by Knox, Tom
Jake winced. Tyrone snatched up a menu.
“Hey, I’m hungry. Aren’t you? Must be. You’ve probably been eating bees for a few days, no? In Laos? You gotta love that variety.” Tyrone turned to the attendant waiter. “Burger, please. Rare. Properly rare. Aw kohn!”
“I’ll have the … the pad thai. Whatever. Thanks. Aw kohn.” Jake handed the menu to the waiter, who executed a wai, then returned to the kitchen.
Tyrone was quiet for a moment, then he turned to Jake.
“There’s one other thing that worries me. Your story.”
“Yes?”
“One bit you skipped over.”
“What?”
Tyrone spoke quietly. The moon was sickly yellow in the sky behind him.
“Jake. You say those police cars coming after you—one of them hit a bomb or a mine.”
“Yes.”
“And possibly some cops were thrown, maybe injured—even killed?”
“I’m not sure. I saw one of them stumble out. Jesus. Jesus Christ … of course—”
The ugly reality dawned on Jake, like he’d woken to a nasty breakfast. The police car that exploded. Now he dwelled on it, conceptually, for a moment—it was obvious. Trouble. Serious trouble. They wouldn’t just let this go. Would they?
Tyrone summed it up: “Maybe a cop died, maybe he didn’t, but that’s serious. Add it to the doctor’s death—murder or suicide—and you have a very serious incident. Perhaps the Lao government will forget about the problem, rather than publicize it.” He squinted at Jake. “That is possible. But maybe they won’t just forget it. They could go through the Cambodian authorities, ask them to arrest you. Or someone might just quietly tell someone … who hires someone. Maybe you should watch your back on Monivong Boulevard.”
The scorpion of fear scuttled down Jake’s collar, under his shirt, and down his spine. He shivered at the sensation. Red-haired, war-chewed old Tyrone McKenna was surely right. Watch your back on Monivong.
Jake stood. He felt ill at ease again, very ill at ease.
“I need a leak.”
Turning on a heel, he crossed the bar to the toilets. He unzipped and sighed, and gazed anxiously out the bathroom window at the river. On both riverbanks, people were out walking. Poor families were frying eggs in braziers on patches of scruffy grass. Bonfires burned. The squid sellers hawked their racks of dried translucent squid. Dried and swaying, like the kun krak.
Jake felt the scorpion move under his shirt. The fear. This city: it always got to him. He found Phnom Penh addictive in its anarchy and energy and exoticism, but it was also a truly harrowing city. Menacing by day and haunted at all times. A city spooked by an unknown future—and a tragic and appalling past.
Down there on those crowded boulevards, on Monivong and Sisowath and National Highway 5, the Khmer Rouge had marched two million townspeople, out of the city, in two sunburned days in April 1975: they had cleared the whole capital as soon as they had won the civil war. People were tipped from hospital beds and forced to walk. The elderly who stumbled were left to dehydrate in the gutter. Children were lost in the chaos and never found again. The capital city was emptied, society was deconstructed, all was dissolved. Two days.
They even blew up the central bank, destroying all the money in the country, sending banknotes and government bonds flying into the shattered streets. The banknotes hung for weeks from the wilting jacaranda trees, like old confetti. Money was officially useless. And then the Khmer Rouge sent the nation into slavery, and they worked and starved a quarter of the population to death, and bludgeoned half a million more. Killing their own parents, their own sons, their own brothers, their own families. Devouring themselves in an orgy of self-harm. The nation that hated itself. The nation that killed itself.
His phone was ringing. It was Chemda.
Her voice was an urgent whisper.
“I got a call from Agnès, in Luang.”
“And?”
“One of the hotel workers, a bellboy. He confessed. He put the things in our rooms.”
“But why—”
“He was told to do it. The smoke babies were ordered, by the kra, the Neang Kmav of Skuon.”
“The who? Who is that?”
The line hissed and deadened for a moment. “Sorry, Jake. I—” The voice was gone, then it returned. “My mother is crying. The whole family is in chaos. Have to go—maybe I can call you back—”
The call ended. Jake waited for a moment, and another moment, and nothing happened. Slipping the phone into his pocket, he returned to his bar stool. His plate of pad thai was sitting on the table. Tyrone was already assaulting his burger. Jake picked up his knife and fork, but he didn’t feel remotely hungry anymore. His stomach was full of fluttering nerves. He had already dined, too much, on fear and angst.
He told Tyrone what Chemda had told him. Tyrone stopped eating.
“The Neang Kmav of Skuon?”
“What? What is the Kmav? What is Skuon?”
Tyrone looked atypically rattled. “Skuon is a small town near here. They eat spiders there. Tarantulas.”
“What?”
“And the Neang Kmav is the Black Lady, a notorious fortune-teller who lives there.” Tyrone was shaking his head. “It sounds like a stupid cartoon, but that … that is bad news.”
“But—”
“She’s an extremely powerful sorceress, one of those Khmer witch doctors that gets hired by Thai generals, Malay sultans, Chinese billionaires. Jake, this is the spider witch of Skuon we’re talking about. The spider witch of Skuon.” He gazed at Jake’s frightened face. “Hey. Chillax. At least if she turns you into a frog it will make a good headline.”
14
The air was still and cold above the Cham des Bondons. The stars looked down, protectively, on the standing stones. And on Annika’s little cottage, in the abandoned village. Vayssière.
Hunched over her laptop in the low-ceilinged sitting room, Annika was drinking wine and typing furiously. And drinking wine.
Her fingers paused. She squinted. The ambient light was rich and low and yellow in the room, cast by her antique table lamp with the lemon silk shade. The light from her screen was harsher, and brighter—and it stung her eyes.
Or was this stinging actually tears? Annika rarely if ever cried. She was proud of her scientific logic; she was proud of her coolness. But the emotion of confessing, after so long, was profound. Agony and relief at the same time. Because it was so hard to be honest. That’s why she was drinking, that’s why she was drunk: she needed the courage to do this. To wrench the lies away.
The years of complicity and deceit, with Ghislaine, meant the deceit had become part of her, grown deeply into her being. She was like one of those sad old trees on the Cham: a tree that had grown too close to barbed wire, so that the tree had eventually grown around the wire, and absorbed it, slowly and painfully, until the cruel iron wire was part of the tree itself. But she had to rip out the lies, because they were killing her, slowly.
Another slug of wine. Côtes du Rhone.
Her fingers tapped again, for a minute or more. She was an expert typist, even after a bottle of red. Yet now she had reached the crux. This needed a pause. A significant pause. And a deep breath.
Annika stared through the small open window of her living room, across the barren Cham. The silhouetted and distant stones looked like Victorian scholars, dressed in black and posed in thought. The chill autumn wind was gusting through the window, making her shiver.
Werewolves. Werewolves on the Margeride. Sometimes she wondered what exactly was out there. She knew it was something terrible. She didn’t know it all, but she knew enough, and that’s what she had to confess, before it was too late. Just tell the plain truth. Because the truth was terrifying enough, and more terrifying than any werewolf.
But first—another slurp of wine. Some more courage. Another pause.
She stood and stepped and leaned to the window, swaying slightly, gazing into the darkness. W
aiting. Waiting for what? Death. Or worse.
The wind answered her questions, the cold, cold wind and nothing else. Shivering in the chill, she shut the window tight, and her heart filled her throat with terror at the face she saw.
But then she almost laughed, in shock. It was herself, reflected: she was gasping at her own reflection in the dark glazing. The living room interior, unlit and reflected.
Momentarily, she regarded her own aging face. How would she describe it? How did one describe a face? How accurate could one be with just a glimpse?
A few days ago, someone had come forward with a description of the possible killer, or, at least, of someone acting suspiciously near Ghislaine’s house, on the night the archaeologist was butchered. A neighbor had been walking his dog along the semirural road near Marvejols and had glimpsed a strange figure over a hedge. Why would anyone be skulking in a field on a very dark and wet evening?
But the description of the killer was so bizarre: short, slender, very probably a young woman; long dark hair, a chalky-white face. Could a woman do all that? It seemed a little incredible. Something else was assuredly out there. Something stronger, stranger, more brutal than the police conceived. And more people were dying. Annika had to confess, to admit what she knew—before the murders got worse, before they were completed.
Annika walked back to her desk, wineglass in hand, gazing around the room as she paced: at her pictures from the Ice Age caves: of the mute and wounded Hands of Gargas, the great black frieze of Niaux.
This tableau of a life seemed slightly insulting now. Once, these pictures, these mementos, they had meant everything—truly everything—but now all this, her life’s work, the ceaseless work and the tireless lies and the childless journey she had shared with Ghislaine, it was a historical, ideological, and actual dead end: it had literally ended in death.
Ghislaine had been cut open like the bison of Lascaux, his intestines falling to the floor. And more people would follow if Annika did not confess. There was no reason to maintain the deception one moment longer.
She set down her glass with an unsteady and unhappy hand, and she pulled out her chair, and she sat at her lonely desk, and reopened her e-mail. But even as she tapped the first words she hesitated. There was a large, agitated shadow on the wall. Cast by a moth. The moth must have flown in before she shut the window, and now the insect was trapped in the lampshade, its little wings beating desperately.
The dying struggle of the moth made the lamplight flicker on the walls, animating the pictures: the Hands of Gargas opened and closed, showing the severed fingers; the dying boys of Addaura struggled in the dust, watched by the men with sinister beaks.
Annika tried to type, to continue. But the moth was so desperate, trapped and hysterical.
Enough. Her thoughts were unraveling, the tears were not far away. She needed to rescue the moth, remove this last distraction, and then return to her computer and write it all down.
Approaching the lamp stand, she reached her hands inside the shade. A subtle shiver drove through her as she touched the madly flapping wings of the moth; she still nurtured childhood fears of moths trapped in her hair, flying into the mouths of sleepers, choking them on dusty wings.
An absurd phobia. Clutching her hands carefully, Annika caught the struggling thing between her fingers, caging it, not killing it. Slowly she moved to the nearest window, a small, leaded medieval window; it was unlatched. She just had to nudge the handle with her elbow and she could release the moth into the night. Just like this.
A white face passed in the darkness outside.
The shock was arctic. Liquidly chilling. What was that? What had she seen? Surely she had seen a face: it was meters away, a chalky-white face, staring, barely visible in the gloom, like a ghost. And now it was gone.
But had she? Had it even been there? Yes, perhaps no. Perhaps yes. She was quite drunk. Maybe she had imagined it. Her thoughts were fierce and turbulent and melting. She calmed herself as best she could. It was probably her deeper anxiety making her foolish—she had surely imagined it, and now it was gone. So she could return to her computer.
A noise rattled across the garden.
Annika spoke, timidly.
“Hello?”
It was so black out there, almost moonless. A deserted village with no streetlights. A dark so dark it could play tricks. But there—there!—that noise again. Was it just the wind, rattling an ancient door—or something lurking among the crumbling walls, maybe in the neighboring, wholly ruined cottage.
Annika leaned farther out of the tiny window.
“Bonsoir? Hello?” Were these words in her head? It was all doubt. “Is there someone there?” She felt absurd as she did this. A drunken old woman imagining things, talking to the silence; it was the last indignity.
Silence. Then more silence. Annika pulled back a fraction.
The face loomed again. The white face was rushing toward the window at incredible speed.
Annika choked with shock.
A dark hand was reaching in. Gripping her.
Who was this?
What was this? An angry face, showing animal anger, growling, murderous. Bestial. Shameless. And now the body of this white-faced creature was pouring through the open window, pushing her back, hands enormously strong, muffling her mouth, all over her. Annika was grabbed by the throat and her arms and her legs: she was grappled by something unexpectedly and luridly powerful. Like a monster. A childhood monster.
A jab of sharp pain pierced her neck, just under her chin. She had been injected. At once she felt the cold of paralysis slam into every limb, yet her brain was quite functional, she could sense and think and fear, and feel her heart straining at the terror.
Annika tried to scream—but the paralysis was too strong. Yet she could feel pain, too, searing pain. She was being dragged by the killer, this brutish mutant, this beast from Gévaudan. She was being dragged out of her sitting room by her own hair, yanked at the roots in her scalp.
Her hip bone banged against a table; now she was in the kitchen, her elbows knocking against the fridge, the oven, the door. The kitchen door. Lights dazzled her eyes and then more lights, and then she felt coldness and darkness. They were outside. She was being dragged over the front doorstep and along. By her hair.
The attacker was effortlessly potent. Annika was tugged and pulled all the way down her path, past her trash cans, past her little flower bed, out onto the track that led to the Cham des Bondons. Sharp, cold skies sang the night; Capricorn spun above her.
Where were they going? The stones? It had to be. She, it, this white-faced thing, this monster was dragging Annika to the stones. Again the Belgian woman tried to scream; again she heard nothing. Had she gone deaf?
No. She wasn’t deaf. She could hear the coarse and rasping breaths of the killer, the animal-like panting. She could hear the sounds of her own body slishing over the dewy turf as she was hauled along by the hair.
The stones awaited.
The nearest stone to her cottage was one of the tallest, the Soldier, three brutal meters of impervious granite, a pillar of black in the black of the night: she saw it coming toward her. The stone was standing like an executioner, medieval, in a horrible black hood, waiting to do a silent duty. The killer lifted Annika into position. He, she, it—this thing jerked back Annika’s head. The monster was going to smash her head against the rock. Just slam her skull into the stone, crushing the cranium. The front of the cranium. Yes, of course.
In her last moments Annika thought of her e-mail, in her laptop, waiting. Pulsing in the light. Unfinished. Everything she had done in her life had come to nothing; even this one last attempt at honesty. The first hot tears ran down Annika’s face as she stared up at the sky, as the killer pulled her head back as far as it would go. Ready. Ready to slam her forehead against the rock. To smash open her skull and pulp her living brain.
Annika wept for the end of her life. The stars above the stones were like a million firefli
es, in a dark and freezing jungle.
15
The road out of Phnom Penh, once the road of ghosts, was now a cavalcade of makeshift Asian capitalism run amok: cyclos and fuming buses and whining motos and angry Mercedes passing impromptu gas stations where tinkers sold bottles of pilfered gasoline from suspended glass vessels. The liquid in the big upside-down bottles was blood-red and urine-yellow. Jake thought of men turned on their heads, leaking blood.
“Yes,” said Ty. “Let’s try the National, the new one in Abu Dhabi.”
Tyrone was sitting next to Jake in the back of the taxi, but Ty was apparently talking to someone in Jakarta. Or maybe Sydney. Or Hong Kong. He was schmoozing and huckstering, pitching and charming.
Jake envied Tyrone his contacts and his ruthless ambition, almost as much as he envied Tyrone his war stories, that elegant war weariness. Oh yeah, Bosnia, been there, done that, saw a brain in the road. Jake did sometimes wonder if Tyrone actually played up to the image of the cynical, war-weary correspondent; perhaps Ty had molded his persona to fit the cliché.
Whatever the answer, Tyrone McKenna had been doing it long enough that he really had become the stereotype, par excellence. The hard-bitten hack with hair-raising tales from global war zones.
Jake was glad Ty was with him; Jake was not so hard-bitten. Jake was properly scared.
“And let’s try Tamara. Yeah. That new ed at the Observer mag, slept with Marcus Dorrell—you hear that?”
Corralling his nerves, Jake locked his camera lens on the view through the window and took photos.
He didn’t want to think about their impending meeting with the spider witch of Skuon. It was cartoonishly unsettling, like a cheesy anime film come to life. Leaning out of the taxi, he took a photo of a garish, blinging red Buddhist temple surrounded by big, black, cockroach-glossy Toyota SUVs. Gangsters’ cars.
They were on the outskirts of Phnom Penh now, heading past the airport. Aimless concrete buildings straggled along the hot and disintegrating road; a mobile phone outlet, adorned with lurid pink balloons, stood next to a butcher’s shop with three orange pigs’ heads on a counter—and then Jake glimpsed the first dusty sparkle of paddy fields.
