We maintain this rhythm for a while: me, cleaning. Him, observing. A few minutes into my housekeeping, I hear a discreet thud. I look up. A paperweight has been mysteriously returned upright.
The unexpected act of nominal charity kindles a weird anger. You can push me around. You can dick with my life. You can raise my rent. But don’t pretend you actually care about my well being. Especially not now, not here. That fury quickly transfigures into ill-guided inspiration. A plan clicks into place and I stand, giddy with the knowledge I’m about to say something breathtakingly idiotic again.
“By the by, Your Highness. I was thinking,” I draw a circle in the air with a finger, my other arm looped around the waste bin, its bowels acrid with the stomach bile. “Theoretically speaking, if I went to Diyu and told them that you were press-ganging one of their representatives into unsanctioned service, wouldn’t that annul my oath and get you into incredible amounts of legal trouble?”
The Dragon King cants his skull. “Are you threatening me?”
“I’m not threatening you,” I say, as I deposit my container on the desk, all the while thinking to myself: Yes. Yes, I am. “I’m just expressing, in a roundabout way, my desire to not be enslaved by a verbal contract. As much as I’d like the fortune you’ve promised and to avoid the certain death you’ve been implying, there is no way this is happening. I’m not—I’m not risking those Furies.”
“Not even for me?”
Minah peels from the doorframe, a monochrome palette of what little is good and beautiful in my world. Her feet make no sound, no sound at all (the langsuir, ang moh, are very good at levitation) as she picks through the wreckage, eyes half-shuttered, baju kurung rustling like the waters of a midnight lake.
“Minah,” I swallow. “Sayang, you shouldn’t be here—”
She ignores me. Her attention belongs wholly to Ao Qin, who watches her sinuous approach with a mix of repulsion and wonder. I wonder if he sees a little bit of his daughter in her corpse-pale face, her scar-kissed arms. Eventually, Ao Qin nods, slow and boneless, spine bending serpentine-supple. “We can grant that boon, dead little girl.”
“Wait, what are we—”
In reply, Minah, still stoically ignoring my endeavours to make eye contact, laces her hands about his and bows low, lips pressed reverently to the Dragon King’s fingers. “There are no words to convey my gratitude, Yang Pertuan.”
“Excuse me? Someone? What are we talking about here?”
“We will even personally escort you to Meng Po,” continues Ao Qin. “But only if Mr. Wong completes his task.”
My ribs immediately become three sizes too tight. Minah was a good girl in life. Pious, even. The kind who prayed five times a day, who paid her zakat without complaint, and eschewed the temptations of bacon and expensive liquor. But all that virtuous behaviour means nothing when you’ve suckled on the marrow of your ex-spouse and drained his lover’s heart like it was some succulent fruit. Heaven has long ceased being an option for Minah; but reincarnation? That was still a possibility.
A dim, distant possibility, like a childhood daydream half-remembered, but still an achievable solution. It would require wading through a storm of red tape, of course, and innumerable court appearances. But it could happen.
Especially if you have the backing of an antediluvian deity.
“Thank you,” Minah says, her voice so rich with hope and want that I know I’ve lost before even she turns to fix her beautiful gaze on me. I would do anything for this girl. Anything, at all. And they both know this. Fuckers. “We shall be in touch.”
I smile weakly and nod. There was nothing else to be said.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SKY BURNS blue as we slouch through the gridlocked highway, the distant city of Kuala Lumpur a conundrum of skyscrapers, post-colonial architecture, and verdant green jungle. Someone punches their horn furiously. Another car replies with a loud bellow, like a beast answering a challenge.
The air conditioning coughs. Once, twice. Six times. The mechanical hacking eventually weakens into a background rattle even as Feng Mun lowers the temperature. Warm air blasts through the vents, smelling of chrysanthemum and exhaust gases. Roar as it might, the cab’s emphysemic A/C is obviously losing its battle against the wet, torpid heat.
As the sun beat down through the right window, I scoot a bit closer to the left, trying in vain to melt into what little shade exists.
(Don’t know why I bother, ang moh. It never works.)
“So, boss,” Feng Mun begins, coy, gap-toothed smile gleaming in the rear view window. “Have you talk to my wife recently ah?”
“Sorry. Haven’t had the time.” I mumble, in between arranging a plate of offerings and fighting my lighter. I fumble and lose my grip. The char siew pau bounces onto the floor, gathering dirt and whatever else has collected on the carpeted floor. Hopefully, its recipient won’t care too much. I don’t want to deal with the competition.
My cab driver twitches a shoulder, still obnoxiously sunny. “Okay loh! If you got time, ask her if she have enough money. If not, I can burn more.”
Feng Mun is the poster child of modern mínghūns. Where his predecessors married for desperation or to continue a family line, my ex-colleague (no one stays in the triads forever, ang moh) married his ghost (I’m being literal again, yes) for love. According to rumour, all it took was a single black-and-white photo and then six of years of bush-beating, nail-gnawing, long-distance courtship.
If this were a Shakespearean performance, Feng Mun would have killed himself for her ages ago, possibly while ululating about his affections, but the two are practical, earthen folk. (His wife, Sue Lin, was a prodigal accountant.) Such a transgression, she pointed out, would have doomed him to a lower strata of Diyu, invalidating the whole gesture. So, they’re both waiting for his natural demise, trading messages through mediums, and affection through willing possessees. (Yes. I know, ang moh. Very unsettling. But they’re happy and the mediums get paid. Who are we to judge?)
“Okay.” I drain a bottle of mineral water in a single motion, chuck it onto the floor as I ignite a trifecta of red joss sticks. The air immediately clots with the smell of sandalwood, nauseatingly dense. But the God of Missing People mandates such excess. Anything else and you’re asking for papercuts.
At least, that’s my assumption. My comprehension of Taoist sorcery is only very minimally superior to my grasp of animistic magic, which is to say I really, really should be chaperoned by an adult at all times and kept away from the complicated ideas. I have no aptitude for the mystic arts, only pig-headed resolution and a vague certainty that knowing how to contact the people I work with is a valuable trait. It gets you somewhere. Far, unfortunately, isn’t one of those destinations.
“Is it okay if I roll down the—” I clutch the lever in anticipation. Feng Mun’s car is a geriatric embarrassment in every way, except for the engine purring beneath the bumblebee-yellow hood.
Feng Mun’s voice booms, bright and boisterous, only slightly damaged by the scar rippling from mouth to clavicle. “Caaaaaaaaaaan! For you, anything also okay!”
“Er.” Squeak squeak squeal-crunch. The contraption jams. “Um.”
“Push harder laaaa.” He chortles. On the radio, Taylor Swift’s static-mauled voice rises in volume, imploring listeners to shake it off, shake it off.
I throw my shoulder into the motion, just as a torn-out scrap of newspaper glides through the pinprick gap between window and door frame. Another follows. Then another, and another. Another. Missing people notices. Kidnapping reports. Public entreaties to return a beloved son, a cherished daughter. An entire river of cheap newsprint washes into the cab, swilling together into a vaguely humanoid shape.
“Don’t block my mirror, can or not?” Feng Mun shoots glibly, immune to the strangeness. Outside, the driver of a passing Proton Wira gawks, slack-jawed, until I stare him down.
Eyes—all the black of the darkest inks, all young, all excerpts from lives interrupted—na
rrow as they flutter past. Mouths gape, hiss like cats.
“Really, Rupert?” They grumble in perfect unison, their Cantonese accented and musical. “Of all the places in Kuala Lumpur, of all the happening joints you could have invited me to? You had to call me here?”
“Eh, what’s wrong with my taxi, ah?” Feng Mun drapes an elbow over the back of his seat, and cranes a look backwards. He waggles a finger. “I clean it every day, you know?”
“He does.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Look, I—can we argue about this later? I’m trying to do business here.”
The God of Missing People lounges back in its seat. The faces on its skin—too young, much too young—murmur among themselves, their gazes darting this way and that, a gaggle of gossiping relatives at Chinese New Year. Seconds later, they stop, all at once, and focus on me.
“Fine.” Hundreds of eyes, some visible, some walled up behind text-scarred creases, roll with teenage extravagance. “First: let’s see the goods.”
I wedge a smile onto my mouth and try to maintain eye contact with the countenances papered around its head, a feat complicated by their reluctance to do the same. My mood lifts, however, when a corkscrew-haired girl of about sixteen shares a wink. Good sign. Definitely. Definitely maybe.
Impaling the joss sticks on a doughy char siew pau, I nudge the offerings forward. The response this time is unmistakably favorable. The God of Missing People, cooing in chorus with itself, trails fingers of cheap paper around the spread, round and round in languid figures of eight. Over and over and over. With every orbit, the food begins to grey, rotting from the inside out. Mold settles like muslin over the decay, and the deity sighs orgasmically to itself.
“Delicious,” It croons. “You never fail to impress. You have no idea how many people call me up without even sparing a thought about what I want, or what I like, or—”
The god stops. Despite the tropical sun, I feel the ambient temperature drop several degrees, sinking to somewhere between ‘reasonable chance of doom’ and ‘unequivocal disgruntlement.’ I pluck at my collar.
“Yes?” I extend the word like an olive branch, half in wistful fatalism. It’s obvious that there’s no hand waiting to receive it, just a colony of hornets. But optimism is stubborn.
The God of Missing People doesn’t answer. Not at first. I watch with growing unease as its mouth works in furious silence, like an old woman in mortal conflict with a glob of toffee. Eventually, it discharges a wad of hair and gum and chewed-up plastic wrappers into a cupped palm, before presenting the offending bezoar for examination.
“Not my fault.” The exclamation bubbles out before I can stop it; I sound like an obtuse toddler. I’m too busy squashing the temptation to ask about the exact logistics of what just happened to be properly tactful. Somewhere between all that, a manic thought arises: It wasn’t as though the deity had actually eaten the char siew pau...
“You’d think, Rupert,” The god says, almost hyperventilating at this point, every word swaddled with venom, every sentence an octave above the last. “You’d think that you, of all people, would understand the importance of curating an offering. It’s not like I asked for much. Not like your old gods with their virgins and golden calves.”
“But, I—”
“More excuses?” Now its voice is vibrating. “You should be down on your knees right now, thanking me for being so benevolent. Why, I can’t imagine how—”
A sigh whooshes free before I can reel it back. There’s no hope for it. Persnickety gods don’t stop once they’ve started steamrolling down their preferred tangent. I wait for an opening to riposte, misguided as that notion might be, and finally find one as Feng Mun eases us into a three-lane stalemate.
“I’m really, really sorry.” Hardly the most macho rejoinder, but humility is never a bad place to start. “It was entirely an accident. I did not mean offense. If there’s any way I could—”
“You could ask someone else to be your bloodhound.” It sniffs.
Damn it damn it damn it damn it. “We’ll be even after that?”
The God of Missing People twists its head, arms crossing, every visible face puckered with low-key distaste. Something nasty feeds into its body language; this is probably not going to be something I appreciate. “Yes. But only if you let me watch.”
Nope.
“Cruelty is next to godliness,” I mutter under my breath, but I extend my hand palm-up, wrist bared. With more practice than I care to admit, I slide a razor from its expertly sewn—Minah has a dreadful amount of free time—pocket in my inner sleeve. The blade itself is nothing terribly noteworthy. A plain wedge of stainless steel about the size of my thumb. Nonetheless, it suits its purpose.
I mumble a string of homemade incantations beneath my breath, spitballing new flourishes to the beat of my own breath. Contrary to pop culture, magic prefers invention to ritual—so long as you adhere to the fundamentals, that is. You can’t grill a steak without meat, after all, or pull ghosts from the road without a tribute of blood. Failure to get the basic tenets right invariably results in... stickiness.
Anyway.
Halfway through the polysyllabic maelstrom, I stab the blade into my forearm.
Pain fountains and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the world fractures into a Daliesque painting, all melting colors and insane configurations, shapes eating shapes, faces bleeding into faces and car hoods and anorexic monstrosities with too many limbs. Images begin to flicker at the edge of my vision: television-static outlines, incandescent enough to imprint afterimages on the eyeballs, jumping in and out of reality. I catch the cracked slope of a pregnant stomach, the grimace of an old man, an ocean of eyes, hands reaching, skin crisping, crackling, sizzling, subcuticular fat smoking, fragrant as an open-air barbeque and—
I tense. The cab is now glutted with ghosts, accident victims and traffic prey. They stick to every available surface, head and limbs contorted, cracked in places, smashed in others. Bent, broken, bleeding. Bloated with water, with pus, with blood. Every variety of smashed-up a vehicular accident can possibly conjure. Ectoplasmic brain drips like rooftop rainwater.
Speak-speak-speak-speak. A susurrus of overlapping voices. Feed-feed-feed-feed. Warning slithers between every vowel, thick and wet. Unlike gods, who are irrefutably mood-swingy but still generally of orderly mind, the dead lean towards simple-minded violence.
FEED.
The psychic tantrum is practically an assault at this point, a sledgehammer of pure demand. I wince and thrust my arm up in fine imitation of Freddie Mercury. The ghosts don’t wait. They pour forward, mouths unhinging, and it’s all I can do to stammer through a hastily considered ward; barely sufficient to keep them from emptying me of everything.
A frictionless eternity later, the tide slackens, oozing to a persistent trickle. I crack open a bleary eye. My vision crawls with microscopic life and necromantic traversities, a smear of lines throbbing to a 90mph heartbeat. I’m exhausted. Spent. Gone. But it’s over, except for one persistent apparition, a middle-aged Chinese woman with a face like burnt pork rinds, who refuses to detach. The rest have withdrawn, and are squatting like cats in the corners of the cab.
Speak-speak-speak-speak.
“Did any of you see the Dragon King’s daughter?”
Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes.
“Did you see who killed the Dragon King’s daughter?”
Whispering, too low for human hearing, as the spirits consult among themselves. In retrospect, it might have been better to provision a name, but Ao Qin, in his eternal wisdom, ignored all my tactful attempts at acquiring it.
The murmurings segues into stuttering assent: Yess-ssss-sss-sss-ss...
Huh. Interesting. An external party was definitely involved in the deaths. I mull over my options. Convenient as the alternative might be, I don’t want to out the Furies. Ao Qin might not have explicitly stated that I couldn’t share details about the case, but casual disclosure seems like a universally horrible idea, regardles
s.
The other issue is that traffic ghosts generally have god-awful vocabularies; something about lowest common denominators. More than one syllable a challenge.
The God of Missing People leans forward, hands planted onto the seat, one behind the other, looking for all the world like a cat prepared to lunge. My skin immediately prickles with portents of disaster. It’s beginning to feel like I’m missing an important memo somewhere, the one titled, Please RSVP to not be sacrificed horrifically.
After some consideration, I make my play:
“If asked to testify in a court of Hell, will you agree to truthfully identify the killers if they are brought in for examination?”
The air pressure drops, fast enough and low enough that my ears go pop and Feng Mun yelps. Before either of us can articulate a coherent word, the ghosts exit en-masse, sucked back out into the coiling traffic, their eyes huge and haunted. They leave their fear in the air, however, solid as a tumour, poisonous.
The God of Missing People slides back, drapes itself across the back of the cab like some young starlet.
“Happy?” I demand through clenched teeth, coiling a bandage around my arm. Blood is unfortunately an important part of being a black magic man.
“Beyond my wildest dreams.” It slithers forward again, presses its cardboard tongue against the red webbing my skin, and coos. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“Find her for me.”
“Find who?”
“The—” This really is awkward. All of it. The lack of the name, the God of Missing People lapping at my wound like a docile kitten. I hunch into my shoulders and extend my arm further, placing as much distance between the two of us as possible. The spectral auntie finally departs, throwing us both dirty looks as she goes, imprecations sprouting like egg sacs under her analogical breath. “The Dragon King’s daughter.”
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