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

was one thing, but homicidal—?
    I dipped, held my finger up to the sun where that great blazing orb slipped down toward the plateau’s rim. Squinting, I saw…just a blob of goo. Except—black dots were moving in it, like microscopic tadpoles.
    Urgh! I wiped the slime off my finger onto the rough concrete of the wall. Wrong bucket, obviously, for something had gone decidedly wrong in this one. Backing uncertainly away, I heard the doleful bleating of the white kid.
    Across the garden, he was chewing on the frayed end of a rope hanging from the corner of a tarpaulin where it had been thrown roughly over the chair under the olive tree. The canvas had peaked in the middle, so that it seemed someone with a pointed head was still sitting there. I stared hard, felt a tic starting up at the corner of my eye. And suddenly I knew that I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want it one little bit. And I wanted Julie to be here even less.
    Coming round the house to the seating area under the vines, it became noisily apparent that I wasn’t the only disenchanted person around here. An angry, booming female voice, English, seemed matched against a chattering wall of machine-gun-fire Greek. I stepped quickly in under the vines and saw Julie sitting in the shade at the ocean’s edge, facing the sea. A book lay open on her table. She looked back over her shoulder, saw me, and even though she wasn’t involved in the exchange, still relief flooded over her face.
    I went to her, said, “What’s up?” She looked past me, directing her gaze toward the rear of the seating area.
    In the open door of the house, Dimitrios made a hunched silhouette, stiff as a petrified tree stump; his wife was a pale shadow behind him, in what must be the kitchen. Facing the Greek, George’s wife stood with her fists on her hips, jaw jutting. “How dare you?” she cried, outraged at something or other. “What do you mean, you can’t help? No phone? Are you actually telling me there’s no telephone? Then how are we to contact civilization? I have to speak to someone in the town, find a doctor. My husband, George, needs a doctor! Can’t you understand that? His lumps are moving. Things are alive under his skin!”
    I heard all of this, but failed to take it in at once. George’s lumps moving? Did she mean they were spreading? And still, Dimitrios stood there, while his wife squalled shrilly at him (at him , yes, not at George’s wife as I’d first thought) and tried to squeeze by him. Whatever was going on here, someone had to do something, and it looked like I was the one.
    “Sit tight,” I told Julie, and I walked up behind the furious fat lady. “Something’s wrong with George?” I said.
    All eyes turned in my direction. I still couldn’t see Dimitrios’s face too clearly, but I sensed a sudden wariness in him. George’s wife pounced on me. “Do you know George?” she said, grasping my arm. “Oh, of course! I saw you talking to him when I was in the sea.”
    I gently prized her sweaty, iron-band fingers from my arm. “His lumps?” I pressed. “Do you mean those swollen stings of his? Are they worse?”
    “Stings?” I could see now that her hysteria had brought her close to the point of tears. “Is that what they are? Well, God only knows what stung him! Some of them are opening, and there’s movement in the wounds! And George just lies there, without the will to do anything. He must be in agony, but he says he can’t feel a thing. There’s something terribly wrong…”
    “Can I see him?”
    “Are you a doctor?” She grabbed me again.
    “No, but if I could see how bad it is—”
    “—A waste of time !” she cut me off. “He needs a doctor now!”
    “I take you to Makelos.” Dimitrios had apparently snapped out of his rigor mortis mode, taken a jerky step toward us. “I take, find doctor, come back in taxi.”
    She turned to him. “Will you? Oh, will you, really? Thank you, oh, thank you! But… how will you take