‘Who’s there?’ he asked, momentarily surprised by the quaver that his voice had developed.

He quickened his pace, looking over his shoulder every three paces, thoughts of rape, buggery, bewilderment and worse screaming in his head.

Damn this fog!

He walked on at his hastened pace for a few more minutes and strained his ears in the gloom, only to hear that his stalker’s footsteps had hastened as well. He was definitely being followed. Panic rammed its fist into his chest and squeezed the first thing it got hold of. Chan began to run.

You pussy. Stand up and fight!

His inner voice never failed to taunt him during the most inappropriate times, a goading voice stemming from his depraved id.

Fuck off, he mumbled back. Not now.
‘Wait!’ shouted a seemingly dismembered voice through the fog. ‘Mr. Aleong, please wait!’ A Trinidadian voice, ragged and panting as it now struggled to keep up. And one that knew Chan’s name. He stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Who are you and what yuh want, man?’ His panic, though still there, was dissipating, and quickly being replaced by a shocked curiosity at hearing his name, and anger. ‘What de arse you followin me for?’

There were three times when Chan’s accent thickened: when speaking to fellow West Indians, when angry, and when drunk. The walk to this point had leeched any alcohol previously in his system, ruling the latter out.

‘Ah sorry, man. Is just... please. Yuh hadda help meh.’ It was a whining, desperate voice. Chan’s curiosity was now piqued. Still not able to see the face to whom the voice belonged, he slowly ventured closer, a tightly coiled spring. The first thing he noticed was the smell that wafted towards him: a mixture of days (weeks?) old sweat, excrement and disease.

‘Show yourself first!’

With a waving of his arms, he attempted to clear away some of the fog that still remained between them without much success. As he continued his approach, a form became increasingly apparent, slowly materializing out of fog as if made from the very fog itself. What it revealed was the sorriest state of a man Chan had ever seen in the flesh. Dishevelled from top to toe, he stood there literally swimming in his clothes, like a grim parody of a child playing dress-up. His narrow skeletal frame seemed too weak to hold up his already waif-like state and he stooped over as if he were a thousand years old. He was black-skinned, but even his skin looked unhealthy. Taking on a greyish hue

...Elephantine...

it was pulled taut across his face, turning it into some sort of freakish starvation mask like the ones he used to watch on those television programmes in the 1980s about starving Ethiopian children with the bellies hugely swollen from kwashiorkor. But it was the look in his eyes that made Chan gasp involuntarily. It was the look of a man who has seen his own death and realizes it to be both untimely and painful. It was manic, frightened, pleading and exhausted all in one. But most of all, it was haunted.

‘Are you Chan Aleong?’ he asked, finally catching his agonized breath.
‘Why?’ asked Chan cautiously.
How the hell does this creature know my fucking name?
‘Look, I eh looking to mug you or nuttin. I just need your help. I doh know who else to ask.’
‘Help you with what? What on earth could you possibly want from me?’
‘You is de man doing all ah that research on Trinidad folklore an ting, right? De jumbie man?’
‘Yes... but I still don’t...’
Jumbie man??
‘Look, man,’ he interjected, suddenly impatient. He pulled his collar from his emaciated neck. ‘A soucouyant bite me, okay? Two weeks ago in Trinidad. An I go dead if you doh help meh.’

Soucouyant. The local vampire. Chan stood there staring at him, his mouth suddenly slack and devoid of speech. What kind of sick joke was this?
‘A what?’
‘Ah soucouyant, man! What happen? Yuh forget what one is??’
There was anger in his voice now, but there was also a greater desperation lurking beneath. ‘Look at meh neck and see fuh yuhself!’

He yanked the collar harder. Chan was powerless not to look. Surely enough, there lay two circular puncture marks just to the right of his Adam’s apple, under which throbbed his carotid artery now clearly visible under his wasted musculature. The skin around it was bruised, and there were scabbed over scratch marks at his jaw line and nape as if whatever had done this had struggled to wrench his neck into a suitable position. Thoughts began clamouring in Chan’s mind. It was almost too much for him to get his head around. If this terrible shadow of a man was to be believed, then all he had worked so hard for to this point was finally about to be vindicated. Here was his proof: this walking, talking, breathing rag had been bitten by a soucouyant and had lived to tell the tale! With a palpitating heart and shallowed breathing, Chan felt as if he was entering a state akin to euphoria, and all in front of this man whose life was surely soon to end. Yet, he hesitated.

‘What kinda drugs you on, man? What kinda arse you take me for?’

It had to be said. This was too good to be true, and God how he wanted it to be true. False hope, however, would crush him, and he would not allow it. This animated corpse would have to convince him.

Come on, you shit. Convince me. Please.

The man stared at Chan, incredulous, while tears pooled in his impossibly large eyes.

‘What you mean? I not lyin, man. That bitch hold meh down and suck meh dry! Look at me, man! I look like I ha AIDS or someting!’
Maybe you do.
‘Please. Is not AIDS. Yuh hadda believe meh. You is meh las hope. What I go do if you don’t?’

His voice was faltering. He looked deflated, defeated and scared. Hanging his head, he began to cry, pathetically weak sobs of pure distress and fatigue. Chan stared at him for a long minute as the tears streamed down his precipitous cheekbones, carving rivulets into the scaly skin of his face, and finally pitter-pattering on the ground below him. He was telling the truth, every single word of it, God help him. Or at least he believed he was. Wasn’t that enough to warrant further prodding? It was decision time.

‘Come with me. I’m taking you home.’

He looked up, hope surfacing through his tears, causing Chan to look away.

God, stop looking at me. I can’t bear your eyes.

The look had evoked a feeling disgust, revulsion and shame in Chan. It reminded him of the feeling he got when trying to shrug off a homeless person begging for change, and he resented him for it.

But what was he doing, taking this man home with him, anyway? Was he suddenly overcome with some newly found humanitarian goodwill? Had he some deep need to rescue this poor soul from his harrowing plight? To protect him and heal his shattered mind? No. Chan wanted his story, plain and simple, and once he had leeched it from him, he didn’t give a rat’s arse whether he died before the sunrise or lived to fight another day. Indeed, Chan thought he’d be better off dead, such was his incredible, yet unexplainable repugnance towards this man. And such was the speed with which his obsession to know more spurned itself. Looking back, Chan would later realize he was like a man possessed, driven by the idée fixe that after all this time he had finally stumbled across possible proof that Trinidad and Tobago actually harboured blood-suckers, and maybe more, and would stop at nothing to secure it.

* * * * * *

After walking a while, Chan finally managed to hail a cab to take the both of them the rest of the way home. It had cost him as well. The cab driver took one look at his newly-found pal and said No fuckin way, mate. Twenty extra pounds later, they were both chauffeured to Chan’s front door.

Chan took him into the dark stillness of his house, turned on the lights, sat him on the living room sofa, and fed him the first thing he laid hands on in the cupboard. Shortly after, he started interrogating him while he sat there sipping a Pot Noodle like it was the blood of Christ. Chan sat next to him and listened, enthralled by his tale and scribbled it all down like a lunatic till his hand cramped. His heart was hammering by this point, ramming blood through his arteries, causing my ears to ring and his loins to stir. He could barely believe what he was hearing.

The man’s name was Lennox Atherton. A fisherman by trade, he lived and worked in Cumana, a little village nestled within eastern region of the Northern Range, a berth of rain forest spanning the entire width of northern Trinidad. He and three others had gone hunting for agouti one night in the thick vegetation that carpets the range. The night was overcast, and the clouds, pregnant with impending rain, hid the moon covertly within their expanse.

A bad night for hunting, Lennox had thought, but they had forged on anyway, pellet guns in hand.

Sometime during the course of the hunt, Lennox, not being as experienced a hunter as he was a fisherman, had become separated from the others. Cursing himself, his friends and the very night itself, he tried to retrace his steps, but to no avail. Soon he was desperately lost. Panic set in shortly after, and with it came a flood of all of his childhood superstitions. As a child he was told that the woods in these parts were haunted, full of jumbies and douens. He had scoffed at those stories as a grown man, having been in these very woods numerous times as an adult, but in his current state of fear, every bush and tree stump became a potential jhumbies, every rock a douen. He called out to the others, but got no reply.

It was about twenty minutes later that he cut his hand on a rock as he tried to scale down a slippery minor escarpment. By this time, the heavens had opened. Rain fell to the earth in sheet after drenching sheet, soaking him to the core. His carefully treading gait eventually became a frenzied, haphazard charge through the bush and he became increasingly hoarse from shouting for help. The laceration on his hand seemed to be quite deep, and blood kept dripping onto his clothes and onto the ground, so he wrapped it in the handkerchief he kept in his pocket, and kept bludgeoning onwards, crashing through the bush like a drugged bison. But he soon stopped. Though panicked, his hysteria was not so great as to make him oblivious to the fact that all of a sudden the forest had become deathly quiet, save for the tapping of the rain on the leaves. Not a single cricket chirruped. His skin broke out in gooseflesh, and he stopped breathing in an attempt to hear better, but there was not a sound to be heard, save the rain, which itself was by now easing. It was as if he had all of a sudden become the last living thing on the planet, or at least in the forest. Suddenly, there was a rustle in the undergrowth to his left. He spun around and cocked his gun.

A quenk? he wondered. He thought he might actually cry with relief if he saw one of the hairy little wild pigs snuffling around in the undergrowth, so wired was he.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, attempting to sound commanding but failing.

Something within him knew that the question was pointless, anyway, and more worryingly that whatever was out there wasn’t a quenk. Carrying on as slowly and as quietly as he possibly could in his ultra-tensed state, he strained to see and hear in the blackness. All his previously panic-blunted senses were now honed to razorblade sharpness. His breathing was ragged in his ears and his bleeding hand throbbed rhythmically as his imagination ran amok.

The rustle resumed, and now came from his right, or so he thought. He whipped his head round to see, but it was from behind that he was eventually attacked. It happened all too quickly. He had time only to fire one badly aimed round of his pellet gun into the air before it was knocked out of his hands, and he was thrown to the ground.
Help! he tried to scream, but whatever it was that had floored him was suddenly sitting on top of his chest, forcing all the air out him. Had he had the air to scream, however, it is doubtful whether he would have been able to, for as he looked into the face of the creature now straddling him as if preparing to perform some sort of lewd sex act, he lost part of his mind. Blubbering incoherently, he began flailing his arms wildly, but managed only to land a few lame punches on his assailant’s body. His efforts were rewarded with a bone-crunching back-hand that instantly dazed him and drew blood from his lip. He ceased his futile attack and concentrated on regaining his focus without much success. By then it was too late. His last conscious thought before the creature (woman??) sunk its fetid gob into the depths of his neck was that it had finally stopped raining, the moon had decided to finally peep through the clouds, and that he had shat himself. Moments later, all was black.