In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  People started to look, but, leaning in toward each other, they could only hear their own laughter.

  Popo—the kid—picked up Craig outside Mazson’s at 9:00 the next morning in a battered but just about roadworthy Suzuki Jeep.

  “Jambo,” he said as Craig climbed in beside him. “Jozani Forest.”

  “Jambo. Jozani Forest,” Craig confirmed their destination.

  They rumbled out of town, which became gradually more ramshackle as they approached the outskirts. Popo used the horn every few seconds to clear the road of cyclists, who were out in their hundreds. No one resented being ordered to make way, Craig noticed, as they would back home. Popo’s deft handling took the Jeep around potholes and, where they were too big to be avoided, slowly through them. Most of the men in the streets wore long flowing white garments and skullcaps; as they got further out of town, the Arabic influence became less pronounced. The women here wore brightly-colored kikois and carried unfeasibly large bags and packages on their heads. Orderly crowds of schoolgirls in white headgear and navy tunics streamed into schools that appeared to be no more than collections of outbuildings.

  Between the villages, banana plantations ran right up to the edge of the road. Huge bunches of green fruit pointed up to the sky, brown raffia-like leaves crackled in the Jeep’s draught.

  “You look for Red colobus monkey?” Popo asked without taking his eye off the road.

  “I told you last night,” Craig reminded him. “Zanzibar leopard. I’m looking for the leopard.”

  “No leopard here,” Popo shook his head.

  “I heard the witch doctors keep them.”

  “No leopard.”

  “There are witch doctors, then?”

  Popo didn’t say anything as they passed through another tiny village, crowds of little children too small to be in school running up to the Jeep and waving at Craig, old men sat under a shelter made out of dried palm leaves. The children shouted after them: “Jambo, jambo!” Craig waved back.

  “In Jozani Forest . . .” Popo said slowly, “Red colobus monkey. Only here on Zanzibar.”

  “I know,” said Craig, wiping his forearm across his slippery brow.

  “And the leopards? The witch doctors? I have to find them.”

  “No leopard here.”

  He wasn’t going to get much more out of Popo, that was clear. When the kid swung the Jeep off the road, he reacted swiftly by grabbing his arm, but they had only pulled into the car park for the forest. He let go of the kid’s arm.

  “Sorry. Took me by surprise.”

  Popo blinked slowly.

  “No leopard here,” he repeated.

  The noise of the boat’s engine, a constant ragged chugging, made conversation impossible. There was no point trying to make yourself heard, but that didn’t stop Lief from occasionally mouthing easily understood remarks about the choppiness of the water, the heat of the sun.

  The others—Karin, Anna, Kristin and Alison—grinned and nodded, although Alison’s grin was a little forced. Her trip to Prison Island was always going to exact a price, even though it was only supposed to be a half-hour hop: Alison could barely walk through a puddle without getting seasick. As the twenty-five-foot wooden craft took another dive off the top of the next crest, she lurched forward and felt her stomach do the same, only, it seemed, without stopping. She retched, assumed the crash position, fully expecting to be ditched in the drink. It didn’t happen. The boat lumbered up the next heavy swell, perched an instant at its arête, and plummeted into the trough. Alison groaned.

  The two Danes were chattering excitedly in their own tongue, clearly having a ball. When she looked up, Alison saw Anna and Kristin smiling down at her. “Are you okay?” one of them asked and Alison just managed to shake her head. “It’s not far to the island,” Anna said, looking forward, but the boat pitched to port, throwing her off her feet. She tumbled into Alison’s lap, Alison dry-retching once again.

  “Oh God,” she moaned. “I can’t stand it.”

  “It’s not far now,” Lief tried to reassure her, although he was puzzled as to why they had shifted around so much that the bow was now pointing out to sea.

  “Where are we going?” Anna asked, of no one in particular, once she had picked herself up off the duckboards.

  Now Kristin demanded “What’s going on?” as the bow swung around several degrees further to port. Their course could no longer be even loosely interpreted as being bound for Prison Island. “Where are you taking us?” she shouted at the boat’s skipper, a lad no more than eighteen sat in the stern, his hand on the outboard throttle.

  They were now heading into the wind, and spray broke over the bow every seventh or eighth wave. Alison had started to cry, tears slipping noiselessly over green cheeks. Her mouth was set in a firm, down-curved bow, her brow creased in determined abstraction.

  Lief rose to his feet unsteadily and asked the skipper “What’s going on?” The eighteen-year-old just stared at the horizon. “We want to go to Prison Island. We paid you the money. Where are you taking us?” Still the guy wouldn’t look at him. Lief leaned forward to grab his arm but found himself jerked back from behind. The other African, who had been squatting in the bow, motioned to Lief that he should sit down. The fingers of his left hand were wrapped around the stubby handle of a fisherman’s knife.

  “Sit,” he ordered. “Sit.” He looked at the girls. “Sit.” He pointed at the wooden bench seats and everyone complied. Now Anna had started to weep as well and was not so quiet about it as Alison.

  “Hands,” the boy barked, his jaws snapping around the rusty gutting blade and grabbing at Lief’s wrists. With a length of twine he quickly tied Lief’s hands behind his back before any of the girls had the presence of mind to knock him off his feet while he had his hands occupied and was temporarily unarmed. They would live to regret this missed opportunity.

  Anna and Kristin were almost paralyzed with fear. Alison was within an ace of throwing herself overboard, believing that to be actually in the water could not be worse than being in a boat on it. Still the boat struck out against the direction of the incoming waves and soon they were all soaked from the spray over the bow. The boat climbed and plunged, climbed and plunged. Alison leant over the side and was quietly sick; she hoped it would make her feel better. It was funny how not even mortal fear could distract her from her seasickness.

  Neither, it transpired, could the act of vomiting. If anything, she felt worse, and when the boat slipped around several degrees to port and took the waves side-on, she liked it even less. Each time the narrow craft leaned to either side she thought she was going in—again she considered doing it deliberately. Anna and Kristin were both crying, staring alternately at each other and at Lief, who was ashen-faced. Alison justified her intention to jump ship by interpreting the others’ introvertedness as being an atavistic retreat into their original social groupings in the face of extreme fear. They would no more try to save her life than they would that of one of the two kidnappers, she reasoned. How long had they known her? Twelve hours. What kind of bond grew in such a short time? Not a lasting one.

  She remembered what her mother had once told her, when they’d taken the ferry to Calais. “Look at the horizon,” she’d said. “Watch the land. Don’t look at the water.” Thinking of her mother only brought fresh tears and looking left at the palm-fringed shoreline of the island some half a mile away made her feel no better. There was no way she would ever be able to swim such a distance, not even if her life depended on it. And seasickness had to be better than either drowning or being eaten by hammerhead sharks—she’d done her homework and mother nature’s bizarrest-looking fish was known to nest in several of the bays around Zanzibar.

  She leaned forward again in order to sneak a look at the African boy who had gone back to the bow now that Lief was tied up and neither she nor any of the three other girls appeared to be capable of making a move against him and his mate. He appeared to be searching for something on land a
t the same time as casting quick little glances back at his captives. If she wasn’t mistaken, Alison thought he was nervous. She wondered if they could turn that to their advantage. Maybe he was new to this game, whatever it entailed.

  “Listen,” she addressed the others, “we’ve got to do something.”

  The three girls looked up, whereas Lief retreated further inside himself. He looked as if they might have lost him. Were it not for him, they could have all jumped overboard on a given signal and helped each other to shore. But with his hands tied behind his back, Lief would be unable to swim and the logistics of trying to drag him, lifesaving-style, over half a mile even between them seemed insurmountable.

  Karin and Anna were still crying; Kristin had stopped and was calmer. “What can we do?” she wondered.

  “Hey!” the boy in the bow shouted at them, brandishing his knife.

  “We could all go overboard and take Lief with us,” Alison whispered. “See if we can make it to the shore. Or we rush one of them, try and overpower him, knock him in, whatever. We’ve got to do something.”

  “Even if we jump in, they’ve got the boat, they would easily catch up with us.”

  The boat tipped suddenly as the boy from the bow skipped over the wooden cross-seats toward them and, sweeping his right arm in a wide arc, connected with Kristin under her jaw, knocking her completely off balance. Alison watched in horror as Kristin teetered for a second close to the gunwhale, unaware of the seventh wave about to hit the boat on the starboard side. A scarlet stripe had been drawn on her cheek by the boy’s knife which had been in his hand when he hit her. The wave smacked into the side of the boat and she was gone in a flash, vanished.

  “No!” Alison screamed, clambering over to that side of the boat and leaning over. Kristin had been swallowed by the waves. Shock, presumably, having rendered her incapable of reaction. She must have taken her first breath only after hitting the water.

  “You murdering bastard! You fucking . . .”

  Alison leaped at the youth in her fury, but he grabbed her slender wrists and held her at bay, grinning while she struggled. She tried to kick him but he threw her down on to the bottom of the boat where she scrambled for safety as he leaned down over her threatening with the knife.

  “No more,” he said.

  Kristin’s friend Anna had clasped her arms around her knees and was rocking to and fro on her seat, moaning softly. Karin was sobbing, caught between trying to protect Alison and looking after her distracted boyfriend.

  When he was satisfied the threat to his and his partner’s authority had diminished, the youth returned to his post in the bows, occasionally shouting remarks back to the stern in Swahili. Alison climbed back on to a seat, unable to control a violent trembling which had seized her limbs. She kept visualizing Kristin washed up on the beach: she would appear not to be moving, then would cough up a lungful of sea water and splutter as she fought to regain control of her breathing. When the images were blacked out by another sickening swoop down the windward side of a wave, she knew that Kristin was dead. She might eventually get washed up among the mangrove swamps of south-western Zanzibar, but her bones would have been picked clean by the hammerheads.

  The boat shifted around dramatically on a shout from the lookout boy. They were heading into shore. Alison doubted whether Lief would even be able to walk.

  Jozani is the last vestige of the tropical forest that had at one time covered most of the island. The Red colobus monkeys make it a tourist attraction, but the monkeys conveniently inhabit a small corner of the forest near the road, not far from one of the spice plantations. Visitors are taken out of the car park, back across the road and down a track to where the monkeys hang out.

  The first monkey Craig saw was not remotely red.

  “Blue monkey,” the guide said. “Over there,” he pointed through the trees, “is Red colobus.”

  Craig saw a number of reddish-brown monkeys of various sizes playing around in the trees; leaping from one to another, they made quite a racket when they landed among the dry, leathery leaves.

  “Great,” Craig said. “What about the leopards?” The guide gave him a blank look.

  “You want see main forest?”

  “Yes, I want see main forest.” He followed the guide back to the road and into the car park. The tour around the main forest, Craig knew, would only scratch the surface of Jozani.

  “My driver can guide me,” Craig said, slipping a five-dollar bill into the guide’s palm. “You stay here. Relax. Put your feet up. Get a beer or something.”

  The guide looked doubtful, but Craig beckoned Popo across. He walked slowly, with a loose stride, long baggy cotton trousers and some kind of sandals. “Tell him it’s okay,” Craig said to Popo. “You can take me in.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Popo talked rapidly to the guide, who shrugged and walked back to the reception area defined by a bunch of easy chairs and some printed information and photographs pinned up on boards.

  “Let’s go, Popo.”

  Popo headed into the forest.

  They followed the path until Craig sensed they were starting to double-back on themselves. He stopped, pushed his sunglasses up over his forehead and lit a cigarette.

  “I think I want to head off the path a little,” he said as he offered a cigarette to Popo.

  The African took a cigarette, and lit it, the $100 bill folded around the pack not lost on him.

  “Do you want to take the whole pack?” Craig asked. “I have to head off the path a little way. Leopards, you know?”

  “No leopard here.” Popo’s hand hovered in mid-air. “Witch doctors then. You interested or not?” Craig offered him the bribe again and nodded in the direction he wanted to go. Popo took the pack of Marlboro, slipping the cash out from underneath the cellophane wrapper and folding it into his back pocket. Then he led the way into the forest proper. After a few yards he knelt down at the base of a tree. Craig knelt down beside him and looked where the kid was pointing. There were dozens of tiny black frogs, each no bigger than a finger-tip, congregating on some of the broader fallen leaves.

  “Here water come,” said Popo. “From sea.”

  “Floodwater?”

  “Yes. No one come here. Dangerous.”

  “Good. Let’s go on, in that case.”

  The moment they hit the sandy bottom, the youth in the bow jumped out and tugged the boat up on to the beach. The kid in the stern pulled up the outboard. Three gangly, raggedy youths walked across the beach to meet them. Alison, Karin, Lief and Anna were forced out of the boat at knifepoint and the two youths exchanged a few words with the newcomers before turning their boat around and pushing off from the shore.

  Alison, Karin and Anna had to walk with their hands on their heads to the treeline; Lief’s hands were still tied behind his back. His face betrayed no emotion. Alison was amazed he’d been able to get up and walk. As for Alison, her legs had turned to rubber, despite her small relief at being on dry land. Their new captors were also armed and ruthless-looking.

  The wind blew through the tops of the palm trees, an endless sinister rustling. But as they trooped into the forest, the palms thinned out, their place taken by sturdier vegetation. The canopy was so high it created an almost cathedral stillness. All Alison could hear now, apart from their shuffling progress through the trammeled undergrowth, were the occasional hammerings of woodpeckers and the screams of other, unknown birds. From time to time, on the forest floor she would spot sea shells glimmering through the mulch. She jumped when she almost walked into a bat, only to discover it was a broad, brown leaf waiting to drop from its tapering branch. She swiped at it and when it didn’t instantly fall she went ballistic, swinging her arms at it as if it were a punchball. The party halted and two of the African youths came toward her, their knives at the ready. She peered over the edge of sanity at the possibility of panic, stood finely balanced debating her options, caught between self-preservation and loyalty to the group.

>   Before she knew what she was doing she had taken flight. One of the youths might have taken a swing at her, the point of his knife flashing just beneath her nose. She couldn’t be sure. Something had happened to spur her into action. Action which she instantly regretted, mainly because it was irrevocable and she knew she would never outrun the local boys; also because she had deserted her companions, which according to her own code of honor was unforgivable. Yet she couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have taken the same chance. Indeed, by running, she had created a diversion which, if they had any sense, they would exploit.

  These thoughts flashed through her mind as she crashed through the forest, her flesh catching on twigs and bark and huge serrated leaves yet she felt no pain. Adrenaline surged through her system. She couldn’t hear her pursuers but she knew that meant nothing. These boys would be able to fly. Whatever it took, to render her bid for freedom utterly futile.

  As soon as they heard the drumming, Popo became jittery. Craig didn’t give him more than five minutes.

  “What is it, Popo?” he asked him. “What’s going on?”

  “Mbo,” was all he would say, his eyes darting to and fro. “Mbo.”

  It was faint, still obviously some way off, but unmistakably the sound of someone drumming. It wasn’t the surf and it wasn’t coconuts dropping from the palm trees, it was someone’s hand beating out a rhythm on a set of skins. A couple of tom-toms, maybe more, the kind of thing you played with your hand, sat cross-legged—whatever they were called. Craig hadn’t a fucking clue. As for Popo, he was out of there. Craig didn’t even watch him go, back the way they’d come. His hundred bucks had brought him this far, which was all he’d wanted the kid to do.

  A mosquito whined by his ear. He brushed it away and walked on, moving slowly but carefully in the direction of the drumming. He stopped when he heard another sound, coming from over to his right. Another, similar sound, but more ragged, less musical. The sound that would be made, he realized, by someone running. Craig’s mind raced, imagining someone running into danger, and he was about to spring forward to intercept the runner, whom he still couldn’t see, when he saw hovering in the space in front of him a whole cloud of mosquitoes.