“I’m going back to sit on the seat. All right?” He did not even nod. I said again “All right?” and then moved crabwise back up the hill, cautiously, watching him. He stayed where he was, and we remained like that for perhaps a minute. I lit a cigarette to try to counter the released adrenalin, and listened in vain for the sound of an engine down by the sea. Then, abruptly, the black figure came up towards me. He stood in front of me, blocking out the sky. The cigarette was snatched out of my mouth and flicked away. Then in the same movement I was jerked to my feet. I said, “Now wait a minute.” But he was strong and as quick as a leopard. Sweating a little. I could smell his sweat. An absolutely humorless face, and an angry one. It was no good, I was frightened—there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back. The edge of the seat cut into my legs and I fell half across it. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him trotting away, carrying his mask, through the trees to the north. I opened my mouth to shout something at him, then said it in a whisper. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, but it was filthy, defiled.

I went back to the gate and ran down the path to Moutsa. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea and rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.

Contracts… actresses… I was now asked to believe that they were hired to play their roles; not only that, but so in the dark about Conchis’s intentions that they didn’t even know whether I was not deceiving them exactly as they were deceiving me; trying to vamp Lily as Lily vamped me. But when I thought back to various inexplicable things Lily had said, to inconsistent looks, tentative looks, those out-of-role looks, and other doubtfulnesses beyond any she might have been acting, I began to wonder, to waver… I had long suspected that there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets… but how could they be his puppets when they knew so much about him? Or did they know so much about him?

And once again, did it matter?

As I swam out there, with the dark slope of Bourani across the quiet water to the east, I could feel in me a complex and compound excitement, in which Lily was the strongest but not the only element. I thought, I am Theseus in the maze; let it all come, even the black minotaur, so long as it comes; so long as I may reach the center.

I came ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house.

I woke feeling even more slugged, more beaten-steak—the heat does it in Greece—than usual. It was ten o'clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs. There was a note waiting for me on top of the muslin-mounded breakfast table under the colonnade.

DEAR NICHOLAS,

Alas, very urgent financial business connected with the “scare” of a fortnight ago obliges me to go at once to Geneva. I look forward to seeing you next Saturday, if you can dispose of your academic duties. Maria is leaving with me. She is taking advantage of my absence to visit relatives in Santorini. Hermes is returning to lock up the house this afternoon. Please enjoy your lunch, and accept my apologies for this unpardonable breach of hospitality.

MAURICE CONCHIS

I looked under the muslin. There was my breakfast. The spirit stove to heat up the coffee. A carafe of water, another of retsina; and under a second muslin an ample cold lunch. My first thought was that he had funked meeting me after the incident with his Negro thug; my second, that at least I could make some detective use of the occasion.

I carried the breakfast things round to Maria’s cottage, as if to put them out of harm’s way on her table, but the door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis’s door, then tried it. It was also locked. Second failure. Then I went round all the groundfloor rooms in the house, and pulled up all the carpets to see if there were trapdoors to mysterious cellars. There were not. Ten minutes later I gave up; I knew I was not going to find any clue to the girls’ true identity, and that was all that interested me.

I went down to the private beach—the boat was gone—and swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but jutting out from the coast just enough to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs. No way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area Lily and Rose supposedly headed for when they went “home.” There was dense low scrub on the abrupt-sloping clifftops before the pines started, just enough to hide in, but manifestly impossible to live in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.

A vein of colder water made me twist on my front again, and as I turned I saw. A girl in a pale pink dress was standing under the seawardest pines on top of the cliff, some hundred yards to the east of where I was; in shadow, but brilliantly, exuberantly conspicuous. She waved down and I waved back. She walked a few yards along the edge of the trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pink dress, and then, with an inner leap of exultation, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, some twenty yards apart, and the closer waved again. Then both disappeared back together into the trees.

Five minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, at the deserted Poseidon statue. I suffered a moment’s angry suspicion that I was being teased again—shown them only to lose them. But I went down the far side of the ravine, past the carob; and soon I could see their two pink figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of rock and earth, wearing identical summer dresses, loose-topped and longskirted, of some cottony material with thin pink and white, rose and lily, stripes. A glimpse of pale blue stockings. Rose stood as soon as she saw me coming and came idly and Edwardianly down the hummock and a little way towards me. She had her hair up, two curved wings that framed her face and ended in a chignon. I glanced at her wrist, though I was sure. It had no scar. And I glanced beyond her at the girl whose hair was down her back, as loose as on the Sunday morning a fortnight before; who looked so much younger, yet sat and unsmilingly watched us meet. Rose made a face; a modern face that denied her costume.

“Elle est fdchée.” She looked round. Lily had presented her back to us, as if in a pique. “I told her you said you didn’t care which of us you met this morning.”

“That was kind of you.”

She grinned. “Bored of me.”

“And what have you decided?”