The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Susan Davis The Centipede

She wished Elsa hadn’t told them about the poisonous centipede. Annie kept her head down, negotiating the track like a minefield. The centipede could be right here, coiled in the long grasses with purple vetch and lilies fluttering. It could be tunnelled beneath those stones, or down where the old garden gave way to scrub, the silly Mickey Mouse ears of the prickly pears.

“You go on inside,” she called out to her husband and sister-in-law who stood below, on the terrace of Peep’s old cottage.

“Okay. We’ll go and do the recce.” Elsa’s voice boomed up at her. Elsa was swinging Pepe’s great key from her hand. She looked as if she were doing the pendulum test over the belly of a pregnant woman. “We’ll have to holler to frighten the rats,” she added cheerfully.

Left, alone, Annie paused to sneeze. The drifts of flowers released a hot peppery tang, which irritated her nose. The air was so dry. She might shrivel up out here: defenceless, her skin would slough off. The centipede knew this. The centipede was waiting just for her.

“Friend of mine met up with one of the things in the shower.” It was one of Elsa’s dinner-party anecdotes. Last night, as she’d cracked open mussel shells and decapitated prawns, she’d told them of the malevolent habits of the centipede.

“Had to prise it off her arm with the shower head.” Elsa sucked at the squid until the black ink oozed at the corners of her mouth. “They won’t let go once they get a grip on you. They stick like leeches, hang on for grim death.”

Elsa would probably never have mentioned the creature. But earlier that week, just before Mark and Annie arrived in Anda-lucia, a neighbouring campesino had disturbed one while digging a hole for a water pipe.

“Chopped it into three separate pieces, every piece still squirming all by itself.” She waggled inky fingers at them. “Poor thing. I was quite pissed off about it. What are you frowning at, Annie?”

“I was just thinking…” Annie hesitated, knowing that contradicting Elsa was a reckless act. “I read somewhere that over thirty thousand bulls are tormented to death in this country, every year. Surely that’s something to get upset about?”

Elsa shrugged. Bulls? What of it? Dull, lumbering great creatures bred for entertainment. But the centipede was beautiful. “The way I see it,” Elsa said, “anything beautiful has the right to life.”

Annie continued down the track. She could hear Elsa’s voice now, echoing in the emptiness of Pepe’s cottage. The cottage was for sale. Elsa’s idea was that Mark and Annie should buy it and move to Spain for good.

Inside, the three rooms smelled of rats and mouldy garlic and damp. Mark reached out and pulled Annie close, as if they were newly-weds inspecting their new home, as if the decision were already made.

“What d’you think, love? It’s a snip, Elsa says. Did you see the olive trees, and the almonds?”

In Elsa’s presence Mark seemed to shrink. Annie felt a pang of sympathy and irritation. This air of bravado was thrown on for Elsa’s benefit, like the linen jacket and Panama hat. They could not disguise what he really was: timid, unfit, an ineffectual schoolteacher.

Elsa was striding about, wrenching the shutters open as if she owned the place herself.

“It takes imagination, that’s all. A good airing; it needs living in again.” Elsa’s bare feet in their flip-flops shuffled carelessly through the rat droppings and dead leaves which had blown in under the door.

“You don’t think they might be nesting here?” Annie glanced nervously about.

“What? The rats? Oh, more than likely.”

Elsa feared nothing, it seemed. Not rats, nor spiders, nor snakes, nor poisonous centipedes. Nothing. Look at her now, peering into cupboards, into cavernous fireplaces, dodging a shower of debris with a kind of elegant flamenco move. The Carmen-style blouse revealed an opera singer’s cleavage, the same weathered texture as those pots on the terrace: her legs were ropy with veins. And yet Elsa carried herself, straight-backed Spanish style, bosom thrust forwards, head thrown back, so that she seemed to be looking down upon everything.

It was strange. Annie was the younger of the two women, yet, in her sister-in-law’s presence, she felt faded and frail. She knew that in the southern sun she would not flesh out like Elsa into a tawny handsome woman; she would simply frizzle up like an empty seed-pod and grow old.

“The garden needs work, naturally.” Elsa pushed past them to the terrace. “But you can take cuttings from my place.”

Annie said mildly that she hadn’t got as far as thinking about gardens just yet.

“Why not?” Elsa swung around to face her, small amber eyes piercing, demanding explanations.

Annie raised her head and blinked. It was always like this. Confronted by Elsa she felt as if she were gazing into the sun. Black spots danced before her eyes. She felt suddenly drowsy.

“Well, there are things to be considered…” She glanced toward Mark for support, but he stood smiling vacantly out at the view, content to allow his big sister to make the decisions.

“Like what?”

“Oh… money for one thing…”

“Sod the money!” Elsa spat the words as if she had something between her teeth. “I have money. I want to help.”

“Oh well, that’s very kind… but the children…”

“What children? You’re not pregnant again, are you?”

“Of course not. I mean Bethan and Simon, well, I know Simon’s in his last year at college, and Bethan lives with her boyfriend, but they still need…”

“They’re all grown up!” Elsa roared, not letting her finish even. Dismissing Annie’s children, Elsa strode to the lower terrace to inspect the olives. “You can’t mollycoddle them for ever, Annie.”

“That’s what I keep telling her.” Surfacing from his trance, Mark sounded petulant. “We should put ourselves first for once.”

Annoyed, Annie started back up the track. What did Elsa know about families? She had married a Galician poet who gave her no children, who was her child himself. The poet had died four years ago. Elsa, who had guarded him like a lioness from journalists, fans and interruptions of any sort, saw him off with an elaborate funeral.

Did Elsa now have lovers? Pondering this a little jealously, Annie forgot to look where she was walking. Halfway up the track, she screamed: “I’ve been bitten, I’ve been bitten by something!” She shrieked shamelessly, hopping on one foot. Her fault. Thinking of Elsa’s lovers, she’d forgotten about the danger lurking in the grass… the centipede. “I didn’t see what it was. I didn’t see it!”

In an instant Elsa was beside her. For such a large woman she moved rapidly, darting to Annie’s side, grasping her shin, “Let’s have a look, then… ah, that’s all it is, horse fly. My God, what a bloody fuss!”

Feebly, Annie explained, “I thought it might be that thing you told us about, you know, the centipede…” She trembled upon one leg, frail as a stork.

Elsa laughed, “Listen, my darling girl, if it had been the centipede, you’d be writhing on the ground in bloody agony, I assure you. And anyway, the last person to be killed by the bite in this country was four years ago. Did you know that?”

“No. No, I didn’t.” Once again, Annie squinted as if to protect her eyes from the sun.

“Well, there you are then!”

The poet had left Elsa in some style. Inside, the hacienda was all polished Gothic gloom, great thronelike chairs and chests with rusting iron locks; chests that might have been brimming with Conquistador gold rather than spare bedding. The dining table was sombre, immense; its glassy surface relieved by a gaunt candelabra and a shallow dish of medlars.

Through these rooms, Elsa blazed in her gaudy kaftans, a fire catching. She suffered, it seemed, no ill effects from her bare feet on cold marble floors. Annie watched enviously. She herself would surely have developed a kidney infection at once. She was careful always to wear her sandals or canvas shoes inside the house.

“You used to hate her once.” Annie had tracked Mark down in the study. “You told me. Even your mother told me… she once tried to smother you in your pram by getting the cat to sit on your face.”

“Did she? I don’t remember that.”

“She smeared fish paste on your chin.”

“Hmmmm…?” Mark watched the TV screen doggedly. He had the look of a man in denial while ships sank, while houses burned around him.

“She must’ve been about seven, love. I don’t think she’d want the cat to sit on my face now, do you?”

“But why, why is she so keen for us to take Pepe’s cottage?”

“Is it the rats you’re scared of? It’s all right, Elsa left Paco instructions to put poison down — he’s cleared them out, apparently.”

“It’s not the rats, it’s the thought of living two miles away from your sister. She’s… she’s…”

But what could she honestly say about Elsa? Elsa, who was the perfect hostess, feeding and entertaining them, even wanting to help buy them a house in the sun, and refusing any contribution towards their keep; Elsa with her jokes and stories and her great crushing bear hugs and her temper.

“Annie… Annie, are you there?” Now the summons brought her trotting, trit-trot along the passage towards the open door of Elsa’s room, and the furious rattling of clothes hangers. Elsa was having a clear-out.

“These are for you, madam. Try them on. I can’t wear them bloody all, and I hate waste!”

Flashing her amber eyes at Annie as if she suspected her of harbouring butter mountains, of compulsive shopping orgies. The dresses were like cosmic accidents: bright floral splodges, violent starbursts in gold and flame.

Annie held one against herself. She looked as if she were being swallowed whole by some gigantic jungle man-eating flower. “Thank you, Elsa.” What else could she say? Elsa’s generosity always disarmed her. “You’re too good to us, really. Thank you.”

They were supposed to be staying for a month. Mark was convalescing from a mild breakdown. Arriving in this country strained and jittery, now he seemed almost tranquil, lulled both by the heat and his sister’s motherly attentions.

Elsa was “motherly” in her way. Always up before them in the mornings, humming a strident flamenco as she stirred the porridge. Into the porridge she dripped a stream of golden honey, the precious Miel de Canna, produced exclusively in one of the white Moorish villages thereabouts. Then she would stand with her arms folded, watching until Mark had licked his spoon clean.

“He can’t go back to teaching, Annie, it will kill him,” Elsa told her. More of a proclamation, really. She had packed Mark off on a walk with map and picnic. From the terrace, they could see him, leaping goatlike on a distant hillside across the valley. No, not a hillside, a mountain. Annie could hardly bear to look. She held her breath as Mark ascended to a brittle precipice, crimped and fragile as pastry edging.

“He’ll fall,” she had whispered, “Oh my God! It makes me dizzy just watching.”

“Don’t be pathetic,” Elsa roared. “It’s only a pimple. We should all learn to live a little dangerously from time to time.”

With Mark packed off for the day, Annie had to accompany her sister-in-law to the market, where Elsa would haggle over vegetables, silk blouses, lace tablecloths, waving her fleshy arms about, exclaiming in her exuberant Spanish. Later, the market produce would reappear in a paella with everything thrown in: fish heads, or claws, or eyeballs goggling up at them from the plate. Elsa would tuck in heartily. There was not much that she considered inedible. Once, a guest joined them for dinner, a handsome Spaniard who flicked his napkin with a bullfighter’s grace. Elsa lowered her head and spoke to this guest in a throaty flirtatious whisper. Her amber eyes flickered dangerously. Elsa’s lover. Of this, Annie had no doubt. It was not surprising. After all, her sister-in-law was a woman of large appetities.

The paella did not agree with Annie. After frequent trips to the loo, she felt she must be growing thinner and frailer. Her body remained greenish white, sappy like a bluebell stalk; her head weighed heavy. Elsa’s very presence exhausted her. The energy radiating from the magnificent woman had sapped Annie’s own strength. She could only fidget listlessly on the terrace, viewing the distant figure of her husband as he cavorted about the hills, growing bronzer and fitter on mountain air and his sister’s honeyed porridge.

Strange how Annie felt most alive at siesta, when Elsa retired behind the great oak door of her room, curled up in her kaftan like some voluptuous beast. At these times, Annie felt like a bird who sees the cage door open and fidgets on its perch, uncertain whether to chance flying into the light.

Outside the light was dazzling. There were strange rustlings among the geraniums; lizards basked in the heat, crickets chirped.

Inside the house, Annie rustled in the cool of Elsa’s study, finding the book she wanted with its picture of the centipede, the thickness of a man’s two middle fingers. There it was with its waspy stripe. The book was written in Spanish. But she recognized the word muerte. Death. The centipede meant death. How could she come to live in a country where such things existed?

They were waiting for Elsa. The town was beginning to stir slowly into life after siesta. Men clustered in the bars. The abrupt gunfire of their conversation reached Annie as she sat with Mark at the fountain.

An old woman passed with that stoical waddle common to the locals, arms laden with gladioli. She was making her way toward the church where all about the crumbly stucco of the tower the swifts dived, darted endlessly. The men’s voices, the swifts, the smooth hiss of the fountain were soothing.

Annie was thinking that, yes, she could grow comfortable here; even perhaps live in Pepe’s cottage. It would please Mark. He sat now, twirling his sunglasses in his hands, gazing towards the abogado’s office for his sister. If only she could relax. If only she could give herself up to it, to the sweet drowsy heat… to Elsa… No, not to Elsa! At once Annie sat upright, grasped the rim of the fountain, for here she was, Elsa, crossing the plaza, bouncing toward them.

“Hola! Hola, Maria!” Elsa called gaily to the gladioli lady, who appeared startled and murmured something. Did Annie imagine it, or did the woman cross herself as Elsa passed? Elsa waved triumphantly at Annie and Mark, flourishing a wad of papers, then halted by Juan’s bar to call to the little lame dog which always skulked there: “Here, perro! Look, see what mummy’s got…” The mutt limped forward as Elsa crumbled stale blood sausage which she always kept for this purpose in her bag. Nervously it suffered her caress, her croonings, before shrinking back to the doorway.

Elsa rose, dazzling as a sunflower in her kaftan, her strings of amber beads, bronzed arms chinking with bangles. Annie could almost smell her from across the square. Or was it the acacia trees, releasing a fragrance so strong she almost swooned? She clutched harder at the fountain, feeling the lukewarm spray in her face. Elsa bounded toward them now, and it seemed the swifts dive-bombed the church tower in a kind of panic; some German tourists at one of the pavement tables seemed suddenly to flag in the heat beneath striped awnings.

“Darlings!” Elsa was upon them, thrusting her warm solid flesh between them both. “It’s all settled. Nothing for you two to worry about. I’ve signed the papers myself.” She beamed at them, “I’ve bought Pepe’s old place in my name, but God, what do I need of it? It’s for you two. A present.”

Annie could remember little after that, just Mark’s wittering gratitude. And being almost crushed by Elsa’s thigh next to her, the heavy scent of her, the energy… and she… Annie, clinging and clutching at the damp stone rim to stop from falling. The water gave off a rancid scent. It was evaporating in the heat. Soon there would be nothing left but a greenish vapour.

Annie’s first thought on waking was that she was in jail. But she was looking at the iron grille at her bedroom window. Mark was leaning over her: “Elsa says you’ve had a touch of sunstroke. She says with your fair colouring it’s madness to go out without a hat. And look… she found you one. She thinks of everything.”

The hat smelt of dog basket. The great flopping brim was wound about with a bronzy chiffon scarf. Turn it upside down and you could sail the Atlantic, across the choppy Bay of Biscay, all the way to Dover, safe from the sun and Elsa and centipedes… Annie’s eyes closed again.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly eight. We thought we’d take an evening stroll over to the cottage. Our cottage, I mean. Not Pepe’s. God, I can’t get used to the idea. Annie and Mark’s cottage… how does it sound?”

“You mean Elsa’s cottage,” she said dully. “It belongs to Elsa.”

But he was drifting towards the door, telling her to stay there and rest. He was drifting away from her, from England, into Elsa’s burning stratosphere, into Spain. She called out after him: “Watch out for the centipede.” But he was gone.

The centipede burrows below ground to hatch its grubs. It prefers undisturbed land, the thatch of dead grasses, skeleton leaves, powdered seed heads; it lurks in cracks and craters, in the dust beneath the bony roots of olive trees. You might never see one in your whole life, except in a book. You might go hunting it out deliberately, turning every stone, peeping into crevices, and yet find only ants and spiders. Or — and no one can rule out this possibility — you might just be one of the very few who come upon it suddenly, its deadly amber stripe flashing its warning… too late. You might be an unlucky statistic, a few lines in the newspaper, the wrong place, the wrong time. Statistically it’s rare. But not impossible. Nothing is impossible.

The sun was low as Annie started towards Pepe’s cottage. She was wearing the pale blue sundress, and Elsa’s straw hat, and sandals. To the west, the sun brushed the mountaintops, turning the land the colour of Miel de Canna, porridge honey.

Things were biting her shins, mean little pinpricks of pain which she ignored. She had grown tired of it, this fear she had of wild dogs and sickness and insects; of this bright burning landscape, of skulking in Elsa’s shadow. Somehow she must steal back the initiative, show Elsa that she was no frail sappy Englishwoman to be dried out and crushed.

A slight breeze ruffled the grass as she descended to the cottage. The purple and yellow wild flowers undulated like a quilt.

“Elsa!” she sang out bravely, “Elsa… are you down there?” Then, as Elsa appeared, “This hat you gave me is too big!”

They were looking up at her, Elsa and Mark, as she flung the hat into the grass. There! That would show Elsa what she could do with her gifts. Big generous Elsa, now so silent. Both of them. As if they didn’t want her there.

Something twitched, just beneath the brim of the hat, tilting it up slightly… shifting. Annie looked down, noticing her own toes, vulnerable in the sandals. There was a moment almost of relief that she had come face to face with it at last.

It was the hat, of course, that had disturbed its nesting place. She recalled quite coolly what the book had said, how fast they moved, the centipedes, full of a mad voracious energy, poison flowing like ink from tiny steel-trap jaws.

“Once they get a grip,” Elsa had said, “you can’t shake them off.”

Elsa and Mark were clambering towards her. They seemed to be moving in slow motion. The sun going down lit Elsa’s hair in a curious two-tone of dark honey with an amber stripe. Funny how she had never noticed before, that stripe in Elsa’s hair.

As they drew closer to her, the sun vanished altogether; the eucalyptus trees shivered in the breeze. The pain was really no worse than she’d expected.