by Vann Chow
At the moment, the guestroom door flung opened. The girl they had met earlier in the fields walked in with two plates of food.
“Dinner time!” she said, and plunked down the dishes in her hands. Considering that she was only two feet tall, the girl was very competent at her job as a grumpy jail guard one sees in movies that delivered the inmates food. It didn’t seem to bother her that the food had been spilled all over the table for the little care she took with handling them. “Want anything else?” She asked.
Ian and Chad looked at the two silver plates lying on the table in the center of the room. Apart from the rice, everything on the plate was a dull brownish color. And there was no meat in the dish. The cloud scoop of soup in one of the compartment had started to settle and separated into two layers. It looked to be a pig’s bone marrow soup or beef blood soup.
Chad strode towards the girl and started to ruffle the hair on her head, “How about some rice wine, huh?” To his surprise, the girl’s head was so thin that it was as though it had been made out of paper, Chad’s fingers poked through it as soon as they touched her head and left five glaring finger holes on it. In a moment of panic, all three persons presented in the room screamed in fear. Instinctively Chad jerked his hand backwards and ripped a big piece of what used to be the top of her skull off the girl’s head. It revealed absolutely nothing inside the girl’s head. She was hollowed! Ian recalled that she had mentioned something about being a papier-mâché servant. Ian had seen those dolls before in supplies stores next to funeral homes. The girl shoved Chad angrily with her two hands for what he had done and started to cry uncontrollably.
“Why did you have to touch me?!” She screamed and ran out of the room asking for her master. As Chad stumbled backward, he knocked one of the dishes off the table and the other dish also slid towards the edge of the table. Ian rushed forwards and saved both the last dish and Chad from tumbling down.
“What the hell was that?!” Chad asked in panic.
“She’s a living papier-mâché doll,” Ian said.
“Then I should have ripped her entire head off and end this demonic bullshit right then and there.”
“Don’t be so cruel. She is probably not feeling very well right now, with part of her head left in our room.”
“Shit, the food.” Chad looked at the spoiled food on the floor.
“We still have one left.”
Two stomachs were heard grumbling in the short pause that followed.
“You can have it.” Chad and Ian both spoke at the same time.
“No, you saved it. Eat.” Chad pushed the dish closer to Ian.
“No. We can share.” Ian pushed the dish towards the center of the table.
“Share what?” Chad pushed the dish back towards Ian again. “This is a Happy Meal for me for Chris’s sake. You eat it. At least one of us will be full.”
Ian stared at the dish in front of him blankly. His stomach was growling and his mind was emptied. He was too weak to think properly, let alone to argue with Chad.
“Besides, you almost died today. You’re weak. I can wait until our next meal.” Chad said compassionately, although he was highly skeptical that the girl will ever come back to deliver meals again after what he had done to her.
They were expecting some kind of gruesome revenge from the girl. Yet nothing happened for the next hour. The sun was setting in this dimension and the laborers working in the field downstairs were starting to thin out and returned to their own abodes. The outside was peaceful and clam. The timescale here in this alternate reality seemed to be independent of the outside world they had come from. By the time the sun had completely hidden itself behind the mountains, Ian had finished off the rice and the vegetables on the dish. His hunger alleviated, he offered the soup to Chad.
“What did I say?” Chad scorned him for being so indecisive. “Drink up!”
And so Ian took a big gulp of the soup obediently. As soon as it slid down his throat he knew something was wrong and he spat it out immediately. However, some had already been swallowed. Chad stood up from the edge of the bed to see what’s wrong only to find Ian’s face darkened and took a shade of green. His head reeled and he started perspiring. Beats of sweats had flowed down his forehead and
gathered at the tip of his nose. As soon as the first drop of sweat hit the surface of the table, Ian collapsed on to the table. He was then shaking violently in a spasm. His face a tortuous expression.
“Ian, Ian!” Chad pressed Ian’s shaking head with his hands, trying to somehow stop the spasm. It didn’t seem to have any use. Seeing how Ian was suffering, Chad pulled Ian up from behind and locked his arms around Ian’s abdomen. With one forceful pull, Ian belched and puked up everything in his stomach. He slipped from under Chad’s embrace and collapsed to the ground, coughing violently.
Outside, there was rustling of footsteps and some excited whispering. It seemed like someone had planned on poisoning them. The sound of the footsteps got busier and busier. It seemed like more men than before the incident had gather outside their room. Then the door creaked. Someone was coming in to see the results of the great work they had done.
“Play dead!” With the last breath he had, Ian grabbed Chad’s by the collar and pulled him down towards the ground. Chad collapsed onto the floor next to him with a pretentious thud, took a deep breath and shut his eyes. The last thing he saw was the smug expression on the face of the superintendent lady.
“This served you well. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get a couple of servants around here?! I have plenty of man in here working the fields but only she knows how to repair my clothes and do my hair right. Now you ripped off a part of her hair in my facility, how am I going to look as management if I can’t even protect her from that?”
“It was a… mistake.” Ian who had propped himself up by one hand on the stool had explained. His voice hoarse.
“Don’t think I’m trying to get back at you. Hatred and revenged are not permitted here. Otherwise we’ll be no better than the rest of them.” She walked around the room to look at Chad, who was lying motionlessly on the ground.
“Why…did you...” Ian asked. He concentrated all the force he had left in his beaten body on to the left arm that was lying on the stool, attempting to prop himself up.
“DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT MOVING, BOY!” Mr. Burke’s voice stopped him short. “If you take more than seven steps the poison will run through your veins and purge your soul out of your body! You’ll never be able to return home if that happens.” He stepped out from behind the two swaying doors of the room, concerned. The superintendent lady gave him a disdainful look. “Well, well…” He stuttered under her mad glance. “He’s such a fine young man and he is just, you know, so weak. I highly doubt that he will try to elope from this highly guarded prison….” He paused to look at the woman. “Now on the contrary, his friend....” Chad gave a painful groan when he was being referenced and pretended to have lost consciousness again. “Oh well,” Mr. Burke finally came up with a more persuasive argument for the two unlucky clients he had. “They have the rights to a fair trial in the Celestial Court. Innocent until proven guilty. It’s the law. Madam, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of the court by killing two crooks like this. You want them to be alive when they get to there.”
“Why...” Ian asked again.
“Why? My servant heard everything. Your plans about escaping here? It’s not going to happen.”
Mr. Burke said to Ian. “Technically, they are only allowed to…” But before Ian could hear more of what he had to say, he had lost conscious again, “….to immobilize you.” Mr. Burke finished his sentence. “Not kill you.”
“Take them to the isolation rooms.” The women commanded. Two laborers behind her came forward and lifted the Ian and Chad onto their backs.
They carried them back down the moving platform of the pagoda, went through a series of unidentified paths in the fields and through a tunnel they were transpor
ted into where the isolation rooms were. The isolation rooms were not really rooms. They were dimly lit excavated compartments inside a big cave where a man of six feet can barely stand straight. Each of these compartments, or caves was blocked by a gigantic piece of stone at the entryway that looked almost a foot thick. The guards there had to lift the stones with a special leverage made of planks and wheels in order to pull them in and out the threshold. It was in one of these that Chad got dropped off first. When he woke up, the laborers were sealing up the cave with a thick block of stone as he stood up and started to bang on the stone, crying “Let me out! Let me out!” fruitlessly. He cursed himself for having fallen asleep on the way there. To his surprise, he turned around to find that instead of another stone wall, the other side of the room was made up of beautiful mineral stalactite and stalagmite columns jutting out from the ceiling and the ground of the cave like a row of clenched pointy teeth in a vampire’s mouth.
A thud was heard nearby. He was sure if it was coming from Ian’s. He leaned against the side of the stonewall and strained his ears to listen for any sign that Ian might have come back to consciousness. “Good that the room is so small.” He thought to himself, “At least he won’t have enough room to move and got himself killed.” He grabbed two columns of stalagmites in his hands and wanted to test his strength against them. With all his might he pushed against these columns again and again. Yet they were so sturdy that they weren’t even shaken the slightest bit. He tried it again a couple more times. Each time it took a little bit more energy out of him. He repeated it until his knees buckled. Panting, he kneeled on the floor helplessly. He was supposed to save Ian but he didn’t stay vigilant. He threw one last angry punch at the stalagmite in front of him with a loud angry shriek.
“Fuckkkk!” Something in his fist snapped. He had broken his knuckles. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! It hurts! Fuck!”
Aching beyond belief, he gave up on the idea of breaking out. For once, he felt defeated. Who knew what awaited him outside, he thought. Whatever it was, they had won. Suddenly, he saw a flash in the darkness beyond the mineral columns of his prison cell. His body twitched at the thought of a viscous creature lying beyond the barrier.
“Anyone in there? Don’t be afraid. I just want to help you. Stay back!” It was a man’s voice. Before long, the man made a loud cry. “Arggghhh!” And with this cry, the columns of stalagmite and stalactite came crashing down in front of Chad. He was in such a shocked state that everything seemed to have occurred in slow motion and he could see clearly when the ends of each column snapped and fell down one by one from left to right. A great cloud of dust was stirred up and blocked his view of his rescuer. He waved the dust off frantically with one hand while clasping the other over his mouth and nose. Then he saw a bony hand stretched out for him.
“Come here!” The stranger said, “Grab my hand!”
Chad didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the hand as tightly as he can and started to climb over the broken stone heap to the other side.
There he heard a group of men laughing and cheering happily. He could not see who they are. Yet from their laughter he could tell there were at least four or five of them. Chad tightly clenched in his rescuer’s hand in his. As the dust settled he could finally make out the face of the man who saved him. He was expecting to see someone bigger than him but the man that had appeared in front of his eyes was this puny little Chinese man. He didn’t have anything but a loin cloth on him. His shoulder bones and ribcages were sticking out like a bag of skeleton. The way he stood, his rickety legs formed two half curves of an o-shape. Chad’s jaw dropped.
“It’s a moderner!” One man from the group behind the skinny man called out to the others beside him. “I told you I was right. Now pay up!” And the other groaned and dropped their money in front of the winning man. There seemed to be some kind of bet on the identity of the cell mate they had just saved.
“Thank you,” Chad said to the skinny man. “Chad, Chan Ka Ming. That’s my name.” The old man didn’t reply.
“He’s nearly deaf. You’ve to shout everything to him.” One of the other men said.
“Are you alone or with someone?” The man who guessed his identity right shouted at him. His hands were cupping some kind of metal stones that the others have handed off to him just recently.
“My friend is here too with me. Can you guys get him out too, please?”
“I told you!” The man laughed hysterically at his good fortune. “Pay up! Pay up!”
“What?!” Chad asked the skinny man standing in front of him. “Are they making bets on…”
“One more?” The skinny man leaned his ears closer to Chad’s mouth and asked. “One more?”
“Yes!” Chad answered as loud as he could.
Before long, the man had released Chad’s hand. Chad turned around to see that he had stopped in front of Ian’s cell that was no more than a few feet away. The structure of his cell was exactly like his. “Argghhhhh!” The man made the growling noise again. This time Chad could see clearly what he was doing to shattered the mineral shafts. And to his surprised, the guy only had to swing his arm once at them and they all came toppling down as if they were made out of sand. Inside the cell was Ian, curled up like a ball unconsciously on the ground. Not noticing the commotion happening around him.
“Ian, Ian!” Chad called. He climbed into the compartment and came back out with Ian on his back. He plopped him down near the group of men and tried to feel his pulse. He couldn’t feel anything.
“Hey, get out of the way!” A man brushed Chad aside and squatted next to Ian. With care he took Ian’s hand in his and started to take Ian’s pulse with a look that he knew what he was doing.
“Just let him do it. Don’t worry.” Another man patted Chad’s back to comfort him.
“It was bad. His pulse was extremely weak,” the man said under his breath. The cave was however quiet enough for all of them to hear his diagnosis. The man felt Ian’s lower arm and then his upper arm. “His muscles are too stiff. The warmth of his body is almost gone. This is really bad. Let me see his face. I need to take a look at his face.”
“Give him some light!” Someone in the group shouted.
There was a spark. Then the whole cave was lit up. One man came towards Chad and handed him a wine bottle. It was ablaze.
“Your torch,” he said, giggling. Now Chad could clearly see that there were five men in the group.
“Your friend drank something the warden offered him?”
“He ate the dinner they gave us. I knew something was wrong. They said it was something that could kill him in seven steps,” Chad replied frantically.
“No way!” One man said. And they all gather closer around Ian to have a closer look at him. “Not the Seven Poison Powder!”
“The strongest drugs they have ever used on us were Sleeping Incense.”
“No, it was the Juice of the Wild Red Carnation.”
“That’s nothing! I was forced to down a dozens of Five Treasure Pills before.”
“Stop bragging, you guys. I thought it was just some rotten cabbage they put in your dinner. By the third hour you puked so much your faces turned blue. I remember it very clearly. Don’t argue with history.”
“Some bad food cannot take me down that easily,” the other one retorted.
“I still remembered that look on your face.”
“But that didn’t hurt me a bit. They put poison in the meat sauce.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
“He must have drunken some pretty good rice wine out there, hasn’t he?” One of them interjected the argument and asked Chad.
“Good rice wine?! He was almost drowned in it.” Chad answered. “You know, the big wave.”
“Huh. Who told you he would die in seven steps? Maybe they were just bluffing,” one of them said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, Seven Poison Powder’s too expensive.”
“Too rare.”
“I wonder why they have never
used it on us.”
“The only way to know for sure is to make him walk,” one man suggested.
“Dumb ass, if he’s really drank the Seven Poison Power he would blow up into pieces as soon as he took the seventh steps,” the man who won lots of money today argued. “There are better ways to prove something.”
“The lawyer told us,” Chad said. “Gosh, what’s his name? Burke something. He has an obvious disliking towards me but he likes Ian all right. I don’t see any incentive for him to lie to us about something like that?”
“To put fear in your heart? That way he can keep you guys where you are?” One man suggested.
“Which is here,” the other added. Chad had only noticed now that these two men who just spoken were identical twins. They had the same wide forehead, wide upper torso and quite a handsome face. They were wearing the same ridiculously tight bright yellow latex suit that flares out at the end of their hand cuffs and leg cuffs. They looked as if they were gymnasts for circus’s balancing act.
“Because you guys might have a real chance of leaving,” one of them said as he gave Chad a once-over. Chad was six feet tall. He looked like a giant among them.
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Or as I’ve said, your friend could have by accident drank some really powerful rice wine they don’t want anyone to have and they have to purge it all out of his system, fearing that he might get too sick from its strength.”
“Or grew too strong from it.”
“What do you mean?” Chad asked him. “You’re not implying that he would get some kind of super power from the wine, right? I heard them talking about it on the fields.”
“That’s how he got his.” One of them pointed to the skinny man who smashed the stone walls of their prison cells for him a while ago. He shrugged his shoulders mindlessly when all heads were turned to him.
“And I got mine.”
“Are all of you this strong?” Chad asked excitedly.
“No, we get different power.”
“What’s your super power?” He asked.
“I can set anything on fire, I guess.”