The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories

MARETA By John D. Keefauver

Of course, I didn't know Mareta had killed him until a few days ago. But her admission of murder was negligible — nothing — compared to what I found in her bedroom closet the day after.

I shouldn't have gone into the closet, I know; it was dangerous. As soon as I saw the two bottles and the photographs, I should have left the room — left the house, fled. With the knowledge they gave me, it was suicidal to remain near her. That was her plan, I realise now: to let me discover her secret, then destroy me. But I had had no time to think; I had time only to act, and she had forced me to that.

Now, too late, I realise that she had left the bedroom door unlocked purposely. Curious, I had gone in. Oh God, if only I had kept out of the place! If your child sucks blood, isn't it better not to discover it? If your wife gives birth to a monster, wouldn't it be better never to know? Now… I am drained.

Drained, like her bottles. Her drinking; I never realised to what an extent it had gone. Drunk, she had told me how she murdered Victor, her second husband, her voice puffed with pride and hate and. and, yes, power. Power! Mareta bragged of what she had done, and she felt power even in the telling of it. Later, I understood something else: by her talk of murder she was purposely planting fear in me. She succeeded.

It had been his eyes, she had told me, smiling drunkenly, ironically. Victor's eyes. I knew about them; after all, I had been there that night she had killed him, although at that time I, along with everybody else, thought it had been an accident. I had heard the story of Victor's eyes for months after his death. Eyes. I can 'see' them now. Bound for the island of

Hydra in the Aegean Sea, I was on a boat out of Athens when I met Victor and Mar eta. By chance we were standing side by side next to the railing, both gazing at the first island stop of the daily milk-run boat. Toothpaste-white houses, glittering in summer sun, marched irregularly down to the sea from island mountains. Impressive; but when I turned toward Victor to comment casually on the sight, I saw for the first time his eyes and they wiped out the picture of the storybook houses — forever.

They battered me, these eyes; they hurt. They were pain; they were fear. They were lost; they had been beaten. They were a hungry child.

Sweat, yes. They looked as if they were sweating — too wet, too oily. They glistened with fear, shone with fright.

Mareta, his wife then, had been standing beside him, of course — brilliant in a wind-whipped dress, hair dancing. Even then I felt her power — poised, sharp, penetrating, hard, like a knife. I felt her in my pores. She was small, almost dainty, standing next to her dark-skinned and bulky husband. Yet, even from the beginning I had the feeling, though vaguely, that he and his eyes made up a puppet, and that his wife, Mareta, deftly handled the strings — and that now she was tired, her fingers bored.

By the time we reached Hydra at noon, we had become acquainted enough to have lunch together. Talk came easily. I learned that they too planned on spending a few days on the island of some 3,000 souls, mostly fishermen, the rest tourists and artists, and that Victor, born in Greece, had moved to the United States as a child and was now visiting his parents in Athens. It turned out that the three of us were from the Los Angeles area, where he was in the wholesale fruit business and I taught high school. He told me he had been married to Mareta less than a year. And it was her second marriage, too, I learned; her first husband had drowned, she said. She was years younger than Victor.

In the beginning no one suspected, least of all I, that she was a killer. She did it that first night in quiet, sleeping Hydra, did it efficiently, effortlessly, and with pride. How she smiled in drunken humour months later — just a few days ago now — when she told me how simple it all had been. How easy. How stupid of him.

She had talked Victor into accompanying her on a midnight swim — she did such things with great charm. He did not swim himself, and now I realise that that was one of the reasons she married him — perhaps the most important reason. Did he suspect her? As I look back over my own relationship with Mareta, how I grew to suspect her, I think it possible that Victor did too. But after living with her almost a year, perhaps he wanted to die. Never mind — he died, and was I to be next?

They left their hotel — where I had a room too — and walked arm and arm (she underlined this point with a chuckle) out of the village proper, up a path along a nearby mountain side. She knew exactly where she was going. Years before she had visited Hydra with her parents; she had gone swimming with them in water beneath a lip of stone that jutted out from mountain rock some twenty feet above the sea. In the lip, out from the mountain enough to be over water, was a large hole. She had remembered the hole, how it would not be seen on a moonless night, how death could easily come there — either by falling on the sharp rocks in the shallow water or by drowning, or by both.

It was clever of her, she admitted. Clever that she arranged their trip to the island on a moonless night without Victor realising what she was doing. Clever that that same afternoon she had visited the spot alone, measuring her strides from a point on the path to the hole, measuring the distance carefully, so that that night she knew exactly where to stop and give Victor a push over the edge of the hole. He had given one short anguished yell as he dropped; she had heard his body splash into the water… 'a delightful sound.'

She'd waited. Victor did not come to the surface. Then, an excellent swimmer, she had dived in after him, ostensibly to help him, actually to see if he were dead, she told me. He lay on rocks beneath shallow water; he made no living move. She pushed his body into deeper water, she said, then rushed back to the hotel, screaming in wifely agony.

This I knew; for I had been awakened that night by the commotion caused by her announcement that her husband had fallen into the sea. I joined the fishermen and tourists and the village men of the law at the hole in the lip. I watched as they searched for his body. Currents had carried it out to sea. It wasn't found for days, days that I stayed with Mareta, comforting her in my innocence, listening to her talk of Victor, how her love for him had been so strong at first, how it had turned slowly into fear, fear of his eyes. Fear, as she had had of her first husband's eyes, the one before Victor, the one who had also drowned. Neither husband could swim, but it was only a few days ago that I suspected that she had deliberately picked husbands who could not swim. I cannot swim myself, and I became her third husband. And it was only days ago too that she told me that even if Victor had not drowned from the fall, even if he had accused her of attempted murder — it was of no matter; she was the power and the glory and no man and no law could touch her.

Mareta and I had gone out together each day to watch the search for Victor's body. We were on the shore the fourth day, the day his body washed out of the sea. One bystander had vomited, another had stumbled away. I myself cringed in horror at the sight of Victor's eyes — and at the sight of Mareta's when they laid the body out and she was asked, after much hesitation, to identify the body. I saw her expression. My God! how I wish I had not. I still 'see' it — more vividly now, even in my present condition. At the time I didn't believe what I saw; I thought my own eyes deceived me. So gruesome, so terrible, that flick, barely perceptible, of happiness on Mareta's face when she saw that both of Victor's eyes had been ripped from his head.

A fish, some monster of the sea, had ripped out Victor's eyes, was the consensus of Hydra fishermen and the law of the island. Some fish with a diabolical mind, they agreed. (Of course, there were cuts and slashes over most of his body, and his clothes were torn in many places.) Yes, the fishermen said, there were fish that could chew out a man's eyes. Perhaps there was a sweetness of a man's eyes that a fish liked. Perhaps they, the fishermen, should protect their own eyes every time they went into the sea. It was something to think much about.

The village shuddered at the tragedy; it was on the front page of the Athens newspapers. And when Victor was buried in the city, a stillness like the Parthenon in moonlight lay like a knot in my heart. I think my memory of Mareta's smile at Victor's eyeless face was poisoning me even then, but I didn't know it. I translated the emotion into love, pity.

Fear. It was to come later, sharp as a knife, after Mareta and I were married. She went back to Southern California after Victor's funeral, and I did too, though later and by a different route. I travelled through Europe for the summer, and by the time I got back to the Los Angeles area she had been there long enough, it appeared, to have forgotten Victor and their marriage. She had rid her home along the coast south of the city of all evidence of him. She had wiped him out, and within a week we were lovers, within a month we were married.

Looking back, seeking a reason why she married me, I can only come to the conclusion that it was mainly because I liked the water — sailing in her Mercury, lying on the beach beside her pool — but did not know how to swim. I had little money, but that was no problem: all her men — her father, her first husband, and Victor — had given her or left her money. My salary as a teacher was hardly needed. Of course, at first I thought she loved me. It did not take me long to find out how bitterly wrong I was.

And why did I marry her? I wonder myself, looking back on the marriage of only months ago. I am perplexed. I think it was because some of her — enough — rubbed off on me on the island of Hydra; her seed grew in me, like a cancer as it turned out. She came through my pores, growing all the time. She had a dazzling quality about her, a goddess power that said, I I admit you, you are very fortunate indeed.' She admitted me, and I plunged in. And her body. It was golden and sinewy, rich with curves and hunger; it fed on me. Our love-making was frenzied, almost combat. But as I look back, I see now that there was no love in her or her body; only hunger; it — she — took and never gave. And when her appetite was appeased, she shoved me away. Within months she was tired of me. And soon fear came.

Fear. First it was disguised, like an itch in the soul; puzzling, like a stare from a stranger you feel you know — like the stare of Mareta that I came to know. Eerie, frightening, powerful, this stare of hers; it thrust itself at me, into me, exploring, prying. It was a power, a* weapon — and I began to better understand why I had married her. Power. She was power. Power attracts. And power destroys.

One afternoon beside the pool I became conscious of her stare to such an extent that I knew it was the focus point of my growing fear. I remember how sun glistened on her golden body and on an opened penknife she held in her hand; she had been peeling an apple. She was lying naked — we never wore suits at the enclosed pool — her head toward me. I was sitting in a beach chair beside her when sun caught the knife blade and a blinding ray hit my eyes. I brought my hand up quickly to shield my face, and she lowered the knife. She knew what she had done. She had done it purposely, I realised later. Then I felt the full impact of her stare; it hit me harder than the sun ray had. It came shooting from behind the knife blade, slashing my eyes. Then I saw too the flash of her smile, so quick that at that time I wasn't sure she had smiled. Later I realised that her smile was the same as the one she had let flick through her expression the day they brought Victor's eyeless body from the sea.

That night I could not sleep. Lying beside Mareta, I thought I felt her stare upon my face. But it was dark in the room; the mind plays tricks. I shrugged off the feeling and finally slept. Later I awoke and felt her fingers slowly, carefully, lightly, exploring my eyes. 'Yes?' I said. Immediately, silently, she withdrew her fingers. All I could hear was her breathing — fast, excited, as if we were making love.

From that day on she seemed to have her knife with her almost all the time. At the pool she used it to peel fruit, in the kitchen to cut vegetables. At night I saw it by our bed, on the bedstand beside her head, the blade always showing. She kept it razor sharp. It was very small, expensive, with a black ivory covering. It had only one blade, which she kept polished. She did not want me to handle the knife. I held it only once. She had left it, forgotten, on the bedstand once when she went into the bathroom; I picked it up. On either side of the blade, worn with age, were carvings of very delicate, probing, powerful eyes.

'Why do you use such a fine knife to peel vegetables?' I asked later.

'A knife should be used,' she said. And again I saw the flick of her ironic, secret smile. 'That's what my first husband said when he gave it to me.'

Fear. We were out in her Mercury one afternoon, a day in which heat waves shimmered like fire off the ocean. The wind had died, and although I could not swim I lowered myself over the side of the boat into the cooling water. Holding tightly onto the gunwale, I dipped my head into the ocean. When I looked up, Mareta was staring down at me, her secret smile escaping her face (too late; I saw!) her open knife near my fingers on the gunwale. When my face tilted toward hers, she lowered the knife quickly — too quickly? 'I thought I saw a shark,' she said.

She began to drink heavily, retreating each day from me into a world of alcohol and silence. I'd come home from work and find her in the bedroom, the door locked, no preparations made for dinner. More and more she kept her bedroom door locked all night, forcing me to sleep in a spare bedroom; and the nights we did sleep together she would not let me touch her and I awoke feeling her stare or her fingers on my eyes. She refused to explain her behaviour; she would not answer my questions.

'What is wrong? What have I done? Why afe you acting like this?'

She would only smile.

And when I persisted in my attempt to question her, she — never saying a word — moved out of our bedroom. I came home one evening and I could not find her. I searched the house. She had disappeared. Her car was in the garage. Thinking she was at the beach, I walked to the area where we frequently used to go. She was not there. When I got back to the house, she was in the kitchen preparing dinner, using her knife. She was drunk.

'Where have you been?'

She only smiled.

Often when I came home from work I could not find her in the house. Later, though, she would come down from upstairs, an upstairs I had just searched — including all bedrooms — without finding her. She refused to explain her whereabouts, to even talk, and I soon stopped asking her. I stopped looking for her in the house when I came home after work. I was very tired of it all — and afraid.

But one evening — just a few days ago now — she did not come down from her upstairs hiding place until after I had fixed my own dinner and read the paper. I was watching television, my back to the living room door, when I felt her hand on my neck, a warm caressing touch, like softened butter. I turned. She was naked.

She came around in front of me, blotting out the TV picture, swaying slightly; she had been drinking. Faint light behind me glazed her face; her ironic smile glittered in shadowy mirth. She stepped toward me, her arms came out. Her body touched me, I turned my face.

'What do you want?'

'Let's go out to the pool,' she said.

'No.'

'Take off your clothes, we'll go in together.'

'I'm going to bed.'

I stood up. She spread herself against me, like warm icing on a cake. Her arms twined around me. Her lips spread for my kiss.

'Now,' she said. 'At the pool.' I felt her thrust.

I pushed away.

She kept her smile, but it hardened angrily. Spinning, she glided — she walks with the stealth of a cat — out the door toward the swimming pool. I went to the window and watched her stoop at the edge of the water and pick something up. Then she came back into the house and went up to the spare room. As she passed me I couldn't see what she carried in her hand; the object was too small. It wasn't until just a few hours ago now that I understood it must have been her knife.

Then though, the curiosity of what she had picked up at the pool took me into her room later. She was sitting in front of a window, a half-filled glass of whiskey beside her, staring out into the dark. I can 'see' her expression now; how can I ever forget it? Her ironic smile was at its ultimate in cruelty — an expression of a mad goddess.

But for the first time her smile and stare were of secondary importance to me. A tapestry hung down one wall, I had seen it many times, but as I came into the room that night I saw that one edge of it, about halfway down, was indented. It was caught on a key that stuck out of a Yale lock. Too, I could see a few inches of an almost imperceptible line of a doorway in the wall. In her drunkenness and anger, she had either forgotten to take the key out of the lock or had purposely left it there for me to see. There was a secret room behind that wall, a hidden closet.

She seemed not to notice that I had seen the doorway. She focused her smile and stare on me. Her anger was now either gone or under control. Very carefully, very slowly, very calmly, her words coming in the quiet between the falling of ocean waves nearby, her voice filled with pride and power, she said:

I killed Victor.'

And then, her cool proud voice cutting me as if She were carving her words out of my skin, she told me, for the first time, the story of leading Victor to the hole on the island of Hydra. And again — this part of the story I had heard so often — told me of his nightmare eyes — eyes like her first husband's, eyes she feared.

'I killed him too,' she said, meaning her first husband, the one before Victor, her voice singing with power now. 'He drowned,' she chuckled. 'All my husbands drown. None know how to swim.' She took a long drink.

'Go look in the mirror,' she said. 'Go look at your own eyes, you'll see what I mean. You're just like Victor and the other one. You're after me, you want to kill me too. I can see it in your eyes.' Her voice had lifted into a knot, as if it wanted to scream. It's in your eyes too!'

I went back to my room on jelly legs. I locked the door. I tried to sleep. I felt Mareta's stare, I saw her smile; in my mind I heard her insane words, over and over. I felt her fingers on my eyes — through the bedroom wall.

I got up and snapped on the light. Pwent to a mirror.

As I looked into the glass and saw my eyes, I at first felt shock and fear. But the longer I looked, the calmer I became and the more I understood. Mareta had made fear grow in the eyes of Victor and her first husband. As the men gradually saw her for what she was, fear grew. Mareta, seeing the fear and realising theyknew her, translated their knowledge into a threat to her security — her power. And, thus, she destroyed Victor and her first husband.

I understood this because, gazing into the mirror, in my own eyes I saw the surge of living fear.

The next morning I saw a lawyer about getting a divorce. I planned to move out of the house as soon as I could find a place to live.

But I had waited too long.

As soon as I got inside the house that evening, Mareta came down from upstairs, silently, her smile so strong it seemed to be a being itself. Her stare pried into my eyes before she went out the door, the knife in her hand. I watched her walk across the lawn toward the beach, then I went up to her bedroom.

I suppose I should have known she would come back to the house immediately. If I had thought, I would have realised that she had left the house simply to give me an opportunity to get into her secret closet — especially when, going into the bedroom, I found the tapestry pulled back and the hidden door left open a crack.

Inside the closet I found the bottles. Two of them. Discarded olive bottles, washed and sealed. They were neatly lined up on a shelf, a stool in front of them. Mareta must have sat for hours staring at them and the photographs behind. The three pictures, propped up against the wall, were of her first husband and Victor — and me. A sharp device — a knife? — had been thrust through the eyes of each man.

My mind, of course, at first refused to believe what I saw in the bottles, even though I had come to know Mareta for what she was. The sight I saw in them will stay with me forever, though I've tried with all my being to shut it out these last few days. The sight haunts me. My only consolation is that I know I will never see, actually, such a nightmare again. It is an impossiblity.

While I stood in the closet, trying to accept psychologically the horror of what I saw in the bottles, Mareta came silently into the bedroom behind me. I did not hear her until she was almost on me. I turned in time to see her plunge the knife at me, silently, her smile bursting with pride, her stare like a goddess. We struggled. She had the advantage of surprise, and I was hurt. She struck again and again before I managed to get the knife from her and, wildly, blindly, stab it into her, blood streaming down my face.

She was dead by the time they got her — and me — to the hospital. They buried her yesterday. I wasn't there. I was in the hospital, where I am now. I'm glad she's dead. I'm glad I killed her. I wish she had been destroyed years ago, before she had had time to kill.

My only consolation, as I've said, is that now, blinded by the knife thrusts of Mareta (she had aimed the blade at my eyes only), I'll never again see those bottles, those olive jars containing the pickled eyes of Victor and husband number one, eyes she had cut out with her knife as the men lay at the bottom of the sea.