Best British Horror 2014 Page 9

  He swept the calendar onto the floor and trampled on it, feeling more than cardboard give way underfoot. He might have been stamping on a mask, but not an empty one. Once it was crushed absolutely flat he watched to be sure that nothing crept from beneath it, not even a stain, and then he retreated to the bedroom.

  Suppose he’d set the madness free? He didn’t like to keep the presents so close to the remains of the calendar. In any case it might be wise to set off for his old house – he was afraid it could take him some time to find. At least he hadn’t undressed for bed. He clutched the presents to his chest and hurried onto the balcony, beyond which a greyish light was starting to take hold of the world. He gazed at his door until he succeeded in fixing at least the shape of the number in his mind. ‘You’re the one with your tail hanging down,’ he said.

  It was daylight now, however grey, and he did his best to hasten through the streets. He shouldn’t be distracted by trying to count Christmas trees in windows, let alone Christmas lights. Today’s date ought to be enough for him. ‘Two and five and you’re alive,’ he told some children before they fled across the road. He mustn’t frighten anyone. Among the reasons he’d retired had been the fear of needing to resemble Smart so as to teach.

  He came to his old road at last, only to feel as if someone had gone ahead of him to jumble all the numbers. He just had to locate his old home, not remember which number it was. He didn’t have to count his way to it, and he was surprised how soon he found the wrought-iron porch. He hugged the presents – one, two and another – as he thumbed the bell push. ‘Two and five and you’re alive,’ he carolled until the boy ran to open the door. Summers was about to hand him the presents when the boy turned his back. ‘I don’t know what he wants,’ he called. ‘It’s some old man.’

  The Secondary Host

  JOHN LLEWELLYN PROBERT

  There isn’t much time. Blood is already spattering the paper on which I am writing. I have no idea how many minutes I have left and yet there is so much to say, so much I need to warn people about. Already the pain that sears my face distracts me from setting down this account. Perhaps it would be better if the world did not know. It would be simpler if I just lay here and allowed myself to die. I am finding it difficult to focus, both because of the burning agony and the other thing that I cannot talk about . . . yet. I must begin at the beginning, or as close to it as I feel is relevant. There – the morphine has made the pain a little more bearable, for the moment at least.

  ‘To travel is better than to arrive.’ I seem to remember being quoted that somewhere. Whether or not that was the author’s intended meaning doesn’t matter. Words and phrases corrupt with the passing of time, but until I came to Zanzibar I would never have known that words themselves can be corrupting and destructive, when formed by the right kind of tongue, issued from the right kind of lips.

  Torn from the right kind of throat.

  I stood there on Stone Town dock, pondering that phrase with regard to cancelled flights, missed connections, and numbers of days lost in innumerable sleepover hotel rooms and figured that I hadn’t done too badly in taking just under three days to get here from England. At my feet were two suitcases. The pale blue Samsonite was filled with personal possessions. The other, a battered black affair I was intending to leave behind, was filled with medical supplies I had brought from my hospital – items which could still be put to good use in a country where venous cannulas and suture materials a few months past their expiry date could still be used to administer drugs and stitch wounds when the alternative was no treatment at all.

  I took a deep breath. The air was redolent with spices from the markets across the way, but tainted with the stink of petrol from the motor boats moored nearby, the musky odour of the flavourings a veneer for the grim functionality, the gritty ugliness that lay beneath. To my left, along the seafront of the island’s west coast, lay the strip of bars and nightclubs that they had still been in the process of building during my last visit over ten years ago. I had taken the first ferry across from Dar Es Salaam that morning, having been stranded there late last night after delays to my connecting flight from Kilimanjaro. I was tired and fed up and could have used a drink. In fact under the circumstances it was probably a good thing that the bars were closed.

  A battered pickup truck with the works ‘Amir’s Cabs’ unprofessionally stencilled on the side took me the short distance through the winding streets of the old part of Stone Town to my hotel. On my way there I saw several of the large, intricate, and ornately carved wooden doors that are unique to the country. The beggars crouched beside them (there were so many more now than last time), a grim modern-day contrast to their old world elegance. Again I experienced the same feeling as I had on the jetty – that mixture of beauty nestling beside the grim reminders of everyday life.

  With so much having changed it was a delight to discover Mazson’s Hotel pretty much the same as it had been ten years ago. Tucked away within an unobtrusive courtyard, it was an unassuming older brother to the vast modern constructs where most of the holidaymakers stayed. The whitewashed walls and varnished boards of it veranda were the first welcoming thing I had encountered since my arrival. I was given an upstairs room, from the doorway of which I could look onto the courtyard. As soon as I had unpacked I lay on the bed, intending to spend my first days back on the island asleep, with possibly a break for food and scotch a little later in the day.

  It was not to be.

  The trilling of the bedside telephone shook me from a troubled sleep filled with nightmare imagery no doubt influenced by my journey. I looked at my watch to see it was only nine am – I had been asleep for just two hours.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice was a dry croak but I ignored the water in the decanter at my bedside. I had learned before to my cost that when in these climes it is best to stick to the bottled stuff.

  ‘Dr Kendrick?’

  I nodded and then rasped an acknowledgement.

  ‘You are here at last, then?’

  I resisted the urge to reply that no, I was still stuck in Dar, but from the man’s tone I couldn’t tell if he had much of a sense of humour. Instead I explained I had just arrived.

  ‘Good!’ The voice brightened considerably. ‘Can you come to the hospital this morning?’

  ‘I’m not really awake,’ I replied.

  ‘But there is someone here who wants to meet you,’ the voice continued. ‘Come as soon as you can.’

  It didn’t sound as if I had much choice. I asked who was speaking only to be rewarded with the click of a disconnected line. I knew from past experience that ‘someone’ could mean the island’s president and his entourage, complete with television crew to ensure the event of an English doctor coming to the island was as widely publicised as possible, and so I rang room service and asked for lots of coffee as I prepared to survive on raw energy for yet another day.

  The Mnazi Mmoja Hospital (‘It means One Coconut Tree,’ Mohammed Makinde, the hospital’s director, had explained to me on my previous visit) had been built in the early 1960s, and was as forbidding a block of communist concrete as one might expect for a building that had, until the relinquishing of power, been named after Lenin. The main building’s grim oblong stood flanked by the sea on one side and the buildings of Old Stone Town on the other. If anything, the passage of time had made it look like more of an anachronism than ever.

  The cool interior still stank of a familiar mixture – the raw antiseptic of carbolic mingled with the sickly sweet odour of infected wounds and rotting flesh. Many of the patients here had suffered trauma that had been sufficient to disable but not severe enough to kill, and open wounds, even with the best surgical care, often did not do well in a climate where heat and humidity could cause infection to run riot.

  I stood in the hospital’s foyer, the walls the same sickly shade of dark green, the fluorescent strip lighting still insufficient to cast awa
y the shadows. There were plenty of windows but even on a bright morning like this the building was still good at scaring away sunshine.

  ‘Dr Kendrick?’ A broad-faced African man, whose smudge of black moustache on his upper lip was the only hair on his otherwise gleaming head, emerged from the door to my left, gave me the widest if not the most sincere of smiles, and clasped my hand a little too hard for comfort. ‘I am Zuberi Amadi, the director of Mnazi Mmoja.’

  I frowned. ‘But where’s Mohammed Makinde?’ I asked.

  Amadi’s face fell. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you this when you have only just arrived, but Mohammed has become very unwell. Under the circumstances it was thought best that he be allowed to rest, far away from the job that had been causing him too many worries.’

  I looked behind me. Across the street was Mohammed’s house. I hadn’t noticed on my way here but it looked locked up. ‘He’s not at home then?’

  Amadi shook his head. ‘He has gone to the north of the island to recuperate.’ He put a meaty hand around my shoulders, causing me to tense. ‘Relax my friend! Everything else here is much the same.’ He eyed my suitcase. ‘I see you have brought us fresh supplies – good! Let me relieve you of them.’ He snapped his fingers and a beautiful young woman appeared. She brushed past me to get to the battered black bag, and as she did so my senses were momentarily swept away by a the aromas of cinnamon and sandalwood; a subtle mixture that seemed uniquely hers and made me want to follow her. She gave me the kind of look men have been known to kill for, then took the case and went off somewhere upstairs with it. ‘Now,’ he said, leading me firmly and not so gently, ‘I have someone for you to meet waiting in my office.’

  Mohammed had never had an office, and as Amadi led me into the room he had emerged from earlier I recognised it as the old X-Ray suite. Not anymore. The ageing fluoroscopy equipment had been moved out and a large, chipped wooden desk moved in. Several chairs, their worn blue plastic coverings ripped in places and leaking yellow foam completed this untidy collection of furniture. The man who had been sitting on the one closest to the desk got to his feet as I entered.

  ‘May I present Mr Andreas van der Merwe.’ Amadi’s eyes seemed to glitter with pride as he introduced me.

  Whoever I had been expecting, it had most certainly not been a Caucasian man in a crumpled white linen suit. His open-necked shirt bore a little grime around the inside of the collar, but the hand he held out to greet me with was clean, the nails manicured.

  ‘I have heard a lot about you,’ he said, his voice betraying the slightest hint of a South African accent, ‘and I am pleased to meet you at last.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure,’ I replied, returning his brisk handshake, ‘although I must confess I’m surprised that you’ve heard anything about me at all.’

  ‘Mohammed spoke very highly of you before he became . . . ill,’ said Amadi from behind me.

  I looked from one man to the other, trying to work out the politest way of finding out what I needed to know. ‘So if Mohammed is no longer here,’ I said, ‘which of you is now the acting director of this hospital?’

  ‘Oh that would be Zuberi,’ replied van der Merwe with a laugh. ‘I’m not medical. I wouldn’t have a rat’s chance in hell of knowing how to run this place.’

  Somehow the way he said that suggested it wasn’t exactly true. ‘And what is your profession, Mr van de Merwe?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m an anthropologist,’ was his reply. ‘I’ve been coming here on and off for a couple of years now, studying local culture, history.’

  ‘From the way Stone Town has changed since I was last here I’d say the local culture consists mainly of cheap bars and desperate nightclubs,’ I said with a grin.

  It was not returned. ‘My studies have been confined to the inner part of Zanzibar, Dr Kendrick. The very centre, in fact. I believe you have some familiarity with Eusi Ngome?’

  I had been taken on a tour of the island by Mohammed on my last visit here, and it only took a moment to recall the place van der Merwe was talking about.

  Eusi Ngome – the Black Castle.

  Actually, Mohammed had explained, it had most likely been a temple in aeons past, but the locals had given it that name anyway. I remembered the crumbling masonry and teetering towers of the place he had taken me to, buried deep in the forest at the centre of the island. When I had asked him why it had acquired such a name he had merely shrugged. ‘Probably mothers keeping their children away from a dangerous building,’ he had said.

  ‘You spent some time there yourself, I understand,’ van der Merwe persisted, bringing me back into the present.

  I nodded. It was all coming back to me now. I had wanted to see something of Zanzibar’s past, something from way before the involvement of communism, even before Muslim rule if possible. ‘Have you nothing really ancient for me to look at?’ I had asked, citing the medieval castles of my own country as examples.

  It had taken some time before Mohammed had finally admitted to the temple’s existence, citing as his reason for hesitation that it was difficult to get to, and that the place itself was risky. The huge, weathered masonry blocks were apt to shift at any time, he had said, and throughout the ground there were said to be sinkholes down which people had fallen to their deaths.

  But I had insisted and so we had gone, leaving Mohammed’s pickup truck on one of the narrow dirt tracks that wound their way through the forest, and making the rest of the trip on foot. It took us nearly an hour of following tiny paths through increasingly thick jungle before we reached our goal.

  And what a goal it had turned out to be.

  I found it difficult to believe that such a place was not described in the guidebooks, but Mohammed had explained that it was considered too much of a deathtrap by the authorities for its whereabouts to be too well known.

  I had expected the crumbling stone ruins to be overgrown with creepers and vines from the surrounding jungle, the almost obsidian rock to be obscured with a thousand years’ worth of gradual encroachment from the surrounding foliage, but that was not the case at all.

  ‘The forest does not like it,’ Mohammed had said, his voice deadly serious. ‘It stays away.’

  The remains of the Black Castle covered an area about the size of a football field. But this was no playground. I was about to begin exploring when Mohammed stopped me and reminded me about the sinkholes.

  I regarded the stretch of bare hard-packed earth before me. ‘It looks safe enough to me,’ I said.

  Mohammed had shaken his head, taking a stone from nearby and tossing it into the clearing. It hit the earth with a dull thud. I watched expectantly for something to happen.

  ‘See?’ I said when nothing did. ‘This bit seems to be safe enough.’

  I had taken three paces when I felt the ground give way beneath me.

  It occurred with such frightening rapidity that I had no time to leap free. I threw myself forward, scrabbling at the edges of the pit that had opened up as I began to slide down. As my fingers finally gained purchase a little way inside and I almost cried with relief, I also noticed a very curious thing.

  The pit into which I had fallen was lined with black bricks.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Mohammed’s face appeared at the rim, his worried expression turning to relief as he realised I was just inside. I reassured him that I was but that I wasn’t sure how long I would be able to hang on.

  I could hear Mohammed rushing around outside, hopefully looking for a vine strong enough to cast down and help pull me out. I was only a few feet inside and so there was enough daylight for me to see that I appeared to be hanging in an artificially constructed shaft, lined with moss-encrusted brown stone. Below me the pit swiftly disappeared into blackness. What on earth could the purpose of something like this have been?

  There was a noise from beneath me.

  I can’t begin to describe it, and r
emembering it now still turns my insides to water the way it did then. It was not a natural noise, by which I mean it wasn’t the crashing of waves or the grinding of rocks, and yet somehow there were elements of those two things in it, and so much more besides. As if some vast and ancient slumbering beast that both lived in the rock and was part of it had been disturbed by my actions.

  It felt as if the depths of the earth were growling at me.

  And it was coming closer.

  ‘Mohammed!’ I screamed. ‘Get me out!’

  I began to kick at the sides of the pit to try and lever myself up, but my thrashing just made me slide down further.

  ‘Hurry, Mohammed!’ I cried as I clung to the damp brick, the tearing growls from beneath growing ever louder.

  I looked down and for a second caught a glimpse of flailing suckered tendrils reaching up to ensnare me, tiny barbs on their wriggling tips ready to plunge into my skin. I cannot possibly describe the sense of relief I felt as I saw the vine drop beside me. My sheer terror of the thing below meant that I didn’t stop to think whether or not the vine would hold my weight as I grabbed it and felt myself being pulled to safety, my bare arms scraping across the stone and leaving streaks of blood behind.

  Once I was out Mohammed looked at my bloodied arms and hands with horror but I assured him I was all right as I dragged him away from the place, urging him to run.

  ‘There’s something down there!’ I screamed as he followed me. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s huge!’

  And then the strangest thing of all happened. Mohammed looked at me with something approaching awe, and when he spoke it was with reverence rather than horror.

  ‘You woke Him up,’ he said. ‘He wanted you.’

  At least, that’s what I thought he said. Mohammed refused to be drawn on the matter further, and by the time we got back to Stone Town he was behaving as if nothing had happened.