“Turn left,” he said.
“It’s saying straight ahead,” Harry countered.
“The machine doesn’t know what it’s talking about. If we hadn’t followed it in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
And then a light blinked on in the woodland, straight ahead of them. It was about a quarter of a mile away, very tiny, almost concealed by the thick spread of the trees.
“There’s something there,” Harry said.
“What . . . ?” Jason squinted into the darkness.
“It must be a house or something. We can ask the way.”
“At—the—crossroads—continue—straight—over,” the navigation urged them. The voice sounded almost cheerful. Why had it repeated itself, Jason wondered, when they weren’t even moving?
But Harry needed no further prompting. He changed gears and the BMW moved forward again, through the gate and onto the track with the barbed wire along the side. As they rolled forward, the trees thinned out a little. Somehow the moon had finally broken through and they saw fields spreading out, what looked like rough farmland that was completely surrounded by the forest. Ahead of them, a cluster of buildings sprang up, made of red brick with weeds and ivy climbing up the guttering. They passed an abandoned tractor, a rusting coil—more barbed wire. The light seemed to have vanished and they wondered if they had really seen it. Whatever this place was, it looked abandoned.
They turned a corner and there, once again, was the light, coming from an open barn on the other side of a yard. A tall, uneven chimney had been built behind the barn, stretching high above it. And someone was burning something. Thick black smoke rose into the night, and even with the windows closed, Jason could smell meat that was being roasted and smoked at the same time. They drove through a second gate, this one made of steel and brand-new. There was a vehicle parked to one side, a refrigerated truck that looked old but in better repair, at least, than the tractor. Jason saw some words painted in red along one side.
AUNT MARIGOLD’S SMOKED MEAT AND BLACK PUDDING
100% organic. Made only from the freshest ingredients.
Somewhere, a dog barked. Behind them, Jason heard a clang as the steel gate closed and, just for a moment, he thought of Dionaea muscipula. The Venus flytraps that he had seen in Aldeburgh.
Harry pulled up in front of the barn. He didn’t turn the key but the BMW stalled and they came to a halt. The two boys got out. The night air was very cold. They could feel it running through their hair, stroking the back of their necks.
This was a pork farm. It had to be. There was an oven burning at the back of the barn and the floor was covered with straw, which was splattered with blood that had dripped down from the carcasses hanging on hooks attached to wooden beams. But the carcasses didn’t look as if they had come from pigs. They didn’t look like any animal Jason had ever seen. He saw a leg severed just above the knee. What might have been a shoulder. And, on another hook, an arm. It might have been made of plastic, but Jason knew that it wasn’t. It had been well smoked in the oven. The arm had had a bright red marking right on the shoulder.
A heart—and a name.
Romeo.
Jason felt his blood freeze. There was a rushing in his ears.
A woman appeared, coming out of the barn toward them. She had long silver hair, a yellow face and gray lips that were partly open, revealing teeth that could have come from the cemetery. She was wearing a dirty green apron that hung all the way to her feet. The apron was smeared with old blood. She lifted a hand to wipe her mouth with her sleeve and Jason saw a jagged knife, also bloodstained. Harry was standing dead still. He had gone white. Jason was surprised to see that Haz was crying. But Jason was crying too. He knew what this was. He knew where they were.
The woman was not alone. A man—huge and bearded —had appeared behind the car, holding a length of filthy rope, the sort you might use to tie down animals. Jason caught sight of him in the side mirror. Then the woman reached them.
Her eyes blazed and she smiled at the two boys. Her voice was shrill and high-pitched. “You—have—arrived,” she said.
THE COBRA
The ancient taxi with its scratched paint and dusty windows rattled to a halt and the engine cut out. They had parked on a narrow street, next to a shop selling lanterns, chairs, boxes and chessboards, all of which were hanging off the front wall and spilling onto the pavement.
“Is this it?” Charles Atchley demanded.
“his is it,” the driver agreed with a smile.
“But it’s not a hotel!” Charles whined.
“It’s a riad,” his mother explained. “It’s not quite the same thing.”
The truth was that Charles Atchley had never wanted to go to Marrakesh. It might be a vacation abroad, but from what he had heard, the capital of Morocco would be hot and sweaty with no beaches, no McDonald’s, no amusement parks and nothing much to do at the hotel except sit and read. And as he hated books, what was the point of that? Worse still, the food would be strange, the people would speak little or no English, there would be flies everywhere and he would have to spend hours either walking through ruins or struggling up the Atlas Mountains. All in all, he would much rather have stayed at home.
But as usual, of course, he was going to have no choice. Charles was fifteen years old, the only son of Rupert Atchley, a successful barrister. His mother, Noreen Atchley, produced illustrations for women’s magazines. The three of them lived in a house in Wimbledon, south London, and Charles went to a local school where he did just enough work to stay out of trouble but not enough to make any real progress. That was the sort of boy he was. You could never point your finger at him and say that he was actually bad. But he was undoubtedly spoiled and really had no interests outside of fast food, computer games and Manchester United. Left to himself, he would have stayed in bed until twelve and then watched television all afternoon, perhaps with a plate of fried chicken and fries balanced on his knees.
It was hardly surprising that he was rather overweight. Again, he wasn’t exactly fat. He just looked unhealthy, with ginger hair that he never brushed and a scattering of acne that moved—almost liked clock hands—around his face. He liked to wear tracksuit pants and baggy T-shirts, and he could even make his school uniform look shabby and out of shape. It must also be said that he was something of a bully. There had been one or two incidents with some of the younger boys at the school, but he had been clever enough to avoid responsibility, and although the teachers had their suspicions, so far they’d never had enough evidence to nail him down.
His mother and father adored him and turned a blind eye to most of his faults. Noreen had once waited in line all night to make sure he was the first boy on the street with a PlayStation 3, and Rupert was certainly overgenerous with the pocket money. Whatever Charles wanted, Charles usually got, even if he did have to stamp his feet a bit to get it.
It was only when it came to vacations, or any decision that affected the whole family, that his parents would insist on having their own way. After all, they would argue, they both worked hard—and they were the ones who were paying. So like it or not (and the answer was definitely not), Charles had been dragged to no fewer than six art galleries in Rome, to a whole selection of dreary chateaus in the Loire, to far too many shops in New York, and now it seemed he would just have to put up with whatever horrors Marrakesh had in store.
Even the airport seemed to confirm his worst fears. It consisted of a single, rather old-fashioned building that wouldn’t have looked like an airport at all but for the runway outside. And it was hot. The breeze seemed to be blowing out of some enormous hand drier. It almost burned his skin and he was sweating and irritable long before the bags turned up—last, of course—on the single carousel.
His mood got no better in the taxi on the way to the city. His first impression of Marrakesh was of a vast cluster of low redbrick buildings all jammed together inside an ugly wall. Palm trees sprouted out of the rubble, but they somehow failed to make
the place any more appealing. The traffic was terrible and it didn’t help that the airconditioning inside the taxi wasn’t working. It was all the more annoying that both his parents were enchanted by what they saw.
“It’s so exotic!” his mother exclaimed, peering out of the window. “And listen to that!”
From a high, slender tower—a minaret—the high-pitched voice of an imam was echoing across the city.
“Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. . . . Ashhadu an la Ilah ila Allah. . . .”
“What’s that racket?” Charles demanded.
His father, sitting in the front seat, twisted around. He had noticed the driver frowning next to him. “It’s not a racket, Charlie,” he explained. “You should be more respectful. It’s the Muslim call to prayer.”
“Well, I hope it doesn’t go on too long,” Charles muttered.
And now the hotel.
The Riad El Fenn was about halfway down the alley. A large wooden door opened into a dark, cool hallway with deep red walls and a chessboard floor. A bowl of white roses had been arranged in a vase on a low Arabstyle table, and there were about fifty pairs of slippers—all of them different colors—spread out for guests who preferred not to wear shoes. From the hall, a passageway led to an inner courtyard with doors on all sides and four orange trees forming a tangled square in the middle.
Noreen had been right. The riad was more like a house than a hotel, with half a dozen different courtyards connected by a maze of stairs and corridors. Even after several days, Charles would still have difficulty finding his way around. There wasn’t what he would have called a swimming pool here, although every courtyard had its own plunge pool, like something you might imagine in an Arabian palace, just big enough for five or six strokes from end to end. There were flowers everywhere, scenting the air and giving a sense of cool after the dust and heat of the city. And unlike a hotel, all the rooms were different. Some were modern. Some were old. All of them had a little surprise of their own.
Charles was sleeping next door to his parents in a turquoise room with a keyhole-shaped door and antique wooden latticework all around his bed. His bathroom was huge, with gray stone walls, a little like a cell in a monastery only with a shower at one end and, at the other, a bath almost big enough to swim in. There were more roses on a table and rose petals scattered over the bed. His parents had almost fainted with pleasure when they saw it. But the first thing that Charles had noticed was—no TV! No plasma screen. No flat screen. Not even a portable. He wondered how he was going to survive.
They had lunch together on the roof. That was another strange thing. The riad didn’t seem to have a proper dining room. Everyone ate sitting on low cushions, at tables shielded from the sun by a canopy that stretched from one end of the roof to the other. Charles could barely recognize any of the food. There was some sort of bean salad and pieces of lamb cooked in a sauce, but there wasn’t anything he actually wanted to eat.
His parents were in raptures.
“This is the most wonderful place!” Noreen exclaimed. “It’s so beautiful. And so peaceful! I can’t wait to get out my watercolors.”
“The food is sensational,” Rupert added, helping himself to a spoonful of couscous, which was a local specialty.
“Look at those flowers!” Noreen had a new digital camera and quickly focused it on a terra-cotta pot on the other side of the roof. She had taken at least a hundred pictures and they had only been there an hour.
“More wine!” Rupert lifted his glass and a waiter appeared almost at once, carrying a bottle fresh from the ice bucket.
What was even worse than all this was that, as Charles discovered, all the other guests were equally delighted by the Riad El Fenn. They swam in the pools, drank in the courtyards, took steam baths and massages in the warm, scented air of the hammam and chatted until midnight, sitting under the stars as if they had known each other all their lives. It didn’t help that Charles was the youngest person there. One of the couples had two sixteen-year-olds, but the three of them didn’t get along, so Charles was largely left on his own.
He spent the next twenty-four hours getting his revenge on the riad in all sorts of mean and spiteful ways. He jumbled up all the slippers and broke the leaves off the plants. He poured a glass of lemonade into one of the plunge pools. He even scribbled his name on a painting hanging up in one of the hallways. None of this helped the situation at all. In fact, nobody even mentioned what he’d done, which, in a way, made him even more annoyed.
And then, one evening, the Atchleys visited the souq.
This was the covered market that sprawled across the heart of the city with hundreds of little shops selling rugs, slippers, glasses, handbags, spices, plates and bowls, but nothing—as far as Charles could see—that anyone would actually want to buy. He was tired and footsore by the time they came out, Noreen now wearing a pair of ridiculous earrings that Rupert had bought for her at probably ten times the correct price.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked, examining herself in the mirror.
“I think they’re horrible,” Charles replied.
“No need to be like that!” Rupert said. “Come on. Let’s go to the main square. With a bit of luck we might see the cobras.”
The main square—it was called the Djemaa el-Fna—was beyond the souq, in the old part of town, a huge open area surrounded by hotels and restaurants with long balconies and staircases leading up to crowded rooftops. It was just getting dark and the square was a fantastic sight with thousands of people milling around and food stalls with flames sparking and charcoal glowing and smoke climbing slowly into the sky. There were entertainers everywhere—magicians and acrobats, jugglers and story-tellers—with fifty musicians competing with each other to make themselves heard above the din.
And there were the snake charmers. There were at least half a dozen of them, each with their own basket, their own pipe, their own separate crowd, the sounds of their music fighting with each other in the open space. The Atchleys had moved toward the one nearest to them, on the very edge of the square, almost lost in the shadows. It was strange how set apart he was from the others, almost as if he didn’t want anyone to watch him—or maybe it was the other snake charmers who didn’t want him anywhere near them. Certainly, he had attracted fewer spectators than the rest of them. Only seven or eight people stood watching as the Atchleys approached.
Even so, the solitary snake charmer looked exactly like a snake charmer should, sitting cross-legged on a little mat in front of a round wicker basket. He was playing on a pipe, a dark, slender instrument that reminded Charles of the recorder that had once been forced upon him at school, although the sound it made was harder and more sinuous. He played for a moment and then Noreen gasped, her hand fluttering to her throat. A cobra suddenly appeared, silk-like and deadly, rising out of the basket and swaying just a few inches away from the pipe as the music continued.
The Atchleys pushed their way to the front so that Noreen could take another half a dozen photographs, the flashbulb briefly fighting against the approaching night. Rupert’s mouth was hanging open. He had gotten a sunburn during the afternoon and his neck seemed to be glowing as much as the streetlamps. Charles couldn’t help thinking how stupid they both looked. And as for the snake charmer . . .
He was a small man, at least sixty, with very dark skin, gray stubble on his cheeks and a hooked nose. He was wearing a long white robe with a waistcoat and loose-fitting cotton trousers. His feet were bare and his toes looked like pieces of old, gnarled wood. Charles only glanced at him briefly. He was much more interested in the snake, which certainly looked vicious enough with its flared hood, its spitting tongue, its tiny, evil eyes. It really did seem to be hypnotized, totally controlled by the music that wove an invisible pattern around its head.
“It’s extraordinary!” Noreen whispered, afraid to raise her voice in case she broke the spell. “It’s like something in a fairy tale!”
“That’s one of the most venomous snakes
in the world,” Rupert told her. “It’s got enough poison to kill a horse.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to be this close?” Noreen stepped back a pace, suddenly nervous.
“These people know what they’re doing,” Rupert replied. “It takes years of practice. But they know exactly the right tune to play. It’s a bit like magic. But the snake will dance all night if they want it to.”
“That’s not true, Dad,” Charles interrupted in a loud voice. “There’s no magic and the snake isn’t dancing. It’s not dangerous. It’s actually half asleep.”
Both Rupert and Noreen turned to look at their son, who was standing with his arms crossed and a smug smile on his face. Some of the people in the crowd had also overheard him and were turning to hear what he had to say.
“I saw a program about it on TV,” he went on. “The snake can’t even hear the music. The only reason it’s swaying is because it’s following the movement of the pipe. And actually, cobras are very timid. They’re not dangerous at all.”
“But look at it, darling!” Noreen exclaimed. “It looks like it’s about to attack!”
“Spreading its hood is just a way of defending itself,” Charles explained. “It would much rather be back in its basket. And it probably doesn’t have any poison in it anyway. The snake charmer will have made sure it was sucked out before he began.”
“Young man, you are quite mistaken!”
Charles looked around to see who had spoken and was surprised to discover that it was the snake charmer himself. The old man had lowered the pipe from his lips and the cobra immediately disappeared back into the basket. The few spectators who remained drifted away without giving any money. Suddenly the Atchleys were on their own.
“The art of the snake charmer is an ancient one,” the man continued. It was hard for the Atchleys to believe that such an old and Arab-looking man could not only speak English but speak it so well. He had a very cultivated accent, which sounded completely unlikely coming from those yellowed teeth and cracked lips, but he spoke very slowly, as if remembering a lesson taught years ago. “My father was a snake charmer and his father too. I learned the skill when I was six years old. And sometimes I learned from my mistakes . . .” He held out his arm and as his sleeve fell back, the Atchleys saw an ugly crescentshaped scar that could have been stamped into his flesh. “The bite would have killed me had my father not had a vial of antivenom,” the old man continued. “Even so, I was ill for months and the mark of the cobra remains with me to this day.”