The coffin was empty, nothing left of the vampire Prince but the dried blood and the stake.
Jackson stared for a long time. He disintegrated from the staking. It had to be true. He was so old there was nothing remaining, not even ash.
After a time, Jackson convinced himself. His mind moved onto other matters and he left. There was, after all, still something to be done.
He spent the next day checking on all of Dracula’s known victims over the last two years. All from Tet back had been cremated. One of the young junkies had been given over to his parents for burial, but that had been after three days spent in the county morgue. The victims from the shelter massacre had likewise been cremated by the county. He crossed them all off.
Next he drove to a costume shop, purchased a wig, moustache, and dark glasses. A thrift store provided a long coat. He managed to check out a car being held in connection with an armed robbery.
Then he drove to the hospital.
The two young survivors of the shelter massacre were still unconscious, in critical condition. In his disguise, Jackson slipped easily into their room, unseen.
He had already examined them, noted how they had been left strangely untouched, compared to their elders. Even the child who had died had not been torn apart, but had succumbed to shock. The only mark these two bore were tiny pinpricks on their necks.
It was possible that even Dracula had been incapable of mutilating a child . . . or perhaps he had appropriately applied the ancient urge to procreate to children.
Jackson wasn’t taking any chances. He could not suffer a possible monster to live . . . and so he removed the two stakes from beneath the long coat.
It was done quickly and quietly, then he was gone before anyone knew. He realized he hadn’t needed the borrowed car after all, but then again, if nothing else, Lucy had taught him not to risk unnecessary self-sacrifice.
He thought it was done now. He didn’t even mind that no one else would ever know what a hero he’d been, how he’d driven the shadows out. Even if the children had been untainted, Jackson could rationalize that survival would only have meant lives of poverty and misery, ever-increasing violence and tragedy. And if Dracula had escaped (it isn’t possible), he was hopelessly mad, in a world of madness.
Jackson, on the other hand, would face that world and, if he had to, meet it every step of the way.
NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of seven novels, including Counterparts, Antwerp, Regicide and First Novel.
He has edited twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, and head judge of the annual Manchester Fiction Prize, he has won three British Fantasy Awards and also runs Nightjar Press, publishing signed limited-edition chapbooks.
Recent stories have appeared in Dead Letters, Being Dad, and Stories. His latest publications are In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaboration with artist David Gledhill, and the short story collection, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing).
Mbo
Nicholas Royle
As the cracks widen in Dracula’s carefully maintained sanity, he escapes to the African continent . . .
It was a question of arriving at the right time. You didn’t necessarily, for example, turn up at the same time each evening, but juggled various considerations, such as the heat, the number of clouds in the sky, even what type they were, whether they were cumulus or stratus or cirro-stratus—stuff like that. You wanted to turn up just at the right moment, just in time to get a seat and a good view and not a moment too soon. After all, the terrace of the Africa House Hotel was not a place you wanted to spend any more time than you absolutely had to. It simply wasn’t that nice.
It wasn’t nice partly because you were surrounded by all those people you had gone to Zanzibar to get away from—white people, Europeans, tourists; mzungu, the locals called them, red bananas. White inside but red on the outside, as soon as they’d been in the sun for a couple of hours. Apparently there was a strain of red-skinned banana that grew on the island.
And partly because the place itself was grotsville. In colonial days, the Africa House Hotel was the English Club, but since the departure of the British in 1963, it had been pretty much allowed to go to seed.
But you didn’t go there for the moth-eaten hunting trophies on the walls, or the charmless service at the counter, but to sit as close to the front of the terrace as you could, order a beer and have it brought to you, and watch the sun sink into the Indian Ocean. Over there, just below the horizon—the continental land mass of Africa. Amazing really that you couldn’t see it, thought Craig. It didn’t really matter how far away it was—twenty miles, thirty—looking at it on the map, Zanzibar Island was no more than a tick clinging to the giant African elephant.
Craig ordered a Castle lager from the waiter who slunk oily around the tables and their scattered chairs. He was a strange, tired-looking North African with one of those elastic snake-buckle belts doing the job of keeping his brown trousers up. Similar to the one Craig had worn at school—8,000 miles away in east London.
He didn’t like ordering a Castle, or being seen with one (they didn’t give you a glass at the Africa House Hotel). It was South African and everyone knew it was South African. He supposed it was all right now, but still, if people saw you drinking South African beer they’d assume you were drinking it because that’s what you drank back home. In South Africa. And whereas it was all right to buy South African goods, it still wasn’t all right to be South African.
And Craig wasn’t, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was, but not so badly that he’d drink any more of the Tanzanian Safari, or the Kenyan Tusker. One was too yeasty, the other so weak it was like drinking bat’s piss.
This was his third consecutive evening at the Africa House Hotel and he was by now prepared to let people think he was—or might be—South African. He wasn’t staying there, no way, uh-uh—he was staying at Mazson’s, a few minutes’ walk away. Air-con, satellite TV, a bath as well as a shower—and a business center. The business center was what had clinched it. Plus the fact the paper was paying.
Craig slipped the elastic band off his ponytail and shook out his fair hair, brushed it back to round up any strays, and reapplied the elastic. He took off his Oakley wraparound shades and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Stuck them back on. Squinted at the sun, still a few degrees above the bank of stratus clouds which would prevent the Africa House Hotel crowd from enjoying a proper sunset for the third evening in a row.
From behind his Oakleys, Craig checked out the terrace: people-watching, with a purpose for once. News of the disappearances clearly wasn’t putting these tourists off coming to Zanzibar. Mainly because there wasn’t any news. Not enough of a problem in any one country to create a crisis. One weeping family from Sutton Coldfield—“Sarah just wouldn’t go off with anyone, she’s not that kind of girl;” a red-eyed single mother from Strathclyde—“There’s been no word from Louise for three weeks now.” It wasn’t enough to get the tabloids interested and the broadsheets wouldn’t pick up on it until they were sure there was a real story. A big story. No news was no news and, by and large, didn’t make the news.
Craig had latched on to Sarah’s story following an impassioned letter to the editor of his paper from the missing girl’s mother. He was a soft touch, he told his commissioning editor: couldn’t bear to think of those good people sitting on the edge of their floral-pattern IKEA sofa, waiting for the phone to ring, weeping—especially not in Sutton Coldfield. But MacNeill, who’d been commissioning pieces from Craig for three years, knew the young man only attached himself to a story if there was a story there. And since he was between desk assignments anyway, MacNeill let him go. On the quiet, like. Neither the Tanzanian government nor the Zanzibari police would acknowledge the problem—too damaging to the developing tourism industry, ironically—so Craig needed a cover, which C
raig’s sister, the wildlife photographer, came up with.
The Zanzibar leopard, smaller than the mainland species, was rumored by some to be extinct and by others to be around still, though in very small numbers. One of the guidebooks reckoned if there were any on the islands, they had been domesticated by practitioners of herbal medicine—witch doctors to you and me. The Zanzibari driver who collected Craig from the airport laughed indulgently at the idea. And Craig read later in another guidebook that witchcraft was believed to be widely practiced on Pemba Island, 85 kilometers to the north of Zanzibar though part of the same territory. Though if you tried to speak to the locals about it, they became embarrassed or politely changed the subject. But that was Pemba, and the disappearances—thirty-seven to date, according to Craig’s researches—were quite specifically from Zanzibar Island.
Thirty-seven. Twenty-three women between seventeen and thirty, and fourteen men, some of them older, mid-forties. From Denmark, Germany, Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Australia and the US. Enough of a problem as far as Craig was concerned. He was torn now, he was ashamed to admit, between wanting the world to wake up and make a concerted effort (thereby, hopefully, securing the earlier recovery of Sarah, or Sarah’s body, and thirty-six others) and hoping he would be the first to break the story.
The cover. A naturalist based at the University of Sussex, Craig’s brief was to confirm whether or not leopards still lived wild on the island. They’d even put Sussex’s professor of zoology in the picture, for a consideration of course which they called a consultancy fee, so that if anyone called from Zanzibar to check up on Craig, they’d find him to be bona fide.
That afternoon, Craig had visited the Natural History Museum, quite the most bizarre of its type in his experience. Glass cases full of birds, presumably stuffed birds, but not mounted—lying down, recently-dead-looking, their little feet tied together with string. Tags to identify them. Their eyes dabs of chalk. In a grimy case all on its own, the bones of a dodo wired up into a standing position. A couple of stuffed bats—the American Fruit Bat and the Pemba Fruit Bat—ten times the size of the swallow-like creatures that had flitted about his head as he’d walked off his dinner the evening before. A crate with its lid ajar: when he opened it, a flurry of flies, one he couldn’t prevent going up his nose. Inside, a board with three rats fixed to it—dead again, stuffed presumably, but with legs trussed at tiny rodent ankles. No effort made to have them assume lifelike poses. No bits of twig and leaf. No glass eyes. No glass case. He dropped the crate lid. Oddest of all: row upon row of glass jars containing dead sea creatures and deformed animal fetuses, the glass furred up with dust and calcified deposits, so you had to bend down and squint to make out the bloodless remains of a stonefish, the huge crab with the image on its shell of two camels with their masters. The conjoined duiker antelopes.
And the stuffed leopard. They hadn’t done a great job on it. The taxidermist’s task being to stage a magic show for eternity: the illusion of life in the cock of the head, the setting of a glassy twinkle. The Natural History Museum of Zanzibar should have been asking for their money back on this one. You could still see it was a leopard though. If you didn’t know, you’d look at it and you’d say leopard. Craig examined it from every angle. This was what he was here to find. Ostensibly. It couldn’t do any harm to have a good idea what one looked like.
Up on the terrace, the touts were working the crowd—slowly, carefully, with a lower-key approach than they tended to use down in Stone Town. In Stone Town the same guys would shadow you on the same streets day after day.
“Jambo,” they’d say.
“Jambo,” you’d reply, because it would be rude not to.
“You want to go to Prison Island? You want to go to the East Coast today? Maybe you want go to Nungwi? You want taxi?”
You ran the gauntlet going up Kenyatta Street and never had a moment’s peace when you were around Jamyatti Gardens, from where the boats left for Prison Island, its coral reefs and giant tortoises. He’d read the books all right.
“Jambo.” The voice was close to him. Craig sneaked a look around as he necked his beer. A young Zanzibari had moved in on a blonde English girl who had been sitting alone. The girl smiled a little shyly and the youth sat down next to her. “The sun is setting,” he said and the girl looked out over the ocean. The sun had started to dip behind the bank of cloud. “You want to go to Prison Island tomorrow?” he asked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
The girl shook her head. “No. Thanks.” She was still smiling but Craig could see she was a little nervous. Doing battle with her shyness was the adventurous spirit that had brought her this far from whichever northern market town she’d left behind. She was flattered by the youth’s attentions but could never quite forget the many warnings her worried parents would have given her in the weeks before she left.
The tout went through the list and still she politely declined. In the end he changed tack and offered to buy her a drink. Craig heard her say she’d have a beer. The youth caught the waiter’s eye and spoke to him fast in Swahili. Next time the waiter came by he had a can of Stella for the girl and a Coke for the tout. Craig watched as the girl popped open the Stella and almost imperceptibly shifted on her seat so that her upper body was angled slightly further away from the boy in favor of the ocean. Maybe she shouldn’t have accepted the beer, thought Craig. Or maybe it was old-fashioned to think like that. Perhaps these days girls had the right to accept the beer and turn the other way. He just wasn’t sure the African youth would see it like that. Whether he was a practicing Muslim—the abnegation of alcohol told him that—or not.
A high-pitched whine in Craig’s ear. A pin-prick in the forearm. He smacked his hand down hard, lifted it slowly to peer underneath.
Craig started, then shuddered; never able to stand the sight of blood, whether his own or anybody else’s, he had once run out of the cinema during an afternoon screening of The Shining. He had fainted at the scene of a road accident, having caught sight of a pedestrian victim’s leg, her stocking sodden with her own blood. She survived unscathed; Craig’s temple bore a scar to this day where he had hit his head on the pavement.
The mosquito had drunk well, and not just of Craig either. His stomach turning over, he quickly inspected the creature’s dinner which was smeared across his arm, a red blotch in the shape of Madagascar, almost an inch long. Craig wondered whose blood it was, given that the mozzie had barely had enough time to sink its needle beneath his skin. Some other drinker’s? Craig looked about. Not that of the Italian in the tight briefs, he hoped. Nor ideally had it come from either of the two South African rugby players sitting splayed-legged at the front by the railing.
He spat on to a paper tissue and wiped his arm vigorously without giving it another look until he was sure it had to be clear. The energy from the slap had been used up bursting the balloon of blood; the mosquito’s empty body, split but relatively intact, was stuck to Craig’s arm like an empty popsicle wrapper.
This bothered him less than the minutest trace of blood still inside the dead insect’s glassy skin.
When he looked up, the blonde girl had joined a group of Europeans—Scandinavians or Germans by the look of them—and was eagerly working her way into their telling of travelers’ tales, while the young tout glared angrily at the bank of clouds obscuring the sun, his left leg vibrating like a wire. Craig hoped he wasn’t angry enough to get nasty. Doubted it—after all, chances were this sort of thing happened a lot up here. The kid couldn’t expect a hundred per cent strike rate.
Craig gave it five minutes, then went over and sat next to the kid. Kid turned around and Craig started talking.
Ten minutes later, Craig and the kid both left, though not together. Craig was heading for Mazson’s Hotel and bed; the kid, his timetable for the following day sorted, having spoken to Craig, was heading home as well—home for him being his family’s crumbling apartment in the heart of the Stone Town, among the rats and the rubbish
and the running sewage. To be fair, the authorities were tackling the sewage, but they hadn’t yet got as far as the kid’s block.
The group that Alison, the blonde girl, had joined was approached by another tout, an older, taller fellow. More confident than the kid, not so much driven by other motivations, less distracted—he had a job to do. With her new companions, Alison was not so nervous about getting into the trips business. She wanted to go to Prison Island, they all did; they looked around to include her as the tout waited for an answer, and she nodded, smiling with relief. Turned out they were German, two of them, the two girls, but naturally they spoke perfect English; the third girl and the boy, who appeared to be an item, were Danish, but you wouldn’t know it—their English, spoken with American accents, was pretty good too.
“We were just in Goa,” said Kristin, one of the German girls. “It is so good. Have you been?”
“No,” Alison shook her head. “But I’d like to go. I’ve heard about it.” She’d heard about it all right. About the raves and the beach parties, the drugs and the boys—Australians, Americans, Europeans. It had been hard enough to get permission to come to Zanzibar, especially alone, but her parents had accepted her right to make a bid for independence.
“Ach!” shouted Anna, the second German girl, flailing her bare arms as she failed to make contact with a mozzie. “Scheisse!”
“Where are you staying, Alison?” asked the Danish boy, Lief, his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder.
Alison named a cheap hotel on the edge of Stone Town.
“You should move into Emerson’s House,” Lief’s girlfriend, Karin, advised. “That’s where we’re all staying. It’s really cool. Great chocolate cake . . .” She looked at Lief and for some reason they sniggered. Kristin and Anna joined in and soon they were all laughing, Alison included. Their combined laughter was so loud they couldn’t hear anything else.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 31
