The sun had already dipped below the horizon. Blue and yellow lights flickered along the shore, outlining the silhouettes of the hotels across the bay. The sea in the distance also flashed with garlands as fishermen set out to catch squid. The waves hissed over the beach and dissolved into the white sand, turning it into a smooth road as hard as concrete.

I decided not to ask Irene about anything for a while – it was obvious that memories of her childhood were hurting her and she couldn’t handle it right now.

When we reached the smooth rocks over which the stones called “Grandma” and “Grandpa” (their shapes resembled the genitals of a man and a woman) towered, she undressed, and stepping gently on the silky wool of seaweed, slid into the inky water.

“Come here!” I heard from the darkness. “It’s deep. Come on, Vik! Go, don’t be afraid.”

But the dark water always frightened me. Who knows who’s hiding in the abyss? I heard that predators come to the shore at night. Once a friend of mine almost drowned in a pioneer camp. After lights out, the boys and I ran to the sea; my friend was splashing on the shoal when a fin appeared in the distance. Although Sasha knew that there were no dangerous sharks in the Black Sea, he was so scared that he choked on the water and lost consciousness. The poor guy could hardly be saved. And it was only a dolphin that swam by…

I strained my hearing to make out the movements of a person swimming among the splashing waves, but I couldn’t make out anything.

“Hey, it’s dangerous out here!” I shouted into the darkness. “Irene, get out of the water now!”

No one answered the call.

“Irene!” I called again. “Don’t be stupid, do you hear me?”

The answer was a deafening silence. With a curse, I quickly undressed, threw off my sneakers, and then I heard laughter from somewhere off to the side. Irene emerged from behind the rocks. In the shimmering light of the young moon, her skin was silvery, like a mermaid’s. Water trickled from her hair in thin streams.

I caught my breath.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.

“Really?” She looked embarrassed for some reason. “My mother used to tell me that my appearance scared even the crows.”

“Nonsense! You know that’s not true.”

“Oh, no!” she snorted. “How should I know? Do you want to know what she used to call me? Fat caterpillar!”

She turned away in shame, covering her nakedness with her hands:

“Do not look at me.”

For a second, I thought I was looking at a resentful moth who had been taught since childhood that her wings were a sign of some morbid mutation. Wasn’t that the reason for her desperate desire to be liked by everyone, to prove to herself that she wasn’t ugly?

“Why a caterpillar?” I went over and hugged her. Her firm body was pleasantly cold. “You don’t have a drop of fat in you; look, you’re shivering like a sheep’s tail.”

“That’s now,” she snorted again. “But before, when I sat down, I used to get these nasty fat folds here, here, and here. My mother never missed an opportunity to laugh at me for them, telling me that I should eat less.’ She bullied me all the time, and after that mess with Sean, she literally went crazy, calling me all kinds of bad names and threatening to put me an asylum. And when I turned fourteen, she suspected me of sleeping with my father, can you believe it?”

“No, I can’t,” I admitted. “Where’s your dress?”

“Over there,” she nodded vaguely. “It was terrible! My mother was mad with jealousy. She spread rumors that I was out with older men, hanging out somewhere in the evenings. It was so hurtful! I had never kissed a boy before. After school, I would straight to go to the park and walk around for hours just to avoid coming home and seeing my drunk father and hearing my angry mother scream. Or I would stay late at the library. When I was a child, my father sometimes told me fairy tales before the bedtime, so I learned to read early. I especially liked “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Then there were “Jane Eyre”, “Wuthering Heights”, “Catcher in the Rye” – books about love and friendship, which replaced friends for me. By the way, it was in the library that I first heard about Freud and his psychoanalysis. So I decided to study psychology at the University of Edinburgh, where higher education is free for Scots. You know, I noticed a long time that many people who have problems with their relatives want to become psychologists, apparently hoping that their studies will help them to solve these problems.”

“Were you successful?” I wondered.

“As you can see, not so much,” she bent down to pick up her dress, pulled it over her head and slipped her feet into her flip-flops. “Shall we go?”

“Yeah. But be careful, it’s slippery.”

We walked around the rocks and back to the beach, where we sat on the sand under the stone parapet. I leaned my back against the hot wall; Irene snuggled up next to me. The stars shone brightly in the sky, the sea breathed humid warmth, and the white plumeria blossoms exuded a delicate tropical scent of lemon zest into night. I lived that scent, it seemed to come from Irene’s skin, as fresh and clean after the swim as the morning dew. It’s strange how this generally not bad girl could have fallen prey to the Dark Ones...

“You never told me why ‘they’ took you,” I turned my face to her. Did you do something wrong at the university? Did you break bad there?”

“I wish…” she sighed. “You know what they say – it’s better to do something and regret it than to regret something you didn’t do. This is my story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when I left home, it seemed to me that now I would start a new life, that I would finally become uninhibited and brave, that I would hang out in clubs, fall in love, go on dates – in a word, everything would be fine. I really wanted that. I could see that the boys on campus liked me, and they were always hitting on me, but as soon as I was tete-а-tete with one of them, my mother’s image came back to me. ‘You little slut!’ she yelled. ‘Get him out of here right now!’ So I had no choice but to push the horny suitor out the door in fear. I wanted to look like a good girl, but it turned out the other way around – the guys decided that I was just playing hard to get, that it was such a cunning trick: first to get the guy excited and then to get him out. For some reason a lot of them liked it very much. Rumors started to spread that I was a hot girl, and the number of guys who wanted to make sure of it was growing. Quite often they told me: ‘Come on, don’t be so unassailable, everyone knows who you really are, there’s no need to pretend to be a saint.’ In short, everything was the same as when I was a child at my grandmother’s house – I was considered a whore.”

“And soon I met Ilya,” her eyes flashed for a second, then went blank again. “Funny, he was from Russia too – so ambitious, so determined. He got into the business school at the university and immediately fell in love with me. He was handsome, rich, sent me flowers, gave me presents and showered me with compliments. On the third date, he told me he loved me, but nothing happened between us – just a few kisses. I did not know how to behave with him – what if someone had already told him something bad about me? But a month later he asked me to marry him.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Wow, just like that?” I almost choked. “Didn’t that surprise you?”

“Of course, I was surprised. But I thought, love at first sight can happen, why not?”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t know,” she smiled embarrassed. “I don’t think so. I just wanted to be needed by someone.”

“And you said yes?”

“Of course I did,” she nodded. “Although some of the things he said and did should have made me wary. Like hoe reluctant he was to talk about his family, mentioning only once that his father was a big official and his uncle was a real estate in Cyprus. Or the way Ilya insisted on a prenuptial agreement that would leave me with nothing in the event of a divorce.”

“Hmm, that’s really weird,” I hummed. “But you could have said no, right?”

“I could have,” she sighed. “But I didn’t want to seem selfish. We began to prepare for the wedding. But as it turned out, the Dark Ones had been after Ilya for a long time. ‘They’ needed him alone and alive, so ‘they’ decided to get rid of me.”

“How did this happen?”

“We were on our way back to campus from a weekend trip and got into a car accident,” her voice trembled. “It was terrible, Vik! My fiance survived, but my head was blown off…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” my hand touched her shoulder.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she said without looking up, drawing a few lines in the sand with her index finger.

“What happened next?”

“The White Room,” the lines in the sand turned into a circle.

“What were you doing there?”

‘The same as you,” she erased what she’d drawn with the palm of her hand. “I had a lot of fun. Not right away, of course. I cried the whole first night, couldn’t come to my senses, couldn’t believe in was over. And then The Shadow came and told me that instead of crying, I should do what I dreamed of doing. So I went to Disneyland. I always wanted to go there. Ashley and Ethan’s parents took them there when they were kids, and the boys loved it – the hunted castle, the pirate ship – but they weren’t allowed on the roller coasters yet, and I more interested in those than anything else. So I had a great time in the White Room. But then I decided to find out what Ilya was doing, if he was sad and missed me. Aha! Not only did he not miss me, but he was courting Maggie, my classmate Oh, I was so angry! I decided I’d had enough of my limitation. So I became Cleopatra.”

“What does that mean?” I don’t get in. “Did you really turn yourself into an Egyptian queen?”

“Not exactly,” she replied with a smile, “only in my imagination. In those fantasies I had a palace and a bunch of lovers crowded around my chambers.”

“And like Cleopatra, you always executed them after a night of love?”

“Do you think I’m that bloodthirsty?” she grinned. “No, it’s simpler than that, I lost interested in them.”

“And then?” I was curious.

“The fairy tale ended quickly and I ended up on the Island, where there is only one way for girls to pay off their debts. At least that’s what Randy told me…”

“Yeah, he’s a Jedi master of bullshit,” I hummed.

“And soon I found out that Ilya and Maggie had gotten married.”

“Can’t you forgive him?”

“It wasn’t about him,” she shook her head. “I’d realized by then that all he cared about was getting a British passport so he could do some shady business with his father. As for me, I thought I was different, but I wasn’t. You have no idea what I’ve been through, how low I’ve fallen. The very first night I slept with a disgusting old asshole. He came on vacation with his wife, but the first chance he got, he ran to find the girls. He bragged in the bar about what a great lover he was, but when it came down to it, he cum in two minutes and didn’t have the strength for more. I thought I was going to die. I stood in the shower for an hour and couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. In reality, it was nothing like I’d imagined. I decided that I would never go back to the brothel, I don’t want that shit, and I don’t want to be somebody’s toy.”

“Did ‘they’ let you go?”

“No, I was told: ‘If you don’t want to be a toy, play by your own rules, you have the psychology skills and grandmother’s instincts.’ From now on I could choose who to be with and who to send away, and I went almost entirely into the virtual.”

“Does that change anything?” I asked carefully.

“Nothing,” she replied silently, “but I didn’t think about it at the time. I was flattered that I always had the last word. I could spend hours on dating sites and chat rooms, relieving in the power. Men, women, it didn’t matter; that’s what the virtual world is good for. The fantasies I had mastered in the White Room were enough for me. I loved finding out the hidden thoughts and desires of my victims by tasting their sexuality. Don’t be surprised, it’s like alcohol, stronger in some, weaker in others. Some are bubbling and sparkling like champagne, and some have long since gone sour and turned into vinegar – I tried not to mess with them, preferring dry red wine. It’s like blood, just as tart and heady. I used to drink my lovers to the last drop. It was a high!”

“Did you hack my brain, too?” I pulled her pale face closer to me.

“Yes,” she lowered her eyes. “But you were different. You were like a sip of pure water; I thought there were no more men like that. You didn’t just want me; you had feelings for me…”

“And yet you ripped me off.”

“No, I didn’t Vik! Listen, are you really dead?” she looked at me doubtfully.

“What a question! Can’t you see it?”

“That’s the thing, no!” Irene whispered hotly. “I swear I didn’t want to empty you. On the contrary, I wanted it with you, but you… You were as if you were alive! I don’t know how, but you and I energized each other. Usually in sex you either give or take, but this is the firs time I’ve made love as an equal. So I’m asking you, are you really dead? Where’s your energy coming from?”

“Hmm,” I wondered. “Austin had suggested that we could generate it ourselves somehow. Whether through creativity or reflection on the past and present, I haven’t quite figured it out yet.”

“Is Austin the hermit living in the abandoned hotel?”

“Yes, he is. I think the monk opened his eyes to this theory,” I pointed towards the temple. “Over there.”

“Sure!” she rejoiced. “Why didn’t I think of this before? Have you seen him?”

“You mean the monk? Only briefly. We didn’t talk much. I think he has something to do with ‘them’,” I said casually.

But suddenly Irene confirmed my suspicion:

“You’re right. He really has a dark past, so dark that when he died ‘they’ didn’t change his residence and left him on Samchang, where he had lived before. There’s even his grave down in the cemetery. But the tourists hardly pay any attention to it – for Europeans, all Asians have the same face, although he is not Asian at all, he just looks like them. But you noticed him right away, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” I said. I couldn’t wait to know the monk’s story. “What happened to him after that?”

“He turned against his colleagues,” Irene replied. “The Dark Ones thought that by taking him on as a partner, ‘they’ would have a loyal ally and be able to get their energy mining going, but Gee ruined those plans. He would not forgive the betrayal, and their paths parted.”

“Lord!” I groaned. “What kind of betrayal? Who the hell is Gee? Who the hell is he?”

“Who?” Irene was surprised “The monk. Gee Kerrigan is his real name.”

She stopped talking, then got up and said she had to go. I was dying to know what happened next, but she obviously didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Well, okay. What’s stopping me from meeting the monk myself? I’ll wait for another day-off at the club and find out everything.

To be continued