Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  I walked up to the bar and the bartender moved down to meet me, two ships joining on a charted course. I knew he was doing this to make me feel welcome and that embarrassed me. I was damned if I would act nervous and, instead of stopping at the end of the bar nearest the door, I walked right down the bar to the far end, running the gauntlet of their attention. The woman, laughing, swung a playful leg at me. The bartender passed me, going in the opposite direction, and now he had to retreat, parallelling my course along his own side of the bar. This struck me as funny and I laughed. The bartender laughed too, although he probably didn’t know why. Greeting me by name, he asked if I wanted my usual and that broke the tension. The locals relaxed. One by one, they nodded, not so much to me as to the realisation that I was a neutral. I knew how a Swiss must feel. The bearded fellow nodded first, then the man beside him, then the pirate, and the nod ran down the line, heads rippling in sequence, like falling dominoes. Then they ignored me.

  * * * *

  I stood at the end of the bar, by the stairs, listening to the talk and wondering if I should buy a round for the house, or if that would compromise my neutrality? I had a second drink. The bartender, my ally, kept looking down to make sure my glass was filled. The woman gave me a shy look that, with her black eye and coarse demeanour, was rather endearing. A gradual change altered the mood of the drinkers. They were men of abrupt rage never long sustained.

  ‘Listen!’ said one. He slapped his hand on the bar like a gavel. ‘Listen, what if that dog-eater had walked in here?’

  ‘Hey, that would of been something.’

  ‘We’d of showed him what we does to dog-eaters, eh?’

  ‘It would of been just like the old days!’ cried an ancient mariner, gleefully.

  This was rare good humour to them and everyone was laughing and drinking and taking turns in making lewd suggestions to the woman. Her replies outdid them. They had actually slipped from outrage to gaiety as abruptly as if they’d stepped from shadow into light and their levity depressed me far more than their resentment had. I finished my second drink and shook off the eager bartender. I didn’t run the gauntlet again; I went up the back stairs to my room.

  * * * *

  These were the descendents of the wreckers.

  I could still hear the undulation of their mingled voices from my room. Laughter came in sudden bursts, punctuating the steady drone. They were speculating on how they would deal with a man who ate dead dogs and they spoke of that unfortunate man without the slightest sympathy, just as, I knew, a wrecker from the past would have joked with his peers, mocking the way some pitiful victim had squirmed and pleaded under his cudgel - and then, without the faintest feeling of wrongdoing, dutifully fetch his loot home to his adoring wife and happy children.

  I felt a timeless despair.

  * * * *

  XII

  I dozed in depression and awoke to find the walls vibrating again. They seemed to pulse in and out like plastered lungs, billowing around me. It was not my heartbeat. A distant shouting sounded. I sat up, frightened, filmed by a pyrexia of dread. Then I realised the commotion came from below, running like fluids up the timbers of the building. There was a cry of anger ... a crash...another cry that rose to a scream. It appeared that the ephemeral good humour of the crowd had turned surly again: autophagous anger devouring itself with ravenous rage. They had few tools, those rough men; they saw every frustration as a nail to be hammered by violence.

  Then, of a sudden, the noise ceased.

  There was no transition, no gradual ebbing of the uproar - there was bedlam and then there was a silence so absolute that it was sound in itself ... a cosmic boom. That void of sound roared in my ears. Fights do not end in such abrupt silence, unless...

  I went downstairs...

  * * * *

  From the balcony, gripping the banister, I looked into the barroom. The men were standing in a circle, looking inwards and down. The bartender was standing back, a broken truncheon in his hand. The woman was leaning against the counter, one hand at her throat. No one moved. I waited, scarcely breathing, knowing that there was some terrible centrepiece to that silent circle. I wanted to bear no witness to this scene: my impulse was to creep back up the stairs but I could not move. My legs seemed to grow from the floor, my hand was glued to the railing.

  The big, bearded man moved. Something flashed silver in his hand - flashed silver and, turning, flashed red. His hand went to his pocket, he stepped aside. Another man moved. One by one they broke from that ring, cast off by the centrifugal force of shock; they went to the doors. I saw the body around which that motionless orbit had described its silent arc. Blood had spread out like melted wax; in that blood, the body was like a fossil, preserved forever in red amber.

  It was Sam Jasper, and he was dead.

  The woman walked out, stumbling, still holding her throat. Only the bartender remained. He still gripped the broken truncheon, like driftwood that kept him afloat in reality; his face was as bloodless as if he, too, had spilled his veins onto the floor.

  I was able to move then - I had to move, for my trembling legs threatened to collapse. I went down the final steps into the room. The bartender turned towards me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  He had anticipated my words; already launched from my throat, they came out, anyway: ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, again.

  I was trying not to look at Sam. I looked at the telephone and the bartender followed my gaze. He moved towards the phone and I stepped forwards. Then he came back towards me and I stopped. It was like some ritual dance choreographed in Hell. He moved the broken club like a baton, leading the silent music of our gavotte. Then he broke the pattern, leaning against the bar, his head lowered. He began to speak.

  * * * *

  ‘Jasper,’ he said. ‘But not like Jasper. He came in the door. Someone asked him how he was, but he didn’t answer. His mouth was open but not making any noise and...drooling. He came at us. Not fast, he had a strange, deliberate step...not like he was weak, like he was just remembering how to walk...’ The barman’s throat worked convulsively, disgorging his words as if vomiting up poisoned food. ‘...His fingernails...teeth...like an animal...Nobody did anything at first, we all knew old Sam...’ He looked at me as if he wanted confirmation. I nodded. I could imagine those men, confronted by the unknown, unable to react...unable to identify the nail that had to be hammered. ‘But then he grabbed Sally. She’d jumped up on top of the bar. Sometimes she used to dance on the bar,’ he said, as if that were miraculous. ‘Sam got her by the ankle...pulled her off. Her back hit the edge of the bar and she screamed...then everyone got hold of him ... it was because of Sally ... if she hadn’t of moved...that’s when Sam went for her, when she jumped up on the bar...’ He stared at me. He was justifying it. An attack on a woman had played the catalyst to their stunned immobility, it was a thing to which they could react in their fashion. I nodded my understanding.

  ‘But he was too strong,’ he said, wonderingly.

  ‘Just an old man everybody knew...too strong. He was throwing men aside, snapping his teeth ... I thought he was going to kill Sally. I came over the bar and hit him...with this—’ he held up the truncheon ‘—and he didn’t even feel it. It snapped over his shoulder...Old Sam, but too strong...’

  He let the broken club roll from his hand onto the counter; his voice was hollow. ‘Then there was a knife,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who started it...someone...then they all had knives and hooks out, they were stabbing into Sam like they couldn’t stop, like they was all crazy, like sharks when they get frenzied ... or like they was too scared to stop. And Sam didn’t seem to know he was being stabbed. It went on and on. Then Sam was down on the floor, he must of been dead. All his blood has poured out, he’s dead, and everyone steps back from him...and Sam sits up!’

  I flinched. The bartender’s voice went into me as those knives had gone into Sam Jasper; I was bleeding sweat,
congealed fear seeped from my pores The bartender gripped my arm; said, ‘He sat up and his jaw dropped open; then he fell over again...but all his blood was out and ... he moved after he was dead...’

  He was trembling. His hand shook on my arm and the trembling passed on into me. What terrible determination had caused Sam Jasper to move, to defy mortality with a final convulsion?

  Locked together by the coupling of his hand, we shuddered face to face. Then he looked away.

  ‘They left,’ he said, as if aware for the first time that we were alone in the room. ‘They all left.’

  I understood that. Murder had been done and these were not men to plead self-defence or to stand trial...nor to go, as Nurse Jeffries had, to the compound.

  ‘It wasn’t like the old days,’ he said.

  His hand dropped away from me. He went down the bar and hesitated by the telephone. Then he turned and went out the door. I waited for a few minutes. Then I went down to the phone. The switchboard said, ‘Sorry, sir, the lines are still out of order...’ and I said, ‘You’d better listen to me.’ Ten minutes later Larsen arrived.

  * * * *

  XIII

  Even had the phone been working, it would never have occurred to me to call Jerry Muldoon, although, legally, Jasper’s death should have been his concern. And I wasn’t thinking of getting a story, either. I was lost in an emotional wilderness. I only hoped that Larsen would know what to do - that there was something that could be done. Waiting for him, I prayed that Mary Carlyle would not walk in, bearing some news for me. Mary had liked Sam Jasper. And that was not Sam on the floor, that sticky mould of red aspic...nor, worse, had it been Sam in the moments before he died. I could never tell Mary what had happened here. But I could tell Larsen - in his way, he too was a dead man.

  I went behind the bar and poured myself a huge brandy.

  I was halfway through it when Larsen arrived. He came in with half a dozen men and, while they inspected the body - gingerly, at first - he came directly over to me.

  He said, ‘You were right to call me, Harland.’

  ‘I thought I might be. Have a drink?’

  His cold eyes flickered.

  ‘The bartender left too,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to need your help, Harland.’

  I poured Larsen a drink. He didn’t refuse it. When I’d first seen him, he’d sipped very slowly at a beer; things were changed. They were taking Sam Jasper out on a rubber sheet and, as they stepped, their heels made squishing sounds in the congealing blood.

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘The men he fought with...who killed him. I want you to identify them.’

  ‘I didn’t see the fight. I told you, I—’

  ‘The men who were in the bar earlier,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘I guess you’ll cooperate. You phoned me.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean I won’t...I’m not sure I can. I didn’t know any of them by name or—’

  He nodded crisply; said, ‘Understand this. You can’t protect anyone. I’m not talking about a criminal charge here, this isn’t crime and punishment. These locals are...independent types. They won’t come in voluntarily, we’ll have to find them. All of them. And they’ll be hiding, thinking they are guilty of murder or—’

  ‘Guilty? It strikes me that if anyone on this island is guilty of anything—’

  ‘Don’t be antagonistic,’ he said. Then he took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes. He looked at me, for the first time, without the lenses between us. He seemed more human. He said, ‘Guilt? I know about guilt. I think every one of us, working on this thing, feels guilty. Sometimes, Harland...sometimes I feel guilt so heavy that it’s like a shroud draped over me. I have to stop whatever I’m doing and take a deep breath. And doing that, I only manage to inhale the guilt, it gets in my lungs, inside me. I’m not a robot, Harland. I thought I was a patriot...but a guilty patriot. Now...well, now we do what we can.’ He put the spectacles back on, as if hiding behind them. He took a slug of brandy. He was waiting for me to speak.

  I said, ‘I only know what the bartender told me...’

  Larsen nodded impatiently.

  ‘He...Sam Jasper...was inhumanly strong. He was insane, of course, but when the knives went into him he scarcely seemed to notice, he—’

  ‘I know,’ Larsen snapped. ‘I don’t need an account of the affair, I know what...they...can do.’

  ‘They?’

  He ignored that.

  He said, ‘Do you know if any of them were...wounded?’

  ‘No. But Sam was fighting with them...and he had attacked a woman ... so I think we can assume he inflicted some damage.’

  Larsen sighed, nodded; said, ‘I want you to describe every one of the men who were in this room, as best you can. Then I’ll want you to identify them as we bring them in. We have to find them, and we have to do it in the next couple hours.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that. Just in case we do. If we don’t...why, then, you’ll know about it, just like everyone else. You won’t like it.’

  ‘This...disease, this madness. It’s infectious, right?’

  ‘Of course it’s infectious, goddamn it! You’ve seen what happens.’

  ‘And you have to find these men in time to treat them, to give them an antidote or inoculate them or whatever...’

  ‘Whatever! You’re wasting time.’

  ‘I have to be sure just what I’m doing, just why I’m helping you, Larsen.’

  ‘I told you, there will be no criminal charges. Isn’t that enough?’ He was looking at his watch. ‘Please, Harland,’ he said, quite softly.

  ‘All right. I’ll do the best I can.’

  He nodded. ‘We’ll go up to the compound. You can dictate the descriptions in the car. I’m already having my men round up all the known regulars from this place, shrimpers, fishermen...it’s just possible...’

  One of the others came up to him, awaiting orders.

  Larsen said, ‘Get that blood up. All of it. We don’t need...Then seal the place.’ The man nodded. The blood, too? I thought. Larsen turned back to me. ‘Well, come on, then.’

  I finished my drink and followed him towards the door.

  Larsen grabbed my arm and maybe he said it to impress the urgency on me, or to frighten me, or maybe he just felt like saying it. He said: ‘None of us may get out of this, Harland ... we may never leave this island. And, believe me, it won’t be a tropical paradise then...’

  * * * *

  XIV

  Drinking black coffee from a white mug, I sat behind a table in a small whitewashed room feeling depressed and sick and tired. I had described the men - and the woman - as best I could and, although the descriptions seemed pitifully inadequate to me, Larsen seemed satisfied. I expect he had a file on everyone who lived on Pelican. From time to time he nodded, as if in recognition. There was something almost intimate in our relationship as I confided in him in the back seat of the car. When I mentioned the woman, he said, ‘That’ll be Sally...salad girl on the shrimp boats...ship’s whore, to speak plainly,’ and he also put names to the bearded man and the long-haired philosopher...several others - I paid little heed; perhaps I did not want these men to have names, to label those I was betraying and thereby make them individuals. My information was slight. My memory for details had been blurred, knocked out of focus, yet Larsen drew from me more than I thought I knew in the shadowed intimacy of that moving car. I had exhausted my recollections by the time we entered the compound.

  We drove up to the main building, a single-storey affair with wings on either side, and Larsen escorted me to the whitewashed room. His men had not been idle. They started bringing the locals in as soon as I had taken my seat. Larsen stood beside me, behind the table. There was a gooseneck lamp there and he kept his hand on the flexible shaft, tilting it up and down
. The bulb was very bright, very white against the wall. Larsen leaned forward; his face sprang out with an albedo to shame the moon, lips drawn back, clenched teeth geometrical. Dark veins in his neck defied the lurid glare. Then he leaned back into darkness and his face receded.

  They brought the locals in one by one, two guards to each man and another guard on the door. They were angry, bewildered men, roused from bed or rousted from bars without explanation. The Cuban counterman from the Fisherman’s Cafe was one of the first; he looked sullen and dejected. Others who had heard the news looked sly and cunning. They all stared directly at me and I felt the lowest form of traitor, but I neither flinched nor looked away, convinced that I was doing what had to be done, despite these secret police tactics. I recognised several of the locals, but not from the Red Walls. I spoke to no one and they just glared at me, their faces distorted by elongated shadows thrown up from the lamp. Perhaps they could not identify me as they looked into that glare. I shook my head each time and Larsen sighed. Knowing I had to identify the men who had been involved, I nevertheless felt satisfaction each time I was able to negate one.