“Tliat’s right,” she said, “it was Mykonos. And this is going to sound strange and terribly female I’m afraid but I think I can even pin the day down. It was our third or fourth time together. I felt something happening then and there, the pill be damned. Do you think that’s possible?”
He laughed. “With you anything’s possible.”
“Are you okay with this, Robert? Really okay? It’s not too late.”
“I’m more than okay. I’m delighted for godsakes. We can do this. Film rights to
The Killing Season
, remember? And my agent’s got two houses interested in the book. My dry spell’s over. Hell, you’re selling your stuff too. I think we can do this fine. We quit at one, though, okay?”
“Two maybe? A little down the road?”
"Two maybe. Are you ready to be a working mother?”
“Are you?”
He laughed. “Sure. I think so. Why not?”
***
He stopped her and turned her toward him and drew her into his arms and kissed her.
And it was true,
he thought. He’d be home as much as she would. Writing with a kid in the house?
Absolutely.
And he could almost pin down the day himself then. If she said it was their third or fourth time together then he knew exactly when it was, it had to be, they’d never been closer or more tender. It was the time she’d cried and asked him not to leave her, and they were already afraid by then-they didn’t know why or of what but it was already upon them and he’d promised her he wouldn’t and thought how far and fast they’d come together, and he’d said, But what if you leave me? He remembered her answer. Dodgson, you should live so long.
A breeze ruffled her hair.
The thought came to him unbidden. At first he considered it pretty damn strange-and then he didn’t. Because back there on the mountain Lelia had lifted up her child to him.
And perhaps it wasn’t a curse. Perhaps it was just a knowing of the way of things. The wheel turning.
He thought,
I have Billie now.
All this promise.
***
At the top of the hill they paid their admission and walked further, stopped to gaze down at the Theatre of Dionysos far below and then walked the stone steps to the Propylaea. She looked up at the huge Doric columns just ahead, the rich golden light on white marble set against a perfect clear blue sky and gasped.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “My god.”
He laughed. “Jesus Christ had nothing to do with any of this. And you haven’t seen anything yet, believe me.”
He felt uncommonly excited, even exalted being here. And exalted was right, it was exactly the right word and not overstating it a bit. He almost wanted to run the long wide steps, not walk them. But he took his time, savoring this, felt her savoring it beside him maybe even more than he was-was almost able to imagine seeing it through her eyes, an artist’s eyes. Mahtiamu, he thought. It meant you are my eyes. The eyes through which I view the world.
Without the tourist mob it was magnificent. They walked alone hand in hand in silence and a gentle wind.
***
At the top they turned and there it was, revealed to them all at once, all these structures laid out ahead of them across the broad central plateau. The elegant temple of Athena Nike, the Erechtheum with its delicate Porch of the Maidens. And to the right, the Parthenon-the temple Pericles had commissioned to give the Athenians “eternal honor.”
And it did. Massive and still, huge in scale and human to the cone. Glowing with a honey-colored light, the sky above it the bluest of blues just over its roof as though the gods had conspired to crown it with vivid color. The shadows in the columns’ pliths and fluting cut sharp as razors.
He looked at her and saw that she had begun to cry.
“All my life,” she whispered, “since I was just a little girl, I’ve been looking at pictures of this. Pictures…just…photos. But this…do you feel it? Do you feel it, Dodgson?”
“Yes. I do.”
He had never known such a sudden force of peace. Such a sense of standing at the massive heel of dignity, of harmony and beauty. He was astonished.
He felt new.
Chase, he thought, is this what it feels like? Something like this?
“Look at us!” she laughed. “We’re like a couple of kids! You’re crying! You too, Dodgson! You’re crying too.”
And he had no idea if it was seeing her face awash with happiness or his own joys lost and found or both together but it was true.
This is Greece,
he thought.
I was wrong. I was a goddamn fool.
Not beaches and tavernas and cafes. But this moment, this place, tins huge spirit still abroad here. The ancient world still gracing and informing the new with its calm heroic vision of what at its best the human soul can do.
They wandered in silence. In a little while they sat and Dodgson watched her as she began to draw. All the light and shadows.
AFTERWORD
She Wakes
had a rough time getting out of bed.
Written between 1983 and ’84 on my trusty IBM Selectric typer, it was my fourth novel and my first crack at the supernatural. I did not have a wonderful batting average at the moment.
Off Season
had sold well despite its publishers’ attempts to disown it. But
Ladies' Night
hadn’t sold at all and
Hide and Seek
had been flushed down the 40,000-copy-print-run toilet.
I was looking, I think, for a Stephen King book.
It didn’t happen.
She Wakes
would sink my batting average to an even 500 and damn near empty my bank account.
I had been to Greece twice by then for a total of about five months and had actually felt the immense lingering power of places like Mykene and Delos. In fact with the exception of the psychic “summons,” the experiences Chase has in the Treasury of Atraeus were very nearly my own. I’d had other experiences, equally powerful, which in order to keep the story rolling I had to leave out. But the point is I’d had the feeling of the place in spades.
I’d also felt the easy, languorous siren-song of the islands, which so much appeals to Dodgson.
The first time I traveled there I expected to stay in Greece a month.
I stayed four.
And had the money not run out could easily have made it longer.
It was that mix of the intensely spiritual and purely physical that made me think that Greece would be a perfect place to set a supernatural novel. To date I hadn’t seen it done since
The Odyssey
. I could slip in all the good old sex and violence and still point to something bigger-something which, for rife, was actually there.
In the six years that elapsed between the time I first flew over in ’77 to my second trip in ’83 the country had changed-and not for the better. The tourists were still flocking there but they weren’t spending money the way they used to. Things did always seem to need a paint job. The old ways were slipping. The mopeds were roaring. Terrorists did walk into the Athens airport and start blasting away. Greece was trying to find her way toward the ass-end of the twentieth century and, to my way of thinking, making a mess of it. And that’s what gave me my theme. Regeneration, renewal. A kind of prayer for a country I had come to love.
I’d done my homework previous to the first trip so I knew about the tripartite figure of Selene/Artemis/Hecate. I’d also met and had a brief affair with a very strange bigger-than-life Irish girl my first time in Matala. I’d written about her in a story called “The Liar,” published years before in Swank magazine. So I also had my villainess. I figured I was off and running.
The original title for the book was going to be The Huntress and it took me about eight months to write it.
And another four years to sell it.
My agent tried, god knows. Sent it out to hardcover houses and softcover houses, big houses and little houses.
Nobody bit.
The rejection letters told the story. First, my timing was rotten. The bottom had just dropped out of the market for supernatural fiction as it does periodically and unless you were King or Straub or Saul or Koontz, forget it. Then, it seems I’d made a bad mistake with one of my characters. Those of you who’ve read the Berkley edition as well as this one have probably noticed that in this new version Eduardo is gay. Well, this new version is also a restored version. Because that’s who he was originally. The guy I modeled him on was, so I figured why not? But a gay man as a secondary lead in a supernatural thriller?
What are you, nuts?
Women read this stuff.
So for the last couple of submissions I finally gave in to the pressure. I rewrote him, sorry to say. The real Eduardo is dead now, hit by a car in Athens and never did get to see what I’d done to him. I apologize anyway.
But anything to get the book out there. Anything.
Didn’t work. No go. 500 ain’t shabby for a batter but it sure is for a novelist.
First
Ladies’ Night
and now this.
I was depressed as all hell.
More so when I read T. E. D. Klein’s wonderful book
The Ceremonies
-which came out in ’84, and had a pretty similar ending.
I wrote to Robert Bloch, who had been my friend, confidant, personal wiseman and mentor since I was a teenage kid and told him so. He told me not to worry-hell, it had happened to him-that what I should do is put it in a cardboard box in the closet and pull it out again in a couple of years or so when the market tips upward again.
As in most things Bob chose to speak on he was right.
I went on and wrote
Cover
, which sold, thank god. To Warner Books.
Then my mother fell very ill and died in January of ’87 and between that and some tumult of a male-female nature, for a while there I didn’t have a whole lot of heart for writing. But
ya gotta eat
and
ya gotta slog along
. So I pulled out
The Huntress
and tinkered with it some more, cutting the long slow monologue of Chase’s just before the shit hits the fan, among other things-which eventually became the story “Winter Child”-and put it away again when I got the idea for
The Girl Next Door
.
Warner Books promised much. They promised hardcover, even. But when they dropped the ball on
Cover
and then drove it twelve feet into the ground on
The Girl Next Door
my agent and I went shopping and what we shopped was
The Huntress
. The market had turned again, just as Bob said it would. Berkley picked it up and gave me my first really good cover art ever. Even if they did want to change the book’s name to something scarier. What the hell. I came up with a new one.
Finally, in 1989,
She Wakes
opened her eyes to the world.
Even if the world didn’t exactly open its eyes to her.
Like
Hide and Seek, Cover
, and
The Girl Next Door
before her, my Greek book sank without a trace.
Well, maybe a ripple of a trace. Because you’re reading this, aren’t you.
She Wakes
was my fourth book written and my fifth book published. I was only into my fourth year as a novelist and it shows. There are some awful lines in this book and for the most part I’ve left them that way, the same warts-and-all approach I took to the rewrite of
Ladies ’Night
. But I’d always wanted to do a rewrite on this one-the only book I really did want to rewrite almost from the beginning-largely because I was never satisfied with what I considered the flat, pat feeling to the epilogue.
When I got the chance and the check I jumped at it.
I went back to Greece for a month in April this year for the first time in sixteen years and took the book along with me. While I was there I realized that for one thing, I’d gotten some facts wrong in the original. That’s Dionysos riding the panther, dummy, not Apollo. And he’s riding a panther, not a goddamn lion. That sort of thing. So I’ve changed them. I also added and subtracted a line here and there. I don’t let editors punctuate me the way I used to so I’ve removed all those pesky colons and semicolons.
But most importantly, I found out what was wrong with the ending.
Why it bothered me so.
I found out as soon as I got there.
Because the first day I got there I climbed the hill to the Acropolis and there was the Parthenon on that glorious bright spring day and I said to myself, you nitwit! You set a whole damn book in Greece, in this wonderful country, and then in the very last chapter you move the thing to Paris? Huh? Paris? What was wrong with you? What were you thinking?
There’s no regeneration in Paris. Maybe for somebody there is, I guess, though I can’t think who at the moment but not for you at least.
The regeneration for you is here, standing right on this mountain.
After sixteen years.
Bathed in ancient light.
So that was how I wrote it.
-Jack Ketchum
August 2001