‘In September 2000,’ recalls Kidd, ‘a Portuguese sea-captain called Luis Da Silva barged into a tale called “Cats and Architecture” and demanded to have his story told. Since then he has appeared in nine more short stories and two-and-three-quarter novels — Demon Weather, The Werewolf of Lisbon and Resurrection — which are currently under consideration by a publisher.’
‘Cats and Architecture’ (which is also reprinted in this volume) first appeared in Supernatural Tales 2, and the next four Da Silva stories in a chapbook entitled Second Sight. More recently, ‘Handwriting of the God’ was published in Dark Terrors 6 and another of the tales, ‘Ze and the Amulet’ (featuring two characters who also appear in ‘Mark of the Beast’), is scheduled for Supernatural Tales 4.
‘ “Mark of the Beast” has more than a nod in Kipling’s direction,’ continues the author, ‘both in its setting and its title. It came from trying to find a new angle on the werewolf story, and it introduces Harris the Werewolf, who seems to have taken on a life of his own. I had no idea, when he first appeared, that he was going to be an important character in the series. Other characters reappear, some quite frequently, but haven’t yet graduated to “Scooby Gang” status. For anyone interested, this story takes place about two and a half years after the “Death in Venice” section of “Cats and Architecture”.’
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.