Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

The subordinate disappeared up the metal steps. Marco followed, then paused at the top, a dark figure silhouetted by the sun. He gazed at his prisoners in the bowels of the boat and his prisoners all stared up, at this last square of hope, this glimpse of tropic sky.

‘Your friends,’ Marco said, abruptly, taking some objects from a sack. He threw two footballs into the metal cell, which bounced along the steel floor. Then he slammed the trapdoor shut.

With the only opening to the outside world quite sealed, it was profoundly dark in the stinking, broiling metal chamber. Yet there was just enough sunlight, lancing through small rusty holes in the metal roof, to make out that the footballs were not balls at all, but two human heads: the captain of the MV Myona, and the other deckhand.

Jose wailed like a child and then made a retching sound. Adam stared, riveted and appalled, at the heads. They were lying sideways and staring wet-eyed at each other, like lovers talking on a shared pillow. The expressions on the heads were incomprehensible, terror and serenity. A tiny dewdrop of blood fell from the dead captain’s hair on to the metal floor.

‘We are finished.’ Boris’s voice was quavering. ‘They are going to kill us all, but they will torture us first. The Zetas’ cruelty is famous. ’

‘We know.’ Adam said, flatly. ‘We fucking know.’ He yanked at the handcuffs looping him to the metal pipes. This was beyond useless. Yet he tried uselessly, for ten minutes, twenty, tugging at the cuffs until his wrists were scraped and raw and bloody.

Jess spoke, for the first time. ‘We could bargain with them.’

Nina replied, fierce in the shadows. ‘With what? We have nothing. Fuck all of them anyway. Let them kill us — even if we had something to give they would still kill us.’

Boris’s once-macho voice was reduced to a low whimper. ‘This is quite right, whatever we do, whatever we say, they will kill us — but first they will try and get any information: they will torture us.’

A shock of light silenced his lamenting.

The trapdoor had been opened. Marco came down the stairs, followed by two of his lieutenants. He reached the bottom of the ladder and surveyed them. Contemptuously.

‘There is no ulluchu here. We came here a week ago. We asked all the tribes, we tried it. We have been following you. We spoke to the shaman in Belen. Boris Valentine is celebrated in Iquitos.’

His voice was surprisingly neutral. He spoke exceedingly good English: he was evidently very educated. This man could have been a rising young major in the Mexican army, Adam thought. But the Zetas paid so much more.

Marco paced across the rusty metal floor, kicking a severed head out of the way as if he was practising football. Then he knelt by Nina. Adam strained in his shackles to see what was happening, there, at the other side of the chamber, in the shadows.

‘What do you know, Nina? Your father’s notebooks end at Iquitos. What did your father know? Where did he go after this? We think he went into the Andes. The mountains. Where the ulluchu grows better?’

She said nothing. Marco’s sigh was ominous and heavy. He leaned closer, and Adam was reminded of Ritter, trying to kiss her, or lick her: like a predatory rapist.

‘I could hit you, Miss McLintock. I could electrocute you, or cut you up. Maybe I could cut off one of your fingers. Or your lips. I could cut your lips off. Tell me.’

Nina said nothing.

He stood, with a slight jerkiness in his movements. The ulluchu maybe? Then he signalled to one of his men, who was carrying a plastic box, a kind of Tupperware container, quite ludicrously domestic.

Inside the translucent box were small creatures moving in dirty water: the wriggling shadows were visible through the plastic, they looked like long, dark tadpoles.

Boris, lying next to Adam, was already writhing and whimpering. What did he know?

The whimpering was evidently a mistake. Marco swivelled, alerted by the noise. He scrutinized the fat man in the bright Hawaiian shirt and khaki trousers. The little fishes wriggled in the box in the dark chamber light.

‘And you are Boris Valentine. Famous scientist. So you know what these are, don’t you?’ A slight, unpitying smile. ‘For the benefit of your friends, who probably do not know, I will explain.’

Marco took the box and put it on the floor. He opened the lid. The little fishes jiggled, as if enlivened, exposed to the beam of sunlight from the open trapdoor.

Marco was putting on a very thick rubber glove. ‘These fish are candiru. The toothpick fish. Or, more often, the vampire fish. Of the family Trichomycteridae. A type of parasitic freshwater catfish. Unique to Amazonia.’

He flexed his fingers in the glove. ‘The vampire fish was once thought to be the matter of legend. Or, at least, their less pleasant habits were considered much exaggerated. But then the first case of true human parasitism was scientifically recorded. In 1997.’

He dipped a finger in the box, stirring the silty water. All the little black fish wriggled and jiggled, excitedly.

‘The candiru has a voracious appetite for blood. Given the chance it will eagerly parasitize fish and mammals, including humans. Some believe they are attracted by the smell of urine. They commonly enter the human system through the penis, anus or vagina. Once there, they lodge themselves in the urinary tract, or maybe the fallopian tubes or ovaries. Or the seminal vesicles? Is that the English word? Yes. Vesicles. And the ureter.’

Boris was backing away, kicking at the metal floor in his urge to retreat from the shallow box of dancing vampire fish. Marco’s smile was brief. He reached in and picked out a fish with his gloved hand.

‘Once it is safely within the human body, the fish grows, gorging itself on human blood and flesh. They can easily triple in size. Quadruple even. They eat away at your flesh from the inside. Their vicious spikes prevent them being removed without lethal damage to internal organs, once they are in they are in. The pain as they eat their way through the sexual organs and lower intestines is said to be indescribable. For a man, the only possible way they can be removed is by complete emasculation. That is to say, by cutting off the penis and testicles. Even then the possibility of death from blood loss, trauma and sepsis is extremely high. But first the little fish has to enter the body.’

He held the wriggling black fish in his palm and moved closer to Boris.

‘Tell me what you know.’

Boris was wetting himself. Adam could see the stain on his khaki trousers. He sympathized fiercely. And he turned away. Helpless.

Boris yelped, ‘He went to the mountains! He went to the Andes! The Andes!’

Marco tutted. ‘Where in the Andes?’

‘Huancabamba. He want to a place, near Huancabamba! It’s true. I saw the receipts.’

Marco shook his head. ‘Huancabamba? Why there? And where exactly?’

‘A mountain, uh ah uh ah — a village called Toloriu.’

Marco shook his head, and dropped the little fish in the box. Then he pulled a knife from his pocket and quickly and brutally slashed open Boris’s khaki trousers, exposing the professor’s chubby white thigh. Then he diligently made a short but deep cut in Boris’s skin.

Boris yelped like a dog being whipped.

With his gloved hand, Marco dipped once more in the box and retrieved one of the fishes. It wriggled in his palm. Then he carefully tipped the little fish towards the bleeding red gash in Boris’s pale thigh. Adam stared, even though he didn’t want to stare. The vampire fish in Marco’s palm seemed to lift its tiny head, sniffing the blood. Then it slid gratefully into the open wound. Repulsively, quite repulsively, Adam could see the fish under the skin, intent and wriggling inside the flesh. Then it burrowed deeper and was gone.