The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Chico Kidd Mark of the Beast

Blood in the night.

In the warm moist darkness, the town was a cacophony of smells — vivid, exciting, thrilling, delicious. Each one told a story, each held a promise. Hunger writhed in his belly, but the odoriferous stew was so seductive that he could almost ignore the gnawing compulsion, almost push it to one side in order to explore the exhilarating possibilities opening up to him in every direction. Secrets. Secrets.

He sniffed the air with delight, drinking in the rich brew, and let his scent-sense wander over the profusion of smells, much as a shopper might scan the goods on view in a bazaar. Here a pi-dog bitch in heat had urinated, and she would already be mated; there an ailing beggar had lain for a while, and he would die soon of his sickness.

Yet in the end hunger became the imperative, and he filtered out, not without a little regret, the odours that did not promise food and focused on one particular, juicy, blood-rich odour. It led him along a maze of streets and finally down an alleyway that, to human eyes, would have been impenetrably dark. But to him, to whom scent both marked his way and told him the history of every place he passed, it was as bright as a gaslit street. To a man’s nose, too, it would have smelled foul, at least to one that was unused to its stink.

Human debris lived in this place along with the rats and other scavengers — families crowded in makeshift shacks of cardboard and corrugated iron, picking over the rubbish of those just a little more fortunate. Here lived beggars, cripples, lepers, the weak and the poverty-stricken: here were rich pickings for a creature hungry for an easy meal.

Small children were the easiest to take, and, he had found, the sweetest meat, especially the little males, whose mothers pampered them as best they could despite poverty: their flesh soft and buttery, their bones crunchy and filled with the most delicious fatty marrow. He salivated at the thought, if he could be said strictly to have thoughts. They were more like olfactory pictures, impressions, memories.

Now that one particular scent was very strong, so tempting, so mouth-watering. Licking his lips, he peered carefully round the corner, yellow eyes glinting, and sensed the prey, a sleeping toddler of no more than two years. It slumbered just a few feet away, just on the other side of a makeshift wall of splintered plywood, and he padded up to this barrier that was no barrier and nosed under it. Inside, a little fire of dried cow-dung sent up a pungent smoke that almost made him sneeze, and something cooked on it in a rusty iron pot — it was an unappetizing concoction of rice, he registered, thinly flavoured with a chicken bone. His meal, that slept plumply just by the fire, was far more appetizing, with plenty of meat on its bones.

As if sensing danger, the child opened its eyes. But it was too late to cry out.

The shipping agent was a diminutive babu with slicked-down hair and an oleaginous manner. He spoke rather rancid Portuguese and insisted on calling Luis Da Silvachefe. After an hour in his office, the captain felt as if he had been deep-fried.

It was also damnably hot and humid. The stickiness of the atmosphere was not at all alleviated by a sail-like fan that a boy in the corner was desultorily operating with a string tied to his toe. It barely stirred the air, except perhaps for a foot or so in front of it.

His shirt was wringing wet as if he had been swimming in the ocean — admittedly a rather unlikely occurrence, since the water around the port differed from an open sewer in name only: at low tide, the harbour smelled like a midden. But even that was a minor discomfort compared with wearing an eye-patch in this hellish climate.

Captain Da Silva lit what was probably his sixth cheroot — after that many, his mouth felt like old carpets — and regarded the other man with irritation. He was almost at the end of his patience, and badly in need of a drink. The agent, whose name was Gomes, had offered him tea. The captain was of the opinion that only the English could possibly enjoy tea, despite the fact that it had come to them via Portugal in the first place, but he thought he would probably have melted away into a little puddle on the floor without it and had accepted a cup of the sweet, revolting stuff.

But whether under the jurisdiction of the Portuguese or the English, as he knew from experience, the subcontinent moved at its own pace. You just had to let events roll along. Until in the end they would gather so much momentum they were in danger of becoming a juggernaut. The trick was to catch them just before they reached that stage — to catch the tide, as it were, at precisely the right time. Which was easy enough to do with a ship, but damnably difficult when it was a tide in the affairs of men.

Outside, palm leaves rattled with a noise like rain. Beneath them, a pair of crows were brawling raucously. Da Silva eyed them sourly through the open window, thinking, come to the tropics and you expect exotic birds, jewel colours, sweet trilling songs. And what do you get? Crows.

Money changed hands and the next level of wheels was lubricated. That done, the agent leaned back and smiled, displaying an alarming set of false teeth that appeared to have been rifled from a corpse, and saying with patent insincerity, ‘We are being sorry for all the delays,’ in a way that made Da Silva want to hit him. ‘It is the fault of the damn superstitious peasants in this town,’ he explained.

At the word superstitious the captain became attentive, although he made no outward show of the fact. ‘Indeed?’ he said in a disinterested tone, blowing smoke in Gomes’s direction.

‘Oh yes,’ replied the agent, leaning over the desk to impart information and treating Da Silva to a gust of truly horrific breath, perhaps in retaliation. ‘All bloody ignorant peasants. They are saying there is a wolf stealing children from their homes, you know? As if damn wolf would come into the town! And not normal wolf, oh no, that is not good enough, they must have it that it is some kind of supernatural. Well, chefe, what do you expect, they are all low-caste heathens and untouchables, not even Christians like you and me.’

A number of comments rushed through Da Silva’s mind at that remark. But all he did was shrug his shoulders. ‘And this affects our business how?’ he asked, fighting the urge to stick a finger under his eyepatch and somehow dispose of the sweat accumulating there.

‘Oh, you are knowing what the people are like here, chefe, no?’ said the agent, apparently unaware of any irony. ‘Too damn ignorant to know any better. Werewolves and nagas and ghosts, pah,’ he added — thus neatly encompassing East and West in one contemptuous phrase — and appeared to be preparing to spit until he caught sight of Da Silva’s expression and thought better of it, turning the aborted expectoration into a cough.

Da Silva, who had no objection at all to spitting as an expression of contempt, wondered with some amusement what Gomes would say if the agent knew that he saw ghosts all the time. Including the faint shade of a long-forgotten bureaucrat — who had presumably, therefore, died in harness — in this very office. Not only that, but the captain had encountered far more dangerous creatures. More dangerous than wolves in many ways.

It was curious, though, the way the subject had come up. Or maybe not so curious. I ought to be getting used to it by now, he thought resignedly, feeling a little like spitting himself. You’d think I was some kind of lodestone. So wouldn’t thatjust be a surprise if it does turn out to be a werewolf or something of the sort, just waiting for Da Silva to put into port.

Gomes, unaware of the captain’s thoughts, prattled on. ‘But I have good news! I can do you a favour! I am hearing of a sailor who is looking for a ship, a man with the mate’s chitty, right here in town.’

Da Silva grunted non-committally. Though he had not met Gomes before, he recognized the type. There were Gomeses in every port in every country in the world, and somehow they made the wheels of commerce go round and kept him in business. But, like all the others, this man was more likely to tailor his reportage to what a listener wanted to hear rather than anything that resembled the truth. Probably some decrepit old pirate who spends his days so drunk on palm whisky he can’t find his arse without a map, he thought. ‘Really.’

‘Oh, yes, chefe,’ the other said unctuously. ‘An American man,’ as if this negated anything the captain had been thinking. ‘I shall be arranging a meeting, yes?’

It couldn’t do any harm to meet the man, Da Silva said to himself with a sigh, on the off chance that Gomes was actually correct. ‘Yes, go ahead, Senhor Gomes,’ he said.

Which was why Captain Da Silva was currently awaiting the arrival of one Edward Harris, lately of Boston, Massachusetts, while sweating and soundly cursing each and every equatorial land for its vile climate. Formality be damned, he had decided, and had shed his coat. Now he was mopping moisture from the humid zone under his eyepatch in a vain attempt to make wearing the thing more comfortable. You could probably grow mushrooms under there, he thought irritably.

However the captain was not thinking about the imminent Harris but was contemplating the ghosts that mingled with the breathing crowds at the quayside under the sullen monsoon sky. They were of little help, but that was no more than he expected. The damned things were only shades, after all, memories of the people they had been, haunting the place where they had died. Very few of them seemed to retain any kind of awareness for very long, yet today they seemed — restive, somehow. Disturbed. Sometimes he thought they were able to communicate with each other in a kind of dim, distant way, and now it was almost as if they were all infected with nervousness, odd though that sounded. What would make a ghost nervous?

He knew a way to ask, but that involved summoning a real spirit, something he was reluctant to do. Even now he found the thought of necromancy repellent, and always would. It was a kind of slavery, and that purely disgusted him. Having been, for many years, as good as owned himself, he was reluctant to force another soul to his own will. Even if the body it had once inhabited was no longer living.

The char-wallah who had supplied Gomes with tea, and whom he had collared on leaving the agent’s office, had not only confirmed the man’s story but had added a considerable amount of grisly detail of his own, presumably in the interests of artistic verisimilitude, in exchange for appropriate remuneration — not to mention offering to bring the hysterical mother of the latest victim for a small additional sum. Da Silva had turned this last down.

I can’t just let it rest, he thought. Damn it. And was wondering what to do about it when the man he was waiting for arrived.

Harris was unmistakable, especially in a crowd whose main racial mix, ghostly and living alike, consisted of Indian and Portuguese in various combinations. He was nearly six feet tall, heavily built, and as red-haired as Judas Iscariot.

The captain hastily replaced his eyepatch. Informality was one thing, but he knew the scar that ran from eyebrow to cheekbone was not a sight to let loose on anyone at a first encounter. On the quayside, Harris caught his gaze and gave an odd little wave, one that might one day grow up to be a salute.

‘Captain Da Silva?’ he called.

‘Senhor Harris, I presume?’

‘That’s me, skipper. Permission to come aboard?’

‘Come along, Senhor Harris.’

Twenty minutes later, the Isabella had a new third mate, and Da Silva was silently apologizing to the absent Gomes: Harris seemed both sober and competent. Which probably meant there was something wrong with him. But for the time being the captain was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, being a firm believer in letting people have enough rope to hang themselves rather than trying to do it for them.

This captain seems like a regular sort, even if he does look like a pirate with that black eyepatch. I guess he’s been at sea since Pontius was a pilot, but I’d bet fifty dollars that he’s never come across a sailor with my particular problem before. I’ve gotten used enough to signing on for one trip and being given my papers when we tie up at the other end that it don’t bother me no more, but I don’t reckon I’ll ever get used to the change that comes over me every full moon, and neither will any skipper. Still, after kicking my heels in this godforsaken hole all this time I reckon I would have shipped out with the Flying Dutchman if he’d happened to put into port.

I recall feeling pretty goddam down, watching the Nimrod shrink into the distance. It wasn’t so much being without a berth again, like I said, I’m used to that — it was where I was stuck ashore. Places like these, they ain’t healthy. If the malaria don’t get you the yellow fever will, and if the typhoid don’t, the dysentery will, what ignorant fellows call the dire rear. Though I can’t say I’m prone to catching regular human-type diseases any more it don’t mean I couldn’t go down with distemper or rabies, and I wasn’t fixing to put it to the test.

Last month I’d gotten away with it by locking my door — my granma could have picked the lock but I pushed the bed against it — and tethering myself to the bedframe with my collar and chain. It’s what I aim to do every month, but on a ship there ain’t no privacy. I tell my messmates I’m going down sick, but when they see what sort of sick they can’t wait to leave me be. Since this thing happened to me, Mrs Harris’s little boy’s been worse than a pariah, but working the sea’s all I know how to do.

Da Silva shook hands with Harris. The American’s hand was the size of a bear’s paw but his grip was merely firm, not bone-crushing. With hands that big, he had no need to prove anything. The captain lit a cheroot and offered one to Harris, who refused politely.

‘You needn’t be in any hurry to quit your lodgings, if you don’t want to,’ Da Silva said. ‘We’re mired down in seventeen levels of bureaucracy, as usual. If it weren’t for that we could be out of here tomorrow. Oh, and the fact that there seems to be a werewolf on the loose.’

Watching Harris closely for any reaction, but not really expecting one, he was surprised to see the American’s eyes widen for a bare instant. Now I wonder what that was about? he thought curiously, drawing in smoke.

‘Werewolf, huh?’ drawled the mate. ‘How do they work that one out?’ And he took a cigarette out and lit it. Da Silva smiled faintly, being quite used to reading body language. He raised an eyebrow.

‘The Indian penchant for melodrama, perhaps,’ he suggested, somewhat disingenuously, and shrugged his shoulders.

Harris looked doubtful. ‘They must have a reason, don’t you think, skipper?’

‘Justification, then,’ said the captain, feeling the scar on his cheekbone absently. It still felt strange, a strip of smooth slippery skin. ‘So they wouldn’t have to admit that they weren’t watching a child, they say the wolf that took it had supernatural powers.’

‘A wolf in the town, though?’ Harris said, unconsciously echoing Gomes, and turned away, ostensibly eyeing the crowd at the waterfront.

‘Whatever it is,’ said Da Silva, ‘it’s a convenient excuse for more delays. Anyway, Senhor Harris, I’ll send word when I need you.’

‘Right, skipper,’ said the Isabella’s newest crew-member, and took his leave.

The man was shocked when he heard about the werewolf, Da Silva thought. But not surprised to hear me say the word. A drop of sweat ran down his nose, and he wiped at it irritably. Damned stupid climate. The captain took off his eyepatch, his hand encountering damp hair as it cleared his head. His shirt was glued to him, and all the folds of his clothes were sodden. I wish to God I was back in Lisbon. Where it gets hot in summer, but you don’t liquefy in it. He rubbed at the patch ineffectually, grimacing.

‘Who was that?’ asked a curious voice by his elbow.

‘New third mate,’ he said, ruffling his son’s hair automatically and finding it as clammy as his own.

‘Oh mãe,’ said Zé disgustedly. ‘Someone else to boss us around.’

‘That’s what ‘prentices are for,’ Da Silva informed him.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Harris,’ said the captain. ‘He’s an American, so I expect you’ll be learning a few new swear words.’

Zé grinned at the prospect, and did a little dance round his father. When he had been nine years old, a sailor from Providence, Rhode Island, had taught him to say goddamn — much to Da Silva’s private amusement — and given him a silver dollar, which Zé would not be parted from. ‘When are we sailing? It’s too hot here.’

‘Too hot, too wet, too stuffy, too dirty. I don’t know, Zé. As soon as we can. As soon as all those bloody bureaucrats decide I’ve paid them enough in bribes. Heaven only knows.’ A yawn caught him by surprise. My God, I’m tired, he thought, how did that happen? He wiped his hand over his face, the sweat feeling greasy on his palm and his fingers, then dragged it through his hair, mopping his forehead with his shirtsleeve as it followed through. Zé looked at him and giggled.

‘Your hair looks like a bottle-brush,’ he said.

‘Haven’t you got any studying you should be doing?’ asked the captain, ominously, and his son took the hint and scuttled off. Da Silva watched him go, a small smile on his face. He hadn’t really wanted the boy to follow in his footsteps at all, but it had soon become obvious to both him and his wife that Zé would get himself to sea by fair means or foul. So they had concluded that the safest thing had been to take him on the Isabella where he could at least be watched some of the time. And Da Silva had to admit that he was doing well.

He lit another cheroot, put the thoughts of Emilia — whom he missed every day — that Zé had awakened firmly out of his mind, and wondered what he should do about the werewolf.

Hell and damnation, why is the skipper interested? What does he know? How can he know?

Get yourself under control, Harris. He don’t know aboutyou. There’s something else going on in this burg. Some one else, that don’t care about killing people. Well, good God Almighty, life is cheap here. Ain’t that the truth.

But that ain’t the point, is it? The point is, I can’t tie myself up no more, case someone finds me and kills me before I can do anything about it. Kills me for something I ain’t done. But Jesus, what happens then, when the beast comes to me? Can I control it?

I remember. I remember. It was the George Washington from Liverpool to Riga. Freezing Baltic waters. Rime on the sheets. Danny O ‘Leary got pneumonia and nearly died. We put into port a day before it iced over, and there we were, stuck fast till she thawed. And wolves in the streets, leaving paw prints in the snow and yellow stains of piss on the frozen buildings. Marking out their territory. Hell, folks said they was even out on the sea, running on the ice.

So what the devil was a sailor supposed to do, take up woodcarving?

It was poker was my undoing, like my Ma always said it would be. Except I don’t reckon she meant it like it happened. I didn’t go with no hookers, didn’t want to catch the pox. Didn’t go drinking, at least not too much, rots your brain. Took care of my brain and my prick but lost my goddam humanity when I stepped outside for a smoke to clear my head.

Yellow eyes in the night, hot and yellow as molten gold poured into a mould, the same deep fierce glow. Lips, black, stretching back from a mouth full of fangs. Smell of decaying blood, new blood.

And I’m dead.

Only I’m not.

Then, a month later, pain. Excruciating pain. My spine is broken, my legs and arms dislocated, even my skull feels like it’s exploding. I fall to the floor screaming. Some bones stretch, some shrink, everything re-forms. It feels like there’s hot lead running in my veins. It hurts so much I have no more breath to cry out, and it goes on and on and on and a furnace heat builds until I think I’m really on fire, with actual flames shooting from my skin. But I can’t see them burning because when I open my eyes their perception has changed, the entire concept of seeing has altered.

I don’t see with my eyes any more, but with my nose. Sight is no more than shadows. The sense of smell is totally overwhelming, the scent of blood irresistible.

I’m a wolf.

So I go hunting.

José Da Silva, known to everyone — except to his mother when he was in for a hiding — as Zé, sat in the ‘prentices’ cabin and pretended to study. But however convincing this outward appearance of diligence, he was actually rerunning the last part of his father’s conversation with Senhor Harris in his head, over and over.

The two men had been talking in English, of course, but Zé had inherited the captain’s gift for languages and already spoke it pretty well himself. Added to which an addiction to penny dreadfuls, a form of literature to which O’Rourke, the ship’s doctor, had introduced him, had made him familiar with words like werewolf.

Zé had long suspected that his father knew rather more about uncanny things than he ever let on, and this seemed to confirm it. Except that he hadn’t said it was actually a werewolf, had he? But that was uninteresting. The possibility of real werewolves was, on the other hand, decidedly intriguing, not to say exciting.

Zé chewed the end of his pencil and rubbed his left cheekbone in unconscious imitation of the captain. I could ask Vik, he thought, except that I can’t figure out how. This was a native boy a year or so older than Zé who appeared to be indigenous to the dockside, and with whom he had struck up a sort of friendship despite the lack of a common language. Vik had a smattering of Portuguese and English, and had taught Zé a few words of Hindi, but it was hardly a sufficient linguistic basis for explaining such a sophisticated concept as that of a man who turned into a wolf. The greater part of most of their conversations was conducted in sign language, with odd words thrown in here and there — usually very loudly, since Vik seemed convinced that Zé would understand him if only he shouted loudly enough.

Another drop of sweat fell on his book, and he wiped it off absently, noticing in passing that the page was quite pocked with damp patches. It had been uncomfortably hot and humid ever since they had put into port, even when the skies opened — as they did fairly often — and released a torrent of rain as solid as the sea. Zé found this quite remarkable, being used to the air feeling fresher after rain had fallen.

If it is a werewolf, he thought, I wonder if Father has silver bullets for his revolver? And that led to another idea, just as exciting: did his mother make them for him? Emilia Da Silva was a jeweller, and he had watched her casting small metal trinkets often enough; though since the captain had acquired the Isabella she also ran the business from an office in Lisbon, and that took up much of her time. Zé visualized his father stalking something in deep shadows, gun in hand, but his picture of the werewolf itself was somewhat hazier. The illustrations in O’Rourke’s books showed hairy beasts that bore very little resemblance to actual wolves — not that Zé had ever seen a real wolf, except a stuffed one once — but he wanted the werewolf to be more formidable, somehow, than those often ill-drawn pictures. To be a better adversary.

Unaware of his son’s train of thought, Da Silva headed away from the stinks of the waterfront into the only slightly different stinks of the town, making for a small grey church that sat on a bare sward that perhaps once had been green with grass, incongruous amongst tall palm trees and leathery-leaved frangipani.

The Portuguese who had colonized this shore had been as much evangelists as explorers and, like most zealots, had been enthusiastic in suppressing local religions and, often forcibly, substituting their own. That missionary zeal meant that there was no shortage of priests in the area, which should have been good news, since in most places a priest was a reliable, not to say indefatigable source of information.

Father Miguel Domingues did not look, at first sight, like the kind of ascetic who wore a hair shirt, being decidedly on the plump side. But on closer inspection, his chin and his round skull alike had both been shaved to within an inch of their life, and his lips were bracketed with deep furrows and were too thin for his full face. It gave him a forbidding air, and Da Silva’s heart sank. He looks like a damned Jesuit, he thought.

The priest arched his nostrils at Da Silva and eyed the captain haughtily, taking in eyepatch and scar and incongruously blue eye, and damp untidy hair and four o’clock beard, somehow combining an expressionless stare with the appearance of being singularly unimpressed. Da Silva returned the stare and decided the feeling was mutual, though how Domingues managed to cope with wearing full clerical fig without apparently raising a sweat was, admittedly, quite a trick.

‘What can I do for you, my son?’ he enquired, in the peculiarly gentle tone that some priests affected, and that never failed to set the captain’s teeth on edge. They probably took a special course on it at the seminary, he decided. Unctuous condescension certificate.

Da Silva had already made up his mind not to beat about the bush by skirting around the topic. He lit up a cheroot, partly because the priest looked the type to be irritated by smoke, with his flaring patrician nose — though God knew his sinuses must have had to put up with much worse things than cigars, living here — and said bluntly, ‘Have you heard about this wolf that’s supposed to be eating children?’

The priest gave him a raking stare that said plainly, What business is it of yours? but answered in an indulgent tone. ‘Of course. Tragic. But these things happen, my son. I fear that despite all our efforts, many of these poor souls remain unenlightened.’

And that makes it all right if they’re eaten, does it? Da Silva thought. He blew smoke out, and wiped sweat from his upper lip. ‘It doesn’t worry you?’

‘It saddens me deeply,’ replied the priest. ‘If those poor children had been baptized they would now be with God, however unfortunate their lives on earth.’

There’s my problem, thought the captain. I don’t believe that any more, if I ever did. Why should God be so petty as to turn them away? Aloud, he said, ‘What do you think about the rumour that it’s some kind of supernatural beast?’

At that, Father Domingues chuckled indulgently, his prejudices about seafarers obviously confirmed. ‘My son, my son,’ he said, overt condescension creeping into his voice that implied not only superstitious sailor but also, and not very far behind at that, ignorant peasant as well. ‘I do hope that we have put that sort of superstition behind us. We are, after all, living in the twentieth century now.’

The captain, who was rather more than half inclined to dismiss the better part of religion’s trappings as superstition invented by priests to subjugate ignorant populaces — especially those parts which led the ordained to believe in their own superiority, if not omnipotence — bared his teeth in something that was almost a smile. ‘But a lot of people do still believe in that sort of thing. Don’t you believe in the Devil, Father?’ he added. A little to his surprise the priest reddened, but the captain was careful not show his amusement.

‘Evil can come in many forms,’ the priest said sharply, looking at Da Silva with narrowed eyes. ‘But prayer is always effective.’

Da Silva stared back, suddenly furious at the sheer stupidity of the man’s arrogant ignorance, and bit back an angry retort. Prayer is always effective! Yes, and I’m the grand panjandrum of all India. He had to take care not to show his anger, though, so merely raised an eyebrow fractionally. ‘I’m sure I can count on your prayers, then,’ he said, and turned to go.

To hell with the whole pack of them, he thought viciously. If they’re too bloody narrow-minded to see what’s in front of their noses, then I’ll get the information I want from someone who knows. Still imagining he could feel Father Domingues’s gaze on him, he took a few deep breaths to steady himself. An unwise reaction, given the truly heroic level of putridity in the street.

Carefully he picked his way along, skirting deep, opaque, chalky-yellow puddles that you would never even consider putting a foot into. Not if you wanted to keep your boot intact, that was. And then he frowned, feeling another presence watching him, though when he looked round there was nothing suspicious to be seen. Not even the priest.

He was roused from his thoughts by a voice cutting through the cacophony of the street and speaking cultured Portuguese. ‘Excuse me, senhor capitão, but perhaps I can be of help.’ He turned round abruptly, his accoster having come up on his blind side, to see an elderly man clad only in a dhoti and a coat of dust. This ancient recoiled slightly at Da Silva’s grim expression, but persisted. ‘If you were wanting to know about the. wolf, that is.’

‘That was the general idea,’ replied the captain, rubbing at his scar and feeling sweat run down his face.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ the old man said, oddly formal. He looked a good deal older than Methuselah, but his brown eyes were bright and alert in his seamed face. ‘My name is Mohan Das. And I am at your service.’

Intrigued, Da Silva asked, ‘What can you tell me?’

‘Will you walk a little?’ Mohan Das moved off, and Da Silva fell in beside him. Not a tall man, he topped the diminutive Indian by several inches, and had to moderate his normal pace. In fact, in most eastern countries he could feel tall, and was vain enough to enjoy the sensation — a reaction that amused him.

They had hardly begun to walk when he was obliged to stop almost immediately as an inordinately large and solid-looking ghost surged up in front of him. The captain swore silently, irritated that any shade could still have the capability of startling him. He walked through it determinedly. His companion, however, either did not notice or affected not to do so.

The knife he wore concealed down his back chafed, and sweat pooled and ran inside his clothes. Da Silva wished he could emulate Mohan Das and strip off, and grinned to himself — more at the picture it presented than at the possible reaction it could cause. Which would probably be none at all, here. ‘May I ask why you are hunting this thing?’ the old man asked, curiously. ‘Are you on some kind of crusade?’

Well, yes, the captain thought, startled, although he would not have put it quite that way. But, on reflection, he did feel he had an obligation. A duty to get rid of such things whenever they crossed his path. As they did now, since he began seeing ghosts. A little taken aback, as much by his own response as by the question, he said, resignedly, ‘It looks like it.’ And felt as though he had taken an irrevocable step.

The other nodded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘And you can see ghosts, too.’ That was not a question. Da Silva wondered how he knew. ‘How long have you had this ability?’

Da Silva indicated his eyepatch. ‘Ever since this happened.’ He sometimes wondered whether it was the precise nature of the entity that had destroyed his left eye that had enabled his second sight, rather than the loss itself. Since it had been a demon. This information he did not intend to share with the old man.

‘May I ask how it happened?’

‘You may ask,’ said Da Silva, in a tone that brooked no argument, ‘but I won’t tell you.’

Mohan Das seemed unperturbed by his refusal. ‘In some cultures, shamans’ eyes were ritually put out before they could come into their full powers,’ he remarked, conversationally. ‘And seers and sibyls were often blinded, too.’

The captain raised his eyebrows. Shamans, he thought. What next, witchdoctors? ‘I’m not a seer.’

‘What is a name?’ asked the other. ‘You see ghosts. You fight evil. What does that make you?’

‘Captain of the Isabella,’ retorted Da Silva. Mohan Das laughed, and executed a neat manoeuvre to avoid a particularly persistent beggar. He moved through the crowd the way a fish does through water, quite at home in his own element. Da Silva, who had to dodge ghosts as well as people, fared less well, although he was gradually learning to walk through, rather than round, the shades that thronged the streets wherever he went. Even after nearly two years, though, it was still not quite automatic.

‘You will find,’ observed his companion, without looking up at him, ‘that you are not unique. But neither are you alone.’

He had half-suspected it. But hearing it said, especially by someone who, however educated he sounded, came from a culture profoundly different from his own, was more disconcerting than comforting.

‘Can you help me?’

‘Only with information, senhorcapitão.’ The old man smiled, all the wrinkles in his face gnarling, like the bark of a tree, and Da Silva wondered just how old he was. ‘Oh, yes, I have done things in my time — been a hero. How old are you?’ he asked abruptly, and the captain, taken by surprise, answered automatically.

‘Forty-two.’

‘You are a young man still. I am more than twice your age now. Much more.’ His expression sobered. ‘And I must warn you, if you have not already realized it, that your task will become more dangerous as time goes by.’

‘More dangerous,’ repeated Da Silva. Oh good. That’s just the sort of thing I wanted to hear. ‘Why?’ he asked, bluntly.

The old man looked up at him, his eyes hooded. ‘Because they know you now. Your sight, and your actions, mark you, and they will recognize you.’

And the proof of that is that I know exactly what he means by they, he thought mordantly, and expelled a deep lungful of smoke. ‘You said,’ he reminded Mohan Das, ‘that you could tell me something about the wolf.’

‘Ah yes,’ the other agreed. ‘The wolf.’ But he said no more. Da Silva wiped sweat from his face again and wondered once more how people managed to live, even thrive, in such a climate. He looked up to see clouds building in the lead-coloured sky.

‘It’s going to rain,’ he observed.

‘Yes. We should take cover.’

Da Silva thought he wouldn’t have minded getting wet if it would cool him down at all. But the last time he had been caught in a monsoon downpour all it had done was soak his clothes still further without noticeably decreasing his discomfort.

He followed the old man under a low doorway, ducking instinctively although he had only ever met one low enough to smack his head on, and sat down where indicated in a stuffy, sweat-smoke-and-spice-scented dimness.

Mohan Das spoke to someone unseen in such a quiet voice that the captain could catch not a single word, which annoyed him.

‘The wolf?’ he prompted after a silent moment, and heard rain begin to drum on the roof.

‘This is, as people have surmised, not a natural wolf,’ the old man said. ‘At least, not natural in the sense that it was not born a wolf but has, as we might say, acquired wolfhood — had wolfhood thrust upon it, as it were.’

‘You’re saying it is a werewolf, then?’ said Da Silva. ‘Can it be killed? What I mean is—’

‘You are asking about silver bullets, I imagine. Yes?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ the captain admitted, a little irritably, since despite Zé’s fancies he had no such ammunition for the revolver in his pocket.

The old man looked at him shrewdly, dark eyes glittering. By now the noise of the rain was so profound it sounded as if they were inside a drum, and Da Silva had to strain to hear him when he spoke.

‘I expect you know that certain metals are, by their nature, more potent against. unnatural things. Just as some substances are apt to evil. Although the effectiveness of both is affected by the nature of the wielder.’

A steaming glass was placed in front of Da Silva, and he sniffed it suspiciously. Oh God, more tea, he thought. What I’d give for a decent brandy. There probably wasn’t one this side of Constantinople — even the stuff in the decanter in his cabin had come from Greece and was, frankly, gut-rot. ‘And that means?’ he asked.

‘I am sorry,’ said Mohan Das. ‘What I mean to say is, you would find it easier to kill such a thing with a bullet made of silver than with one made of lead, but depending on how much. virtue you have of your own it might add effectiveness to the lead. I think, though, that unless you were very fortunate, you would need to decapitate the creature extremely quickly after shooting it with an ordinary bullet. Otherwise you would have a wounded and angry werewolf on your hands, which would not be a pleasant prospect.’ He took a sip of the scalding tea. ‘May I see your knife, senhor capitão?’

Long past the stage of asking how the old man knew things, Da Silva unsheathed it carefully in the limited space and offered the hilt to him. Mohan Das took it, which made the captain feel decidedly uncomfortable, and scrutinized it for some minutes. The only sound was the rhythmic thunder of the rain, like a huge engine very close by. After a while, the captain could stay silent no longer. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘A formidable weapon,’ said the old man, handing it back. ‘Silver and steel. I would think it should suffice.’

‘You would think?’ Da Silva repeated, holding the knife loosely in his sweating hand. ‘You aren’t sure?’

‘Senhor capitão, nothing is sure. But I believe you are well enough armed, should you wish to pursue this thing.’

The captain’s mouth and throat were so dry by now that he took a mouthful of tea in desperation. It shocked his taste buds, being black, bitter and astringent. But being also devoid of either condensed milk or sugar, it was more palatable than the sweet glop he had drunk in Gomes’s office. He drained the glass, and suddenly realized that the great piston sound of the rain had ceased. I wonder when that happened? he thought, and put away his knife.

‘Do you know where I might find it?’ he asked. Mohan Das closed his eyes and slowly opened them again.

‘I think it will find you, senhorcapitão,’ the old man said quietly, and Da Silva felt a shiver along his spine despite the heat of the day.

The idea of silver bullets having once occurred to Zé, he found himself quite unable to shake it off. After a while he gave up even the pretence of studying and just stared into space. The gentle, almost imperceptible motion of the ship was soothing, but a strange sense of urgency was building in him, fuelled by his own imagination. He was supposed to be meeting his new friend Vik soon, who had promised (he was almost sure) to take him to see a man who could perform the famous Indian rope trick. But that could wait. Zé had already seen enough of India and its denizens to realize that their sense of time was a flexible notion, even in those who possessed timepieces, which Vik certainly didn’t.

He wondered later whether if Felipe, his fellow ‘prentice, had been around to talk to, he would even have been thinking about it. But it was Felipe’s watch, it being the captain’s policy to keep the two boys on separate duties in order to keep them out of mischief. Which precaution was patently not working right now.

At length Zé got up and, after checking that the coast was clear, padded aft in his bare feet to the captain’s cabin. His heart was pounding as he turned the door-handle and slipped inside.

Empty, the cabin smelled of his father in some indefinable way that was more than the odour of smoke. It was also close and airless, and Zé felt himself start to sweat again. This brought on the sudden dread that the captain might be able to detect that he had been in here by his smell, and he had to sit firmly on the irrational fear.

Zé looked at the tantalus with its anchored decanters of brandy, port and madeira without feeling tempted — an episode of sampling all three in unwise quantities at the age of eleven had rather put him off the idea of alcohol — and his gaze passed on to a framed photograph of his mother. He approached the desk still staring at this, and a drop of perspiration ran down his nose and fell on the blotter. A section of his father’s spiky handwriting, reversed, ran immediately into a blob, the black ink fringing to a strange bronze colour. Zé flinched back, muttering an oath that his mother would have boxed his ears for.

Nervously, he slid open the desk drawer, but feared to hunt through the chaos within lest he leave a sign of his presence. He fingered a silver hip flask — which he could not recall ever having seen his father use — but immediately rejected it as being too big, and then guiltily had to wipe his smeared fingermarks off it with his shirt-tail. The gun that he had expected to see was not there, but a box of ammunition for it was. Zé poked at it, finding ordinary bullets, and took one out carefully. He took another overview of the drawer’s contents, and sighed. As he closed it, his gaze lit on a key-fob.

And then the answer struck him, and he castigated himself for an idiot. He could use his lucky silver dollar.

When he slipped ashore, a silver bullet sat in his trouser pocket where previously there had been a coin.

Zé wormed through the crowds in search of Vik, and spotted him fairly quickly. He was tall for his age, which Zé estimated to be about a year older than him, and that made him easier to see in a throng of people.

‘Namaste,’ he said, and Vik replied with ‘Boa tarde.’ Which made Zé smile. Languages were such fun. He had been brought up in Venice, where Portuguese had been his family’s private tongue. And now they were based in Lisbon, the Venetian dialect of Italian served the same purpose. Any new language delighted him, though — the way everything fitted together so neatly — and had the added bonus that people genuinely seemed to appreciate his attempts to learn it. Even if his accent occasionally caused amusement.

Vik grinned at Zé, white teeth flashing (except for one gap), and Zé passed the other boy one of the captain’s cheroots. Along with alcohol, this was another vice he did not share with his father, also due to having sampled rather too much of it at an earlier age.

‘Come,’ Vik said, tucking the smoke somewhere in his grubby clothing, and set off at a pace that left Zé panting in his wake. The crowd flowed round them, gulped them down, digested them, and he was overwhelmed by its assault on all his senses. Smells, intriguing and inviting and revolting by turns. Some foods and spices were identifiable, and some made his mouth water while others seemed utterly disgusting. Sewage, too, was a familiar stink, as was the powerful odour of unwashed humanity. But there were a thousand others that were totally unrecognizable.

The noise, too, was indescribable, people shouting in a dozen or more different dialects, singing, chanting, perhaps praying, but what was the strange brazen instrument he could hear? Dogs he heard, too, and donkeys, goats and cows, but also something that — exciting thought — could be an elephant, perhaps. Of motorized traffic there was very little, the internal combustion engine not only being a relative newcomer but there being, also, a conspicuous lack of roads that vehicles thus powered could run upon. But he heard motor horns, nonethelesss: what else could that mechanical braying be?

Beggars thrust deformed limbs at him, hawkers everything from jewellery and little carved statues to fruits and flowers and sweetmeats and cups of glutinous tea. At times Zé nearly lost Vik in the tumult. There was so much to see that he almost wished he could, and drown in the sensory overload. Sweat was pouring down his face and body, but he hardly noticed it, except when it stung his eyes. A three-legged yellow dog, so agile it hardly seemed to miss its lost limb, darted by with a bone, black with flies, in its mouth, trailing a faint carrion stink of tainted meat; and a fat child stumbled by in half-hearted pursuit, squealing like a stuck pig.

Rushing to keep up with Vik, Zé nearly ran smack into a white cow with a flaccid hump on its back. Someone had painted its horns red and garlanded the beast with glass beads and flower chains, but it still smelled of shit and its legs were mired to the knees, if cows had knees. He skidded in the beast’s wake, and almost fell, putting his hand on its warm flank to steady himself. Where was Vik? The taller boy had vanished in the throng, as he had been threatening to do.

Zé cursed, but half-heartedly. Either he would find Vik, and they could go to see the conjurer; or he would not, and he could then find something different to do in this fascinating crowd. He stuck his sweaty hands in his pockets, but immediately took them out again, and slowed his pace, following — on nothing more than a whim — the scent of woodsmoke. It quickly blended with a delicious frying smell, and his stomach growled. Vik more or less forgotten, Zé headed towards the prospect of food.

I wish I knew what the skipper was up to. Does he think he can go blundering after a werewolf, just like strolling down the main street? And why would he be interested, anyhow? Hell, it ain’t none of my concern. No, I guess it is. I’ve signed on theIsabella now, so he’s my captain. Jesus, as if life wasn’t complicated enough.

Harris paused in the act of stuffing his belongings into his sea-chest for long enough to light a cigarette, and then went back to his packing.

This is going to be tricky. I can’t follow him no more, I swear he knew I was there. But I can’t see myself changing in some back alley. Too risky. So I have to make sure it happens in here, then go after him. Least I reckon I can find his scent. Hell, ain’t many folks have themselves a. wolf bodyguard. Then tomorrow I get out of this dive.

Goddam it, it’s getting dark already. No — I’m wrong. Just thought for a moment there I felt the change coming on. I’m thinking about it too much, is what it is. Pull yourself together, Harris. There’s too much riding on this for you to lose focus now. If you don’t ship out on theIsabella you’re going to be stuck here. And I don’t know how long I can cope with that. I ain’t killed anyone yet since this happened but I sure as hell can’t guarantee that’s going to stay the case if I have to stop here much longer.

He looked out of the window at the lowering sky, yellow-grey clouds still bulging with unshed rain. They hid the sun; would hide the moon, when it sailed into the air above them. But nothing could stop its pull. He was a creature of tides now, as subject to the moon as was the sea, and when it was full and in the sky, he became a wolf. That was not to be changed now, he knew, and it was pointless to regret it. And now he had to use it.

And as my ma used to say, What can’t be cured must be endured. Though I don’t reckon she had this kind of thing in mind when she came out with that particular gem.

The small squalid room which he had inhabited for the past two months was on the ground floor of the building, and ease of access — and egress — more than made up for the multitude of spiders, roaches, lizards, rats and other assorted urban wildlife that shared it with him. The rats, indeed, found themselves preyed upon rather than predators when the moon was plump and high, and that had the added advantage of assuaging the Harris-wolf’s hunger for a time. He smiled without humour, both at the thought and the memory of the taste. Not when he had actually consumed them, but at the foulness in his mouth when he came back to himself.

Pain lanced through him, and he doubled over in agony, falling to the floor and trying to curl round the hurt. Which was impossible, because it was his entire body.

Oh no, not yet. Please.

Leaving Mohan Das, Da Silva was surprised to find most of the day gone. The sense of being watched, however, was now absent, and he stepped out into the steaming street, skirting new and deeper puddles that had appeared. Above, some of the clouds had thinned slightly, and were turning the colour of steel as the sun they hid tumbled unseen towards the horizon. A faint feeble breeze stirred the awnings of the stalls that lined the street.

His conversation with the old man had disturbed him, as if something had taken away part of his free will. I will be damned if I’ll exchange one sort of slavery for another, he thought savagely, however noble or heroic its aim. If I hunt werewolves, or vampires, or whatever the hell else is loose in the night, I’ll bloody well do it because it needs to be done. Not because I’ve been chosen to do it. I didn’t fight any of those other things because someone ordered me to do it. If I do this, it’s on my terms.

He pushed the anger down, and lit a cheroot. The tip glowed redly in the fading daylight, and steadied his thoughts a little. So, he said to himself, I have a talent. That’s all. It’s no different from being able to sing, or add up. That’s why Emilia does the books, and I don’t. That’s why Caruso sings Verdi and not music-hall ditties, and the snake-charmers in the marketplace pipe their thin music at cobras. They do it because they’re good at it.

And I–I see ghosts.

Somewhat calmer now, the captain wiped the sweat from his face and began to walk along the street, past shops that sold spices in sacks and fireworks and bolts of multicoloured silk, cooking pots and trinkets and woodcarvings, tobacco and cashew nuts and palm whisky. Now he was more annoyed with himself for getting angry. Never mind all that now, he thought firmly. Think about the matter at hand.

By this time dusk had fallen with the usual tropic suddenness, though it was not noticeably cooler. He lifted his eyepatch away from his face in the hope that the tiny breeze would ease the discomfort, but without success, and he sighed.

The lighted shops and doorways took on the distance that lamplight imbues them with to an outside observer, that warm and welcoming glow that at the same time excludes the life within from those without.

Not a part of the crowd, but now further distanced from it, he attempted to filter out the living and concentrate on the dead. Of whom there were, in fact, more. As Harris had noted, and Da Silva knew well, life was cheap here. The pattern of the ghosts that drifted amongst the press of humanity bore that out, for mostly they were the shades of victims. Women and children, the weak and the sick, beggars and prostitutes, the robbed and the beaten and the raped. A crowd of miserable souls. Literally.

But nothing lupine ran among the shades, and there was no threat hanging in the air save the echo of Mohan Das’s voice.

I think it will find you, senhor capitão.

Yet his hackles had risen, and it was not, this time, with the sense that he was being watched. It was the unshakeable feeling that, between one heartbeat and the next, something was loose in the night.

The grey wolf lay on the dirt floor, panting in the aftermath of almost unendurable pain. But now he lived in the moment, and the memory of agony did not remain in his mind. He heaved himself to his feet, feeling renewed strength flowing through his body. Power far greater than his feeble human form, and a fierce joy at the prospect of the hunt.

This time there was in his nostrils the smell of one particular human being. Not a tiny child this time, and therefore a little less tempting. He shook his head, puzzled. Why should he scent this one, when he knew that there were far richer pickings in the shacks and hovels where he had preyed before?

Keeping to the shadows — not a difficult task — he crept swiftly on the trail, an imperative that tugged at him with strange urgency. He could taste his quarry, and it knew nothing of his pursuit, which was the first thrill of the hunt. When it sensed him and knew the first small stirrings of fear, that was the second joy of the hunt. And the third was the kill, the taste of its terror that sweetened the meat. Yet there was that about this prey which seemed to promise more than soft small children. Some spice, some savour. Something he did not understand.

Impelled by this odd compulsion as much as by the need to feed, he padded along a path he discerned as easily as a man would a broad road; and if anyone sensed his passage it caused them no more than a momentary unease.

Zé, his senses completely overloaded, was immersed in a microcosm of India’s vastness, drinking in sights and sounds and smells the like of which he had never imagined. He had just eaten some pastries, stuffed with mind-blowingly-hot spiced vegetables, that he’d bought from a hawker, and was now sucking in breaths of air in an attempt to cool his mouth. He paused to watch a snake-charmer, a lithe brown boy of about his own age who was playing his pipe to the swaying hooded head of an enormous cobra. The spectacle markings stood out clearly on the reptile’s back, and Zé watched its motion, as fascinated by the snake as the cobra itself was by the music.

Close by, another boy was trying to interest passers-by in a somnolent python that was looped hugely round his shoulders. He had hold of it just behind the head, and was lunging at people with it, a manic grin on his face, laughing uproariously if they flinched back and capering ponderously under the snake’s weight.

This scene was lit by a sputtering fire that cast shadows at strange angles when the flames spurted and sparked, and Zé abruptly realized, with a start of guilt and alarm, how dark it had grown. Oh! he was going to be in hot water. He stared round the crowd in sudden apprehension at the inevitability of punishment. Seeing a gap in the direction in which he thought the waterfront lay, he headed for it purposefully, nimbly dodging the boy with the python.

Ten minutes later he halted, panting heavily, a stitch stinging his side, thoroughly and comprehensively lost.

And then, behind him, in the darkness, something growled.

Da Silva’s scalp prickled. What is this, another new sense? he wondered sourly. He considered unsheathing his long knife, but decided against it. It would be too conspicuous. Instead he fingered the revolver in his pocket, and wondered briefly about silver bullets. Well, I’ll just have to rely on virtue, won’t I? he thought, with a mirthless grin that made him look more than a little wolfish himself.

It was not just a tingle of unease. All his nerve endings felt raw and exposed. And his whole back was as taut as rigging in a high wind. Sweat trickled into his eye and he flicked it away automatically with a finger, scanning the crowd of living and dead with every sense he could muster. Sight was less important in the gathering dusk than his awareness of ghosts and this new sensitivity to. something evil in the night.

Rounding a corner, he found himself abruptly in another world altogether, and cursed at the realization. He had stepped out of the populous town into its noisome underbelly, stinking mud underfoot, noxious drifts of garbage to either side, uncertainly lit by fires here and there. The stench made him gag.

Da Silva took out his revolver and cocked it, holding it in his right hand. He was left-handed, but finding a target was easier this way round since he had lost his left eye. Besides, it kept his other hand free should he want to draw his knife. And that, he thought, turning his head to look at his surroundings, was a distinct possibility. At times like these it was a distinct disadvantage to have no sight at all on one side. Sweat crawled in his hair and ran down his sides. He felt his heart pounding. In fact, he could hear his heart pounding, and damned loud it sounded, too. Raising the gun, he stepped cautiously forward.

The scent of the quarry was very strong now, so powerful that it quite overwhelmed everything else. Saliva surged into his mouth in anticipation, and he loped along, tasting the prey’s fear, feeling no need to hide in shadows any more.

Close now, so close — and then, just as he was on the point of springing, something else intruded. An alien sense, like a knife-blade in his brain, and his senses splintered: sight, or the memory of it, spilled into his mind, putting him off. And he remembered.

He knew this prey — this boy. It — he — was his friend. He could not kill it. But it was not, he suddenly became aware, what he had really been seeking: it was merely an echo of it. His real quarry was — there.

Disbelief almost stopped Da Silva in his tracks, disbelief and dismay. What in the name of Christ and all the saints was Zé doing here? But he saw his son standing in the dingy, fire-lit alley, and he saw the wolf at the same time. And it saw him.

He sensed, rather than saw, its muscles bunched to pounce, and raised the gun. As he did so a voice he almost recognised shouted indistinctly, ‘Leaf’im, ski’-er!’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s my son.’ And he fired.

His shot caught the wolf in mid-spring, right in the centre of the chest, but the beast’s momentum propelled it forward almost unchecked by the force of the bullet to smash into him. They crashed to the ground together with an impact that drove the breath from his lungs and the gun from his hand — he swore as he heard it skitter off in the darkness — and then the wolf’s wide, fanged, stinking, snarling jaws were an inch from his face.

Da Silva stuffed his right arm in the beast’s maw while he fought to unsheathe his knife from underneath his body. Fangs slid into his forearm like hot knives into butter and he hissed through his teeth at the pain, and then something knocked the creature off him. He felt his flesh tear as the beast relinquished its grip, and heard Zé shout something.

Gasping for breath, Da Silva whipped out his knife as he lurched to his feet, to see another wolf battling with the first one. This beast was much larger, and had reddish fur. Its teeth were in the grey wolf’s throat.

Zé grabbed his hand and pressed the revolver back into it. ‘It’s got a silver bullet in it,’ he whispered, wide-eyed with fright.

The captain shot him a glance that was both astonished and relieved as well as threatening retribution to come, and took hold of the weapon, pushing Zé behind him. Blood running down his arm made the grip slippery, but he brought the gun up, only to shrug helplessly at the growling, snapping mass of fur that was the two battling wolves.

A moment later, the bigger animal’s strength and size told, and the grey wolf was pinned to the ground beneath it.

‘Shoo’ i’, ca’-n,’ the red wolf panted, barely intelligible. Its mouth had not been designed to frame human words.

‘Harris,’ said Da Silva, and put the gun to the grey wolf’s head. ‘I’ll need to talk to you later,’ he added as he pulled the trigger.

The recoil jarred his bitten arm painfully, but the smaller beast spasmed in death, blood and bone and brain matter spurting from the exit wound. Zé made a small sound of disgust, and the red wolf stepped back, its eyes on Da Silva, who nodded once, with a slight smile. Then it turned and padded away into the shadows.

‘Look!’ said Zé. The dead wolf that lay on the ground seemed to shiver, and its outline blurred. Its body jerked and twitched, as if things were moving under the skin. Which was exactly the case, Da Silva realized, sheathing his knife. The grey fur seemed to fade into the flesh, the muzzle of the face shrank, the shape of the skull changed as if an unseen hand were remoulding it like clay, and a naked boy lay there with a gunshot wound in his head.

‘Mother of God,’ said Da Silva, slipping the gun back into his pocket. He squatted down to look for the bullet, gritting his teeth at the pain eating his arm.

‘It’s Vik,’ Zé breathed in a mixture of wonder and horror. Then he turned away and abruptly lost the pastries he’d eaten earlier. Da Silva found the bullet and straightened, pressing his bleeding arm against his ribs.

‘Come on,’ he said, putting his other arm round his son’s shoulders and giving him a rough hug. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

When they got back to the Isabella Zé, somewhat to his surprise, did not get the anticipated hiding, and he thanked the sailor from Providence for that.