PARADISE

    

    The first they took were a pair of campers, young men surf-casting for their breakfast and too busy to notice the figures moving toward them through the fog until there was only time to turn and recognize, as in a nightmare, the sharp stick skewering the neck of the teenage boy, the trailing entrails of the Greek, the charred black face of the thin young woman dressed in rags-time only for that before the big man with the open festering shoulder wound sunk his fingers into the eyes and mouth of the nearer one and pulled him down into the foaming sea, breaking his neck as he fell, while the others moved over his friend with open hungry mouths.

    The big man watched them die.

    Then later, watched them slowly rise.

    There had been six of them. So that now they were eight.

    They moved through the morning mist and afternoon rain, scattering along the shoreline and up through the rocks and down to the beach, wading into the sea, separating and coming together, moving toward town.

    The next were brother and sister, twins. Germans, eighteen-year-old handsome blondes. It was raining by then, a light drizzle. They had strung up a line between a pair of trees so the rainwater could rinse out their clothes. The boy was naked. Everything he owned except a pair of socks was on the line already. The girl wore a white cotton blouse. She was hanging up her brother’s socks when the line went down and a girl no older than she appeared and pulled her onto the sand, clawing at her.

    Her brother tried to run. But they were much too close by then, a horrible proximity of pale reaching hands. He tried to run in one direction and then the other and then sank to his knees and cried.

    And watched his sister die before they got to him.

    The old Greek fisherman sat in a boat anchored twenty feet offshore. He was checking his traps, which unfortunately for him were not empty. So that in his distraction with the traps it was a simple thing for the twins to wade out to him and overturn his boat, then hold him under. The last thing he saw were three molting crabs peering out at him from inside a trap he would never live to harvest. One was a very good size.

    The fisherman made eleven.

    The rain fell hard and people stayed indoors. But even so there were stragglers and their ranks slowly swelled-and those few Greeks who lived along the way and noticed the slow-moving group of touristas trudging into the wind along the distant shore were accustomed to seeing strange foolish things from these foreigners, who stayed out all night and slept all day, who took the sun on their fair skin, who treated dogs like children and their children, sometimes, like dogs. They thought nothing of it.

    They thought nothing, either, of the woman who walked alone well behind the rest, who seemed to drift in and out of focus in the shifting wind and rain. Except, perhaps, some of the men who saw her. Even at a distance the supple poise and strength of her was visible beneath the flowing white garment. Even at a distance she was desirable.

    To some she looked like a goddess.