The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Horror
Google: xm4sAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2009-09-22T06:00:00+00:00

I find it rather surprising now that these events did not have more effect on me at the time. Perhaps it was because the mind goes numb when it encounters what it cannot understand; and I had been, as the Ancient Greeks used to say, “a donkey at the Mysteries”. So I simply continued my tour of Greece and saw many lovely things. If there was a change in me, it was that I was less earnestly interested in the classical antiquity of the places I visited, and more generally concerned with their beauty and their people.

In this way I came to the Meteora in central Northern Greece to the East of the Pindus mountains. The place is famous for the strange rock towers, great bony fists of stone, that thrust their way upwards from the Thessalian plain. The wind whistles round them with a sound like the sea, and on them are perched the monasteries of the Meteora. Some are inhabited by large colonies of monks, and these are the most accessible and frequently visited ones, but I was determined to visit them all if I could.

The Monastery of St Simeon can only be reached by coming up from the valley floor and climbing the several hundred steps that are carved into the living rock of the pinnacle. I met no one during my ascent. At the top of the steps I rang a bell at the monastery gate. A dark-robed monk with a long black beard, sunglasses and a limp answered my summons and in perfect silence escorted me round his domain, of which he was the sole human inhabitant. At the top of some clumsy wooden steps a cat arched its back and stared at us with indifference. The monk showed me the winch and pulley system by which he hauled up provisions from the ground below, then he took me to a chapel stained with mildew but painted all over with scenes from the life of Christ.

He moved about the chapel silently pointing out to me the various images painted on the walls. Several times I noticed him staring at me; then, with a sudden, impulsive movement, he led me over to a tiny side altar, no more than an apsidal niche.

In the apse was the fresco of a scene which I later identified as the Anastasis: the Harrowing of Hell. Jesus, in a dynamic pose, unusual for the conventionally iconic style of painting, is dragging the dead from their tombs, his whole body redolent of the energy of the Risen Christ. I have come across this image many times since in Greek Orthodox iconography, but one detail, as far as I know, was unique to this particular image. The figure on the right whom Christ is dragging by the arm from his sarcophagus, was here being held back by a curious, pale, toad-like creature whose two long forelimbs were clasped round the man’s legs. The spectator is witnessing a moment of perfect equilibrium and suspense, the outcome of which remains forever uncertain.

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