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

me?”
    “Come,” he said. They walked round the building to the rear, followed the wall until it ended, crossed the scrub to a clump of olives, and disappeared into the trees. I went with them part of the way, then watched them out of sight: Dimitrios stiff as a robot, never looking back, and Mrs George rumbling along massively behind him. A moment later there came the clattering and banging of an engine, and his three-wheeler bumped into view. It made for the packed-dirt incline to the road where it wound up the spur. Inside, Dimitrios at the wheel behind a flyspecked windscreen, almost squeezed into the corner of the tiny cab by the fat lady where she hunched beside him.
    Julie had come up silently behind me. I gave a start when she said: “Do you think we should maybe go and see if this George is OK?”
    I took a grip of myself, shrugged, said: “I was speaking to him just—oh, an hour and a half ago. He can’t have got really bad in so short a time, can he? A few horsefly bites, he had. Nasty enough, but you’d hardly consider them as serious as all that. She’s just got herself a bit hot and bothered, that’s all.”
    Quite suddenly, shadows reached down to us from the high brown and purple walls of the plateau. The sun had commenced to sink behind the island’s central hump. In a moment it was degrees cooler, so that I found myself shivering. In that same moment the cicadas stopped their frying-fat onslaught of sound, and a strange silence fell over the whole place. On impulse, quietly, I said: “We’re out of here tomorrow.”
    That was probably a mistake. I hadn’t wanted to get Julie going. She’d been in bed most of the time; she hadn’t experienced the things I had, hadn’t felt so much of the strangeness here. Or maybe she had, for now she said: “Good,” and gave a little shudder of her own. “I was going to suggest just that. I’m sure we can find cheap lodging in Makelos. And this place is such—I don’t know—such a dead and alive hole! I mean, it’s beautiful—but it’s also very ugly. There’s just something morbid about it.”
    “Listen,” I said, deciding to lighten the atmosphere if I could. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You go back to the taverna, and I’ll go get the fish. We’ll have the Greek girl cook them for us and dish them up with a little salad—and a bottle of retsina, as we’d planned. Maybe things will look better after a bite to eat, eh? Is your tummy up to it?”
    She smiled faintly in the false dusk, leaned forward, and gave me a kiss. “You know,” she said, “whenever you start worrying about me—and using that tone of voice—I always know that there’s something you’re worrying about yourself. But actually, you know, I do feel quite hungry!”
    The shadows had already reached the taverna. Just shadows—in no way night, for it wasn’t properly evening yet, though certainly the contrast was a sort of darkness—and beyond them the vast expanse of the sea was blue as ever, sparkling silver at its rim in the brilliant sunlight still striking there. The strangeness of the place seemed emphasized, enlarged…
    I watched Julie turn right and disappear into the shade of the vines, and then I went for our fish.
     

     
    The real nightmare began when I let myself into the chalet and went to the sink unit. Doubly shaded, the interior really was quite dark. I put on the light in the arched-over alcove that was the kitchen, and picked up the two fish, one in each hand—and dropped them, or rather tossed them back into the sink! The ice was all melted; the live-looking glisten of the scales had disappeared with the ice, and the mullets themselves had been—infected!
    Attached to the gill flap of one of them, I’d seen a parasite exactly like the ones on the big grouper; the second fish had had one of the filthy things clamped half over a filmed eye. My hair actually prickled on my head; my scalp tingled; my lips drew back from my teeth in a silent