James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

The big toe was missing from his left leg. It was replaced by emptiness, and a rough wound with a bone peeking through. All the other toes were still there. Delicate, curling shapes, like a cluster of stunted mushrooms.

‘Why?’ Petri whispered.

The question sounded lonely and hollow in the cave’s echoless space. Petri started to giggle, and his vision filled with tears.

‘Why the big toe?’ he asked the empty cave.

Petri realized that he was being stared at. The motion had been at the edge of his peripheral vision, but his mind was numb and slow to connect the dots.

The light of the screen went out just as he saw the silver dots of eyes at the end of the narrow passage. Petri dragged himself backwards and switched on the screen again.

The light did not reach far enough, but against the darkness he could discern faces as gray shapes around glowing pairs of eyes. Petri held his breath and listened. Scraping sounds, at the edge of his hearing. Like tired old men trying to saw timber at the same time. Ears that had grown up in the noise of traffic could just barely hear it. The sound was accompanied with lazy smacking sounds and frail sighs of pleasure.

They did not ask for much. They lived on handouts.

Something reached towards him from the darkness. A thin arm. Blue veins. One pair of eyes stooped closer. Petri leaned back but stayed where he was. For a fleeting moment, he saw a pale, hairless crown of a head. Shining eyes below it. Bloodstained fingers.

The arm jerked and something fell in front of Petri. Light, tingling sounds against the stone.

Petri lowered the cellphone light.

Two pieces of bone.

His big toe. Petri recognized it right away, even though the skin was gone. The pieces of bone were damp and shiny, maybe with spit. A few stains left by bloody fingers.

The eyes retreated back into the darkness. Why? Petri would have liked to ask. What was this grotesque trade all about? He had the right to know, but the sea of silver dots was like the starry sky. No use in asking. Maybe they were dead already.

Petri bowed forward and reached to take the pieces of bone with his left hand, even though pain was trying to tell him not to use that arm. He squeezed them in his fist. The lazy movement of his fingers made pain radiate all across his body.

The faces stayed still.

‘Darling . . .’

A weak voice. A woman’s voice. Petri stared at the pairs of eyes and tried to illuminate them better.

‘You can talk?’ he asked numbly.

The shape of a smaller face stood out amongst the figures, circled with black hair, without glowing eyes. Petri remembered Nina. How could he have forgotten the young, beautiful Nina?

‘Are you okay?’ Petri asked.

A long silence. Grunting breaths, smacking sounds. And then, one word:

‘Go.’

Judging from her voice, Nina was very, very cold.

‘No,’ Petri said. ‘You’re coming with me.’

The hand that held the cellphone was shaking. The restless light made it hard to focus.

‘I can’t.’

‘I got out, too,’ Petri said. ‘They let me go . . . pushed me out, I wouldn’t have made it—’

‘You’re too old,’ Nina interrupted him.

Petri tried to understand why his age suddenly mattered, in the middle of all this. Nina had never brought it up. Twenty-­eight years and three months. A blink of an eye.

‘Too old. They don’t want you. Maybe they respect you. Alex told me before . . .’

‘Alex is there?’ Petri asked.

‘Kind of.’

‘I want to speak with him.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Totally sure.’

He could hear Nina’s teeth chattering through the creatures’ smacking noises and dragging breaths. The girl had to be in shock. Petri thought about her naked, freezing body. About how Nina’s skin touched the skin of the creatures with glowing eyes. The thought enraged him.

Petri found a loose rock on the ground. He squeezed it inside his fist and started to crawl towards the hole, cursing and yelling.

‘Don’t.’

Petri stopped. The creatures had gone quiet. Not a sound. Only the chattering of Nina’s teeth.

‘You didn’t see what they did,’ Nina whispered.

She sounded like she wanted to cry but was too tired to do it. Nina, who had never sacrificed anything.

Petri’s rage dulled as fast as it had awoken. Fear returned. It brought back the pain and exhaustion, the desire to breathe outside air. Petri lowered the hand that was holding the rock.

‘I’ll go back to the village and get some help,’ he said.

‘You do that.’

Nina sounded sleepy.

‘We will come and get you really soon.’

‘Good.’

‘Don’t let them take you anywhere.’

‘I won’t.’

Petri forced himself to stand up and started to collect some clothes. There was no time to be picky. He found his own pants, but the shirt was Nina’s. It was too small and too tight around his injured shoulder, but it would have to do. The silver dots followed his every move when he put the pieces of bone into his trouser pocket.

‘We will see each other soon,’ Petri said, even though they both knew that this was the end.

Here’s where it finally happened. In a nameless cave, deep underground, near the border between France and Spain.

Petri walked back along the same route they had followed, lighting the way with a cellphone. The stone scratched at his old, stretchy skin, tore wounds in the soles of his feet, which had been covered by shoes for too long.

When he came to the hole that led to the surface, he looked up, breathed in the biting night air and felt alive for the first time in decades. Petri looked for protrusions in the wall that he could grab and use as footholds, started to climb towards freedom. It was a difficult task, maybe impossible. A dislocated shoulder, one of his supporting toes gone.

A lucky, wounded cockroach attempting to climb out of a glass bottle.

After falling for a third time, Petri lay on his back on the stony ground and panted. He cried a little and wondered if there was anything worth all this effort outside the cave. A sleeping village, disbelieving police officers who would never find Nina. The calls of unfamiliar animals, the meaning of which he did not understand. The blinking eyes of long-­dead stars and a wind that blew around the shreds of torn birthday cards.

On an impulse, he took the two pieces of bone from his pocket. Twirled them around with his numb fingers. Put them in his mouth.

The bitterness of blood and strange saliva. He bit down with determination until something gave. Either a bone or a tooth. A musty, primal taste flooded his mouth. The taste of survival.

He forced himself on his feet and tried again.

One of South Africa’s eleven official languages, Afrikaans is a rela­tively young one, a descendant of the Dutch spoken there by colonizing settlers and not recognized as a distinct language by the South African government until 1925. There is a long tradition of horror fiction and ghost stories in Afrikaans, dating back to the éminence grise of Afrikaans letters, poet C. J. Langenhoven ( 1873-­1932 ) , who published literary ghost stories, the best of which were collected in a 2015 volume in Afrikaans but await an English translation. Contemporary Afrikaans horror authors include François Bloemhof and Jaco Jacobs, both primarily writers for young readers, but whose horror stories for adults appeared in the 2016 anthology Skadu­stemme [Shadow Voices] , where they were featured along with our next story, Martin Steyn’s ‘Kira’. Though predominantly an author of crime novels, one of which, Dark Traces , has appeared in English, Steyn grew up reading Stephen King and occasionally publishes a tale in the genres of horror or the supernatural, like this one, in which a man returns to his childhood home, where he experiences an otherworldly encounter.