SAID PAPASTAMOS, “but you should have. What? You think the Greeks are ignorant of these things? Greeks, of all people? Listen, I was a boy in Phaestos on the island of Crete, born and lived there until I was thirteen. Then I went to my sister in Athens. But I never forgot the myths of the islands, and I never forgot what I saw and heard there. Did you know that there are places in Greece even now where they put the silver coins on the eyes of the dead, to keep them closed? Hah! Those slits in the eyes of Layard. He kept opening his eyes!” Darcy said to him: “Manolis, how could we know? If you took a hundred people and told them you were hunting a vampire, how many do you think would believe you?” “Here in Greece, in the Greek islands, ten or twenty,” the other answered. “Not the young peoples, no, but the old ones who remember. And up in the mountains—in the mountain villages of Karpathos, for example, or Crete, or better still in Santorin—maybe seventy-five out of a hundred!
