There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.
The ghosts of antiquity, he thought, propelling his ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.
Olive trees lined either side of the path beneath him. The last of the tourists straggled down from the hill even as the phantom came in sight of the Propylaea, the ancient gateway with its colonnades of Doric columns to the east and west and the rows of thick, proud Ionic columns on either side of the central stair and corridor, holding up nothing but the sky. Spirits were propelled through the tangible world by force of will alone. This was one of the facts of the new science he had studied ever since he had become a part of it. And yet Dr. Graves slipped more rapidly through the veil of night without even realizing he had quickened. He moved above the Propylaea and then paused abruptly, hanging in the air, staring at the majesty of the Parthenon, the temple built to honor the virgin goddess Athena upon her defeat of Poseidon, with whom she had warred for the patronage of the city.
Perikles himself had initiated the construction of the temple in the fifth century B.C. It had been a Byzantine church, a Latin church, and a Muslim mosque in the centuries that had passed since then. When Graves had last been on the broken, bleached ground atop the Acropolis, the Parthenon had been a terrible sight, never having recovered from an explosion that had destroyed part of the temple when the Venetians laid siege, attempting to wrest control of the city from the Turks. Then that thieving bastard Lord Elgin had stolen so much of the sculptural decoration of the place and shipped it back to London to the British Museum. Leonard Graves had spent time on archaeological digs in Greece, and though it had been more than one hundred years since Elgin’s crime, the mistrust he had found among the Greeks had saddened him. But he could not blame them. That was what happened when an ignorant fool stole national treasures. He ruined it for everyone else.
Some of the sculptures remained, but the place truly was a ghost of its original glory. Even so, he was pleased to discover upon closer inspection, drifting on air currents toward the eight-columned face of the temple, that restoration was under way and appeared to have been going on for decades. Barriers were in place that would keep tourists out. And as he alighted upon the marble stairs and then passed between two of those columns and into the massive central chamber he was surrounded by scaffolding.
He felt he could almost hear the chants of the cult of Athena, could almost see them gathered there around her statue. The dust of history coated everything, both in the physical world and the ethereal one.
"Hello?" he called, standing in the center of the chamber, looking up through the collapsed ceiling at the night sky as the stars began to appear.
The ghosts came like the stars, materializing one by one in the darkness of the temple, between columns and beneath scaffolding. Some floated above him, others crouched on the marble beams around the edges of the chamber. Graves said nothing as they scrutinized him, most of them faceless shades, so long dead that they had forgotten their own images and could no longer form the details of their fleshly appearances. Some were in the helmets and garb of Grecian warriors, others in the robes of priestesses of Athena.
Yet for all of the cultures that had lived and died upon the Acropolis, the ghosts of the Parthenon seemed to number only the most ancient. Only the Greeks. Graves wondered if all of the other ghosts, the Turks and Venetians and the rest, had all been driven out.
At length one of the ghosts drifted toward him. Dr. Graves could not see if it was male or female, for this specter was little more than an upper torso clad in a robe and the rough shape of a human head. It had no face. Neither eyes nor mouth. When it spoke the words seemed to manifest upon the air much like the spirits themselves. Leonard Graves had been dead more than half a century. The ancient dead could not harm him — as far as he knew — and yet he felt a rippling chill pass through him as he heard this voice out of the ancient world.
"You are not welcome here."
The words were in another language, an ancient form of Greek, but such barriers meant little to the dead. Like other ghosts, Dr. Graves could draw the meaning of the words from the ether itself. From the substance of the spiritual realm, a tapestry woven from the souls of humanity throughout the ages.
"I apologize for the intrusion," Graves said quickly, for he had been schooled in many things during his life, diplomacy among them. "I will stay only a moment and then leave you to your peace."
The faceless dead laughed at him. Their spokesman tilted his head to one side, and the words came again, yet now Graves wondered if it was he speaking or if this was the voice of the collective.
"There is no peace here while the world treads upon this ground and admires the temple of Athena as nothing more than a relic. It would be better if it were nothing more than dust. Perhaps then we could move on."
Graves nodded, hoping he projected sympathy. He began to speak again, but was interrupted.
"And you will leave when you are instructed to do so. Or you will never leave. We shall see to that."
Fear rippled through his spectral form again, and Graves bowed his head and began to withdraw. "My apologies again. I merely thought that if the Gorgon had desecrated this temple with her presence, you might tell me."
" Wait."
Dr. Graves forced himself not to smile as he paused and glanced around. The gathered dead drifted closer, some of them emerging from among the columns and forming a tighter circle around him. There was a flicker of identity across the face of the spokesman ghost, but then it was gone.
"What do you intend for Medusa?"
"Medusa?" Graves repeated, mouth dry. So it was true. Not just a Gorgon, but the hideous monster of legend. "Only to stop her from killing anyone else."
There was a susurrus of whispers on the ethereal plane, the voices of dozens, perhaps hundreds of ghosts speaking all at once. He heard them as a single sound, the hushed noise of the wind through a cornfield. Then all at once it ceased.
The faceless spokesman slid closer to him, staring at him with no eyes, speaking to him with no lips.
"She has been here. We sent her away."
Graves nodded. "There are too many people who might see her."
" Fool!" the voice in the ether snapped. The faceless ghosts swirled closer, and Graves shivered with the cold of tombs millennia old. "We would never allow Phorcys’s tainted spawn within these walls. It would be the gravest insult to the goddess."
"Of course," Graves agreed, moving backward toward the entrance. "If only I knew where to find her, I could be sure she would never be able insult the goddess again."
Once more the temple was filled with that ripple of whispers.