The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Watching Harris closely for any reaction, but not really expecting one, he was surprised to see the American’s eyes widen for a bare instant. Now I wonder what that was about? he thought curiously, drawing in smoke.

  ‘Werewolf, huh?’ drawled the mate. ‘How do they work that one out?’ And he took a cigarette out and lit it. Da Silva smiled faintly, being quite used to reading body language. He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The Indian penchant for melodrama, perhaps,’ he suggested, somewhat disingenuously, and shrugged his shoulders.

  Harris looked doubtful. ‘They must have a reason, don’t you think, skipper?’

  ‘Justification, then,’ said the captain, feeling the scar on his cheekbone absently. It still felt strange, a strip of smooth slippery skin. ‘So they wouldn’t have to admit that they weren’t watching a child, they say the wolf that took it had supernatural powers.’

  ‘A wolf in the town, though?’ Harris said, unconsciously echoing Gomes, and turned away, ostensibly eyeing the crowd at the waterfront.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said Da Silva, ‘it’s a convenient excuse for more delays. Anyway, Senhor Harris, I’ll send word when I need you.’

  ‘Right, skipper,’ said the Isabella’s newest crew-member, and took his leave.

  The man was shocked when he heard about the werewolf, Da Silva thought. But not surprised to hear me say the word. A drop of sweat ran down his nose, and he wiped at it irritably. Damned stupid climate. The captain took off his eyepatch, his hand encountering damp hair as it cleared his head. His shirt was glued to him, and all the folds of his clothes were sodden. I wish to God I was back in Lisbon. Where it gets hot in summer, but you don’t liquefy in it. He rubbed at the patch ineffectually, grimacing.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked a curious voice by his elbow.

  ‘New third mate,’ he said, ruffling his son’s hair automatically and finding it as clammy as his own.

  ‘Oh mãe,’ said Zé disgustedly. ‘Someone else to boss us around.’

  ‘That’s what ’prentices are for,’ Da Silva informed him.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Harris,’ said the captain. ‘He’s an American, so I expect you’ll be learning a few new swear words.’

  Zé grinned at the prospect, and did a little dance round his father. When he had been nine years old, a sailor from Providence, Rhode Island, had taught him to say goddamn – much to Da Silva’s private amusement – and given him a silver dollar, which Zé would not be parted from. ‘When are we sailing? It’s too hot here.’

  ‘Too hot, too wet, too stuffy, too dirty. I don’t know, Zé. As soon as we can. As soon as all those bloody bureaucrats decide I’ve paid them enough in bribes. Heaven only knows.’ A yawn caught him by surprise. My God, I’m tired, he thought, how did that happen? He wiped his hand over his face, the sweat feeling greasy on his palm and his fingers, then dragged it through his hair, mopping his forehead with his shirtsleeve as it followed through. Zé looked at him and giggled.

  ‘Your hair looks like a bottle-brush,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t you got any studying you should be doing?’ asked the captain, ominously, and his son took the hint and scuttled off. Da Silva watched him go, a small smile on his face. He hadn’t really wanted the boy to follow in his footsteps at all, but it had soon become obvious to both him and his wife that Zé would get himself to sea by fair means or foul. So they had concluded that the safest thing had been to take him on the Isabella where he could at least be watched some of the time. And Da Silva had to admit that he was doing well.

  He lit another cheroot, put the thoughts of Emilia – whom he missed every day – that Zé had awakened firmly out of his mind, and wondered what he should do about the werewolf.

  Hell and damnation, why is the skipper interested? What does he know? How can he know?

  Get yourself under control, Harris. He don’t know about you. There’s something else going on in this burg. Someone else, that don’t care about killing people. Well, good God Almighty, life is cheap here. Ain’t that the truth.

  But that ain’t the point, is it? The point is, I can’t tie myself up no more, case someone finds me and kills me before I can do anything about it. Kills me for something I ain’t done. But Jesus, what happens then, when the beast comes to me? Can I control it?

  I remember. I remember. It was the George Washington from Liverpool to Riga. Freezing Baltic waters. Rime on the sheets. Danny O’Leary got pneumonia and nearly died. We put into port a day before it iced over, and there we were, stuck fast till she thawed. And wolves in the streets, leaving paw prints in the snow and yellow stains of piss on the frozen buildings. Marking out their territory. Hell, folks said they was even out on the sea, running on the ice.

  So what the devil was a sailor supposed to do, take up woodcarving?

  It was poker was my undoing, like my Ma always said it would be. Except I don’t reckon she meant it like it happened. I didn’t go with no hookers, didn’t want to catch the pox. Didn’t go drinking, at least not too much, rots your brain. Took care of my brain and my prick but lost my goddam humanity when I stepped outside for a smoke to clear my head.

  Yellow eyes in the night, hot and yellow as molten gold poured into a mould, the same deep fierce glow. Lips, black, stretching back from a mouth full of fangs. Smell of decaying blood, new blood.

  And I’m dead.

  Only I’m not.

  Then, a month later, pain. Excruciating pain. My spine is broken, my legs and arms dislocated, even my skull feels like it’s exploding. I fall to the floor screaming. Some bones stretch, some shrink, everything re-forms. It feels like there’s hot lead running in my veins. It hurts so much I have no more breath to cry out, and it goes on and on and on and a furnace heat builds until I think I’m really on fire, with actual flames shooting from my skin. But I can’t see them burning because when I open my eyes their perception has changed, the entire concept of seeing has altered.

  I don’t see with my eyes any more, but with my nose. Sight is no more than shadows. The sense of smell is totally overwhelming, the scent of blood irresistible.

  I’m a wolf.

  So I go hunting.

  José Da Silva, known to everyone – except to his mother when he was in for a hiding – as Zé, sat in the ’prentices’ cabin and pretended to study. But however convincing this outward appearance of diligence, he was actually rerunning the last part of his father’s conversation with Senhor Harris in his head, over and over.

  The two men had been talking in English, of course, but Zé had inherited the captain’s gift for languages and already spoke it pretty well himself. Added to which an addiction to penny dreadfuls, a form of literature to which O’Rourke, the ship’s doctor, had introduced him, had made him familiar with words like werewolf.

  Zé had long suspected that his father knew rather more about uncanny things than he ever let on, and this seemed to confirm it. Except that he hadn’t said it was actually a werewolf, had he? But that was uninteresting. The possibility of real werewolves was, on the other hand, decidedly intriguing, not to say exciting.

  Zé chewed the end of his pencil and rubbed his left cheekbone in unconscious imitation of the captain. I could ask Vik, he thought, except that I can’t figure out how. This was a native boy a year or so older than Zé who appeared to be indigenous to the dockside, and with whom he had struck up a sort of friendship despite the lack of a common language. Vik had a smattering of Portuguese and English, and had taught Zé a few words of Hindi, but it was hardly a sufficient linguistic basis for explaining such a sophisticated concept as that of a man who turned into a wolf. The greater part of most of their conversations was conducted in sign language, with odd words thrown in here and there – usually very loudly, since Vik seemed convinced that Zé would understand him if only he shouted loudly enough.

  Another drop of sweat fell on his book, and he wiped it off absently, noticing in passing that the page was quite pocked with damp patches.
It had been uncomfortably hot and humid ever since they had put into port, even when the skies opened – as they did fairly often – and released a torrent of rain as solid as the sea. Zé found this quite remarkable, being used to the air feeling fresher after rain had fallen.

  If it is a werewolf, he thought, I wonder if Father has silver bullets for his revolver? And that led to another idea, just as exciting: did his mother make them for him? Emilia Da Silva was a jeweller, and he had watched her casting small metal trinkets often enough; though since the captain had acquired the Isabella she also ran the business from an office in Lisbon, and that took up much of her time. Zé visualized his father stalking something in deep shadows, gun in hand, but his picture of the werewolf itself was somewhat hazier. The illustrations in O’Rourke’s books showed hairy beasts that bore very little resemblance to actual wolves – not that Zé had ever seen a real wolf, except a stuffed one once – but he wanted the werewolf to be more formidable, somehow, than those often ill-drawn pictures. To be a better adversary.

  Unaware of his son’s train of thought, Da Silva headed away from the stinks of the waterfront into the only slightly different stinks of the town, making for a small grey church that sat on a bare sward that perhaps once had been green with grass, incongruous amongst tall palm trees and leathery-leaved frangipani.

  The Portuguese who had colonized this shore had been as much evangelists as explorers and, like most zealots, had been enthusiastic in suppressing local religions and, often forcibly, substituting their own. That missionary zeal meant that there was no shortage of priests in the area, which should have been good news, since in most places a priest was a reliable, not to say indefatigable source of information.

  Father Miguel Domingues did not look, at first sight, like the kind of ascetic who wore a hair shirt, being decidedly on the plump side. But on closer inspection, his chin and his round skull alike had both been shaved to within an inch of their life, and his lips were bracketed with deep furrows and were too thin for his full face. It gave him a forbidding air, and Da Silva’s heart sank. He looks like a damned Jesuit, he thought.

  The priest arched his nostrils at Da Silva and eyed the captain haughtily, taking in eyepatch and scar and incongruously blue eye, and damp untidy hair and four o’clock beard, somehow combining an expressionless stare with the appearance of being singularly unimpressed. Da Silva returned the stare and decided the feeling was mutual, though how Domingues managed to cope with wearing full clerical fig without apparently raising a sweat was, admittedly, quite a trick.

  ‘What can I do for you, my son?’ he enquired, in the peculiarly gentle tone that some priests affected, and that never failed to set the captain’s teeth on edge. They probably took a special course on it at the seminary, he decided. Unctuous condescension certificate.

  Da Silva had already made up his mind not to beat about the bush by skirting around the topic. He lit up a cheroot, partly because the priest looked the type to be irritated by smoke, with his flaring patrician nose – though God knew his sinuses must have had to put up with much worse things than cigars, living here – and said bluntly, ‘Have you heard about this wolf that’s supposed to be eating children?’

  The priest gave him a raking stare that said plainly, What business is it of yours? but answered in an indulgent tone. ‘Of course. Tragic. But these things happen, my son. I fear that despite all our efforts, many of these poor souls remain unenlightened.’

  And that makes it all right if they’re eaten, does it? Da Silva thought. He blew smoke out, and wiped sweat from his upper lip. ‘It doesn’t worry you?’

  ‘It saddens me deeply,’ replied the priest. ‘If those poor children had been baptized they would now be with God, however unfortunate their lives on earth.’

  There’s my problem, thought the captain. I don’t believe that any more, if I ever did. Why should God be so petty as to turn them away? Aloud, he said, ‘What do you think about the rumour that it’s some kind of supernatural beast?’

  At that, Father Domingues chuckled indulgently, his prejudices about seafarers obviously confirmed. ‘My son, my son,’ he said, overt condescension creeping into his voice that implied not only superstitious sailor but also, and not very far behind at that, ignorant peasant as well. ‘I do hope that we have put that sort of superstition behind us. We are, after all, living in the twentieth century now.’

  The captain, who was rather more than half inclined to dismiss the better part of religion’s trappings as superstition invented by priests to subjugate ignorant populaces – especially those parts which led the ordained to believe in their own superiority, if not omnipotence – bared his teeth in something that was almost a smile. ‘But a lot of people do still believe in that sort of thing. Don’t you believe in the Devil, Father?’ he added. A little to his surprise the priest reddened, but the captain was careful not show his amusement.

  ‘Evil can come in many forms,’ the priest said sharply, looking at Da Silva with narrowed eyes. ‘But prayer is always effective.’

  Da Silva stared back, suddenly furious at the sheer stupidity of the man’s arrogant ignorance, and bit back an angry retort. Prayer is always effective! Yes, and I’m the grand panjandrum of all India. He had to take care not to show his anger, though, so merely raised an eyebrow fractionally. ‘I’m sure I can count on your prayers, then,’ he said, and turned to go.

  To hell with the whole pack of them, he thought viciously. If they’re too bloody narrow-minded to see what’s in front of their noses, then I’ll get the information I want from someone who knows. Still imagining he could feel Father Domingues’s gaze on him, he took a few deep breaths to steady himself. An unwise reaction, given the truly heroic level of putridity in the street.

  Carefully he picked his way along, skirting deep, opaque, chalky-yellow puddles that you would never even consider putting a foot into. Not if you wanted to keep your boot intact, that was. And then he frowned, feeling another presence watching him, though when he looked round there was nothing suspicious to be seen. Not even the priest.

  He was roused from his thoughts by a voice cutting through the cacophony of the street and speaking cultured Portuguese. ‘Excuse me, senhor capitão, but perhaps I can be of help.’ He turned round abruptly, his accoster having come up on his blind side, to see an elderly man clad only in a dhoti and a coat of dust. This ancient recoiled slightly at Da Silva’s grim expression, but persisted. ‘If you were wanting to know about the . . . wolf, that is.’

  ‘That was the general idea,’ replied the captain, rubbing at his scar and feeling sweat run down his face.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ the old man said, oddly formal. He looked a good deal older than Methuselah, but his brown eyes were bright and alert in his seamed face. ‘My name is Mohan Das. And I am at your service.’

  Intrigued, Da Silva asked, ‘What can you tell me?’

  ‘Will you walk a little?’ Mohan Das moved off, and Da Silva fell in beside him. Not a tall man, he topped the diminutive Indian by several inches, and had to moderate his normal pace. In fact, in most eastern countries he could feel tall, and was vain enough to enjoy the sensation – a reaction that amused him.

  They had hardly begun to walk when he was obliged to stop almost immediately as an inordinately large and solid-looking ghost surged up in front of him. The captain swore silently, irritated that any shade could still have the capability of startling him. He walked through it determinedly. His companion, however, either did not notice or affected not to do so.

  The knife he wore concealed down his back chafed, and sweat pooled and ran inside his clothes. Da Silva wished he could emulate Mohan Das and strip off, and grinned to himself – more at the picture it presented than at the possible reaction it could cause. Which would probably be none at all, here. ‘May I ask why you are hunting this thing?’ the old man asked, curiously. ‘Are you on some kind of crusade?’

  Well, yes, the captain thought, startled, although he would n
ot have put it quite that way. But, on reflection, he did feel he had an obligation. A duty to get rid of such things whenever they crossed his path. As they did now, since he began seeing ghosts. A little taken aback, as much by his own response as by the question, he said, resignedly, ‘It looks like it.’ And felt as though he had taken an irrevocable step.

  The other nodded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘And you can see ghosts, too.’ That was not a question. Da Silva wondered how he knew. ‘How long have you had this ability?’

  Da Silva indicated his eyepatch. ‘Ever since this happened.’ He sometimes wondered whether it was the precise nature of the entity that had destroyed his left eye that had enabled his second sight, rather than the loss itself. Since it had been a demon. This information he did not intend to share with the old man.

  ‘May I ask how it happened?’

  ‘You may ask,’ said Da Silva, in a tone that brooked no argument, ‘but I won’t tell you.’

  Mohan Das seemed unperturbed by his refusal. ‘In some cultures, shamans’ eyes were ritually put out before they could come into their full powers,’ he remarked, conversationally. ‘And seers and sibyls were often blinded, too.’

  The captain raised his eyebrows. Shamans, he thought. What next, witchdoctors? ‘I’m not a seer.’

  ‘What is a name?’ asked the other. ‘You see ghosts. You fight evil. What does that make you?’

  ‘Captain of the Isabella,’ retorted Da Silva. Mohan Das laughed, and executed a neat manœuvre to avoid a particularly persistent beggar. He moved through the crowd the way a fish does through water, quite at home in his own element. Da Silva, who had to dodge ghosts as well as people, fared less well, although he was gradually learning to walk through, rather than round, the shades that thronged the streets wherever he went. Even after nearly two years, though, it was still not quite automatic.

  ‘You will find,’ observed his companion, without looking up at him, ‘that you are not unique. But neither are you alone.’