Petri forced his eyes closed, but in real life, he did the opposite. His eyes were open, he was conscious again and still helplessly stuck.
Petri started to scream and swing his head. No mercy; head against stone until it all fades away.
And finally it did.
Evening sun shining through the open balcony doors in some little Portuguese town, the name of which Petri couldn’t remember. The balcony doors had wooden blinds; one of them was open. The sun was setting behind the mountains.
Nina’s hair against the white pillow.
Look how beautiful, Petri said.
Nina didn’t answer him. Petri took the girl by the shoulder and turned her around.
Her face was covered by hair. Petri moved it aside but could not find Nina’s face. The hair would not end. Just when he thought he could see a glimpse of an eye or the tip of her nose, more hair appeared. The hair went on and on, tangled around his fingers, wrapped tightly around them, and there was something between all that hair, not eyes or tips of noses, but . . .
Small mouths angry rat mouths.
They greedily attacked the fingers tangled in hair, like this had been the plan from the very start, when Nina, whose name Petri did not yet know, had walked across that room at that party, so young and so beautiful and so sudden that everything changed, like waking up from a dream.
And Petri woke up.
He didn’t scream this time. His shoulder was numb, but he felt something touching his feet. Petri held his breath and focused on the sensation like it was a quiet sound he was trying to listen for.
Fingers were exploring his toes. He could feel the tickles clearly. It was almost a pleasant feeling. The world was good, after all. The fingers separated his toes patiently, gently. Like an ape grooming its mate or a parent caressing the feet of their child.
When the pain came, it wasn’t even that bad, all things considered.
It still left him unconscious.
Petri remembered the school festival at the end of first grade. He hadn’t seen his father and mother anywhere. After the festival, he had run out and stood in the schoolyard, thinking that something bad had happened, that the world wanted to hurt him. The details of it remained hidden, like the details of some hostile, hiding, curled-up creature. Then his father and mother had stepped through the school doors. Familiar faces and smiles, and they asked why Petri had just run past them.
Petri couldn’t explain. Maybe he had wanted to see the world as it was, without his father and mother, catch the world in the act before it curled up and hid.
Petri kept repeating the memory, absent-mindedly certain that it was something crucial, something he could not quite catch. Again and again, he focused on the moment in the empty schoolyard, when something had curled up to hide, had run underneath the bathroom door when he had flipped on the
light.
Petri realized that his skin was free.
He was the cockroach that had gotten away.
Petri lifted his head. The motion felt like a luxury. To be allowed to move like that.
Only the skin of his back was touching stone. The darkness was still complete, but the tightness was gone.
Petri suspected that he was sleeping. The world wanted to hurt him, and it would not let go that easily.
He felt out his left shoulder. It was dislocated and broken. The pain was real. Petri pushed himself to sit up and groped at the ground around him. His hands touched fabric. His fingers explored the object until Petri realized that it was a backpack. Opening it one-handed was difficult. Inside, he felt the plastic shape of a cellphone.
A lucky cockroach, indeed.
When the screen woke up, it shone like the sun. It filled the cave. Petri hooted with joy and looked around. He saw the handprints covering the wall, the clothes on the ground. A miracle had happened. Petri did not understand how, but he accepted it. He illuminated the old cave, his old skin, the old childhood scar on his knee.
And his toes.
His legs were at the mouth of the passage leading to the last cave. Behind them, there was a darkness that the light could not reach.
The big toe was missing from his left leg. It was replaced by emptiness, and a rough wound with a bone peeking through. All the other toes were still there. Delicate, curling shapes, like a cluster of stunted mushrooms.
‘Why?’ Petri whispered.
The question sounded lonely and hollow in the cave’s echoless space. Petri started to giggle, and his vision filled with tears.
‘Why the big toe?’ he asked the empty cave.
Petri realized that he was being stared at. The motion had been at the edge of his peripheral vision, but his mind was numb and slow to connect the dots.
The light of the screen went out just as he saw the silver dots of eyes at the end of the narrow passage. Petri dragged himself backwards and switched on the screen again.
The light did not reach far enough, but against the darkness he could discern faces as gray shapes around glowing pairs of eyes. Petri held his breath and listened. Scraping sounds, at the edge of his hearing. Like tired old men trying to saw timber at the same time. Ears that had grown up in the noise of traffic could just barely hear it. The sound was accompanied with lazy smacking sounds and frail sighs of pleasure.
They did not ask for much. They lived on handouts.
Something reached towards him from the darkness. A thin arm. Blue veins. One pair of eyes stooped closer. Petri leaned back but stayed where he was. For a fleeting moment, he saw a pale, hairless crown of a head. Shining eyes below it. Bloodstained fingers.
The arm jerked and something fell in front of Petri. Light, tingling sounds against the stone.
Petri lowered the cellphone light.
Two pieces of bone.
His big toe. Petri recognized it right away, even though the skin was gone. The pieces of bone were damp and shiny, maybe with spit. A few stains left by bloody fingers.
The eyes retreated back into the darkness. Why? Petri would have liked to ask. What was this grotesque trade all about? He had the right to know, but the sea of silver dots was like the starry sky. No use in asking. Maybe they were dead already.
Petri bowed forward and reached to take the pieces of bone with his left hand, even though pain was trying to tell him not to use that arm. He squeezed them in his fist. The lazy movement of his fingers made pain radiate all across his body.
The faces stayed still.
‘Darling . . .’
A weak voice. A woman’s voice. Petri stared at the pairs of eyes and tried to illuminate them better.
‘You can talk?’ he asked numbly.
The shape of a smaller face stood out amongst the figures, circled with black hair, without glowing eyes. Petri remembered Nina. How could he have forgotten the young, beautiful Nina?
‘Are you okay?’ Petri asked.
A long silence. Grunting breaths, smacking sounds. And then, one word:
‘Go.’
Judging from her voice, Nina was very, very cold.
‘No,’ Petri said. ‘You’re coming with me.’
The hand that held the cellphone was shaking. The restless light made it hard to focus.
‘I can’t.’
‘I got out, too,’ Petri said. ‘They let me go . . . pushed me out, I wouldn’t have made it—’
‘You’re too old,’ Nina interrupted him.
Petri tried to understand why his age suddenly mattered, in the middle of all this. Nina had never brought it up. Twenty-eight years and three months. A blink of an eye.
‘Too old. They don’t want you. Maybe they respect you. Alex told me before . . .’
‘Alex is there?’ Petri asked.
‘Kind of.’
‘I want to speak with him.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Totally sure.’
He could hear Nina’s teeth chattering through the creatures’ smacking noises and dragging breaths. The girl had to be in shock. Petri thought about her naked, freezing body. About how Nina’s skin touched the skin of the creatures with glowing eyes. The thought enraged him.
Petri found a loose rock on the ground. He squeezed it inside his fist and started to crawl towards the hole, cursing and yelling.
‘Don’t.’
Petri stopped. The creatures had gone quiet. Not a sound. Only the chattering of Nina’s teeth.
‘You didn’t see what they did,’ Nina whispered.
She sounded like she wanted to cry but was too tired to do it. Nina, who had never sacrificed anything.
Petri’s rage dulled as fast as it had awoken. Fear returned. It brought back the pain and exhaustion, the desire to breathe outside air. Petri lowered the hand that was holding the rock.
‘I’ll go back to the village and get some help,’ he said.
‘You do that.’
Nina sounded sleepy.
‘We will come and get you really soon.’
‘Good.’
‘Don’t let them take you anywhere.’
‘I won’t.’
Petri forced himself to stand up and started to collect some clothes. There was no time to be picky. He found his own pants, but the shirt was Nina’s. It was too small and too tight around his injured shoulder, but it would have to do. The silver dots followed his every move when he put the pieces of bone into his trouser pocket.
‘We will see each other soon,’ Petri said, even though they both knew that this was the end.
Here’s where it finally happened. In a nameless cave, deep underground, near the border between France and Spain.
Petri walked back along the same route they had followed, lighting the way with a cellphone. The stone scratched at his old, stretchy skin, tore wounds in the soles of his feet, which had been covered by shoes for too long.
When he came to the hole that led to the surface, he looked up, breathed in the biting night air and felt alive for the first time in decades. Petri looked for protrusions in the wall that he could grab and use as footholds, started to climb towards freedom. It was a difficult task, maybe impossible. A dislocated shoulder, one of his supporting toes gone.
A lucky, wounded cockroach attempting to climb out of a glass bottle.
After falling for a third time, Petri lay on his back on the stony ground and panted. He cried a little and wondered if there was anything worth all this effort outside the cave. A sleeping village, disbelieving police officers who would never find Nina. The calls of unfamiliar animals, the meaning of which he did not understand. The blinking eyes of long-dead stars and a wind that blew around the shreds of torn birthday cards.
On an impulse, he took the two pieces of bone from his pocket. Twirled them around with his numb fingers. Put them in his mouth.
The bitterness of blood and strange saliva. He bit down with determination until something gave. Either a bone or a tooth. A musty, primal taste flooded his mouth. The taste of survival.
He forced himself on his feet and tried again.
Translated from the Finnish by Sanna Terho
Martin Steyn
Kira
One of South Africa’s eleven official languages, Afrikaans is a relatively young one, a descendant of the Dutch spoken there by colonizing settlers and not recognized as a distinct language by the South African government until 1925. There is a long tradition of horror fiction and ghost stories in Afrikaans, dating back to the éminence grise of Afrikaans letters, poet C. J. Langenhoven (1873-1932), who published literary ghost stories, the best of which were collected in a 2015 volume in Afrikaans but await an English translation. Contemporary Afrikaans horror authors include François Bloemhof and Jaco Jacobs, both primarily writers for young readers, but whose horror stories for adults appeared in the 2016 anthology Skadustemme [Shadow Voices], where they were featured along with our next story, Martin Steyn’s ‘Kira’. Though predominantly an author of crime novels, one of which, Dark Traces, has appeared in English, Steyn grew up reading Stephen King and occasionally publishes a tale in the genres of horror or the supernatural, like this one, in which a man returns to his childhood home, where he experiences an otherworldly encounter.
Tamason.
I push the cabin’s door open, Knysna Lake purling softly behind me. The stagnant odor hits me like an accusation. The dust must be at least two centimeters thick and I notice more than one thing scurrying.
I’m happy to be back. I’ve always seen Tamason as ‘back’ and the apartment in Stellenbosch as ‘away’, although I spend my days in that student town. Here I always feel whole again.
That’s why I’ve fled here.
I inherited Tamason from my parents. From the beginning there was a bond between me and the cabin; I was the one who gave it its name when I was little. We were sitting on the porch and my mom pointed out the sunset to me. When those red fingers, a woman’s fingers without any doubt, drew silky stripes through the clouds, I said one word: ‘Tamason’. What I tried to say was ‘tomato sun’, but at that stage, tomato was still either ‘mato’ or ‘tama’, depending on the sentence or my mood. And so was my beloved house christened.
It takes me the rest of the afternoon to make the house reasonably clean, ‘every nook and cranny’, as my mom was so fond of saying. In the process I discover all kinds of filthy creatures that had come to breed and mutate happily in mankind’s absence, and everything gets summarily bugsprayed and massacred; I have no conscience when it comes to insects.
With the dust and corpses cleared away and my airways sneezed clean, I go and sit with a can of Castle on the porch swing. I look out over the water. The ripples look so calm, but the surface is a dark veil.
I start up a fire and grill a whole package of sausage. By the time it’s ready there are three more empty beer cans beside the barbecue. I eat half of the sausage along with a roll and go sit down again on the swing, my second-to-last Castle in my hand.
I become conscious of hands. Soft hands, women’s hands, touching my forehead carefully. I open my eyes, confused and disoriented and startled.
But she’s already five steps away. Her eyes are large and dark like the lake, her cheeks dull white and smooth in the light of the gas lamp, her mouth slightly open. Dark hair hangs down to her shoulders. She has a loose white dress on, something that folds over her body almost like a sheet, and her bare feet are close together. She holds her hands in front of her.
I open my mouth to say something, but she is already gone.
Just gone. Like a drop of rain on the lake.
I rub my face and wonder if I’m awake. I still feel her cold fingertips against my skin.
I stand up and step on my empty beer can beside the swing, lose my balance and topple headlong.
It’s one way of making sure you’re awake. I remain lying on the wooden porch and wonder about her. Was she real? Or was it just a dream?
*
The morning sun is shining on the lake when I open the door. I walk into the mineral-rich water, swim out towards the depths and then back to shore. There are a lot of boats on the lake, some with sails, like paper flowers floating in a myriad of colors on the brownish water, others without sails but with powerful engines that cut through the silence. The lake feeds the village, and in a way the village feeds the lake.
Really in more than one way.
After breakfast I grab my guitar and go sit on the swing. It’s somewhere during ‘Polly’ when I feel the clammy thing against my hip, where the T-shirt must have slid up. At first I’m startled, but then I see the animal who has pressed his muzzle against me, laughing and excited, low on his forepaws, rear end in the air and tail wagging.
I can’t resist the big golden retriever. I set the guitar down and sink onto my hands and knees, a mimic of the dog’s posture. His mouth gives a bigger laugh and he shuffles closer. I slap on the plank, and when he jumps I push him to the left. He pulls back and comes again. I turn him away. So we try to outwit each other until he finally jumps around and licks my face. I push his head away but can’t stop him from laughing.
When I finally stand up, I look around but don’t see anyone. There’s no collar on the dog’s neck, but his fur is clean and it’s obvious that he’s well cared for.
‘Where’s your owner?’
He just laughs and sinks down again on his forepaws.
After lunch – we shared a can of Vienna sausages, mine with mustard, his without – I take him out onto the sand, in the hope that he’ll head home. But he just sits and looks at me. He pays no heed to my encouragement. He follows me left and right along the lake. I try to chase him off, but he plays dumb and makes a game of it.
Finally I give up and walk back towards Tamason. I write my shadow’s description and my address on a sheet of paper and walk towards the café. The dog is well trained too, because he doesn’t go in with me.
Old Tolla is behind the counter and he smiles when he sees me. ‘Hey, Tommie! Man, it’s been a long time since I saw you last. How’s it going?’
‘Good, thanks.’ Does it count as a lie if you don’t think about the answer? ‘And you?’
‘Young man, if I complain, the wife says it’s my own fault for wanting to sit and read the newspaper.’ He holds up his hands and grins.
I used to come and buy sweets from Tolla when I was waist-high. He always let me have them at a discount. But old age has crept up on him; the gray has completely overtaken his lush forest of hair, the cracks around his eyes and the corners of his mouth are deeper and folds have appeared in the skin of his neck. Yet the lines on my forehead are deeper too.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 28