THE JOURNEY BACK WAS QUIET. The frogs were gone, the magic of the night thinned and dispersed by the snoring households of Fish Hoek. It’s now or never, Joanna told herself as she drove. Just look inside the goddamn box.
She had, once, when she was working for the Archives in Roeland Street, come back to her Golf in the car park under the building. The cement had been cool in the murderous December heat. She had been grateful: the five-o’-clock headache that was crowding in at her temples felt like it was settling in for a good long visit.
When she saw the ox skull, she stopped. It was perched on the concrete directly in her path, sternly facing the white double-cab of her employer. The skull had been boiled clean: there was no smell, no layer of putrefying flesh attached to its planes. It was the size of the head that was baffling. Joanna pictured a man in blue overalls struggling under its weight. How had he smuggled it in? And didn’t he know there were cameras?
Or else he knew and didn’t care, chuckled Doctor Renfield. I bet that’s what happened.
She circled the thing. It definitely wasn’t pointing towards her car. Whatever it was, it wasn’t meant for her. Surely goodness and mercy, and all that. Honestly. What did you have to do to piss off one of the lowly staff at the Archives?
But that was then. All the ox had taught her was that people did things that you didn’t expect. Now Joanna, who had spent her life minding her own business and finding that it didn’t really help, was determined to open the cardboard box in Recreation Road. And besides, this was different. She was different. She was seeking it out, choosing to open the flaps to satisfy some basic curiosity about her neighbours. And she knew it would be bad. The box stank, three degrees worse than the smell at THE FAMILY BUTCHERS.
So why are you bothering? the Doctor asked. It can only end badly, you stupid girl. Just go home.
“I need to know,” Joanna told him. “And that’s that. I’m here now, and I’m already drenched. It’s not going to change anything.”
Recreation Road was deserted apart from a couple of tiny Israelite corpses. The sick and the old, thought Joanna. By tomorrow morning their thin transparent casings would already be baking hard in the watery sun. “If there are any witches left in Fish Hoek,” Joanna muttered, “they’d better get out here fast.”
She rolled down the window on the side near the stand of trees and inhaled, thinking, Oh, I love that smell! It’s what the makers of air fresheners want when they sell you Pine Fresh or Forest Glade. What is it? Menthol? Something pepperminty that makes you sit up and take notice. The wet trees shook their branches, and the water rushed down the sides of the mountain, too fast to be absorbed into the sand. Joanna inhaled until her chest hurt. It really cleared the head. She wasn’t tired at all. The clocks of the last two years were rewinding: she was back at the beginning.
She turned off the engine and got out. A quick look, she promised herself. She shoved the car keys in the tiny front pocket of the shorts. (What was it for? Did people really store condoms there?) The gutters were overflowing, stopped up with sticks and plastic bags and KFC boxes. Joanna shoved the blockage aside with her bare foot. There. The run-off charged down into the dark, where it met the hundred small streams of the groundwater.
The kicked streetlight was still out. Nice one, arseholes, thought Joanna, as she knelt down and peered at the box. It was belling out at the bottom, finally about to give way under the deluge of the past week. She reversed one top flap, and then another – it was just like packing up her office – and the stench rushed up to her all at once.
“Oh, my God!”
Joanna shuffled back on her heels. She had known it would be bad, but this was awful.
She leaned forward again, holding her sleeve over her mouth and nose, trying not to let the reek of rotting flesh find its way inside her body. Her saliva glands spurted helplessly, as if she could rinse the smell from the back of her throat.
It was a cat.
Of course it is, whispered Doctor Renfield. Even the Devil has shovelbums. Satanists also start at the bottom and work their way up.
The animal had been so badly mutilated that Joanna couldn’t tell which end was its head and which its rump. Patches of grey fur stuck to its sides like a checquerboard; its ribs were partly exposed where the skin had shriveled. There. That must be its face. The cat’s blackened lips were retracted in an everlasting snarl. Oh, kitty. Who should she call? Did the SPCA work after hours?
When they pushed Joanna forwards, she thought, Oh God! Not in the box! Not in the box! She fell into the road instead, grazing the left-hand side of her body. Her shoeless feet scraped over the gravel at the kerb. The fat man in the hoodie sat on her chest and swept her hands over her head.
“Here, kitty, kitty!”
The hole of his mouth stank of old cigarettes. Up close she saw that the skeleton was on the front of his top too. The ribcage was moving as he panted on her. He’s going to spit in my face, thought Joanna. Oh, I don’t think I can stand it! The rage and fright made her legs hammer against the flab on his back, but he stayed on, straddling her waist.
“I like it when they fight.” He lifted her wrists up a little way and then smashed them back down on the tarmac. The gravel ground into her skin like teeth. He was smiling at her! He turned to his friend in the cap, who was standing at Joanna’s feet. The thin boy’s legs bowed like a wishbone in his stovepipe jeans. “Don’t you like it when they fight?”
The thin one wasn’t even out of breath. He had his hands in his pockets, fingering something small that clinked. God, his tattoos! They were anatomically correct, blue and red lines tracing his bones and veins and arteries, as if he’d been skinned. They disappeared under his T-shirt at the biceps. He had a straggly little moustache, like the woodcut of Vlad the Impaler. Joanna imagined it on the skin of her thighs – she wasn’t stupid – and struggled harder.
If you were fitter you could get away!
“Move her,” said the standing man. He jerked his chin at the traffic circle and the shadow shifted on his face. “You’re in the middle of the road.”
“Help me, then,” said the man in the hoodie. Joanna bucked her hips to throw him off.
He got off her and the two of them dragged her over the zebra crossing. “She’s fucking heavy!” he complained.
Joanna drew in her breath and screamed, the noise tearing up from her guts. Was there no insomniac at the windows? Not a single old lady watching for the Reaper in the street below?
The thin one dropped her feet and jammed the heel of his right hand against the underside of her nose. It jarred her brain. The blood came straight away.
“Stop that,” he said mildly, a parent scolding a child in a supermarket tantrum. “Just stop that noise.”
Joanna couldn’t believe that he had hit her. The clichés of a hundred TV procedurals hammered at her.
You don’t have to do this.
Let’s talk.
I won’t call the police.
How ridiculous those programmes were, she saw now. Of course the men were going to hurt her. Kill her, even. And after her, some other woman in a dark place, two against one. It didn’t matter who. They didn’t care.
The heavy one gripped her wrists more tightly and the skinny one took hold of her ankles again. There were dark streaks running down from under his cap into the neck of his shirt. It’s hair dye, isn’t it? Joanna told herself. He dyes his hair black.
They half-carried, half-dragged her towards the substation, panting with the effort. The thin one’s shoes were shiny and hard, with points. Joanna, breathing through her mouth because her nose was smashed, looked up at the tree and saw the split for what it was: two horns from the same evil head.
Her coccyx banged against the kerb of the traffic circle. The gonk of her bum hitting the cement came next. The pain belled into her knees, vibrating.
I’m paralysed! she thought. I’m going to have to watch and I won’t be able to move!
Swings, roundabouts, mused Doctor Renfield. Maybe it won’t hurt as much.
But it would. She knew it would. The rain was coming down harder, and it would drown out any sound she made.
They pulled her head-first down the stairs. Joanna felt something in her skull crack as it banged on each one. She tried to bring her neck as close as she could to her chest.
The door at the bottom of the steps was closed – DANGER GEVAAR INGOZI – as it always was.
“Open, Sesame!” called the bigger one, and laughed. That’s wrong, thought Joanna. It’s supposed to be
Rock of two arches,
Open and let me in.
The thin one fiddled something out of his pocket: she saw the glint by the toad moon at the top of the stairs. He jammed it into the lock and the door opened. Then he felt around the doorframe, the tattoos wriggling, and a bright light shone through a grille. It buzzed. Further in there was another door with enormous bolts around the edges, an ACME safe in a cartoon. I know what’s behind there, thought Joanna. The sewers. Pleasedon’tleavemeinthere.
He was bowing to her like Dracula. The dye gave him sideburns that joined up with the goatee: he was cowled with darkness.
“Welcome to my home! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!”
I can’t go inside, thought Joanna, from where she lay on the cement floor. Oh, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never come out again! All those bodies in the sewers, like a bad detective novel. I can’t be one of them!
It won’t be that bad. It happens all the time. It won’t be as bad as some of the times with Jan.
She kept kicking feebly at the men but they just moved out of her reach. It wasn’t hard. Her head had been damaged somehow and her nose was swelling closed: she could only breathe from one nostril. All at once Joanna was very tired, the adrenalin draining away like the streams that were rushing into the storm drains overhead, catching at the pine needles, spinning a toad corpse here and there. She wanted more than anything to sleep.
Save your energy¸ said Doctor Renfield. You’re going to need it. Your’e a writer. Take note. Notice every little thing.
She tried to look around her. The little room still stank coldly of paint and damp to her working nostril, but otherwise it looked like the Clinic where James had the shots that left scars on his small biceps. The walls were a fresh prosthetic pink: a jar of cloudy turps stood forgotten in one corner with a paintbrush jammed in its mouth. Didn’t they distill it from pine resin? BUSHMAN BITES!! said the jar. PICKLED ONIONS. EXTRA HOT HOT HOT!!! A brown and wizened man grimaced on the label. His jaw met his nose in an obscene grin. There were tears squirting from the sides of his eyes.
It’s not supposed to be like this, Joanna thought. She began to cry in sympathy with the man on the jar, hating the sound she made. I wanted Peers Cave; I wanted Ntunjambili. It’s supposed to be a safe place. The blood was pooling thick in the back of her throat, like snot, and she gagged. The thin one heard her and moved forward. He lifted his leg and kicked her in the groin, the point of his boot fitting neatly between her spread legs.
I’m not going to feel this. I’m not. Having James was worse. This is going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. Don’t pass out.
“Hey, do you want to go first, or can I?” said the heavy one. He was reaching into the pocket of his hoodie. His lips were wet. He was still panting, but not with exertion. The skeleton on his front juddered and hopped as his knuckles fisted the thin flesh of the fabric.
Oh, Sweet Jesus! It’s a knifeaknifeaKNIFE!
“I can wait,” said the skinny man. He took off his cap and shook his long hair out. The sparse strands flicked black dye like freckles against the walls.
The heavy one grabbed at the hem of Joanna’s boxers and cut savagely upwards towards her heart. She was the only one who heard the jingle of the keys tangled in the material, and the beginnings of rage stirred.
He could have just taken them off!
“Lick her,” ordered the thin one. The other one’s knifehand paused in its ripping. He started to laugh.
“Go on. Lick her. You don’t want to leave any evidence.”