Tails of Wonder and Imagination

MBO Nicholas Royle

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 oilily 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—37 to date, according to Craig’s researches—were quite specifically from Zanzibar Island.

Thirty-seven. Twenty-three women between 17 and 30, and 14 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 36 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.

The tout went through the list and still she politely declined. In the end he changed tack and offered to buy her a drink. Craig heard her say she’d have a beer. The youth caught the waiter’s eye and spoke to him fast in Swahili. Next time the waiter came by he had a can of Stella for the girl and a Coke for the tout. Craig watched as the girl popped open the Stella and almost imperceptibly shifted on her seat so that her upper body was angled slightly further away from the boy in favour of the ocean. Maybe she shouldn’t have accepted the beer, thought Craig. Or maybe it was old-fashioned to think like that. Perhaps these days girls had the right to accept the beer and turn the other way. He just wasn’t sure the African youth would see it like that. Whether he was a practising Muslim—the abnegation of alcohol told him that—or not.

A high-pitched whine in Craig’s ear. A pin-prick in the forearm. He smacked his hand down hard, lifted it slowly to peer underneath.

Craig started, then shuddered; never able to stand the sight of blood, whether his own or anybody else’s, he had once run out of the cinema during an afternoon screening of The Shining. He had fainted at the scene of a road accident, having caught sight of a pedestrian victim’s leg, her stocking sodden with her own blood. She survived unscathed; Craig’s temple bore a scar to this day where he had hit his head on the pavement.

The mosquito had drunk well, and not just of Craig either. His stomach turning over, he quickly inspected the creature’s dinner which was smeared across his arm, a red blotch in the shape of Madagascar, almost an inch long. Craig wondered whose blood it was, given that the mozzie had barely had enough time to sink its needle beneath his skin. Some other drinker’s? Craig looked about. Not that of the Italian in the tight briefs, he hoped. Nor ideally had it come from either of the two South African rugby players sitting splayed-legged at the front by the railing.

He spat on to a paper tissue and wiped his arm vigorously without giving it another look until he was sure it had to be clear. The energy from the slap had been used up bursting the balloon of blood; the mosquito’s empty body, split but relatively intact, was stuck to Craig’s arm like an empty popsicle wrapper.

This bothered him less than the minutest trace of blood still inside the dead insect’s glassy skin.

When he looked up, the blonde girl had joined a group of Europeans—Scandinavians or Germans by the look of them—and was eagerly working her way into their telling of travellers’ tales, while the young tout glared angrily at the bank of clouds obscuring the sun, his left leg vibrating like a wire. Craig hoped he wasn’t angry enough to get nasty. Doubted it—after all, chances were this sort of thing happened a lot up here. The kid couldn’t expect a hundred percent strike rate.

Craig gave it five minutes, then went over and sat next to the kid. Kid turned around and Craig started talking.

Ten minutes later, Craig and the kid both left, though not together. Craig was heading for Mazson’s Hotel and bed; the kid, his timetable for the following day sorted, having spoken to Craig, was heading home as well—home for him being his family’s crumbling apartment in the heart of the Stone Town, among the rats and the rubbish and the running sewage. To be fair, the authorities were tackling the sewage, but they hadn’t yet got as far as the kid’s block.

The group that Alison, the blonde girl, had joined was approached by another tout, an older, taller fellow. More confident than the kid, not so much driven by other motivations, less distracted—he had a job to do. With her new companions, Alison was not so nervous about getting into the trips business. She wanted to go to Prison Island, they all did; they looked around to include her as the tout waited for an answer, and she nodded, smiling with relief. Turned out they were German, two of them, the two girls, but naturally they spoke perfect English; the third girl and the boy, who appeared to be an item, were Danish, but you wouldn’t know it—their English, spoken with American accents, was pretty good too.

“We were just in Goa,” said Kristin, one of the German girls. “It is so good. Have you been?”

“No,” Alison shook her head. “But I’d like to go. I’ve heard about it.” She’d heard about it all right. About the raves and the beach parties, the drugs and the boys—Australians, Americans, Europeans. It had been hard enough to get permission to come to Zanzibar, especially alone, but her parents had accepted her right to make a bid for independence.

“Ach!” shouted Anna, the second German girl, flailing her bare arms as she failed to make contact with a mozzie. “Scheisse!”

“Where are you staying, Alison?” asked the Danish boy, Lief, his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder.

Alison named a cheap hotel on the edge of Stone Town.

“You should move into Emerson’s House,” Lief’s girlfriend, Karin, advised. “That’s where we’re all staying. It’s really cool. Great chocolate cake…” She looked at Lief and for some reason they sniggered. Kristin and Anna joined in and soon they were all laughing, Alison included. Their combined laughter was so loud they couldn’t hear anything else.

People started to look, but, leaning in towards each other, they could only hear their own laughter.

Popo—the kid—picked up Craig outside Mazson’s at nine the next morning in a battered but just about roadworthy Suzuki Jeep.

“Jambo,” he said as Craig climbed in beside him. “Jozani Forest.”

“Jambo. Jozani Forest,” Craig confirmed their destination.

They rumbled out of town, which became gradually more ramshackle as they approached the outskirts. Popo used the horn every few seconds to clear the road of cyclists, who were out in the hundreds. No one resented being ordered to make way, Craig noticed, as they would back home. Popo’s deft handling took the Jeep around potholes and, where they were too big to be avoided, slowly through them. Most of the men in the streets wore long flowing white garments and skull caps; as they got further out of town, the Arabic influence became less pronounced. The women here wore brightly coloured kikois and carried unfeasibly large bags and packages on their heads. Orderly crowds of schoolgirls in white headgear and navy tunics streamed into schools that appeared to be no more than collections of outbuildings.

Between the villages, banana plantations ran right up to the edge of the road. Huge bunches of green fruit pointed up to the sky, brown raffia-like leaves crackled in the Jeep’s draught.

“You look for Red Colobus monkey?” Popo asked without taking his eye off the road.

“I told you last night,” Craig reminded him. “Zanzibar leopard. I’m looking for the leopard.”

“No leopard here,” Popo shook his head.

“I heard the witch doctors keep them.”

“No leopard.”

“There are witch doctors, then?”

Popo didn’t say anything as they passed through another tiny village, crowds of little children too small to be in school running up to the Jeep and waving at Craig, old men sat under a shelter made out of dried palm leaves. The children shouted after them: “Jambo, jambo!” Craig waved back.

“In Jozani Forest…” Popo said slowly, “Red Colobus monkey. Only here on Zanzibar.”

“I know,” said Craig, wiping his forearm across his slippery brow. “And the leopards? The witch doctors? I have to find them.”

“No leopard here.”

He wasn’t going to get much more out of Popo, that was clear. When the kid swung the Jeep off the road, he reacted swiftly by grabbing his arm, but they had only pulled into the carpark for the forest. He let go of the kid’s arm.

“Sorry. Took me by surprise.”

Popo blinked slowly.

“No leopard here,” he repeated.

The noise of the boat’s engine, a constant ragged chugging, made conversation impossible. There was no point trying to make yourself heard, but that didn’t stop Lief from occasionally mouthing easily understood remarks about the choppiness of the water, the heat of the sun.

The others—Karin, Anna, Kristin and Alison—grinned and nodded, although Alison’s grin was a little forced. Her trip to Prison Island was already going to exact a price, even though it was only supposed to be a half-hour hop: Alison could barely walk through a puddle without getting seasick. As the 25-foot wooden craft took another dive off the top of the next crest, she lurched forward and felt her stomach do the same, only, it seemed, without stopping. She retched, assumed the crash position, fully expecting to be ditched in the drink. It didn’t happen. The boat lumbered up the next heavy swell, perched an instant at its arête, and plummeted into the trough. Alison groaned.

The two Danes were chattering excitedly in their own tongue, clearly having a ball. When she looked up, Alison saw Anna and Kristin smiling down at her. “Are you okay?” one of them asked and Alison just managed to shake her head. “It’s not far to the island,” Anna said, looking forward, but the boat pitched to port, throwing her off her feet. She tumbled into Alison’s lap, Alison dry-retching once again.

“Oh God,” she moaned. “I can’t stand it.”

“It’s not far now,” Lief tried to reassure her, although he was puzzled as to why they had shifted around so much that the bow was now pointing out to sea.

“Where are we going?” Anna asked, of no one in particular, once she had picked herself up off the duckboards.

Now Kristin demanded “What’s going on?” as the bow swung around several degrees further to port. Their course could no longer be even loosely interpreted as being bound for Prison Island. “Where are you taking us?” she shouted at the boat’s skipper, a lad no more than 18 sat in the stern, his hand on the outboard throttle.

They were now heading into the wind, and spray broke over the bow every seventh or eighth wave. Alison had started to cry, tears slipping noiselessly over green cheeks. Her mouth was set in a firm, down-curved bow, her brow creased in determined abstraction.

Lief rose to his feet unsteadily and asked the skipper “What’s going on?” The 18-year-old just stared at the horizon. “We want to go to Prison Island. We paid you the money. Where are you taking us?” Still the guy wouldn’t look at him. Lief leaned forward to grab his arm but found himself jerked back from behind. The other African, who had been squatting in the bow, motioned to Lief that he should sit down. The fingers of his left hand were wrapped around the stubby handle of a fisherman’s knife.

“Sit,” he ordered. “Sit.” He looked at the girls. “Sit.” He pointed at the wooden bench seats and everyone complied. Now Anna had started to weep as well and was not so quiet about it as Alison.

“Hands,” the boy barked, his jaws snapping around the rusty gutting blade and grabbing at Lief’s wrists. With a length of twine he quickly tied Lief’s hands behind his back before any of the girls had the presence of mind to knock him off his feet while he had his hands occupied and was temporarily unarmed. They would live to regret this missed opportunity.

Anna and Kristin were almost paralysed with fear. Alison was within an ace of throwing herself overboard, believing that to be actually in the water could not be worse than being in a boat on it. Still the boat struck out against the direction of the incoming waves and soon they were all soaked from the spray over the bow. The boat climbed and plunged, climbed and plunged. Alison leant over the side and was quietly sick; she hoped it would make her feel better. It was funny how not even mortal fear could distract her from her seasickness.

Neither, it transpired, could the act of vomiting. If anything, she felt worse, and when the boat slipped around several degrees to port and took the waves side-on, she liked it even less. Each time the narrow craft leaned to either side she thought she was going in—again she considered doing it deliberately. Anna and Kristin were both crying, staring alternately at each other and at Lief, who was ashen-faced. Alison justified her intention to jump ship by interpreting the others’ introvertedness as being an atavistic retreat into their original social groupings in the face of extreme fear. They would no more try to save her life than they would that of one of the two kidnappers, she reasoned. How long had they known her? Twelve hours. What kind of bond grew in such a short time? Not a lasting one.

She remembered what her mother had once told her, when they’d taken the ferry to Calais. “Look at the horizon,” she’d said. “Watch the land. Don’t look at the water.” Thinking of her mother only brought fresh tears and looking left at the palm-fringed shoreline of the island some half a mile away made her feel no better. There was no way she would ever be able to swim such a distance, not even if her life depended on it. And seasickness had to be better than either drowning or being eaten by hammerhead sharks—she’d done her homework and mother nature’s bizarrest-looking fish was known to nest in several of the bays around Zanzibar.

She leaned forward again in order to sneak a look at the African boy who had gone back to the bow now that Lief was tied up and neither she nor any of the three other girls appeared to be capable of making a move against him and his mate. He appeared to be searching for something on land at the same time as casting quick little glances back at his captives. If she wasn’t mistaken, Alison thought he was nervous. She wondered if they could turn that to their advantage. Maybe he was new to this game, whatever it entailed.

“Listen,” she addressed the others, “we’ve got to do something.”

The three girls looked up, whereas Lief retreated further inside himself. He looked as if they might have lost him. Were it not for him, they could have all jumped overboard on a given signal and helped each other to shore. But with his hands tied behind his back, Lief would be unable to swim and the logistics of trying to drag him, lifesaving-style, over half a mile even between them seemed insurmountable.

Karin and Anna were still crying; Kristin had stopped and was calmer. “What can we do?” she wondered.

“Hey!” the boy in the bow shouted at them, brandishing his knife.

“We could all go overboard and take Lief with us,” Alison whispered. “See if we can make it to the shore. Or we rush one of them, try and overpower him, knock him in, whatever. We’ve got to do something.”

“Even if we jump in, they’ve got the boat, they would easily catch up with us.”

The boat tipped suddenly as the boy from the bow skipped over the wooden cross-seats towards them and, sweeping his right arm in a wide arc, connected with Kristin under her jaw, knocking her completely off balance. Alison watched in horror as Kristin teetered for a second close to the gunwhale, unaware of the seventh wave about to hit the boat on the starboard side. A scarlet stripe had been drawn on her cheek by the boy’s knife which had been in his hand when he hit her.

The wave smacked into the side of the boat and she was gone in a flash, vanished.

“No!” Alison screamed, clambering over to that side of the boat and leaning over. Kristin had been swallowed by the waves. Shock, presumably, having rendered her incapable of reaction. She must have taken her first breath only after hitting the water.

“You murdering bastard! You fucking…”

Alison leapt at the youth in her fury, but he grabbed her slender wrists and held her at bay, grinning while she struggled. She tried to kick him but he threw her down on to the bottom of the boat where she scrambled for safety as he leaned down over her threatening with the knife.

“No more,” he said.

Kristin’s friend Anna had clasped her arms around her knees and was rocking to and fro on her seat, moaning softly. Karin was sobbing, caught between trying to protect Alison and looking after her distracted boyfriend.

When he was satisfied the threat to his and his partner’s authority had diminished, the youth returned to his post in the bows, occasionally shouting remarks back to the stern in Swahili. Alison climbed back on to a seat, unable to control a violent trembling which had seized her limbs. She kept visualizing Kristin washed up on the beach: she would appear not to be moving, then would cough up a lungful of sea water and splutter as she fought to regain control of her breathing. When the images were blacked out by another sickening swoop down the windward side of a wave, she knew that Kristin was dead. She might eventually get washed up among the mangrove swamps of south-western Zanzibar, but her bones would have been picked clean by the hammerheads.

The boat shifted around dramatically on a shout from the look-out boy. They were heading into shore. Alison doubted whether Lief would even be able to walk.

Jozani is the last vestige of the tropical forest that had at one time covered most of the island. The Red Colobus monkeys make it a tourist attraction, but the monkeys conveniently inhabit a small corner of the forest near the road, not far from one of the spice plantations. Visitors are taken out of the car park, back across the road and down a track to where the monkeys hang out.

The first monkey Craig saw was not remotely red.

“Blue monkey,” the guide said. “Over there,” he pointed through the trees, “is Red Colobus.”

Craig saw a number of reddish-brown monkeys of various sizes playing around in the trees; leaping from one to another, they made quite a racket when they landed among the dry, leathery leaves.

“Great,” Craig said. “What about the leopards?”

The guide gave him a blank look.

“You want see main forest?”

“Yes, I want see main forest.” He followed the guide back to the road and into the car park. The tour around the main forest, Craig knew, would only scratch the surface of Jozani.

“My driver can guide me,” Craig said, slipping a five dollar bill into the guide’s palm. “You stay here. Relax. Put your feet up. Get a beer or something.”

The guide looked doubtful, but Craig beckoned Popo across. He walked slowly, with a loose stride, long baggy cotton trousers and some kind of sandals. “Tell him it’s okay,” Craig said to Popo. “You can take me in.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Popo talked rapidly to the guide, who shrugged and walked back to the reception area defined by a bunch of easy chairs and some printed information and photographs pinned up on boards.

“Let’s go, Popo.”

Popo headed into the forest.

They followed the path until Craig sensed they were starting to double-back on themselves. He stopped, pushed his sunglasses up over his forehead and lit a cigarette.

“I think I want to head off the path a little,” he said as he offered a cigarette to Popo.

The African took a cigarette, and lit it, the $100 bill folded around the pack not lost on him.

“Do you want to take the whole pack?” Craig asked. “I have to head off the path a little way. Leopards, you know?”

“No leopard here.” Popo’s hand hovered in mid-air.

“Witch doctors then. You interested or not?” Craig offered him the bribe again and nodded in the direction he wanted to go. Popo took the pack of Marlboro, slipping the cash out from underneath the cellophane wrapper and folding it into his back pocket. Then he led the way into the forest proper. After a few yards he knelt down at the base of a tree. Craig knelt down beside him and looked where the kid was pointing. There were dozens of tiny black frogs, each no bigger than a finger tip, congregating on some of the broader fallen leaves.

“Here water come,” said Popo. “From sea.”

“Floodwater?”

“Yes. No one come here. Dangerous.”

“Good. Let’s go on, in that case.”

As soon as they hit the sandy bottom, the youth in the bow jumped out and tugged the boat up on to the beach. The kid in the stern pulled up the outboard. Three gangly, raggedy youths walked across the beach to meet them. Alison, Karin, Lief and Anna were forced out of the boat at knifepoint and the two youths exchanged a few words with the newcomers before turning their boat around and pushing off from the shore.

Alison, Karin and Anna had to walk with their hands on their heads to the treeline; Lief’s hands were still tied behind his back. His face betrayed no emotion. Alison was amazed he’d been able to get up and walk. As for Alison, her legs had turned to rubber, despite her small relief at being on dry land. Their new captors were also armed and ruthless-looking.

The wind blew through the tops of the palm trees, an endless sinister rustling. But as they trooped into the forest, the palms thinned out, their place taken by sturdier vegetation. The canopy was so high it created an almost cathedral stillness. All Alison could hear now, apart from their shuffling progress through the trammelled undergrowth, were the occasional hammerings of woodpeckers and the screams of other, unknown birds. From time to time, on the forest floor she would spot sea shells glimmering through the mulch. She jumped when she almost walked into a bat, only to discover it was a broad, brown leaf waiting to drop from its tapering branch. She swiped at it and when it didn’t instantly fall she went ballistic, swinging her arms at it as if it were a punchball. The party halted and two of the African youths came towards her, their knives at the ready. She peered over the edge of sanity at the possibility of panic, stood finely balanced debating her options, caught between self-preservation and loyalty to the group.

Before she knew what she was doing she had taken flight. One of the youths might have taken a swing at her, the point of his knife flashing just beneath her nose. She couldn’t be sure. Something had happened to spur her into action. Action which she instantly regretted, mainly because it was irrevocable and she knew she would never outrun the local boys; also because she had deserted her companions, which according to her own code of honour was unforgivable. Yet she couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have taken the same chance. Indeed, by running, she had created a diversion which, if they had any sense, they would exploit.

These thoughts flashed through her mind as she crashed through the forest, her flesh catching on twigs and bark and huge serrated leaves yet she felt no pain. Adrenaline surged through her system. She couldn’t hear her pursuers but she knew that meant nothing. These boys would be able to fly. Whatever it took, to render her bid for freedom utterly futile.

As soon as they heard the drumming, Popo became jittery. Craig didn’t give him more than five minutes.

“What is it, Popo?” he asked him. “What’s going on?”

“Mbo,” was all he would say, his eyes darting to and fro. “Mbo.”

It was faint, still obviously some way off, but unmistakably the sound of someone drumming. It wasn’t the surf and it wasn’t coconuts dropping from the palm trees, it was someone’s hand beating out a rhythm on a set of skins. A couple of tom-toms, maybe more, the kind of thing you played with your hand, sat cross-legged—whatever they were called. Craig hadn’t a fucking clue. As for Popo, he was out of there. Craig didn’t even watch him go, back the way they’d come. His hundred bucks had brought him this far, which was all he’d wanted the kid to do.

A mosquito whined by his ear. He brushed it away and walked on, moving slowly but carefully in the direction of the drumming.

He stopped when he heard another sound, coming from over to his right. Another, similar sound, but more ragged, less musical. The sound that would be made, he realised, by someone running. Craig’s mind raced, imagining somone running into danger, and he was about to spring forward to intercept the runner, whom he still couldn’t see, when he saw hovering in the space in front of him a whole cloud of mosquitoes.

They shifted about minutely, relative to each other, like vibrating molecules, seeming at one moment to dart towards him, only to feel a restraining influence and hang back. Because of the noise of the fast approaching runner he couldn’t hear their dreadful whine, but he imagined it.

And the runner appeared, crashing her way through the trees, arms and legs flying—a young girl, the young girl from the Africa House terrace, Craig realised—heading straight for the source of the drumming.

“Hey! Stop!” Craig shouted as the swarm of mosquitoes swung its thousand-eyed head to follow the girl’s progress. The whole cloud tilted and curved after the girl. She screamed as they crowded around her head: hardly could she have announced her arrival any more extravagantly. Not that Craig had any idea who or what was responsible for the drumming, nor whether they represented a threat. He just had his instincts.

The girl had a head start on him. He ran as fast as he could but couldn’t close on her. Too many long lunches in The Eagle. Too many fast food containers in the bin under his desk. His heart beat a tattoo against his chest. He thrust his arms out in front of him to catch a tree trunk and so managed to stop short as the girl burst through into a wide clearing, the mozzies still shadowing her.

His hand-drums lying scattered at his feet, the drummer rose to his full height—six foot something of skin and bone, unfolding like some med student’s life-size prop. He was a white man, although it was impossible to judge his age. His feet and lower legs were bare, but the rest of him was clothed. Craig rubbed his eyes, which had started to go funny. Perhaps the heat and the exertion. The fear, maybe, which he acknowledged for the first time, his pulse scampering. The man’s coat constantly shifted in and out of focus, like an image perceived through a stereogram. Either there was something in Craig’s eyes obscuring his vision, or some filmy substance, spider’s web or other insectile secretion, draped across the undergrowth between him and the clearing. The tall man moved closer to Alison, who shrank away from him. He peered at her with bulging eyes that indicated thyroid disorder. His coat settled organically around his coat-hanger shoulders. Alison screamed and the coat shimmered. She lashed out with her right hand, drew a swathe through the living, clinging coat of mosquitoes. They swarmed about her head for a moment, mingling with the swarm that had aggravated her, before gravitating back to their host.

The man’s movements were slow. He seemed to make them reluctantly, as if he had no choice. His face was too sunken in the cheeks and uniformly white to betray any emotion. Stepping back from the girl, he picked up a long bone-white blood-stained instrument from the floor by his drums and strapped it over his skull. The false snout, a foot long by the look of it, wobbled hideously as he approached the girl again. The base of it—the knuckle joint, let’s face it, the thing had been fashioned from a human femur—rested against his mouth. He blew through it, a low burbling whistle, at which the mosquitoes became markedly less agitated and settled around him; Alison sank to her knees in a dead faint and he snuffled about her prone body.

Craig was furiously considering what action he could take when a further crashing through the undergrowth announced the arrival of Alison’s friends from the Africa House, bound and led by three tough-looking African youths who each mumbled what appeared to be a respectful greeting to the tall man—“Mbo,” they each seemed to be saying.

Lief, the Danish boy, had remained unresponsive throughout the trek from the beach. His girlfriend, Karin, was trembling with fear and continuous shock; Anna simply screamed whenever anyone came near her. Two of the youths took hold of Karin and Anna and laid them out flat on the ground. Grabbing lengths of dried palm leaves, they wound them around the girls’ ankles, going around and around several times, then over the loop in the other direction between the legs until they were secure. They left the arms. The third African youth swiftly bound Lief’s ankles in the same manner. Craig had to strain to see where the three were taken: beyond the lean-to on the far side of the clearing. But what lay hidden there, Craig could not see.

The tall white-skinned man was still inspecting Alison when one of the youths returned and started to bind her around the ankles as well. The man sat down once more upon the ground, his legs becoming dismantled beneath his hazy coat like a pair of fishing rods being taken apart. He picked up his hand-drums and began to play.

Craig took advantage of the noise to retreat a few yards from the edge of the clearing back into the forest. Twenty yards back, he crept around towards the back of the camp. It took him a while, because he had to move slowly to avoid alerting anyone to his presence, but he got there. Then it took him a moment before he recognised what he was seeing, even though this was what he’d been looking for. What he’d come to Africa for.

They hung from the branches of a single tree. Like bats.

Like bats, they hung upside down.

Like bats, or like the poor creatures Craig had seen in the museum in the town—bound, each one of them, at the ankles. Three dozen at least.

Most of them were completely drained of blood, desiccated, like the Bombay duck Craig would always order with his curry just to raise a laugh. Husks swinging in the breeze. Wind-dried Bombay duck. Long hair suggested which victims were female, while bigger skeletons hinted at male—but there was no way of telling with most of the poor wretches.

Nearest the ground hung the recent additions—Karin, Anna, Lief. Craig heard the tall man coming around the side of the hut, before he saw him. The wind was not strong enough to drown out the whining concert of the mosquitoes the tall man wore around himself like so many familiars. His own insectile eyes protruded as he looked at his new arrivals, all strung up and ready for him.

Behind him came two of the youths carrying Alison.

The tall man, wearing his bone nose-flute, took a tiny step towards Anna, whose screams were torn out of her throat at his approach.

I could already smell the coppery tang of blood even before the ancient ectomorph in the coat of mosquitoes prodded the young girl’s throat with the sharpened femur he wore strapped to his head.

Craig was ashamed at himself, but couldn’t stop the opening sentences of his eye-witness account forming in his mind.

I was smelling the blood he had already spilt. I must have smelled it on him or in the air, because the ground beneath my feet nourished no more exotic blooms than the surrounding forest, for he spilled no blood. This exiled European, this tall, spindly shadow of a man—scarcely a man at all—drank the blood, every last drop. It was what kept him alive. I sensed this as much as deduced it as my eye ranged across the bat-like corpses suspended from his tamarind tree. At the same time I felt a shadow fall across my heart, from which I knew I should never be free, even if I were somehow to effect an escape for myself and the youngsters who had joined the monster’s collection.

This was Craig’s problem now. The purple prose would die a death at the hands of the paper’s subs—but thinking of it in terms of the news story he had come out here to investigate helped him distance himself sufficiently to keep his mind intact, to remain alert. Whatever the odds stacked against him, he still possessed the element of surprise.

While he was still thinking, racking his brains for an escape route, the tall man’s head jerked forwards, driving the tip of his bone-flute into the hollow depression of Anna’s throat. Blood bubbled instantly around the puncture then disappeared as it was sucked down the bone. Craig forced his eyes shut, fighting his own terror of spilt blood. But he had heard the man’s first swallow, his greedy gargle as he tried to accommodate too much at once. Craig had always believed himself the hard man of investigative journalism, hard to reach emotionally—his bed back home never slept two for more than one night at a time—and impossible to shock. His fear of the sight of blood had never been a problem before; he avoided stories which trailed bloody skirts—car wrecks and shoot-outs—not his style.

As he retched and tumbled forwards out of the concealing forest, he knew this was a story to which he would never append his byline: firstly, because he wasn’t going to get out alive, and secondly, even if he did, the trauma would never allow him to relive these moments.

Two youths pounced on him, jabbering excitedly in Swahili. A third youth darted into the forest in search of any accomplices.

As the youths bound his ankles, Craig watched the tall man gulp down the German girl’s blood. He drank so eagerly and with such vigorous relish, it was possible to believe he completely voided her body of all nine pints. His cheeks had coloured up and Craig thought he could see a change in the man’s body. It had filled out, the mosquitoes that clung to him no longer covered quite so much of his grey-white nakedness.

He wondered when his own turn would come. Would the tall man save up his victims, drink them dry one a day, or would he binge? Already, he had turned to Alison, swinging from her bonds as she tried desperately to free herself. She was a fighter. Karin sobbed uncontrollably alongside, and Lief was wherever he had gone to while they were all still on the boat. As Craig was hoisted upside down and secured by one of the youths, he thought to himself it would be preferable to go first. As if sensing his silent plea, the tall man twisted around to consider the attractions of his body over the girl’s.

Popo’s approach was swift and silent. The first any of those present knew of it was an abrupt cacophony: the crashing of bodies through dry vegetation, the deep-throated growling of hungry beasts, the concerted yells and screeches of our rescuers. Visually I was aware of a black and gold blur, flashing ivory teeth and ropes of saliva swinging from heavy jaws as the leopards leapt.

Popo saved my life at that point—the exact moment at which the old Craig died. It was necessary, if I were to survive. The hard-nosed journalist was as dead as the corpses swinging in the breeze higher up in the tree. He would not write up this story, I would—but not for a long time, and not for the newspapers. It’s history now, become legend, myth—just as it had always been to Popo and the men of Jozani.

Those who survived it—and they are few—speak of it rarely. Lief lives quietly, on his own, in a house by the sea in his native Denmark. Karin, his former girlfriend, has returned to Africa as an aid worker. Most recently she has been in eastern Zaire: I saw her interviewed on the TV news during the refugee crisis. I have no contact with either of them. Alison and I tried to remain in touch—a couple of letters exchanged and we met once, in a bar in the West End, but the lights and the noise upset us both and we soon parted. I have no idea where she is now or what she is doing.

I left my reporter’s job on medical advice and spent some time fell-walking in South Wales until I felt well enough to return to work, but on the production side this time. I never have to read the copy or look at the pictures—just make sure the words are on the page and the colours are right.

I go to Regent’s Park Zoo every so often to look at the leopards. Watching them prowl around their cages reminds me of the moment in my life when I was most alive—when I saw, with an almost photographic clarity, one of Popo’s leopards take a swipe with its heavy paw at the bloodsucking creature’s midriff. There was an explosion, a shower of blood, Anna’s blood. His skin flapped uselessly, transparently, like that of the mosquito I had swatted against my arm on the terrace of the Africa House Hotel.

Popo and his men—witch doctors or Jozani Forest guides, I never found out—untied us and lowered us safely to the ground. Later that evening, after the police had been called and started the clear-up operation, Popo himself took me back to Zanzibar Town in his Suzuki. On the outskirts of town he brought the vehicle to a sudden halt, flapping his hand about his head as if trying to beat off an invisible foe.

“What’s up?” I asked, leaning towards him.

“Mbo,” he muttered.

I heard a high-pitched whine as it passed by my ear. I too lashed out angrily.

“Mosquito?” I asked.

“Mbo,” he nodded.

It turned out I had got the little sod, despite my flailing attack. Maybe it was just stunned, but it lay in the palm of my hand. I was relieved to see that its body was empty of blood.

“We call it mosquito,” I said and I shivered as I wondered if we had brought it from the forest on our clothes.

For months later, I would discover mosquitoes, no more than half a dozen or so, among the clothes I had brought back from Zanzibar. So far, they have all been dead ones.