GUYANESE HORROR FICTION KAMARANG…What Vibert Sealey saw on the stairs

May 11, 2020 News

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“She was twisting against him in a sinuous, boneless way that set Sealey’s stomach churning. She was speaking to the boy, and she was trying to press a small bottle to his lips, when she turned and saw Sealey….”

By Michael Jordan

Vibert Sealey lay in his hammock, a half-smoked cigarette in one hand. He heard a sigh from the room behind him, then the creak of bed-springs as Brenda tossed in her sleep. He thought of her … skin black as coal and velvety smooth, lying alone in his bed. He should have been in there, stroking that smooth black skin, running his hands through her hair, or just snuggled next to her, in sleep. Instead, here he was, lying in his hammock and thinking of another woman.

This room in which he kept his bush-gear had always been a sort of retreat for him. Rocking in his hammock, surrounded by his warishi and other implements, he could always dream himself into some peaceful, remote jungle location…imagine himself near a running stream…or maybe in his own camp, listening to Bap Reggie relating one of his far-fetched bush tales, or hearing Jerry Mentore strumming softly on his guitar, with the cry of baboons in the background.
Since his encounter with the girl at Kamarang, who maybe was the same girl at the Ritz, his visits to the bush-gear room had increased. He’d lie in his hammock and try to rock himself away from memories of that last disastrous visit to Kamarang. Tonight, though, the memories clung to him, along with the memory of what he’d seen a few hours ago, at the Ritz.
Angrily, he jabbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. What was he so jittery about? All that had happened was that he’d seen the girl and the boy standing on the stairs leading to her room. That was all.
And yet…and yet…
*
Partly out of curiosity, and partly because of a nagging unease, he had stayed at the Ritz until the boy had returned from the girl’s room. After watching them head upstairs, Sealey had moved from the bar and taken a seat to rest his knees. He was disturbed, around midnight, by a middle-aged, over-powdered prostitute, who had come up the steps, looked around the almost empty brothel, then sat near him and asked for a beer. She had just struck up a conversation that he knew was leading to her getting down to business, when Sealey suddenly realised that he wanted to urinate. He went to the urinal, relieved himself, and was heading back to the hall when he saw them.
They stood, almost out of sight, on the stairs that led to the girl’s room. The girl was stark naked. She had the boy pressed against the rails and she was twisting against him in a sinuous, boneless way that set Sealey’s stomach churning. She was speaking to the boy, and she was trying to press a small bottle to his lips, when she turned and saw Sealey.
She stared at him. He felt the force of some unknown emotion that made him want to step back. Instead, he averted his gaze and headed back up the corridor. About a minute later, the boy came into the hallway. He gazed around the brothel, lifted a tired-looking hand to the barman, then trudged down the stairs…
And that was it. Nothing to be alarmed about.
And yet…
And yet…
And yet he’d seen something like this before…
*
“The headaches again, Vibert?”
Vibert Sealey, sitting at the doctor’s table, nodded.
“Vibert, you ease on that drinking—and taking the tablets I gave you?”
“Yes,” Sealey said. He groped in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, remembered where he was, then added. “They ain’t helping me, though.”
Doctor Mootoo nodded. “Let me give you a quick check-up. Maybe I could change the medication if the pressure still high.”
Sealey sighed. He shouldn’t be taking out his moodiness on his old friend. But the headaches, and the tightness behind his neck were killing him.
“How’s Brenda?” the doctor asked.
“Okay…”
He’d felt as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus when the young man had stepped out of Doc Mootoo’s office. The boy had not even noticed him. And though it was the first time he’d seen the girl’s lover by daylight, the boy had somehow seemed different.
What was he doing here? He tried to tell himself that the unease he felt was irrational. After all, Georgetown was a small city, and the ‘doc’ was well known. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the boy should come here. To the same clinic that he, Vibert Sealey, attended. Yet he couldn’t rationalize away the feeling that his meeting the boy here was no mere coincidence, and that something he wanted to leave alone was dogging him…
“Damnit,” he muttered.
Doctor Mootoo stared at Sealey. “What bothering you, chap?”
“You had a patient here a couple minutes back. A young, fair-skin chap.”
“Oh yes…you know him?”
“What wrong with him?”
Doctor Mootoo reached for a pen. He rolled it between his fingers.
“Why you want to know?”
He would tell the doc he was just curious. Then take the prescription and get the hell out of here…
Instead, he found himself saying: “I think I find the girl. The one Leon had in Kamarang.”
The doctor shifted forward. “You mean you still looking for she?”
“She staying at the old Ritz place.” Sealey took a deep breath, rubbed his right temple. “She sleeping with the young chap who been to see you.”
The doctor started. There was silence, broken only by the humming of the fan.
“You still think that she had something to do with Leon’s death?”
Sealey nodded.
“Even after what the police say? Even after my post-mortem?”
“Yes.” He leaned closer. “Doc, I need to know why this boy coming to see you.”
Doctor Mootoo stared back at him, tapping the pen on his desk. “You wondering if she harming the boy?”
Sealey nodded.
Doctor Mootoo shook his head. “I don’t think anything wrong with the boy. He complain of tiredness…weight loss, but I think that he just a bit anaemic.”
Sealey felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. “Just…what?”
“Anaemic,” Doctor Mootoo said. “Just…oh!”
Now there was a gleam in Doctor Mootoo’s eyes. It was the same look his friend had when he was speaking about some murder case that intrigued him.
“Ohhhh,” he said again.
Sealy felt the throbbing at his temples return. “So you think—”
“It might be nothing.”
To Sealey, Doctor Mootoo didn’t sound convinced, and the gleam in his eyes was still there.
“I would know for sure in a couple of days. I tell him to check back in a week, though. Want to make sure that he rests.”
“And you will let me know if anything wrong with him?”
“Yes…just to ease your mind.” Doctor Mootoo glanced down at Sealey’s prescription, then handed it to Sealey. “But you got to worry about yourself, chap. Your pressure up a bit again.”
Sealey took the prescription. “Well…hope the medication do the trick.”
The doctor smiled, but his eyes held a look of concern. “Vibert, the best medicine for you is to forget about Kamarang. Just keep away from that girl and that place. They not good for your health.”
Sealey sighed. “I know. Doc…Something else been bothering me…something stupid, maybe…”
“What?”
“Leon had a knife, an old thing made out of bone or something.”
“What about it?”
“We never found it.”
*
Despite what Doc Mootoo had said, despite not wanting to, Sealey found himself at the Ritz that night. The girl was there, sipping her cider. Again, she sat by the punch-box and stared through him. He didn’t see the woman that the barman said was her aunt, and for that he was glad. He asked the barman about the cap he’d left behind. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when the man said he hadn’t seen it.
That night, he dreamed of Kamarang. He heard the planes landing on the airstrip. He saw old Bap Reggie, leering at a thick, red-skinned whore. And, as usual, he dreamed of the tiny room, and, on a coconut mattress, the grey, wasted body, with the lips drawn back like a dog’s…
*
“Well, Vibert, I didn’t expect to see you so soon.” The doctor was smiling, but the brown eyes were questioning.
Sealey sat in the chair opposite the doctor’s. He sighed, as a rush of breeze from the oscillating fan gave some respite from the heat that had pursued him inside.
“Leslie, you know damn well what I come about.”
“The girl from Kamarang’s boyfriend.”
Sealey nodded.
The two men stared at each other for a moment. Doctor Mootoo sighed, then reached for a small stack of files on his desk.
“I schedule him for today.”
“He is in the waiting room.” The boy was conspicuous among the mostly older patients in the waiting room. The boy had glanced at him when he had gone to the doctor’s receptionist, but had seemed lost in his own thoughts.
“Mi…chael..Jones…,” the doctor said, reading from one of the open files. He closed the folder and looked at Sealey.
“Let me put you at ease, now. Nothing the matter with the boy that a little rest and proper diet wouldn’t cure. He just slightly run-down, as I’d suspected.”
“Nothing? You sure?”
Doctor Mootoo leaned closer. “After we had that talk, I decided to do some other tests. Poison … VD … drugs —sent samples to the Analyst Department.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Nothing.”
Silence, save for the whirring of the fan, as the doctor’s words sank in.
His experience of Sunday had made him doubly sure that the boy was in some sort of danger. He had spent most of the previous day speculating about what the doctor would find. Now, here was Doc Mootoo, saying that there was no mystery. He should have been relieved. Instead, he felt a vague unease. It disturbed him that whatever was happening was beyond even his friend’s mental reach.
He sensed the shrewd eyes on him. “So how you feeling, Vibert? Taking my tablets?”
Sealey shifted in embarrassment, now aware that he was massaging his neck. “Taking some karila bitters,” he mumbled.
Doc Mootoo sighed. “What wrong with my tablets?”
Sealey breathed deeply. “You think that them pills could have any…side effects?”
A pause. Then: “Maybe…why you ask?”
He knew that it was his imagination, but suddenly it seemed as if the sunlight filtering through the windows had dimmed. The images of Sunday came rushing back—
He pushed them away.
“Something crazy happen to me yesterday…” He recounted Sunday’s events. He heard his voice, as if from a distance. Part of him was in the hammock again, brushing the strange, scaly creature from his shoulder…
They sat in silence afterwards, the doctor staring at his desk. The silence made Sealey uncomfortable. Was Doc Mootoo thinking of him as his friend, or as a patient who was cracking up?
“Sleep paralysis,” Doctor Mootoo said suddenly.
“What?”
“Maybe you had a bout of something called sleep paralysis. You were partly awake, but still dreaming—”
“Damnit, Leslie. I wasn’t dreaming. I felt something crawling on me. I smelt it afterwards…”
Again, as on his last visit, he saw that familiar gleam in Doctor Mootoo’s eyes.
“Vibert, what you think really happen on Sunday?”
Sealey gave a low, embarrassed laugh. “Doc, how much of this obeah nonsense you believe?”
The doctor stared at Sealey, but said nothing.
“Some strange things happen to me recently.”
“Like the thing at home?”
“In a way. Is little things that I can’t explain.”
He told the doc about the disappearance of his cap. He spoke about the girl’s strange behaviour that night. He told the doc about the girl’s aunt, whose foot was turned backwards, like the hunter at Kamarang. He spoke about the night that someone—he almost said something—had followed him in Lombard Street.
The words came with difficulty. On Sunday, after his experience in the hammock, it had been easy to connect all the events preceding Sunday to the girl. But now, voicing his fears, the incidents seemed unconnected and trivial. He felt like an old man going senile, frightened of shadows and fretting about losing an old cap. He half-expected his friend to laugh, but after he was finished, the doctor just sat, frowning at his desk. At last he looked at Sealey.
“You believe that this girl working some sort of…Amerindian spell on you?”
And there it was, this ridiculous notion, out in the open. “Doc, I trying to tell you that I believe that the girl up to something, and that it got something to do with that boy. I believe that she know that I watching her and yes, I think that she after me, too.”
“But why she would want to harm him? The boy is just a porter, for heaven’s sake.”
“For the same reason that she kill Leon.”
“And that reason is…?”
Sealey shook his head in frustration. “I don’t know. I just feel that what happened to Leon happening to this chap, too, Leslie. As to why, I got this feeling that Old Perez knows something.”
What had his old friend at Kamarang said after Leon had died and Sealey had vowed to find the girl? Leave this thing alone, Vibert Sealey…this thing has nothing to do with you…
Doctor Mootoo sighed. “If it will make you feel better, I could use some of my connections to get the boy’s samples tested overseas.” He seemed to hesitate, then said: “Frankly, I had half-expected to find something, at least worms in his system, after I learn that he getting nightmares.”
“Nightmares?”
Doc Mootoo was telling him something about worms in the body and nightmares, but Sealey barely heard him. Once again, he sensed that another piece of some dark puzzle had just fit into place.

(Taken from the supernatural novel Kamarang by Michael Jordan.
Copies of the illustrated edition of Kamarang are on sale at Austin’s Book Store. Kamarang (Kindle and paperback, with illustrations) is also available on Amazon)
The author can also be contacted for autographed copies on +592 645 2447 or by email: [email protected])

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