The Big Killing

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The lamplight made huge shadows that loomed and wavered down the warm, bare corridor to Fat Paul’s room. The hotel was silent apart from the loose change and keys in my trousers and my feet on the strip of sisal carpeting over the polished floor. Several rooms had their doors open, sheets piled on the floor in one, the maids slacking with the lack of business during the week. There was a smell of raw sewage that didn’t surprise me after the rain.

Fat Paul’s room was at the end of the corridor, the room on the corner, windows on two sides. The bad smell was getting stronger and changing with sweeter nuances over the sulphur that made my face twitch and my empty stomach sick. The hairs were up on my neck, the sweat cold. I went back down and told the receptionist to find the manager.

The manager was annoyed. He didn’t like problems on a night with no power and with nobody in the rooms. He knew how little money he was making. He changed his tone when he hit the smell in the corridor; in fact, he shut up and got his handkerchief out. He had a master key which I wanted him to use, but his hand was shaking so much I took it and opened up the room.

The stench exploded out of the room, but worse than the smell was the noise. I’d heard that noise on African butchers’ stalls in the market when they flick the black meat with a bloody cloth and with an irritated buzz a skin of flies takes off a foot and relands. That was the first noise. Behind it was something worse. Behind it came the sound of a flap. Something tense and feathery batted the air in the dark. Without thinking, I reached in and turned on the light switch, but the power was still off. I held the lamp in the room and heard the tearing of flesh, and the flap – the flap of a large bird’s wing.

There in the yellow oily light, in the black shadows working their way up the walls, were two vultures. The one with its head down, the other looking up, its whole head covered in blood, black and red in the strange light, as if it had been recently skinned.

The manager’s vomit slapped the polished floor between the carpet and the wall at the same time as the power came back on. Harsh electric light banged on in the corridor and room. The vultures shrieked at the sudden exposure and danced back into the centre of the room, their wings spread. The red-smeared muslin drapes at the windows open to the sea were lifted and twisted almost horizontal to the ceiling by the wind. The floor was covered in blood, the red and black of carnage. The ghastly yellow of Fat Paul’s raw fat quivered as he lay there opened out, mostly naked, his clothes torn off. My vomit, consisting of nothing but soured and burning spirit, joined the manager’s. I retched myself dry and breathless.

We went back downstairs and the manager called the police while the receptionist found me a broom. Back upstairs in 208 the vultures had been joined by a tornado of insects circling the light and speckling the walls. I closed all the shutters but one and beat the vultures out of the room – the two of them screeching, mad, angry, their heads bloodied, their wings heavy. I shut them out and they stayed outside and screeched, scraping their talons on the metal railing of the balcony.

Two of the three bodies in room 208 had been shot. George’s hand was still inside his jacket reaching for his gun. One eye was missing. A large quantity of blood had soaked into his shirt, the jockey tie and the carpet. Kwabena lay with a collapsed wooden table underneath him, one of his large hands over a huge wound in his chest. Fat Paul’s head rested on his shoulder. He had what seemed to be a set of giblets hanging out of his mouth and he’d been opened up the length of his abdomen. Some of his fingers had been sheared off. They lay like cocktail sausages next to him. The ones still attached had no rings on. His gold chain and watch had gone. High up on his chest, against the lighter coffee-coloured skin, I saw the marks that I hadn’t seen on George and Kwabena. The leopard-claw marks. As I closed the door I saw the black hole where Fat Paul’s genitals had been and realized what the giblets were.