Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef

by Cassandra Khaw

  The passageway dilates into a proper street and I emerge, a little out of sorts, almost into encroaching traffic. A passing motorist zips past, flipping me the bird as he goes. I dance back onto the pavement, and crane a look up. The buildings here are old and unimpressive: dreary grey, a knuckle of dodgy hotels, and dime stores fenced by a coil of taut-shouldered pedestrians.

  I inhale exhaust in giddy relief. Still no Hao Wen. With luck, he’s getting incarcerated right now for assaulting a random innocent. Feeling fractionally more optimistic about my chances of survival, I skitter down the walkway towards Bukit Bintang. No reason to invalidate the last fifteen minutes by chucking myself back into Hao Wen’s path. If the Sak Yant master wants my hide, he can wait for it. Besides, the person I’m hoping to interrogate won’t be around till midnight.

  DO YOU KNOW what an aging ex-mobster moonlighting as a gastronomical genius-for-hire does for fun, ang moh?

  He plays Dance Dance Revolution.

  Honestly, I’d have preferred DotA to hopping about on an illuminated square in eyeshot of disbelieving teenagers, but Bukit Bintang no longer has any decent cybercafés.

  ...What?

  THE SKY NEVER truly darkens here. Light pollution stains the night a moody indigo between the gaps in the skyline. Foot traffic ebbs, alters in tone; itinerant families become replaced by rougher crowds, drunken revellers and hard-eyed women in skyscraper heels.

  No one attempts conversation as I inch my way to Petaling Street, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, I’m too tired to deal with another sapient being right now; I’ve bled enough today to merit the eternal disapproval of the Red Crescent Society, who no doubt would have something to say about such a reckless waste of valuable blood. On the downside, the silence is giving me room to think.

  Ao Qin betrayed you, growls a voice in my head. Well, maybe, mumbles another. Technically, his only crime was misrepresenting the scope of the project.

  A third voice: are we really talking like marketing strategists these days?

  I shake myself free of my moody contemplations. The Dragon King’s frankly homicidal approach to employee motivation has definitely changed the playing field. What troubles me, though, is the fact he saw fit to alert Hao Wen to this valuable kernel of data and not I. Why? Neither Minah nor I spend enough time in the ocean—I can’t even swim—to have caused accidental offense. A political thing, perhaps? A bitter rivalry between his kingdom and Diyu?

  No matter how you slice the quiche, there’s nothing good to find here. Ao Qin clearly has, at best, limited interest in keeping me alive. I turn a corner, and adjust the drape of the plastic bags over my shoulder as I go so that they don’t cut quite as deeply into my battered flesh. Occultism isn’t anywhere near as glamorous as some people believe, and about six times as heavy. (Career exorcists, by the way, tend to be repugnantly muscular. Just in case you were wondering, ang moh.)

  Paranoia takes over from low-level anxiety as I jangle under the chintzy Chinatown arch, a gaudy monument to the country’s intrinsic faith in the white man’s ability to spend. Petaling Street, home to bargains so good, they had to write its name thrice. The place is quieter at this time of night. The stalls that choke its arteries have mostly dispersed, leaving only a few obstinate entrepreneurs and rows upon rows of eateries, furtively occupied by half-awake locals and nervous tourists. The air glitters, toothsome, hungry. Eager.

  Despite the unconscionable number of rubes who visit during the day, I much prefer Petaling Street during the hours of sunlight. Easier to vanish into a body of hundreds than to be incognito on an empty, trash-haunted street. Luckily for me, Hao Wen is a no-show and after a few minutes of stalking furtively between pillars, I scoot towards the crossroads.

  The trampled asphalt is green here, made eerie by the tinted glass that stretches over Chinatown like sheltering arms. In a puddle of filth, the moon is a bone-white sneer. I squat down and empty my bags, trying in vain to look like a purposeful eccentric rather than a vagabond rooting through rubbish.

  Most of my paraphernalia is uncommon, but not... unusual. Resources to erect a shrine. Offerings. Joss sticks. A monochrome portrait of an unsmiling boy, his eyes disarmingly flinty even in their cage of photographic film. Triangles of sponge cake, tangerines for color, a currypuff. The black cockerel, though, unconscious from a strategic blow to the cranium, is considerably more arresting. Similarly, I suspect more than a few passersby might see the cleaver, pitted and marked by decades of use, as cause for alarm.

  Right on cue:

  “Mommy, what’s he—” a little British boy flutes.

  “Keep moving, dear. Don’t make eye contact.”

  I whip my head around in time to see his mother, a stout woman with salt-and-champagne hair shield his eyes, and wrench him forward by the elbow. Her husband glowers balefully, arms fanned out into plump barricades.

  Right. Time to speed things up. I wait till the family drifts away before I begin set up, a process that quickly devolves into martial combat with the rooster, who awakens seconds prior to decapitation. Shrieking and slashing, squirming with the ferocity of a captured warlord, he scores a dozen wounds before I finally pin his neck under a knee, and begin hacking through gristle and bone.

  It’s messy. And loud. By the time I’m done, I’m soaked to the skin, my nails pebbled with unmentionable substances.

  The butchery isn’t all bad. For one, it serves admirably to keep onlookers away. No one really wants to talk to an apparent axe-murderer, and those who do tend to either converse from the attention-grabbing end of a gun barrel or have the professional courtesy to wait till the madness is concluded. More importantly, I now have enough blood to summon Jesus at this point.

  That’s not who I call, though.

  The spirit of Petaling Street is an old one, older than the capital itself, a relic installed by immigrant miners suspicious of new opportunities. A child interred alive in the soil, mouth stuffed with coins to buy Diyu’s forgiveness, completely beggared of traditional funeral accompaniments to circumvent any dream of escape.

  “What do you want, Rupert?”

  Innocence doesn’t keep. Especially not after decades entombed in the choking black earth, restless, enslaved, alone save for the company of worms. The spirit—Jian Wang; forgetfulness—rasps in a voice like construction; ponderous, deep, brimming with warning.

  I don’t answer, and continue instead with the runes, adding sigils of binding, patterns of stasis; rows upon rows of instruction, of warning; clauses for every situation, precautions for any eventuality. The cockerel twitches once, severed windpipe expunging a last bubble of blood. I keep painting.

  “Rupert.”

  The bitumen is saturated with writing now.

  “Rupert.”

  “Mm?” That should be enough. I look up, wipe the blood from my jaw with the back of a hand, and then untwist and climb to my feet, dusting myself off as I go. Jian Wang stands with his arms crossed, a boy of about eight, button-up shirt hanging too loose on an emaciated frame, stomach inflamed with the memory of parasites. His mouth is small, sharp with displeasure.

  “I had questions.”

  “Speak.” Under the demand, at the periphery of hearing, a growling tangle of we hate you live feed devour eat hate.

  I can feel him examining his restraints, muscle writhing, straining. Jian Wang’s gaze narrows. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath, every muscle rigid, until his lips slither into a smirk. (There are two kinds of ghosts, ang moh. The ones who wither from existential despair, and the ones who grow immeasurably dangerous from decades of rage. I’m sure you can guess which one Jian Wang is.)

  “You’re afraid of me.” Eat eat eat feed rip your limbs eat eat tear bite chew eat. “I haven’t seen so many wards in a long, long time.”

  I wet my lips, taste rust. “I have a healthy respect for your power.”

  “What do you want?” Eat eat eat hate hate hate hate eat.

  His Mandarin is archaic and elegant,
untarnished by exposure to adjacent dialects. From the look on his bloodless face, it’s clear he expects communication in kind. Which is problematic because I can barely get through a sentence in Mandarin without pausing to think.

  “Help?” I say in Cantonese, hopeful.

  Jian Wang’s mouth broadens. There’s no teeth, no tongue; just a circle of featureless black sucking at my eyes.

  I palm my face. “I need, uh. This is hard. I need—”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “SO, IT REALLY was the Furies?”

  Jian Wang shrugs and sips from his cigarette, the cherry blazing a lurid blue. He exales octagons of smoke; everyday physics has no authority over the dead. “Bodies like midnight, hair filled with bite. Hound’s breath, and wings of the bat.”

  I champ on the impulse to critique his poetry, pitching my weight from one foot to another. While hardly the most inspired recitation, Jian Wang’s impromptu rhymes are, as he has haughtily noted, still volumes better than my slaughter of his mother tongue.

  “I’ll take that as a yes?” I sluice Dettol over my forearms and wince as the antiseptic fluid sears across my injuries.

  Jian Wang smiles thinly and hooks skeletal fingers under his right knee, towing his leg closer, cigarette now dangling between his teeth. He is sitting, improbably balanced, on the summit of a fire hydrant.

  So far, the ghost has refused to acknowledge any attempt at explaining my linguistic shortcomings (public schooling, errant parents, adolescent certainty that Shakespeare would disrobe any woman, no matter how svelte), choosing instead to throw my shame in my face by demonstrating his adroitness with Cantonese, if not poetry.

  I throw a cagey look over a shoulder, hunting for evidence of Hao Wen—or worse, the attentions of a well-meaning police-man come to see why a blood-drenched lunatic is talking to himself in the middle of Chinatown. Thankfully, no one emerges from the gloom.

  “Right. So do you know why the Erinyes killed Ao Qin’s daughter?” My skin throbs. It’s a long shot, sure. But there’s nothing that passes through Petaling Street that Jian Wang is unlikely to see.

  The revenant drums fingertips across his lower lip, one corner of his mouth rising. He transfers his cigarette into a hand, drinks deep. “The Gracious Ones only venture where they are summoned; creatures of responsibility, unlike certain commoners.”

  Burn. On a more positive note, Jian Wang is no longer broadcasting low-frequency loathing in my direction, his speech reduced to one-dimensional boredom.

  “Who summoned them, then?”

  His eyes—bottomless, the black of rot—flash with laughter. “No one of matter, no one loved. Just a broken little dove.”

  Tension knits my ribs tight. He knows something. “What does that even—”

  Jian Wang tuts an objection, an admonishing finger raised as he hops onto his feet. The ghost oils forward. “Eye for an eye, hand for a hand. Knowledge is yours, when I have what I demand.”

  He’s baiting me, it’s clear. What really unsettles me is his confidence in opening a new channel of negotiation. The spell should have him trussed so tight, he’d need permission to speak. I work my nails into my palm, and force my mouth to maintain its amiable rictus. “Fine. Fine. What do you want?”

  “Freedom.”

  For the tenth of a nanosecond, I can see Jian Wang as he was, rather than what he has become: a child, frightened, suffocating around a throat stuffed with metal, dying incrementally. The world closing above him in bursts of dark loam. Alone, for however many decades he’s been buried here.

  “Look, I only push pencils. I have no influence over Diyu—”

  “But you can fast-track my application.”

  That brings me up short. “I can?”

  “I’ve checked.” Jian Wang sniffs, head bobbing, all pretenses of intimidation and nicotine addiction discarded. “You have the authority to at least push it to the attention of middle management.”

  “I do?”

  “You do.”

  The fact that Jian Wang knows things about my position that I don’t, that he knows complex bureaucratic privileges that I wasn’t even aware existed, disconcerts me in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. I clamor hopefully for an intelligent rejoinder. “Since when?”

  Before I can get my answer, a new voice intrudes, bassy and roughened by hard use, the words couched in lowbrow Malay. “Boss, what you doing so late?”

  I spin in place, nearly tripping over my own feet, excuses cycling across the tip of my tongue. A flashlight cast lines of white up my legs, my torso, which gather on my face. I shade my eyes, catch the glint of a badge in the glare.

  “Just cleaning up,” I tell him absently, already aware that this is really just a show of cordiality at this point. There’s absolutely nothing I can say, I’m sure, that will make any of this look okay in the incredulous eyes of the law.

  The policeman sways closer, body reeking of cologne and the sweat of a fourteen-hour shift. Although his uniform strains over a rotund belly, sleeves slicing into pillowy arms, his face is hard, his gaze clear and alert. If he spends any time behind a desk, it isn’t of his own volition.

  “I can see that,” he booms. A name tag reveals his name as Muhammad. His torch dips from my countenance, glides across the platter of offerings; lingers on the rooster, and its nest of feces and eldritch scrawlings. “Black magic?”

  I shuffle back, arms behind my back, fist locked over wrist. His forwardness surprises, but not as much as the matter-of-fact delivery. “No lah,” I demur, lapsing back to creole. “Only good magic lah.”

  “You sure?” Muhammad seems unconvinced. When he speaks, his tone is easy, a pitch calculated to disarm and reassure. It chuckles: Ah-ha-ha. We’re all friends here. It’s a voice I recognize from a different life. Muhammad hasn’t committed to an interpretation of me yet, meaning I have about five minutes before I’m walked off in the direction of a balai.

  “Of course lah.” I say, a little too quickly. You’re getting soft, sneers a voice in my head. “Business not doing so good, so got to ask god for help loh.”

  The officer strokes his armament of chins as he limps forward, flashlight wedged into a loop at his belt, spare hand braced against a cane. “I see. But normally, people use roast duck, or hell money, or fruit. Not blood.”

  “Um.” I retreat a step. “You’ve got a point.”

  “Do you need help, Rupert?” Jian Wang inquires, mildly.

  It takes every molecule of self-control to not jump out of my skin. I’d somehow forgotten about Jian Wang, who seems deeply amused by my oversight. Muhammad, perspicacious as always, follows my wild gaze to the vacant space visible to mundane eyes.

  “Am I interrupting something?” He says, every word selected with elaborate care. Under the manufactured concern, I hear the real question: how high are you right now?

  “No?”

  Chink. A snap of metal. Handcuffs catch the glow of the streetlamps, circles of orange steel. I take another step backwards. Muhammad’s gait elongates, smooths out, discloses a muscular strength that promptly puts me on high alert. “Tell you what, how about we go down to the station, check in with my friends, and then we can all go to the mamak, hm?”

  “I can help you, Rupert,” Jian Wang purrs. “You just have to let me.”

  “I’m... I....” My eyes oscillate between the two, death and flab, a ghost and a cold cell. I try to sidestep the policeman, circle around to the other side of Mount Muhammad.

  He shifts quickly despite the cane, intercepting me, still wearing his congenial smile although his eyes have grown mirror-blank. “Don’t make it hard for either of us, yah?”

  “I’m not trying to—” I’m really not. Muhammad has the advantage of bulk, but I’m fairly certain I can incapacitate him before he can retaliate in kind. And if not, there’s still the cleaver, an enticement sprawled seductively within arm’s reach. Maybe. He is pretty fast. The muscles in my jaw convulse, and teeth click. “There’s nothing to worry about here.
”

  “Uh huh.” He chucks the act. Officer Friendly vanishes, replaced by steely resolution and the growing certainty that Muhammad might be my martial superior. “Come on.”

  “Rupert.”

  I don’t want to hurt Muhammad. I’ve got a natural soft spot for embattled professionals, being a card-carrying member of the tribe myself. Men like Muhammad and I, we just want to do our jobs and go home. Under other circumstances, I’d seriously consider allowing him to apprehend me and then paddling through the paper trail home. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to hemorrhage any more time.

  “Okay, Jian Wang.” A tickle of rawboned dread, a whisper in my mind that sounds very much like What are you doing, Rupert? I ignore it. “Do your magic.”

  And he does.

  Jian Wang rips through the air, silhouette blurring halogen-bright. I watch as he leaps onto the man’s shoulders, faster and more fluid than anything humanoid has any right to be, and squat down to watch. He braces small feet between Muhammad’s clavicles and rams his fingers into the policeman’s mouth, grinning derangedly the whole time. Down, down, he reaches, until he is embedded shoulder-deep. Pausing long enough to leer at me, Jian Wang then begins pushing his head between Muhammad’s lips, which contort grotesquely, a loop of meat like a misaligned scarf, almost comical in appearance.

  “Whhh—” The cop gurgles, a death rattle noise. His eyes bulge. Air wheezes through the slit of his mouth, and it keeps going and going, even when it no longer seems possible for his lungs to squeeze out more.

  His shoulders snap back, chest protruding. His sternum pops. Muhammad rises onto his toes like a fish on a hook, head canting backwards. His mouth dilates, the skin of his cheeks unstitching, turning red and white as muscle fibres unravel and tear, ivory gleaming wetly beneath yarns of pink. An arm suddenly lunges from between his teeth, fingers balled in triumph. Something grey and weak struggles within the hand’s grip, dribbling black gunk. Muhammad is making new noises now, feather-fragile, confused, a feeble, whining ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay.