Tidal Rage by David Evans (best big ereader .TXT) 📗

have used a hair remover the day he left the ship, but none was required, as one had to have hair to remove it. Sebastian left the ship for his thirty-six-hour sabbatical before flying back to San Diego via Heathrow.

He had stood naked in his shower and spread soap and scrubbed vigorously with a scrubbing brush all over his body—under his arms, across his chest, around the pubic area, everywhere. After showering, he had inspected himself and was pleased with the outcome. He was sure the dead skin cells—which accumulate on all human beings and leave identifiable DNA traces when they fall invisibly—had been eradicated and had been washed away down the shower drain.

The day had come; the day he had waited for since Geraldine. Sebastian disembarked in Singapore. He had somehow managed to control his passions on the ship. Some of the men and women had beautiful locks of hair. What he wouldn’t have given to have been able to tear out some of those strands and to gorge himself on it, the screams of the victim just an added pleasure he fantasised about constantly.

Sebastian had taken the train from Singapore, travelling the twelve hours north, until he arrived at the ferry terminal at Butterworth. The ferry would take him off the mainland of Malaysia to Penang, and on to Georgetown on the island. The ferry was the first of the day, and most people would be coming the other way to the mainland, rather than going to the island at this time, so it was relatively quiet.

On arriving at the island, Sebastian then took what passed for a bus to the Batu Ferringhi. It was 5:30 am when he arrived at the central town bus station, which consisted of a couple of sheds with corrugated roofing.

The bus station had a busy outside café that began to service several locals who were having breakfast before going to work. He smelt damp foliage and the unmistakable aroma of fish, along with the acrid stench of sewage, intermingled with the aroma of spices.

On the map, the kampong, Batu Ferringhi, was just off the main street, and offset a couple of hundred yards south of the market on the opposite side.

The market side was very civilized. There were seating areas where the locals drank tea, and local traders were readying their stalls with a variety of live, dead, and inanimate objects to sell.

While the bus station and local market were not precisely what Sebastian would consider American or British standard, they looked comparatively modern after he veered off the main road and onto the tracks into the kampongs. The concrete of the twentieth century ebbed away with every footstep.

The particular kampong Sebastian had chosen was ideal. There was a main road running from the bridge at Gelugor north, as you entered the sub-tropical island to the small town of Batu Ferringhi. The town was on the tourist trail, due to its proximity to one of the best butterfly farms in Asia. There was also the snake temple, and the area had excellent beaches. The road was sporadically littered with tired Seventies-built hotels, along with a few later models.

The light of the morning that welcomed him when he arrived at the bus station struggled to penetrate the canopy of trees on the narrow paths leading to the kampong. Sebastian began to sweat; the heat of the early morning began to intensify. It had reached 28 degrees Celsius before most people in the area had set off to work.

Sebastian had to traverse deep monsoon drains by a small metal ramp among the dead foliage that was on the dried, baked mud track. He heard the melody of monkeys that inhabited the canopies above. Sebastian was now in the jungle, passable jungle with defined trails, but jungle nonetheless.

There was dense foliage that consisted of banana trees, palm trees, and aloe vera and sisal plants, with their sharp, pointed, rigid, needle-type leaves overhanging and impinging on the path. On more than one occasion, Sebastian was stabbed by one tropical plant or another.

The environment did worry Sebastian somewhat. For all his careful planning, he had not been in this type of situation before. His childhood memories differed from the tropical forests he remembered in Thailand. Maybe it was the foliage that gave rise to the overwhelmingly humid conditions. The heat and lack of light in the jungle area were not something he had thought about when planning this. When he entered this jungle, he began to think about other hazards that had not crossed his mind in the planning stage.

Several rhesus monkeys swung overhead and squawked in a threatening manner; they appeared to resent the intruder’s presence into their domain. Sebastian hoped the noise of the monkey’s chattering covered all the sound he was trying not to make.

The route to the kampong, although semi-lit by the rays of the sun that penetrated the canopy in sporadic areas, was cluttered with dead foliage, and the multitude of micro wildlife including beetle and ant varieties. Sebastian followed the electric and telephone wires, which seemed out of place. They did not belong, any more than he did in the area. The lines led him to the main area for the huts. Telegraph poles sat in between the dense foliage on either side of the little square in the centre of the kampong. The early morning chorus from singing birds that jostled for space along the lines assisted in camouflaging the noise he made as he inched along the edges.

Sebastian began to sweat even more profusely, as the high temperature and humidity increased once he was off the main road and into the jungle. Due to the lack of hair on his body, the sweat ran in rivulets down his back, and cascaded in the crease of his buttocks and down his legs. Sebastian stopped when someone further down the track made a noise, and