DON TUMASONIS

Thrown
FRESH FROM AN EVENING of overindulgence on the island of Anafi some
years ago, Don Tumasonis awoke with a story in his head, and
immediately wrote it down.
Encouraged by fellow orgy survivors, to whom he shyly showed
the fragment, he realised that honour, power, riches, fame, and the
love of women were within his grasp. He acquired a Muse, as is
recommended, having already been provided with that sine non qua
of writers, a long-suffering wife. Two International Horror Guild
awards, a film option and a Hawthornden Fellowship soon followed.
He still awaits power and riches, but admits that three out of five is
not too bad.
His longish tale “The Swing” was recently published in the Ash-
Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead, edited by Barbara and
Christopher Roden. Other projects are in the works.
“Once, I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist,” Tumasonis
recalls. “I had, after all, got stinking drunk on cheap plonk with Sir
Edmund Leach, so I thought myself eminently qualified. Fired with
explorers’ tales, I fixated on northern Nepal. Months of struggle with
Tibetan put paid to that fantasy and, suddenly more realistic, I settled
for Crete.
“Field work in the glorious mountains of Sfakia produced little of
academic value. Penitent, I vowed to cross the Great Island by foot,
east to west. As may now be suspected, even that last project was
somehow thwarted short of completion. Not all was lost – the
narrative of ‘Thrown’ draws largely on events that occurred during
several legs of that journey.”
IT WAS STRANGE COUNTRY, cast into tumult by disaster.
Signs of this were everywhere, from the seaside city in the south
where they first stayed, to the northern village from whence they
would start their walk. Across the neck of the island, debris was
visible all over, through the dusty windows of their ageing Mercedes
bus, running late. The delay was a result of the massive flood of
several days past, with traffic still detoured around the washed-out
main highway bridge, to the old road a bit further inland.
When Martin and Marline had first come to Crete two days after
the deluge, quasi-urban Ierapetra was drying out from the
rampageous torrent that had wrecked its streets and invaded
buildings. The branch Agricultural Bank’s records and documents
were spread out on sidewalks and streets, stones and bricks neatly
pinning papers in place, the sun wrinkling and baking fibres. Nearby,
a flower-filled Roman sarcophagus doubling as a sidewalk planter
lent white Parian cachet to an adjacent telephone booth.
Floods came often enough on this island of canyons and gorges,
but this one had been a monster, by every local estimation. It was
the usual chain of events. Heavy autumn rains washed broken trees
and branches down a ravine, compacting with clay and gravel at a
pinched slot, forming a natural dam. Before anyone even knew, or
had time to react, millions of tons of water had built up, until the
sudden giving way, and catastrophic release.
A couple had been taken out to sea, drowned in their Volkswagen
beetle. Excepting these, and one old woman at an isolated farm,
there was no other loss of human life, amazing as that seemed in the
aftermath.
But the water, gaining speed, spewing like a jet from the mouth of
the deep cleft above the cultivated plain, took all else living with as it
ripped through the countryside, crashing to the sea in a few
calamitous minutes.
Some short hours after having checked into their room – the
cheapest they could find, with a bare concrete floor, the two followed
the lead of everyone else: they promenaded, taking in the chaos and
damage, trying to assimilate the monstrous extent of the wreckage
about them.
Crowds of foreigners from the large tourist complex near the shore
mingled with the local Greeks, walking east out of town. Hundreds,
clumped together in their scores, their pairs, were heading along the
beach, where the detritus of the flooding was spread. All were silent
and stunned, even two days after, and talked, if at all, in hushed
voices, in the descending light of the sun.
Past the hotels, a new river channel had torn through the shore
road, destroying it, and people waded across, past a parked
bulldozer there for the clean-up. On the other side, all over the long
broad beach, lay hundreds of animal corpses, wild and domestic.
Lizards rotted promiscuously with goats. Pathetic lambs, wool
matted and muddy, strewn broken amid snapped tree limbs. Snakes,
and above all, chickens, were everywhere, half-buried in the sand.
Let this their memorial be.
Back at their rundown hotel room, the couple made love. Rattled
by what they had seen, they drank to excess, and things ran wilder
than usual between them, married ten years.
Marline sat at an angle leaning forward, hands on Martin’s ankles,
facing his feet, as he lay on his back, in the reverse cowgirl,
pornographic industrial standard pose, provider of unobstructed
views. They had started prone, two layers, both face up, with her on
top. Disembodied hands stroked her, leaving her too open and
exposed, as if naked in public with some unspeakable object inside.
She slid upright and forward, into the unpremeditated position, a
natural extension of the first, really, looking upward as she rocked.
A single red light bulb, forming the sole illumination, bare, dangled
on its brown plastic wire from the ceiling, casting a garish glow
throughout the room. The double shutters were closed, and the
chamber, already damp from their showering, became even more so,
heating up.
The entire tawdriness of the situation inspired Marline to a totally
uncharacteristic frenzy. Replying in the dialogue of the flesh, Martin
grew enormous, larger than ever inside her, and imagined himself in
the cheapest of houses of prostitution, some bold and promiscuous
whore working him for all his money’s worth. The red light added to
the fantastic aspect, that of being in a Fellini film, or a Turkish camp
of ill-fame, where poor young widows, respectable and married the
one day, the next, with no one to protect them, are thrown headlong
into the wildest of debaucheries, with no escape.
Marline’s face was invisible as Martin clenched her smoothly
sculpted, heaving buttocks. Perfectly rounded, they were starting to
fleck with pigment from the hours in the Cretan sun, complementing
the rest of her freckled body, now writhing like a snake, as she and
he both gasped for breath. He held those nether spheres tightly from
behind, as it seemed otherwise she would rocket off him in her now
fierce motion.
Her short red hair was like a helmet, and under the crimson bulb,
dark. At the moment of ecstasy, she turned for the first time to face
him, from over her shoulder. Her sharp jaw was distended – like a
John dory, the thought came to him from nowhere – and her eyes
were wild. She was not looking at him. She saw beyond, to
something else. He could not recognise her again; this was the face
of an entirely different person: had he met this one in the street, he
would not know her.
The more he looked at her frenzied eyes, the more strange she
appeared, until he conceived her a demon, the devil itself, no
woman, no wife he knew. At their mutual orgasm, a chill of irrational
fright ran through him, but he closed his eyes, taking in air in huge
gulping heaves, uncaring.
Flush fading, consciousness revived, Martin saw Marline collapsed
forward across his legs. He was still inside her, the sticky wetness
draining down from his crotch and then his buttocks, turning cold on
the sheet beneath him. She rolled off, and resting on her side, eyes
closed, a smile across her mouth, murmured something about going
out again, a night-cap. Then she yawned.
“Napoleon slept here, did you know? Ierapetra’s ‘holy rock’ in
Greek,” he said.
Marline was already putting on her clothes.
Dropped off past the lines of delayed traffic still waiting to cross the
old narrow bridge, they had gone more or less straight up from the
sea, from the small settlement clinging to steep slope above coastal
highway.
At the upper end of the little hamlet, by the trailhead, they tipped
their heads back to see the inland range hanging above. It had been
his idea to go up it and explore its interior, part of a larger plan to
walk the island from east to west. This day’s march would link
together sections done previous seasons, thus completing eastern
Crete, an opportunity provided by doctor’s orders, after a second,
work-related breakdown.
Old women, bent nearly double and swathed in black, assured
them they were on the right way, no guarantee in itself, as Greeks
would rather die than admit to ignorance of any subject, no matter
how far removed from their normal competence. Enormous cliff
faces towered to the east; they had come down from there two years
back, an epic struggle to find a disappearing track.
Village noise was soon below them, growing ever more faint and
distant, replaced by the always present susurrant wind. The trail, an
old respectable Cretan path, wound steadily upwards in large or
smaller switches. After an hour’s trudge or more in the expanding
sunlight, they stopped on a shoulder, the site of some stronghold of
Minoan refugees, driven to the heights after their civilisation had
collapsed. While Marline put together a picnic, Martin puttered about
on the partially excavated ruins above.
There was not much more to see than dry stone walls, crumbling
remnants of some ’20s dig, German or Italian, he did not remember
what the guidebook said. The overwhelming vista looked north over
the Ægean, with Thera somewhere volcanically looming, invisible in
the slight haze, on the horizon distant before him.
Only one thing distinguished the fast decaying ruins from any
modern wreckage of local revolution: a flat, carved stone bowl, cut
into the living rock, like some small birdbath. Cracked in several
places, stains covered one side of the interior.
They ate, and before wrapping up after their little meal, Martin
looked out over the scene in front of them, and without preamble,
spoke out.
“You know, when I grew up in Rochester, I never felt comfortable
with the sky.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there was always something, something about it that never
felt quite right. D’you know what I mean?”
“Not really . . .”
“At first I thought it was the colour. Summers were warmer then, or
so it seems now. I’d lie back, on the grass of a lawn in July, and
stretch out, looking up at the sky. It would be cloudless, and the
heavens so deep when I concentrated, I felt I was plunging into
them.
“It was then I began to get a strange impression, that the vast
inverted bowl I was falling into was somehow wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused, and all was silent but for the wind. “I’m not quite sure
how to express it – alien, perhaps?” he continued.
“I thought perhaps it was just the flatness of hue the sky can attain
on a clear day in the middle of the year. But with the notion
established in my mind – I was only eleven or twelve the first time I
conceived it – or rather, made it articulate, since I later realised it
was a perception I had had all along, that I was only then putting into
words – I came to the conclusion that the feeling was more general.
“It could come upon me other seasons of the year, when the sky
had a different colour, under other conditions of time and
temperature. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.
“I developed the odd notion that I was born with an instinct of how
a proper sky should look, I mean, in the old days people seldom
moved from the districts where they were raised. Rooted in the soil,
they might just in some way become attuned, after generations, to
the look of a certain latitude and longitude, so that any variation in
colour of air or position of sun from that imprinted on their bones,
would somehow appear odd.”
He paused. “I mean, some animals have iron in their brains,
they’ve found out, onboard compasses that always point north, so . .
.” His voice trailed off, and they were silent for a lingering moment.
 “You’ve never mentioned that before. If you want to know,” she
said with a slight smile, “I think it’s all a load of rubbish.” She flicked
out playfully with her foot at his leg, as they sat.
He smiled back weakly, and continued: “I began to think so too,
especially after I got older, and started travelling about, first locally,
then, around the Continent, and further. I suppose I was always, at
some unconscious level, thinking that if I found the right spot, the sky
would brighten, things would look up, and all would be right in God’s
world.”
She gave him a friendly smirk, hearing that, but he did not react.
“Y’know, at one point the whole idea came back to me, and I
started to think, what if we really came from somewhere else, even
from off the planet? A spaceship crashes here eons ago, seeds the
place with its offspring – it would explain our exceptional place in the
world.”
“But DNA.”
“Right you are, dead on. Common kinship. Once the implications
of that discovery had percolated through my thick skull, I abandoned
the idea. We’re here where we began, all right.”
They set about packing the remains of their picnic lunch; he
wrapped the water bottle in towelling to keep it cool, while she
cleaned the knife and stowed the food in her sack. Gear ready, they
hoisted their packs, and stood a moment in the boiling sun, adjusting
their straps and buckles.
Martin rested on his walking stick, a katsouni, store-bought, but
being made of rare local wood, some protected dwarf elm that grew
here and there in the high mountains, a great conversation starter in
the rural districts.
“It has to do with a feeling, more than anything else, a feeling of
not belonging here at all. As if . . .”
“What?”
“As if I were some kind of object, something hurled here
unwittingly, against its will, like that German philosopher used to
claim. To a place not my true home.”
“Oh.”
 Martin did not dare mention or even hint at the experience of the
night before – that, during their making love, alienation had triggered
this memory of an old idea, up to now all but half-forgotten.
They started up the hill.

They reached, an hour or two later, the upper verge of the cliff, a flat
ridge separating two peaks. Stalky anisette plants, tall invaders from
another dimension, stood all around. Martin and Marline stopped to
rest and admire the tremendous view before them.
The sea was far below; ahead lay a vast bowl, surrounded by bare
and rugged peaks. The depression was partly cultivated, and they
could see a few tiny dark-clad figures taking in the harvest, and few
more working the vines. A dirt track threaded through it.
Martin gave Marline a hug, spontaneously, and it felt like he was
hugging the air.

The trail descended into the sere arena below, desiccate but for the
few irrigated plots chequering its innermost concavities. Small lizards
scurried off the path. Marline and Martin headed down, pointing
themselves towards the biggest of the summer houses, a massive
white-washed affair with a shaded porch.
There were huge rust-coloured plastic barrels with black lids in the
shadows; commonly used for storing wine, these gave promise of a
kafenion. This hope was bolstered by a few rucksacks, obviously
alien, resting above the steps, the bright colours an evidence of
foreign wanderers or customers nearby. A peasant woman, middle-
aged, in black with a grubby grey apron, walked out from inside, her
cheap plastic flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor of the
patio. She smiled pleasantly, shaking her head from side to side, the
Balkan gesture of query. A trace of concern was in her eyes.
“Xeni. Katse, katse,” she insisted.
Thus invited, the couple seated themselves on a couple of
rundown chairs with worn-through wicker seats.
“Nero thelete?”
Martin nodded, and the woman shuffled off to get water, and
glasses. While she was inside, Martin looked at the nearby packs
leaning on a pillar, and recognised a German marque.
The woman came out again, bearing a tray loaded with pumpkin
seeds and shelled hazelnuts, a few garishly wrapped boiled sweets
mixed in. Two glasses filled with water completed the ensemble.
They were careful to toast the woman’s health in Greek, before
swallowing the cool water. There followed the inevitable questions:
Where do you come from? What work do you do? Why are you
here? Have you any children? followed by clucks of sympathy at the
answer “none”.
It was a formula, probably being repeated dozens of times that
same moment across the island, wherever tourists and Greeks were
meeting for the first time. Were a man the interrogator, topics would
have drifted over to money earned, and yearly wages. A delicate
little probing, performed with overt politeness, with always the
undercurrent of gaining information, reaping some advantage; the
pull, the tug, with little exception always towards: how is this one
useful to me?
Her questions tapered off once it was established that the couple
were ordinary people doing the familiar if incomprehensible act of
travel for its own sake. Martin then took his opportunity, with his
kitchen Greek.
No, there was no kafenion. No place to overnight. The mountain
over there was Effendis Christos. The people here were all from the
village below, and were up to tend their summer gardens and trees;
they would go down in the evening. Yes, there were other strangers
here, Germans, up on the mountain.
Marline, with better eyes, saw them first. A red spot, a yellow, and
two blues – chemical colours of the jackets or jerseys, up near the
summit, stretched out along a fairly vertiginous route.
They’ve been up there all day, the woman said.
At which point, as if to confirm her statement, the sounds of a
distant yodel echoed from far up the hill. Fun, up on the rocks, Martin
thought.
At length, having questioned the woman about the track to the
next village, the two set off again, early evening approaching. They
went uphill through the dry landscape, east, sun to their backs, up a
low pass, then up to another and finally a third, the watershed. No
one had been by, and the enveloping silence was profound.
They could see down, back to the brink crossed hours before, at
the foot of the northern massif. On either side of the dusty way
where they stood, two ranges, here close, ran parallel. To the right,
the flat ridgeline of Effendis now sat low, a hundred metres above
them. The road had climbed up almost level with the long spine of
the peak; it would be an easy walk to the top from here.
Like a shadow-show, Martin thought, and he felt somehow
cheated realising that what was so difficult from the one side, could
be done so easily from the other. This brought to mind the automata
of Descartes, gliding down the streets in cavalier cloaks hiding
clockwork, indistinguishable from passersby.
“They are the passersby,” Martin said aloud.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, just a thought about the mountain.”
Marline laughed, her voice echoing with a strange tinny tone.
“Effendis Christos – Jesus! They’re probably all Turks here!” she
giggled.
“She didn’t even know the word is from her neighbours to the east,
or is it maybe cousins?”
Still laughing, Marline suggested setting up camp. If they went on
down a few minutes more, they could still see both ways, but would
be shielded from the eyes of any loitering villagers behind them. The
deep empty valley, next morning’s walk, opened out long ahead
before turning right; beyond, they could see a fair stretch of the south
coast.
Going a few metres off the rutted track that now ran over patches
of bare rock, they unfurled their sleeping mats and bags. Cooking up
a brew on a small gas stove, they drank it with bread and cheese,
sitting wordlessly on the inflated cushions.
The view was extraordinarily clear, with every object sharp and
definite in the limpid air. Objects that must have been miles off
seemed close enough to touch. Shadows were being magnified and
thrown vast distances. Clarity imagined, but seldom seen.
 Martin felt a gnawing unease, but unable to find words to express
it, remained silent.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just – I can’t say it.”
Another long pause, and then Martin said, “It’s really nothing,” and
felt his eyes for no reason suddenly fill with tears. Standing up
quickly, so Marline would not see, he turned to face the way they had
come.
“I’m going up back a little bit,” he said to her. “I just want to see
how long the shadows actually are.” She did not reply, so he began
to slowly move through the low bushes, sole cover to the treeless
earth, through the infinite symphonic tones of yellows and browns
and black-greens that reeked of spice and animal excreta. The sky
was absolutely cloudless.
Some paces uphill, back on the unmetalled track, he turned to
look. The north slopes of Effendis to the right were now in shadow,
but every object in the imperfect dark was still visible. He could
almost hear the rocks, dusty purple in the shade, crack as they
started to cool from the day’s impartible heat.
The rest of the hills, ahead and to the left, and the valley between,
were filled with light that tore the heart, obsidian sharp, crystalline,
clear. Marline, small and distant below, had packed the few pieces of
mess gear, and was now smoking a cigarette, seated arms around
her knees, looking the same direction as Martin, setting sun to their
backs.
And then he saw the shadow, his own. At first he was not sure,
until he moved, and the shadow moved with him. It was enormous,
occluding acres of hillside below the horizon up to the valley’s end,
beyond, miles away. He felt dizzy, and to steady himself, turned
round and stumbled further up, hugging himself with his arms,
gulping great breaths, gasping after air.
Coming to a halt, he slowly turned again.
His shadow, since he was higher, had of course moved upward
with him. In the flat light, it was now taller than the lofty ridgeline of
the farthest range, and covered a reasonably large part of the sky
above, darkening the air, which still remained transparent.
 Stunned, Martin slowly lifted an arm, and its umbra eclipsed the
blue, almost to the zenith.
He began to hyperventilate sharply, and with vertigo and nausea
washing over him, panic took hold. He ran down to his wife,
stumbling once, falling, cutting open a pant leg at the knee, so he
bled, but paid no heed.
She was waiting, with her arms stretched wide, waiting to catch
him, to enfold him. He wept, eyes closed, as she held him, crooning,
soothing her lost child.
“Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong, you’re here, with me, there
now . . .” she said.
“But you saw it, didn’t you?” he repeated over and over again,
without her any reply, only the soft caress. Eventually, shaking still,
he left her embrace, and stood up.
The shadows were gone now, the sun down at last behind them.
At the spot where the world had turned to the dimensions of a shoe
box minutes before, the sky was evenly shaded.
It must be my eyes, he thought, the macular degeneration, those
spots that float across. He saw one now, thread-like in the air before
him, and blinked to make it go away. When he opened his eyes, the
hanging string, like a piece of thick shimmering cord, was larger,
wriggling in front of him, a dark blue transparent plastic worm
vibrating at an impossible rate. He blinked furiously; with each blink,
the writhing blue rope gained in definition, and his breathing stopped.
Speechless, mouth hanging open in supplication, he looked back
at Marline. But it was no longer her, but the grinning thrust-jawed
demon of the night before who looked back at him. Teeth gleaming,
this creature shook her head in quick small jerks from side to side,
like someone palsied, and small, brilliant blade-like rays of green and
blue outlined her silhouette, streaming off her.
Despairing, Martin turned round a last time, and faced the now
motionless protuberance. Its hue, he noted on the abstract,
complemented, but did not match, that of the air. He heard Yes, yes,
come from behind him, but he did not know whose voice.
Reaching out, using his nails, he worried the limp thing loose,
except for one solidly emplaced end, embedded in the air.
 With a firm grip and a single wrap around his fist, using great
force, he jerked the cool and wet object straight down, ripping open –
to the applause of his wife behind him, with the satisfying roar of torn
canvas and rock-broken waves in his ears – the mountains to their
root, and the sky, the traitor sky he always knew was wrong.