The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

When she stood up, Sandrine glanced at what she had only briefly and partially perceived as a hint of motion at the top of the room, where for the first time she took in a dun-colored curtain hung two or three feet before the end of the oval. What looked to be a brown or suntanned foot, smaller than a normal adult’s and perhaps a bit grubby, was just now vanishing behind the curtain. Before Sandrine had deciphered what she thought she had seen, it was gone.

“Just see a rat?” asked Ballard.

Without intending to assent, Sandrine nodded.

“One was out on deck this morning. Disappeared as soon as I spotted it. Don’t worry about it, though. The crew, whoever they are, will get rid of them. At the start of the cruise, I think there are always a few rats around. By the time we really get in gear, they’re gone.”

“Good,” she said, wondering: If the waiters are these really, really short Indian guys, would they hate us enough to make us eat rats?

She followed him through the door between the two portholes into pitiless sunlight and crushing heat made even less comfortable by the dense, invasive humidity. The invisible water saturating the air pressed against her face like a steaming washcloth, and moisture instantly coated her entire body. Leaning against the rail, Ballard looked cool and completely at ease.

“I forgot we had air conditioning,” she said.

“We don’t. Vents move the air around somehow. Works like magic, even when there’s no breeze at all. Come over here.”

She joined him at the rail. Fifty yards away, what might have been human faces peered at them through a dense screen of jungle — weeds with thick, vegetal leaves of a green so dark it was nearly black. The half-seen faces resembled masks, empty of feeling.

“Remember saying something about being happy to bathe in the Amazon? About washing your clothes in the river?”

She nodded.

“You never want to go into this river. You don’t even want to stick the tip of your finger in that water. Watch what happens, now. Our native friends came out to see this, you should, too.”

“The Indians knew you were going to put on this demonstration? How could they?”

“Don’t ask me, ask them. I don’t know how they do it.”

Ballard leaned over the railing and used his knife to scrape the few things on the plate into the river. Even before the little knuckles of meat and gristle, the shreds of vegetables, and liquid strings of gravy landed in the water, a six-inch circle of turbulence boiled up on the slow-moving surface. When the bits of food hit the water, the boiling circle widened out into a three-foot, thrashing chaos of violent little fish tails and violent little green shiny fish backs with violent tiny green fins, all in furious motion. The fury lasted about thirty seconds, then disappeared back under the river’s sluggish brown face.

“Like Christmas dinner with my husband’s family,” Sandrine said.

“When we were talking about throwing Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit into the river to see what would happen—”

“The fish ate the books?”

“They’ll eat anything that isn’t metal.”

“So our little friends don’t go swimming all that often, do they?”

“They never learn how. Swimming is death, it’s for people like us. Let’s go back in, okay?”

She whirled around and struck his chest, hard, with a pointed fist. “I want to go back to the room with the table in it. Our table. And this time, you can get as hard as you like.”

“Don’t I always?” he asked.

“Oh,” Sandrine said, “I like that ‘always.’”

“And yet, it’s always different.”

“I bet I’m always different,” said Sandrine. “You, you’d stay pretty much the same.”

“I’m not as boring as all that, you know, ” Ballard said, and went on, over the course of the long afternoon and sultry evening, to prove it.

After breakfast the next morning, Sandrine, hissing with pain, her skin clouded with bruises, turned on him with such fury that he gasped in joy and anticipation.

1976

End of November, hot sticky muggy, a vegetal stink in the air. Motionless tribesmen four feet tall stared out from the overgrown bank over twenty yards of torpid river. They held, seemed to hold, bows without arrows, though the details swam backward into the layers of folded green.

“Look at those little savages,” said Sandrine Loy, nineteen years old and already contemplating marriage to handsome, absurdly wealthy Antonio Barban, who had proposed to her after a chaotic Christmas dinner at his family’s vulgar pile in Greenwich, Connecticut. That she knew marriage to Antonio would prove to be an error of sublime proportions gave the idea most of its appeal. “We’re putting on a traveling circus for their benefit. Doesn’t that sort of make you detest them?”