As he retched and tumbled forwards out of the concealing forest, he knew this was a story to which he would never append his byline: firstly, because he wasn’t going to get out alive, and secondly, even if he did, the trauma would never allow him to relive these moments.
Two youths pounced on him, jabbering excitedly in Swahili. A third youth darted into the forest in search of any accomplices.
As the youths bound his ankles, Craig watched the tall man gulp down the German girl’s blood. He drank so eagerly and with such vigorous relish, it was possible to believe he completely voided her body of all nine pints. His cheeks had coloured up and Craig thought he could see a change in the man’s body. It had filled out, the mosquitoes that clung to him no longer covered quite so much of his grey-white nakedness.
He wondered when his own turn would come. Would the tall man save up his victims, drink them dry one a day, or would he binge? Already, he had turned to Alison, swinging from her bonds as she tried desperately to free herself. She was a fighter. Karin sobbed uncontrollably alongside, and Lief was wherever he had gone to while they were all still on the boat. As Craig was hoisted upside-down and secured by one of the youths, he thought to himself it would be preferable to go first. As if sensing his silent plea, the tall man twisted around to consider the attractions of his body over the girl’s.
~ * ~
Popo’s approach was swift and silent. The first any of those present knew of it was an abrupt cacophony: the crashing of bodies through dry vegetation, the deep-throated growling of hungry beasts, the concerted yells and screeches of our rescuers. Visually I was aware of a black and gold blur, flashing ivory teeth and ropes of saliva swinging from heavy jaws as the leopards leaped.
Popo saved my life at that point—the exact moment at which the old Craig died. It was necessary, if I were to survive. The hard-nosed journalist was as dead as the corpses swinging in the breeze higher up in the tree. He would not write up this story, I would—but not for a long time, and not for the newspapers. It’s history now, become legend, myth—just as it had always been to Popo and the men of Jozani.
Those who survived it—and they are few—speak of it rarely. Lief lives quietly, on his own, in a house by the sea in his native Denmark. Karin, his former girlfriend, has returned to Africa as an aid worker. Most recently she has been in eastern Zaire: I saw her interviewed on the TV news during the refugee crisis. I have no contact with either of them. Alison and I tried to remain in touch—a couple of letters exchanged and we met once, in a bar in the West End, but the lights and the noise upset us both and we soon parted. I have no idea where she is now or what she is doing.
I left my reporter’s job on medical advice and spent some time fell-walking in South Wales until I felt well enough to return to work, but on the production side this time. I never have to read the copy or look at the pictures—just make sure the words are on the page and the colours are right.
I go to Regent’s Park Zoo every so often to look at the leopards. Watching them prowl around their cages reminds me of the moment in my life when I was most alive—when I saw, with an almost photographic clarity, one of Popo’s leopards take a swipe with its heavy paw at the bloodsucking creature’s midriff. There was an explosion, a shower of blood, Anna’s blood. His skin napped uselessly, transparently, like that of the mosquito I had swatted against my arm on the terrace of the Africa House Hotel.
Popo and his men—witch doctors or Jozani Forest guides, I never found out—untied us and lowered us safely to the ground. Later that evening, after the police had been and started the clear-up operation, Popo himself took me back to Zanzibar Town in his Suzuki. On the outskirts of town he brought the vehicle to a sudden halt, flapping his hand about his head as if trying to beat off an invisible foe.
“What’s up?” I asked, leaning towards him.
“Mbo,” he muttered.
I heard a high-pitched whine as it passed by my ear. I too lashed out angrily.
“Mosquito?” I asked.
“Mbo,” he nodded.
It turned out I had got the little sod, despite my flailing attack. Maybe it was just stunned, but it lay in the palm of my hand. I was relieved to see that its body was empty of blood.
“We call it mosquito,” I said and I shivered as I wondered if we had brought it from the forest on our clothes.
For months later, I would discover mosquitoes, no more than half a dozen or so, among the clothes I had brought back from Zanzibar. So far, they have all been dead ones.
<
~ * ~
PAUL MCAULEY
The Worst Place in the World
AFTER WORKING as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University, Paul McAuley is now a full-time writer, and lives in North London.
His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, while his fifth, Fairyland, won the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards.
His other novels include Secret Harmonies, Red Dust, Pasquale’s Angel, the three books of “Confluence” (Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars), The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun.
He has also published more than seventy short stories (he won the 1995 British Fantasy Society award for “The Temptation of Doctor Stein”) and a Doctor Who novella (fulfilling a childhood ambition), and he edited the anthology In Dreams with Kim Newman.
Shocked back to sanity, but with his blood now contaminated, Dracula begins to build his power-base from Africa ...
~ * ~
IT IS A square room twenty feet on each side, with a small, high window blocked by bars and wire mesh. A broken-down cinema projector squats in the middle of the room, its electrical guts ripped out, its lens missing. The concrete floor is filthy, and awash with sewer water in one corner; the unpainted breeze-block walls are streaked green and black with algae and mould. Old blood scabs a patch of the floor. Harry Merrick can smell it, strong as spoiled meat, above the fresh blood which spatters his clothes. It is a terrible place, but after the hot, black horror of Block A it seems like the bridal suite of the Hilton International.
“You a political now,” one of his guards says. Her shiny black skin is puffed and loose, like that of a three-day-old corpse. Bristles sprout in tufts from her chin and neck; yellow tusks pierce her upper lip. She wears camouflage fatigues and mirrored sunglasses, and aims her M16 with awkward, clawed hands while a shivering medical orderly, stinking of fear, takes a sample of Harry’s blood. The man gets the vein on the third attempt, leaving a bad haematoma in the pit of Harry’s elbow that begins to disperse even as the barrel of the big syringe fills with dark blood. The orderly plunges the syringe into an ice bucket and scurries away, mocked by the guards.
“That won’t do you any good,” Harry says. “Loses its goodness as soon as it leaves my body, turns to black powder in a few minutes. Tricky stuff, blood.”
“We do magic with it,” the woman guard says. “Bad magic. African magic.”
Another woman, as monstrous as the first, unlocks manacles Harry could have parted with a twist of his wrists. But there are too many guards and dogs between here and freedom, and some of the guards are as strong as he is.
The guard licks at the weeping sores around the base of her tusks. Her tongue is bright red, and forked at the tip. She says, “The Count comes for you soon. Then maybe we stake you and cut off your head.”
“I look forward to it,” Harry says and straightens up. A mistake. The guard reverses her rifle and thumps Harry in the kidneys and then, when he doubles over obediently, in the back of his head.
“Animal,” the guard says. “Killer. Leech.”
A human guard fixes a crucifix to the wall and then the door is slammed and double-locked, and Harry is left alone with his shame.
~ * ~
Harry first heard of the Count a month befor
e he was arrested. He had gone to the market to try and buy fresh fish and vegetables for the bar’s kitchens. The war, so long a rumour far away in the south, had finally reached the capital, following on the heels of the swarms of refugees.
The rebels had crossed the border two months ago, had quickly taken the iron mines and begun a slow push towards Lake Albert and the capital. At first the rebels’ advance had followed a strict tempo. They would take a town and pause, regrouping and strengthening their position, then move on again. But recently the rebels had split into two unequal groups, the smaller more disciplined and more efficient (their leader, Prince Marshall, who had taken to telephoning the BBC World Service with boastful accounts of skirmishes inflated to battles, drove about the front in a jeep, shooting any of his troops who paused to indulge in looting), and the pace of the advance had quickened. Before the split in the rebel ranks there had always been food available in the capital if you could pay the price, preferably in US dollars, but now even staples like rice and manioc were running low.
Harry Merrick had done his best to keep his bar operating normally, even if it meant dipping into his reserves to match inflated war prices. It was a matter of keeping up appearances. The bar was Harry’s refuge—had been for thirty years. It was popular with expatriots and the corrupt businessmen, government officials and army officers who had flourished under President Weah. The whores were clean and young; the booze was unadulterated; the food was good, thanks to Francis, the Fela cook. But the army, since the coup principally of the President’s tribe, had started to round up Fela men, because both Prince Marshall and Leviticus Smith, the leader of the main group of rebels, were Fela. Harry’s cook refused to go out after two of his uncles were arrested and shot, and so Harry had taken over the buying duties.
The capital’s food market was a maze of tin-roofed stalls beside the ferry terminal, with the eight-storey National Bank, the tallest building in the country, on the other side of the wide lakeside avenue. Normally, the market was bustling from dawn until dusk, but lately less than half the stalls were open, and those half-empty. Harry, in sunglasses and wide-brimmed bush hat to protect him from the early morning light, was haggling over a cage of scrawny chickens when the army truck drove up.
The Bureau of State Research had maintained a low but constant state of terror in the capital since the coup d’État five years ago. President Daniel Weah was a vain, badly educated man with an inferiority complex matched only by his greed and ruthless cunning. He had killed all his fellow plotters in the confusion after the coup and assumed total power as President-For-Life, although he still held his former army rank of sergeant. One by one, he had removed the government officials and ministers of the old regime and replaced them with badly educated men from his village. The Chief Justice had been shot in court; the Minister for Defence and two senior army generals had died when their helicopter had been brought down by a heat-seeking missile near the border; the head of the TV station had been blown up by a car bomb that killed sixteen passers-by and wounded more than fifty others. Prominent businessmen had been assassinated, too, and the state had appropriated their assets; like many other small businesses, Harry paid his taxes directly to a bagman who came around every week and had an uncanny knowledge of the turnover of the bar.
None of this was particularly exceptional for a post-revolution African country in the early 1980s, but after the rebels took the south, the army began its own terror campaign. Soldiers of the two tribes which had previously held power in the country were disarmed and herded into camps; more than a hundred were killed when they had tried to break out of their barracks. Bodies appeared at intersections with their severed heads in their laps, seeming to watch the thin traffic go past. No one dared remove them. A missionary was shot in his church because he had given shelter to the families of two disappeared army officers. Checkpoints were set up at every road out of the city and if someone was detained they were never seen alive again.
Despite the terror and the pincer-like advances of the two groups of rebels, most of Harry’s acquaintances in the golf club, the focal point of the expatriate community, were of the opinion that the President would survive. These were men who had lost almost everything as the economy dwindled away into the pockets of a very few, but like a gambler who stakes everything on a final throw, they refused to believe that they were out of the game. Harry himself thought that the President was smarter than he looked. Daniel Weah might be a swaggering bully who behaved like a cattle herder who had just come to the big city, but that was an act. He played dumb, but was shrewd and well advised, and always pretended to listen to the elders of his own tribe. Now, though, it seemed that he was losing his grip; a few nights ago he had had to appear on TV and explain that the massacre at the barracks had been due to rebel infiltrators, which no one believed at all.
When the army truck pulled up by the side of the road, the crowd parted for it with alacrity. It was a Bedford ten-tonner with a heavy grill over its radiator, its cab and the canvas cover over its loadbed splotched brown and green. Soldiers jumped down, lifted a man’s corpse out by its arms and legs, and dropped it onto the tin counter of an empty butcher’s stall. Then the truck pulled away, soldiers clinging to its sides and whooping with laughter at their joke and firing their Ml6s into the air even though so-called happy shooting had been banned to save ammunition.
The corpse wore only ragged trousers. It had been severely beaten, and shot in the back of the head. An iron rod had been pounded into its chest, and its hands and feet had been cut off. Something horrible had happened to its mouth; it looked like someone had broken the jaw and stretched it, then hammered crooked ivory nails into the gums and through the cheeks. The crowd looked at the mutilated corpse, murmuring to each other. Harry, shocked, pushed his way out of the circle, and was hailed by the French journalist, René Sante.
As usual, Sante was brimming over with gossip and rumours. He was indefatigable, a stringer for half a dozen newspapers and one of the major American TV networks. He had been at a dinner for the remaining ambassadors last night, he said. The President had worn his sergeant’s uniform, his blouson heavy with ranks of medals he had awarded himself. Before the dessert course he had made a speech.
“He said he would deal the rebels a blow from which they could not recover,” Sante told Harry. “There’s talk he plans to napalm the frontline villages. He also said that there were no shortages, that thieves had stolen the riches of the country and he would soon arrest them all, and all would be well. Then he took a spoonful of his dessert and got up and left. He gets bored at those things, my friend. I’ve been to about twenty, and I’ve never once had dessert. It was ice cream, too—I haven’t had ice cream for a month. I think,” Sante said, lowering his voice, “that there is not long left. They say he has brought mercenaries in, and that’s always a desperate move. The population never likes it because it reminds them of the worst excesses of colonialism, and there’s always the risk that they’ll go out of control.”
Harry and René Sante were sitting at a cafe table on the other side of the market. The journalist was sipping from a beer; as usual, Harry had bought iced tea which he didn’t touch, except occasionally to hold to his forehead. He was grateful for Sante’s chatter because it helped him not to think about the corpse and what it might mean. The day was brightening, and splinters of light penetrated the lenses of his dark glasses like slivers of hot silver; he could feel his exposed skin begin to tighten. He told Sante that last night a TV journalist from CBS had been drinking at the bar.
Sante nodded vigorously. He was a small wiry man, full of energy. He wore a travel-stained safari jacket, its pockets bulging with canisters of film, cassette tapes, spare batteries. He had set his three cameras on the rickety tin table. He was pleased to have caught the dumping of the body; he thought he could sell it to Paris Match. It was a parable of the African situation, Harry thought. The army and the journalists fed on horror, and the ordinary people went hungry.
>
Sante said, “I know the guy from CBS. He’s just been with Leviticus Smith. Smith is boasting that the war will be over in six months. He says he will be President for two years, and then he will think about elections. You should consider of getting out, my friend.”
“I’m comfortable here.”
After the coup, Harry had been tempted to give up the bar and start over somewhere else, but things had quickly settled down. Humans were creatures of habit, and old habits and customs persisted despite the bursts of energy which suddenly and unpredictably overwhelmed their precarious social structures. They had no patience; they didn’t have the long view. They saw only what was before their noses, and lived for the day. Harry was able to live amongst them so easily because they twisted facts in their own minds to fit their preconceptions.
Even René Sante, who lived off his wits, was easy to fool. He saw Harry as a kind of fellow traveller, not exactly an ally, nor even a friend, but someone who had a common interest in the mixed currency of gossip and rumour and fact by which stringers survived. To Harry, the journalist was neither prey nor a threat. Harry would never drink from him, but René yielded to Harry all the same, too ready to spill what he knew.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 36
