Tales from the Icy Gringo

The nightmare

My face crumpled at the fluorescent lighting as I peered across the room. I felt bleary and hollow, wrenched from the depths of sleep. My girlfriend was thrashing on her bed, the sheets coiled tight around her stomach. She must be having a nightmare. She had them sometimes. One time she'd yelled something about the police and pushed me clean out of bed.

A man was inside our cabin. I wondered who it was. It was hard to focus, my eyes were dribbling tears and my face was still scrunched from the light. I could see a bald head, shaved smooth and round, atop a tall lanky frame. Our friend from the sailing trip maybe. Probably borrowing one of the cheap Belizean beers we'd bought from the general store. The one beside the sandy boardwalk that looked like it had been constructed with the debris from a shipwreck.

The bald lanky man moved towards the door. As he passed my girlfriend, she drove the heel of her right foot hard into his jaw. The man's head snapped to the side but continued walking, accepting the violence with a dull indifference. My girlfriend wailed and kicked her legs high in the air, launching a ferocious assault on his chest and head and neck. Bone thumped against bone, against flesh, against cartilage. The bald lanky man absorbed it all, then opened the thin wooden door and left.

It took a while for the screaming to stop and I did nothing to calm it. I sat crouched on the single bed across the room, watching my girlfriends stricken face with foggy detachment. The whole thing was surreal. I felt sorry for our friend. I'd find him later and apologise, explain about my girlfriends nightmares.

It was dark outside. I'd assumed it was mid-morning. Outside the window I could see the truck of a coconut tree illuminated by the light from our window. The one I'd stared at while working on my laptop till 2am. I checked the time. Barely an hour later. No wonder I felt so groggy.

"I thought it was a dog!" My girlfriend's feet were still moving across across the mattress, the adrenaline refusing to believe the danger had passed. She shuddered. "Why didn't you do anything?"

I didn't have an answer so I just walked over to her, almost stepping on my laptop. I must've plugged it in before I went to sleep. Or tried to at least. The cord was about a foot away on the floor.

"Are you okay? Who was that? What's going on?"

The story tumbled out of her. She'd been woken up by a small scratching sound and noticed the door was open. At first she thought it was a dog, we'd seen a lot of strays lounging around on the beach. Most of them pooped out and harmless. She'd closed the door and flipped the latch. The scratching was replaced by a scuffling sound. She turned the light on and sat up in bed, searching the room for the dog that was now certainly locked inside. Almost immediately a man had sprung up at the foot of the bed. The stuff of nightmares. The monster from under the bed.

We spent the rest of the night with the lights off, peeking through the venetian blinds. Beyond the front deck of our cabin there was a clump of coconut trees on the beach. 4 men stared back at us, crouching in the sand.

Eventually, sometime before sunrise, they left. We figured they'd been watching me tapping away on my laptop through the side window. Stupidly I'd been sitting in front of it with the blinds up, the glow from the screen a blaring signal to any and all opportunistic thieves.

Later that day we found sandals outside our door as well as a handful of coins. Footprints in the sand led to the shore and up the beach. Our friend hadn't joined the men behind the coconut trees. Maybe they were unconnected.

After delivering a rambling chaotic version of events to the owner of the cabins, I followed the footprints up the beach. An indignant detective determined to redeem himself.

The footprints eventually led into a narrow gap between two flimsy wooden shacks. I began to question the intelligence of my little quest. What if found the house where the intruder lived, what then? He hadn't stolen anything, the laptop had been forgotten the instant the light came on. I lost my nerve, creeped out by sneaking around between other peoples houses. I scuttled away.

On the way back I saw a dreadlocked teenager I'd met the day before. He had two girls tattooed on the front of each shoulder and when he opened his armpits their legs split apart to reveal enormous tufts of pubic hair. I told him about the man that had broken into our cabin. He shrugged. A junkie probably.

In the afternoon we left by water taxi and caught a bus to the next town. When we arrived it was smothered in darkness. An electrical blackout apparently. We walked in the middle of the street with our backpacks, eyeing the people huddled in the shadows. It did nothing for my girlfriends nerves. It felt as though we'd entered a horror movie set in the wild west.

Eventually we found the hostel mentioned in our guidebook and checked in by candlelight. What was advertised as charming felt menacing in the uncommon darkness. Our host led us to a room where my girlfriend asked if the door had a lock. It didn't. We thanked her anyway and collapsed on the bed, feeling drained by the past 24 hours.

A few minutes later I got up again and barricaded the door with a chest of drawers.