She doesn’t know I hate her. She doesn’t know that less than six months after James’ funeral, Nick got down on his knees and told me how many times they’d fucked; that he held onto me so tightly, I was nearly glad that they had. She doesn’t know that he would never leave me. She doesn’t know him.
“It’ll be alright,” I say, and her shoulders drop, she finally tugs her glove free, clips back into the line.
And at the halfway point, I start to think it might be. That maybe—just maybe—the sheer number of Bad Things that have already happened are enough. But then I feel it: the air changing just like it did before Jakub came sliding out of the gloom on the other side of that mirror—a hush, a breath too close to my ear—and I know that I’m wrong. Again.
I unclip myself from the line, and I’m no longer slow, no longer afraid. My crampons find little purchase; my left foot slips off the ledge into dark space more than once, but I keep on going, faster, faster. Until I reach Kate.
“Go!” I push her so hard she shrieks—but either she can sense the danger in my voice or in the slow deadly shifts of the wall of ice against us, because she immediately obeys, abandoning the fixed line even as Nick is screwing in another anchor up ahead.
“Go!” I scream again. “Nick! Go!”
He turns just as my headlight finds him, his face slack and pale, and then he looks up at the serac in the very moment that it starts to scream.
We run. And run. And the world collapses around us.
• • • •
Kate is who I hear first. She’s sobbing again, but she can’t catch enough breath—the result is an oddly comforting squeak. She only stops to shout Nick’s name, and a sob comes out of me too when, finally, he answers in a hoarse shout.
I sit up, struggle to get to my knees. When I look back, the line is gone, the ledge is gone, the serac is gone. I’m finding it hard to breathe myself—I hear the thin air wheeze through my lungs—but my O is gone too.
I stand up and sway, but there’s nothing to hold onto. When Nick struggles to his feet a few meters further down, his headlight glancing off Kate’s helmet, her suit, I see a long streak of blood running from his temple to his jaw.
“Oh my God, Nick,” she says. She sounds exhilarated and broken at the same time. “Oh my God.”
He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at all the destruction behind us, eyes still wide and wild and black.
And I stare back, but even though we’re the closest we’ve been since the summit, I know I can’t reach any closer. My dread is exhausted, heartbroken. He’s safe. He’s alive. But it isn’t enough.
“You felt her too, right?” Kate grabs hold of his upper arms. “I know you fucking did. She was there! She was—”
“Don’t touch me,” he says, but he’s already shrugged her off, already backed away. He keeps on looking, looking, looking, and something in him finally breaks as he drops to his knees, as he howls into the black, the vast ocean of white.
I look away from Nick and back at the summit. The low moon throws light and shadow against the rock, the snow, the ridges and fissures, the pillars and gullies. I think of Jakub and Acke and all the others who’ll be left on this mountain, frozen in time and in place; disappeared, or dragged away from the path to become a landmark, a trig point, a cautionary tale. I think of Pasang and Chongba and the Slovaks trapped inside the Death Zone with no fixed lines, and an avalanche and collapsed serac between them and Camp IV. They may as well be on that moon.
And I think of them all sitting around that stone altar, laughing and eating. Smearing grey sampa flour on their faces; the promise that they would live to see each other become old and grey. Mountain says no.
Because the view from the other side of the mirror can so often look the same. Even when you know exactly what it feels like to fall, to be alone. Even when you know—as you look up out of silent blue dark into howling white light and life; as the air prickles against your skin like blunted pins—that it’s already too late. Like a slow-suffocating nightmare inside thick, heavy curtains. A leaving that never feels like going anywhere at all. To be gone, but not gone.
They can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both.
And they didn’t.
The shocking agony of plunging into that silent blue dark, Felix’s weight pulling me down faster, harder, the snapped rope showering snow. To feel it coming, to know. A breath, barely long enough to scream, but stretching out into infinity.
Denial: a mountain climber’s best and worst friend. Better to believe. Except we never do—those of us already on the other side of that coin, that mirror. Because then there really is no going back at all.
Nick still howls even as the wind picks up again and the night gets colder. But he’ll come back. He’ll always come back. Because this is where Nick lives. Not in our shitty Catford maisonette. Not even in base camps or trekking lodges. Only up here, in the clouds and violent snowstorms and hurricane-force winds; on the rock faces and ice fields and stony summits; in the gullies and crevasses, the ridges and jet winds and dancing tails of white snow. Up here, where people can’t survive; where we start dying faster the moment we start to climb. This is Nick’s home.
And mine. Because what I told Pasang will always be true. I think of Acke shouting stay with me to the stone, the snow, the sky. I am here because Nick needs me to be here. And so I stay. I will always walk beside him. It’s the only reason I’ve ever climbed any mountain at all.
©2017 by Carole Johnstone. Originally published in Horror Library: Volume 6. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
British Fantasy Award winning Carole Johnstone is a Scottish writer, currently living in Essex, England. Her short fiction has been published widely, and has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy series.
Her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done, and her novella, Cold Turkey, were both shortlisted for a 2015 British Fantasy Award.
For more information on the author, see carolejohnstone.com.
Nikishi
Lucy Taylor | 5374 words
Seasick and shivering, Thomas Blacksburg peered out from beneath the orange life boat canopy, watching helplessly as the powerful Benguela current swept him north up the coast of Namibia. For hours, he’d been within sight of the Skeleton Coast, that savage, wave-battered portion of the West African shore stretching between Angola to the north and Swakopmund to the south.
Through ghostly filaments of fog that drifted around the boat, Blacksburg could make out the distant shore and the camel’s back outline of towering, buff-colored dunes. To his horror, the land appeared to be receding. Having been brought tantalizingly close to salvation, the current was now tugging him back out into the fierce Atlantic.
A leviathan wave powered up under the boat, permitting Blacksburg a view of houses strung out like pastel-colored beads. Impossible, he thought. This far north, there was nothing but the vast, inhospitable terrain of the Namib desert, an undulating dunescape stretching inland all the way to the flat, sun-blasted wasteland of the Etosha Pan.
Blacksburg calculated his options and found them few. So suddenly and fiercely had the storm struck the night before that no distress call had gone out from the ill-fated yacht Obimi. With the captain knocked overboard and the boat taking on water, Blacksburg and his employer, Horace DeGroot, had been too busy trying to launch the life boat to radio for help. The Obimi wasn’t expected in Angola until the following Friday. No one was looking yet. When they did look, there would be nothing to find. He was the sole survivor.
The settlement in the dunes appeared to be his only chance.
Checking to make sure the leather pouch strapped across his chest was still secure, he dove into the water.
• • • •
Hours passed before finally he hauled himself ashore and collapsed, half-dead, onto the sand. The fog had lifted, revealing a narrow beach hemmed in
between two vast oceans—to the west, the wild Atlantic and, to the east, an unbroken sea of dunes that rose in undulating waves of buff and ochre and gold. Silence reigned. The hiss and thunder of the surf was punctuated only the cries of cormorants and the plaintive lamentations of gulls.
Believing that he’d overshot the settlement he’d glimpsed from the boat, Blacksburg trudged south.
Fatigue dogged him and acted on his brain like a psychedelic drug. Retinues of ghost crabs, fleet translucent carrion-eaters with eyes on stalks, seemed to scurry in his footprints with malevolent intent. Once he thought he glimpsed a spidery-limbed figure traversing the high dunes, but the image passed so quickly across his retina that it might have been anything, strands of kelp animated by the incessant wind or a small, swirling maelstrom of sand that his exhausted mind assigned a vaguely human form.
The hyena slinking toward him, though, was no trickery of vision. A sloping, muscular beast with furrowed lips and seething, tarry eyes, it angled languidly down the duneface, its brown and black fur hackled high, its hot gaze raw and lurid.
Blacksburg took in the clamping power of those formidable jaws, and dread threaded through him like razor wire.
He bent and scooped up a stone.
“Bugger off!” he shouted—or tried to shout. What emerged from his parched throat was a wretched, sandpapery croak, the sound a mummy entombed for thousands of years might make if resurrected.
The hyena edged closer. Blacksburg hurled the rock. It struck the hyena with a muted thunk, laying open a bloody gash on the tufted ear.
The hyena’s lips curled back and it uttered a high pitched whooping sound so eerie and wild that the temperature on the windswept beach seemed to go ten degrees colder. He heard what sounded like a Range Rover trying to start on a low battery, but this false rescue was only the guttural cough out of the spotted hyena’s broad muzzle. With a final saw-toothed snarl, the pot-bellied creature—which was seventy kilos if it was ten—wheeled around and loped back into the dunes that had spawned it.
• • • •
Exhaustion had so blunted Blacksburg’s senses that he almost sleepwalked past the grey, wind-scoured facade of a two-story house whose empty window frames and doorway stared down from atop a dune like empty eye sockets above a toothless mouth. Climbing up to investigate, he found a gutted shell, the bare interior carpeted with serpentines of sand, roof beams collapsed inward to reveal a square of azure sky. Gannets nested in the eaves. On the floor, a black tarantula held court atop a shattered chandelier.
Spurred by a terrible intuition, he struggled up another dune until he could look down at the entire town—a pathetic row of derelict abodes, a sand-blasted gazebo where lovers might have lingered once, a church whose steeple had toppled off, the rusted carcass of a Citroen from some forgotten era.
The hoped for sanctuary was a ghost town. A graveyard of rubble and stones.
Stunned, despairing, he roamed amid the wreckage.
The wind shifted suddenly, and he inhaled the mouth-watering aroma of cooking meat. The hot, heady aroma banged through his blood stream like heroin. Saliva flooded his mouth. Half-dead synapses danced.
Stumbling toward the scent, he crested another dune and looked down upon the beach to see a sinewy, dark-skinned old man using a stick to stir the enormous cast-iron potije that rested atop a fire. The old fellow wore frayed trousers, a yellow ball cap, and a short-sleeved pink shirt. His left hand did the stirring. The right one, flopping by his side, was lacking all its fingers.
Behind him, a girl in her late teens or early twenties was pulling a bottle of water from a canvas backpack on the ground. She uncapped the bottle and poured it into the potije. She wore an ankle-length tan skirt, battered high-tops, and a billowy red blouse. A brown bandanna around her head held back a crown of windblown dreads. An old scar zigzagged like a lightning bolt between her upper lip and the corner of one eye.
With feigned heartiness, Blacksburg slid and trotted down the dune, crying out, “Uhala po”. It meant good afternoon in the Oshiwambo tongue, but judging from the old man’s reaction, it might as well have been a threat to lop off his remaining fingers. The old man’s eyes bulged and he let loose a shriek of mortal fear. The woman had considerably more sang-froid. She held her ground, but snatched up a sharpened stick.
“My name is Blacksburg,” he croaked, holding up his hands to show he meant no harm. “I need help.”
The old man commenced a frenzied jabbering. The woman chattered back, and an animated exchange took place, virtually none of which Blacksburg understood. Finally the old man fell silent, but he continued to appraise Blacksburg like a disgruntled wildebeest.
“Excuse my uncle,” the woman said, in meticulous, school book English. “You frightened him. He thought you were an evil spirit come to kill us.”
“No, just a poor lost wretch.” He gestured at the empty water bottle. “You wouldn’t have another of those, would you?”
The woman took another bottle of water from the backpack and handed it to Blacksburg, who gulped greedily before eyeing the potije. “Fine smelling stew there,” he said. “What is it, some kind of wild game, stock, chutney, maybe an oxtail or two?”
Using her stick, she speared a dripping slab of wild meat. Blacksburg fell upon it like a wolf. The meat was tough and stringy as a jackal’s hide, but, in his depleted state, he found it feastworthy.
Between mouthfuls, he gave a version of his plight, detailing the sinking of the Obimi and the loss of her captain, but speaking only vaguely of the one who had chartered the boat, his boss Horace DeGroot. The woman told him that her name was Aamu, that she and the old man were from an Owambo village to the east. “We’ll take you there tomorrow. A tour bus stops by twice a week. You can get a ride to Windhoek.”
DeGroot’s largest diamond store was in Windhoek. Blacksburg had no intention of showing his face there.
“But what are you doing in a ghost town cooking up a feast,” he said to redirect the conversation. “Did you know that I was coming? What are you, witches?”
The girl snorted a bitter laugh. “If I were a witch, I’d turn myself into a cormorant and fly up to Algiers or Gibraltar. I’d never come back.”
Something in her vehemence intrigued Blacksburg, who was no stranger to restlessness and discontent. “Why do you stay?”
The bite in her voice was like that of a duststorm. “Do my uncle and I look rich to you? We live in a tiny village where the people raise cattle and goats. A good year means we get almost enough to eat. A bad year . . .”
Blacksburg saw no evidence of food shortage in the overflowing potije, but saw no need to point that out.
With greasy fingers, he gestured toward the forlorn remnants of the town. “This place, what is it? What was it?”
Aamu foraged deeper inside the backpack, bringing out a couple of Windhoek Lagers. “No ice,” she said. “You drink it warm?”
He grinned. “I’ll manage.”
“Come walk with me. I’ll tell you about the town.” She took off at a brisk pace, high-tops churning up small clouds of sand, hips fetchingly asway.
Walking was the last thing he wanted to do, but Blacksburg wiped his hands on his trousers and headed up the dune behind her. It was a star dune, one of those sandy forms created by wind blowing from all directions, and it had Blacksburg’s eye. Suddenly, with an agility and vigor that caught him by surprise, the old man lunged and seized his biceps in a fierce, one-handed grip, babbling wildly while pumping his mutilated hand.
“Nikishi!” he repeated urgently.
Blacksburg, a head taller and twenty kilos heavier, shook him off like a gnat.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked, catching up to Aamu.
“He’s warning you about the evil spirits, the ones that take animal and human form. They like to call people by name to lure them out and kill them.” She rolled her eyes. “My uncle’s yampy. In our village, people laugh at him. Last week he grabbed a tourist lady’s iPod an
d stomped it in the dirt, because he thought that evil spirits called his name from the earbuds.” She took a swig of Lager, grimaced. “Can’t stand this stuff warm.”
She took off abruptly again, climbing nimbly while Blacksburg labored to keep up. They navigated a surreal dunescape, where decaying buildings pillaged by time and the unceasing wind stood like remnants of a bombing. The larger buildings, the ones the desert hadn’t yet reclaimed entirely, indicated a degree of bourgeois prosperity that must have, in its heyday, seemed incongruous, perched as the town was on the edge of nothing, caught between the hostile Namib Desert and the pounding surf.
Aamu must have read his thoughts. “Forty years ago,” she said, “this was a busy diamond town called Wilhelmskopf. Water was trucked in once a week. There was a hospital, a school, plans for a community center, even a bowling alley. Everybody lived here—Afrikaners, Germans, Damara and Owambo tribesmen.”
“What happened?” Blacksburg said, although he could guess. Many of the smaller diamond towns had petered out by the middle of the previous century, eclipsed by the huge discovery of diamonds in Oranjemund to the south. Of these, Kolmanskopf, a ghost town just outside Luderitz, and now a major tourist attraction, was the most well-known.
Aamu’s answer shocked him. “In the late 60s, there were a lot of violent deaths, people found with their throats ripped out, torn apart by animals.”
Blacksburg thought of the hyena that had menaced him on the beach. “Hyenas? Jackals?”
“Certainly. But fear spread that a nikishi and its offspring lived among these Wilhelmskopf people, changing into animal form at night to prey on them. A few superstitious fools panicked and turned on one another, accusing each other of sorcery. Eventually the town was abandoned. Can you believe such bosh? Now it belongs to the ghost crabs and the hyenas.”
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018) Page 7