The Mask of Atreus Read Online Free PDF Page A

She checked the bathroom, then went back out onto the landing, calling his name. She had just invaded his private sanctuary for the first time since taking the job; skulking around no longer seemed necessary or appropriate. She paused on the landing, then drifted back into his bedroom at a loss. There was absolutely no sign of him. Given what you had been afraid of finding, she thought, you should be comforted by finding nothing . She wasn't.
    She sat on his hard bed and glanced around the room. It was, thanks to Tonya, immaculate as ever. There was a pad of paper on the bedside table by the phone, and Richard had scribbled something on it in his spidery handwriting, but other than that, everything was neat and orderly, the furniture carefully aligned, the vast bookcase which lined the wall perfectly stacked and dust-free. Deborah bit her lip and leaned over to peer at the scribbling on the nightstand pad. It was a single word, circled several times and punctuated with a brace of question marks: Atreus??
    Deborah stared at it, feeling the dim stirring of an old memory, a literary memory; then she brushed it away. Where the hell is he?
    She put her head in her hands and saw something on the floor, half concealed by the oversized bedspread, as if accidentally kicked under the bed. She reached down and picked it up. It was a fragment of pottery, tightly concave like part of a very round jug, and it was painted. On a soft turquoise 24
    A. J. Hartley
    background was a fragment of a female head in profile, the eye large and almond-shaped, the hair in dark ringlets. It looked like a cartoon or a sketch but was full of a casual--
    almost flippant--grace and energy. She held it up to the light and rubbed the surface between her fingers, suddenly sure that it was not just some broken knickknack: It was old. Nothing from any period in North America's history looked like this, she was almost certain. It looked familiar, but familiar in a way that said she had seen comparable pottery before, not identical. Ancient Egyptian? No, it was too alive, the face too coquettish. It might be that old but . . . She couldn't be sure. Mesopotamian? Assyrian? No. And anyway, if it really was old, what was it doing there? The museum had no classical antiquities. She looked at it again. Greek maybe?
    The word on the pad, circled and dotted with question marks, popped back into her head: Atreus . That was Greek too.
    Atreus was one the descendents of Tantalus in Greek mythology, right? His brother . . . There was something to do with his brother, or his children . . . She couldn't remember. She moved to the vast bookcase across the south wall of the bedroom and considered the book spines. Maybe there would be something in there on Greek mythology.
    There was. In fact, as she moved across the face of the shelves, she let out a half whistle of bewildered amazement. Every one of what probably numbered four hundred volumes was somehow about ancient Greece: mythology, history, archaeology, politics, poetry, culture, art, philosophy. She pulled a heavy volume claiming to be An Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and flicked to the Atreus entry, reading dreamily, unsure of exactly what she was doing, what she was looking for.
    Richard. You're looking for Richard.
    It was no wonder she had remembered the name. Atreus was the head of the ruling line of Mycenae, the great citadel of Bronze Age Greece, from whose lion-carved gate, said 25
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    legend, Agamemnon had led the army which laid siege to Troy for ten years. It was his cursed house that had torn apart generation after generation in bloody feuds, dividing brothers, children, spouses, exacting the most terrible of vengeances in acts too appalling to be spoken: fratricide, patricide, matricide, human sacrifice, incest, cannibalism. Deborah closed the book and stared at the fragment of ceramic in her hand as other student memories of Bronze Age history and archaeology surfaced and slotted