“I’m going to the bar,” I told Maggie.
I watched the faces fade in and fade out on the screens as I crossed the room. The last face I saw before the angle became too narrow to see anything at all made me come to an abrupt halt with a silly expression on my face.
Because it was mine.
I backtracked. The face that had looked a lot like mine twenty years earlier had gone and been replaced by that of Gordon, the man I had met in the reception hall. I looked at the other screen, but it would be a while before the shot came around again and I’d be able to see it and realize that the guy who looked like me didn’t look that much like me after all.
I stood waiting for the bartender to pour me a pint of Guinness. He tried to make conversation. He was Greek, very friendly, and he didn’t have many customers, but I wasn’t up for it. I felt strange, dissociated from my surroundings. I palpated my neck.
“Hello Will,” said a voice.
I turned around to see Henrik leaning on the bar. He asked the bartender for a Scotch. From the glassy look in his eyes I guessed he’d already had a couple.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” he said.
“What?”
“This. This place. This whole evening. The mugshots. I didn’t know they were going to do that. With that picture constantly flashing up on screen, it’s like there’s two of you. You now and you then. Do you know what I mean?”
“I saw yours,” I said. “You’ve not changed a bit.”
He gave a little laugh and knocked back his Scotch.
“I’m going to head back,” I said.
“Cheers.”
Seated at the table with the starters arriving, I waited for a gap in the conversation and turned to Maggie.
“What was going on with that whole lift thing?” I asked her.
“I can’t explain it,” she said, her eyes shining. “We went up but then didn’t need to come down again. It’s this place. The rules are different here.”
I could tell Maggie was having a good time; she wouldn’t normally come out with something like that. She’s a very rational person. Either being a doctor made her like that or she became a doctor because that was the kind of person she was. Bit of both probably.
“Do you think it’s possible,” I said, “that we actually went down when we thought we were going up? After I got in?”
“But then we’d have just got back where we started and that wasn’t the right floor. It’s just—” She stopped and her eyes widened and she sang the theme tune to The Twilight Zone. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that – perhaps ten years ago. I smiled and she leaned forward and I kissed her, then immediately she turned away and put her hand on the psychologist’s arm to impart some fascinating piece of gossip she’d just remembered.
Thinking that it would be a while before the main course arrived, I got up from the table. On one of the big screens I recognized the sequence of mugshots that had preceded that of the guy who looked a bit like the younger me. When the face came up again, I studied it. Was he here, in the room? He would be four years older than me if he was Maggie’s contemporary. Would he have aged better?
I thought of him as a version of me four years on, just as the second lobby I’d visited with the identical walnut table was a version of the one on the floor below. It was simply a floor higher. Separated in space rather than time.
I wondered if I should get another pint, but remembered I hadn’t finished the last one.
On a table next to the easel just outside the ballroom was a laptop. It was playing a slideshow of the pictures taken in the hotel’s reception hall. I picked out Maggie, smiling broadly and looking up at the camera just like everybody else. I saw the web designer and the boring gastroenterologist and even, standing on the edge of the group, Gordon, the man I had talked to briefly. I spotted Henrik and his wife, Caroline. There was the divorced psychologist, the tall man with the thinning hair who had known where he was going, there was the woman in taffeta and the man from the reception desk who had changed out of his jumbo cords and pastel polo shirt.
And there, just to the left of centre, was I, my neck tendons straining with the effort of holding my head up to smile for the camera. Maybe I looked a little tired around the eyes, perhaps I appeared a tad heavier in the jowls, even slightly paunchier.
I turned around and headed back into the ballroom. I checked out the nearest tables, but there was no sign of anyone who looked a bit like me. I reached our table, but remained standing, scanning the room, running my eyes over every table in there. He wasn’t to be seen. I sat down, thanked the waitress for my main course and smiled at Maggie, who still looked like she was having a good time.
“This is so weird,” she said quietly but emphatically.
She didn’t know how weird.
I pushed back my chair.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I won’t be long.”
“How’s your neck?”
I looked at her.
“Are your glands still up?”
“I’ve just got to . . .”
My legs took me away from the table. I didn’t like it when she didn’t show concern, and I didn’t like it when she did. She couldn’t win, and neither could I. I prodded my neck as I crossed to the exit. I glanced at the group photo on the laptop, wondering, as I sometimes did, what was the point of a life like this, a life lived in constant fear of its ending. Wouldn’t it just be easier to cut short the wait?
I fingered the keycard in my pocket with one hand and the raised gland in my neck with the other as I walked slowly and softly past the wonky chair and the scuffed cabinet. I stopped to straighten the print that was hanging askew. The glass doors gave on to the lift lobby. The walnut table looked bare. Sitting on the shiny velveteen sofa reading The Independent was Gordon.
“Hello Will,” he said, turning the page.
I had no doubt that if I were to go up a floor, there he would be again, sitting on the sofa reading the same newspaper. And whichever floor I was on, our room would be three doors down on the left beyond the wood-panelled doors.
I reached the door and slid the keycard into the slot. It flashed red. I tried again. Still red. I tried sliding it in very slowly and extracting it just as slowly. Still the red light flashed. I stood for a moment and listened to my breathing, which was fast and shallow.
And then I heard a man’s voice. It was very close. I looked behind me to see if someone had left their door open. They’d left the ballroom to make a phone call and decided to do it in the privacy of their room. But the doors on the other side of the corridor were all shut and the corridor was empty.
Sometimes, when I play five-a-side football and we’re warming up while waiting to begin, I count the players to see if we’re all there. I count four and wonder who’s missing, and it takes me a few moments to realize I’ve failed to count myself.
The frightening thing was that the corridor did genuinely feel empty, as if even I wasn’t there. I would try the card in the door one more time before going to report the fault. I shoved it into the slot, which pushed the door open half an inch with an audible click of the mechanism.
I wondered if we’d left the door unlocked and what valuables might have been at risk. Then I heard the voice again, louder this time. It was coming from inside the room.
SIMON KURT UNSWORTH
Mami Wata
SIMON KURT UNSWORTH’S STORIES have appeared in the Ash-Tree Press anthologies At Ease with the Dead, Exotic Gothic 3 and Shades of Darkness, as well as Lovecraft Unbound, Gaslight Grotesque, The Black Book of Horror 6, Creature Feature, Where the Heart Is and Black Static magazine.
His story “The Church on the Island” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and was reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 and The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror. His first collection, Lost Places, was recently issued by Ash-Tree, to be followed by Strange Gateways from PS Publishing.
“When I was first asked to contribute to Exotic Gothic 3 (which was to feature Gothic-influenced stories in non-Gothic environments), I agreed without really thinking about it,” Unsworth explains, “and then spent a long time struggling, trying to work out how, precisely, I was going to manage it or quite how to make a start.
“I knew what I wanted to do, sort of, but not exactly how to do it, so one day alarmingly close to the deadline I did a fun thing: I freewheeled through Google. Using a small document about Zambian myths and cultures I found online (I set the story in Zambia for no reason other than an old family friend lives there and it seemed exotic in Gothic terms), I used one Zambian word from it as a search term and read what came up, took one intriguing Zambian term from the search results and searched for that, etc, and disappeared into Google’s merry depths.
“I ended up with an academic paper about a particular myth, a travel blog about a sort of beer made from corn and a weird little ‘my God’s better than your God’ blog by a kid in Africa, and somewhere in the middle of that, the story appeared.”
THE HEAT WAS like a brick.
Thorley had never seen shadows like it; they seemed edged in gold and darker at their centre than pitch. Even indoors, they pooled at his feet like glorious ink, gathering around his ankles and under the tables in the chibuku tavern. They even reflected themselves in the sweat that gathered on the brow of Chilongo, Thorley’s companion seated on the other side of the table.
“This is a good place,” Chilongo was saying. “An honest place. Sure, we have our problems, like anywhere, but we’ve always worked hard. I don’t know why they had to send you.”
“They sent me,” said Thorley, “because the mine’s production has fallen by over half and they want to know why.” Behind Chilongo, bottles glittered on the shelves lining the bar, throwing their own shadows across the mural painted on to the wall. A mermaid, golden haired and naked, had her back to the bar’s interior but looked over her shoulder into the room. Her tail was splayed out in front of her, half hidden by her body. Beyond, painted smaller so that they looked insignificant and weak, were rows of men. They looked awe-struck, frightened.
Actually, Thorley hadn’t been sent, he had chosen to come, even though he didn’t need to. The loss of production was a financial concern but it could have been sorted out by phone and email with the onsite managers. It was Chilongo’s voice that had done it in the end, its rich musicality dancing down the telephone line and making the already grey British day greyer. Thorley had heard the sun in Chilongo’s voice, heard the rhythms of African speech, heard something brighter than the drear that faced him through the window, and it had called to him, irresistible and powerful.
“Every mine has runs of luck, good and bad,” said Chilongo. “We’ve just hit a bad period.”
“Indeed?” said Thorley. “And yet the last report said shaft four had hit a new seam, was promising great dividends.”
“It didn’t play out,” insisted Chilongo. “It looked good, but then it turned out to be nothing. We’ve had some flooding in the deepest shaft, some machinery problems. Nothing to worry about. You know how it goes.”
“No,” said Thorley, “I don’t,” and as he said it he thought to himself, but I know when someone’s lying to me. What I don’t know is why.
Thorley had decided not to stay in one of the large hotels. Travelling in from Kitwe, the town nearest to the mine, would have been a waste and besides, he wanted to see what industrial Zambia was really like. He had seen the brochures that sometimes came across his desk, glossy things filled with pictures of wild animals and wide, sweeping plains, telling prospective investors about the landscape and the abundant workforce and the stable government, and about mines that produced yield after impressive yearly yield of copper or nickel or cobalt, but he had never visited. He had never needed to; previously, things had run smoothly and the local managers had dealt with things.
He also didn’t want to stay with the expats, although several of them had offered him accommodation when they discovered he was coming. He had never liked expat communities, which seemed to him to fall too easily into patterns of casual racism redolent of colonialism. They were a necessary evil as Thorley saw it, useful for the skills pool they provided but claustrophobic with nostalgia and boredom, and he certainly didn’t need to expose himself to it any more than was strictly necessary. Instead, he had chosen to stay in a workers’ motel on the outskirts of Kitwe, not far from the mine.
Thorley could have been in a room anywhere; the bed with nondescript covers and sagging mattress, the cheap sideboard that doubled as a television stand, the shower room created by partitioning off one corner and installing a plastic cubicle and shower, the chair on which he hung his clothes.
He placed his underwear and shirts in the sideboard drawers, seeing as he did so a Gideon’s bible. It was old, bleached by the heat, and its spine cracked painfully when he lifted and opened it, the imitation leather dry and brittle. The drawers were lined with newspaper, he saw, aged to the colour of sand and as brittle as the Gideon’s spine. He lifted out a sheet and tried to read it, but the print had faded so that he could only make out some of the words. The headline on the page read FOUR DEAD MEN and below was a date in July, three months previously. He put the sheet back in the drawer and decided to work.
Even after sundown, the heat was oppressive. The motel had no air conditioning, and Thorley soon found that the only way to stay even close to comfortable was to strip to his pants and fan himself with the papers he was supposed to be reading. It was impossible to concentrate anyway; he knew most of the facts already, about how the mine’s production had fallen off dramatically in the previous five months, down from around 450 tonnes to less than 300, how there was no official explanation (apart from Chilongo’s “bad luck”) for this drop in output. Much of the explanation, Thorley saw, would lie in the significant drop in workforce numbers that had occurred over the previous months. The mine still operated, of course; they had not lost that many men, just more than was normal or usual, for reasons that weren’t clear.
Thorley could hear the mine workings as he lay on his bed, a distant throatless rumble peaking occasionally into dull booms or percussive echoes. Closer to, someone was playing a radio loud, the signal fading in and out so that the music and voices seemed to sway about Thorley. He was exhausted and hot, his eyes gritty from tiredness and the dry air, his sweat loosed across him like a second skin. The tap water was only lukewarm and did not quench his thirst, no matter how much he drank. He was wondering about dressing and going in search of ice when he must have, finally, drifted into slumber.
When Thorley awoke it was still dark, and not much cooler. He sat up, realizing as he did so that some of his papers had stuck to his body. They peeled off with a sound like kissing, leaving the ghosts of letters on his flesh that rubbed away under his fingers. In the distance, he heard sirens, or one siren echoing, it was hard to tell, and men shouting. He went to the window of his room, picking up his glass of tepid water as he went, and pulled aside the curtains.
His rented car was a grey shape in the darkness, and the flat apron of the car park beyond a smooth shadow segmented by painted lines. Despite the noises, which seemed to be getting closer, he could see no movement except the distant shimmer of thorn bushes moving in the slight breeze.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The far edge of the car park bordered the road to the mine, and now he could see someone walking along it, heading away from the motel. Shadows from the buildings on the far side of the road swept across the figure as it walked, an alternating, dappling pattern. It was a woman, Thorley saw, tall and thin and white with straggly blonde hair that fell down her naked back.
Naked? No, that couldn’t be right. She must surely have some backless top or dress on, something cool for this stifling heat. He couldn’t see her lower half, so shrouded in shadow was she, but he thought he could hear the swish of material as she walked.
Just before she w
alked out of view, an ambulance went past heading away from the mine, its swirling light illuminating her fully for a moment, showing Thorley her long arms and splayed hands with dark nails. In the moment of her disappearance, she turned her face to him and smiled, her teeth white as alabaster against the surrounding night. She was young, and very pretty.
The next morning, Thorley ate breakfast and waited for Chilongo. The motel had no dining room, so he had walked over the road to a tavern that had a sign outside advertising GOOD FOOD FROM EARLY TIL LATE and ordered himself a coffee and the fruit plate. Although it was before eight, the sun had already cast itself hard across the ground, creating more of those shadows that seemed so dark.
It was worse inside the tavern, where the large glass windows, cataracted with dust and dirt though they were, magnified the heat of the morning far beyond anything the slowly turning ceiling fan could cope with. Flies buzzed across the trays of wild mango, plum and sand apple, the owner flicking a red cloth at them half-heartedly, making the insects rise and fall.
Thorley sat at the table farthest from the windows, hoping to find some respite from the light. At a nearby table, two men stared with undisguised interest at him. He smiled, nodded, broke eye contact by looking down at the papers he had brought with him.
The coffee was poor, weak and gruel-like, but the fruit was excellent, fleshy and juicy and, to his palate, exotic, and he enjoyed the sensation and taste of it in his mouth. As he ate, he looked around the tavern. The other diners were mostly men, workers from the mine, he assumed, some coming off nightshift, others going on. The men going on shift, cleaner and fresher, ate fruit and spoke to each other; the men coming off shift ate plates of vegetables and meat in silence. Most of the men looked over at him during their meals, eyes sullen and wary.
Behind the counter and counterman, painted on the rear wall, was a mural. This one showed a dark-skinned woman with long hair confidently facing into the room, with a comb in one hand. She was naked apart from a snake, draped around her shoulders, its tail and head covering her breasts. The artist had painted her well, and she glowed with large, expressive eyes and a ripe, full mouth. The landscape behind her, however, was cruder, showing only the barest of detail. Hills and a vast plain stretched out, the plain full of what Thorley first thought were apes or horses but then realized were men. There were hundreds of them, mostly barely more than stick figures, all facing the woman. Some appeared to be kneeling, others had their arms raised. It was an odd mix of primitive and modern art styles, although an impressive one.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 29