The darkness, now complete, brought with it silence. Thorley tried to move but Chilongo pulled him back against the rough wall, tightening his grip on Thorley’s hand as he did so. Thorley, recognizing that he was powerless, submitted and remained still.
The first sound was a frictional rustle. It was initially very faint but grew rapidly louder, a constantly shifting, moving sound that made Thorley think of heavy drapes in a breeze or a taffeta ballgown wrapped around a dancing woman’s thighs. Under it there was something else, a clink like stones being tapped together or teeth clicking. Surrounded by the blackness of the absolute, Thorley could not help but populate the darkness with shapes, although what shapes he did not know.
Something was even now slipping around the corner, heading towards them, he was sure. The noise was growing louder, sounding less like material, becoming more like paws stepping delicately over uneven ground or scales rasping against stone. A new scent came to Thorley’s nostrils, foetid and sour like water that cannot flow.
Something moved in the darkness before Thorley’s face. He felt the air shift as it went past, and his face prickled with fevered heat.
Towards the excavator, one of the men whimpered and the thing in the darkness darted away, snapping like a whipping canvas sail in the feverish air. Something skittered away from him, the chitinous clatter not quite covering a noise like some subtle beast scenting the air.
Another man whispered something before being shushed, and the air shifted once more as the thing moved, swift and invisible, among the group. A third man let out a stifled cry and then a fourth (Rowe, Thorley thought) moaned. Another movement, another displacement of air and a hollow, terrible sucking. Rowe groaned again and one of the other men shouted. Someone screamed, the panic echoing as the sucking came again, and Rowe let out a rattled breath. Thorley realized that Chilongo was pulling at him, that he had stepped forward without knowing why, and then the air moved again and the burning heat caressed his cheek once more. Chilongo yanked him once and he was falling, banging, careening into the darkness as a something wheeled back towards the main tunnel.
“What was it?”
Chilongo did not answer, but merely shook his head.
“An animal? A lion in the tunnels?” asked Thorley, insistent. The sun caught in the sweat on Chilongo’s face, birthing shadows around his eyes.
They were in the workers’ canteen, above ground and alone. The rest of the shift had gone, and Rowe had been taken home. Their exit from the tunnel had been frantic and confused, all shouts and pushes and pulls, carrying the half-conscious Rowe and looking around as they ran, stumbling across uneven floors and past side tunnels that yawned like expectant mouths.
They had not turned on the main lights before fleeing, using only the lamps of their helmets, the hazy beams crossing and criss-crossing in the wide tunnel, illuminating men running gracelessly on all sides of him, heading back up the slope. Even in the lift, claustrophobic and full, Thorley couldn’t relax, but stared through the lattice of the closed door as it began to rise, half-expecting to see something appearing from the darkness to snatch them back into the gloom.
Nothing came.
Rowe was not injured that Thorley could see, although he seemed exhausted and dopey, as though he had heat-stroke. One of the other managers had agreed to drive him home and Thorley had watched as the supervisor was taken to the car, walking like an old man. He seemed thinner, somehow, as though being underground had wasted him in some way. Even his shadow looked old, grey and brittle and shrunken and not the depthless and expansive black of the shadows of the man who escorted him or the surrounding cars and buildings.
“It is not an animal,” the African said finally. “It is something else. A tourist, really. She has come like a snake from one of the lakes, Kashiba or Namulolobwe perhaps, is merely enjoying a change of scenery. It has happened before. She never stays long. It is nearly over and she will move on soon, find somewhere new to be. It’s said Mobutu kept her, or one like her, in the Congo, and she gave him strength and jewels for thirty years.”
“She? It’s a woman?” asked Thorley.
“Not a woman, no,” said Chilongo. From over his shoulder, another painted mermaid stared at Thorley. Even here, he thought, although this picture was like cave art. In it, the mermaid, with a fat serpent wound around her body, was grinning widely and holding up a hand upon which a stick figure danced. The figure was male, had swollen genitalia but no facial features. The mermaid’s breasts were exposed, full and rounded and with dark, prominent nipples. She was pale, almost white, with red hair.
“If not a woman, then what?” asked Thorley.
“Mami Wata,” said Chilongo. “A water demon.”
Thorley finished his whisky while making the call. Yes, the mine had suffered some local staffing problems, he said, but they were on their way to being sorted. Production would rise again soon. Chilongo and Rowe had been the very essence of helpfulness, showing him what he needed to see. All was well in Zambia . . .
He didn’t believe it.
He wasn’t sure what was happening here, but he knew he would never get to the bottom of it. He saw it in the suspicion on the faces of the mineworkers, heard it in the voices of the others eating in the taverns, felt it in the heat and in Chilongo’s deferential touch to his shoulder as he got out of the car. “Go back,” Chilongo had said. “Go back and leave us to finish this. It is nearly over, she has almost all she wants. Things will be well again soon.”
Thorley could see no other course of action; demon or animal, imagination or reality, he had no way to understand what was happening here and no strategy for dealing with it. His own places were calling him now, where the shadows weren’t so dark, and the streets were slick and definable and dull. He wanted to go home.
It was late on Thorley’s last night in Zambia. A frantic scratching was beckoning him from a heated sleep, as he lay on top of cheap blankets that stuck to his skin. Clad only in his shorts, he went to the window and drew back the curtains.
The woman was on the other side of the glass.
She smiled. Thorley’s original suspicions were right; she was naked, her breasts pressed flat against the pane. One hand was also flattened against the glass, the fingers scratching at it slowly. In the darkness, her skin seemed to shift from a rich, lustred brown to a pale pink, and her hair to shimmer from black to blonde. Her smile showed teeth as white as milk, her eyes dark and feral and inviting.
Thorley stepped away from the window, uncomfortably aware of his stiffening erection. Her incisors were long, gleaming against pomegranate-red lips, the nails on the end of her fingers curved into wicked hooks. Her areolae were perfect circles and he knew that if he stepped close enough and looked down, he would see that her legs were long and shapely, meeting in a delta of musky hair. He stepped towards the door, pulling off his shorts as he went.
Outside, a slight breeze blew air that was warmer and dry against Thorley’s naked flesh. The woman came to him, holding her arms out, naked as he’d expected and hoped, her tongue poking out slightly from between enticing lips.
Thorley stepped into the cage of her arms, feeling himself tremble. She made a noise like a hissing snake and her smile widened so that it seemed to crawl around her entire face and her mouth opened and that tongue came out, long and red and black and curling and tasting the air, tasting him and then Chilongo rasped, “Leave him be.”
He was standing just out of the woman’s reach, holding a shotgun and pointing it at her. “He is muzungu. Taking him will mean trouble. Find another.”
The woman hissed again and Thorley suddenly wondered how he had seen her as attractive. She smelled wild, of earth and urine and spoiled meat and her tongue was longer than any had a right to be, her only sound a hiss, instinctive and vicious. He stepped back but she moved with him, stepping to follow him, staring at him.
Chilongo moved forwards, pushing the gun barrel into her belly and saying, “No. Fingi! Go into the town, there
are men there who will only be missed by us, not by anyone else.”
Her tongue was on his skin, wet and warm, slipping against his neck.
Chilongo pushed with the barrel and she moved, opening her arms and releasing Thorley. She glared at Chilongo, who gestured briefly with the shotgun towards the road.
Away from her, the smell of her dissipating, Thorley was aroused again as he looked at her breasts, at the way her lips were parted and her breath came in tiny gasps.
Chilongo looked across at him and said, “Go. She is not for you, nor you her.”
As if in reply, the woman sibilated, low and venomous, and her tongue appeared again, lapping at the air. Revulsion washed across him and he backed away.
Thorley managed to stumble to his room as the woman, the thing, remained motionless, staring at Chilongo. He met her gaze without moving, the gun barrel’s black maw hovering at the height of her belly. On the far side of the car park a car sped past, horn braying. Chilongo, distracted, glanced away and in the briefest moment that his eyes were averted, the woman moved.
She covered the distance to Chilongo incredibly fast, dropping low as she went and shrieking like wind across glass bottles. As the car moved along the road, Chilongo’s shadow shifted around him, dancing with the moving headlights, and the woman went with it. Her face brushed the ground, the scraped-porcelain noise of her teeth grinding across the pavement making Thorley’s own teeth ache in sympathy. Her tongue lashed at the ground ahead of her face, writhing and lapping at Chilongo’s shade, sucking violently. Chilongo let out a scream, high and thin, and took two steps forwards, wobbling. The woman darted away from the African, rising as she did so, licking tendrils of blackness that dangled from her mouth and dripped across her breasts.
Chilongo fell to his knees and gave a last, weak exhalation. He looked across at Thorley, and Thorley saw tears glittering in his eyes as he fell forwards, his head cracking against the floor. Thorley slammed his room door shut, backed away further until his knees hit the bed and he fell across it. Ignoring the terrible, liquid sucking sounds coming from outside, he pulled the blanket around him so that it covered his head and thought about home.
The sounds carried on for a long time, impossible to avoid, too audible, slithering into his ears like old grease. Thorley curled up, pulling his knees into a foetal position and wrapping his arms around his legs. The rough grey blanket prickled against this skin as he prayed for the noises to stop.
In the morning, Chilongo was still there. Thorley hadn’t slept; dressing quickly, packing and leaving the motel room early before anyone in the rooms around him stirred, he saw the man’s body was in the same place, legs on the road and head towards Thorley’s door.
Kneeling beside Chilongo, he looked into his glassy, dead eyes and said a silent thank you. The low rising sun glared into his face as he rose, and he saw that Chilongo was the only thing in the car park not casting a shadow. He went to his car, throwing his bag in the rear seat, and drove away quickly.
He did not look back, but he did drive to the mine. The smelting works and storage units and the spiderweb connections of conveyor belts and ramps twisted around him as he wound to the front of the main building and parked.
Thorley got out of his car, sensing the difference in this place. He walked out to the centre of the open space, looking around him. The air burned hot with the acidic scour of industry. All was busier than it had been on his previous visits despite the early hour. Two men, crossing the dusty apron to the lorries parked on the far side, laughed. Machinery roared, its volume shivering the dust hanging in the air. The mine pulsed with energy and movement and life.
Whatever she was, whatever darkness had been deep in the belly of the mine, had gone. Suddenly exhausted, Thorley turned and moved back towards the car. It was time to go.
As the rental limped down the road, he saw in the rear-view mirror the towering battlements and turrets of the mine, the chimneys spewing ropes of smoke into the morning air, curled like snakes against the sun.
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
Venturi
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON IS a film and television writer/producer/director. He has worked with Bryan Singer, Steven Spielberg and Roger Corman, among others, and has written/produced three mini-series, eight feature films, thirty pilots and hundreds of comedic/dramatic television series episodes for HBO, TNT, NBC, CBS, ABC, Showtime Networks, Fox Network and Syfy. He has also published two short-story collections and a novel.
Matheson is a studio musician who studied with Ginger Baker of Cream and has played drums with The Smithereens and Rock Bottom Remainders. He has worked as a paranormal investigator for UCLA, and is considered an expert in parapsychology. He runs his own production company in Los Angeles and the Matheson Company with his father.
“Nineteenth-century physicist G.B. Venturi discovered a compressive phenomenon which effects fire, moving through a canyon, causing the flames to be intensified, feeding upon themselves,” Matheson explains. “This acceleration, called the ‘Venturi Effect’, is as apt a metaphor for paranoia as I have encountered.
“When my own house in Malibu burned down, some years back, my senses altered. As fires ate hillsides and smoke drowned sun, I was forced to evacuate in twenty minutes and ultimately lost everything. I even watched my house go up in flames, on the TV news – a surreal pain.
“The loss awakened me to signs of oncoming fire – rising wind, distant scents of smoke, angry glows on mountains that rim the bay. To this day, even a burning cigarette, anywhere nearby, triggers a vigilant circuit within me.
“I still live in Malibu, aside its dreamy spell, but am never as completely at ease here as I once was. When winds convulse and fire engines wail, my heart races and I know everything could change.”
3:34 P.M.
“When did you first notice this?”
“Week ago,” said David. “Three days after the fire.”
“Any pain?”
“No.”
The doctor’s gloved fingers probed shoulder blade. It was soft, egg-sized; under skin.
“. . . saw the fire on TV. Did you have to evacuate?”
David watched smoke swarm the medical building, tall flames lash, wanting in.
He looked at the doctor.
“You still up in that canyon in Malibu? I hear they don’t give you much time to get out.”
Banshee winds hammered the glass, black plumes muting sun. The room darkened, the doctor’s face a feral shadow.
“I had fifteen minutes. You take what you can.” His mouth was dry. Body numb. “My house didn’t burn. But the neighbourhood’s gone.” He felt ill. “Thirty-eight houses.”
The doctor stopped. Tried to picture it. “My God.”
Dense smoke suddenly filled the examination room; gushing through vents; seeping under doors. Grimy ash swirled; sick snow.
“Fire creates its own wind,’’ said David, “. . . it’s called the Venturi Effect.”
The doctor’s breathing deepened.
“The flames feed on themselves. Like a frightened animal.”
“Venturi . . .” the doctor repeated.
David could see his next door neighbour’s house clawed by apricot blades, cooked black. “Got to ninety-six miles an hour on my hill.”
The doctor fell silent. “Awful. Gotta be exhausted. Getting any sleep?”
“Not really.”
He nodded, re-washed hands. Voice apothecary calm. “Far as I can tell, this thing feels like a muscle spasm. Tension.”
Smoke snaked around the doctor, luscious pleats of it fingering his neck, sliding between lips and teeth.
“I want you to take hot showers. I’ll give you some muscle relaxant. It’ll ease up.”
David heard winds outside moan louder.
“Let’s just watch it. Call me if anything changes.”
“Like what?”
The doctor scrawled on prescription pad. “You look exhausted, David. You gotta get some sleep. The
se’ll help.”
“I can’t sleep. It’s fire season.” His eyes were red with exhaustion. ”Anything could happen.”
The doctor looked outside. Smiled, told David it was a nice day. “Weather guy says it may even rain.”
David heard axes smashing through doors and quietly left the office.
4:47 P.M.
The freeway couldn’t breathe.
Drivers hunched. Eyes eating; devouring. Watching mirrors; lips sewn in disgust. Exhaust pipes fuming; vile, chrome mouths.
David felt his shoulder blade. Wanted whatever was in there to die.
2:17 A.M.
The folded chair was in a carpet of soot.
David sat on his deck, surrounded by charred mountains that smelled like wet, dead cigarettes. Their burnt flesh rose from shore; soft, black cameos, looming and silent.
He sipped coffee. Scanned his dead neighbourhood; grey casket streets. It had been days since he’d slept and his bones felt wrong; aching, drilled with holes. He yawned, eyes bloodshot. Watched insomniac sea. Surf broke far below; pale blades on ink.
“. . . the meridian where conscious and unconscious meet,” the Swedish widow up the street had told him, days before she died in the ’97 firestorm, trapped in her house, chased by red infuriations.
He stopped, mid-swallow. Smelled smoke.
Somewhere; maybe close; the first sign death neared. It was everywhere; the warm, charcoal breath. Those who hadn’t survived fires didn’t notice the hateful, uninvited scent of it. Billowing, citric welts, rushing closer, making birds shriek in terror, trees bend.
He heard groaning red trucks curving up his narrow road, tires crunching, blinded by smoke. Seventy-foot flames swaying in the ravine like burning kelp.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 31