it on that. The owner of a taverna saw me easing my neck, slowly cranking my shoulders—my pained movements generally—and asked if I drink much ouzo. I asked why? He told me if you don’t drink it with water it drains the oil out of your joints. Then he pointed out the old men: their rheumatic joints; their shuffling about wearing gnarled, weathered-leather, pained and patient expressions. And: “Ouzo!” he declared, with the emphasis on the “z.” “When they were young, they drank it too much. They drink thee ouzo without thee water.” Well maybe they did, but I don’t.
This island was the last one we came to. I suspect because he was avoiding it. I suspect because he knew—as I now know—that this was the one. And he was putting off the inevitable...
He had taken to drink (not ouzo, but just about everything else), soon after we lost my mother. I know now that it was just to ease the pain, the stiffness in his joints ... or mainly so. His room was next to mine, and one night I woke up to the sound of his moaning. Thinking he was nightmaring about Ma, I went in and sat on his bed.
He had been drinking and didn’t wake up, but I heard him say, “Don’t sleep with the mandrakes, John.” That’s me, John. I stayed a little while but eventually, as I left him and tiptoed to the door, he said it again. “Don’t sleep with the mandrakes. They whisper their warnings, John, but even they don’t understand. They have forgotten, as I shall soon forget. They would scream, but they’ve forgotten who to scream at. So don’t sleep with the mandrakes... “ His voice was full of shudders.
And in his study all sorts of botanical books, clippings, photocopies from rare library sources, vegetable vagaries. But this was a man who loathed gardening! And there were maps, too, all of Mediterranean shores and islands.
But: “Not a single Mandraki,” he said to me one time. “Oh, the locals know the name—the term?—well enough. There are Mandrakis every-bloody-where, as frequent as St. Paul’s-bloody-Bays-except on the maps! The closest we get to acknowledging it is in Rhodes: Mandraccio Harbor, where stood the Colossus. The rest of it is all myth and legend—like vampires on Santorin, the volcano island. You know our saying, John: don’t take coals to Newcastle? You know its meaning? That it’s pointless taking coals to Newcastle because Newcastle has enough of its own? Well of Santorin they say don’t take vampires! And of mandrakes they won’t speak at all!”
I scarcely knew what he was talking about, not then. But I did know that he was a down-to-earth man who had never had a lot of time for myths and legends. Neverused to have, anyway. “It’s as if,” he said, sighing his frustration, “I wasn’t supposed to remember. But I do, and I know that it’s important.”
There I go, jumping about again. It’s not easy to remain lucid. My bones ache...
“Important!” said the old priest, puffing and panting where he clambered toward me over a heap of weathered stones that might at one time have been a wall.
...But I was going to explain about the place. If not its actual location, an idea of its topography. Little or no use as a guide; there are a million places just like it.
Inland, a range of low but jagged mountains. Green but by no means lush. Scrubby, let’s say. And a white dot way up there that could be a monastery. Closer, vague gray foothills falling down from the mountains, their spurs reaching out to the aching blue Mediterranean. A quarter-mile away, above the beach, something of a
church. Oh, very well, a church ... but some of the Greek Island churches are little more than shrines, tiny little things. And this is one of them. Four walls with a high frontal facade bearing a white cross. Inside, a whitewashed room no bigger than your living room, with arched niches or recesses in the walls that house icons. And medieval paintings on the walls depicting Jesus, angels, one or two saints with haloes, demons, and sea-beasts. When priests come down from the monastery, they probably pray there. Or they use it to keep watch...
Then the land sloping down to the sea, and in between this jumble of rock-piles and a few scattered ruins, not ancient but just primitive fishermen’s houses; I’m told there was a village here before the earthquake. But which one? The islands have had lots of earthquakes. Finally there’s a handful of untended, ancient olives that might even have been a grove at one time, and a path leading through them to the deserted shingle beach. Obviously it’s off the beaten track.
At one end of the beach where the ground dips and the sand turns to mud there’s a boggy place, a swampy margin that smells bad when the wind is from that direction. The ground behind is flattish, only gradually rising, and between the marsh and the church the vegetation thickens up a little. A few gnarly olives and spiky bushes, spitefully sharp grasses, some flowers, various weeds, and a lot of Greek pod-plants—squirting cucumbers?—thatpop! and spit weak acid at you if you brush by them too close. And mandrakes:Mandragora officinarum .
“Or perhaps thee different, er, sapecies?—ah, yes,species! —thee differentspecies altogether, but mandraki anyway, yes,” the old priest told me, with a decisive nod. Then asked, “Was you father German, perhaps?”
“You don’t like them, do you?” I said.
“Thee mandrakes? Thee Germans?” He cocked his head on one side in that way of his.
“Either... both,” I said with a stiff shrug, from where I had chosen a flat rock upon which to seat myself. I was surrounded by mandrakes, sprouting in the rich, swamp-fed soil.
“Thee Germans,” he answered me shrug for thoughtful shrug. “Now is too late not to like them. I not believe in this thing, thee sins of thee fathers. You know? I notwant believe...”
“And thee mandrakes?” (I was picking up this peculiar person’s manner of expression. “Thee mandrakes,”—and this “sapecies” in particular).
“Thee necessary evil,” he answered, almost without thinking. But then hedid think, and quickly corrected himself: “Er, Theesamell —thee stink. Thee flowers are sickly when is too many of them, like here. Nasty samell, yes?”
“You keep watch over them.” I was direct.
He chose not to understand, frowned and looked back at the church. Between the church and the scrubby ground, a few leaning stone crosses and headstones within a low-walled area spoke mutely of an ancient graveyard. “Overthem ,” he said, “yes. Men who died in thee war. Local men. Thee resistance.”
“In England there would be some kind of memorial,” I said. “A monument. And every year people would come to remember. Here the people seem to have gone away.”
“Some come,” he said, looking at me curiously.
“And then you are here, tokeep them away,” I said. “Or to make sure they are simply visiting the beach. Like the girl you talked to the other day.”
“Thee girl?” And then he remembered. “Ah, thee girl! With thee, er, black, er —”
“—the sea urchins. Echinoderms?” I prompted him.
“Theeechini , yes. She has thee lover. She want be alone a little moments, for thee thinking.”
“But it’s a bad place to do your thinking, eh? Your dreaming?” I said. “I mean, too close to the mandraki?”
Then he knew that I knew. His eyes went wide, and leaning closer he said, “You know of me, of us, thee brotherhood—but do you knowme, myself?”
“The sins of the fathers,” I said. “No, I don’t know you, but I think my father might have.”
And then he knew for sure. “You father!” he gasped. “So, I was right. But not thee Germans. TheeEnglish captain! Thee soldier! You are looking so much like him—ah!” Followed by silence for a long while. And I took the opportunity to think back, back...
* * *
My father, the English captain. He had been one of several officers who organized the islands’ underground resistance. Loners mainly, they spoke Greek—looked Greek, under a Mediterranean suntan—fished during the long summer days, and created mayhem at night. So he’d told me, on one of those rare occasions when he told me anything.
...After Ma died, he had refurbished her old greenhouse to cultivate them. Mandrakes, I mean, Do you know the old myth, the old legend of the mandrake? Oh, I knowyou do, old priest, or monk, or whatever you are... but I’ll tell you whatI know anyway. See if I get it right, okay?
They were well known in Biblical times ... well of course they were! As long as there have been shamans, witches, witchdoctors, alchemists, occultists—as long as there have been myths and legends—there have been mandrakes. They are said to have aphrodisiac properties. Maybe that explains Solomon in Song 7: 13—“The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, 0 my beloved.” He was a horny one, Solomon. “Come smell the mandrakes, while I get my leg over.” That’s what he was really saying.
And then there’s Genesis 30: 14-16—the story of Jacob, Reuben, Rachel, and Leah. What woman needs another woman’s man when she can chew on the fruits of the mandrake? Or bring herself off with its root.
And the smell... narcotic? “When perfectly developed the fruits lie in the center of a rosette of dark-green leaves like yellowish bird eggs in a nest. They have a peculiar but not unpleasant smell and sweetish taste, and being principally an emetic, purgative, and narcotic, are mildly poisonous. The plant was much employed in dubious medicine in the olden days, mainly due to superstitious regard of its thick tap-root, which has a passing resemblance in shape to the lower limbs and quarters of the human body...”
That’s what one book says of it. But that’s one of many books and mainly botanical. Other volumes are more concerned with the superstition itself. Look for the mandrake in Josephus, and in Pliny, and in the “Lost Books” of Solomon himself—if they weren’t “lost;” but since they treated of magic, King Hezekiah destroyed them, “lest their contents do harm.”
The mandrake—the baharas—the Zauberwurzell or sorcerors root... as in the German.
My father used to kill Germans. And then the Greek monks had to dispose of the bodies.
“They had wagons,” he recalled one time. “Nothing motorized, you understand. Just donkey-hauled carts with wooden or very occasionally rubber wheels. Traders hauled fish, fruits, kerosene, oil, hay, between villages. The priests had to come down out of the mountains for all their provisions, even for water when the rains were late. At least, that was the excuse they used for always being around. But if we were up to a bit of sabotage and a German patrol came on the scene, we weren’t afraid to take them out. We could always count on the brotherhood to be there with a cart. I can’t tell you how many motorcycles got dumped in the sea where the cliffs fell sheer into deep water, or how many kraut bodies were hauled away in those donkey carts. The monks weren’t much bothered by German checkpoints or patrols, you see? Not at first, anyway. I mean, for supposedly religious types they were the blankest-faced liars I’ve ever come across.’ And the bravest. But... oh, there was something about them. I don’t know.”
“And you don’t remember where this happened?” I said. “It was life and death, but it escapes your memory?”
“We were active on many islands,” he told me. “It’s as if it has all merged into one.” And, as so often before: “It’s as if I’m notsupposed to remember.”
“And you think it’s important?”
“What did they do with the bodies?” he said. “That’s what I keep asking myself. What did they do with the bloody bodies! Where—how—did they dispose of them? I mean, those German patrols simply disappeared. So completely that for a long time the German officers in command must have begun to believe they were dealing with deserters! Which wasn’t unthinkable, because by then they were on the losing end of things. They were watching the harbor, all the small bays and other suitable landing places, checking that their young soldiers weren’t simply running away to the mainland and putting distance between.”
“What is it that’s drawing you back?” I asked him. “Is it just to get it out of your system—the horror of it, I mean?”
“The horror of it? Of the war, the killing?” He shook his head. “Horror, yes, of something. But not of that. That was my job...”
“And you never did find out what the monks were doing with the bodies of the Germans you killed?”
“No.” He shuddered, despite that it wasn’t nearly cold in the greenhouse. “Yes, I did... I think, but I’m not sure. And that’s what’s driving me. I have to be sure.”
* * *
“Oh?” I tried to keep it light, because this was the closest my father had ever come to the root it. My God, to the root of it!
“One night,” he told me, very quietly, “one night when my party of Greek resistance fighters had blown up a small ammunition depot and melted back into the hills, I talked to one of the priests. He asked if he could help, but I said no, there was nothing to dispose of this time. Which was when I thought to ask him what they did with the bodies. He was a very young man, young as myself and very mild-seeming. But, ‘Ah,’ he told me with a grin you wouldn’t believe—an almost fiendish grin, that showed his shattered teeth and savage satisfaction—‘the bodies of the Germans, yes? Well, don’t you worry about them. They will never be found. Not a trace. They are no more. They sleep with the mandrakes...”
“His shattered teeth?”
“Some German had hit him with the butt of his rifle. Nerves were fraying and their brutality was on the increase. Also, a group of priests had been rounded up and shot along with the young men of one of the villages. It was as a reprisal for the loss of one of their officers.”
“And this sleeping with the mandrakes thing?”
“I took it to mean they were buried. Like this Sicilian thing about sleeping with the fishes—when they dump a victim’s weighted body in a lake or in the sea. That’s what Itook it for, anyway...”
* * *
“But you... I don’t understand,” said the old monk, breaking into my memories. “Him, you father, I understand that. But not you. Whyyou come here?”
“You understand about my father?” I said, eagerly if achingly, and more than a little wearily. “Then you know why he did it, why he slept with the mandrakes—actuallyslept with them, here—there.” I twitched my stiff neck, indicating the ground behind me, the coarse Mediterranean shrubbery, weeds, and mandrake rosettes in their hundreds.
“A mistake,” the old man told me. “He not know. Thee accident. Thee Germans were preparing to leaving thee island. He do bombs, sabotage on their boats. They hear him on his radio: he will be picked up from thee beach. But which beach? Thee Germans no know. They cover thee one road, thee donkey tracks, and thee beaches. Your father, he must hide. He is—how you say—pinned down, yes! He stay here, thee whole long night, hiding. Buthere , in this place! Mandraki!”
“And he slept. Lying low. On the ground. With them.”
“He was—how you say?—exhausted, yes...”
* * *
Exhausted, like me that time when I was with my father in the greenhouse. I was exhausted from the tension and the continual mental tug-o’-war. We were sitting opposite sides of a garden table. Suddenly he got mad with his useless memory—or with the memories that wouldn’t let themselves be remembered—and he brought his left fist down on the table. His little finger made a dry cracking sound, and broke off at the junction with his hand. It just broke off!
He looked at it lying on the table, then at the stump. No blood. It didn’t bleed. It was gray, fibrous, like a piece of rotten dowelling; there was maybe just a suggestion of moisture, like an old carrot when you snap it. Useless and unfeeling, his entire left hand was more or less the same. He could scarcely bend the rest of his fingers. This was the first time I had noticed this infirmity, because he’d kept it hidden. But no longer.
And I thought: leprosy! I knew there were colonies in the Greek Islands, though the disease has been on the decrease ever since World War Two. But he had beenin World War Two! Was that what this was all about?
He reeled out of the greenhouse and I sat there paralyzed thinking he was going to the doctor’s.
Exhausted, yes—emotionally exhausted. And I fell asleep. I slept with the mandrakes.
When I woke up I was in my chair—but my feet were three or four inches down into the dry earth, as if it were a bog in there! I pulled them out, and they made a sucking sound. Then I pulled up the mandrakes—dragged them up by those horrible forked roots which are so like the bodies and legs of a man or woman—all of them. But though I half expected it (for I had been reading my father’s books), not a one of them screamed.
Of course not, for they were only mandrakes. They had only been nourished with water, and maybe a little plant food. Theywere plants, with no dreams of their own.
His scribbled letter said goodbye; he was going back to the islands. I would not see him again. Whatever he left behind was mine. And whatever else I did, I must never sleep with the mandrakes.
Too late.
When I removed my shoes, they had been eaten right through the soles. They were as soft and as riddled as Gorgonzola. And I wondered: something in the plant food, maybe?
But I thought not...
* * *
“You missed him,” I told the old monk, whom I now knew to have been my father’s monk. “He came back. He was—he is—here. But you didn’t stop him. Why not?”
“I hear them,” he said. “Mandraki! In my dreams I hear them it is like thee—how you say—theeexcitement! Thee whispers! But not for thee long time. Then last summer I hear them again. But I think isonly a dream. I come down out of thee monastery anyway. But they are quiet again. I no know, but perhaps...”
“...Not perhaps,” I cut him off. “Definitely. That was my father.” And I held up my father’s watch, stainless steel, all crusted with dirt, as I had found it in the soil where I slept with the mandrakes. He had always been a solid, very much “down-to-earth” type, my father.Hah!
I’m sure that the old monk couldn’t understand my humourless grin when I told him: “The strap—a single corroded link of the strap—was sticking up out of the earth. Where there’s muck there’s brass, you see, or sometimes chromium-plated steel... and sometimes much more that that.” By then he had brushed by me to go stumbling about in the mandrakes, his mouth gaping—working in a sort of silent, violent, biting horror—snapping at the air with those blackened fangs. Because suddenly he knew that I had been sleeping with the mandrakes. And yet I was sure there was something other than horror in him, some grotesque curiosity, something habitual, almost an addiction.
There in a den of squirting pod-plants, which he set popping and hissing as they jetted off like small aerial plums to spread their seed, he found my bed. A place where the soil was indented in my shape; more than indented,hollowed, to a depth of some eight or nine inches.
“But why? Whyyou? ” he finally mumbled.
I could have told you then, old monk, that it was probably in my blood, or that I had picked up my “habit” in England, in my mother’s old greenhouse. But I didn’t bother. I knew that it was irreversible, and that eventually you’d be reading this. Oh, yes, for I know now that this is for you.
Still, I was a little anxious and angry. You’ll remember I asked you: “Why haven’t you destroyed them? Is it ...Godly, or even priestly—or monkish—that they’re allowed not only to exist but to flourish here?” And your answer:
That the mandrakes had been here in Mandraki before you, and before every invader, and that they’d always been used for the same purpose. That there are Romans down there, and Asiatic Huns, knights crusader, Turks, Italians, and goodness knows who or what else! “Their screams, they would be make thee brotherhood deaf—or mad!” you said. “Thee whole world might be make deaf, or mad.”
“They scream?” I didn’t believe ... until I remembered my father’s nightmares.They would scream (he said),but have forgotten who to scream at.
“In our dreams,” you explained, you old Priest of the Mandrakes. “In thee dreams—and in theeminds —of men!”
“But mainly in the dreams of the brotherhood? The Brotherhood of the Mandrake?” I nodded my understanding. “A Pandora’s box, which you daren’t destroy.”
“And besides,” you said, “thee Turkey man is always thee threat, even today...” Followed by that terrible grin of yours that my father saw, for like me you had accepted the inevitability ofmy lot. And you had simply shrugged it off! With that grin, and a smell like raw sewage from your rotten mouth—you oh-so-false-priest, you—you’d accepted that I was lost. And I knew you would do it again, if you thought it was necessary. You and yourun orthodox brothers in their high white monastery would start it up again, if or whenever your bloody island was threatened!
And then, quietly I asked you, “Do they know? Did any of them other than my father know? Tell me: are they down there thinking,knowing, even now? And ... and does it hurt? I mean the change? Does the change hurt?”
But you could only shrug that fateful shrug of yours, for you didn’t know. And it seemed to me that now that you had acceptedmy fate, you didn’t really care...
You didn’t know if it would hurt, couldn’t say if there would be pain, because the onesyou had lain to rest with the mandrakes were already dead. (All of them, I wonder?) But like my father before meI am still alive. And by the time you read this, old man, I shall know. Butun like my father, I shall remember everything. And it will be that much faster for me, for while he did it only once, I’ve slept with the mandrakes night after night.
And because it will be faster, I won’t have time to forget, I shall remember! And tomorrow or the day after—or the night after that, or next year—but definitely while I’m still able, I’ll come back here. And Iswear that I’ll remember, for everything will be written here in my book. Then, when they take me, I’ll not merely sleep with them buttalk to the mandrakes, explain it all. And thenthey shall know and remember, too.
Yes, and then they’ll know how to scream and where todirect their screaming! Good luck to you and your bloody brotherhood then, you old false priest...
* * *
The girl on the sundeck of the speedboat where it lolled gently on an ocean blue as the sky found the old man with her binoculars and sighed her relief. He was the same one she’d spoken to a year ago, she was sure, but he wasn’t on the beach. This time he was climbing a track between stunted olives toward the little church. And he seemed to be in a hurry. That was good; she hadn’t much cared for his air; his teeth were horrible and his breath disgusting. But he was a priest and so she’d shared her catch with him. This time the beach was deserted, however, and she and her party would go ashore.
The boat was anchored and already the rest of them were in the water, their gorgeous golden bodies arrowing for the beach. But still she focussed her binoculars on the old monk. What on earth was he doing?
He had come to a halt; he stood stock still on the rocky goat track, then gave a little leap—and another! And now he was tearing something up. A book? Scraps of paper went fluttering, like a flower shedding petals. His weird dance continued. He cavorted, his body twisting and whipping, his black cassock swirling, billowing. And for a moment—a brief moment as she twisted a knurled knob to bring him into clearer definition—she saw his face. Those bulging eyes; that yawning rictus of a gape. And his ravaged teeth that she remembered only too well! Then his tall black capstan hat went flying; he appeared to be slapping his open palms hard against his ears, as if to crush his head between his hands!
Some kind of ritual? Or was it simply a bad toothache? But that agonized look on his face—why, she believed she could even hear his screams, or somebody’s screams, from here! Such a powerful image—likeThe Scream by that odd artist fellow, Edvard Munch, was it? Or maybe he was insane. They must be very lonely up there on the mountain. But she had twisted the knob too far and the priest had suddenly blurred to a lurching black blob.
Then, once more remembering his smell, she shuddered, hung the binoculars on the deck rail, and dived cleanly into the water. Despite that he was a priest, or monk, or whatever, his memory was an offence to the tranquility of the place. This forgotten little wilderness of a beach, that for some reason or other no one ever came to visit. This place, known only as Mandraki.
A tranquil place, yes.
But up in the monastery in the mountains, everything was other than tranquil. Everything was bedlam...