The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“I don’t detest them at all,” Ballard said. “Actually, I have a lot of respect for those people. I think they’re mysterious. So much gravity. So much silence. They understand a million things we don’t, and what we do manage to get they know about in another way, a more profound way.”

“You’re wrong. They’re too stupid to understand anything. They have mud for dinner. They have mud for brains.”

“And yet.…” Ballard said, smiling at her.

As if they knew they had been insulted and seemingly without moving out of position, the river people had begun to fade back into the network of dark, rubbery leaves in which they had for a long moment been framed.

“And yet what?”

“They knew what we were going to do. They wanted to see us throwing those books into the river. So out of the bushes they popped, right at the time we walked out on deck.”

Her conspicuous black eyebrows slid nearer each other, creating a furrow. She shook her beautiful head and opened her mouth to disagree.

“Anyway, Sandrine, what did you think of what happened just now? Any responses, reflections?”

“What do I think of what happened to the books? What do I think of the fish?”

“Of course,” Ballard said. “It’s not all about us.”

He leaned back against the rail, communicating utter ease and confidence. He was forty-four, attired daily in dark tailored suits and white shirts that gleamed like a movie star’s smile, the repository of a thousand feral secrets, at home everywhere in the world, the possessor of an understanding it would take him a lifetime to absorb. Sandrine often seemed to him the center of his life. He knew exactly what she was going to say.

“I think the fish are astonishing,” she said. “I mean it. Astonishing. Such concentration, such power, such complete hunger. It was breathtaking. Those books didn’t last more than five or six seconds. All that thrashing! My book lasted longer than yours, but not by much.”

“Little Dorrit is a lot longer than Tono-Bungay. More paper, more thread, more glue. I think they’re especially hot for glue.”

“Maybe they’re just hot for Dickens.”

“Maybe they’re speed readers,” said Sandrine. “What do we do now?”

“What we came here to do,” Ballard said, and moved back to swing open the dining room door, then froze in mid-step.

“Forget something?”

“I was having the oddest feeling, and I just now realized what it was. You read about it all the time, so you think it must be pretty common, but until a second ago I don’t think I’d ever before had the feeling that I was being watched. Not really.”

“But now you did.”

“Yes.” He strode up to the door and swung it open. The table was bare, and the room was empty.

Sandrine approached and peeked over his shoulder. He had both amused and dismayed her. “The great Ballard exhibits a moment of paranoia. I think I’ve been wrong about you all this time. You’re just another boring old creep who wants to fuck me.”

“I’d admit to being a lot of things, but paranoid isn’t one of them.” He gestured her back through the door. That Sandrine obeyed him seemed to take both of them by surprise.

“How about being a boring old creep? I’m not really so sure I want to stay here with you. For one thing, and I know this is not related, the birds keep waking me up. If they are birds.”

He cocked his head, interested. “What else could they be? Please tell me. Indulge a boring old creep.”

“The maids and the waiters and the sailor guys. The cook. The woman who arranges the flowers.”

“You think they belong to that tribe that speaks in bird calls? Actually, how did you ever hear about them?”

“My anthropology professor was one of the people who first discovered that tribe. The Piranhas. Know what they call themselves? The tall people. Not very observant, are they? According to the professor, they worshipped a much older tribe that had disappeared many generations back — miracle people, healers, shamans, warriors. The Old Ones, they called them, but the Old Ones called themselves We, you always have to put it in boldface. My professor couldn’t stop talking about these tribes — he was so full of himself. Sooo vain. Kept staring at me. Vain, ugly, and lecherous, my favorite trifecta!”

The memory of her anthropology professor, with whom she had clearly gone through the customary adoration-boredom-disgust cycle of student-teacher love affairs, had put Sandrine in a sulky, dissatisfied mood.

“You made a lovely little error about thirty seconds ago. The tribe is called the Piraha, not the Piranhas. Piranhas are the fish you fell in love with.”

“Ooh,” she said, brightening up. “So the Piraha eat piranhas?”

“Other way around, more likely. But the other people on the Blinding Light can’t be Piraha, we’re hundreds of miles from their territory.”

“You are tedious. Why did I ever let myself get talked into coming here, anyhow?”