They shifted about minutely, relative to each other, like vibrating molecules, seeming at one moment to dart toward him, only to feel a restraining influence and hang back. Because of the noise of the fast-approaching runner he couldn’t hear their dreadful whine, but he imagined it.
And the runner appeared, crashing her way through the trees, arms and legs flying—a young girl, the young girl from the Africa House terrace, Craig realized—heading straight for the source of the drumming.
“Hey! Stop!” Craig shouted as the swarm of mosquitoes swung its thousand-eyed head to follow the girl’s progress. The whole cloud tilted and curved after the girl. She screamed as they crowded around her head: hardly could she have announced her arrival any more extravagantly. Not that Craig had any idea who or what was responsible for the drumming, nor whether they represented a threat. He just had his instincts.
The girl had a head start on him. He ran as fast as he could but couldn’t close on her. Too many long lunches in The Eagle. Too many fast-food containers in the bin under his desk. His heart beat a tattoo against his chest. He thrust his arms out in front of him to catch a tree trunk and so managed to stop short as the girl burst through into a wide clearing, the mozzies still shadowing her.
His hand-drums lying scattered at his feet, the drummer rose to his full height—six foot something of skin and bone, unfolding like some med student’s life-size prop. He was a white man, although it was impossible to judge his age. His feet and lower legs were bare, but the rest of him was clothed. Craig rubbed his eyes, which had started to go funny. Perhaps the heat and the exertion. The fear, maybe, which he acknowledged for the first time, his pulse scampering. The man’s coat constantly shifted in and out of focus, like an image perceived through a stereogram. Either there was something in Craig’s eyes obscuring his vision, or some filmy substance, spider’s web or other insectile secretion, draped across the undergrowth between him and the clearing. The tall man moved closer to Alison, who shrank away from him. He peered at her with bulging eyes that indicated thyroid disorder. His coat settled organically around his coat-hanger shoulders. Alison screamed and the coat shimmered. She lashed out with her right hand, drew a swathe through the living, clinging coat of mosquitoes. They swarmed about her head for a moment, mingling with the swarm that had aggravated her, before gravitating back to their host.
The man’s movements were slow. He seemed to make them reluctantly, as if he had no choice. His face was too sunken in the cheeks and uniformly white to betray any emotion. Stepping back from the girl, he picked up a long bone-white blood-stained instrument from the floor by his drums and strapped it over his skull. The false snout, a foot long by the look of it, wobbled hideously as he approached the girl again. The base of it—the knuckle joint, let’s face it, the thing had been fashioned from a human femur—rested against his mouth. He blew through it, a low burbling whistle, at which the mosquitoes became markedly less-agitated and settled around him; Alison sank to her knees in a dead faint and he snuffled about her prone body.
Craig was furiously considering what action he could take when a further crashing through the undergrowth announced the arrival of Alison’s friends from the Africa House, bound and led by three tough-looking African youths who each mumbled what appeared to be a respectful greeting to the tall man—“Mbo,” they each seemed to be saying.
Lief, the Danish boy, had remained unresponsive throughout the trek from the beach. His girlfriend, Karin, was trembling with fear and continuous shock; Anna simply screamed whenever anyone came near her. Two of the youths took hold of Karin and Anna and laid them out flat on the ground. Grabbing lengths of dried palm leaves, they wound them around the girls’ ankles, going around and around several times, then over the loop in the other direction between the legs until they were secure. They left the arms. The third African youth swiftly bound Lief’s ankles in the same manner. Craig had to strain to see where the three were taken: beyond the lean-to on the far side of the clearing. But what lay hidden there, Craig could not see.
The tall white-skinned man was still inspecting Alison when one of the youths returned and started to bind her around the ankles as well. The man sat down once more upon the ground, his legs becoming dismantled beneath his hazy coat like a pair of fishing rods being taken apart. He picked up his hand-drums and began to play. Craig took advantage of the noise to retreat a few yards from the edge of the clearing back into the forest. Twenty yards back, he crept around toward the back of the camp. It took him a while, because he had to move slowly to avoid alerting anyone to his presence, but he got there. Then it took him a moment before he recognized what he was seeing, even though this was what he’d been looking for. What he’d come to Africa for.
They hung from the branches of a single tree. Like bats.
Like bats, they hung upside-down.
Like bats, or like the poor creatures Craig had seen in the museum in the town—bound, each one of them, at the ankles. Three dozen at least.
Most of them were completely drained of blood, desiccated, like the Bombay duck Craig would always order with his curry just to raise a laugh. Husks swinging in the breeze. Wind-dried Bombay duck. Long hair suggested which victims were female, while bigger skeletons hinted at male—but there was no way of telling with most of the poor wretches.
Nearest the ground hung the recent additions—Karin, Anna, Lief. Craig heard the tall man coming around the side of the hut, before he saw him. The wind was not strong enough to drown out the whining concert of the mosquitoes the tall man wore around himself like so many familiars. His own insectile eyes protruded as he looked at his new arrivals, all strung up and ready for him.
Behind him came two of the youths carrying Alison.
The tall man, wearing his bone nose-flute, took a tiny step toward Anna, whose screams were torn out of her throat at his approach.
I could already smell the coppery tang of blood even before the ancient ectomorph in the coat of mosquitoes prodded the young girl’s throat with the sharpened femur he wore strapped to his head.
Craig was ashamed at himself, but couldn’t stop the opening sentences of his eyewitness account forming in his mind.
I was smelling the blood he had already spilt. I must have smelled it on him or in the air, because the ground beneath my feet nourished no more exotic blooms than the surrounding forest, for he spilled no blood. This exiled European, this tall, spindly shadow of a man—scarcely a man at all—drank the blood, every last drop. It was what kept him alive. I sensed this as much as deduced it as my eye ranged across the bat-like corpses suspended from his tamarind tree. At the same time I felt a shadow fall across my heart, from which I knew I should never be free, even if I were somehow to effect an escape for myself and the youngsters who had joined the monster’s collection.
This was Craig’s problem now. The purple prose would die a death at the hands of the paper’s subs—but thinking of it in terms of the news story he had come out here to investigate helped him distance himself sufficiently to keep his mind intact, to remain alert. Whatever the odds stacked against him, he still possessed the element of surprise.
While he was still thinking, racking his brains for an escape route, the tall man’s head jerked forwards, driving the tip of his bone-flute into the hollow depression of Anna’s throat. Blood bubbled instantly around the puncture then disappeared as it was sucked down the bone. Craig forced his eyes shut, fighting his own terror of spilt blood. But he had heard the man’s first swallow, his greedy gargle as he tried to accommodate too much at once. Craig had always believed himself the hard man of investigative journalism, hard to reach emotionally—his bed back home never slept two for more than one night at a time—and impossible to shock. His fear of the sight of blood had never been a problem before; he avoided stories which trailed bloody skirts—car wrecks and shoot-outs—not his style.
As he retched and tumbled forwards out of the concealing forest, he knew this was a story to which he would never ap
pend 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 colored 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 gray-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 colors 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 flapped 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 toward 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.
After working as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University, PAUL McAULEY became full-time writer in 1996.
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, Gardens of the Sun, Evening’s Empires, Something Coming Through, and Into Everywhere.
He has also published around 100 short stories (winning the 1995 British Fantasy Society award for “The Temptation of Dr. Stein” from In the Shadow of Frankenstein), a Doctor Who novella (fulfilling a childhood ambition), and a BFI Film Classic study of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and he edited the anthology In Dreams with Kim Newman.
The Worst Place in the World
Paul McAuley
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 first 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 before he was arrested. He had gone to the market to try to buy fresh fish and vegetables for the bar’s kitchens. The war, so long a rumor far away in the sou
th, 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 toward 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 expatriates 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.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 33