“I don’t know what it is. But that running sounds right” he repeated slowly. “Whatever’s here is restless, moving.”
“I knew when I came in. I just didn’t know why.”
“I was watching you to see. If you saw...” I heard the same tightness in his voice as I felt in my own “Look honey, I’ve been here for two nights on my own already. I wasn’t sure if it was just me” I moved the chair to sit close to him, craving the solid feel of him, cheek against the fabric of his white T-shirt. My mind marvelled - Two nights of this! On his own!
“What is it?”
He shrugged, and I felt him breathe in deep under his t-shirt.
“Look I’ll take you round. See if y’all can feel anything”
Small steps. We walked slowly from the front door, down the corridor.
Into the kitchen.
Fine.
The living room was a little chilly, a little dark.
The bathroom was gray and dull. For a second, a shadow chased past the corner of my eye. My heartbeat jackhammered. I couldn’t drag my gaze to the mirror beside the sink.
Charles held my arm. “No, not there” I said, flatly.
We walked into the master bedroom, Charles’s room.
There was nothing there.
Except at the top of the walls.
Twenty minutes later, we were standing outside the front door, not speaking. We were holding hands like children, gripping each other, tugging downwards. Our rucksacks spilled clothes at our feet.
#
What did we see in that room? My mind has rolled over that memory so many times that it is as flat and unrealistic as a poor effect in an old B-movie.
It was a movement, darkness, a shadow, nothing more. But as I looked at it, it seemed to stretch and grow, to pulse with an oily black shimmer.
It’s not even a dramatic story, is it? In the end, all I saw were shadows. What I didn’t realise back then was that shadows are everywhere. When you cross a border, things are never quite the same. Now I see the darkness everywhere. It follows me, stealthy as a black cat. I see it sometimes, half-glimpsed, on the edges of vision. Sometimes I think I see it behind my eyes at night. That’s what I fear most. Whatever lies beyond our borders moves easiest in the darkness. All borderliners know that. Charles and I didn’t really stay in touch. Sometimes experience draws you closer together. Sometimes it has the opposite effect. I think that privately we were reluctant to be near each other, in case our combined presence attracted anything else. He did come to see me in Dublin, towards the end of his backpacking year. It wasn’t a great success, with little time to talk. Besides, things that seemed interesting or philosophical in Paris and urgently important in London just felt odd and off-kilter against the normality of home. Afterwards we wrote to each other in a haphazard fashion. He moved to New York, fell in love with a Californian waitress. I heard he was engaged to her and I wrote to congratulate him.
It was just yesterday that I heard about it in an e-mail from Adele. She must have stayed in touch with him. “Isn’t it so sad about Charles? What a lovely guy. I can’t believe he’s gone. Suicide is so hard for a family to cope with.”
I’m sitting on the seat in my back garden, thinking about him. It’s a crisp autumn evening, and the lawn looks like dark, soft velvet in the twilight. His twenty year old self is so clear in my mind, even though almost everything he said to me and I to him is lost, when he is just a smile in a photo album, when I don’t even have his address anymore. I recall that eye-meet in the hostel lobby, that clicking into sharp focus, that whirling sense of recognition, that inevitability of speech. If I weaken and remember the whole story, I will move the darkness closer to me. I concentrate on trying to retain that memory of sunshine and eager chat, his smiling face, his southern drawl. I’m making an image to hold on to like a talisman, to sustain me through the long night ahead.
Yet, in spite of my best efforts, I can’t stop it. My fists unclench, I give way. I remember our journey to the borders, the pulsing blackness that we found there. As I sit in the dusk, cold tears edge down my face, tears for Charles who tried to outrun the shadows and failed, Charles who spent so many years walking the borderlines, Charles who has left me alone in the darkness.
Since 2013, Tracy Fahey has written Gothic fiction that deals primarily with the uncanny home, folktales. memory and recurrence. Inspired by her academic research into the bizarre, monstrous, transgressive and Gothic in fine art and literature, she writes short stories that have been accepted for publication in various anthologies including Impossible Spaces (2013), Hauntings (2014), The Girl At The End Of The World (2014), Drag Noir (2014), Where Dreams and Visions Live (2014), Faed (2015) with several more due for publication with Martinus Press and Fox Spirit Press in early 2015. She was shortlisted for the Creative Writing Ink Award (for short story 'Escape') in August 2013. In her spare time she organises a department of fine art, directs a research centre and runs a fine art collective.
Her current ambition is to claw back enough time to complete her first collection of short stories. You can read more about her at http://designingtracy.wix.com/tracyfahey
It Came From the Ground
Stephen Bacon
1
We’d been in Rwanda for only a few days before we saw the child with the machete. In the grand scheme of things, he came to represent the human form of horror that greeted us, unlike the things we encountered later. Sometimes at night I wake shuddering, desperate to escape my own glimpse through that border of sanity. The child with the machete was our motivation for going to Kigali, but the creature we witnessed in the sprawling farmland of Rwanda is the reason I will never return.
This was in the winter of 1994, when Rwanda was infested with death and madness. Karen, Joel and I had flown in from Johannesburg, my camera and Dictaphone hidden deep in the bottom of my rucksack. I’d been listening constantly to In Utero, the raw vocals of Kurt Cobain throbbing in my head like a mantra. It was the only CD I had in my Discman. Nirvana’s fury definitely eased my mood.
The airport was balanced on the summit of a rocky mountain. We caught a cab down into the city, feeling a sense of relief when we escaped the baking exposure of the airport.
We’d bummed around for the first twenty four hours. I tried to ignore the atmosphere between us, occasionally throwing surreptitious glances in the direction of Joel and Karen. To her credit, she never once betrayed her true feelings, although my own imagination taunted me mercilessly.
The heat was less oppressive than in the hills so the narrow roads encircling the western quarter offered welcome shelter from the sun. Tucked inside my wallet was a piece of paper bearing a single name – David Kirenga. Next to it was a hastily scribbled phone number, given to me by our contact in Burundi, who’d recently fled the country to escape the civil war. In the back room of a sweaty café we had examined the photographs he’d shown us; six blurred polaroids of a child running through the street wielding a bloodstained machete. Apparently the kid – an orphan, who looked to be no older than twelve – was an influential Hutu warlord, who’d allegedly seized power by escaping the orphanage after the atrocities had begun. He he’d lost his left arm in the conflicts, and this added to the grotesque image. Our contact – a jittery Tutsi farmer who constantly mopped his brow with a foul-smelling handkerchief – gave the information with an air of near-hysteria. He described an area of farmland, many miles outside Kigali, where the kid had set up a kind of commune.
I’d stared entranced at the polaroids. They were poor quality but I could imagine the potential they promised. My Nikon was capable of doing the hard work – all I needed was to get close enough to catch the opportunity. The photos, grainy and blurred as they were, offered enough to suggest that we’d not come on some fool’s errand. My journalistic instinct had been right.
Ask any reporter and you’ll get one of a few different answers about why we do what we do. Some will say the desire for honesty and truth, the need to tell th
e news. Some will cite noble ventures like integrity and morality. For me it was the Pulitzer.
For years I had dreamed of achieving the highest recognition in my field. It was what kept me warm on those days when I shook cold rain from my hair. It was what kept me alert on those nights when boredom tugged at my eyelids. If I’d thought about it long enough I might have actually realised that the possibility was beyond hope, but it was all I had to keep me focused. Images from a time of war were the way to reach the Pulitzer – think of Nick Ut’s photo of the little Vietnamese girl running naked along the road, or Joe Rosenthal’s shot of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima – absolutely breathtaking images that have resonated with the public ever since. I wanted my name to be spoken of with such esteem. Recognition was the only reward that would impress my father; his own millions bought him whatever he wanted. Even a minor journalistic award would be the ultimate way of ramming his disapproval of my career as far down his throat as possible.
We rented a room in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city, more out of necessity to remain low-profile than for financial reasons. Karen and I took one room, Joel the one next door.
I lay on the bed watching the ceiling-fan rotate. Karen was taking a shower. Somewhere nearby an argument raged in staccato French. Upstairs a television blared out a programme in Swahili. I wondered what Joel was doing, imagining his movement in the room next door.
Karen hadn’t brought her journal on this trip, just her notepad. I’d checked it for entries while she showered but it was just filled with background on Rwanda and the civil war. Joel wasn’t even mentioned.
At nine o’clock I went down to the payphone in the foyer. I dropped several centime coins into the slot and dialed the number from the scrap of paper in my wallet.
David Kirenga’s voice was quiet and distinct. We agreed a fee for his trouble, and made arrangements for the following morning. I returned to the room.
Karen was in a weird mood. She tried to entice me into bed, but I resisted. She’s a noisy lover and I was afraid Joel would hear us.
The car drew up outside at the allotted time the following morning. The trunk of the vehicle smelled of sour milk so I was careful where to stow our rucksacks. Joel took the front, Karen and I jumped in the back.
David talked as he drove. I had to lean forward to hear, which left me nauseous and disorientated. His English, though accented with the soft intonation of French, was near perfect. The initial journey through the streets of Kigali was tense and jerky and I was relieved when we finally reached the outskirts of the city.
2
Rwanda isn’t called The Land of a Thousand Hills for nothing, and the grasslands and countryside that extended beyond the capital were far more verdant than I’d expected. David explained that armed guerrillas frequently patrolled the hills. An anxious glance passed between us, even though our research had prepared us for such facts.
David’s voice was captivating and he told a compelling tale as we travelled the dirt roads that encircled the city, rising high into the hills.
The kid with the machete was called Fabrice Kambanda. Little was known about him prior to his escape from the Kigali orphanage in April. David pointed across the valley to a black scorch, stark against the green hillside.
“Our president’s plane was shot down in April.” He swallowed. “The fire is still burning in our hearts.”
I could hear the scratch of Karen’s pencil as she wrote in her pad. I remembered the report of the president’s death; several days later the news was eclipsed by the suicide of Kurt Cobain. To the Western world, the immortalisation of a rock star takes precedence over the death of the leader of an African nation. What a fucked-up place we live in.
“Fabrice has become a legend in less than two months. People talk about him like he’s the Devil. Maybe he is, but he’s still a twelve year-old boy.”
“How’d he lose the arm?” Joel asked.
“In the skirmishes.” David shrugged. I could see the reflection of his dark eyes in the mirror. “Many bad things have happened. It’s like the world has gone mad.”
“Not the world.” Joel raised a cynical eyebrow. “Just Rwanda.”
We drove through the countryside for about an hour. It was difficult to gauge the distance because of the undulating terrain. At one point we had to pull over to the side of the road and let the car rest behind a screen of bushes. We waited anxiously as the vehicle ticked and creaked in the heat, silently awaiting the approach of the jeep that David had spotted across the far side of the valley. The armoured truck was carrying three passengers - all members of the Hutu militia – brandishing rifles and knives. As we watched through the trees I felt the weight of Karen’s stare and understood the message; David’s fee had been worth every penny, given his knowledge of what we were dealing with.
Soon we were on our way, slowly climbing into the foothills. David continued to talk as he drove and we were lulled by his narration.
He spoke of the way the atrocities had affected the people he knew. Karen was frantically transcribing these personal accounts, but I was impatient for us to reach the kid. The endless stories of mutilation and massacre were hard to absorb, and I felt my mind hardening against the reality of what was happening here.
There were several signs of horror on the road. We saw a burned-out car, blackened and twisted like a grotesque metal beetle. The shattered glass glittered in the sunlight as we passed. Several feet away, a body lay in the shrub-grass. I could have been wrong but it looked like the figure was missing its head. I fired off some shots through the window, convincing myself that I was mistaken - that it was instead a bundle of rags or some remnants thrown from the fire-stricken car.
The ache in my back was starting to become an acute pain when David suddenly announced that we were a few miles from our destination. Fatigue that had just begun to settle into my limbs was now dispelled by the news, and I licked my lips and glanced out of the window, suddenly alert.
Our car pulled over. A dried mud-track bisected the grass that edged the asphalt road and threaded into the trees thirty feet away. Our passage was blocked by a tree trunk that had been deliberately placed to prevent vehicles from driving along the dirt road. We climbed out.
“From here we’re on foot.” David opened the trunk of the car and we grabbed the rucksacks. He took a bottle from his own bag and gulped down a long swig of water. “It’s too dangerous to go any further by road. The militia is active along there.”
I noticed a lingering glance pass between Joel and Karen at this point, as I was fastening the rucksack’s strap across my chest.
David was attending to our equipment, checking to ensure we were ready for the hike. He stood and peered at me. “There’s a convent about four miles east. We’ll be staying there for the night; Fabrice has taken over a farm close to the convent. That should enable us to be near enough for you to get what you want.”
His intent may have been lost in translation, but I thought I detected a hint of distaste in his voice. For the first time I wondered what these people must think of us; taking photographs and writing reports while their own people massacred each other. I glanced away.
We began walking, led by David. All around us the long grass whispered in the gentle breeze, creating movement and confusion. The ground underfoot was soft. I tried to concentrate on covering the distance with minimal damage to my body. My gym days were long behind me, and I was a little worried that I might become a liability.
Karen suddenly took my hand and I turned and smiled at her. Instinctively I glanced towards Joel, who was peering into the trees. The mid afternoon sun was beginning to descend, shadows encroaching across the grassland.
We walked for about 45 minutes. The going was tough because the track was overgrown. Once or twice we crossed chain-link fences that ran into the distance as far as we could see. Their gates were padlocked so we had no option but to climb them. We stopped for a break in the shade of a small grove. David passed aro
und some crumbling flatbread, very sweet to taste. He urged us to eat to maintain energy levels.
We set off again shortly, and I noticed Joel’s face was flushed with exertion. I felt a sense of satisfaction that I appeared to be managing better physically.
Our terrain was changing; the gently rolling hills were giving way to denser vegetation. Clumps of trees were springing up at increasing intervals, adding to my feeling of claustrophobia. I moved carefully. Darkness settled around us, though the sky still retained the final vestiges of daylight.
We were about to cross a narrow stream when, from somewhere nearby, a volley of gunshots rang out.
3
Instinctively we hit the ground. My ragged breath sounded deafening in the still air. A flurry of yells rose from the trees ahead. We remained as we were for almost ten minutes as the voices seemed to diminish. There was one further gunshot, sounding quite distant, before we relaxed enough to stand again. We negotiated the stream with increased nervousness before hurrying after David.
Within twenty minutes we emerged from the woods into a clearing. The outline of a large two-storey building stood in silhouette against the sky. An adobe wall encircled the perimeter of the ridge.
“We’re here.”
I felt a surge of relief at David’s words. We dragged our feet up the incline towards a wooden gate that stood proud of the wall.
“It’s more like a prison than a convent,” Joel remarked.
There was an electric bell on the outside of the gate. David pushed it twice. I noticed relief in Karen and Joel’s faces, even in the darkness. Presently a small hatch in the door opened, and a wrinkled face appeared. David explained why we were there. The door swung open to allow us entry.
Darkest Minds Page 14