Chinatown, Chee Cheong Kai, Petaling Street: all names for the rotted apple planted deep in Kuala Lumpur’s eye. It is fecund with odours both nauseating and tantalizing, a duality of butter cream crabs and dried urine, fermented bean curd and roasting chestnuts, sewage and sweat and all the other fine accoutrements you can expect to find in a bloated tourist trap. There are a hundred reasons to part with your money here: roasted duck carcass, pirated DVDs with strategically comical sleeves, cheongsams like wisps of flame, and if you look carefully enough, mouths painted with conspiratorial promise.
“’Sup.” I step between two competing storefronts, their owners growling like hounds in competition, and doff an imaginary cap at a tallow-skinned man in front of the stairwell. He stands about a head taller than me, arms crossed over a chest you could build a grand piano around, flanked by two equally grim-faced individuals.
He glowers over the rims of his tinted bifocals. His eyes are the mother-of-pearl of an oyster’s entrails, and there’s something about his body language that says shark, the same way the one on his left screams eel. “You’re late. We’ve been waiting for you.”
I can feel my armpits dampen under his scrutiny, but I don’t tell him I had no clue, or that I spent the better part of my morning trying to convince the boss I needed to come to Chinatown because the ingredients I wanted to procure can be found nowhere else. Better to pretend authority than to admit ignorance, especially when wading in unfamiliar waters. So I nod. Curtly. Just a slight bobbing of the jaw in gruff masculine acknowledgment.
The three take their time to size me up, now that they’ve established I’m the Rupert they’re looking for. They don’t blink. But then again that isn’t common of their genus, is it? Which leaves me to wonder if they’ve really transformed into humanoid form, or if I’m talking to levitating fish.
“You going to let me through?” I prod, after a minute, my head swimming with morbidly hilarious images. “We’re a bit conspicuous out here.”
We’re not. Between the DVD merchants, cocaine-gaunt and still impossibly enthused despite the advent of high-speed internet and torrents, the posturing schools of teenage lowlife, the sunburnt tourists, and the occasional triad affiliate, we fit right in. At least, until you squint at our tattoos too long. Like mine, the ink on Ao Qin’s underlings, a hodgepodge of primordial symbolism too old for anything but cephalopods to understand, disdain staticity.
“You’re a lot less impressive than the others,” remarks Eel, his nose twitching. He smiles; his mouth reveals too many incisors and a grotesque underbite. Moray Eel. M. Eel. Eel for short.
“Say what?”
“Like I said, Mr. Wong,” interrupts Shark, scooping one broad arm gently, but very insistently, around my shoulders. “Please. This way.”
“Wait, what others—”
Patience doesn’t appear to be one of Shark’s virtues. Push transitions to violent shove, as he knocks me forward with appalling effortlessness. I stumble, stub my toe on the first step, bite down a curse, but don’t crash. Shark lumbers in behind me, eclipsing the glare of the noon sun, and not-so-surreptitiously blocking my exit.
“Up.” As with all muscle, Shark is economical with words.
The stairwell ahead is only periodically lit. Naked bulbs dangle and sway from the ceiling, fizzing at irregular intervals, coughing like old men. Posters, pasted over the bones of a hundred other advertisements, turn the walls into a mosaic of broken dreams. The floor is lined with trash: someone’s dinner, fossilized remnants of someone’s dinner, and what generations of cats have dragged in, chewed up, and spat out. I toe carefully through the mess.
“So, what’s it like working for Ao Qin?”
Silence. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.
“How are you liking Kuala Lumpur?”
More silence.Clomp.
“Dry land doing okay for you?”
Clomp. Clomp. Pause.
“You talk too much.” Clomp.
I shrug. Fair enough.
Midway to the fourth landing, I give up on the banter, if for no other reason than it feels ridiculous to wheeze for conversation, while Shark drives on like an Olympic athlete. My thighs are burning, my hips straining. It’s ten years too late for so much exercise, honestly.
“Here,” says Shark, interrupting my misery.
I push away from the railing and straighten, squinting through a fog of exhaustion, breathing perfectly controlled, expression perfectly uneven. An unimpressive door squats before me, its wood bloated from moisture and splintered from abuse. The peeling paint is an indistinct shade of digestive-fluids-green.
Shark doesn’t wait for me to compose myself. Stopping at the top step, he reaches over me and raps on the door with sausage fingers. It swings open, and I’m instantly bludgeoned by a charnel stench.
I clamp a sleeve over my nose as I limp into the room: a dirty loft with equally filthy floor-to-ceiling windows, naked of any furniture or distinguishing feature save for the slaughterhouse tableau. Someone has moved the two bodies since I last glimpsed them through Ao Qin’s head; the tatters of their arms have been gathered and crossed over their chests, their legs pushed together with a sense of decorum. What I think was Ao Qin’s daughter is garnished with a bouquet of irises, white as teeth, unnervingly vivid against the onset of decomposition.
our daughter is dead our daughter is dead our daughter
Strange how expertly memory can dilute truth. Ao Qin’s recollections were steeped in iron and burst intestines, but they had nothing on the actual crime scene. our daughter is dead our daughter our daughter. The smell is—
“Rupert?”
To my surprise, there’s a man there, bald head gleaming like a boiled white egg. How did I—
“Er. You’ve got the advantage on me.” I bare my teeth at him, arm lowering, even as I frantically endeavour to attach his wan, round face to a name. “I’m afraid I don’t—Hao Wen? What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” His forehead rucks. Hao Wen is a doughy-looking man with a middle-aged paunch and the cheeks of a toddler, deceptively soft. As always, his outfit seems calculated for unobtrusiveness; an off-color shirt, with off-color slacks, battered sneakers of no recognizable brand. If you ignore the unnaturally red mouth, Hao Wen looks utterly forgettable, utterly unremarkable.
(He’s not, though. Obviously. Hao Wen is one of the rare Sak Yant masters who works directly with the soul, human and otherwise. He’s hideously powerful, as a result. If you ever have the chance to meet him, ang moh, be sure to ask Hao Wen for a Mahaaniyohm. You will never be short of sexual partners again.)
“Fulfilling a duty?” I circle around him, shuffling like an injured boxer in the fight of his career, careful to make no sudden moves.
Hao Wen purses his mouth, nodding. “Mmmmmm.”
“You?” I don’t take my eyes from his hands. His tools of trade—bamboo-capped needles, in every size—dangle limply from his fingers.
“The same, the same. Mmm.” Hao Wan bobs closer, serene. Up close, his presence is enormous. Room-eating. “Ao Qin asked me for help. Mmm.”
“Me too.” I try to laugh, but it comes out a nervous, high-pitched hiccup of a noise. “Seems like we will be partners then, eh?”
“Mmmmm.” I’ve never been able to identify the reason for that sound he makes. Mmm. Mmmm. Happy or sad, it’s always mmmm.
I drop into a crouch beside the bodies, arms draped over my knees, and tilt my attention partway down. Now, this is interesting. Ao Qin’s memories, reasonably enough, were so consumed by unimaginable horror that they left no space for fine details. Details like the neat little cut outlining the underside of his daughter’s jawline. It’s a shockingly clean injury for its size. The wound travels from ear to ear, and is deep enough that I’m genuinely surprised her head hasn’t rolled off her neck.
Yet, at the same time, there’s no sign that a struggle had taken place. Sedatives—magical, I imagine, although I can’t figure out why the Erinyes would ne
ed it—must have been involved. Or something worse. My gaze skitters over the pulped mess of the husband’s face. Unlike his wife, this one went down screaming. Maybe they took him first. Maybe they made her watch...
“Any leads on your end?”
“Mmmmm.” Hao Wen paces around the radius of the crime scene and, much to my extreme discomfort, comes to stop right behind my shoulder. “A few. You?”
“Mm,” I mimic, a bit sarcastically. That sound is shaving at my nerves. “A few. I thought we could, maybe, consolidate what we know”—so I don’t have to cross-check this nightmare—“and then, maybe divide up search zones, and—”
“Mmmm,” There’s an uncanny edge to his constant vibrato now. “You don’t know, do you?”
I sigh. “Probably not. No one tells me anything.”
“There can only be one, Rupert.” The tiniest schink of steel-on-steel as Hao Wen sighs, low and sad.
“Are you quoting Highlander?” The hairs on the back of my neck are standing at attention. I try rocketing onto my feet and sidling away at the same time, and end up rising in an undignified waddle.
I don’t get far. Something sharp lances between my vertebrae, right above where my neck meets my shoulders. I stiffen. The needle plunges deeper, deeper, until I can almost feel a pinprick tickle against my windpipe.
“Don’t move. Mmm? Mm. It will probably end very badly for you.”
“You’ve made your point rather clear.” Ha. I launch a panicked look in Shark’s direction. He’s clearly aware that something is going down. Unfortunately, my misfortune appears to be a spectator sport rather than cause for intervention.
Hao Wen, still mmm-ing thoughtfully away, dips to his haunches so we’re both eye level. He shutters his eyes and begins mashing his generous jowls with his free hand hand, plucking at the flab in a way that makes him look suspiciously like a sleeping trout.
“You and I are not the only ones that Ao Qin summoned to the duty.”
“Uh-huh? Crowdsourcing has its virtues.”
“Yes. Mmmmm,” sighs Hao Wen. “But the problem is that he’s going to award only one person the prize.”
“And the others?”
“MmMMMMMM.” Nothing good can come of the tone he’s using. He cuddles the sound like a pet, stroking it, teasing it, before finally, in a feathery murmur, explaining: “They die.”
Uh oh.
Hao Wen snakes an arm forward and around my neck, a fresh needle clasped between his fingertips. “No hard feelings, mmm? I’m just trying to minimize the competition. Mmmm.”
As he reaches down, tiny hands rise from my skin to clutch his—
FREEZE-FRAME.
So, here’s the deal: being alive is awesome. It’s better than being in Heaven, which I hear is endlessly dull, and certainly miles ahead of accommodations in Diyu. Unless you’re keen on the bliss of non-existence, what you have right now, ang moh, is the best you’ll ever get. Unsurprisingly, life, for all of its torments and unpredictabilities, is a habit-forming vice.
It is the rare soul who undertakes cosmological migration without complaint. Most buck when confronted with the notion of being separated from the material plane, although they usually concede after some initial grumbling. Not all, though. Some cling to physicality like a drug, a grudge. These spirits eventually become refugees: ghosts, poltergeists, and in some cases, yaoguai of considerable malevolence.
Diyu, of course, is responsible for containing these specters and has been authorized by the Jade Emperor to use any means necessary. Which means one of two things for the vagrant revenants: certain annihilation, or the need to be very, very clever.
And that brings us to my point for this tangent. The savviest spooks use bureaucracy to their advantage. Instead of milling aimlessly through the Earth, they negotiate tenancy agreements. Rental contracts with willing mortals.
Like me.
Oh, come on, ang moh. You didn’t really think all those tattoos were for fun, did you?
HAO WEN’S EYES flare open. “What—”
I don’t need to look to know what is tendrilling out of my flesh: two-dimensional arms, thin as bone, fingers too long and too warped; a face made out of teeth. “You could have stopped the first thing too.”
Bob (of course they have properly foreign names, ang moh, but names have power; call a dragon a duck, and you instantly bring them closer to your level) hisses exultantly in reply. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Bob scrabbling for purchase on Hao Wen’s shoulder, every motion boneless, fluid as kerosene, pulling himself upwards, fist after fist.
The Sak Yant master moans when Bob’s grip finally locks over his face, and kicks free with a yelp, scrabbling backwards on his hands. Needles spray across the floor. Bob croons his disappointment like a lovelorn girl. The commotion has agitated the other tattoos; I can feel them unfurl and swell, rheumatic from dreams of sensory gluttony but eager to awake, to capitalize on this opportunity to devour and tear and hungry what is this light what is who are where are you delicious tired get out of my space what are you doing
More hands stretch, more faces press against the film of my skin.
“Guys, a little help here?”
The needle impaling my spine clatters free.
I rise and backpedal away from Hao Wen, much to my renters’ dissatisfaction; they like conflict. But bravado really isn’t my jam. Reading my fear, the tattoo artist looks at me appraisingly, and then snarls and belches a word of old power, mountain-language, bone-speak, so potent that the air itself quavers like an exposed lung.
Half my tattoos drop dead.
Yeah. Time to go.
With one last hopeful look at Shark, who still hasn’t budged from the exit, I stab an elbow into the window behind me. Glass erupts and empty air yawns. I glance over my shoulder: no fire escape. Clearly, the building planners weren’t proponents of public safety. Below, the road swarms thick with life and plastic canopies, an artery choked with ants.
I turn back to Hao Wen and shrug helplessly.
“Been real, but I, uh. Later, Hao Wen.” I flash him the one-finger salute of the rude and, biting down on my terror, pitch myself backwards into the open air.
CHAPTER SIX
THERE COMES A time in every man’s life when he finds himself flabbergasted by the choices he’s made. For some, that occasion arrives in the twilight of his years, when all he has left is a bounty of slightly wilted dreams.
For me, it’s right now.
I’ve regretted many things over the last thirty-seven years. Flirtations with recreational chemicals, second-degree murder, an ex-girlfriend with an alarming propensity for strap-ons. But I don’t think I’ve quite regretted anything as much as trusting Bob to whisk us away to safety.
My digestive system wasn’t manufactured for high-speed rooftop chases. It might be a different matter if the pursuit involved only a single axis of horizontality, but it doesn’t. As Bob violently seesaws from one precarious handhold to the next, Chinatown transforming into a stop-motion blur of post-colonial shophouses, we strain against the definition of forward motion. Up, down, upside-down. Whiplash turns at forty-five degree turns, aerial cartwheels.
My stomach heaves as we wheel around a street sign, and I narrowly, narrowly, escape unloading what little is left on passersby.
“How about I promise to not solve this case?” I shout as Bob latches onto the underside of a balcony, no longer even aping normalcy. His limbs have splintered into a hydra of groping fingertips. They wave like seaweed in the periphery of my vision. “Ao Qin could save you the trouble of killing me!”
Hao Wen doesn’t reply, but continues doing that frightening thing where he sort of blinks, almost casually, from perch to perch, jolting closer whenever I peel my eyes away. Closer, closer. Steel burns in the sunlight for a twentieth of a heartbeat; a needle just about misses my ear as it whistles past.
“Get us out of—no, wait. Get us down!”
Bob sibilates his incredulity, weaving in place, clearly
unwilling to take my order at face value. Smart yaoguai.
“Trust me! I have a plan! Get us down!”
Another uncertain hiss before he capitulates and we plummet, headfirst, into the alley behind a fishmonger. Bob manages to barely avoid snapping my neck, but I do make contact with the asphalt cheek first. I breathe a lungful of fish juices as I clamber onto my feet, spitting slime and dirt. I don’t turn to look for Hao Wen, instead stumble headlong into the crowd that is, of course, milling in the wrong direction.
I free a crumpled handful of papers from my pockets, yellow talismans inscribed with shaky cockerel-blood calligraphy. One day, I’ll have a proper Fulu Pai practitioner make me a batch instead of enduring my own questionable handwriting. Until then:
“Come on, come on...” No time to sort the unnecessary ones; I drop them as I jog-shuffle forward, leaving a trail of parchments that loops and twists like a cartographer’s nightmare. Ah. Here we go.
“Uncle! You want to buy—” a salesman ventures, gesturing at a rack of knock-off Adidas goods.
I almost stop to argue about whether I qualify as an ‘uncle’ yet, but wave a hand and wobble forward, shouldering through a pair of tanned Caucasian men, their smiles broad and wondering behind gleaming aviator glasses. As they pass me, I tap them each on a shoulder, sticking a pair of amulets to their sweat-soaked shirts.
I then fasten another charm to the edge of a merchant’s table, plant a fourth on a round-bellied auntie, a fifth on a punk with an aqua-blue mohawk and a dense constellation of piercings. This goes on until I run out of relevant phylacteries, at which point I dash into a side street through a spill of diners.
If all goes as intended, Hao Wen will waste at least the next twenty minutes looking for me where I’m not, making all the paperwork I will invariably have to fill out (Diyu is notoriously strict about use of their triangulation talismans) worth the drudgery.
Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef Page 4