The Mammoth Book of Dracula (46 page)

It was possible that even Dracula had been incapable of mutilating a child ... or perhaps he had appropriately applied the ancient urge to procreate to children.

Jackson wasn’t taking any chances. He could not suffer a possible monster to live ... and so he removed the two stakes from beneath the long coat.

It was done quickly and quietly, then he was gone before anyone knew. He realized he hadn’t needed the borrowed car after all, but then again, if nothing else, Lucy had taught him not to risk unnecessary self-sacrifice.

He thought it was done now. He didn’t even mind that no one else would ever know what a hero he’d been, how he’d driven the shadows out. Even if the children had been untainted, Jackson could rationalize that survival would only have meant lives of poverty and misery, ever-increasing violence and tragedy. And if Dracula had escaped
(it isn’t possible),
he was hopelessly mad, in a world of madness.

Jackson, on the other hand, would face that world and, if he had to, meet it every step of the way.

<>

~ * ~

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Mbo

NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of five novels—
Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut
and
Antwerp—
and two novellas—
The Appetite
and
The Enigma of Departure.

He has published more than 100 horror stories, most recently in
Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror
(PS Publishing),
Bloody Vampires
(Glasshouse Books),
Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories
(Noose & Gibbet),
Black Static
and
Shadows & Tall Trees.
His short story collection,
Mortality,
was short-listed for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize.

Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and reviews fiction for
The Independent.
He also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in the form of signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award and the Bad Sex Prize—and hopes to win both again.

As the cracks widen in Dracula’s carefully kept sanity, he escapes to the African continent
...

~ * ~

IT WAS A question of arriving at the right time. You didn’t necessarily, for example, turn up at the same time each evening, but juggled various considerations, such as the heat, the number of clouds in the sky, even what type they were, whether they were cumulus or stratus or cirro-stratus—stuff like that. You wanted to turn up just at the right moment, just in time to get a seat and a good view and not a moment too soon. After all, the terrace of the Africa House Hotel was not a place you wanted to spend any more time than you absolutely had to. It simply wasn’t that nice.

It wasn’t nice partly because you were surrounded by all those people you had gone to Zanzibar to get away from—white people, Europeans, tourists;
mzungu,
the locals called them, red bananas. White inside but red on the outside, as soon as they’d been in the sun for a couple of hours. Apparently there was a strain of red-skinned banana that grew on the island.

And partly because the place itself was grotsville. In colonial days, the Africa House Hotel was the English Club, but since the departure of the British in 1963, it had been pretty much allowed to go to seed.

But you didn’t go there for the moth-eaten hunting trophies on the walls, or the charmless service at the counter, but to sit as close to the front of the terrace as you could, order a beer and have it brought to you, and watch the sun sink into the Indian Ocean. Over there, just below the horizon—the continental land mass of Africa. Amazing really that you couldn’t see it, thought Craig. It didn’t really matter how far away it was—twenty miles, thirty—looking at it on the map, Zanzibar Island was no more than a tick clinging to the giant African elephant.

Craig ordered a Castle lager from the waiter who slunk oilly around the tables and their scattered chairs. He was a strange, tired-looking North African with one of those elastic snake-buckle belts doing the job of keeping his brown trousers up. Similar to the one Craig had worn at school—8,000 miles away in east London.

He didn’t like ordering a Castle, or being seen with one (they didn’t give you a glass at the Africa House Hotel). It was South African and everyone knew it was South African. He supposed it was all right now, but still, if people saw you drinking South African beer they’d assume you were drinking it because that’s what you drank back home. In South Africa. And whereas it was all right to buy South African goods, it still wasn’t all right to be South African.

And Craig wasn’t, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was, but not so badly that he’d drink any more of the Tanzanian Safari, or the Kenyan Tusker. One was too yeasty, the other so weak it was like drinking bat’s piss.

This was his third consecutive evening at the Africa House Hotel and he was by now prepared to let people think he was—or might be—South African. He wasn’t staying there, no way, uh-uh—he was staying at Mazson’s, a few minutes’ walk away. Air-con, satellite TV, a bath as well as a shower—and a business centre. The business centre was what had clinched it. Plus the fact the paper was paying.

Craig slipped the elastic band off his ponytail and shook out his fair hair, brushed it back to round up any strays, and reapplied the elastic. He took off his Oakley wraparound shades and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Stuck them back on. Squinted at the sun, still a few degrees above the bank of stratus clouds which would prevent the Africa House Hotel crowd from enjoying a proper sunset for the third evening in a row.

From behind his Oakleys, Craig checked out the terrace: people-watching, with a purpose for once. News of the disappearances clearly wasn’t putting these tourists off coming to Zanzibar. Mainly because there wasn’t any news. Not enough of a problem in any one country to create a crisis. One weeping family from Sutton Coldfield—“Sarah just wouldn’t go off with anyone, she’s not that kind of girl”; a red-eyed single mother from Strathclyde—“There’s been no word from Louise for three weeks now”. It wasn’t enough to get the tabloids interested and the broadsheets wouldn’t pick up on it until they were sure there was a real story. A big story. No news was no news and, by and large, didn’t make the news.

Craig had latched on to Sarah’s story following an impassioned letter to the editor of his paper from the missing girl’s mother. He was a soft touch, he told his commissioning editor: couldn’t bear to think of those good people sitting on the edge of their floral-pattern IKEA sofa, waiting for the phone to ring, weeping—especially not in Sutton Coldfield. But MacNeill, who’d been commissioning pieces from Craig for three years, knew the young man only attached himself to a story if there was a story there. And since he was between desk assignments anyway, MacNeill let him go. On the quiet, like. Neither the Tanzanian government nor the Zanzibari police would acknowledge the problem—too damaging to the developing tourism industry, ironically—so Craig needed a cover, which Craig’s sister, the wildlife photographer, came up with.

The Zanzibar leopard, smaller than the mainland species, was rumoured by some to be extinct and by others to be around still, though in very small numbers. One of the guide books reckoned if there were any on the islands, they had been domesticated by practitioners of herbal medicine—witch doctors to you and me. The Zanzibari driver who collected Craig from the airport laughed indulgently at the idea. And Craig read later in another guide book that witchcraft was believed to be widely practised on Pemba Island, 85 kilometres to the north of Zanzibar though part of the same territory. Though if you tried to speak to the locals about it, they became embarrassed or politely changed the subject. But that was Pemba, and the disappearances—thirty-seven to date, according to Craig’s researches—were quite specifically from Zanzibar Island.

Thirty-seven. Twenty-three women between seventeen and thirty, and fourteen men, some of them older, mid-forties. From Denmark, Germany, Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Australia and the US. Enough of a problem as far as Craig was concerned. He was torn now, he was ashamed to admit, between wanting the world to wake up and make a concerted effort (thereby, hopefully, securing the earlier recovery of Sarah, or Sarah’s body, and thirty-six others) and hoping he would be the first to break the story.

The cover. A naturalist based at the University of Sussex, Craig’s brief was to confirm whether or not leopards still lived wild on the island. They’d even put Sussex’s professor of zoology in the picture, for a consideration of course which they called a consultancy fee, so that if anyone called from Zanzibar to check up on Craig, they’d find him to be bona fide.

That afternoon, Craig had visited the Natural History Museum, quite the bizarrest of its type in his experience. Glass cases full of birds, presumably stuffed birds, but not mounted—lying down, recently-dead-looking, their little feet tied together with string. Tags to identify them. Their eyes dabs of chalk. In a grimy case all on its own, the bones of a dodo wired up into a standing position. A couple of stuffed bats—the American Fruit Bat and the Pemba Fruit Bat -ten times the size of the swallow-like creatures that had flitted about his head as he’d walked off his dinner the evening before. A crate with its lid ajar: when he opened it, a flurry of flies, one he couldn’t prevent going up his nose. Inside, a board with three rats fixed to it—dead again, stuffed presumably, but with legs trussed at tiny rodent ankles. No effort made to have them assume lifelike poses. No bits of twig and leaf. No glass eyes. No glass case. He dropped the crate lid.

Oddest of all: row upon row of glass jars containing dead sea creatures and deformed animal foetuses, the glass furred up with dust and calcified deposits, so you had to bend down and squint to make out the bloodless remains of a stonefish, the huge crab with the image on its shell of two camels with their masters. The conjoined duiker antelopes.

And the stuffed leopard. They hadn’t done a great job on it. The taxidermist’s task being to stage a magic show for eternity: the illusion of life in the cock of the head, the setting of a glassy twinkle. The Natural History Museum of Zanzibar should have been asking for their money back on this one. You could still see it was a leopard though. If you didn’t know, you’d look at it and you’d say leopard. Craig examined it from every angle. This was what he was here to find. Ostensibly. It couldn’t do any harm to have a good idea what one looked like.

Up on the terrace, the touts were working the crowd—slowly, carefully, with a lower-key approach than they tended to use down in Stone Town. In Stone Town the same guys would shadow you on the same streets day after day.

“Jambo,” they’d say.

“Jambo,” you’d reply, because it would be rude not to.

“You want to go to Prison Island? You want to go to the East Coast today? Maybe you want go to Nungwi? You want taxi?”

You ran the gauntlet going up Kenyatta Street and never had a moment’s peace when you were around Jamyatti Gardens, from where the boats left for Prison Island, its coral reefs and giant tortoises. He’d read the books all right.

“Jambo.” The voice was close to him. Craig sneaked a look around as he necked his beer. A young Zanzibari had moved in on a blonde English girl who had been sitting alone. The girl smiled a little shyly and the youth sat down next to her. “The sun is setting,” he said and the girl looked out over the ocean. The sun had started to dip behind the bank of cloud. “You want to go to Prison Island tomorrow?” he asked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

The girl shook her head. “No. Thanks.” She was still smiling but Craig could see she was a little nervous. Doing battle with her shyness was the adventurous spirit that had brought her this far from whichever northern market town she’d left behind. She was flattered by the youth’s attentions but could never quite forget the many warnings her worried parents would have given her in the weeks before she left.