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

‘Bizarre! Bizarre!’ I said to myself. I stumbled out of the courtyard. I was sober enough for anything, except driving a car. I went to a main street to hail a taxi. And if Leuk Dawour had disguised himself as a cab driver? I had all the anxiety in the world, but I didn’t have a choice. Everything came out all right, fortunately. Nonetheless, I was sure that the rab of Dakar wasn’t going to let me go so easily. I felt his gaze at my back. He was following me . . .

Bakary was sleeping. I undressed and lay down beside him. I had never squeezed him so tight in my arms as on that night. He had woken up several times to ask if I was all right. I responded, ‘Yes.’ I didn’t want to tell him . . . Anyway, he would have told me that I had hallucinated. For some time, he hadn’t stopped telling me I smoked too many joints and drank too much . . . Ah! I was ‘in a state’ (pregnant), as they say here. Two months pregnant.

When I woke up the next day, Bakary wasn’t beside me. He had left word on the table to say that he was going to visit his family in Mbour and would probably return late that night. I had known about this trip for a long time. But what he really wanted to say in the message was in the final words: ‘Have a good day. A big hug from me. I love you.’

I took the bus to see the ‘premises’ again. The workers hadn’t yet arrived. They didn’t have set hours. They began when they wanted, which is to say late. I made a tour of the house. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Everything was in order. Even the ladder was in its place. I saw my nearly empty bottle and my stubs stuck in the sand. I took my car and returned home, totally confused.

I didn’t feel well. I was nauseous and had terrible stomach pains and discharges. My fetus wound up in the toilet. It was clearly a blow from Leuk Dawour. How was I going to tell Bakary? Oh what a day!

I felt so bad that I had to disconnect my telephone and go to bed very early, after having chugged a bottle of whisky and lit several joints. I needed a pick-­me-­up.

The terrifying image of the one-­legged horse haunted me. I was tormented by the rab of Dakar. Why had he left me alive? When was he going to show up again? To reassure myself, I had gotten into bed with a little pistol under my pillow. It was a Raven 25 semi-­automatic that my father, worried about my safety, had given me. I slept, my finger on the trigger. Let’s just say I dozed off . . .

I couldn’t tell you what time it was. All I remember is that at a given moment I felt Leuk Dawour’s gaze upon me. He pushed his muzzle towards my face. Smoke came from his nostrils. But before he could touch me, I had fired. He collapsed at the foot of the bed, giving an inhuman cry. Blood flowed onto the floor as a cigarette burned my sheets. I had just eliminated the rab of Dakar . . .

Since that night, I haven’t stopped repeating to the psychiatrist, every time I’m sitting across from him, looking him straight in the eyes: ‘Yes, I killed Leuk Dawour Mbaye, but it was in self defense.’

Translated from the French by James D. Jenkins

Unlike its Scandinavian neighbors Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and even to a small extent Iceland, Norway apparently has no contemporary horror scene to speak of, seemingly eschewing the supernatural in favor of crime novels by writers like Jo Nesbø and Karin Fossum. But excellent horror stories and supernatural tales do exist in Norwegian literature – if you’re willing to dig a little bit to find them. As discussed in the foreword, the Norwegian thriller writer André Bjerke ( who dabbled a little in the supernatural himself, as in his novel De dødes tjern [The Lake of the Dead] , which reads like a Norwegian episode of Scooby-­Doo) unearthed nearly two dozen rare Norwegian ghost and horror stories from the 19th and 20th centuries. In our opinion, the best of them was the following tale by Frithjof Spalder ( b. 1933 ) , originally published in 1971 in the collection Jernjomfruen [The Iron Maiden] , named after the medieval torture device. Though Spalder’s tales were received with appreciation by connoisseurs of the genre, they seem not to have found a wide public, perhaps because they were so different from anything else being published in Norwegian literature at the time. ‘The White Cormorant’ is an elegant, perfectly constructed little tale that we’re delighted to present to a wider audience of readers.

It was evening by the time I came out of the tavern and went down the dusty road that led to the harbor where our boats were. It was almost dark, and it had started to drizzle. I could smell the wet dust from the road filling the air. I began to walk slowly downhill, a little tipsy from the beer I had drunk. Fortunately I had brought my jacket with me, and I put it on and turned the collar up to my ears. It was not particularly cold, but it is nice to walk with your collar like that, especially if it is a good collar, like this one, and if you have something to think about. And I had something to think about.

Our village, Ballyheigue, is small and lies on the west coast of Ireland, nestled in a narrow bay. It consists of twelve or thirteen small cottages and a tavern, a road that goes inwards toward the countryside, and one that leads down to the harbor. There is nothing else. Almost all of us make our living from the sea.

A couple miles further south lies the great cliff named Sybil Point. It is a high, steep cliff of weathered black granite that lies like a clenched fist out in the sea, connected to the mainland by a low, narrow ridge where some scraggly grass and windblown bushes grow, like a hairy wrist.

Sybil Point.

I remember well that one of the old, bearded chaps at the tavern, after having gotten good and drunk on the strong beer, had coughed and said anyone who sailed round the cliff must be either one hell of a sailor or else downright mad, and the others had nodded, mumbling. He had grabbed my scarf with large, clenched fists and pressed my face down to his own so that I could smell the beery stench from his sagging mouth and see how blurry his watery blue eyes were.

‘Listen here, my boy,’ he had said in a drunkard’s voice. ‘I’ll tell you something. There isn’t a single man here who manages to travel past Sybil Point unless he’s one hell of a sailor – or downright mad!’

He looked at me for a long time after saying this, long enough for me to feel uncomfortable. The others remained quiet. He swayed before me and stared as though he expected a challenge on the spot. I kept completely silent and merely looked intently into his darkening eyes. Then he released his grip, which by the way was solid enough, and turned away with a contemptuous sound.

It was that contemptuous sound I thought of as I walked, kicking at the stones on the way to the harbor. Well, all right. He had been drunk. What are a drunkard’s words? Lies or truth? Maybe the only truth. I stood on the wet planks of the pier and looked out over the forest of masts that tilted and pitched up and down before me in the weak swells. It had grown dark, mostly because of the woolly gray clouds that hung over the sea to the west and which now silently sent their fine drizzle down over the harbor. Out at the jetty where the lighthouse was, I could see a strip of lighter cloudcover. It was possible there would be fine weather tomorrow. And if it was fine weather . . .

Why not?

I was young and strong and full of daring. Why shouldn’t it go well for me? Who was to say that I wouldn’t manage it? Now I suddenly saw a challenge in it, that challenge I had hesitated to answer up at the tavern. This was the only proper course. A quiet, deliberate decision, taken alone, without provocation. Decisions made under pressure are almost always worthless.