Erinyes Read online

  Are those eyes? And that weird looking hole a mouth? It can’t be, can it? Nah it’s just a glitch. What about the rest of the pictures? Print. Print.

  What did that guy call it again?

  Chapter 6

  Agamemnon looked into the vault of heaven and prayed saying, "I call Jove the first and mightiest of all gods to witness, I call also Earth and Sun and the Erinyes who dwell below and take vengeance on him who shall swear falsely, that I have laid no hand upon the girl Briseis, neither to take her to my bed nor otherwise, but that she has remained in my tents inviolate.

  Then he cut the boar's throat.

  I formed the words with my mouth in silence. The Erinyes who dwell below and take vengeance. I closed the book of Iliad. Heavy stuff.

  I played with my lips for a while.

  I took my new phone and went to the bathroom. After a touch up I started taking selfies on the mirror, the light is excellent there, I’m getting tons of likes.

  Click. Nope, another pose.

  Click. Nah.

  Click. Click.

  Oh man, it’s smudgy again. Zoom it and print, dad should really get this feedback so they can fix it.

  Wait, is that a face?

  Is that…

  Is that thing behind me?

  Purple Time

  She reached her hand to touch my face and I ducked instinctively. Smashing the mirror behind me, the shards piercing my back I ran as fast as I could out of the bathroom, running through thick time.

  On the hallway I could hear mom’s Turkish TV blasting at full volume, the sounds distorted by my adrenaline and the Doppler effect.

  I turned around for a second to see, the Erinyes was chasing me like a feline predator, her movements slow but steady. She was smiling, the kariola was smiling.

  The door smashed into splinters at my left and a rather big piece pierced my cheek. I spat blood and ran to the balcony.

  The sun was blinding and I was disoriented for a couple of seconds too long. She came closer and opened her arms as if to embrace me, her nails scratching the bookcase at her right with impossibly bright mauve sparks, as if she was welding the books to reality.

  The automatic sprinkler had watered the plants and I could smell the lovely moist dirt and the fresh flowery fragrance.

  “What a lovely place to die,” I thought and realised I got myself trapped in the balcony, no exit but down. No, not down, it is too high. Next balcony, yeah, I can reach it.

  Mrs Toula would not be happy to see me crashing her place uninvited but she’ll get over it.

  I started climbing the mid-wall that separates the balconies from the neighbours and grabbed a hold of the aluminium thing and stepped on a big potted plant and then I slipped and fell and hit my head.

  Chapter 7

  I woke up from a splash of water on my face, shaking in my mother’s arms.

  “Oh darling what happened?” my mom asked as she was cradling me and checking my temperature. She was still wearing her kitchen apron and her hands smelled of cut vegetables.

  I looked around groggily. “I’m not sure. When did I get here?” I propped myself up, stabilised for a second and looked back at the bookcase. Everything was fine. In its place, undisturbed.

  Huh.

  I could have sworn I would wake up to a path of destruction.

  Mom was checking into my eyes like doctors do, as if she knew what to do. Which she didn’t. “Mahi, did you faint?” Her eyes opened with realisation and she whispered, “Are you pregnant? If you are, it’s OK, but you need to tell me.”

  I swiped her hand away and stood up properly. “Ohi. No mom, I’m not pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

  She bit her lip. “Did they teach you at school? About contraception?”

  “Yes mama…” I exhaled and went back to my room.

  I shut the door and sat down. I could feel her worry radiating through.

  I thought about the chase. I could remember everything perfectly.

  Was I on drugs or something?

  Chapter 8

  It took me a minute or so to tell everything to Deppy, but Billy was a whole other thing. I had to call him on the phone like a Neanderthal.

  “So, are you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “No!”

  “Interesting…” he said and I could just picture him taking the Spock pose.

  “I sent you the pictures on your email.”

  “OK, but I can’t see them yet. I’ll call you when I get home.”

  What. A. Freak.

  Who doesn’t check his emails on his phone in this day and age?

  I checked my profile. A few more likes here and there, two more sleazy comments, deleted, reported, thank you… Huh. Seven check-ins at the coffee shop I just came from.

  Copycats. Bunch o’ copycats. I let them know with an appropriately punny cat pic.

  Anyway, I was late for frontistirio. Frontistirio is a private cram school, where they teach you the things school ought to teach you but doesn’t, so everybody needs to spend more time and money to pass the exams. I thought it was the norm, but I learned much later that it is solely a Greek thing.

  I picked up my bag and hit the road.

  It was like a three minute walk from my house, so took my time and window-shopped a bit.

  Eventually, I got myself there, but I was late even when I started, then I was a bit late again with my detour, and most of the class-hour was gone anyway so I just sat outside at the bench and waited for the next one.

  It’s not like I had studied for either one.

  Chapter 9

  The bell rang (yes, we have a bell cause this is still the 20th century for some reason) and the other kids stormed out.

  I was on the bench, which was covered in writings and quotes and little drawings that made it a work of art in itself.

  Most of my class came and surrounded me.

  “What’s that, the new phone?”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Oh, nai, veil or something.”

  “It’s awesome. Not the pink one of course, don’t want the pink one,” a classmate said, defending his manliness.

  I decided to act smart and show them what Deppy figured out. She was around the corner. She could easily hear me talking about the phone’s features that she taught me about a few hours before. If she was offended about that, she didn’t show. My class was “Ooh-ing” and “Ahh-ing” as I demonstrated.

  “Let’s say I don’t know who you are Christos, and I see you here on the street. I look at you through the phone’s screen, and there’s your public profile! You’re online, so I can see your profile pic, your status, whatever. Nothing private though, nothing like that.”

  That got another round of interest, and people turned to their own phones and googled for the minisite Hermes had made for showcasing the Veil.

  Yes, this was going to be a hit. I felt proud for my dad. It’s not like he was the only one making the thing, but it was nice that his company was looking forward to a mass-market success.

  The bell rang again, this time telling us to get our asses inside.

  We all ignored it of course. Except the nerd. Deppy went inside for class.

  A few minutes later, the teacher came outside and started herding us in.

  Chapter 10

  I was bored. Bored bored bored. Bort. Borrrrrrrrt.

  I was sitting at the back, of course. Only losers sit at the front.

  The teacher was scribbling some math on the board. I was supposed to know all of these three times already, but they looked like Chinese to me.

  Frontistirio was making us do-over the curriculum again and again, and had us give mock exams again and again until the SOS parts were drilled in our heads. SOS were the really important bits. We pronounced it like “sauce,” cause we are Greek and shit.

  I looked down.

  Oops too low
. I adjusted my blouse that was leaving too much skin exposed and sat up straight.

  I looked down again, at my book.

  It was nice and neat. Fluorescent markers had highlighted the SOS bits. With pink of course. Yellow was for the tricky stuff. Green for the ones I could safely ignore and delete from my memory.

  I was fighting an urge to check my phone. It had vibrated twice already. Or had it? I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I would think it vibrated but then I’d check and see nothing. I could almost hear Billy’s pretentious voice in my head, “it’s the phantom vibration syndrome, where the false belief that one’s…” and then I would shut him up. And he would say it with the tone of voice that implied we were addicts or something but he was somehow out of this world, more involved and natural.

  Even so, more importantly, this teacher had a hawk’s eye for texting. There was no way I’d risk getting my sparkly new pink phone confiscated by this malaka.

  I would endure.

  I looked around for moral support. Billy wasn’t doing frontistirio, he was reading by himself. We were classmates only in the morning, at school. Deppy was here with me, smiling at a boy two rows to the left. What was his name? John? Jed? Joe?

  No clue.

  See? This is where the veil is useful! Just pick it up and look through the screen. Boom. In-far-ma-shah.

  Must. Resist.

  I thought about actually trying to solve the math problem. That should take me a while. I began reading from the top. The teacher was already done with the solution, and had stood aside so we could copy it down.

  Did I mention he didn’t just let us take a picture and be done with it?

  The barbarity.

  I was writing down the problem-solution duo, flicking my head up the board, down the notepad, up, down, up, down, when a shadow waved in the corner of my eye and I froze.

  Purple Time

  She came through the teacher’s chest, like an ethereal projection, her eyes darting around the class, staring at people with hatred.

  My heart pumped blood at a thousand litres per second and my fingers electrified at the extreme dosage of adrenaline.

  I lowered my head and froze in place, my first instinct being to hide in the crowd. She arose from the teacher’s chest but her body was hazy, not fully there.

  Her eyes and her hands and her hair were there, moving as if on the surface of a strong current. She looked around and turned straight at me, letting me see the hatred in her purple eyes.

  She charged at me, pushing the teacher aside tearing his chest with her claws, rippling through the furniture and the people like an unstoppable sound wave.

  I pushed the desk aside and ran to the door. She was gaining on me, closing in, splinters flying. Three rows, Two rows. One row. I dodged and hit a classmate. I pulled him behind me, offering him as sacrifice to appease Erinyes. She wasted fractions of a second to rend him in half and extend her bloody claw at me.

  Her nails bit in my flesh and I screamed in pain. She tore most of my back but the pain gave me thrust and I ran, every step as if searing hot iron was lashing my body.

  I reached the door and swivelled with my hand towards the street, she hissed and brushed her hair at me, her hair like animated snakes, purple and with purpose, stinging my hand.

  I pulled my arm back and screamed from pain, new toxic pain as I ran to the bright light outside.

  Chapter 11

  I was hiding in a corner.

  Someone touched me and I flinched. I looked up.

  Deppy was looking at me with worried eyes. Our height difference made her look almost level at me even with me crouching down. I looked around, there was no sign of Erinyes.

  “What happened Mahi?” she asked me but I had nothing to reply.

  I walked back to the classroom and Deppy held my arm, as if to support me if I fell. I walked past my classmates, they were staring and whispering amongst themselves. I’d never been so ashamed in my life.

  I walked past them, a couple of boys tried to make some sort of tease but Deppy nipped that in the bud. I looked into the classroom.

  Other than my own desk, the one I had flipped over, everything else was where it should be. I expected to find a bloody battlefield inside, but it was just my stuff on the floor. I picked them up hastily and put them in my bag, which Deppy was holding open for me. I propped up the chair and the desk, and head low, I jogged out of there.

  Chapter 12

  “You didn’t see anything?”

  “Ohi, sorry, nothing,” Deppy replied and she was being honest.

  I pulled my legs close to my body. We were at her house, after conjuring up girl-troubles at her dad. He didn’t bother us at all and he left us the living room, finding some daily chore to attend to. Deppy’s dad was a stay-at-home father, working from a fancy computer setup with three monitors and expensive hardware and 24/7 graphs ticking away. Deppy had explained many times to me what it is he actually did, but I zoned out every time after ten acronyms. The only word I remember (because her dad used it like 6.2 times in a sentence) was heuristics. Whatever that was.

  Her parents had reversed their roles since Deppy was a baby, so he was the one that actually raised her. Her mother had a promising career and they had decided not to abandon it after Deppy was born. So her father gradually shifted his work and clients to a flexible schedule that he could attend to at home, and he was happy to do the house chores while the mother was out there in meetings and business suits. It was a complete reversal of Greek household values, where the mother was expected to stay at home and raise the kids, and it had attracted a lot of snide remarks from people addressing the father’s sexuality, or at the very least, the diameter of his balls.

  All I knew was that, after my dad, Deppy’s dad was the awesomest dad in the world.

  I welded my eyes to a painting across the living room, not daring to look my friend in the eye. The painting was from some fantasy RPG game, one that Deppy and her dad played together, and it depicted a busty woman with a big sword in an impossible pose. Seriously, her back would have to be liquid to perch her butt like that. Deppy had told me once that it was the original painting that was scanned for the game’s artwork, and was bought at an online auction. They loved geeky stuff like that.

  “But you do believe me,” I asked her when she came back in the room with hot chocolate for me. I kept my gaze on the sword.

  Deppy took a few seconds to reply. “I don’t think you are crazy, if that’s what you are asking…” she said, and grabbed my pink new phone. She had no boundaries at that sort of thing, and you just had to learn to accept it.

  She sat at her father’s workstation and plugged in my phone. The computer setup was intimidating to most people, and seemed important. Deppy knew of course what to do so as not to disturb her father’s work, so she logged in to her accounts and seemed to take up only two of the monitors, while the third one was showing stats and data as usual.

  She leaned back and the chair squealed audibly. “Okay, that’s actually something.” We were both looking at a zoomed image of my selfies, of the smudgy part that we had seen earlier and that I had printed back at home.

  The smudge was kinda-sorta-maybe facelike.

  Deppy started typing away and brought up the videos our stupid-ass classmates had just uploaded. Deppy winced and sucked in air. “Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t see those right now…”

  “Ohi, it’s fine. Pull them up,” I said.

  Due to the mobile ban at class, they weren’t as quick to draw as they would have in normal circumstances. The videos began after I had stormed out of the classroom, capturing a nice ear-piercing scream I’d let out. They had all managed to get my crouching in the corner in time, and in one Deppy was yelling at the boy and telling him to back off.

  I hadn’t noticed that.

  She had defended me.

  Deppy downloaded them all and focused on a trigger-happy girl’s video, who had began recording a few seconds earlier than all the others.r />
  As she was processing the video, I decided to block it all out for a while and focus on the sweet, warm chocolate. I closed my eyes and zoned out of the ambience of whirring computer fans and keyboard shortcuts.

  Several minutes passed.

  “W-T-F,” Deppy yelled in acronym and I jumped up startled and burned my finger.

  “What?”

  “This is trippy!”

  I went over her shoulder and looked at the monitor. Deppy had stabilised and looped a few frames at the beginning of the video, that had barely managed to record me leaving the classroom. It showed my hand on the door frame as I was swivelling. My body was hidden from the wall. A dark form was after me, clearly moving towards me in the few frames. Purple sparks were touching my fingers.

  My cup smashed on the floor and I made a mess.

  Chapter 13

  I am wearing my Hello Kitty dress. It is new and clean and I love it.

  George wants to go look for his bicycle. The road is wet and covered with dirt. We are alone in the house, mommy had to go to the hairdresser’s and left me to take care of my little brother. Daddy is at work.

  The flood is intense. Mommy called twenty times, I told her we are OK. She says she can’t drive back, says she’ll be late. It’s alright, I say, we’ll wait here.

  George is kicking and screaming. He is at the balcony, watching the brown waters rushing down the street. It stopped raining but it’s still cloudy and a little dark.

  I look at my new dress in the mirror and I love it.

  George comes to me and tells me he wants to go look for his bicycle. The water took it away. He could see it around the corner but now he can’t see it anymore. He is sure because it’s bright green and you can see it clearly so it’s safe.