We stepped through the glass-paneled doors, passed beneath a vine-laced arbor, and walked onto a patio perched at the edge of the cliff. Clusters of potted geraniums and pansies hung from the eave and fluttered in the breeze. We stopped at a waist-high wall and peered over white lines of surf and into the vastness of the ocean that stretched out beyond.
“I never tire of this view,” Niki said, her eyes drifting dreamily over the endless blue. “What do you think?”
More feelings of familiarity stirred with the rhythmic interplay of wind and sea. “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “This place makes me feel like … like there’s something more to me … more to all of us than we know. Maybe the Pialigarians are right.”
“Right? About what?”
“Maybe we’ve lived before.”
Niki turned toward me and pushed a floating strand of hair out of her face. The softness of her sun-bronzed skin was a pleasant contrast to the harsh backdrop of the black cliffs. “The Pialigarian envisions the soul as being on an evolutionary journey which they depict as a great labyrinth. This journey spans many physical incarnations. With each incarnation, the soul learns something that enables it to advance along its path. We do not come back randomly. We come with a purpose, each with his or her own.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I find it a compelling theory, one that seems quite logical, even comforting.”
“How is it comforting? I don’t know if I could handle the teen years again.”
She laughed. “To think that we have as much time as it takes to learn what we need to learn, this is comforting. To the Pialigarian, there is no Judgment Day, no threat of hellfire and brimstone, just a kind of leisurely stroll on our spiritual journey. What about you? Are you wondering if you have lived before?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, turning back toward the sea. “I’ve been having the strangest feelings that I’ve been here. Not here at this house, but on these islands. It’s hard to explain, but it … it feels like I’ve … come home.”
Niki looked at me with something like amused curiosity. “Perhaps you are having a soul memory. Euphemia explained that a soul memory is not a picture retained in the cells of the brain, but an experience emblazoned in the heart. Would this describe what you are feeling?”
A seagull rose on the air and hovered close enough for me to see its eye move in the socket. Seeing we had nothing in the way of food, the bird screeched and plunged gracefully into the dizzying depths toward the sea. I watched it for a moment, trying to collect some definite thoughts on the subject. I found none. “I’m not really sure,” I said.
“The Pialigarians have a word for intuitive knowing. They call it Zadim. The word is a combination of two others: za, meaning life, and dim, meaning spirit. Life spirit. According to Pialigarian teachings, their deity, the Great Mother, is always calling the souls of her children back to herself through the Zadim. Because they see Pialigos as the symbolic heart of the Great Mother, Pialigarians believe that those instinctively drawn to these islands have reached the final stages of their soul’s evolutionary journey. According to this belief, these souls are responding to the very highest calling of the Great Mother, a form of Zadim they have named, the whisper of Pialigos.”
“You think this is happening to me?” Something was going on, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to go that far with it.
“I cannot say, not with certainty. But it would do no harm to keep an open mind. What I will tell you is this: if, for you, this is a soul memory, if this is the whisper of Pialigos that speaks to your spirit, then I am most happy that you have found your way home.”
Our eyes locked, and in that moment it would have been easy to reach over and touch her cheek, to feel the silk of her hair pass through my fingers, to pull her close, press my lips to hers. Something told me she wouldn’t resist, so I had to.
“Niki! Signor Adams! Are you coming?” It was Dora, shouting from the main patio two terraces below, shattering the soft tension between us. “You must be starving. Come now; see what I have prepared for you.”
“Yes, Dora,” Niki called back, waving. Turning to me, she asked, “You are hungry, no?”
I swallowed hard when I nodded. “Yeah.”
On the way down, I was afraid to say anything, afraid it might be the wrong thing. But I knew the silence that fell between us was not really silence, that much was being said in a strange, wordless kind of way.
I thought of Marion. Just then, she seemed little more than a distant speck on an infinite horizon.
We were just finishing lunch when the only telephone in the entire villa rang. The telephone—an old black dial unit that rang rather than chirped—was located between the kitchen and the dining nook where we were having our lunch. Barnes explained earlier that he’d had the landline installed in the pre–cell phone era and that, because of the island’s isolated location, it had cost him a small fortune. For that reason, he refused to abandon it in favor of wireless technology.
Dora answered on the third ring. “Yes … yes, but of course.” She turned to me. “Signor Adams, it is for you. A young lady named Marion Chandler.”
I’d given Marion the number, but I didn’t expect her to call unless something was wrong. I excused myself from the table and took the receiver from Dora. “Marion?”
“Signor Adams?” Marion giggled. “I love it!”
She was okay. “Yeah, that was Dora. She does the cooking here. Determined to fatten me up too. Hey, how are you doing? Is everything all right?”
“Oh, I’m doing fine, Signor Adams,” she said in her best Greek accent. “Are you at a place where you can talk?”
I glanced back at the table where Niki, Barnes, Nicholas, and Dora continued their conversation. “Not really.”
“Good. Guess what I’m wearing?”
“Wearing?” Jesus. I had to think. It’d be sometime in the morning there. What the hell did she like to wear in the mornings? “Green jogging suit. You just got in from your run.”
“Eww, you are way cold.”
“Blue tights. You’re doing your yoga.”
“Noooo … not doing yoga. But you’re getting a smidgy bit warmer.”
“Okay,” I muttered. “Bathrobe. You … um … you must have just stepped out of the shower.”
The accent left. “Stuart, baby, what’s happened to you? Have those Greek islands done something to your imagination? Think chemise, honey … the one you brought home from Victoria’s Secret.”
I knew the chemise, all right: black silk halter, tied at the back of her neck, front opened like a teardrop exposing a generous portion of her breasts, mid-thigh hem slit to the hip. If she wanted to stop me dead in a mid-sentence edit, all she had to do was step into the room wearing that and her black spike heels. I glanced at my lunch companions again and caught Niki discreetly averting her eyes—not the best time in the world to talk about chemises and spike heels.
I hunkered uncomfortably over the telephone. “You’re ruthless, you know.”
“Oh, I’m a lot worse than that,” she teased. “What else am I wearing?”
“Heels?” My voice was a near whisper.
“Not even heels.” With a breathy moan, she added, “I’m lying here on the bed, all by my lonesome, thinking about you. God, I want you, Stuart. I want you right now.”
On a scale of one to ten—ten being my point of giving in—her force was about a six-point-five. “I want you too, but that’d be a little hard to manage right now.”
“You could do it if you wanted. Book a flight out of there—today.”
“Today?” I almost laughed, but I didn’t. She sounded like she really meant it. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m not? I’ve been thinking about what you said. Stuart, you’re right. We need to talk about our future. I know that now. Come home, baby. Come home right now. Let’s talk.”
She’d kicked up to about a seven-five. “But Marion, I can’t just walk out on these people. I’ve got a commitment here.”
“Oh? I guess you don’t have a commitment here?”
She lost half a point on that one. Overt guilt didn’t work well with me.
“That’s not what I’m saying and you know it. Take off a couple of weeks; come to the islands. I’m in a little cottage that looks out over the water. You’d love it.”
“Well, who wouldn’t? I already told you that I’m buried up to my neck for the next six months.”
She could talk a long time about solving impossible problems in her work. Why was this one any different, so insurmountable? Another half-point deduction. Back to six-five.
“What about Jill or Stephanie?” I suggested. “Couldn’t they cover for you for a couple of weeks?”
I already knew what she’d say, and she didn’t disappoint me.
“Oh right. Like my decorator and architect are suddenly business heads? They wouldn’t know the first thing about running this circus.”
“Marion, you’re not being fair. I told you all about this deal before I—”
“And I still told you to go. I know that, baby. I thought it would be good for you—for us. But it’s only been a few days and I’m … I’m already dying here. What if it takes a year? God, Stuart, I can’t take a whole year.”
I gave her a full point for taking responsibility and another for convincing me that she really did want me. She was flying on nine, but I was determined to hold my ground.
“I’ll get some free time,” I said. “So will you. It’s not like we can’t see each other. The way everyone here is talking, it won’t take a year. I’m thinking weeks, a few at tops.” No one had actually told me that, but I sensed it was true. “We can handle a couple of weeks, can’t we?”
All I could hear was a long, sighing silence. She’d pulled out the big gun. Nine-point-five.
“I suppose.”
“It’ll go by before we know it. If things here look hopeless, I’ll call it off. How’s that sound?”
Another silence, then a sniff. “All right, Stuart. If that’s what you want. It’ll be an eternity.” I could hear the rustling sound of her getting out of bed and wished like hell that I was there to pull her back in. “I’ve got to get ready for work. I just wanted to hear your voice. Come home as soon as you can.”
Her tone was soggy with self-pity, a believable attempt to mask strength I knew she had. Still, the charade had its desired impact, and when she gave me a sad kiss through the phone and told me again how much she loved and missed me, I was ready to quit Barnes right there on the spot. She was hitting about nine-point-nine-nine. A puff of wind could have pushed me over. With my last ounce of strength, I said, “I love you too, Marion. I’ll call you.” I listened until her phone clicked off.
I picked through the rest of my lunch with Marion’s aching voice needling my brain. It didn’t help that I’d come within a breath of making a pass at Niki. Across the table, Niki showed no signs that anything unseemly had happened between us. Still, I needed time alone with her to assess the potential damage, see if she’d sensed how close I’d come to compromising our professional relationship. We were scheduled to meet at 2:00 for a tour of the cave, a good time, I figured, to make sure things were still in their proper places.
I spent the next hour trying to busy myself transferring notes to the laptop. Everything I’d written about the dig seemed flat, unimportant. I was antsy, couldn’t sit still. I snatched clothes from my suitcase, tossed them into drawers, paced from one window to the next, and stared out, seeing nothing. Damn Marion. Why did she have to wait till we were an ocean apart to start talking about our future?
Minutes before 2:00, I grabbed the Nikon, stuffed a notepad and pen in my back pocket, and left the cottage. I found Niki waiting at the patio. Disarmingly cheerful, she gave no indication that anything unusual had happened between us. Maybe Marion’s call had given us both a dose of reality. More likely it had just been my guilt-sparked paranoia that caused me to overreact. Everything was fine. The only thing I needed to do was to make sure it stayed that way.
We took the stairs to the beach and had gone three hundred yards when Niki suddenly stopped. “Look,” she said, shading her eyes and pointing. “You can see the plume of Kyropos.”
I could just make out the darkened smudge barely visible through the quivering distance, not even worth a photograph. But it gave me an idea.
“What makes Barnes think Seagull was talking about Santorini? Why not Kyropos?”
“That is possible, but not likely. There has never been anything of military value on Kyropos. What reason would Seagull have to go there? There are more reasons to believe that his reference was Santorini.”
“Such as …”
“Listen to the talk in any taverna. In this region, when people speak of a volcano, it is always Santorini, never Kyropos. What is Kyropos? Who even cares?” She could have been talking about her hometown soccer team. A foreigner like me would never guess there’d be such a sense of pride in a force capable of obliterating its inhabitants from the face of the planet. She added, “Seagull was a spy, a trained observer. Do you think he would not have known this?”
“Sounds logical,” I said, scribbling down key words of her explanation. Not knowing the region and its people put me at a definite disadvantage. I’d never been in a taverna, never heard what the people there talked about. Still, there was something that didn’t feel right about her story. The only way I knew to resolve it was to keep asking questions.
“Seagull was dying, after all. Didn’t sound like he had much time to go into detail.”
“Yes, he was dying,” Niki agreed. “Possibly, he was delirious. But we know that Santorini experienced a series of minor eruptions from August 1939 to July 1941, roughly the time that Seagull was in this region. He could have easily seen the column of ash from here.”
She started down the beach. I finished writing the dates and caught up to her.
“Okay,” I said, as we continued on the beach, “so why are you looking on Sarnafi? Why not Santorini?”
“I am going to show you why. On the ridge, there is a much shorter trail leading from the villa to the cave. I brought you this way so you can see for yourself why we think Sarnafi is the likely location for our scroll.”
We came to a group of large stone blocks—black, uniformly cut, half-buried in the sand. Niki stooped by one and ran her hand over the near-smooth surface.
“These blocks drew my father’s attention to this island. He recognized the marks of the chisel. You can see the hand of an ancient Pialigarian mason at work here.”
To me, her so-called chisel marks were nearly imperceptible lines that only an archaeologist could appreciate. But I snapped a shot and added her comments to my notebook.
“You ask why we look on Sarnafi,” she continued, “and not Santorini. My father puzzled over this question for many years. There are no Pialigarian ruins on Santorini. Euphemia has assured us that this is true. Why? We can only guess. But you see, here is evidence of a Pialigarian presence. Pialigarian texts speak of outposts, cave-bearing islands where documents of great importance were safely kept in the event of another cataclysm. This would be similar, perhaps, to the way the Essenes cached their sacred writings in jars in the caves of Qumran. There are many islands in the Aegean. Some have caves. Some have ruins. Sarnafi has both. Add to this the fact that Santorini’s ash plume would have dominated the sky during Seagull’s time, and you have a compelling reason to begin here. Of course, this is not the strongest of evidence, but we have to start somewhere.”
I stopped scribbling and tried to assure myself that it was the fault of my untrained eye that I saw only a smattering of large, weathered rocks. “In other words, it’s a long shot.”
“You are having doubts about this theory?”
“You don’t?”
“Okay, it is a long shot. There are no certainties in my field. When you write your novels, you can make them up as you go. I must take the world as I find it. If the archaeologist waits for absolute facts every time before she digs, what discoveries would she make? She often begins her work based on little more than educated speculation—faint chisel marks on the weathered face of a stone. Sometimes she gets lucky, and sometimes she comes up empty-handed. But even when there is no specific find, knowledge is gleaned, lessons are learned, and the scientific database is enriched. Mine is not a profession for the impatient. Nor will it appeal to those who base their happiness on always making specific acquisitions.”
“So, what you’re telling me is that this whole thing could be little more than an exercise in character building?”
Niki lowered her sunglasses as if she’d discovered an important void in my understanding of humanity, and it was her pleasure to fill it in.
“Would that be such a bad thing? In case you have not noticed, the world is in dire need of people with a little more character.” She reset her glasses and added, “Perhaps you should jot this down in that little notebook of yours.”
I didn’t jot it down, mainly because I figured I already had enough character to get by. Personally, I couldn’t see that a few more specific acquisitions—a substantially fatter bank account, for example—were going to do me all that much harm.
Niki started off again. “Come. Perhaps I can bolster your discernible lack of faith.”
I followed Niki to an excavation site whose center was a large courtyard surrounded by broken walls with doors and windows framed in thick casings of stone. Weather and extreme age had reduced the building to a pitiful hint of its former magnificence. The courtyard floor was inlaid with black stone, damaged but recognizable.
“Looks like a labyrinth,” I said, snapping a shot.
“You are looking at the remains of a Pialigarian temple, officially listed, you should be pleased to know, by the Greek Department of Antiquities.” Niki crossed her arms in vindicated satisfaction. “Does this irrefutable evidence appease your skeptical nature?”
I answered with a grin flush with newfound assurance and snapped a few more pictures.
“Come,” she said. “I will show you the cave.”
We followed a primitive trail that snaked between craggy slopes. Passing through a narrow ravine, we stopped when we encountered another, better-defined trail.
“This is the shortcut back to the villa,” Niki explained. “And there”—she pointed to an enormous pile of stone rubble stacked high against the base of the cliff wall—“that is the cave.”
I started to raise my camera, but I stopped, confused. All I saw was the collapsed face of a cliff, no cave. I stepped closer to make sure I wasn’t overlooking something. To my right was a smaller mound of stone, about five feet in height. Someone had apparently moved it from the main slide. Was this the extent of the work done by her Cretan excavators? My pillar of newfound optimism wobbled.
“Am I missing something?”
She shrugged. “That depends. What do you think you might be missing?”
“The cave. I don’t see it.”
“Do you not have eyes?” she said, suddenly defensive. Then she relaxed a little and chuckled. “But of course, you are not an archaeologist. How would you know? The cave is there, beneath the rocks. Do you think I would be excavating a cave that has not collapsed? What need would there be?”
I was trying to reconcile the reality of what I was looking at with the picture of the cave Barnes had painted. They didn’t come close to a match.
“But … but Barnes said you were on top of it, that I’d be lucky to make it here in time to get some hands-on experience.”
“Yes. You cannot see that he spoke the truth?”
Was she joking? I waited for the smile to break over her face. All I got was an annoyed frown.
“Why do you stand there staring at me like a dumbo? Does the thought of a little work make you go mad?”
“A little work? No, the thought of a little work doesn’t make me go mad. Moving tons of rock by hand? Now that makes me go mad. Niki, even with a bulldozer and a boatload of dynamite—”
“We have considered both. We cannot use either. A bulldozer? How would one get it to this spot? And dynamite? We risk destroying the scroll. We have to do it by hand.”
“By han … ?” Her indifference suggested a task as simple as sweeping a sprinkle of dirt into a dustpan. I stepped to the smaller pile of stone. “Your so-called crew, did they move these rocks?”
“Of course they moved these rocks. In case you have not noticed, rocks do not move by themselves. Sergios and his son, Christian, they were helping with the cave.”
“Were? You mean like … are no longer?”
Her eyebrows shot up as if she pretended to be suddenly impressed with my acute powers of observation. “How perceptive you are.”
“Where are they now?” I asked, noticing clumps of grass growing through the small pile. “Looks like they’ve been gone for weeks.”
“Family matters … on the western shores of Crete. This is why they leave.”
“Family matters?” It was the way she broke eye contact that told me she knew more than she was saying. “You’re sure that’s it?”
She hesitated and tossed back her hair. “Perhaps there was something more.”
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
She blew out an impatient breath. “If you must know, they fear Kyropos. Satisfied? They believe the western shore will provide protection from a tsunami.”
“Tsunami? I thought you said Kyropos was no threat.”
“I am here, am I not? These men do not share my optimism. Simple laborers, this is all they will ever be.”
“Maybe these simple laborers know something you don’t.”
The risk these guys saw had obviously outweighed the wage they’d been drawing. My guess was that there was some chatter going on in the tavernas that Niki hadn’t been privy to. She’d been on Crete, after all.
“What could they know? What man wakes up in the morning certain that he will live to see the night? Am I to crawl into a hole with such cowards and shiver in fear for what I do not know?”
“There are ways of improving your odds,” I pointed out. “Like maybe staying out of the path of a nine-hundred-foot wave.”
“Ha! This shows how little you know about volcanoes. If you had been observant, you would see that it was not a tsunami that destroyed the temple of this island. It was the death cloud of ash from Thera.”
“Death cloud?” Instantly, images of melting eyeballs, shattered teeth, and flesh dripping from my face like liquid wax filled my mind. I could see my pathetically maimed body curled in a fetal position, gasping for breath as particles of fine glass permeate my lungs, coughing black blood, praying for death under the merciless blanket of falling ash. “Hell, that makes me feel a lot better. Incineration and suffocation, that wouldn’t be so bad. It’s the fear of drowning that keeps me up at night.”
“Do you also wish to go to the western shores of Crete where you will be safe? Not even the death cloud could reach you there. Better yet, perhaps you would feel safer back on your mountain in Colorado.”
“If I’d known half of what was going on here—no, let me rephrase that—if I’d known half of what wasn’t going on here, I would have stayed on my mountain in Colorado, and you and me wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation.”
“So, you admit that you are afraid.”
“Afraid?” I scoffed at her attempted play on my male ego. “Afraid has nothing to do with it. Look, forget the volcano. Let’s get back to the main problem here. Niki, you and me, we can’t dig out this cave, not even with your two buddies helping us. Not by hand. It’s impossible. You’re a scientist. We’re looking at a major physics problem here.”
She fluttered her eyes shut in defiance, so I waited for them to reopen before I continued.
“Look, here’s a mass of rock that has to be moved from here”—I swept a hand over the slide—“to there”—I pointed to the small pile. “Let’s call this rock slide Point A. That pile is Point B. In order to move that mass from Point A to Point B, you have to have a form of energy. You can’t use dynamite. You can’t use machinery. Your labor force isn’t interested in suffocating, drowning, or otherwise dedicating the rest of their lives to moving enough rock to build a major pyramid. Barnes, with all due respect, is too old to be any help. That leaves us. You and me. One man and one woman. Think about it. There’s simply not enough energy in one man and one woman to move that mass of rock from here”—I drove a finger—“to there.”
“Perhaps if the man were a Greek,” she said, crossing her arms and shifting her weight to one leg, “it would be different. You Americans, so smart but so lazy. Get a machine to do your work. This is how you think. If you cannot get a machine, the work, it does not get done. We Greeks, we build great monuments across the whole face of the earth. Did we use bulldozers? No! Did we use dynamite? No! We used our hands. Our bare hands.”
“You mean you used the bare hands of your slaves,” I reminded her. “Thousandsof them. And maybe a lightning bolt or two from Zeus. Now if you happen to know a couple of gods and a few thousand slaves—”
She threw up her arms. “Fine! You will not help? I will do it myself. I will move these rocks from your stupid Point A to your even stupider Point B. With these hands”—she shook two white-knuckled fists in my face—“I will do this thing. You can sit in the shade and watch. If I must dig alone to get the scroll, then I will dig. You will see.”
The idea was so ridiculously childish that I almost laughed in her face. She might have hit me. I needed to find a way to ease her scientific, rational self back into the discussion.
“What if the scroll’s not here?” I asked, calmly. “We do all this work, and the scroll is not here. Niki, we’re talking years of work. I’ll be pushing a walker by the time we’re done.”
She lowered her fists, but her eyes stayed locked on mine. “If you would work as hard as you try to avoid it, we would clear this cave long before you need your walker.”
It was no use; she wasn’t going to budge. Equally clear was the fact that Marion and I would never make it to the end of this job, especially after I’d told her that we were probably just weeks away from finding the scroll. Was I willing to risk losing her for a hundred grand and a story that may not even exist?
“I’m sorry, Niki, but I think you’ve got the wrong man. I can’t do this.”
“You cannot do what?”
Her clueless façade was starting to piss me off. “This.” I jabbed a finger angrily at the rocks. “We can’t do this in a year. We can’t do it in ten. The whole thing is nuts. Barnes promised me a story. This is a cartoon. I didn’t come over here to do a cartoon.”
“Then there is no reason for you to be here.”
I hated the sound of it, but I said, “My point exactly.”
“And the money that Rufus has paid you?”
“To hell with the money.” I turned to leave.
“I know it is your Marion that is calling you home. You had better hurry.”
I stopped, spun around, and saw her looking at me like I was a pussy-whipped washrag.
“You can twist it into anything you want,” I said, glaring back at her. “The fact is, I don’t like being lied to. You want me to write about your scroll?” I nodded toward the rubble. “Give me a call when you find one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a flight to book.”
I took the shortcut back to the villa, kicking every rock foolish enough to get in my way.
J Douglas Bottorff 