Her heart told her that somewhere close there was a river, so she
walked and walked and walked.
Helen woke a few hours later with heavy limbs, a headache, and
dirty feet. She flopped out of bed, rinsed off the increasingly familiar
nocturnal grime, and threw on a sundress. Then she sat down at
her computer to look up the Furies.
The first website she clicked on gave her chills. As soon as she
opened it she saw a simple line drawing on the side of a pot. It was
a perfect depiction of the three horrors that had been haunting her
for days.
As she read the text under the illustration it gave a nearly
exact physical description of her sobbing sisters, but the rest confused
her. In classical Greek mythology there were three Erinyes,
or Furies, and they wept blood just as they did in Helen?s visions.
But according to her research, the Furies? job was to pursue and
punish evildoers. They were the physical manifestation of the anger
of the dead. Helen knew she wasn?t perfect, but she had never
done anything really wrong, certainly not anything that would have
earned her a visit from three mythological figures of vengeance.
As she read on, she learned that the Furies first appeared in the
Oresteia, a cycle of plays by Aeschylus. After two solid hours of untangling
what had to have been the first?and bloodiest?soap opera
in history, Helen finally got her head around the plot.
The gist of it was that this poor kid named Orestes was forced to
kill his mother because his mother had killed his father, Agamemnon.
But the mother killed the father because the father killed their
daughter, Orestes? beloved sister Iphigenia. To make it even more
complicated, the father had killed the daughter because that?s what
the gods asked for as a sacrifice to make the winds blow so the
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