Dark Horizons

by Dan Smith

Genres: Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

After caring for his mother in her last days, Alex has gone off round the world - with no plan other than to travel and maybe recapture some of his lost youth. Beginning his travels in Indonesia, the idea of finding himself sounds appealing...but soon, he finds himself in real trouble.

It starts with a bus crash on a terrifying mountain road. Lucky to escape with his life, Alex loses everything else - even his identity. But then he meets Domino, a beautiful girl who takes Alex under her wing. At first it's an intoxicating adventure, but Alex starts to realise that danger seems to follow her around. As they approach the magnificent Lake Toba, and head to the remote community of free spirits that Domino calls home, it seems there's trouble in paradise.

The ideals of the camp seem honourable - a simple life, shared by friends in a beautiful place hidden from the world. But Domino has no answers for the questions that are forming in Alex's mind: Why do the local villagers hate them so much? Why are people leaving the camp in the dead of night? And what are the strange shapes lurking just beyond the clearing?

A taut, atmospheric and emotive thriller, DARK HORIZONS transports you to the lush landscapes of Sumatra, and the twisted ideals and deadly secrets lying in wait there...

(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

I had never before witnessed the exact moment at which life passes from the body; the instant it becomes nothing. With only
twenty-five years behind me, I had collected just a few experiences of death, which I kept hidden in a place I rarely visited.
A neatly dressed body lying in the velvety folds of fabric in the confines of a carefully chosen box. The wax-like effect
of once living skin now tended by the mortician’s expert hands. I had stared down at the sunken features of a mother I had
loved and cared for; empty now, reduced to a motionless collection of skin and wasted bone. Mourners dressed in black. Sombre
faces, hands shaken, drinks taken. These were my experiences of death. I had participated in the act of farewell, but I had
never seen that moment. The exact moment at which life evaporates.


But I saw it that day. Sprawled on my stomach, with my head turned to one side, pressed to the hot tarmac, I watched life
disappear. I saw it vanish as if it had never existed, leaving nothing but the ruined shell it once inhabited.


For a while before I opened my eyes, I was content to be where I was. The sun warm on my back, the air quiet around me. My
head was filled with a pleasant, bleary feeling, as if I were just waking from a long, deep sleep. But the silence was punctuated
by the first stunned groan, and as consciousness clawed its way back into my mind, I became more aware of the sounds around
me.


A child crying. A man moaning, or perhaps it was a woman, it was hard to tell. Both, maybe. More than one person. More than two. Then the world popped into focus and I heard many
people. Many voices. Shouting, crying, screaming. The sound of twisted metal settling into place.


I opened my eyes, alarmed that I could see nothing more than a blur of light around the periphery of what I should be looking
at. My whole body was numb. A wave of nausea swept over me and I retched. Disorientated and muddled, I was shamed as my stomach
heaved and I vomited so publicly.


Blinking hard, I tried to move but was unable to do more than shuffle a few inches before another wave of nausea came over
me. I closed my eyes tight and fought the feeling, pushing it back down.


When I opened them again, the world came to me in a bright flash of light and colour. The first thing I saw was the bubbles
of tarmac, which had bloated and popped under the intense heat of the sun. A smell of oil and petrol crept into my nostrils
and clawed into my lungs, making me retch again, forcing me to fight it. I wriggled my fingers, moved my hands, brought my
arms up towards my face. I planted my palms on the road, trying to push myself up, but the effort was too great, so I let
my head fall back onto the warm tarmac and shifted my eyes to take in the scene around me.


I’d been lucky, that much was clear. I had survived, but others had not been so fortunate. An old woman was facing me, her
mouth opening and closing, her voice producing little more than a weak, breathy moaning. Blood ran from her nose and formed
tributaries as it slid into the wrinkles around her lips and chin. Her eyes were wide, her hand outstretched towards me as
if she knew she was dying but refused to relinquish her life without the touch of another human being. To me, she was an unfamiliar
face in an unfamiliar land. Her skin was different from mine, her eyes were not shaped like my own, and our culture was not
shared. Yet there are some things that we all have in common. No one truly wants to die alone.


I watched her for a moment, keeping my eyes on hers, summoning my strength, then I manoeuvred my right arm up and reached across to take her hand. But she was too far away. There
was a space of an inch or so between the tips of our fingers, and yet we continued to stretch towards each other, desperate
for that last moment of human contact.


I began to pull myself towards her, dragging my weight along the tarmac so that I could take her hand. I struggled to close
the gap between us, seeing that she was unable to move. The weight of the bus pinning her to the road was far too great.


Around us, the sounds of suffering grew. The ringing in my ears and the fuzziness in my head was dissipating, and my eyes
didn’t hurt so much any more. I tried not to listen to the creaking metal, the screaming, the crying, the moaning. I tried
to ignore the smell of oil and petrol and blood that saturated the thick, hot air. I tried not to notice the other people
around me. The dead, the dying and the dismembered. I tried only to concentrate on the old woman, her mouth opening and closing
like a fish left to die in the sun, her final ounce of strength channelled into the act of stretching her fingers towards
mine. I pulled myself closer and grasped her hand, squeezing it so that I felt the bones rubbing together beneath her thin,
leathery skin. Old life and new life.


She squeezed my hand in return, closed her eyes in relief, then opened them again and looked at me.

And that was the moment. A life-changing moment. The moment when her deep brown eyes emptied in front of me as if her body were a
vessel and her life were a liquid that had been poured from her. Her eyes died. One moment they were alive and a person lived
behind them. A woman with memories, a place in the world, a purpose. And the next she was just lifeless skin and bone and
flesh. In an instant she had changed from something of incredible value to something of no importance at all.


I was still holding the old woman’s hand when I forced myself to look around once more.

The bus in which I’d been travelling was lying on its side, its rusted orange and green markings looking up at the cloudless
azure sky. Its nose was crumpled, the windscreen shattered into crushed ice spread across the soft tarmac. Skewed at an angle
in the dirt at the side of the road was another large vehicle, this one a truck. The cab had come away from the flatbed.


Seeing the rotting monstrosities like this reminded me of the moment they had collided. I’d been sitting at the front of the
bus, in the ‘death seat’ as I have since heard it called. After waiting almost four hours in the terminal in Medan, and after
two failed attempts to board other buses, I had followed the crowd onto this ill-fated vehicle, only to find myself pushed
down into the backless seat beside the driver, my face only inches from the windscreen.


I’d heard that bus travel in Indonesia was a game of Russian roulette, but I hadn’t expected to find myself in such a position
on my first day in the country – in an overcrowded bus, surrounded by a foreign language, baskets of chickens, screaming babies,
sitting beside a driver for whom life was a race. For an hour I’d tuned out the whining, high-pitched eastern singing that
blasted from the internal speakers. I’d persuaded myself not to care that some travellers were actually outside the bus, clinging to the sills around the windows and the roof-rack. I’d ignored the open door beside me and I’d tried
not to think about what would happen if the bus were to come to a sudden and terrifying stop. But I was certain that of all
the passengers in the bus, I would be the first to die.


As it happened, though, I was wrong. Our collision was not head on, as I’d expected it to be. Travelling with my eyes half
open, I’d assumed that when the impact came, as it surely would, it would be at the moment when our driver made one of his
reckless overtaking attempts – at high speed round a blind corner, giving only a toot of his horn to indicate he was on his
way. I was wrong. Our contact came, in fact, at a fork in the road, and the oncoming Mitsubishi truck hit us at the front side, knocking me from my seat, propelling me through the open door before the bus twisted, slid, turned and toppled.


The people who had been clinging to the near side of the bus were crushed immediately, leaving a ragged red stain across the
potholed grey tarmac as the vehicle slid to its final resting place.


I could see the tide left by the runaway bus. It was a gruesome wake of crushed bodies, dismembered limbs, blood drying in
the sun.


I lingered over the sight for longer than I wanted to, unable to take my eyes from it. I wanted nothing more than to rub it
from my mind, to reach inside my head and disinfect such a view, but I was compelled to look. I’d never seen such a thing
before. I imagined that it was how it might look if a bomb had exploded. Bodies separated from limbs. A head. An arm. A leg
protruding from beneath the overturned bus. A man whose lower body was so crushed that he had split, burst like a wet balloon,
and his viscera had spilled onto the road. The flies had already begun to feast on the shiny mass of grey and red that had
emptied from him.


I turned away and looked back at the old woman, then I forced my arms to move, pushed myself up onto my elbows, brought my
legs around and dragged myself into a sitting position.


My head swam as I scanned around me. Chickens running in the road. People strewn all about. Thirty, thirty-five bodies that
I could see. Many of them dead. One or two people were dragging survivors away from the wreck. Others were wandering in a
dazed stupor as they searched for relatives.


At the side of the road, a few onlookers, unable or unwilling to help.

People’s belongings, too, were scattered around the wreckage. A suitcase burst open, clothes distributed across the tarmac.
A shoe. A basket full of chickens, intact. A soft-drinks crate containing only glass and the last fizz of what had been contained
within. My backpack, bright blue, spotted with blood. It held everything I’d brought with me except my passport and the money, which I kept hidden beneath my shirt in a thin canvas belt.


I stared at my backpack, trying to focus on it. It had made it all the way here from England. From a small camping shop on
a steep street in Newcastle. I’d bought it on a wet Thursday afternoon, the sun already set, the streetlights on and blurred
behind the rain. A cold, wet, ordinary afternoon marked by the purchase of a bright blue rucksack that was to be my travelling
companion for the months to come.


Only now it was lying on a bloodied road under an intense sun in an alien world.

A motorbike passed me, its engine chugging as it made its way around the wreckage. The rider weaved in and out of the people,
the body parts, scanning, witnessing, then picking up speed and heading back onto the open road. Somebody had somewhere to
go and a crash wasn’t going to stop them from getting there. They’d seen it before and they would see it again.


I tried to get to my feet, but once more the nausea surged over me and I waited for it to subside before I began shuffling
towards my backpack. My one symbol of home. The only thing I had that made me who I was. I kept my eyes on it, focusing on
nothing other than the bright blue canvas.


On my hands and knees, I made my way past the old woman, not looking down at her as I struggled forwards, keeping my eyes
only on the bag, until I was distracted by a young boy who came into my peripheral vision, making me turn my head to follow
the movement. The boy, maybe twelve years old, had come from the side of the road where a small gathering of people had grouped
to stare, none of them making any effort to come to my assistance. He stepped over a piece of debris that lay between me and
my goal, then headed for my backpack. He stopped beside it, glancing across at me before bending at the waist and picking
it up. He felt its weight, and then used both hands to swing it round and drape it over his back. He hunched under its load
as he began to move away. I tried to call out to him. He was taking my bag. Perhaps he was moving it to a safer location; perhaps he was helping to clear the road. Or perhaps he was just stealing my belongings. Whatever he was
doing, I called out, but my tongue was lazy and my mouth was dry. My confused mind rebelled against me, refusing to send the
right messages to any part of my body. I was unable to stand and now I was unable to speak. The only sound I heard myself
utter was a fumbled one, as if my tongue had grown too large for my mouth.


The boy stopped and stared at me, the way I mouthed my words, the way I held out one hand in protest. He watched me for a
moment, then came towards me. He had seen sense. He realised I was trying to tell him the rucksack was mine.


I lowered my arm, fell back onto my knees and waited for the boy to come closer. When he reached me, he placed the backpack
on the ground and squatted beside me. He waved a hand in front of my face and I tried to smile, nodding like an idiot. The
boy looked around, glancing up at the people who’d gathered to survey the mayhem, then at the mayhem itself. When his eyes
came back to mine, he reached down and took my hand. He lifted my arm, slipped my watch from my wrist and put it round his
own. He smiled at me before standing again and slinging my backpack over his shoulder.


I stared, helpless, as the boy disappeared among the spectators.

I slumped, my shoulders sagging under the weight of my head, and I felt a mesh of darkness creeping across my mind. There
was pain behind my eyes, which reached up and spread its fingers around the top of my brain, squeezing in rhythmic pulses,
tightening its grip. I felt woozy again, the sounds of the crash fading in and out. I struggled to a sitting position, leaned
back against whatever was there to support me. My vision began to swim and I closed my eyes, wanting to stay right there,
curl up and go to sleep. I wanted to enjoy the warmth of the sun, to find a comfortable spot to lie in.


I felt a tugging at my feet and opened my eyes enough to allow a little light to needle in. Everything seemed brighter than it ought to be, the glare from the sun forcing its way into my eyes, shaded only by the figure crouched at my feet,
tugging my shoes from me.


Then a voice, shouting in a language I didn’t understand. Nasal, foreign, not sounding like words at all, but more like a
staccato attack of consonants and vowels being fired from a rifle. The tugging at my feet stopped, my shoes slipped away,
and the shadowy figure disappeared from view, replaced by another image, this one looming close to me, running a hand over
my head.


An angel. An earth-bound angel, or a heaven-bound one, I wasn’t sure, but an angel nonetheless. She took my head on her lap
and she lifted a bottle to my lips. I drank the warm, sour water, grateful for the liquid on my parched and raw throat. I
complied with her every touch when she moved me onto my side, brought my legs up and turned my head. I let her manipulate
me and move me, and then my mind slipped away into the abyss as she ran her hand across my forehead and spoke in her soothing
tone. Then, darkness.


A warm breeze on my face. A large ceiling fan above me, churning the air over my head, wafting the smell of disease and affliction,
swirling it around me. The blades spinning without sound, the stalk swivelling in its fixing.


I watched the predetermined motion of the fan, allowing my eyes to adjust to the afternoon light, collecting my thoughts into
a coherent pattern. I’d been in a crash. I remembered that. I remembered the old woman, and the angel, too. Although, she
couldn’t have been an angel because I wasn’t dead. At least, I didn’t think so.


I moved my toes against restrictive sheets which were pulled tight across me and tucked into either side of the iron bed.
I pushed my feet up, loosening the stiff cotton, giving myself room to move. I looked around at the other beds in the ward.
Ten in total. Five on my side and five on the other. All occupied.


To my left, a man with a bandage across one eye, the centre of the gauze rusted brown with old blood. To my right, a man with
one of his legs kept from under the sheets, the limb wrapped in bandages, again with the same coloured stain seeping through
the cream material. All of the other beds were occupied by men in similar states of disrepair. Bandages and stains seemed
to be the requirement for accommodation in this particular ward, and I found myself lifting a hand to check for injuries.
Sure enough, the top of my head was bandaged.


I pushed up, manoeuvring into something close to a sitting position and studied my surroundings. A plain ward, with white walls and a green painted concrete floor. No tiles, nothing
fancy, everything functional. The smell of full bedpans evaporating in the tepid air. Ten iron beds with tight white sheets.
Two windows on the opposite side of the room, both filled with green mosquito netting, the shutters thrown open to the day.
I could see a glimpse of foliage outside, the top of a tree which might have been a palm. The mosquito netting gave everything
outside a strange fuzzy hue.


None of the men in the other beds was talking. They either slept or sat and stared. The man beside me, the one with the bandaged
face, caught my eye as I looked around the room, and he smiled, nodding his head once. ‘Salamat siang.’

I processed the words, remembering them from the phrase book I’d bought before leaving England just a day or two ago. I waited
for them to digest, turned the sounds into written words inside my mind, searched for the translation as I remembered it from
the pages of the book. Once that was done, I returned the words, pronouncing them as best as I knew how.


‘Salamat siang,’ I replied. Good afternoon. A polite formality, but contact was made.


The man smiled at me again, ‘Ah, salamat siang,’ he said again, giving me a thumbs up before launching into another sentence, which, to me, was nothing more than a jumbled
collection of sounds.


The brown stain in the centre of his bandage was looking more and more like a strange and sinister eye, so I tried to concentrate
on his good one.


I held up my hands. ‘Saya … tidak … bisa … bicara … bahasa … Indonesia,’ I said with my best accent, telling him I couldn’t speak his language.


He stopped talking and nodded knowingly. ‘Baik, baik.’

After that we just looked at each other, smiling and nodding, sharing the common experience of being strapped beneath tight
sheets with bandages wrapped around a part of our body.


Then he had a thought. He leaned across and offered me his hand. ‘Muklas,’ he said. ‘I Muklas.’

I took his hand, surprised at his limp grip. ‘Alex,’ I told him. ‘Saya Alex.’


Once again we fell into an awkward state of smiling and nodding before his face lit up again as if he’d come to a sudden and
significant conclusion. He took a hand of small bananas from his bedside table and ripped one from the bunch. He passed it
to me saying, ‘Pisang. Pisang tuju. Ba-na-na.’


I took it from him. ‘Terima kasi’ – thank you – words I’d committed to heart – and opened it immediately, my stomach grabbing for the food. It occurred to
me at that precise moment, though, that I didn’t know where I was, nor how long I had been there.


It was a strange realisation that dropped into me like a weight, especially when I remembered the fate of my rucksack. I stopped,
with the banana touching my lips, and I put my free hand to my waist where my money-belt had been.


Gone.

I dropped the fruit on the sheets and turned to check the table beside my bed. I leaned down to open the small door, feeling
the blood racing to my head where it pumped and pounded, beating in my ears. The cupboard behind the door was empty. The weight
that had dropped into my stomach began to mutate. It was no longer just a weight, it was now a living thing, which was expanding
and rising inside me, threatening to cause panic in every cell of my body.


The man beside me was speaking again but his voice sounded different as my breathing quickened. I had lost everything that
gave me any identity. I had lost myself. Everything.


I wrestled with the constricting sheets and swung my legs from the bed. My ankles skinny and pale, dangling from the mattress
as I lowered my feet onto the floor. The glossy paint covering the concrete was cold under my soles as I pushed myself up
to stand. I crossed the ward as quickly as I was able to, my head numb and the sickness returning to my stomach. I didn’t know where I was going or what I would do, but I needed to do something. My clothes had been taken from me, somebody
must have undressed me, put the gown over me, and that meant someone must know where my belongings were. My money and my passport.
Without them I was nobody.


I leaned on the swinging doors, pushed my way into the corridor and stopped. I put out a hand, leaning against the wall for
support, and looked around. One side of the long hallway was lined with beds and trolleys, many of them old and broken, all
of them full. Men and women, some with limbs missing, blood draining from their bodies as ill-equipped doctors and nurses
struggled to help them. The other wall of the corridor provided a place to lean on for yet more patients. They were sitting
in the stifling heat, no fans above their heads to break the air.


I stayed where I was, taking it all in, the sounds and the smells and the sights overloading my mind. I put my free hand over
my eyes, my head swimming, wondering where I was and what I was going to do. When I took it away again, a middleaged man in
a long white coat was standing before me. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke, but his words meant nothing. I shook my
head. ‘I don’t understand.’


He tried to look sympathetic, nodding, still talking, but the look in his eyes was unfamiliar. His expressions were not like
those I was used to. I tried to move away from him, but he smiled, taking my arm.


‘No.’ I snatched away. ‘No. I need to … I need to …’ I needed my life back. I needed to know where I was, but I didn’t know
how to ask him and he didn’t know how to tell me.


Once again he reached out and took my arm, a reassuring look that I recognised.

‘No.’ I pulled away again, but with less conviction this time. He was trying to help. So I held up my hand and nodded, letting
him take me and lead me back into the ward. He helped me to my bed and waited until I was beneath my sheets before he held
out both hands, palms towards me.


‘You want me to stay?’ I asked him. ‘Wait here, is that it? You want me to wait here?’

He backed away, still keeping his hands up, making small movements with them, reinforcing the idea that he wanted me to wait.

So I waited.

For how long, I don’t know. From time to time I glanced at my wrist, forgetting that my watch had been taken from me on the
road. So I waited a while longer, and a while longer still, staring at the door, wondering when the doctor was going to return,
hoping he would bring my identity with him.


I ignored Muklas, the man in the bed beside mine. I avoided any contact with him, keeping all my attention on the swinging
door.


When the doctor returned, he was not alone. This time he was accompanied by the angel I had seen on the road. But of course,
she wasn’t an angel. She was quite real, and she brought with her a breath of fresh air, a relief and a beauty that made her
the next best thing to an angel.


Everything around me was alien. I knew little of the language and the customs. These were things I had intended to experience
first-hand, to soak up and infuse into my consciousness. I came here hoping that I would grow and find myself in the way I’d
heard other travellers speak of. I’d intended to broaden my horizons, unsuspecting of how dark those horizons were going to
be. If I had known that my journey was to begin and end in death, perhaps I would never have stepped foot from my empty home.


I imagined I’d return from my travels a different person. More rounded and experienced. A bigger person. I envisioned an improved me; someone who would somehow stand out from others because I carried a knowing and accomplished
air, but so far I had reached no further than an hour or so beyond my first foreign airport. My intentions had been derailed
by a manic driver and an incredible road system where the only law was the unwritten nasib saja. Only fate. A law that allowed overtaking on blind corners because if it was your time to go, it was your time to go and there
was nothing anybody could do about it. When your time was up, Allah would take you.


So, instead of the worldly-wise individual I was hoping to become, I’d been obstructed at my first attempt. I was left as
myself. An inexperienced, self-conscious individual who’d had just enough confidence to buy a ticket and tell the handful
of people he knew that he intended to travel. I’d even managed to surprise myself by boarding the plane in England and making it all the way across the world.


That’s why she was a godsend. She wasn’t a familiar face, but at the same time she was a familiar face. She had the kind of face I was accustomed to seeing. She looked more like me. I knew, even before she opened
her mouth, that she would speak the same language as I did.


She had an open and relaxed manner about her, not a trace of affectation or self-consciousness. An air that suggested overwhelming
confidence in herself. She came in without much more than a glance around the room, unperturbed by her surroundings.


‘How ya feeling?’ she asked, putting down her bag and sitting on the bed, turning towards me, her body close to my waist.

‘You know what happened to my stuff ?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’ She lifted her bag onto her lap and took out my most precious belonging. ‘Managed to save it for you,’ she said. ‘I
was there when they took your kit off, got you all cleaned up.’ Her eyes slipped from mine, an unwitting glance along my body.
‘The clothes, they’re gone, but this …’ She handed me the belt that I’d kept hidden under my shirt, and I immediately opened
the pockets, relieved to see everything still inside. Cash, cards, passport.


‘I used some of the cash,’ she said, provoking no reaction from me. I was just happy to see the essentials were still present.
I was me again.


‘It was the only way to get you a bed,’ she went on. ‘Money does a lot of talking here, you’ll learn that quick enough. You
can have anything you want, long as you got the cash to pay for it.’


‘Thanks,’ I said, zipping the pocket, and putting the belt on top of the sheet, gripping one end of it in a tight fist.

‘Quite a fuckin’ bump we had there, wasn’t it?’ If she’d been disturbed by the experience, she didn’t show it. She just smiled,
reached up to deal with a stray hair that had crept round to hang over her forehead and across her right eye. It was fair but not platinum; a very light golden-brown, sun-kissed, waved
and touching her shoulders. Like her clear brown skin, it had seen sunshine and felt fresh air. Beside hers, my own skin was
pale, as if I’d been hiding from the world, holed up in a sunless place.


I nodded. ‘Yeah. Quite a bump.’ A bump that had separated people into individual parts. A bump that had left a stain of blood
and viscera in its wake. She must have seen the expression on my face, or perhaps she felt the darkness of my thoughts, because
she put a hand on mine.


‘Don’t think about it,’ she said. ‘You’ll get used to it. Happens all the time round here.’

I looked down at her hand. Her brown skin on my pale skin. Like the old woman at the crash, only this girl’s fingers were
slender and strong, the knuckles not protruding like my own. Her short nails decorated with green varnish, a silver ring on
her thumb. Blonde downy hairs on her forearms, bleached by the sun and standing out against her tan. She squeezed my hand
in a familiar way. As if we knew each other.


‘You were on the bus, too?’ I asked, already feeling renewed. She had returned my identity and given