The Girl in the Empty Room

by Neil Randall

  In fear of his life, de Maria rounded up what was left of his men, and ordered an instant return to The Marauder. Only this time they were to form in tight flanks, one column of soldiers covering the other, with mounted patrols on either side, whom would, every five hundred or so yards, fire a volley of shots into the air. In this fashion, they hoped to both startle and warn off any would-be attackers planning to ambush them.

  And it worked. Through the rest of the day until nightfall, there were no reported incidents or fatalities.

  Only when they reached the shoreline did they have any cause to be suspicious. The burnt-out remnants of the entire settlement had been cleared, all the charred corpses removed (to where it was impossible to say), there was no rubble or debris of any kind, even the sand had been swept clean – as if nothing untoward had happened here at all.

  “I don’t like it,” de Maria whispered to Velázquez. “If Wanayama’s people did all this, then surely they would’ve sabotaged our rowing boats, surely they would’ve ventured aboard The Marauder.”

  “Agreed,” said Velázquez. “Therefore, we must prepare for battle. We must board the smaller vessels with our weapons primed, for surely they must be lying in wait for us, out there, on the ship.”

  But when they approached the galleon, rifles aimed, they encountered nothing but the soft sound of water lapping against the vessel’s vast hull.

  “Climb aboard, Garcia,” de Maria ordered. “Search the ship, down below, compartment by compartment.”

  Ten minutes later, Garcia reappeared.

  “Nothing stirs, Captain,” he shouted, leaning over the bow. “Everything is just as we left it.”

  Relieved yet still wary, de Maria told his men to climb aboard and immediately set sail for home. While undoubtedly a failure, the mission was not without its positive points. They still had the valuable objects they had taken from Wanayama’s tribe to show for their efforts. Moreover, his chief navigation officer had charted the entire voyage, the findings of which would prove invaluable in the future.

  “Push off, lads,” shouted de Maria, on the main deck, wrenching his filthy tunic off over his head.

  “Captain!” said Velázquez. “Come quickly. Look. Natives are crowded on the shore.”

  Bare-chested, de Maria dashed over.

  “What the –!”

  On the beach, to the sound of beating drums, hundreds, if not thousands of Indians in full battle dress waved spears and flaming torches in the air, chanted and shrieked, while performing some kind of aggressive, ritualized dance.

  “Good Lord!” cried de Maria. “I – I don’t understand it. If there were so many of them, then why didn’t they attack us, crush us, take revenge for killing their spiritual leader?”

  “Best not to question, Sir,” said Velázquez. “Best we concentrate on getting ourselves home.”

  But The Marauder never made it back to Spanish waters.

  Ten months later, the ship was found floating off the Cape of Good Hope. When officers from an English trading vessel boarded, they found a scene of pestilential horror, the air stolid with the stench of death and decay, of rotting human flesh. All crew members were dead; the corpses in a terrible state of decomposition, indicating that the ship had been floating unmanned for weeks. Most gruesome of all, each man’s genitals were oozing a black festering substance. On closer inspection, removing the trousers from one corpse, the entire groin region, including the sex organs, perineum and anus were covered with an oily rash, the likes of which the chief medical officer had never encountered before.

  “Mummy,” said Jesse, running over to the bench. “Can we play football now?”

  “Course you can, darling.” Katie rummaged around in her bag and pulled out a cheap plastic football. “There you go.” She rolled it to Jesse; who kicked it over to the other children, who, in turn, rushed over to a five-a-side goal, shouting at each other, vying for different positions: who was going to go in goal, who was going to be Wayne Rooney or Christiano Ronaldo.

  “The Boge!” said Ryan, lighting a cigarette. “Christ, can that man tell a story, used to put on different voices, wave his hands around in the air, stalk up and down the caravan, like he was up on-stage, performing.”

  “And what was the other part of the story?” asked Katie. “Didn’t you say something about history repeating itself, a serial killer, a descendant of the chief?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He exhaled a cloud of wispy smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Apparently, hundreds of years later, there was a series of unexplained murders in America, on the West Coast, right near where the original indigenous settlements had been excavated.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Story of Chief Wanayama (Part Two)

  The small town of Nattawa had fallen on hard times. Always in the shadow of the big city metropolises situated a few hundred miles up the coast, since the collapse of the logging industry the area had suffered a serious economic downturn – high unemployment, low wages, a real lack of hope and opportunity. With a population of just over two thousand, a high proportion of which had Indian blood, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened in Nattawa, local people simply struggled along, living very much hand to mouth.

  That was until oil was found near ancient burial grounds, a nature reserve awaiting World Heritage Status, a great swathe of relatively unspoiled land which Native American descendants considered to be holy, sacred, their own.

  When a big multinational corporation was granted permission to drill there, the local community was up in arms, petitions were signed, protest marches organised, but nothing could stop the wheels of global capitalism from turning. Within three months of a court injunction being dismissed, hundreds of heavy-duty vehicles descended upon Nattawa, temporary buildings were erected to house the workforce, drilling platforms constructed, blighting the countryside. All that could be heard through the night was the chug-chug pounding of industrial apparatus, the dull incessant hum of generators, the march of so-called progress.

  Two days after the drilling operation commenced, one of the workmen, a nineteen-year-old Texan, away from home for the first time, was found horrifically murdered in woodland near the temporary sleeping quarters. His injuries were extensive. He had been scalped in the traditional Indian manner, had had his throat cut, and was suffering from a bizarre sexual complaint, his entire genital region covered in a black rash oozing a slick oily substance. What troubled police most, however, was the card left on the body. The same shape and dimension as a standard business card, it displayed the silhouetted outline of a Native American, complete with feathered headdress, like the images of Sitting Bull or Hiawatha that had become ingrained in the public consciousness.

  As the killing bore all the hallmarks of a ritual Indian murder, Sheriff Roscoe Peterson and his deputy, Eugene Vinton, went from household to household interviewing all local people with Native American blood. But nearly everyone they questioned had cast-iron alibis, were either at home with their families or working nights when the murder took place – relatives and co-workers verified this.

  At the end of each interview, Peterson pulled out a photograph of the card left at the scene.

  “Now, have you ever seen this image before?”

  “Why yes,” said Moonbeam River, from the first household the sheriff visited. “That is a depiction of the great Chief Wanayama.”

  “Wanayama? Who’s he?”

  Moonbeam told the Sheriff the story about the Chief, the legend passed down through generations, how evil forces, white men who’d travelled across vast oceans, destroyed an entire settlement, murdering and raping innocents, how they had burnt Wanayama alive, and how the great chief had returned in spirit form to curse them, infecting them with the black mark of death.

  Peterson gave a start.

  “What was that you said ‘bout the black mark of death?”

  Later, as the two policemen climbed into a squad car, Vinton said, “what do you make of all that, Sheriff?” />
  “Just a load of superstition nonsense, Eugene. Best we don’t pay it no mind.”

  The coroner who performed the autopsy concluded that the victim had died of blood loss due to the savage wounds to the back of the head and throat. However, he was completely baffled by the black rash. After taking various swabs, testing blood and urine, he found traces of some kind of sexual infection, but an infection unlike any recorded before. In need of a second opinion, he sent pictures of the rash and the results of the blood and urine tests to a renowned specialist in the field.

  Next day, security at the complex was heightened. At night, armed guards patrolled the perimetre fence with sniffer dogs. But, incredibly, the following morning, thirteen men were found dead in their bunks, all scalped and with gaping wounds to the neck, the same hideous rash to the genital region, and all with identical calling cards left on their bodies.

  The governor called a state of emergency. Drilling was suspended. Federal Agents flew in to take over the investigation.

  On arrival, Special Agent Dwayne Macmillan, a highly experienced, steely-haired man of fifty-two, surveyed the crime scene, walking around the compound, checking each and every possible point of entry.

  He shared his findings with his team.

  “In my opinion, there’s no way an assailant or assailants could’ve entered the compound, not to mention the sleeping quarters – and remember, a guard was stationed by the door at all times – and not have alerted anyone, especially when we consider the violence of the murders themselves. If we were dealing with one killing, maybe two, the chain of events wouldn’t be so hard to piece together, or believe for that matter, but to have gone from bed to bed hacking away at the top of a man’s head with a machete on thirteen separate occasions, and not have caused a serious disturbance is, again, beyond the realms of all possibility.”

  “What are you saying then, Sir?”

  “I’m saying that we’re clearly dealing with a highly irregular situation here, son. I’m saying that we may well be dealing with something beyond our usual comprehension.”

  Within twelve hours, the coroner received a reply from the specialist he had contacted.

  After undertaking rigorous tests, I’m still at a loss as how to classify this highly contagious sexual infection. Its origins and make-up are so unusual it leads me to believe that it is a manmade, synthetic virus, probably produced in a laboratory, one that is as contradictory as it is potentially devastating. I will undertake various other tests, consult with colleagues, and update you with my findings.

  It wasn’t long before the national press took an interest in the macabre events. One reporter from NBC News tapped into the Native American angle, the fact that drilling operations were taking place on ancient burial grounds that may well have caused outrage and resentment. Like the Sheriff, he started interviewing all families with Indian bloodlines.

  “What do you think happened up at the compound, all the grisly murders?”

  “In all likelihood,” said Moonbeam River, “the spirit of Chief Wanayama has been disturbed, and now he is inflicting a grave vengeance on those who attempt to desecrate land sacred to our people.”

  With the drilling area cordoned off pending a full investigation, the workforce, instead of returning to their homes, some of which were thousands of miles away, took board and lodgings in town. Spending most of their time drinking in local bars the men were soon at a loss as to what to do with themselves.

  “Hey, guys,” a journeyman worker from North Carolina was heard to say one afternoon. “I hear there be one of the best little whorehouses on the West Coast just thirty or so miles away. So why don’t we rustle up some form of transportation, and get ourselves out there for a bit of fun, a bit of poon-tang? Sure beats sitting on our hands in a dive like this, drinking ourselves into a stupor.”

  After consulting with the barkeep, the men hired a van, piled into the back, and drove out to the whorehouse.

  Across town at the local police station, Macmillan had run a check on any crimes, nationwide, that could in any way be connected to the Nattawa killings – incidents with a similar M.O., of scalping and throat-cutting, anomalies to the genital regions. After dismissing a few tenuous leads, cases that involved machete attacks, usually racially-motivated, cases of revenge or self-defense, where predominately white aggressors had been found scalped, a seemingly unrelated matter caught his eye. In the mid-seventies, homosexual men on the West Coast were struck down by a mysterious sexual infection, one which baffled doctors, and proved untreatable, even with the most advanced anti-viral medication. In all, over ten thousand men eventually died of the virus or related illnesses. Despite considerable medical research into the outbreak, no real conclusions were ever drawn as to its origins or how to control it in the future.

  Early next morning, the sheriff’s office received a phone call.

  “Sheriff, yo’ better get yo’ ass out to Mandy’s place,” said the cleaning woman of the region’s only legalized brothel. “Some Goddamn maniac only gone and killed ’em all.”

  A bloodbath. Some fourteen young men, eleven prostitutes, the proprietor, two bartenders, and seven additional staff members had all been murdered in the same horrific manner as the men at the drilling site – scalped, throats cut – and all had the identical sexual infection.

  Macmillan arrived about half an hour after the sheriff and his deputy.

  “What have we got here, Sheriff?”

  “A massacre, Sir. Some lunatic went on a rampage, looks like he used the same kind of machete as in the previous murders, looks like this is the same boy who go done the other killings.”

  Already forensic teams were busy collecting evidence from the scene.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Macmillan as he walked from room to room, looking at one bloodied corpse after another. “What on –?”

  “Sir.” Vinton caught up with Macmillan on the upstairs landing. “We just found this on the counter in the bar area out back.” He handed him a card with the image of an Indian chief on it. “The same one that was found near the other victims.”

  “So it would seem.” Macmillan studied the card in his hand. “And like the murders at the compound, it’s impossible to believe that this is the work of one man. No. We must be dealing with a team of maybe six or seven here. There’s no other credible explanation.”

  Initial reports from forensics only further muddied the waters. There was no finger- or footprints corresponding to any assailants entering or leaving the scene. In none of the rooms, where men had been copulating with prostitutes, was there evidence of third party contamination, despite the fact two people had been murdered in the most brutal manner, a manner which had to leave some sort of trace.

  “What does all this mean?” said Macmillan, galled by such a baffling report. “That we’re dealing with some kind of ghostly apparition.”

  “As far as physical evidence goes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Sir.”

  To placate local residents, as much as to avert a national scandal, negative press on a huge scale (environmentalists held big sway in congress), the multinational corporation suspended all drilling activities on an indefinite basis. As a further act of goodwill, they cleared the area they had violated, and made a substantial financial contribution to World Heritage, should the area be granted status in the coming years, monies which could help fund improvements and regeneration of the town to facilitate future tourism.

  The killings stopped, the case, which remains open to this very day, was never solved, and medical research into the sexual infection proved inconclusive.

  In the days after the burial site had been vacated, the region was subjected to torrential rain- and thunderstorms, an exponential amount of rain falling in an incredibly short space of time. Business premises as well as residential properties suffered severe flood damage, locals were displaced, and another state of emergency called. In the confusion, the ferrying of those affected to places of refuge – the town hall,
the local school – residents reported seeing a strange and terrifying sight across the plains, the image of an Indian chief conducing forks of lightning all across the burial grounds. And although no-one could provide any corroboratory evidence, the Native American families were certain it was the sprit of Wanayama finally reclaiming his holy land from the evil white man.

  “But the most fucked-up thing about the whole story,” said Ryan, tossing another cigarette to the ground, “were the calling cards the killer left behind, ’cause the Boge pulls a card from one of his drawers, all crumpled and blood-spattered, saying it was one of the original cards found on the murder victims. And it was the exact same image he proposed Jacque get tattooed on her forearm.”

  “What ? That’s weird.”

  “Yeah, but what’s weirder was that Jacque was well up for it now, said she understood the symbolism, what the tattoo would represent, went on about freedom and injustice, spirituality, and how she really identified with Chief Wanayama, all that hippy shit she used to spout when she’d been smoking and drinking.

  “The whole thing really freaked me out, ’cause as the Boge was halfway through the tattoo I noticed all these machetes in his caravan, hanging from hooks on the walls, just like the ones he was describing, the ones used to scalp people.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “It is exciting, no?” Katarina skipped along the dirt-track, now and then stepping up onto a grassy bank to avoid the puddles pooled in deep, wide ruts.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Agna followed on behind, treading in her friend’s footmarks, being careful not to get her shoes wet. “Perhaps we should turn back.”

  “Come on,” Katarina said over her shoulder. “All we do is work, work, work, wake up, go to the factory, sort through frozen chips and waffles, boring, boring, boring. Now we have the day off, why not explore the countryside? This is a very nice part of the world, beautiful. It feels like we haven’t been outside in the fresh air since we got here.”