Michael Dibdin: Vendetta

The noises woke him, crashing sounds close at hand, their source invisible in the eerie gloom. He looked round wildly, forgetting for a merciful moment where he was.

Then he saw the line of scuffed footmarks running back across the undulating surface and the dangling branches he had broken in his reckless flight, and understood. Far from vanishing into the trackless wastes of the forest, he had left a trail a child could have followed. But the creature following him was no child, and it was almost upon him.

He knew this was the end. Physically exhausted by his ordeal, weakened by hunger, thirst and loss of blood, this final blow had crippled his morale as well. Further resistance was futile. Nothing he had done since leaving the village had made the slightest difference to the outcome.

He might just as well have ordered a last drink and sat in the bar waiting to die. Yet to his disgust, for it seemed a m kind of weakness, a cowardice, he was unable to let things take their course even now. Instead he must stagger on through that sunken landscape, that lumber room of dead growth, without direction or purpose, out of control to the last.

In this frame of mind, he was incapable of surprise, even when he stumbled across the path weaving through the forest like a road across the bed of a flooded valley.

The trodden surface showed signs of recent use, no doubt by animals, though there were no signs of any droppings. In one direction the path ran downhill, presumably leading out of the lower flank of the forest. Zen turned the other way. Encroaching branches beside the path had already been broken off, and his own footsteps were invisible in the general disturbance of the forest floor. If Spadola went the wrong way when he reached the path, Zen would have gained amp]e time to find a secure sanctuary. Hope teased his heart, banishing the deathly calm of his fatalistic resignation.

The path wound uphill in a lazily purposeful way that lulled Zen's attention, until suddenly he found himself standing on the brink of a deep chasm in the forest floor, scanning the trough of darkness in front of him. He could see nothing: no path, no ground, no trees. It was as if the world ended there.

After standing there indecisively for some moments, he realized the ravine offered the hiding-place he had been seeking, if he could manage to scramble down the precipiious slope below him. Nevertheless, he had to overcome a strong reluctance to descend into ".hat black hole, although he knew this revulsion was the height of foolishness. It was not the dark he should be afraid of but Spadola. He lowered himseif on to a rocky outcrop and started to clamber down.

At first the descent was easier than he had imagined, with numerous ledges and projections. But the further down he went, the fainter grew the glimmers of light fro the surface far above, until at length he could hardly make out his next foothold. The idea of losing his footing and plunging off into nothingness made his palms sweat and his limbs shake in a way that o~eatly increased the chances of this happening. The only measure of how deep the chasm was came from the falling rocks he dislodged.

Gradually the clattering became briefer and less resonant, until he sensed rather than saw that he had reached the bottom.

As his pupils dilated fully, he could just make out the hunched shapes of boulders all around, and realized that he was standing in the channel cut by the river which had flowed down from the lake above before the dam was built. N7 The huge rocks littering its bed would have been washed down in the former torrent's spectacular seasonal surges.

When he heard the scurry of falling stones behind him, Zen's first thought was that the dam had given way and the black tide, unpenned, was surging towards him, sweeping away everything in its path. Then he realized the sound had come from above.

Frantically, he began to pick his way down the riverbed, crawling round and over the shattered lumps of granite, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the killer on his trail. As soon as the noises of Spadola's descent ceased, Zen could go to ground in some obscure nook or cranny. It would take an army weeks to search that chaotic maze.

But, to his dismay, the channel ended almost immediately, widening out into a circular gully closed off by a wall of dull white rock, rounded like the end of a bath. The foliage above was thinned out by this space where nothing grew, allowing a trace more light to filter down to the depths. Zen gazed at the freakish rock formation surrounding,him. He did not understand what could have caused it, but one thing was clear. The wall of smooth white rock was at least ten metres high and absolutely sheer. Zen couldn't possibly climb it, and with Spadola hard on his heels he couldn't turn back. He had fallen into a perfect natural trap, a killing ground from which there was no escape.

The sound of tumbling rocks announced the approach of the hunter. With a weary slackness of heart, as though performing a duty for the sake of appearances, Zen knelt down and squeezed himself into a narrow crevice underneath a tilting boulder. As soon as Spadola reached the end of the gully, he would become aware that Zen could not have climbed out and must therefore be hiding nearby. He would flush him out almost at once. This time it really was the end. There was nothing to do but wait. He lay absolutely still, as though part of the rock was pressing in on him.

'Well, fuck me!'

Zen felt so lonely and scared that the words, the first he had heard since leaving the village, brought tears to his eyes. He was suddenly desperate to live, terrified of death, of extinction, of the unknown. How precious were the most banal moments of everyday life, precisely because they were banal!

A might roar scoured the enclosed confines of the gully. As the shot echoed away, Spadola's peals of manic laughter could be heard.

'Come on out, Zen! The game's over. Time to pay up.'

The voice was close by, although Zen couid see nothing but a jumble of rocks.

'Are you going to come out and die like a man, or do you want to play hide-and-seek? It's up to you, but if you piss me about I might just decide to kill you a little more slowly. Maybe a little shot in the balls, for openers. I'm not a vindictive man, but there are limits to my patience.'

Like rats leaving a doomed ship, all Zen's faculties seemed to have fled the body wedged in its rocky tomb.

He was incapable ot movement, speech or thought, already as good as dead.

Spadola laughed.

'Ah, so there you are! Decided to spare me the trouble, have you? Very wise.'

Zen still couldn't see Spadola, but somehow he had been spotted. The anomaly didn't bother him. It seemed perfectly consistent with everything else that had happened. Footsteps approached. Zen tried to think of something significant in his last moments, and failed.

Something stirred the air close to his face. Less than a metre away, close enough to touch, a boot hit the ground and a trousered leg swished past.

'There's no point in trying to hide,' Spadola shouted, his voice echoing slightly. 'I can still see you. Let's just get it over with, shall we? It's been fun, but…'

There was a loud gunshot, followed by a scream of rage and fury. Then two more shots rang out simultan- eously, one deafeningly close to Zen, the other a repetition of the first. Pellets bounced and rattled against the rocks, ricocheting like hailstones.

It seemed impossible that the silence could ever recover from such a savage violation, but before long the echoes died away as though nothing had happened. Zen had no idea what had happened, so he waited a long time, sampling the silence, before emerging from his hiding-place.

He found Spadola almost immediately, his body fiung backwards across the rocks, a limp, discarded carapace.