The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volume 2 by Roald Dahl

Author:Roald Dahl [Dahl, Roald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR

The Boy Who Talked with Animals

Not so long ago, I decided to spend a few days in the West Indies. I was to go there for a short holiday. Friends had told me it was marvellous. I would laze around all day, they said, sunning myself on the silver beaches and swimming in the warm green sea.

I chose Jamaica, and flew direct from London to Kingston. The drive from Kingston airport to my hotel on the north shore took two hours. The island was full of mountains and the mountains were covered all over with dark tangled forests. The big Jamaican who drove the taxi told me that up in those forests lived whole communities of diabolical people who still practised voodoo and witch-doctory and other magic rites. ‘Don’t ever go up into those mountain forests,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘There’s things happening up there that’d make your hair turn white in a minute!’

‘What sort of things?’ I asked him.

‘It’s better you don’t ask,’ he said. ‘It don’t pay even to talk about it.’ And that was all he would say on the subject.

My hotel lay upon the edge of a pearly beach, and the setting was even more beautiful than I had imagined. But the moment I walked in through those big open front doors, I began to feel uneasy. There was no reason for this. I couldn’t see anything wrong. But the feeling was there and I couldn’t shake it off. There was something weird and sinister about the place. Despite all the loveliness and the luxury, there was a whiff of danger that hung and drifted in the air like poisonous gas.

And I wasn’t sure it was just the hotel. The whole island, the mountains and the forests, the black rocks along the coastline and the trees cascading with brilliant scarlet flowers, all these and many other things made me feel uncomfortable in my skin. There was something malignant crouching underneath the surface of this island. I could sense it in my bones.

My room in the hotel had a little balcony, and from there I could step straight down on to the beach. There were tall coconut palms growing all around, and every so often an enormous green nut the size of a football would fall out of the sky and drop with a thud on the sand. It was considered foolish to linger underneath a coconut palm because if one of those things landed on your head, it would smash your skull.

The Jamaican girl who came in to tidy my room told me that a wealthy American called Mr Wasserman had met his end in precisely this manner only two months before.

‘You’re joking,’ I said to her.

‘Not joking!’ she cried. ‘No suh! I sees it happening with my very own eyes!’

‘But wasn’t there a terrific fuss about it?’ I asked.

‘They hush it up,’ she answered darkly. ‘The hotel folks hush it up and so do the newspaper folks because things like that are very bad for the tourist business.

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