Netherworld

by Lisa Morton

  “What was that you just did?” Diana asked, as they walked from the temple.

  “First I pray to Five Genii for protection, then I use sticks to tell fortune.”

  Diana had already discovered that the Chinese had a penchant for fortune-telling. It was a significant part of their religions, of their festivals, and even of their languages; with their many different tones and inflections—Cantonese was rich with homonyms and provided the basis for considerable belief in numerology. Back on the Althea, Yi-kin, for example, had told Diana that his people believed the number four to be bad luck because the word, sei, was a homonym for the word for death.

  Although Diana personally found the notion of fortune-telling quite absurd, she supposed it was still easier to believe in than the existence of goong-si.

  “And what did your fortune reveal?” she asked.

  “Ha ha.”

  Diana glanced over at Yi-kin, uncertain whether he were joking or saying something in Cantonese. “What is ha ha?”

  “Very bad luck. We probably die.”

  Not very funny at all, Diana thought.

  They were almost to the docks and about to hire a sampan to cross the river to Ho-Nam when they heard the sounds of commotion behind them—shouts, trampling feet—and suddenly Yi-kin tugged her urgently into a small shop.

  “Yi-kin, what—?” she barely got out before Yi-kin held a finger to his lips, and guided her to the back of the lacquerware store.

  Looking anxious, he took her as far to the rear of the shop as he could, and feigned interest in a low chest of drawers. The merchant approached, smiling, and bowed. “Welcome!” he offered.

  “Do not move,” Yi-kin whispered in Diana’s ear, then moved to place himself between her and the entrance to the shop.

  “Yi-kin, what—”

  “White Lotus Sect.”

  Diana remembered something she’d read once, an article buried on the back page of a London newspaper: The White Lotus Sect was a secret society—a triad—that was vehemently opposed to foreign intervention in China. So vehemently opposed, in fact, that they had supposedly murdered a number of British missionaries in rural parts of China, and had recently stirred up trouble with demonstrations in several major Chinese cities.

  Including Canton.

  Diana risked a look past him and out into the street, where she saw a large parade of people passing. Many were dressed as coolies, some as farmers, but they all wore red bandannas, red sashes, and, about their necks, lengths of red cloth inscribed with characters. They were handing out small booklets to onlookers, who were handing them coins in exchange, and they chanted a slogan over and over.

  “What are they doing?” Diana whispered to Yi-kin.

  “They sell anti-European literature. Anyone not pay them get beaten.”

  Nice chaps, thought Diana.

  “They say ‘force out all foreigners’,” Yi-kin added.

  “Oh dear,” Diana said, and attempted to make herself as small as possible.

  Then several members of the group entered the shop.

  Yi-kin saw them, and immediately began calling out, “Ni jeung toi gei chin a?”

  The merchant, startled, turned to Yi-kin, but he was plainly also keeping one eye on the White Lotus Sect men—and on Diana.

  Yi-kin spoke in an abnormally loud voice, and Diana realized he was trying to let the White Lotus Sect know they were natives. “M goi, ngoh seung maai ni jeung toi.”

  Diana dropped to the floor, pretending to examine the legs of a dresser.

  Yi-kin leaned down over her and whispered urgently, “Do you have money?”

  She nodded, dug briefly into a pocket, and produced a handful of local taels.

  Yi-kin took them and shoved them at the merchant, whose attention was instantly diverted from the triad members.

  “Ahhh, do jeh!” the merchant responded, bowing.

  At the front of the shop, another customer was buying some of the booklets. As the Sect completed the transaction and were turning to look back towards them, Diana hugged her satchel to her tightly, praying Mina would stay quiet while her heart beat a tarantella.

  After what seemed an eternity, she heard two loud thumps on the table above her. This is it, she thought. Not a very heroic way to end.

  And then Yi-kin’s smiling face appeared beneath the table as well, and he said to her, “You just buy this table.”

  Diana straightened up, and saw instantly that the Sect had left the shop and moved on down the street. The merchant stood nearby, making notes on a paper.

  “I ask him to deliver table to Hinton house,” Yi-kin informed her.

  Diana felt a rush of relief that left her weakened, and she actually had to grasp her new table to remain steady. She glanced down, and saw that it was a very beautiful thing indeed, and made an instantaneous decision.

  “No, I’ll give him my address in Derby.”

  She managed to leave both the merchant and Yi-kin quite astonished, but she thought the table would serve as an attractive reminder of the fact that her most dangerous enemies could still be quite human.

  After they completed the shipping instructions and left the shop, they reached the river’s edge and hired a sampan, rowed only by a silent, sturdy woman with a baby strapped to her back.

  The sampan deposited them on Ho-Nam, and a short walk brought them to the Hinton Company’s go-down. It was a dank, foul place, with weathered, dark wood and the smells of fungus and decaying fish. But Diana detected another scent in the air as well: It was the stench of the thing she’d slain in the Furnaval family crypt. It was the smell of death.

  Yi-kin was clearly unnerved by the scent, and halted his pace, grimacing.

  “Yi-kin,” Diana told him, “you don’t need to do this.”

  Yi-kin glanced at her, then held one of his sleeves up over his nose; his voice was muffled when he said, “I will not leave.”

  “Doh jeh,” Diana told him, and she was genuinely grateful to have him with her.

  “M sai.”

  They entered the warehouse wherein Antonia had suffered her terrible experiences. It was easily identified, both by her description and by the flags of the British Empire and the Hinton Trading Company flying above its doorways. Even though it was early afternoon, it was gloomy inside the large building, and their eyes took some few seconds to adjust. They made out stacks of crates, some balanced precariously, and a few grimy windows set near the ceiling.

  “Master Li?” Diana cried out, her voice bouncing off of cargo chests and rotting wooden walls.

  There was no answer.

  Mina mewled for release, and Diana set her free. The cat walked scarcely a few feet, then set up her characteristic hissing at the air.

  “Cat find gateway?”

  Diana nodded.

  There was no immediate sign of either the Taoist or goong-si, and so Diana decided to seal the gateway immediately. She was just preparing for the ritual when she heard Yi-kin gasp, and then cry out, “Siu Je….” She joined him.

  He’d found streaks of blood and one of the sailors’ knives on the floor. The blood had also spattered nearby crates and the splintering walls, and left its own acrid, coppery tang hanging in the air.

  “We have to close that gateway now,” Diana told him.

  She strode back to where Mina was hissing, and felt some of the distinctive unease she knew the cat must experience; the small hairs on the back of her neck rose, the very air around them charged with dark energy. She wasted no time in sealing this gate, and had accomplished the act less than one minute later.

  Even though the sense of surrounding menace ebbed for Diana, Mina didn’t curl happily around her mistress’s ankles as usual;. Instead she ran to the closed doorway leading into a side room, and began to scratch at the wood.

  As Diana bound her new cut, she pondered the cat’s actions. Nothing would be able to come through the gateway, but she thought that the creatures Antonia encountered were certainly still present, and
nearby. And she had mentioned that the monsters had come from within one side room in particular. Diana knew she should wait for the arrival of Master Li, but curiosity got the best of her (a trait she shared with Mina).

  Although she’d already considered that the usual vampire protections might be useless here, she nevertheless gave a strand of garlic cloves to Yi-kin, and instructed him to place them around his neck; a second string of cloves went around her own throat. She prepared and passed to Yi-kin a lantern, guessing the smaller storeroom might be windowless and dark; then, still holding the iron knife, she cautiously opened the door.

  Mina immediately disappeared into the room, but Diana and Yi-kin were staggered by a redoubling of that nauseating scent of death; Diana knew with certainty that there were dead things present somewhere in the warehouse.

  The room was small, and as Yi-kin raised the lantern they spied only more crates of varying sizes. Moving carefully, they peered around the stacks of boxes, but found nothing. In one corner stood a large shrouded object; as Diana tensed, Yi-kin pulled the tarpaulin aside, but nothing more than a heap of rice bags was revealed underneath. Some of the canvas bags had split open and Diana saw squirming maggots mixed in with the white grains.

  They were about to examine the roof overhead when they heard the sound of Mina’s tiny claws on wood. Diana turned, and saw that the cat had indeed led them to what they sought: About ten feet in a straight line from the doorway was a handhold carved into the wood of a trap door laid into the floor.

  “Maau ho lek,” Yi-kin noted, complimenting Mina’s talents.

  Diana still had to smile at the Cantonese word for cat (maau), then she motioned Yi-kin over with the lantern. Now she could plainly make out a trapdoor large enough for a man—or something that had once been a man—to pass through. She knelt down and grasped the handhold to give it a slight tug. The trapdoor gave an inch; it wasn’t bolted from the other side.

  She hesitated long enough to exchange a look with Yi-kin, who nodded back to her, tensing himself. Holding the knife ready she wrenched the trapdoor open.

  If the noxious odors had been bad before, now they were intolerable, striking Yi-kin and Diana with an almost physical force. He struggled briefly, then turned aside to retch. Even the cat backed away from that loathsome smell.

  Diana forced her own gorge down, waiting, every nerve tingling…nothing but the vile odor came up at them. As Yi-kin struggled to recover, Diana gently took the lantern from him and tentatively bent forward over that hole in the floor, trying to peer down.

  At first she saw nothing but a ladder descending; Diana figured this space was part of the warehouse’s system of handling contraband, although now it had been put to a more malevolent use. The lantern’s yellow glow seemed to barely penetrate the miasma of rot, and Diana could make out nothing but blackness a few feet down. She glanced around and spotted a rusted pulley close by on the floor, she picked up the heavy device and tossed it into the hole. It fell about twenty feet, but Diana couldn’t tell what it landed on—the noise had been muffled, without the splashing sound of water. She considered the dangers a moment further, then made her decision to lower herself into the hole.

  “No, Siu Je, no!” Yi-kin cried out, when he saw that she intended to climb down the rickety algae-covered ladder into that darkness. “Wait for Master Li!”

  Diana glanced at the pocket watch she always carried. “It’s well after two. He’s not coming.”

  Yi-kin wouldn’t give up. “Then we leave. Gateway is closed—”

  “But the goong-si are still here,” she cut him off. “If we can stop them as well, we must do it.”

  “And if you cannot stop goong-si, we die and become like them,” he whispered to her.

  She did hesitate, considering Yi-kin’s words. She could rationalize that the vampires would spread if she didn’t stop them, that she was striking a blow against the forces of darkness, but, there was another, more delirious truth as well: She wanted to see them. She’d traveled around the globe to confront them, and she wouldn’t be stopped now.

  “That won’t happen,” she told Yi-kin, then started down.

  He moved to follow her, and Diana stopped halfway down the ladder. “Yi-kin, I want you to stay up there.”

  “But—”

  She cut him off. “Stay up there, and if anything happens to me, I want you to run. Ming baak?”

  Reluctantly, he moved back away from the ladder. “I stay.”

  She knew he was lying, and that there was every chance she might get them both killed.

  She secured the knife under the belt of her Hinton uniform, then reached up and took the lantern Yi-kin held down to her. She lowered herself down about fifteen feet before her feet touched the sodden bare ground, not unlike the marshy soil she’d stood in during last October’s efforts at the Hertfordshire cemetery. She made sure her footing was solid, then she moved the lantern around—

  —and her heart nearly stopped at what she saw.

  Around her lay at least a dozen bodies. She saw the Althea crewmen; she saw two men she didn’t know, both dressed as officers; she saw local workers in tattered Chinese clothing. That they were all clearly dead, there could be no question; for one thing, no living man could repose on this fetid swamp. When she looked closer, she saw that some of these men had clearly suffered grievous wounds, wounds now long since dried and caked over. The skin of the cadavers was ashen and shriveled, and there was even one figure partly covered with the same awful moss that grew on the slick stone sides of the room.

  Diana was looking up to tell Yi-kin her discovery when some movement caught her eye. Above her, Mina let out a sharp hiss, and Diana held the lantern higher, but saw nothing. Then she heard the obvious scraping noise of movement behind her, and she turned just in time to see one of the abominations rise to its feet. Impossibly, it rose puppet-like, never bending its knees or hips. It was one of the sailors, a particularly fearsome-looking brute in life whose long beard was now matted with clots of gore.

  Then its arms swiveled upward and it leapt towards her, its limbs too frozen by rigor to allow for any other motion. For a moment Diana could only gape, paralyzed; then she tore the garlic from around her neck and thrust it out at the thing.

  “Diana Siu Je—!” Yi-kin cried out.

  The goong-si took another of those terrible leaps towards Diana, and its claw-like fingers connected with the garlic, ripping the strand out of her grasp and flinging it aside.

  She backed away, but not quickly enough, as it lunged towards her again. Before she could react, its icy cold hands were clutching her throat, with a grip like steel bands. Diana struggled to cry out, to tear at the thing’s arms, to jab with the knife, to do anything, but all she could manage was a choked gasp as her vision began to darken.

  I’m so sorry, William, she thought.

  And then the pressure was gone and she fell to her knees, her strength taken but not her life. She looked up to see someone between her and the goong-si—a man in yellow Chinese dress. Her brain still reeling from the attack, it took her a moment to place the distinctive canary colored robes:

  Master Li, the Taoist monk. He really had come.

  Li turned calmly away from the revenant to Diana, and she looked up to see that the monster stood completely frozen. Blinking with surprise, she saw not a stake nor crucifix nor garlic, but a strip of yellow paper inscribed with Chinese pictograph characters affixed to the creature’s forehead. The thing was completely motionless, its hands still stiffly extended; hands that had held her in their deathgrip until this monk had intervened.

  Li quickly gestured to the ladder, and Diana, still weak, tried to climb; she was grateful when Yi-kin pulled her up. Once she was safely out of the hole, she collapsed onto a nearby crate. She expected to see Master Li follow her up, but he didn’t. For several minutes she and Yi-kin waited breathlessly, half expecting one of the monsters to come vaulting up out of the trapdoor; they heard nothing at all from below, neither scream
s nor moans nor sounds of fighting.

  But Master Li did reappear, climbing slowly up the ladder and appearing completely unfazed.

  As he stepped out onto the floor, the Taoist spoke rapidly in Chinese, which Yi-kin translated. He told them he had secured all the corpses by placing a sacred sutra on them, and that the bodies of those innocents could now be safely transported to their final resting places.

  “Tell him about the gateway,” Diana requested.

  He uttered a lengthy speech, occasionally gesturing at Diana’s bandaged arm or the cat, who now curled herself happily at Diana’s feet. At the conclusion of the speech, Master Li turned to Diana and bowed with a curious gesture, with both hands held out before him, the left hand cupped over the right fist.

  Yi-kin smiled and told her, “Master Li offer you sign of great respect.”

  Diana stood and attempted to repeat the bow, offering it to the monk. From the look of pride she saw on Yi-kin’s face, she assumed she had done the right thing.

  The Taoist and Yi-kin exchanged a few quick words, then Master Li swept hurriedly from the room. Yi-kin turned to Diana and explained, “Master Li invite us to return tonight to watch him fight kap-huet goong-si.”

  “But I thought….” Diana trailed off, perplexed.

  “He stop only these, they are like…what is English word for….” Yi-kin suddenly moved in a jerky fashion, his arms held at strange angles.

  “Puppets,” Diana supplied.

  “Yes, goong-si like puppet. Now he must kill one who make puppet.”

  They left the warehouse and hurried to the English Consul, where arrangements were made for Diana to cash a large check. It took some time (and the bureaucrats at the consul gave her sideways looks and wrinkled their noses at the scent of death on her), but eventually she left the Consulate with an envelope full of hundred-pound notes. After that, Diana asked Yi-kin to wait at a tea shop while she changed out of his uniform, and deposited Mina. She returned in a tidy suit, and they relaxed beneath cages of singing birds while around them merchants conducted business over tea and dim sum. As they consumed buns stuffed with tangy pork (which Yi-kin called chau siu bau), Diana asked him if he understood what Master Li had done.