Food of the Gods

by Cassandra Khaw

  “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.

  “Such a small man for such a big shell.” Jian Wang tsks, as he slicks free, glistening like a newborn, features pliant as a balloon, re-inflating as they reenter the humid air. Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I announce, blearily.

  Snap. Muhammad collapses into a heap, a discarded puppet.

  “Fuck.” The word tears free. I jam a knuckle into my mouth, dancing back. Great. Perfect. I’m a cop killer by proxy now, or at least, the only visible suspect in a ten-metre radius. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. FUCK.”

  Jian Wang fixes me with a look of cool reproach, closing his fingers around his acquisition as it flutters and thrashes against his skin. He brings it to his face, and his hand clenches. The thing, whatever it was, erupts into a foul-smelling smear.

  “What did you do?” The words uncoil, even though I know the answer, know it would only be met with scorn. Creatures like Jian Wang don’t care about creatures like us.

  “Stopped him,” he replies, petulantly. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Most people don’t help someone else by killing a person. Equivalent force. Equivalent force, damn it!” I fling my arms at the corpse, which is already somehow loosening its stranglehold on its bowels. “I didn’t want him dead.”

  “You should have said so,” Jian Wang counters smoothly.

  “Fuck,” I repeat for the umpteenth time.

  Lights flare. A shiver of voices; movement. Large shapes mill in the penumbra outside of the street lamp, resolving into dark blue uniforms, concerned faces. Muhammad had friends. I raise my hands at the warning click of safeties being thumbed back. Someone, voice trembling through each staccato-gasped word, calls for back-up. They’ve seen Muhammad’s body. They’re making the logical conclusion. I’m so screwed.

  “Rupert.” Again, that tone: knowing, predatory, smug.

  I look over at Jian Wang, hands still in the air. “Mmm?”

  “I can help you. Just say yes.”

  So, so screwed.

  In range of a firing squad, tottering at my wit’s end, I say yes. Yes, as a nasty thought dislodges itself from a miasma of awful thoughts. Isn’t this all a little convenient? But I’m not given room to entertain its unpleasantness. A weight crushes into my spine, even as shadows rush over my vision, sounds dimming to an underwater roar, and I drown.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE INTERSTICE BETWEEN seconds tastes like money and is viscous as treacle, with a moist heat that clings tar-like to the lungs so that every breath scrapes and drags. If the dead are condemned to occupancy here, it’s no wonder they’re perpetually depicted as hostile.

  I hobble through the thick film, shoving past the bodies of the living, ash-grey silhouettes that are only mostly solid. A thought intrudes: walking into someone else’s skin, taking over someone else’s existence, could be the easiest thing in the world. All I had to do was put it on—I force it down, pivot around a corner, and swallow a paroxysm of nausea as the universe flattens into a vertical canvas. In the last instant before I am compressed into two-dimensionality, a curiosity rears: where did that idea come from? But it doesn’t last.

  Purgatory, or at least this choking image of it, has one redeeming quality. For all of its lurching, stomach-frothing perils, it permits near instantaneous transportation, if you know which alley to access—which I do—and how to navigate its inconsistencies—which I also do. (If you go gambling in Diyu as often as I do, ang moh, it would be true for you as well.)

  Under my breath, I count the cobbled stones, the succession of vine-smothered banyan trees. Turn right once at a traffic light when it gleams yellow, then left again when it changes to blue. Up hills, down past the churning, mud-brown river weaving through Kuala Lumpur, past the colony of dead construction workers who live still in the bones of Times Square.

  Through it all, the pressure on my spine continues to mount, becoming heavier with every step, until motion itself is torture.

  Have to get out have to get out.

  The thought sears through my system, a knife in the brain, amplified by every shudder of my pulse.

  Have to get out have to get out.

  It fills my head, my veins, my chest. There’s no room left for anything else.

  Have to get out have to get out.

  I break into a sprint.

  Have to get out get out GET OUT—

  Air.

  I crash onto the stoop in front of my apartment, gulping breath like I’m drowning, every muscle and tendon singing with fire. After a long moment, I squeeze into a ball, and begin inventorizing my list of hurts. It doesn’t take long; five seconds into the exercise, I reach the logical conclusion that everything hurts.

  Especially my shoulders, which feel inexplicably like they’ve been carrying mountain ranges for a lifetime. My shoulders are wound tight. Rolled-up power cables, vacuum-packed and sealed into sardine cans tight. If they ever relax again, I’m building a temple to Guan Yin.

  At least, I’m alive.

  Groaning, I roll onto my feet and pick my way up the steps home.

  THE SMELL HITS first: a cocktail of pus and bile and waste matter, pheromonal stink of terror, a glazing of metal. Gunpowder smolders. Somewhere in between, a thread of burnt-black meat. They must have come when Minah was cooking.

  “Minah!” I burst through the door and instantly slip on a pool of red. I smash chin-first into the apartment floor, nearly biting off my tongue in the process. Stifling a whimper, I inch forward on my elbows, too dazed to consider the logistics of being upright, too scared to contemplate pausing and assessing the situation. If I keep moving forward, I won’t have to think about what might have happened. “Minah? Kitten?”

  “I told you not to bring your work home.” Her voice, gently daggered, floats into hearing.

  Soundless, Minah drifts into the living room and kneels beside me, her thoughts unreadable behind glass-smooth eyes. She extends a hand. Our fingers lace and just for that heartbeat, when I breathe in, I’m breathing her frangipani perfume and the promise that everything is fine, that everything is alright, that I’m with someone I love and it will all be okay. Then, she lets go and I’m left with the realization I’m lying on a carpet of warm gore.

  “I—”

  “People came to the house,” Minah announces, distractedly, as though the evidence wasn’t still steaming on every piece of furniture. Her baju kurung is in tatters, the hems brocaded with red fingerprints. One arm gleams with naked bone, with striations of yellow fat. “Luckily, George and I heard
them come up the stairs.”

  “Uh.” I crawl into a cross-legged position. “George is—”

  “Eating.”

  “Okay.” I nod, stupefied by pain, torn between parental instinct and instinctive horror. “Your arm. Um. Are you—”

  “I think some of them actually came over for dinner before...” Minah resumes, volume raised ever-so-slightly, enough to let her swallow my question. Her tone is heartbreakingly gentle, demure. Her fingers trail up her forearm and close over the elbow, disguising wet tendon. “Sayang, why did this happen?”

  “Ao Qin,” I start. Flinch around the realization of how tired I am. “Ao Qin... didn’t tell us everything about his plans. He—this quest is a bit like a reality show. Many people come in, only one person leaves.”

  “Ah,” Minah breathes. Her eyes, normally so warm and vital, remain impenetrable, black as the countryside night. They travel upwards, scouring my face, move higher and then stop.

  “Jian Wang.” In her mouth, the name bristles like the hackles of a dog. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ask Rupert,” replies a sly voice from above my head, its Malay immaculate and couched in palace vernacular. “He’s the one who invited me in.”

  Oh. Oh, right. That explains the ten-ton albatross around my neck. Revelation glissades into a second panicked epiphany. What I have done this time? Heart pushing against the roof of my mouth, I stretch an investigative arm upwards and grope through the air. Something cracks across my knuckles: a boot, a rod? I yelp regardless, snatch my hand away.

  “Jian Wang?” I repeat.

  It’s shocking how slippery the undesirable is, how effortless it is for the eyes to cascade over things they don’t want to see, like homeless vagabonds or ghosts riding pillion. I wrench a shoulder back. A shadow puddles over the floor in front of me, delineating the presence of a small child, skeletal in composition, its legs straddling my neck. Cold fingers grasp the underside of my chin, stroke my attention upwards so I’m looking into a mouth like a void, black eyes buried deep in the hollows of a dead boy’s face.

  “Hallo, Rupert,” whispers the spirit of Chinatown.

  “Aaaaggggh.”

  “You need to leave,” Minah growls. Actually full-on growls, an animal noise too throttled with violence to be construed as anything but a portent of bloodshed. Her lips curl back, and I glimpse fishbone teeth, crowded so closely together you could mistake them for ivory lace. “You don’t belong here.”

  “Please.” Jian Wang sniffs. “Is that any way to talk to a sister-wife?”

  Minah stiffens. “I—”

  “We’re not married. Yet. I’d need to convert to Islam, but that’s—” I thrash my arms, trying to swing back onto my feet, landing instead on my rump atop a pile of, of...no, don’t want to think about it. “That’s not even the point here. When did I agree to be your—your taxi?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I—I, what? I didn’t?”

  Hands shovel in my hair, an intimacy I already find enormously unsettling. “You said you needed help.”

  “I... did?” I hesitate, inundated with guilty relief. Yes! Something I actually know! I bob my head vigorously. “I did.”

  “You didn’t specify what kind of help, so I’m obligated”—you could spread the relish in his voice on toast, honestly—“to stay until you cease needing help.”

  Wait. Heat prickles up along my vertebrate. “With what?”

  “Anything.” Jian Wang’s reply is full of teeth.

  I jam my thumb against the underside of a canine, regretting it instantly. Intestinal tissue has no business being sampled raw. Try not to think about what you’re on try not to think about—“That makes no sense. There have to be limits. You... you can’t just hang around being a ‘supportive’”—airquote, airquote—“‘presence’ forever.”

  “Why not?”

  I stammer to a halt. Already, I have a nagging suspicion I’ve lost this battle, but optimism, however stupid, is the reason to live another day. “Because I said so.”

  Neither Minah nor Jian Wang are terribly impressed. Jian Wang laughs like a jackdaw. My beloved shakes her head, disgust bruising her features, and sways upright. Her gaze stays trained on Jian Wang, bright with carnivorous intensity, mouth peeled slightly open in threat, as though to say, ‘I could hurt you any time I want.’

  Polite, controlled: “You need to get rid of him, sayang.”

  “He needs me.” Effusive, arrogant.

  “I—” I’m about to object when I realize he’s right. Jian Wang is my single best bet for locating the Furies, and possibly surviving the entire fiasco. More crucially, if Jian Wang is with me, he can’t be anywhere else. “Sayaaaang.”

  “Don’t,” Minah snarls, the black of her eyes already radiating into the sclera. Hissing like a cat, head lashing from side to side, she paces into the kitchen, nails lengthening with every swing of her arms. “Use that tone with me.”

  “But sayang.” I clamber after her. My stride is longer than hers; it takes no time at all catch up, to cup a palm around her shoulder. “Sayang, come back here. You don’t understand.”

  She whirls on me, inhumanly fast, flattens her palms on the walls. Ink whorls lap at the apex of her cheeks, which are falling already to rot, attenuating to knife-edge bone. Minah growls again, deeper this time, lacerating my monkey-brain with fear. It’s suddenly very hard to ignore the fact she is, in practice, a cannibalistic corpse with a dietary predisposition for the small intestines. “What. Do. You. Want?”

  “It’s only going to be for a little—”

  “Yang, no. No, yang, no.” Minah softens, mouth pursing in the tiniest of frowns, brows furrowing endearingly. “Listen to yourself. This is not how any of this ends.”

  “It’d be fine.” I move forward and try to scoop her chin into my hands, try to push my forehead to hers. The first, Minah allows. The second causes her to recoil, gaze snapping wide open. Oh, right. She probably doesn’t want contact with Jian Wang’s crotch.

  I shuffle backwards and stoop my head in apology, even as the child-ghost emits a rude noise. Minah pins her attention to a photograph on the wall—my last birthday; we’re ringed by other contractors from Diyu, all beaming drunkenly while an amused Minah sips a cup of tea—slightly skewed and speckled with handprints. “We’ve got this one in the bag. Be patient with me. It won’t take long. I just need a little bit of time.”

  “No.” Her eyes find mine. In the distance, sirens glimmer red-and-blue, distorted by the smoke-glass windows. Then, softer yet: “No.”

  “Why?”

  She caresses my cheek. “I... the matter with Ao Qin—I have no jurisdiction. I cannot tell you to do anything. It is my fault, at least in part. So, who am I to make demands there?” Grief, raw as an exposed vein. I ball my fists around the urge to hold her, to comfort. “But Jian Wang cannot stay.”

  “But he—”

  “He is not your ally. He is not anyone’s ally.” Minah glances up, lips contracting into a dissatisfied moue. “If you let him, sayang, he will devour you whole.”

  “Now, you’re being cruel,” Jian Wang huffs.

  “Nothing that is dead and lives is a thing to trust, and nothing exists that cannot be broken,” she intones, ignoring Jian Wang, in the singsong lilt of a woman reading from a scripture. “I’m... I—call me, when you’ve sorted this out.”

  “Where are you going?” I’m burbling like an abandoned puppy, tail between my legs, but I can’t stop myself. The implications tangling between each word frighten me more than Ao Qin’s displeasure.

  “Away.” Sadness constricts around her, so tightly that I lose sight of the woman I adore. Her voice shakes.

  “But—”

  “Go, sayang.” Minah vanishes into the kitchen, finality resting heavy in the last loving whisper, her hand ice on my wrist.

  I watch her through the doorway, a sylph of a girl digging through a man’s opened ribcage. Slorp. She frees a familiar bundle of pink muscle.
It screeches, tiny hands fastened around a loop of intestine. George, I think, inhaling the abattoir reek, a weird affection suffusing my chest. They’re my family, even if both of them eat unprocessed Soylent Green.

  I take a step forward.

  The Ghostbusters iconic synth-funk jingle squeals from a pocket. I snap a frantic look down, then fumble for the phone, nearly dropping it several times as it keeps squeezing free from my viscera-slick palms. Finally, after the ringing subsides and restarts at least once over, I pop it open and jam the device against my cheek. “Hello?”

  “Rupert.” The boss’s voice is cream and caramel, decadently smooth.

  I freeze. Crap. “Boss.”

  “Come to the manor when you’ve a moment, won’t you?” The boss (my employment contract involves very clear non-disclosure clauses) never talks in definites, only suggestions that mandate immediate obedience. “We missed you. Our palates missed you. You promised us a unique feast, one worthy of surrendering a half-day off to you. What happened, Rupert?”

  “Got sidetracked, boss.” You don’t argue with the boss. You don’t do anything but express meek acceptance. “Sorry, boss.”

  “We will see you in two hours?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Perfect.” Click.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MINAH WAS RIGHT. Jian Wang really is abominable business.

  “Get off.” I prod at his foot. The stench is becoming nauseating: an alphabet of acute bromodosis, damp earth, and sour milk.

  “No.”

  I prod harder. It’s hard to be sure in the tenebrous cocoon of the backseat, but I think Jian Wang’s legs have fused with my chest. Toes writhe under threadbare grey socks, half-submerged in my chest cavity. “Get. Off.”

  “No.”