The boat tipped suddenly as the boy from the bow skipped over the wooden cross-seats towards 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 trammelled 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 towards 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 honour 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.
They shifted about minutely, relative to each other, like vibrating molecules, seeming at one moment to dart towards him, only to feel a restraining influence and hang back. Because of the noise of the fast approaching runner he couldn’t hear their dreadful whine, but he imagined it.
And the runner appeared, crashing her way through the trees, arms and legs flying—a young girl, the young girl from the Africa House terrace, Craig realized—heading straight for the source of the drumming.
“Hey! Stop!” Craig shouted as the swarm of mosquitoes swung its thousand-eyed head to follow the girl’s progress. The whole cloud tilted and curved after the girl. She screamed as they crowded around her head: hardly could she have announced her arrival any more extravagantly. Not that Craig had any idea who or what was responsible for the drumming, nor whether they represented a threat. He just had his instincts.
The girl had a head start on him. He ran as fast as he could but couldn’t close on her. Too many long lunches in The Eagle. Too many fast-food containers in the bin under his desk. His heart beat a tattoo against his chest. He thrust his arms out in front of him to catch a tree trunk and so managed to stop short as the girl burst through into a wide clearing, the mozzies still shadowing her.
His hand-drums lying scattered at his feet, the drummer rose to his full height—six foot something of skin and bone, unfolding like some med student’s life-size prop. He was a white man, although it was impossible to judge his age. His feet and lower legs were bare, but the rest of him was clothed. Craig rubbed his eyes, which had started to go funny. Perhaps the heat and the exertion. The fear, maybe, which he acknowledged for the first time, his pulse scampering. The man’s coat constantly shifted in and out of focus, like an image perceived through a stereogram. Either there was something in Craig’s eyes obscuring his vision, or some filmy substance, spider’s web or other insectile secretion, draped across the undergrowth between him and the clearing. The tall man moved closer to Alison, who shrank away from him. He peered at her with bulging eyes that indicated thyroid disorder. His coat settled organically around his coat-hanger shoulders. Alison screamed and the coat shimmered. She lashed out with her right hand, drew a swathe through the living, clinging coat of mosquitoes. They swarmed about her head for a moment, mingling with the swarm that had aggravated her, before gravitating back to their host.
The man’s movements were slow. He seemed to make them reluctantly, as if he had no choice. His face was too sunken in the cheeks and uniformly white to betray any emotion. Stepping back from the girl, he picked up a long bone-white blood-stained instrument from the floor by his drums and strapped it over his skull. The false snout, a foot long by the look of it, wobbled hideously as he approached the girl again. The base of it—the knuckle joint, let’s face it, the thing had been fashioned from a human femur -rested against his mouth. He blew through it, a low burbling whistle, at which the mosquitoes became markedly less agitated and settled around him; Alison sank to her knees in a dead faint and he snuffled about her prone body.
Craig was furiously considering what action he could take when a further crashing through the undergrowth announced the arrival of Alison’s friends from the Africa House, bound and led by three tough-looking African youths who each mumbled what appeared to be a respectful greeting to the tall man—“Mbo,” they each seemed to be saying.
Lief, the Danish boy, had remained unresponsive throughout the trek from the beach. His girlfriend, Karin, was trembling with fear and continuous shock; Anna simply screamed whenever anyone came near her. Two of the youths took hold of Karin and Anna and laid them out flat on the ground. Grabbing lengths of dried palm leaves, they wound them around the girls’ ankles, going around and around several times, then over the loop in the other direction between the legs until they were secure. They left the arms. The third African youth swiftly bound Lief’s ankles in the same manner. Craig had to strain to see where the three were taken: beyond the lean-to on the far side of the clearing. But what lay hidden there, Craig could not see.
The tall white-skinned man was still inspecting Alison when one of the youths returned and started to bind her around the ankles as well. The man sat down once more upon the ground, his legs becoming dismantled beneath his hazy coat like a pair of fishing rods being taken apart. He picked up his hand-drums and began to play.
Craig took advantage of the noise to retreat a few yards from the edge of the clearing back into the forest. Twenty yards back, he crept around towards the back of the camp. It took him a while, because he had to move slowly to avoid alerting anyone to his presence, but he got there. Then it took him a moment before he recognized what he was seeing, even though this was what he’d been looking for. What he’d come to Africa for.
They hung from the branches of a single tree. Like bats.
Like bats, they hung upside-down.
Like bats, or like the poor creatures Craig had seen in the museum in the town—bound, each one of them, at the ankles. Three dozen at least.
Most of them were completely drained of blood, desiccated, like the Bombay duck Craig would always order with his curry just to raise a laugh. Husks swinging in the breeze. Wind-dried Bombay duck. Long hair suggested which victims were female, while bigger skeletons hinted at male—but there was no way of telling with most of the poor wretches.
Nearest the ground hung the recent additions—Karin, Anna, Lief. Craig heard the tall man coming around the side of the hut, before he saw him. The wind was not strong enough to drown out the whining concert of the mosquitoes the tall man wore around himself like so many familiars. His own insectile eyes protruded as he looked at his new arrivals, all strung up and ready for him.
Behind him came two of the youths carrying Alison.
The tall man, wearing his bone nose-flute, took a tiny step towards Anna, whose screams were torn out of her throat at his approach.
I could already smell the coppery tang of blood even before the ancient ectomorph in the coat of mosquitoes prodded the young girl’s throat with the sharpened femur he wore strapped to his head.
Craig was ashamed at himself, but couldn’t stop the opening sentences of his eyewitness account forming in his mind.
I was smelling the blood he had already spilt. I must have smelled it on him or in the air, because the ground beneath my feet nourished no more exotic blooms than the surrounding forest, for he spilled no blood. This exiled European, this tall, spindly shadow of a man—scarcely a man at all— drank the blood, every last drop. It was what kept him alive. I sensed this as much as deduced it as my eye ranged across the bat-like corpses suspended from his tamarind tree. At the same time I felt a shadow fall across my heart, from which I knew I should never be free, even if I were somehow to effect an escape for myself and the youngsters who had joined the monster’s collection.
This was Craig’s problem now. The purple prose would die a death at the hands of the paper’s subs—but thinking of it in terms of the news story he had come out here to investigate helped him distance himself sufficiently to keep his mind intact, to remain alert. Whatever the odds stacked against him, he still possessed the element of surprise.
While he was still thinking, racking his brains for an escape route, the tall man’s head jerked forwards, driving the tip of his bone-flute into the hollow depression of Anna’s throat. Blood bubbled instantly around the puncture then disappeared as it was sucked down the bone. Craig forced his eyes shut, fighting his own terror of spilt blood. But he had heard the man’s first swallow, his greedy gargle as he tried to accommodate too much at once. Craig had always believed himself the hard man of investigative journalism, hard to reach emotionally—his bed back home never slept two for more than one night at a time—and impossible to shock. His fear of the sight of blood had never been a problem before; he avoided stories which trailed bloody skirts—car wrecks and shoot-outs—not his style.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 35
