Hellenic Immortal (21 page)

There were no satyrs in sight. I’m one of the few humans on the planet who could easily identify one at a glance, and I was more than moderately certain I’d not seen one in my travails. If they were still around—and I was nearly certain they were—either they weren’t common or they weren’t in Athens.

With the help of the hotel desk, I secured a tour bus trip to modern Eleusis—now called Elefsina, which is a decidedly less graceful name. I spent the day wandering around the ruins of the Telesterion temple, and listening to a graduate student mispronounce words that used to mean a great deal to a goodly number of her ancestors. As always, the details of the sacred rites were butchered, filtered through the suppositions of modern archaeology.

It was the first time I’d been to the Telesterion without expecting a cup of kykeon at some point. Kykeon was what the adherents drank for a large portion of the nine-day ceremony. It was similar to beer, but with a few extra additives that induced hallucinations, an aspect I personally never got to experience because of my unique body chemistry. There have been numerous concerted efforts to recreate kykeon since those days, efforts I know could not possibly have succeeded because of one particular additive that may or may not exist anymore. My tour guide claimed it was poppy seeds. I actually bit my tongue.

The cave—the Ploutonion—was the only thing still standing. It was supposed to be the place where Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, returned to Hades and as such, it served a major function in the larger Mystery Ceremonies. I couldn’t imagine conducting the rites using the cave and then marching around the ruins. If the cult was indeed still active, it wasn’t active in Eleusis.

As I rode the bus back into the city and prepared for another evening of blind drunkenness, I considered that I was thinking about this all wrong. The last days of the cult were contemporaneous with the rise of the Christian faith. One thing the Christians did well—and they did a lot of things well—was create a thoroughly mobile religion. It’s hard to think of them that way now with all the churches everywhere, but in the beginning they were as secretive and decentralized as anybody. Put a bunch of Jesus worshippers together, and they could make any place sacred for as long as they needed to. Whereas if you wanted to do away with the mystery cults—as the Romans did—all you had to do was bar the adherents from accessing the places they considered sacred. So if the cult went underground, it had to be a version of the cult unlike anything with which I was familiar; it had to become mobile.

That meant they could be anywhere. They didn’t have to be in Greece at all.

*
 
*
 
*

The Hotel Attalos has a good bar with a bartender named Stavros whose company I rather enjoyed, especially after three or four drinks. I don’t think Stavros knew exactly what to make of me.

Since I’d arrived in Athens without any luggage, I had purchased a few sets of clothing that identified me as a local, rather than a tourist. This caused confusion everywhere I went, because when one is dressed like a native and speaking Greek, one does not generally ask for directions. Likewise, in the hotel, other guests routinely kept assuming I knew where everything was.

Stavros was aware that I was a guest and that it was my first time in (modern) Athens, so he didn’t know what to do with the fact that I spoke his language as well as he did, and that when I was drunk I told him details about his own city he didn’t know himself. Consequently, we spent a lot of time talking. Stavros was determined to figure me out.

“And how was Eleusis?” he asked me.
 

I was on my fourth glass of ouzo, which was when I usually became conversational. “Ruins,” I answered. “Terrible. Used to be a beautiful place.”

“Was it?” he asked. “When was that?”

I smiled. “Thousands would come from all across Attic into the city of Athens. And on the fourteenth day of Boedromion, they would walk the Sacred Path, cross the Bridge of Rhiti, and go see the priestesses of Eleusis. The procession would last an entire day, and all who could make the walk were welcome: male and female, citizen and slave, human and . . . well. All were welcome. It was beautiful. Today? I took a bus.”

Stavros smiled. “Very romantic, Mr. Lenaios. You sound like you were there.”
 

I was traveling under the name Greg Lenaios. I figured claiming Greek lineage would answer some questions regarding my fluency.
 
“I was. Today, I mean.”

“In the days of the pagans,” he clarified.

“Pagans,” I scoffed. “You Catholic, Stavros?”

“Greek Orthodox,” he answered. “Somewhat.”

I grinned. Stavros was twenty-five and thoroughly enjoyed his life as a bartender in a hotel that has an ample supply of attractive American women looking for a little action on the side during their vacation. Darkly handsome, he defined the word
swarthy
. He was probably not the most devout Christian around. “Pagan wasn’t always a bad word,” I explained. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“You speak with longing,” he said, refilling my glass. “I think perhaps you were born in the wrong age.”

“There’s more truth in that than you know.” I raised my glass in an exaggerated toast. “Anyway, I think I’ll be leaving here soon.”

“Where to?” he asked. “You fit in so nicely. I was preparing to recommend a realtor.”

“I can’t stay. I have some unfinished business elsewhere.”

On the television in the background, the late news had come on. Stavros had the sound down because it was in Greek and he was the only person within fifty feet of it—other than me—who could understand what they were saying.

After having spent most of the twentieth century in America, I’d grown accustomed to the high-quality nature of TV broadcasts there, so it was something of a shock the first time I witnessed a European news program. It reminded me of the way the news looked in the sixties, just in terms of technological expertise.

Stavros looked curious. “Where might that be?”
 

“It’s just business.”
 

There was an inset behind the anchors that showed an artistic rendition of something that could have been either Bigfoot or a very hairy wrestler.

“So this is a vacation?” Stavros asked. Unlike Mike, he was never going to get enough information to figure me out.

I ignored his question and pointed to the screen. “Can you turn that up?”
 

He looked over his shoulder. “Ah. You want to know about the wolf-man?”

“Pardon?”
 

He reached up and manually adjusted the sound just in time for me to get the end of the report, which consisted of a phone number and a warning not to approach whatever was being depicted in the background.
 
“Too late.”
 

“What’s a ‘wolf-man’?” I asked.

“It’s nonsense. You’ve heard of
El Chupacabra
?”

I had. Supposedly it was a goat-man sort of monster that mauls cows and small animals in South America. I took note when I first heard of it because when you know there is such a thing as a satyr, anything described as a man looking like a goat gets your attention. Not that actual satyrs are half-goat; it’s just how they’ve always been depicted. “Is this the same thing?”
 

“No. . . and yes. The wolf-man is supposed to be half wolf or dog, not goat. And yes, because there is no such thing. It is people getting carried away. Urban legend, as the Americans call it.”

“A werewolf?”

He smiled. “Are you going to tell me now that wolf-men are real? Perhaps they, too, were at Eleusis in the old days, yes?”

“No, of course not,” I lied, because they were. “But I find this interesting.”

“Ah, but you have pressing business elsewhere.”

“It might not be all that pressing.” I slapped the empty cup down for another refill.

*
 
*
 
*

The next morning, after purging a significant portion of the ouzo I’d drunk the night before in an explosive manner that I don’t need to recount, I picked up a copy of the latest edition of the English language Athens News. I hunted through until I found a story about the local wolf-man, whom they were calling (appropriately enough) the Lykanthropos. It was buried near the back of the paper, which made some sense as one didn’t want to alarm the tourists with local legends. And the story itself was almost entirely useless; it presented a brief recap with hardly any details, and concluded that there was nothing to it. So go out and spend money, you Americans, you.

But the gift shop had a selection of Greek language newspapers, including a few of the less reputable tabloids. I grabbed a bunch and returned to my room.

Stavros was right; it did sound like an urban legend, one that was being given far too much play by a credulous team of reporters. The roots of the story went back as far as six months, when a local woman claimed she was attacked by a wolf-man, and the reports popped up again every time there was a full moon. Of course, there was no hard information to be found. What eyewitness quotes they had, came from people who didn’t want to be identified in the press. And the statements from people who did want their names mentioned all heard from a so-called friend about it, and didn’t witness anything personally.

Worse, the abilities of the Lykanthropos far exceeded anything moderately rational. He was supposed to be eight feet tall and capable of leaping ten stories. He had an enormous jaw and wild eyes, was covered in hair, and either scampered on all fours or walked upright depending on who was describing him. His claws were five or six centimeters long, and his howl could cause small dogs and other pets to drop dead on the spot. He was bulletproof and fireproof, and the only reason nobody had been killed yet, was either incredible good luck or the direct providence of God, depending again on who was being asked. When I compared artistic renditions from four different newspapers—all supposedly based on eyewitnesses—I got four entirely different images.

The police were doing everything they could to keep the locals from overreacting, insisting repeatedly that there was no wolf-man. This just fed into the conspiracy-minded media frenzy. One of the tabloids went so far as to conclude that the Lykanthropos was a member of the police force, or a government experiment gone wrong.

Either this was a mass panic (fairly normal) or there was an unschooled werewolf out there (extremely rare) that was very confused. If I was very lucky, it was the latter.

I spent the next few hours pairing the reported sightings with my handy tourist map and came to an interesting conclusion. More than half of them had taken place in or around the National Gardens.

There was only one night of full moon left. If I was going to catch up with him, it was going to have to be soon.

*
 
*
 
*

I arrived at the National Gardens later that afternoon on what was turning out to be an extraordinarily hot day. Mingling in with a group of tourists, I entered from Amalias Street behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and followed the crowd, trying to reconcile what I was seeing with what the little park direction signs said about where I was. (Every time I look at one of those You-Are-Here maps, I think how many times in my life I could have used a sign like that. Like when I was avoiding the Inquisition.)

It was still a few hours before sunset, so I familiarized myself with the gardens, which didn’t exist in my day. That in itself was a reassuring thing. I did come across a few ruins in my first circuit around the place, but I couldn’t even tell what they were ruins of, so it didn’t bother me all that much.

What did bother me was the ducks. There were hundreds of them, and they thought I was under some sort of obligation to feed them something. I also saw enough cats to make me think this was more than simply a case of somebody letting a house cat run free. It looked like the cats lived in the park along with the ducks. Maybe they even ate the ducks. If so, they weren’t doing a very good job of it.

I had to decide where I would go if I were a confused kid who thought he was turning into a monster. After much consideration, I settled on the zoo. Specifically—the wolf paddock. According to the placard, the wolves were Bulgarian, which would have had an added appeal to the Lykanthropos if he was a student of his own myth history, since werewolves, like vampires, purportedly hailed from Eastern Europe. Bulgaria would do nicely in that regard. (In truth, werewolves aren’t anything like vampires. They’re far less common and the condition is hereditary, not acquired.)

I bought a soft drink and settled down on a bench across from the wolves, and spent the afternoon trying to remember what it was that had stood on that spot. This was a daily ritual, and not at all healthy; it typically led me to drink, which only made the nostalgia worse. Hence, the soda. My other option was a lemonade-type beverage whose principle ingredient was ouzo. It looked tempting, but I had to stay sharp.

I people-watched. When the objects of my attention are female I call it voyeurism, or if I’m drunk, ogling. On this day, I was checking out everybody, so it was just people-watching. With a little voyeurism mixed in, but not much. All the pretty tourists were probably at the Parthenon.

After a couple of hours, with the sun starting to set and my deciding the spot upon which I was sitting used to be a farm, I spied a likely suspect. He looked about fourteen years old, very muscular and pretty hairy. In Greece, this is not at all unusual, as body hair was always commonplace. What was unusual was that he was alone, he was definitely not a tourist, and he stared at the wolves for a quarter of an hour without moving. I got up and stepped beside him.

“Nice afternoon,” I said, in Greek.

He looked surprised to have been addressed, and I realized he hadn’t just been staring at the wolves; he’d been speaking to them.

“Yes.” He edged away slightly.

“I don’t think they can hear you from here,” I said. The wolves didn’t give a damn that either one of us were there. They were too busy sleeping in the shade, which is what sane animals do when it’s very hot. Unlike people.