Bewere the Night (36 page)

I considered for a moment how best to get the information. She seemed suspicious of the newsmakers, tired of them.

“No, I’m from the SPCA. I’m here to inspect the animals and see if we can help you with some money. If there is a person hurting the animals, we need to find that person and punish them.”

“It’s not a person. It is the vampire dogs. I saw them with my own eyes.”

“This was done by dogs?”

She nodded. “A pack of them. They come out of there barking and yelping with hunger and they run here and there sucking their food out of any creature they find. They travel a long way sometimes, for new blood.”

“So they live in the hills?” I thought she’d pointed at the mountains in the background. When she nodded, I realized my mistake. I should have said, “Where do they live?”

It was too late now; she knew what she thought I wanted to hear.

“They live in the hills.”

“Doesn’t anyone try to stop them?”

“They don’t stop good. They are hot to the touch and if you get too near you might burn up.”

“Shooting?”

“No guns. Who has a gun these days?”

“What about a club, or a spear? What about a cane knife? What I mean is, can they be killed?”

“Of course they can be killed. They’re dogs, not ghosts.”

“Do they bite people?”

She nodded. “If they can get close enough.”

“Have they killed anyone? Or turned anyone into a vampire?”

She laughed, a big, belching laugh which brought tears to her eyes. “A person can’t turn into a vampire dog! If they bite you, you clean out the wound so it doesn’t go nasty. That’s all. If they suck for long enough you’ll die. But you clean it out and it’s okay.”

“So what did they look like?”

She stared at me.

“Were they big dogs or small?” I measured with my hand, up and down until she grunted; knee high.

“Fur? What color fur?”

“No fur. Just skin. Blue skin. Loose and wrinkly.”

“Ears? What were their ears like?”

She held her fingers up to her head. “Like this.”

“And they latched onto your animals and sucked their blood?”

“Yes. I didn’t know at first. I thought they were just biting. I tried to shoo them. I took a big stick and poked them. Their bellies. I could hear something sloshing away in there.”

She shivered. “Then one of them lifted its head and I saw how red its teeth were. And the teeth were sharp, two rows atop and bottom, so many teeth. I ran inside to get my husband but he had too much
kava
. He wouldn’t even sit up.”

“Can I see what they did?” I said. The woman looked at me.

“You want to see the dead ones? The
bokola
?”

“I do. It might help your claim.”

“My claim?”

“You know, the SPCA.” I walked back to the shed.

Their bellies had been ripped out and devoured and the blood drained, she said.

There were bite marks, purplish, all over their backs and legs, as if the attacking dogs were seeking a good spot.

The insects and the birds had worked on the ears and other soft bits.

I took a stick to shift them around a bit.

“The dogs will come for those
bokola
. You leave them alone.” She waved at the pile of corpses.

“The dogs?”

“Clean-up dogs. First the vampires, then the clean-up. Their yellow master sends them.”

“Yellow master?” She shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut. Taboo subject.

“You wouldn’t eat this meat? It seems a waste.”

“The vampire dogs leave a taste behind,” the woman told me. “A
kamikamica
taste the other animals like. One of the men in my village cooked and ate one of those cows. He said it made him feel very good but now he smells of cowhide. He can’t get the smell off himself.”

“Are any of your animals left alive?”

The woman shook her head. “Not the bitten ones. They didn’t touch them all, though.”

“Can I see the others?” I would look for signs of disease, something to explain the sudden death. I wanted to be sure I was in the right place.

One cow was up against the back wall of the house, leaning close to catch the shade. There was a sheen of sweat on my body. I could feel it drip down my back.

“Kata kata,”
the woman said, pointing to the cow. “She is very hot.”

It looked all right, apart from that.

I could get no more out of her.

Gina was sweating in the taxi. It was a hot day, but she felt the heat of the cow as well. “Any luck?” she said.

“Some. There’s a few local taboos I’ll need to get through to get the info we need, though.”

“Ask him,” she said, pointing at the driver. “He’s Hindu.”

Our taxi driver said, “I could have saved you the journey. No Fijian will talk about that. We Hindus know about those dogs.”

He told us the vampire dogs lived at the bottom of Ciwa Waidekeulu. “Thiwa Why Ndeke Ulu,” he said. Nine Waterfall. In the rainforest twenty minutes from where we were staying.

“She said something about a yellow master?”

“A great yellow dog who is worse than the worst man you’ve ever met.”

I didn’t tell him I’d met some bad men.

“You should keep away from him. He can give great boons to the successful, but there is no one successful. No one can defeat the yellow dog. Those who fail will vanish, as if they have never been.” He stopped at a jetty, where some children sold us roti filled with a soft, sweet potato curry. Very, very good.

The girl who cleaned my room was not chatty at first, but I wanted to ask her questions. She answered most of them happily once I gave her a can of Coke. “Where do I park near Ciwa Waidekeulu? How do I ask the chief for permission to enter? Is there fresh water?”

When I asked her if she knew if the vampire dogs were down there, she went back to her housework, cleaning a bench already spotless. “These are not creatures to be captured,” she said. “They should be poisoned.” To distract me, she told me that her neighbors had five dogs, every last one of them a mongrel, barking all night and scaring her children. I know what I’d do if I were her. The council puts out notices of dog poisonings,
Keep Your Dogs In While We Kill the Stray
s, so all she’d have to do is let their dogs out while the cull was happening. Those dogs’d be happy to run; they used to leap the fence, tearing their guts, until her neighbor built his fence higher. They’re desperate to get out.

They do a good job with the poisoning, she told me, but not so good with the clean up. Bloated bodies line the streets, float down the river, clog the drains.

They don’t understand about repercussions, and that things don’t just go away.

The client was pleased with my progress when I called him. “So, when will you go in?”

With the land taboo, I needed permission from the local chief or risk trouble. This took time. Most didn’t want to discuss the vampire dogs, or the yellow dog king; he was forbidden, also. “It may be a couple of weeks. Depends on how I manage to deal with the locals.”

“Surely a man would manage better,” he said. “I know your husband doesn’t like to talk, but most men will listen to a man better. Maybe I should send someone else.”

“Listen,” I told him, hoping to win him back, “I’ve heard they run with a fat cock of a dog. Have you heard that? People have seen the vampire dogs drop sheep hearts at this dog’s feet. He tossed the heart up like it was a ball, snapped it up.”

The man smacked his lips. I could hear it over the phone. “I’ve got a place for him, if you catch him as well.”

“If you pay us, we’ll get him. There are no bonus dogs.”

“Check with your husband on that.”

I thought of the slimy black hole he’d dug.

“They say that if you take a piece of him, good things will come your way. People don’t like to talk about him. He’s taboo.”

“They just don’t want anyone else taking a piece of him.”

We moved to a new hotel set amongst the rainforest. The walls were dark green in patches, the smell of mold strong, but it was pretty with birdsong and close to the waterfalls which meant we could make an early start.

We ate in their open air restaurant, fried fish, more coconut milk, Greek meatballs. Gina didn’t like mosquito repellent, thinking it clogged her pores with chemicals, so she was eaten alive by them.

“Have you called Joe?” she asked me over banana custard.

“Have you?” We smiled at each other; wife and sister ignoring him, back home and alone.

“We should call him. Does he know what we’re doing?”

“I told him, but you know how he is.” She was a good sister, visiting him weekly, reading to him, taking him treats he chewed but didn’t seem to enjoy.

We drank too much Fijian beer and we danced around the snooker table, using the cues as microphones. No one seemed bothered, least of all the waiters.

The next morning, we called a cab to drop us at the top of the waterfall. You couldn’t drive down any further. In the car park, souvenir sellers sat listlessly, their day’s takings a few coins that jangled in their pockets. Their faces marked with lines, boils on their shins, they leaned back and stared as we gathered our things together.

“I have shells,” one boy said.

“No turtles,” Gina said, flipping her head at him to show how disgusting that trade was to her.

“Not turtles. Beetles. The size of a turtle.”

He held up the shell to her. There was a smell about it, almost like an office smell; cleaning fluids, correcting fluids, coffee brewed too long. The shell was metallic gray and marbled with black lines. Claws out the side, small, odd, clutching snipers. I had seen, had eaten, prawns with claws like this. Bluish and fleshy, I felt like I was eating a sea monster.

“From the third waterfall,” the seller said. “All the other creatures moved up when the dogs moved into Nine Waterfall.”

I’m in the right place,
I thought. “So there are dogs in the waterfall?”

“Vampire dogs. They only come out for food. They live way down.”

An older vendor hissed at him. “Don’t scare the nice ladies. They don’t believe in vampire dogs.”

“You’d be surprised what I believe in,” Gina said. She touched one finger to the man’s throat. “I believe that you have a secret not even your wife knows. If she learns of it, she will take your children away.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She gave the boy money for one of the shells and opened her large bag to place it inside.

He said, “You watch out for yellow dog. If you sacrifice a part of him you”ll never be hungry again. But if you fail you will die on the spot and no one will know you ever lived. If you take the right bit you will never be lonely again.”

I didn’t know that I wanted a companion for life.

As we walked, I said, “How did you know he had a secret?”

“All men have secrets.”

The first waterfall was overhung by flowering trees. It was a very popular picnic site. Although it took 20 minutes to reach, Indian women were there with huge pots and pans, cooking roti and warming dhal while the men and children swam. I trailed my hand in the water; very cool, not the pleasant body-temperature water of the islands, but a refreshing briskness.

Birdsong here was high and pretty. More birds than I’d seen elsewhere. Broadbills, honey-eaters, crimson and masked parrots, and velvet doves. Safe here, perhaps. The ground was soft and writhing with worms. The children collected them for bait, although the fish were sparse. Down below, the children told us, were fish big enough to feed a family of ten for a week. They liked human bait, so men would dangle their toes in. I guessed they were teasing us about this.

The path to the second waterfall was well-trodden. The bridge had been built with good, treated timber and seemed sturdy.

The waterfall fell quietly here. It was a gentler place. Only the fisherman sat by the water’s edge; children and women not welcome. The fish were so thick in the water they could barely move. The fishermen didn’t bother with lines; they reached in and grabbed what they wanted.

Gina breathed heavily.

“Do you want to slow down a bit? I don’t think we should dawdle, but we can slow down,” I said.

“It’s not that. It’s the fish. I don’t usually get anything from fish, but I guess there’s so many of them. I’m finding it hard to breathe.”

The men stood up to let us past.

“There are a lot of fish,” I said. Sometimes the obvious is the only thing to say. “Where do they come from?” I asked one of the men. “There are so few up there.” I pointed up to the first waterfall.

“They come from underground. The center of the earth. They are already cooked when we catch them, from the heat inside.”

He cut one open to demonstrate and it was true; inside was white, fluffy, warm flesh. He gestured it at me and I took a piece. Gina refused. The meat was delicate and sweet and I knew I would seek without finding it wherever else I went in the world.

“American?” the man said.

“New Zealand,” Gina lied.

“Ah, Kiwi!” he said. “Sister!” They liked the New Zealanders better than Australians and Americans because of closer distance, and because they shared a migratory path. Gina could put on any accent; it was like she absorbed the vowel sounds.

I could have stayed at the second waterfall but we had a job to do, and Gina found the place claustrophobic.

“It’s only going to get worse,” I said. “The trees will close in on us and the sky will vanish.”

She grunted. Sometimes, I think, she found me very stupid and shallow. She liked me better than almost anyelse did, but sometimes even she rolled her eyes at me.

The third waterfall was small. There was a thick buzz of insects over it. I hoped not mosquitoes; I’d had dengue fever once before and did not want hemorrhagic fever. I stopped to slather repellent on, strong stuff which repelled people as well.

The ground was covered with small, green shelled cockroaches. They were not bothered by us and I could ignore them. The ones on the tree trunks, though; at first I thought they were bark, but then one moved. It was as big as my head and I couldn’t tell how many legs. It had a jaw which seemed to click and a tail like a scorpion which it kept coiled.