Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

Eve frowned. "Do I even ask?"

Danny seemed thoughtful for a moment, searching his mind for something familiar, for the story. Conan Doyle saw the process, saw the moment when the demon boy’s eyes lit up with realization. He had remembered. He grinned at Conan Doyle.

"The Hydra’s teeth. That just rocks." The boy bumped Eve affectionately. "Come on. You’re going to love this. I’ll tell you the story while we work."

Conan Doyle nodded and slid back into the Range Rover’s seat. Ceridwen climbed in beside him. Together they began to work with the Divination Box, and all the while his curiosity ate at him.

What are you after, Nigel? What could be so vital to you that you would dare disturb the tomb of an entire age?

The blue sky over Athens had deepened to a rich indigo, and a hint of the moon was visible above the Acropolis. Tourists walked the long path down the hill from the Parthenon, surrendering at last to exhaustion after a long day exploring the city. On their way down, none of them glanced up into the darkening sky, but even if they had they would not have been able to see the ghost of Dr. Graves as he floated back the way they had come, an errant cloud in the shape of a man.

As night crept across the city, Dr. Graves looked up at the outline of the Parthenon silhouetted in the dark and was humbled by its beauty. This is a ghost, he thought. You, Leonard, are merely an afterthought. An echo.

Graves had first visited Athens in 1927. His memories of the Acropolis were what brought him there tonight. In those days he had been a living, breathing man, a thing of flesh and blood. Now he was a wisp of smoke, nothing more. Yet even then he had sensed the ancient soul of this place, all the lives and cultures that had thrived and died there, all the souls that had cried out to their gods for succor. The destruction the Venetians had wrought. The blood that had been spilled upon the stone and earth of that hill. If there was a better place for him to go and try to commune with the phantoms of Athens, he could not imagine it.

The strange part was that in those days of flesh and blood and adventure he had not believed in such things. He had told himself that what he felt was merely awe and respect for the achievements of that ancient society. But that had been foolish. The specters of ancient Greece still lingered atop the Acropolis.

Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.

There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.

The ghosts of antiquity, he thought, propelling his ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.

Olive trees lined either side of the path beneath him. The last of the tourists straggled down from the hill even as the phantom came in sight of the Propylaea, the ancient gateway with its colonnades of Doric columns to the east and west and the rows of thick, proud Ionic columns on either side of the central stair and corridor, holding up nothing but the sky. Spirits were propelled through the tangible world by force of will alone. This was one of the facts of the new science he had studied ever since he had become a part of it. And yet Dr. Graves slipped more rapidly through the veil of night without even realizing he had quickened. He moved above the Propylaea and then paused abruptly, hanging in the air, staring at the majesty of the Parthenon, the temple built to honor the virgin goddess Athena upon her defeat of Poseidon, with whom she had warred for the patronage of the city.

Perikles himself had initiated the construction of the temple in the fifth century B.C. It had been a Byzantine church, a Latin church, and a Muslim mosque in the centuries that had passed since then. When Graves had last been on the broken, bleached ground atop the Acropolis, the Parthenon had been a terrible sight, never having recovered from an explosion that had destroyed part of the temple when the Venetians laid siege, attempting to wrest control of the city from the Turks. Then that thieving bastard Lord Elgin had stolen so much of the sculptural decoration of the place and shipped it back to London to the British Museum. Leonard Graves had spent time on archaeological digs in Greece, and though it had been more than one hundred years since Elgin’s crime, the mistrust he had found among the Greeks had saddened him. But he could not blame them. That was what happened when an ignorant fool stole national treasures. He ruined it for everyone else.

Some of the sculptures remained, but the place truly was a ghost of its original glory. Even so, he was pleased to discover upon closer inspection, drifting on air currents toward the eight-columned face of the temple, that restoration was under way and appeared to have been going on for decades. Barriers were in place that would keep tourists out. And as he alighted upon the marble stairs and then passed between two of those columns and into the massive central chamber he was surrounded by scaffolding.

He felt he could almost hear the chants of the cult of Athena, could almost see them gathered there around her statue. The dust of history coated everything, both in the physical world and the ethereal one.

"Hello?" he called, standing in the center of the chamber, looking up through the collapsed ceiling at the night sky as the stars began to appear.

The ghosts came like the stars, materializing one by one in the darkness of the temple, between columns and beneath scaffolding. Some floated above him, others crouched on the marble beams around the edges of the chamber. Graves said nothing as they scrutinized him, most of them faceless shades, so long dead that they had forgotten their own images and could no longer form the details of their fleshly appearances. Some were in the helmets and garb of Grecian warriors, others in the robes of priestesses of Athena.

Yet for all of the cultures that had lived and died upon the Acropolis, the ghosts of the Parthenon seemed to number only the most ancient. Only the Greeks. Graves wondered if all of the other ghosts, the Turks and Venetians and the rest, had all been driven out.

At length one of the ghosts drifted toward him. Dr. Graves could not see if it was male or female, for this specter was little more than an upper torso clad in a robe and the rough shape of a human head. It had no face. Neither eyes nor mouth. When it spoke the words seemed to manifest upon the air much like the spirits themselves. Leonard Graves had been dead more than half a century. The ancient dead could not harm him — as far as he knew — and yet he felt a rippling chill pass through him as he heard this voice out of the ancient world.