Authors: Parker Bilal
Makana had never really been a strong swimmer. As a child he had splashed about in the river with his friends like all the other boys, but no one had ever taught him to swim properly. But he had no choice now. He began to kick with his feet and stroke the water aside, telling himself he needed to conserve his energy. The shore didn’t seem to be getting any closer. As he swam his mind was turning back to the case. He was fairly sure now that Vronsky had killed Adil, probably the same way he’d killed Farag. Why, he couldn’t say. Did Adil turn against Vronsky, refuse to do his bidding?
Rolling on to his back to give his muscles a rest, Makana stared up at the stars and marvelled at how clear they were out here, so far away from human habitation. It was remarkable, just how many there were. They felt comforting, despite his situation. They took him back to his life with Muna, the happiest time he could remember, when the world had been simple. Sitting out in the yard in the evenings, watching the sky revolve slowly around them. It seemed like another world.
He had been swimming for what felt like hours when he suddenly had the sense that he was no longer alone. Within the darkness around him a deeper, darker shadow was moving in the water. Reducing his movements to a minimum Makana stayed afloat, kicking as lightly as he could. The sea seemed to be alive around him, rising and falling like the breathing of a great animal. He consoled himself with the thought that it would be over in a minute. That was all it would take. A wave struck him in the face with the force of a hard slap, shaking him from his reverie. He began to kick harder again, cautiously at first, expecting the darkness to reach out and swallow him every time he extended an arm, then more firmly, determined to get to shore. His heart stopped when his hand finally struck something hard. He realised it was the reef. Dragging himself over it, he felt the temperature of the water rise and knew he was in the shallows. A few minutes later he collapsed on the beach, gasping for breath. The world looked different. The palm trees towering over him were still. He got to his feet and looked about him.
In the stark glare of a battery of floodlights, the high walls of
The Big Blue stood out against the night sky as vividly as the whitewashed cinema screens Makana recalled from his childhood. He could see Vronsky’s villa. Makana glanced back at the sea and heaved a sigh of relief. It was good to feel the earth beneath his feet. His body felt bruised and swollen, and he knew that if he stopped moving his muscles would seize up. He forced himself to move quickly, breaking into an awkward jog. Approaching the complex along the beach, he was surprised that none of the guards appeared to be in sight, that he was able to get so close without being challenged.
There was a figure up ahead of him in the shadows, walking briskly along the path, away from the villa, heading for the same gap in the fence, the arched green door. The man paused, hearing something. He stopped and glanced back. Makana recognised him. It was the man who had been haunting his dreams, the man he had once glimpsed on a street in Cairo. The man in the beige chequered shirt. He looked at Makana and then turned away and increased his pace. Something was wrong. Makana called out and raised a hand. In the instant he did so there was a bright flash over to his right, coming from the direction of Vronsky’s villa. A hand thumped into his shoulder, lifting him off his feet and into the air. Then everything went black.
The explosion was like a light going on and off in quick succession, a bulb exploding in the back of his head. The blast threw him a good ten metres. Then he was gasping for air, engulfed in a thick cloud that swirled about him, filling his lungs and choking him. After a time he became aware of the intense heat on his right side. He managed to open his eyes and turned to look in the direction of what remained of Vronsky’s villa. It had been almost completely destroyed. The side facing the sea and the upper floor had been ripped right off, as though a giant claw had reached down from the sky and gouged them away. There were shouts and screams of horror coming from the hotel behind him. People were running, calling frantically to one another. Thick smoke billowed out from a fire that licked angrily from the black, cavernous mouth.
Makana rolled over and found himself lying beside the headless torso of the Filipino valet, still in his white jacket. A wave of nausea swept over him as he pushed himself away and fell back on to the grass. His head was ringing and he felt dazed. Everything around him was fuzzy and indistinct. His legs felt as if they were made of rubber, but somehow he managed to stand. He staggered towards the gate leading to the main resort area. A crowd was milling about on the other side of the fence. There were screams of panic and cries in a variety of languages asking what was going on. They parted pretty quickly when they saw the state he was in. Some of the staff appeared, and he fought off their efforts to help him, pointing back the way he had come. ‘Help them,’ he shouted, ‘help them.’ But he couldn’t hear his own words. His mouth was filled with acid bile and he gulped down mouthfuls of air and then bent over and threw up.
He cleared the reception area in time to see a waiting car pulling away in a hurry, exhaust fluttering in the red glow of the tail lights. It looked like there were two men inside. Makana was sure one of them was the man in the beige shirt. Farag’s Mercedes was where he had left it and the keys were miraculously still in his pocket.
His hands were sore and bleeding. They kept sticking to the wheel. His clothes were soaked through and his entire body ached from the salt and lacerations. Makana shivered as he drove with his lights off, humming through the dark, eyes pinned to the twin red darts of the tail lights up ahead. They went south, further down the coast. His head throbbed and his eyesight was blurred. The night air that blew through the open window was cool and dry. There was nothing else he needed to think about apart from those lights ahead. After about fifteen minutes they began to slow. They were approaching a junction. No houses or buildings of any kind in sight. They turned inland and headed west.
Away from the coast it was easier to see without lights. The open landscape seemed to absorb the glow from the distant stars. Makana’s eyes could make out the edges of the road he had to follow. He let the other car get a good distance away, memorising the curves it made to help him see the road. There was nothing out here, nothing but blackness. No signs of human habitation of any kind, just the dim silhouette of hills rising in the distance. The road curved on, rising gently towards the looming shadow of a jagged ridge. A large boulder blocked his view of the road ahead as he went around a long curve. When he came out on the other side the car ahead appeared to have vanished. The road was deserted. No lights in sight.
Makana slowed, allowing the Mercedes to glide to a halt. He cut the engine and climbed out. He stood in the middle of the deserted road listening to the silence. Beyond those hills was the Nile and the Valley of the Kings. Then he caught sight of something. A brief glint. Headlights brushing against stone, like white paint being splashed across a canvas in the dark. It was off to the right. He started the engine again and nosed along the road until he found the rough track leading up to the right. Makana swung the wheel and eased the big car off the road.
The uneven track twisted and turned, winding up into the hills. The rocky walls drew in around him as the track led him deeper and deeper into the shadows. A few minutes later he came around a bend and saw a gently sloping ramp leading at an angle on to a circular platform that jutted out from the rockface. On the top of the promontory a large building perched on the hillside facing towards the sea.
The Mercedes coasted to a halt, engine off. There was no sign of the car he had been following, no sign of anything or anyone. No lights showed in the building. It looked abandoned, a toothless face with windows for eyeholes. Makana made sure the car’s interior light was off and then clicked open the door, acutely aware of how sound travelled, echoing from the walls around him.
He didn’t hear them come up behind him until it was too late. A slight crunch of stone underfoot and then the cold barrel of a gun was pressed against the nape of his neck. The muzzle prodded him to move forward. The gravel crunched under his feet as he climbed the track towards the empty building. It looked like a hospital of some kind. The hollows of the empty windows stood open like invitations. A flashlight clicked quickly on and off. So far no one had spoken a word. Hands seized his arms to steer him up the steps and into the building. Their footsteps rang hollowly through the ruined shell as Makana found himself propelled along. They led him deeper, along corridors where the flashlight bounced back off walls that closed in. The darkness shifted around him. Walls gave way, opening into rooms to left and right, shadows moving fluidly across them like malevolent spirits. The air was damp and cold, rich with organic rot. His shoulder, already raw from the reef, bumped into a wall, then he was bounced down a set of stairs, along a narrow corridor and finally into a room, where he was sent sprawling on to a heap of rubble. The flashlight flicked around the room and then clicked off. The footsteps withdrew. He heard a door slam and a bolt being shoved home.
The fear he felt then was a physical sensation. A memory locked into his body from another time. He had to fight the rising panic. Already he felt the claustrophobia that still haunted his dreams, brought him awake in a heaving sweat. It was all too familiar. The weight on his chest, the sense that he was suffocating. It had been so long ago, and yet here it was, coming back to him as vividly as if it had been yesterday. The unbearable physical memory of being imprisoned, locked away. His breath came in short quick stabs, his heart racing. He forced himself to take deeper breaths, fighting the impulse to scream. I’ve done this before, he told himself. I can do it again.
Makana crouched on his heels in the dark, drawing himself into a ball, taking up as little space as possible, making the room around him expand. He couldn’t tell if the darkness extended above his head for hundreds of metres, or whether it stopped just in front of his face. It was as if he had slipped beneath the surface of this world into another, subterranean plane of existence that was wired into his memory. His whole body was shaking uncontrollably now. He had been shivering with cold in the car. Now sweat poured from him. There was no point in fighting it, he realised. It was coming to carry him back.
Out of the darkness, it was coming.
Help me! Please help me!
A ghost house. He knew it as soon as he opened his eyes. He woke up in his own filth, the filth of others who had passed through these narrow walls before him. The air too thick to breathe, fetid with the acrid reek of piss and shit. His own body waste mixed with that of countless, faceless others who had disappeared before him. This was where they became nameless. This was where they vanished. This was where men were reduced to nameless creatures, without families, or hopes, or beliefs. Their bodies scraped across these walls as they were pushed out of this world.
Save me, Baba!
He couldn’t let go, he told himself. Not just yet. Heaving himself to his feet, he hurled his weight at the door, feeling the jolt of pain as the metal thumped back into his shoulder like a drum. Barely enough strength to stand up. ‘Let her go!’ he screamed, over and over, until his lungs burned. Then he fell back, silent, pressing his ear to the door, straining to hear.
Baba!
‘Nasra!’ he called. Silence but for the flies crowding round his face, trying to get into his mouth, buzzing at his nostrils, his eyes.
His ears were alert to the slightest sound. A locust’s wings. A leaf spinning on water. A cough, a sigh. Any change in the air that would signify that his daughter was safe, alive. Exhausted, his legs buckled and he sank down to the ground, back resting in the pool of filth. When they hosed out this room all trace of him would be gone, he thought. This is all I am, all that remains of me.
What were they doing to her? he wondered. His eyes scoured the wall of darkness for any crack, a hairline fracture that might promise light.
Baba, help me, please!
Night and day. At times he knew the voice was just in his head, screaming at him from somewhere inside, a part of him he could not identify. But then he would come awake in the early hours with a gasp, as if someone had poured ice-cold water over him. The days passed in a blur, shadows closing in on him from all sides. If he pressed his head down to the bottom of the door he could feel the cool night breeze brushing his face. A narrow slit, no more than a couple of centimetres. It was all he had to hold on to. A moment. A breath of air. A tiny increment of hope that told him life went on out there. That people lived and talked and laughed and loved. It was important to believe that there was more than this. Lying there with his face in the filth. The scrabbling of beetles and ants crawling over him. Worms wriggled, coiled over his eyes. A mosquito buzzed in his ears like a diesel engine. Just a single breath of air. It was all he needed to know this would end.
‘Nasra! Nasra!’ he called over and over. Silence.
At times there were other voices. Whispers coming through the door. Low and persistent. A babbling brook that seemed to be trying to warn him. But what were they saying?
Flinging himself to the ground, wriggling, trying to slide under the door to get closer to them, to hear what they were saying, convinced that they held the key to his fate.
‘What? What is it?’
He slept against the wall, propped up against it for protection, feeling the plaster rub off against his skin, trying to dig himself inside. He would be woken at all hours. The door would open and the men would enter and start beating him. So many there wasn’t room for them to lift their sticks. Heavy boots thudded into his ribs. Other times water would crash over him. Sometimes it was not water but the toilet bucket, the stench so powerful it made him gag, his eyes stinging.