The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Chilongo appeared late, stressed but apologetic, and with some of the dancing cadences gone from his voice. He was tired, Thorley saw, the bruised flesh under his eyes sagging and dark. The man was rumpled, his clothes creased. Rings of sweat, dried and fresh, gathered under his shirtsleeves. He smelled anxious and sour.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “It has been a difficult morning and I was unavoidably delayed.”

  “Problem?” Thorley asked.

  “No. Well, yes,” said Chilongo. “There was an incident last night, and one of the men died. One of the miners, I mean. He was in another motel, like yours, and he was found dead.”

  “Not an incident at the mine? An accident, I mean, onsite?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should that be a problem for you?” asked Thorley.

  “Because,” said Chilongo, “I am the man in charge of the miners and of the visitors to the mine. I am responsible for them.” He sounded angry, indignant, and Thorley raised a placatory hand, motioning Chilongo to sit.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I meant no offence. Now, we have a long few days ahead of us. Please, take me to the mine and you can tell me what’s been happening on the way.”

  “We like to keep visitors away,” said Chilongo, noticing Thorley wince as they bounced across yet another rut over the deteriorated track that led to the small mine, a smaller site, specializing in the deepest seams. “Originally, it was to keep ourselves insignificant in the eyes of others, so that they would not bother us. The larger companies are not above having their trucks deliberately break down to block access, or staging the accidental shedding of loads of trash in awkward places, if they perceive you as a threat. Now, however, it stops the inquisitive attempting to get onsite. Reporters and the like.”

  “Reporters? Why reporters?”

  “Because of the deaths.”

  The mine, even though small by comparison with some of the others scattered across the copperbelt, was still huge. As they juddered along the road, and through two security checkpoints, Thorley waited to see the investment he was here to protect.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected, exactly; a series of sheds around a caged lift-head, possibly, or a carved expanse of parched earth hollowed out from the ground, but in reality it was neither. It was a complicated, layered series of huts and prefab buildings, of varying heights, built in the centre of a vast, dusty plain. The separate structures were clustered together, creating the impression of a huge, ever-expanding castle, sprawling its way across the earth like some creeping, cancerous thing.

  As they drew close, Thorley saw the individual huts were huge, boxy structures painted green and brown and coated in sand and dirt, their fronts open to allow trucks to drive in and out. More trucks and dirty buildings lined the perimeter, these stranger shapes with sloped roofs or walls that were missing entirely, all of them linked by rumbling, moving multi-layered conveyor belts like arteries. All over the site, chimneys pierced the air, stretching up from the ground and loosing spiralling coils of dirty grey smoke at the sky.

  Thorley enjoyed the size of it, could feel the vibration of the machinery even in the car. Even with the windows closed, he smelled the sharp stench of acid and machinery and burning, could hear the lupine growl of the conveyor belts and smelting units. He turned to Chilongo, wanting to say something about the sheer immensity of what he was seeing and hearing, but saw that the other man was looking at the approaching mine works with a strange expression on his face; he looked scared.

  Thorley spent the day going through the mine’s records, interviewing the managers and supervisors. He soon realized that there was a distinct split in attitude between those staff who worked solely overground, mainly the expat managers, and those who went underground, mostly locals or supervisors brought in from other areas. The managers put the fall in production down to worker greed, blaming miners who had slowed down or left in the hope of getting higher pay, shorter hours or more benefits. They showed him lengthy technical reports, most written by the same expat managers that were showing them to him, full of technical dialogue and graphs and phrases like unexpected seam depletion and shaft misalignment, none of which told him anything. In one he came across the phrase enviro-cultural factors having an impact upon workforce cohesion and permanence, but it was not clear what this meant. The workers who went underground all reported variations on a theme; that the mine was simply “unlucky”.

  That night, Chilongo took Thorley to a different tavern to eat, this one closer to Kitwe. It looked to have been built out of an old barn, although the inside was nicely decorated and the tables were large and spaced far enough apart that Thorley didn’t feel overlooked or overheard.

  The meal was pleasant, and although he had little inclination to talk to Chilongo, the other man seemed to have recovered some of his energy since the morning and spoke enough for both of them. Thorley listened only partially, chewing his food and glancing around. This was a place couples came, and although it was only early evening, there were several pairs dining around the room. Most looked at him, some fleetingly, some with longer, more intense stares. The couple nearest to him held a fierce, whispered conversation, clearly about him. Thorley caught the word muzungu once or twice. He had heard it this morning at breakfast as well, and the previous day, never spoken to his face.

  “It means ‘Westerner’,” said Chilongo. “That word you keep hearing. We are used to foreigners here, of course, but you are clearly not a mine operator and you have arrived at a bad time. It makes people nervous.”

  “How can you tell I’m not a mine operator?” asked Thorley, intrigued.

  “Ha! You are soft-looking, as though you have spent your life behind a desk. Mine operators, underground or overground, tend to look like the thing they mine eventually. Hard, in the case of copper. Even when a miner is clean, he looks crusted with dirt, no?”

  Thorley nodded; it was true. He had met miners ten years into their retirement and they still appeared as though their skin was grainy with cinders and grit.

  “You aren’t dirty. To miners and the people that know them, you don’t look as if you’ve ever been dirty in your life.”

  “Why is this a difficult time? Because of the deaths?”

  Chilongo didn’t answer straight away, but took a sip of his pulpy elephant orange drink, what he called muhuluhulu, crunching on an ice cube. “The deaths are part of it,” he said eventually. “A small part. It’s not easy to explain. This isn’t a happy place now, or at least, not as happy as it was. But working towns are never that happy, are they? Always worried about production or closures or being undersold, or accidents, or death. There’s no one here who isn’t related to a miner, or to a trucker or a boss or a guard for the mine. The expats tell us to get on with the work, but they don’t understand either.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Are you still planning to come underground tomorrow, to see the mine in operation?”

  Thorley nodded.

  “Then maybe you’ll see then.”

  His motel room was no cooler that evening, although Thorley had managed to get a bucket of ice from reception and had dropped two bottles of water into it in the hope that they would stay chilled for the night. He had also bought himself Scotch whisky and drunk several shots after returning from his meal.

  He thought about Chilongo; the man was hiding something, that was for sure, and the mine managers had no idea of what was happening. Despite all the reports and conversations today, he was no clearer about why this mine was losing staff, had falling production figures.

  They paid well and were generous employers, the conditions were no worse than any of the other companies working in the area and better than some, and yet people were walking away from their jobs. Six per cent of the workforce last month, four per cent the month before, seven the month before that, and few were being replaced. The positions were being advertised, but there were few if any applicants. It made no sense. None.

  Th
e car park was fuller tonight, Thorley saw. As well as his own rental Toyota, already picking up a thin layer of sand and dust after only a day’s disuse, there were two jeeps with mine company logos and three or four other cars.

  The radio was playing again, its indistinct tones tonight accompanied by singing, although whether by a man or woman Thorley could not tell. People were drinking in another of the rooms, he knew; there had already been one shouted argument, the voices slurred, and a bout of raucous laughter that ended in the sound of a bottle breaking. Thorley sipped his whisky and waited for the world to cool.

  At just before midnight, the woman appeared again. She walked into Thorley’s view on the far side of the car park, this time coming from the mine rather than walking towards it. In the sodium orange of the streetlights, her skin seemed the colour of mocha and her auburn hair gleamed like the copper he had spent the day investigating. She walked across the road to the edge of the concrete apron and then stopped, appearing to stare at him even though she was surely too far away to see him. There was something enticing in her gaze, even at this distance, something feral and erotic.

  Thorley became uncomfortably aware that he was standing at the window wearing only boxers and with a growing erection. Stepping back into the shadows of the room, he continued watching. The woman began to walk across the car park, and although he couldn’t see her lower half because of the cars and jeep between her and him, he suddenly became convinced she was naked. He could see the sweep of her clavicles and neck, her hair framing a rounded, attractive face and dropping away down a chest he was suddenly sure was bare. He could see no T-shirt neckline or blouse collar, no thin vest straps or bandeau top.

  When the man came into view and saw the woman, he was as surprised as Thorley was. Drunk, he swayed as he walked, was scrabbling in his pockets for something, head down and oblivious. The woman turned towards the new man, with his skin dark and sweating in the humid night, and smiled broadly. He, seeing her, took two stumbling steps back and then turned and staggered back the way he had come. With a last look towards Thorley, she shifted direction, following the other man.

  Thorley watched her go, somewhere between disappointed and glad; his visit here was complicated enough without adding a woman into the scenario. Finishing his whisky, he went to bed. It was only later, as he drifted towards sleep, that Thorley realized that the woman had been blonde the night before.

  She could easily have dyed her hair, he thought the next morning. People did, after all. It wasn’t unusual. Looking around the tavern, he saw that of the two of the women in there, one had plaits woven into her hair, making it a tangle of straw blonde, red and black that framed her dark face like a halo. Thorley lifted another piece of papaya into his mouth, gazing again at the mural.

  “She is beautiful, yes?” said a voice. Thorley looked around to find Chilongo standing at his side. “Mami Wata. Water mother. You will find her in most of the bars and taverns in the copper-belt. Across large parts of Africa, really.”

  “Are they all pictures of her? All the different women in the murals?”

  “They are all versions of her. She lives in our bars because she attracts men, and where men come, they want to drink. She likes the noise and the attention.”

  Thorley raised his eyes to Chilongo; he was staring at the woman on the wall with a look on his face that Thorley could not completely recognize, a mix of fascination and anger and something else. Lust, maybe. Looking again at the mural, he realized that the mermaid reminded him of the woman from the midnight street.

  Outside, the dusty pavement glowed a heated yellow in the glare of the early morning sun. The road, a strip of darker tarmac, glinted as Thorley and Chilongo walked across it. It was already hot enough to create ripples in the air that Thorley could feel, warm pulsations that tickled his ankles. Crossing towards Chilongo’s car, Thorley saw a crowd gathering in a loose, mutating cluster a couple of hundred yards away.

  “What’s happening?” asked Thorley.

  “Nothing,” said Chilongo. He kept his eyes fixed on the car, and it seemed to Thorley that his companion was deliberately not looking at the crowd.

  “Nothing?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Come, we have to get you underground.”

  The lift cage was empty, but it smelled of men, muscular, sweaty, exhausted. Chilongo and one of the mine engineers, a dark-bearded expat named Rowe, checked each other’s equipment one last time and then closed the doors for descent.

  “We’re going to almost the deepest point in the mine, to one of the newer shafts, so that you can observe the operation and maybe talk to some of the men,” said Rowe as though this was news to Thorley, as though he hadn’t been the one who requested this excursion. Take me deep, he had said, and let me talk to the miners. I need to know what the problem is.

  It was clear Rowe didn’t like him, or didn’t trust him. Thorley could see it in the looks that were even now surreptitiously coming his way. He had the impression that Rowe and Chilongo didn’t like each other, but now Rowe was talking to Chilongo as though they were friends, pointedly excluding Thorley. Thorley didn’t really mind; it gave him a chance to look around.

  It was several years since he had been underground, but he found he still enjoyed it. The temperature drop as they descended was satisfying, an escape from the raw heat of the day above, diving into some cooling swathe that refreshed rather than chilled. He liked the sound of the lift, the metallic clatter dancing above the rumble of the motor and the fainter sound of the mine’s working belly. He even liked the feel of the clothes he had changed into and the weight of the helmet on his head.

  When the descent was over, the lift opened out into a wide shaft that went in both directions, sloping down and echoing with voices and the clank of machinery. Lights were strung out in cabled lines along the tunnel, the air around them haloed in dust and hanging moisture. Two conveyor belts, one above the other, ran along the centre of the tunnel. Both were currently motionless, the heavy rubber belts empty apart from streaks of crushed earth and dry, friable rock fragments.

  Down here, the change in air pressure made Thorley’s ears ache slightly. The smell had changed, from the strong male odour of the lift to one of burning rock and the heavy, tarry scent of oil and exhaust fumes. The three walked down the tunnel, passing under ribs of wood and tight cabling. The noise grew louder as they walked until talking to each became almost impossible. At one point, Chilongo stopped Thorley and pointed down an unlit side tunnel.

  “It is the flooded one, the deep one,” he shouted. “It did not play out, and we had water problems. It is why our production fell so far.”

  No, thought Thorley, it’s not. One failed excursion should not have affected output that dramatically, despite what Chilongo said. The mine was always sending out exploratory shoots, some of which played out and some of which did not. It was normal behaviour. But something else was going on here.

  They came upon the man about ten minutes after passing the abandoned deep shaft. He was positioned under one of the lights, peering intently back up along the tunnel. Under his covering of dirt and sweat, it was near-impossible to tell if he was black or white. Only his eyes, gleaming white against the grime on his face, showed clearly. When he saw them, the man started, stepping back away from the light and into one of the shadowed areas between the bulbs.

  “You! Come here! What are you doing?” Rowe demanded.

  “Watching,” said the man.

  “Watching? For what?” Rowe shouted and Thorley could feel the anger coming from him, fury that showed itself in his bared teeth and reddening face.

  “Watching,” repeated the man. Chilongo nodded at him and drew Rowe aside, leaning into his ear and speaking too fast and low for Thorley to hear. Feeling his own anger build, he stepped after them, trying to discern what the Zambian was saying.

  Chilongo, seeing him, broke off and shouted, with forced cheerfulness, “Let us go. We are almost there.”

  The large ga
ng of men was working on a new shaft, operating a huge excavator. Water sprayed against the rock-face, massive blades chewing into it and spitting the savaged chunks out behind where they were taken by smaller belts to be sorted and disposed of. The noise, nearly unbearable even through Thorley’s ear protectors, was a constant roar of tortured stone and the grind of machinery and the gearshift crunch of an engine labouring under huge pressure merging with the reptile hiss of the water and men calling to each other. The sound was a physical thing, the air vibrating and beating against Thorley’s clothes and exposed skin in a tattoo of industrial rhythms.

  Dust was hanging in the air, reducing the light to a murky yellow gleam punctuated by bright spotlights on the excavator and the paler eyes of the helmet lamps. Rowe, leaving Chilongo and Thorley, went to find the supervisor, going from man to anonymous man to locate him. He was on his way back towards them, pulling a smaller man with him, when the man from the main tunnel reappeared. He was running, banging into Thorley as he dashed past, leaping up onto the running board of the excavator and screaming at the operator. In a moment, the machine fell silent and still, the men shouting and rushing around. Lights clicked off, the sudden darkness shocking in its intensity.

  Thorley heard Rowe shout something and then Chilongo was at Thorley’s side and reaching up to turn his helmet lamp off. Thorley went to speak, to reach up and switch the lamp back on, but Chilongo gripped his hand tightly and said, “Leave it. Stay silent. Please.” Rowe shouted again and as the last of the lights went off, Thorley saw one of the miners wrap a hand around his mouth and drag him to the floor. “You will be safe if you stay silent and still,” said Chilongo. “Please, trust me.”