I Hear Horrifying Sounds Coming From a Storeroom in Greece.

You'll remember the road better than I do, Stelios, but I'll tell you how it looked from the driver's seat. Every fig tree down into Gerolimenas had cicadas in it, all screaming at once, and when the road tipped over the last ridge the bay was lying there flat and white and so bright I had to squint. The car's air conditioning had quit outside Itilo. I came into your yard with my shirt stuck to the seat and a bottle of water so warm it was basically tea.

You came out wiping your hands on a rag and said I looked terrible. I said I'd looked terrible since Kalamata and had only now arrived somewhere that could do anything about it. You laughed and took my bag before I could stop you.

I should say why I was there, since you never asked and I never said. I was forty-three. I'd been a conservator at the regional museum for three years, and before that I framed wedding photographs for twenty-some years. I know a lot about what to do with a bride's veil and a cheap mat board. Then my father got sick, and then he got sicker, and the hospital debt stayed behind after he didn't. I'm still paying it. That's the whole reason I've never turned down a free bed in my life. A friend of a friend said the Mavrakis family had a cracked icon and a spare room, and I said yes before he finished the sentence.

I liked the house right away. I'm telling you that because it's true and because it makes the rest worse. The walls were as thick as my arm is long, and the inside smelled of warm stone and dried oregano and olive oil that had soaked into the wood over about two hundred years. Bunches of oregano hung from a beam in the kitchen. The windows were small and deep, and the light came in through them in slabs. After the drive it felt like walking into someone's cupped hands.

The icon was in the front room, on a shelf over a table with a lace runner. Saint Nicholas, about the size of a cutting board, with a crack running from the top of his halo down through his beard. The gesso was lifting along it in little curls. Somebody had tried to fix it before, with the wrong glue, and left a shiny yellow smear on the saint's shoulder. I stood there with my hands behind my back, the way I do so I won't touch anything, and I thought: easy. Two days, maybe three. Stabilize the flaking, clean the glue off, and I'd have paid for my bed twice over before your mother and the name-day relatives showed up. I told you so. You said, "Good, good, she'll be happy, she's been looking at that crack for ten years." You said it fast, and I took it for hospitality.

Then you showed me the rest of the house. Kitchen, the bedroom with the iron bed, the bathroom with its one tap, the stairs up to the roof and the cistern. At the back of the hall there was a low door, and behind it a stairway going down. It was narrow, with steps worn into shallow dishes in the middle. You flicked a switch and one bulb came on, a weak one, and it lit about the first six steps and then gave up.

I took one step down and the air changed. It wasn't a draft. It was cold all at once, like walking into a cellar full of ice, though I know there's no ice in the Mani in July. I could see the curve of a vault down there at the bottom, pale, and the edge of something that might have been a crate. The wall beside me had marks on it, smudged gray, pencil or soot, running down along the stones at about hip height. I figured they were old tally marks, or some child's scribbling, and I didn't look closer because you were already talking.

"The family keeps old things down there," you said. "Nothing you need. Don't bother with it, it's damp and it's a mess."

Damp, you said. In July. In a house where I'd been sweating through my second shirt since noon. I remember thinking that was an odd word to pick, and then I remember not thinking about it, because you'd shut the door and slapped it twice with your palm, friendly, and turned me back toward the light.

By the front door there was a guest book on a little shelf, a fat one with a cloth cover going soft at the corners. You said your mother liked everyone to sign it. I signed. My name, the date, thank you for the bed. My handwriting is neat, it's the one thing the frame shop left me. You didn't read it. You were looking at your watch.

About an hour later you were in the yard with your keys, and that's the part I think about most. You said there'd been a problem with some papers in Kalamata, something about the land and an office that would only talk to you in person, and you'd be gone two days. Back Saturday. The food was in the fridge, the key to the front door was on the nail, help myself to everything. You said it quickly and you didn't say anything about the house, no "call me if" and no "don't worry about the noises." Why would you, I thought. It's a house.

You hugged me. Hard, with a thump on the back. I remember you smelled of cigarettes and the rag you'd been holding. Then you got into the car, a dusty gray thing with a dent in the rear door, and backed out between the oil drums, and I watched you take the first bend toward the ridge. The dust hung in the road long after the sound of the engine had gone.

I stayed in the yard. There was prickly pear all along the wall, the pads fat and gray-green and furred with spines, a few late red fruit still hanging on. The cicadas hadn't let up. Down below, the bay lay there glaring and didn't move. It was about five in the afternoon, the hottest hour, the stones giving the day back to me through my sandals, and I was standing in the sun with nothing to do and nobody for a long way in any direction.

I should've gone in and started on the icon. Instead I stood there a minute longer, and then I realized I was cold. Just across my shoulders and the back of my neck, in that heat. I went inside and shut the door behind me, and the front hall was cool the way a stone house is cool. But the other kind of cold was in there too, thin and steady, coming from the low door at the back of the hall. It had been there all along. I just hadn't been alone with it.

I didn't start on the icon that evening. I told myself the light was wrong. What I did was eat a tomato over the sink with some of your cheese, stand in front of Saint Nicholas for a while with my hands behind my back, and wash up a plate that was already clean. Around eleven I lay down on the iron bed with the shutter open and a sheet over my legs, and I could hear a goat bell somewhere up the hill and nothing else. The cold from the back of the hall didn't reach the bedroom. I'll give the house that.

I wasn't asleep when you called. Remember that, because later I wondered about it.

"Dimitri!"

It came down the hall, easy, a little hoarse, the way you talk when you're leaning on something. Your voice. The Mani in it, the way you chew the ends of things.

"Dimitri, bring a lamp, will you? I dropped something down here."

I was up before I'd thought anything. I remember the floor was cool under my feet. I went into the kitchen and found the battery lantern under the sink, the one with the bent handle, and clicked it on and off to check it. I was in the hall with it in my fist, halfway to the low door, and I was already thinking: how'd he get back so quick, he said Saturday, did the office —

Your car had been gone six hours.

I hadn't heard it. No engine in the yard, no gravel, no key in the front door. Nothing. And you'd have called from the door, you'd have said I'm back, you daft man, go to bed. You wouldn't be down there in the dark with a dropped something.

I stopped at the top of the stairs. The door was standing open. I know I shut it, I watched you shut it, I watched you slap it twice. The bulb at the first six steps was off. The lantern showed me the top three, worn into dishes, and past that it showed me nothing. The cold came up at me. Not a draft. It came up steadily, the way breath does, and it went through my shirt and settled on my chest.

"Dimitri." Warm. Patient. "Don't stand there, I can see your light."

I could not have said anything. I didn't try.

Then the phone rang.

It rang on the wall by the coat hooks, a cream-colored thing with a curly cord, maybe four steps behind me. I hadn't even noticed it that afternoon. I wouldn't have guessed it was connected. It rang four times, loud in the stone, and stopped before I could decide whether to touch it.

Then my mother coughed.

Not in the receiver. The receiver was sitting in its cradle. It came from the stairs, from down in the dark past where the lantern gave out, and it was her cough, the dry little double one she's had since the winter before last. Then she said, "Dimitri, love. Bring a lamp. Please."

I'd talked to her Sunday. She'd coughed through the whole call and told me twice to take the good shoes.

I took a step back. My heel hit the wall phone's cord and the receiver knocked against the plaster, and I swear everything down there waited for that sound to finish.

"Dimi." My sister now. Quick, a little breathless, swallowing the end of it so it came out Dimi, bring the lam'. That's exactly how she does it. She'd called me Wednesday about her car, and I'd been annoyed because I was in the middle of something and she talked for twenty minutes. I'd have given a lot right then to be annoyed like that again.

"Bring the lamp, it's dark, we can't find the—"

I turned around. I didn't run, because I thought if I ran, something would notice. I walked back down the hall with the lantern swinging and my bare feet slapping the floor. Behind me, all three of them kept talking, not on top of each other but taking turns, polite. You, then my mother, then Katerina. You said, "Dimitri, it's fine, come on." My mother said, "We're cold." Katerina said it again, the same words, a little closer to how she really says them each time.

In the kitchen I hit the switch by the door. Then the one over the stove, the bulb over the table, the little one under the cabinet that I hadn't known was there. I took the lantern and set it on the table lit, which made no sense, I had four bulbs going. There was a floor lamp in the front room with a fringed shade, and I dragged it in by its cord and plugged it in beside the fridge. The window over the sink was black and showed me a man in a wet shirt, so I turned my back on it.

I sat with my back against the wall where I could see the kitchen doorway and the strip of hall beyond it. That was all I could do. I thought about the front door, the key on the nail, my car in the yard with no air conditioning. It was a long way to the nearest light. And where was I going to go at midnight? I'd have to cross the hall to reach the door, and the stairs were right there.

The voices didn't stop. Every few minutes one of them would try again. My mother asked for the lamp. Katerina asked where I was. You said my name very gently, and once you laughed a little, the way you do when you're about to say something kind. I put my hands over my ears for a while and that was worse, because then I couldn't tell if they'd stopped.

I'm not a man who sweats much. Three years ago I'd have said so. That night it ran down my back and pooled under the waistband of my trousers, and my shirt stuck to the wall behind me and peeled off when I leaned forward. The oregano hanging from the beam smelled the way it had at noon. That was strange, the ordinary smell sitting right there in the middle of everything. I looked at it a lot.

Somewhere around what must have been three, the goat bell up the hill started again, and I was so glad of it I nearly cried. It rang and stopped and rang. The voices got further apart. My mother said "please" once more, softer, and then there was a stretch where I counted to a hundred and nobody said anything.

I stayed where I was. I didn't turn a single light off. The window over the sink went from black to a kind of dirty blue, and then there was a gray edge along the top of the frame, and the cicadas began, one, then a dozen, then the whole hillside. I listened to the hall for a long time after that.

Nothing called me. The lantern was still burning on the table.

It was past ten in the morning before I stood up off the kitchen floor. My legs had gone to sleep and my shirt was stiff along the back. The heat was already leaning on the windows, and the cicadas had started in on the fig tree by the yard wall. In daylight it's hard to be afraid of a house, and I was a little offended at how fast I'd turned reasonable. I made coffee on your two-ring burner. I drank it standing up, and then I went to look.

The door at the back of the hall was still open. Nothing else in the house had moved, which I counted against it. I got the big rubber torch out of my glovebox, the one I keep for dead batteries and bad parking garages, and stood at the top of the steps. The cold came up and found my ankles first. It was a thin, even cold with no draft in it, and the hall behind me was so warm that my back sweated while my feet went numb.

I didn't go down. I went three steps, to where the bulb you'd shown me hung unlit, and put my left hand on the wall for balance. Then I remembered the marks. I'd taken them for tally marks, or a child's scribbling. I turned the torch sideways and held it flat against the stone so the light skimmed along the surface, and the smudges stood up out of it.

They were words. Soot, or a soft pencil, in a grown hand, and they ran down the wall step by step at the height a person's hand would fall if he was sitting on the stair. Plenty had been rubbed away. Someone had dragged a sleeve or a palm across them, over and over, maybe in a hurry. What was left near my hip said, DO NOT ANSWER THE ONE WHO. Two steps lower there was a gap, and then KNOWS YOUR NAME. Under that was a smear and a small brown thumbprint where somebody had pressed hard.

I read it three times. I'm a slow reader when I'm scared. My feet had gone past cold into something that hurt, so I backed up the steps with the torch still on the wall until I was in the hall, and I pulled the door to without latching it. I didn't slap it.

The guest book was where you'd left it, on the little shelf by the front door, soft at the corners. I'd signed it Thursday and you hadn't read it. I carried it to the kitchen table, away from the door, and went through it from the back.

My own page was clean. Before mine were a lot of names, and the dates went back years: cousins, a priest, a couple from Athens who'd written paradise. Then about two-thirds of the way in I hit the stub. A page had been torn out close to the binding, fast, because the paper along the edge was ragged and a little of it had come away with the thread. The next page after the gap was scorched. Somebody had held a flame to the right edge and let it go, and the brown stopped just short of the writing. The writing was at the top, a single line in the same soft grey as the stairs:

ANSWER THE ONE WHO IS NOT KIND.

I laid it next to what I remembered from the wall, and I said it out loud to the kitchen, because it's easier to hear nonsense than read it. Don't answer the one who knows your name. Answer the one who isn't kind.

I had no idea what that meant. I'd like to say I worked it out, but I only sat there. Who isn't kind? You were kind. You'd taken my bag before I could stop you. My mother was kind, God knows, to a fault. Katerina could be sharp, but not like that. It sounded like a thing you'd tell a child about strangers, and it was written by somebody who'd had nothing to write with but soot, and had stopped to tear the page out and burn the next one. I didn't know who, or when. I turned the book over and checked the back cover for a name, which was stupid. There wasn't one.

I shut it and put it back on its shelf. Then I stood in your front hall in the one-o'clock heat, with the shutters pulled and the whole house ticking, and my hands were shaking so badly I had to put them in my armpits.

So I went to the icon. I know how that sounds. But it's what I do when my hands aren't mine. Twenty-odd years of other people's wedding photographs taught me that if you give your fingers a small enough job, the rest of you tends to follow along behind.

I took Saint Nicholas down off the shelf. He was lighter than he looked, and the board was warm from the wall. I laid him face up on the lace runner, put a folded towel under his head, and pulled the kitchen chair around so the window light came in from the side. The gesso was lifting along the crack in little curls, thin as onion skin. I used the smallest brush I'd brought, one with maybe a dozen hairs, and I slid it under the edge of each curl and eased it back down. Then I waited for it to settle, and went on to the next.

The cicadas were terrible. They don't stop. They don't even take a breath, and out there in the fig tree it was a drilling inside my skull. I worked through it. The curl, the brush, the wait. Somewhere in the second hour I noticed I'd stopped hearing it, or that I'd stopped minding. The room was hot and plain and smelled of oregano. The saint's beard was coming back together under my hand, a little at a time, and the yellow glue on his shoulder was only glue.

A calm came down on me then. A stupid one. I'd slept maybe an hour on a kitchen floor, and I was looking at a man's painted face with his beard half mended, and I thought, well, there you are. Thirty-six hours of no sleep, a hot house, a cold cellar, an old phone with a bad line. I'd had a house settle around me in the dark and I'd put voices on it. I was forty-three. I'd been tired for three years.

"Exhaustion," I told Saint Nicholas. He didn't argue. I went on with the next curl.

I finished the left side of the beard by seven and stopped there, because the light went and I didn't trust my eyes with the rest. I ate bread and your cheese standing up. Before the sun was all the way off the ridge I'd turned on every light in the kitchen, the lamp with the fringed shade included. I carried the icon in from the front room and propped it against the fruit bowl where I could see it. Then I sat at the table with my phone by my elbow and the lantern by the phone, facing the doorway. One bar of signal, and only if I left it by the salt.

Nothing happened for a long time. I'd like to tell you that was a relief. It wasn't. I knew what I was waiting for, and that's worse than being surprised.

It started a little after eleven. A cough first, the dry double one, two small knocks in the chest. My mother does that when she's trying not to bother anybody. It came from the hall, not from the stairs this time. It was closer.

"Dimitri." Then the cough again. "Dimitri, love, we're cold."

That was her. Last night it had been a woman doing my mother. Now it had her breath in it, and the way she leans on the second half of my name, Dimi-trii, going up at the end. I had my hands flat on the table and I looked at the saint's half-mended beard.

"Dimi, c'mon." Katerina. She swallows the ends of everything. Come on turns into c'mon, and bring the lamp turns into bring th' lam', and it was all there. She even sounded annoyed with me, the way she does, with the kindness under it. "Dimi. It's dark. Dimi, please."

They took turns. They didn't overlap or interrupt, which real people do, and I noticed that and it didn't help. They said my name softly, one after the other, and every time it was a little nearer to what's in my head when I think of them. I could feel it doing that. It was the sound of my own memory coming back at me, and I wanted to answer so badly my jaw hurt.

I didn't. I looked at the phone. I'd stopped believing it would ring.

Then it buzzed on the wood and slid an inch toward the lantern. The screen said STELIOS.

I grabbed it so fast I nearly dropped it into the fruit bowl.

"Hello?"

"What." Your voice. Flat, tired, and rough as a gravel road. Behind it, some kind of echoing corridor and a door banging. "What is it, Dimitri? I'm standing in a hallway."

"Stelios. It's you."

"Who else would it be? Listen, I've been in this building since nine this morning. They lost a stamp. A stamp. A woman in there tells me the file's with a man who's at lunch, and the man's been at lunch since ten o'clock. I've got nothing to say to anyone." You breathed out, long and hard. "And what's that noise? You're breathing in my ear like a dog. Stop it."

"I'm not—" I was. I was breathing very loud, in and out through my mouth. I shut it. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Stop worrying. I can hear you worrying from here. It's a house. It's old. Do your icon, eat something, go to bed." The door banged again. "I'll be back when I'm back. Saturday."

"Stelios, the cellar—"

"Don't start. I haven't got the patience tonight. Saturday."

And you hung up.

I sat there with the phone against my ear listening to nothing. I'd just been told off. I'd been called a dog, near enough, and told to shut up and go to bed, and I can't remember being so glad of anything in my adult life. I laughed once, one breath through the nose. My eyes were stinging.

Because you see, I went back over it while the hall was quiet. That was how you talk. You're short, you're sour, you complain about people you've never met, and you tell a man his breathing is too loud. Nobody had ever sounded less like they wanted me to come anywhere. My mother does cough that way, but when she's on the phone she says what do you want, I'm busy, and Katerina would have told me to stop being dramatic. Whatever was down the hall had said my name six times and never once been irritated. It never sounded like it had somewhere else to be.

The one that wasn't kind. I thought of the grey letters on the guest book page. It was the one on the phone, the one in the hallway of a government building three hours away, with the stamp and the lunch. It was you.

I put the phone down on the table, screen up, where I could see it. My hands had almost stopped shaking. I looked at the saint. I said, quietly, "Right."

The hall was silent. Not the silence from before, with the goat bell and the ticking, but a held one. I could hear the fridge cycle on, and the lamp's cord ticking against the floor tiles, and under all of it, the cold coming in along the floor and finding my ankles.

Then you spoke.

"Dimitri."

It was the voice from the phone. The same rough edge. Except the edge was gone. It was low and unhurried, with every bit of the day's tiredness taken out of it, and the Mani accent laid in smooth where your real one catches. It was the voice you'd use to a child who's had a fright. It was the voice you used the first afternoon, in the yard, when you took my bag.

"Dimitri, it's all right now," it said. "It's over. You did well. You can come down."

I didn't answer. I'd like to tell you that was a decision, but my mouth had shut on its own and my tongue was pressed flat behind my teeth.

Something came up the stairs instead.

I heard it before I saw it. A dry scrape on the top step, then a pause, then the hall tiles. It wasn't walking the way you or I walk. Each foot was set down as if it had been told to be careful. The lamp cord stopped ticking against the floor. The fridge was still running, so it wasn't silence. The cord just stopped.

I kept my hands flat on the table. Saint Nicholas was propped against the fruit bowl with half a beard, looking at me with the one eye I'd finished.

It came into the doorway and stopped under the kitchen bulb.

I'm not going to describe it properly, Stelios, not even to you, not even now. I can tell you what I can stand to tell you. It was tall. It had to bend under your lintel, the one I'd cracked my own forehead on Friday morning going for the coffee. It was dry, and I mean that exactly. Dry the way a bone in a field is dry. The arms were too long and the hands hung down near its knees. The dark from the vault was on it, hanging off the arms and the shoulders, and it didn't stop at the wrists. It kept going a little past them, and the light from the bulb didn't go in.

It came forward and stopped a metre from me. I'd say it was a metre. The corner of the table was between us and I could have reached across and touched it, and I did not think about that for even a second.

Where the face should have been there was nothing. Smooth. Not a mask, not covered. Just smooth, the way a stone is smooth where water has been over it for a long time.

I breathed through my nose, and quietly. You'd told me I breathed too loud. I did it for you.

Then the smooth place spoke, and it wasn't your voice.

"It's fine," it said. "It's fine, it's fine."

I hadn't heard that voice in years. It was thin and had a little click in the breath, from the last week, when he was on the oxygen and they kept moving him between floors. I hadn't kept a recording. You don't think to. I'd thought it was gone, the way you think a smell from childhood is gone, and here it was in the kitchen, exact. The little catch before fine. The way he'd say a thing twice so you'd stop looking at the monitor.

"You've paid enough," my father said. "You paid enough, Dimitri. Leave it."

I'll tell you what that does, because you've never asked me and I think you ought to know. I'm still paying. There's a standing order on the fifth of every month and I can tell you the balance without opening the app. I've never once been told I could stop. And this thing stood in your kitchen in his voice, the one voice I'd have crossed any floor in any house to hear, and told me I could stop.

My jaw ached from holding it. I felt the word coming up my throat, Baba, just that, the way you say it when you're nine and the light's on in the hall. I shut my teeth on it. I felt my lip go between them, and I kept biting, and something gave. It was hot on my tongue, then all over my mouth, with a taste like a coin.

That helped. That's the truth. The pain was mine, it was rough, and it was in the room with me, and I stayed on it.

It lifted one of its hands.

I didn't move. I couldn't have. It reached across the corner of the table with the long arm bending where an arm shouldn't need to, and the finger came to my face. It was cold. Not cold like the cellar air, cold like something that has never once been warm. It touched my cheek just under the eye and rested there. Then it drew down along the bone, slowly, and I understood that it was being gentle. It was doing what he'd done at the end, when his hand was too weak to do anything but lie on my face. It was almost fond.

"It's fine," my father said again, softer, nearly out of breath. "Come on now."

I breathed in and out through my nose. Blood ran down into the corner of my mouth and I let it.

It took its hand away. It didn't go. It stood there with its arms hanging and the dark spilling off them onto your tiles and waited. Not impatient. I kept expecting it to be impatient, because anything alive gets impatient, and it never did. It just stood in the light as long as I did, and I had nowhere else to look but at the place where its face wasn't.

The voices came and went, a few at a time. My mother, once, Dimitri, love. Katerina asking where I was. You, smooth, asking me to come down. I answered none of them. Most of the time it said nothing at all.

I looked at the phone, screen up by the lantern, one bar. I wanted it to buzz and I wanted you to tell me to stop breathing so loud. It stayed dark.

My mouth stopped bleeding sometime after four. My legs went numb under the table, then came back with pins in them, then went numb again. The icon watched. The fridge shut off and came on. At some point I noticed the window over the sink had stopped being black. It was dirty blue at the top of the frame, and then a thin grey, and the thing was still there a metre from me, patient, waiting for me to open my mouth.

I don't know when it went. I'd been looking at the place where its face wasn't, and then the light in the window went from grey to a thin yellow, the cicadas started up on the hillside, and the kitchen had nobody else in it. No sound, no door. The tiles under the table corner were just tiles. I stayed where I was for a while anyway, with my hands flat, waiting for it to come back and be patient at me some more.

When I finally said something, it was "Hello?" and my voice cracked on it. Nothing answered. The fridge shut off.

I stood up and my legs nearly folded. I held the table until the pins and needles quit, then picked up the lantern, because it was in my hand before I'd decided anything. The hall was warm. That was the strangest part, honestly, how ordinary it was. The low door at the back stood open and the cold was still coming up out of it, thin and steady, but it wasn't reaching me now.

There was a key. Big, black iron, sitting in the lock on the hall side. I swear it hadn't been there Thursday, or I'd missed it, which is possible, I was busy being charmed. I took hold of the edge of the door and pulled. It was heavier than it had any right to be, and it dragged on the floor with a scrape I felt in my teeth. I didn't look down the stairs. I got it shut, turned the key until the bolt went over, and stood there with my forehead almost on the wood. Then I put the key in my trouser pocket and went to pack.

That took four minutes. Shirts, razor, the little brushes. I left the icon propped against the fruit bowl with half its beard done, and I'm sorry about that, Stelios, I really am. I'd never walked out on a job in my life. I left the guest book where it was too.

The car was already hot, sitting in your yard with the sun on it. The air conditioning was still dead, so I wound both windows all the way down and took the road out between the dry hills, goat tracks and burnt grass and the fig trees along the walls. About a kilometre out I started laughing. I couldn't help it. It wasn't a good laugh. I had to wipe my eyes with my wrist and the wind took the sound out the window, and I kept thinking, I'm alive, I'm driving, I'm still paying off a hospital bill and I'm alive. My lip had opened up again from the grinning. I tasted it and laughed harder.

I wasn't going to stop until Kalamata. That was the plan, if you can call it one. But above Areopoli there's a little church on the bend, white with a blue door, and a woman was out front sweeping the steps. I don't know why I pulled in. I needed water, maybe. I needed someone who wasn't a voice.

She was short and wiry, eighty or so, in a black dress and a black headscarf with white hair coming out the edges. She stopped sweeping when I got out of the car. She looked at my face for a good while, which I understood, because I'd seen it in the mirror at the last turn.

"You slept in that house," she said.

"Which house?"

"Don't be clever. Your lip's bitten through. Come here."

She leaned the broom on the door frame and went inside. I followed her, because it was cool in there and smelled of wax and old paper. She had a table by the side wall with a lamp on it and a ledger, a long brown one with a cracked spine and a ribbon in it. She sat and opened it without hunting for the page, as if it fell open there by itself. Her name was Despina Kourkoulas, she told me, and she kept the parish books because the priest came only on Sundays and couldn't read his own handwriting.

"I'm going to read you something," she said. "You don't have to say anything."

I didn't. She ran one finger down the margin and read it flat, the way you'd read out a grocery list. Every generation or so, the Mavrakis family had a guest. A cousin's friend, a teacher, a man who came to look at the roof. The guests were found in the vault. Not hurt. Found. She read me a few of the years and the names, and there was no cause of death in any of them, just a date and "found below."

"The last one I wrote myself," she said. "I was forty-four. Nineteen eighty-seven. A German, a restorer, Maximilian Weber. Tall, thin. Very polite, he came here to ask me the way. He was sitting on the bottom step with his lamp still lit."

She turned the page back so I could see the line. Weber, Maximilian. Her handwriting was small and square.

Then she read the other column, the one beside the names, in the same level voice. The year after the roof man, the cistern filled in a summer when nobody else's did. The year after the teacher, three sons came back from the boats in Piraeus, all of them, all in one week. After the German, a bad winter that went around the house and left it alone. She didn't say it was payment. She didn't need to. I stood there with my mouth shut and my hands in my pockets, and the key was in the right one, heavy against my leg.

I thought about Thursday. About you taking my bag before I could say no. About the way you slapped that door twice with your palm and turned me round toward the light. About the way you'd never once said I won't be long. You'd said Saturday. You'd said it three times. Two days, to the hour, for the house to do its work, and then back in time for your mother and the name-day cousins and the long tables in the yard.

Free bed. I'd have driven there for less.

"Does he know?" I said. It was the first thing out of my mouth, and my voice wasn't mine.

Despina closed the ledger and put her hand flat on the cover. "Everybody in that house knows," she said. "Some of them like it less than others." She looked at me a bit longer. "You're the first I've seen walk out of it."

I thanked her. I drank two cups of water from a tin cup she handed me, and she gave me a dry biscuit, which I ate standing in the doorway with crumbs going down my shirt. She picked the broom back up. She didn't wave.

Back on the road I drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows open. My knees were going, a fine fast tremble I couldn't stop by pressing on them. The dry hills went by, and a man on a motorbike with a gas canister strapped behind him, and a long white wall with a goat standing on it. The sun was well up and it was hot, ordinary, awful July heat, and I was in it. I was shaking so badly I had to take the bends slow, and I was grinning, and I thought, that's done. That's done, I'm out. The key clinked against my keys whenever I braked.

I felt free. I want you to know that, Stelios, I did. For about ten minutes it was the best I'd felt in three years.

The phone chimed three kilometres later. I know it was three because I'd been watching the odometer, which is a thing I do when I'm trying not to think. It was lying face up on the passenger seat on top of my map, and it gave one flat little note, then another, then a third.

I thought, signal. Two days of one bar by the salt and now the hills were handing it out for free.

I didn't pick it up right away. I drove another hundred metres or so with my eyes on the road and the phone going off beside me, and then I took it in my right hand and thumbed it open on the wheel. Three voicemails. My mother, my sister, Stelios. All three had come in within a minute of each other.

I played my mother's first, because I'm a coward, and because it was my mother.

"Dimitri." Then the cough, the dry double one, the one she does so she won't be a bother. "I'm just waiting for you to come home, love."

That was all. Four seconds. It was her voice in a way no recording of her had ever been. There was no hiss on the line, and no television going behind her. Her actual voicemails run on for a minute, and she tells me what she had for lunch and asks me to call her back, and then she calls again before I can. She'd never in her life said anything in four seconds.

I didn't brake so much as stop paying attention to the car. There was a wide dirt pull-off by a collapsed stone wall with one fig tree standing over it, and I got the car onto it and switched off the engine.

Katerina's was next. "Dimi, where are you, we're all here, just come home," and she swallowed the end of home the way she does, so it came out as "hom'." There was no edge on it. Real Katerina would have been annoyed about something, my car, my phone, my being late, my being alive and not telling her. This one was sweet all the way through.

Then you. I held the phone a little away from my face for that one.

"Dimitri." Soft. Low. That voice from the yard, when you took my bag. You said my name and then you said nothing, and the nothing was patient. You didn't complain about my breathing. You didn't mention a stamp or a lunch break or a clerk. You didn't have anywhere else to be.

I put the phone on the dashboard, screen down. The engine ticked as it cooled. A cicada started up in the fig tree, then the whole hillside came in behind it, and the heat came through the open windows and sat on my arms. It was past eleven by then and I could feel my shirt drying stiff on my back.

It took me a while to put it together, and I'm slow about these things, so I'll just say it plain. I'd shut the door. I'd turned the key and put it in my pocket and driven away, and I had actually believed a door and a key were what the whole business was about. But the voices hadn't come up from the vault because the vault was where it lived. They'd come up because I was there to be called. It had spent two nights learning my mother's cough and my sister's swallowed endings and the way you say my name when you're being nice to me, and none of that was stored in the cellar. It was in my head. And now it was in my phone as well, delivered on time, with the ends of the words right.

I'd carried it out in my pocket, next to the key. I even had the key in my pocket. I took it out and looked at it, a big black iron thing with a worn bow, and turned it over in my fingers. It was about as useful as a spoon.

I sat there a long time. The shade of the fig moved off the hood and onto the dirt. A lorry went by on the road below with a load of watermelons and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel at me. I lifted two back, like a man with nothing wrong, and then I put my face in my hands and breathed through my nose, quietly, out of habit.

I could have kept going. I want to be fair to myself on that. Kalamata was an hour and a bit away, and there was a bed there if I begged one, and a bank, and my sister who'd shout at me for being dramatic. I could have driven until the phone ran out of charge and then thrown it off a bridge, and I thought about that, quite seriously, for several minutes. It would have been simple. It would have been wrong in a way I could name, because I'd already stopped being the only one in it.

It was your mother. I'd never met her. You'd said she was coming Saturday, for the name day, with the cousins and whoever else, and I could see it without trying. A short woman in black, seventy-six years old, getting out of a car in the yard with a bag on her arm, and the aunts behind her, and the long tables going up under the fig. I could hear someone's child shouting for water. I could hear the house being opened up and the shutters flung back, and everyone being cheerful, and then at some hour of the night a kind voice from the back of the hall asking somebody to bring a lamp.

They'd answer. Of course they would. They'd never been told not to. The only warning in that whole house was in soot on a wall, and a page somebody had torn out and burned, and nobody wrote that for them.

I turned the phone over and it was still showing three little unplayed dots. I didn't listen to any of them again. I started the car.

There was no traffic to wait for. I backed off the pull-off in a cloud of dust, with the wall passing close on my left, and swung the nose round until the road ran the way I'd come, back toward the sea. The key was in my lap. The sun was straight in front of me and the air coming through the windows was hot enough that I'd stopped feeling it.

I'm telling you now, Stelios, that I knew what I was driving back to. I just couldn't see how I was going to let your mother walk into it.

I'm writing this on the roof, Stelios, on the flat bit beside the cistern, because it's the one place in your house where I can't hear the hall. It's ten at night. The stone is still giving back the day's heat through my trousers, and the cistern lid is warm enough that I've stopped leaning on it. I found a ballpoint in the kitchen drawer under the string and a pad of invoice paper in my bag. I've written on the back of eleven sheets so far. My handwriting has gone downhill since page three.

The phone's face down on the stone next to my knee. It's been going off since about nine. First my mother, then Katerina, then my mother again, then you. Each time I turn it over just far enough to read the name, and then I turn it back. Hearing them is the part that would get me. I know what they'd say, and I know it'd be lovely.

The real ones don't call me back to back like that. My mother rings, I miss it, she rings once more and leaves a long message about her knee. Katerina texts first. You, I'm fairly sure, would ring once, swear at the signal, and give up. So I let it buzz itself across the stone. It stopped a minute ago. It'll start again.

I did drive back. You'll have worked that out from the key. It's on the cistern lid by my left hand, and I'm not giving it to you yet. I turned it in the lock again when I got in, in case you were wondering, and nothing had come up while I was gone. It didn't need to. It had me on the phone.

There's a half-used bag of cement under the lean-to by the oil drums, and a trowel with dried grey on it, and a bucket. I saw them this afternoon and stood there a while. So here's the first thing, and it's yours to decide. You can seal that door. Brick it, mortar it, plaster over it so your mother never has to look at it. I'd understand that. I'd help you carry the bricks.

But you should know what it buys. I carried it out of that house in my pocket. It's in the phone now, and in my head with my mother's cough and my sister's swallowed word endings and the way you say my name when you're being kind. A wall doesn't touch any of that. It'll keep calling me. It'll keep calling anyone who's spoken to anyone it can use, for as long as I'm alive, and it'll get the voices a little better every time. I'll be forty-four in March. That's a lot of years of my father saying it's fine.

The second thing is the old arrangement. I've read it in Despina Kourkoulas's handwriting, so don't bother telling me it's a rumour. She keeps the ledger above Areopoli, in the white church with the blue door. She was forty-four herself the year she wrote the German's name, and she told me everybody in your house knows. Some of them like it less than others. I'd like to think you're one of those. I noticed you never said a word about the house at the car on Thursday.

If you keep it, keep it. That's a family matter and I'm a guest, and I've been a guest in plenty of houses where I didn't ask what was in the walls. But I want you to say it to me. Not through the thing, and not to my face on the stairs while you're being gentle. I want it said in your own voice, tired, with the clerk and the stamp and a door banging somewhere behind you. I want you to tell me whether it was me. Whether you looked at a man who can't refuse a free bed and thought, there's one. Because I did think it was a favour, Stelios. I thought I was helping you out. I was happy about it all the way down the road past Itilo, with the air conditioning dead and the water gone warm in the bottle, and I'd have gone on thinking so if the wall hadn't had writing on it.

I'm not angry the way I thought I'd be. I was, around the bend above Areopoli, and then I went through the whole of it again in the car and ended up mostly tired. I've been tired for three years, so I know the feeling. And it's hard to stay angry at a man whose phone voice complained about my breathing. My mother's name on the screen lit up the edge of the stone just now, and I let it ring out. Four rings, then the little dots. I'm not going to tell you that gets easier.

Here's what I'm going to do, and then it's all with you. I'll put these pages on the kitchen table under the icon, with the key on top so they don't blow off. I finished the beard, by the way. Or I did most of it. The left eye needs another day, and I'm not going to be the one to give it. You should know the saint is fine. He watched the whole thing and he looks better than he did on Thursday.

I'll stay up here. I've got a sheet, and the stone will hold the heat till about two. If a car comes up the road in the dark I'll hear it from here, and I'll hear whether it's yours. I'm not going down those stairs for anyone, and I'm not going to the hall for anyone either, however kind they sound. I'm not being clever about it. I just know now which voice to trust, and it's the one that isn't trying.

So pick. Mortar, or the arrangement. If it's mortar, tell me, and tell me it's because you want to, not because I made you feel bad. I'll carry the bricks and we'll find out together how long I last. If it's the arrangement, tell me that. Tell me whether it was me, and tell me plainly, because I think I've earned plain. I'd rather have it from you in a bad mood than from anyone in a good one.

Ring me, Stelios. Complain about the line. Tell me I'm breathing too loud and the clerk's still at lunch. Be short with me. Sound like a man who'd rather be anywhere else, because you would, and because that's how I'll know it's you.

The phone's going again. It's your name this time, and it's very warm and very patient, and I'm not answering it.

I'll wait for the other one.