Storming Paradise Page 5

  The morning sun was bright in the cloudless sky, the air crisp. Hercules and Iolaus were glad to be leaving the abandoned village, despite their regrets at how they were leaving things.

  “There’s nothing more that we can do,” Hercules said as he and Iolaus waved to Phoibe having said their goodbyes.

  “You really believe that?” Iolaus asked.

  “I have to. Questioning that is a sure way to madness.”

  Iolaus saw the logic in his friend’s argument. They had spent more than enough time sifting through soil with nothing to show for it but the dirt under their nails.

  The two men walked out of the village, along the road that led away from the mountains, away from the direction from which they had entered. The road here was flat and followed parallel to the coast, the land dotted with trees and bushes, clumpy grass sprouting at the sides of the track.

  They had gone less than a mile when they spotted another traveler walking along the road toward them. As they approached they saw that the man was dressed in brightly colored garb, albeit a little worn, and that he carried a lyre.

  “Greetings, fellow travelers,” he called as he neared Hercules and Iolaus. “Might I play you a song?” As he said this, he raised the lyre and strummed a chord.

  Iolaus sighed. “Just what we need,” he hissed at Hercules. “More music!”

  The traveling balladeer looked hopefully at Hercules and Iolaus as they approached. “A song about a lost love, or a found one? About the perils of challenging the gods, or the triumphs?” he asked. “I take requests and it will surely brighten your journey.”

  Hercules shook his head. “We have no money,” he told the balladeer, “so your services would be wasted.”

  The man pulled a face and lowered his lyre. “Ah well, I appreciate your honesty, if not your custom,” he said and he continued on his way in the opposite direction to Hercules and Iolaus. As he passed them, Hercules spoke up.

  “I fear there’s nothing for you that way, minstrel,” he said.

  The traveling singer halted and turned, his brows furrowing. “I was told there is a fishing village—” he began, confused.

  “There is, but sadly it’s been abandoned,” Hercules told him.

  A look of growing consternation appeared on the balladeer’s face. “Is there some plague doing the rounds that I’ve not heard of?” he muttered, shaking his head. “Or perhaps a curse? This would be the third village I’ve known that’s been abandoned.”

  Hercules and Iolaus started. “Did you say—?” Iolaus began.

  “Third?” Hercules finished.

  “Yes,” the musician confirmed. “I happened upon one not three days ago in that direction—” and he pointed vaguely behind him, “and before then, on an island to the east, two weeks prior.” He sighed. “I tell you, it does not make it easy to make an honest living when one’s audience has packed up the whole town and left.”

  “Where did you say these villages were?” Hercules asked. “Would you describe them for us?”

  The balladeer nodded, and then a bright smile crossed his lips. “Would you like me to explain in the form of a song?”

  It was Hercules’ and Iolaus’ turn to sigh then. “If you must,” Hercules said, “but please don’t leave out any details.”

  The balladeer plucked at his lyre and began his song. “’Twas a bright and sunny morning when the stranger came to town . . .”

  The best that could be said about the balladeer’s song was that it was inoffensive. The puns were admittedly dreadful and the rhymes occasionally left something to be desired. But by the end of the impromptu recital, Hercules and Iolaus had a clearer idea of what the singer had discovered. Added to their own discoveries, it made for a worrying scenario.

  It was clear that the party street, as they had come to think of it, had appeared in a number of locations throughout the nearby islands. While the balladeer had only discovered two empty villages, he had happened upon one of those shortly after dawn and had heard the strains of music and laughter just before arriving in what had proved to be a silent, abandoned village. Which, as he sang, “made as much sense as a hat made of grapes” (rhyming with the promised “merry japes” of the preceding line).

  Joined by the balladeer, who had wisely decided to make his way back the way that he had come, Hercules and Iolaus discussed what it could all mean.

  “This whole tale reeks of the supernatural,” Hercules complained. “The use of a snare—the party—to trap unsuspecting people. Sailors have recited similar stories for years, with the harpies, the sirens and so on, all magical creatures hoping to lure the unwary.”

  A few steps behind them, the balladeer perked up. “Did you say sirens?” he asked. “I know a song about—”

  “Not now!” Iolaus instructed. Then, turning back to Hercules, he put the scant information they had together. “You think this isn’t so much Main Street as Pain Street?”

  “That’s what our musician friend here infers,” Hercules said solemnly.

  Iolaus leaned close to his partner, pitching his voice low. “You know, you can’t trust everything a balladeer sings. They make stuff up.”

  “They’re supposed to, that’s their job,” Hercules reminded him.

  Iolaus shrugged. “I just don’t see a pattern to this.”

  “Not yet,” Hercules agreed. “But there must be one. An impossible street cannot stay hidden forever—can it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Then we shall track it down and find it once more,” Hercules cheered.

  “I don’t know,” Iolaus said, scrunching up his face. “It sounds dangerous.”

  Hercules laughed. “What party worth the appellation is not?”

  Chapter 7

  How do you chase a rumor? That was the challenge that faced Hercules and Iolaus as they went in search of the mysterious street party.

  They tried other villages, waiting for nightfall, which was the time that the street seemed to have appeared before. They found several abandoned villages, one where just a couple—sick and infirm—remained along with their doting daughter, while the rest of the village had been deserted. Hercules asked the people who remained what had happened and a familiar story emerged:

  “There was a party,” a young woman called Zosime, who tended to her sick parents, explained as she washed cloths in a kitchen basin. “It started when the sun set, and it ran all night. We could hear the noise of it from here, and I did sneak out to look,” she said, peering momentarily out of the kitchen window to where the party had been. “It was so . . . joyful. Everyone attended, laughing and dancing and drinking. There was food, too, so much food! I stole a plateful before returning to check on my parents, about an hour later.”

  “Do you have any idea what happened to the street?” Hercules asked gently.

  Zosime shook her head. “I could not leave my parents,” she said. “They’re both unwell. I came home after eating and I slept while the party carried on without me. When I awoke the next morning, the party had gone, and so had the people. Everyone, except for us.” She looked to be on the verge of tears.

  “It’s okay,” Hercules told her. “You’re all safe.”

  Zosime looked at him, tears streaming down her face. “But where did they go? Why did they all leave?”

  “We don’t know,” Iolaus told her.

  “Yet,” Hercules added. “But we will.”

  There was nothing more to be said, but Hercules and Iolaus stayed through the afternoon, helping Zosime do some chores with which she would have struggled now that she was alone with her parents. Hercules rebuilt a broken wall that had tumbled down months before, and Iolaus worked the vegetable patches around the village until the woman had enough to feed herself and her parents for two weeks—any longer than that and the vegetables would rot, but at least she could defer the backbreaking work
for a while.

  The two friends also took the time to examine the place where the street party had been held, led there by Zosime between her chores. It was all too similar to the spot at the fishing village, where Hercules and Iolaus had almost been sucked down into the earth. Now there was no evidence, no street, not even space for a street. It was as if the whole town, every building and tree and bench, had all shifted to accommodate the mysterious street for one night only. If they had harbored any doubts as to the role of magic in this situation, the evidence—or lack thereof—that they found here quelled them.

  Before they left, Hercules spoke with Zosime with some gravity. “If the people do not return soon, you should consider moving on. It is not healthy to remain in a town that has been deserted.”

  “I don’t fear attack,” Zosime assured him with a proud jut of her jaw.

  “Loneliness is what you should be wary of,” Hercules told her. “It is an insidious thing that drives men mad without their realizing.”

  Zosime nodded, accepting his words. “You’re a good man,” she said, “to say that. Most people wouldn’t care.”

  The days multiplied into weeks. Hercules and Iolaus became increasingly aware of the signs of the mysterious street party—missing people, empty houses, sorrow—and wherever they trekked they looked for them.

  The villages that had been affected seemed to be of a uniform size, no haul larger than one hundred people at a time, and they were spread across a group of islands in the Aegean Sea. Hercules and Iolaus passed through several villages of that size, and heard the occasional rumor of more disappearances. One time they came upon a hamlet that had been abandoned some weeks before, enough time for wolves to settle there in the absence of people, and to defend their territory when the two humans tried to pass through.

  “Disappearance upon disappearance,” Hercules said as he and Iolaus sat on an island beach after close to three weeks of searching. Above them, the late afternoon sun dawdled in the sky, searching for a place to retreat, while the gulls circled, crying for food. “And yet still, we are no closer to finding out why these streets have appeared, nor where they have departed to.”

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” Iolaus admitted, tossing a flat-bottomed stone across the water so that it skimmed over the waves. After three bounces, the stone sunk with a plop.

  “If only we could watch every village,” Hercules said, “but we’d need the fabled eyes of Argus for such a task.”

  “Or a lot of mirrors,” Iolaus suggested, half-joking.

  Hercules eyed the waves as they lapped at the shore, mulling over the dilemma. “There must be a way to watch every village,” he said. “We have identified the type of settlement, and the area within which our mystery street strikes. How hard can this be?”

  Iolaus pushed himself up, glancing up at the sun. “Face it: there isn’t,” he said. “Best we get moving before the sun sets and it starts to get cold.”

  Hercules nodded, rising from the sandy beach. Suddenly, he stopped, gazing out once more at the ocean and the distant islands that waited out there, dark bumps on the horizon. “There is a way, Iolaus!” he cried joyfully.

  “What? I mean . . . how?” Iolaus stuttered.

  “A boat!” Hercules told him, gesturing out at the waters. “We’ll scan from a boat, sail through the night if we need to.”

  “You have rocks in your head,” Iolaus told him dismissively. “How are you going to visit every potential village—”

  “We won’t have to,” Hercules assured him. “Sound carries. Right across the water, enough that we could hear that party from miles away.”

  “We never heard it before,” Iolaus pointed out.

  “We were on land before, not out at sea,” Hercules told him. “Listen—waves and a little breeze, but nothing more. It’s perfect.”

  “And you think we’re just going to hear this party?” Iolaus asked. He sounded doubtful.

  “I think we are going to do what we always do, old friend,” Hercules told him. “We are going to keep going and not give up. Agreed?”

  Iolaus shook his head regretfully. “Yeah, agreed, I guess,” he finally said, rolling his eyes.

  That evening, Hercules and Iolaus chartered passage on a boat owned by an old fisherman who proudly told them he was more at home on the water than on land. “I’ll sail you where you need sailing,” the captain said, “Get you wherever you need.”

  “Ah, that may be a problem,” Hercules explained as he stepped down onto the ten-foot-long sail boat. “See, we don’t really know where it is, exactly, that we’re going.”

  Seeing the captain’s surprise, Iolaus made a show of laughing at his companion’s words. “Ignore my friend,” he said. “He’s a little . . . eccentric in the head. We know where we’re going, right, Hercules?”

  Hercules looked at Iolaus who was nodding encouragingly. “Yes, we’ll know the very moment we get there,” he agreed. “Just get us out on the water.”

  Uncertain, but happy to get out on the water, the fisherman unfurled the sail of the boat and pushed off from the harbor. “Night fishing can be dangerous,” he told his passengers as they sailed out into the open waters. “Let’s get moving, and you fellows point the way.”

  Iolaus had to admit that Hercules had been right about one thing. As they sailed beneath the waning moon, its crescent casting a Mallen Streak across the surface of the water, they could hear a wonderful stillness like nowhere else in Greece. Out here on the nighttime water there was a palpable tranquility; the shushing of the waves against the hull and the whisper of the wind soon faded from consciousness, leaving just an empty void of sound, populated only now and then by the sounds of activity on a distant shore.

  Having told the fisherman to head north, they drifted out into open water and listened for sounds of the street party that was plaguing the area. Hercules heard it first.

  “I think I hear something,” he said, cupping a hand to his ear and turning his head. “That way,” he said after a moment. Then he addressed the fisherman who sat at the rudder steering. “Captain, you know these waters well,” he said. “Is there an island over in that direction?”

  The captain looked where Hercules indicated, and nodded. “A little cluster of them,” he said, “three in all.”

  “Can you head towards them?” Hercules asked.

  Adjusting the rudder, the captain assured them that they could. “We’re on our way,” he said.

  As anyone will tell you, traveling the sea by night can be dangerous. Hazards like sandbars and rocks, while obvious in the daylight, can be almost impossible to find, let alone navigate, in darkness. There were other dangers out there too, and even knowing where the strong currents were was no guarantee that one could always avoid them. Thus, it was no reflection on the captain of the vessel, whose experience and courage on the water were above doubt, that the fishing boat ran into trouble before it reached its destination.

  The nature of the trouble, however, was something that no one could have predicted. As the boat sailed towards the clustered islands, the sounds of the street party came in ebbs and flows across the water, each burst dragged by the wind, and something moved alongside the boat, closing in on them from their starboard side.

  Hercules and Iolaus were up front in the prow, where the empty nets were stacked while not in use, concentrating on the fractured sounds of the street party as they became more solid, trying to locate them by their muddled narrative. The fisherman was adjusting the sail, catching as much of the night breeze as he could as the boat cut through the dark waters. As such, neither he nor his passengers realized the danger they were in until it was almost too late.

  One moment, the small vessel was bobbing along the surface, making passage towards the islands without hindrance. The next, the boat shuddered to a sudden halt, so sudden that it was pulled back in mid-motion, its prow rising up and
out of the water.

  As the prow lifted, Iolaus stumbled sideways and suddenly he had dropped over the edge of the boat and into the water with a splash.

  More sure-footed, Hercules tottered in place before scrambling to the side, searching for his companion. “Captain!” he bellowed. “What just happened?”

  Hercules glanced back up the length of the boat just in time to see the captain being dragged over the side by what appeared to be a dark, ridged tentacle.

  Chapter 8

  It was hard to see what it was in the moonlight. Hercules glimpsed the flash of—was that a tentacle?—wrapping around the boat captain’s waist, and then both captain and tentacle had disappeared over the side. In the wake of that disappearance, the small boat pitched and yawed, threatening to capsize.

  Still standing on the prow, Hercules danced in place as he fought to keep his balance, turning back to the sea where Iolaus had fallen overboard. “Iolaus!” he cried. “Iolaus, where are you?”

  A sopping mop of blond hair emerged four feet from where Hercules was looking, accompanied by a loud gasp as Iolaus sucked desperately for air. “Herc—?” he spluttered through a mouthful of seawater. “What hap-happened?”

  Crouching down, Hercules thrust one arm out towards Iolaus’ bobbing figure in the moonlight. “Here, give me your hand,” he said. “Quickly.”

  Iolaus grabbed for the hand, paddling in the waves to reach it. “What happened?” he repeated as Hercules hefted his soaking form from the cold water.

  “We’re under attack,” Hercules said, already hurrying back along the length of the boat. Four long strides and he was at the rudder where the boat’s captain had been dragged under by that thing.

  “Captain?” Hercules shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  No reply.

  A moment later, his clothes dripping with water, his wet hair clinging to his brow, a shivering Iolaus joined Hercules. “What’s going on? Where’s th—?”