Patsy-Jean frowned. ‘Kim was lying to me? Why would he do that?’
‘Because he wanted you to take your own life,’ said Nurse Okeke, very gently. ‘When people take their own lives, their spirits are like abandoned children, because the gods they believe in will not accept them. Our gods granted us life, and only our gods have the right to take it away from us. If we take it ourselves, our gods will turn their backs on us.’
Patsy-Jean looked frightened now. There was another deafening burst of thunder, right over the gymnasium roof, and the floor was shaken by another earth tremor. ‘So where am I going?’ she asked. ‘Who’s going to take care of me now?’
Almost on cue, the gymnasium’s double doors slammed wide open. A lightning flash lit up the arcade outside, and Jim saw the silhouette of a woman standing there, with the rain glittering behind her. It was the fox-woman, in her conical black hat, and her veil, and her shiny gray robes. She stayed where she was, unmoving, her arms by her sides.
‘Kwisin,’ whispered Patsy-Jean. ‘Kwisin has come to take me away.’
‘No, Patsy-Jean,’ Jim told her. ‘You don’t have to go with her if you don’t want to. I’m sure that we can find some other spirit to take you in.’
He gripped her shoulder tight but he could hold on only to her physical body, and her physical body was floppy and cold. Her spirit rose to her feet, as slippery and insubstantial as oil shimmering on the surface of a puddle, and glided away across the gymnasium toward the open doors. As Patsy-Jean approached, the fox-woman raised her arms as if to embrace her, and Jim was sure that the fox-woman began to grow taller, and to lean forward in the way that she had done when she had appeared in his bedroom, like a four-legged animal standing up on its hind legs.
‘No!’ Jim shouted. ‘Patsy-Jean! Don’t go with her! Don’t!’
He stood up, but as he did so the fox-woman stretched upward until she almost reached the top of the arcade. Her arms grew longer and longer, and as Patsy-Jean came through the doorway she folded them around her and drew her in close. Patsy-Jean screamed, a terrible despairing scream, and then Jim heard a sound like a dog crunching a chicken’s carcass between its jaws.
He lunged forward, although he had no idea how he was going to rescue a spirit that had no physical substance. But he had stumbled only two or three paces across the gymnasium floor before Nurse Okeke caught at his sleeve and stopped him. He twisted around and stared at her. Her eyes were wide and she looked terrified.
‘Don’t try to save her! She is dead already! If you try to save her, the demon will kill you, too!’
Jim turned back to the doorway. The doors were already closing again, but he was just in time to see the fox-woman turn around and hurry away, and in spite of the thunder and the clattering rain, he was sure that he could hear claws rattling on the paving slabs.
Nurse Okeke said, ‘Mr Rook – Jim – really, there is nothing that you can do.’
Jim said, ‘I let her down. I knew she was feeling bad about herself.’
‘It is too late. She is gone. There is a demon in my religion called Mama Chola who takes spirits in the same way. As far as she is concerned, the spirit of every person who commits suicide belongs to her, and she will kill anybody who tries to take them away from her.’
‘It’s Kim,’ said Jim. ‘That Korean kid. He’s responsible. Somehow he can make people see how they’re going to turn out in the future, and he takes away their will to live. I saw myself when I was eighty-something, and I was almost tempted to end it all.’
Nurse Okeke nodded. ‘Mama Chola also has her helpers, who whisper in people’s ears when they are asleep, and give them nightmares, so that they believe that they are going to be sick, or lame, or lose their sight. They become so depressed and exhausted that they stop eating, or drown themselves, and then Mama Chola takes their spirits.’
‘Well, this can’t go on,’ Jim told her. ‘I’m going to have to get rid of him somehow.’ He checked his watch. ‘Where the hell are those paramedics?’
‘Why don’t you go find out?’ Nurse Okeke suggested. ‘I’ll stay here with Patsy-Jean.’
‘I just hope that Kwisin doesn’t show up again.’
Nurse Okeke shook her head. ‘I doubt if she will. She is probably satisfied by now. Besides, she is not looking for people like me, who know what kind of trickery demons can play. There is no better way to protect yourself against demons than to acknowledge that they are real.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jim. ‘And thanks for trying to save Patsy-Jean. If we’d been a couple of minutes earlier . . .’ He looked down at Patsy-Jean’s body. Although she was dead, Patsy-Jean was frowning, as if she had forgotten something and was trying to remember what it was.
FIFTEEN
As Jim opened the gymnasium doors, Dr Ehrlichman came bustling in, accompanied by his lanky vice-principal, John Pannequin, and one of the college security staff, a thickset Mexican with a huge gray moustache.
‘What’s going on, Jim? Nadia Feinstein just told me that one of your students has hanged herself.’
Jim nodded toward Patsy-Jean’s body. ‘True, I’m sorry to say. Patsy-Jean Waller. Nurse Okeke gave her CPR but we were too late.’
‘This is awful! This is such a tragedy! First Maria Lopez and now this poor girl. Do you have any idea why she did it?’
‘She told me that she was very depressed about her weight. Other than that, I don’t really know.’
Dr Ehrlichman walked across to the body and took off his spectacles. ‘You poor young girl. What a terrible, terrible thing to do. I’ve called the paramedics, by the way, and the police. I don’t know what kind of press we’re going to get. Did you see the Times this morning? They called us the “College of Carnage.” Doesn’t do much for our reputation in the community, does it?’
Jim said, ‘I have to get back to my class, tell them what’s happened.’
‘Yes, OK. Very well. But when you’ve done that, I need you back here to talk to the police.’
Jim left the gymnasium and walked back along the empty corridors. Through the windows he could see lightning crackling almost continuously behind the trees, and before he reached Special Class Two there were three loud collisions of thunder, so close to the college that he heard some of the girls in Sheila Colefax’s class screaming in fright.
When he reached the door of Special Class Two he was puzzled to see that the blue blind had been drawn down over the porthole window. He turned the handle to find that the door was locked.
He knocked, and shouted out, ‘Open the door!’
There was no answer, so he knocked again, louder. ‘Open this goddamned door, will you?’
Still no answer. He tried rapping on the window with his ring finger. ‘This is Mr Rook and if you don’t open this door right now I am going to make your life hell! Do you hear me?’
He was still waiting there when another member of the college security staff came hurrying past him, followed by two paramedics.
‘Having some trouble, Mr Rook?’ asked the security man.
‘Door’s stuck,’ Jim told him. ‘Show these guys to the gym first. Then come back. I think my students are just playing me up.’
‘OK, Mr Rook. No problem.’
Jim waited for a while longer, leaning on the door with both hands pressed against it. He couldn’t imagine why his students would want to lock him out of his own classroom, especially since Maria’s suicide had left them all feeling so distraught.
He knocked yet again. ‘Will somebody unlock this door, please? This is pointless and unfunny and I have some very serious and important news to tell you.’
Another few seconds went by, and then Jim heard a soft, complicated click. The door opened, although only by a half-inch. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he hesitated for a moment before he pushed it open any further. There was another peal of thunder, and the fluorescent lights in the corridor flickered off for a moment, and then flickered on again.
He opened the door and st
epped into the classroom. At first he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. Special Class Two were all standing up behind their desks, facing him, but all of them had their heads wrapped up in clear plastic cling film, so that Jim could barely make out their features. They were all breathing laboriously, and the film was sucked in and out of their mouths as they struggled for air.
‘What the hell are you guys doing?’ he demanded. He was so shocked by their appearance that it took him a few more seconds to realize that not only did they have their heads wrapped up in layers of film, but all of them had their right elbows crooked up, and all of them were holding box-cutters against their throats.
All of them, that is, except for Kim Dong Wook, who was standing by the chalkboard. He had written on it, in large capital letters: ETERNAL PEACE AWAITS THE CHILDREN OF KWISIN.
Jim stalked up to Janice Sticky and tried to snatch her arm, but Janice immediately shied away from him. He tried again, but then he saw that there was blood welling up between her fingers, and that she had cut herself on the side of her throat. Her green eyes stared at him through the cling film like a drowning fish trapped beneath the surface of a frozen pond.
‘Janice,’ said Jim, ‘you really don’t want to do this. Listen up, all of you! None of you want to do this! Kim here has made you all believe that your lives are going to turn out to be crappy. He did it to me, too, and I felt like killing myself. But he’s misleading you. All he ever shows you is the worst-case scenario.’
Kim came forward with a smile on his face. ‘You won’t be able to persuade them, Mr Rook. They have seen their future for themselves and they have decided what they want to do. Better to find peace in the land of death than suffer pain and sickness and poverty in the land of life.’
Jim seized the front of Kim’s white shirt and twisted it around, pulling Kim right up to him so that their noses were almost touching.
‘Whoever you are, Kim, or whatever you are, you are a cruel and sadistic bastard, and I’m going to make sure that you get what you deserve.’
He turned back to the class and announced, ‘Patsy-Jean is dead! She hung herself from a rope in the gym! Kim made her believe that she was going to stay fat for the rest of her life and she couldn’t face it. But what Kim told her, it wasn’t true!’
‘Of course it was true, Mr Rook,’ said Kim, still smiling, although there was no humor in his smile at all. ‘How could I have shown her what her future was going to be like, if it did not happen that way?’
Jim twisted his shirt even tighter. ‘Oh, it did happen that way, for sure. She did get fatter and fatter. She got so goddamned fat she had to stay in bed for the rest of her life. But what you failed to tell her was that this was only one of her futures. She had another future waiting for her, too – and in that future she got her weight under control and she was healthy and she was happy. And there was yet another future, in which she got so skinny that she was a model and she appeared on the cover of magazines.’
‘This is not true, Mr Rook. Each of us has only one future and that one future cannot be avoided, except by death.’
Underneath the cling film on her face, Tamara started to squeak for breath. When Jim looked around the classroom, he could see that all of his students were having serious difficulty in breathing – Georgia, Teddy, Ella and Arthur. In the back row, Grant was leaning forward over his desk, coughing, and even through the cling film, Jim could see that his mouth was turning blue. But all of them kept their box-cutters held up to their throats, and Jim didn’t dare to try and rush at any of them, in case they cut themselves like Janice, or worse.
A devastating rumble of thunder shook the whole room, and three polystyrene tiles dropped off the ceiling and see-sawed down to the floor.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Jim shouted into Kim’s face. ‘What gives you the right to take these young people’s lives?’
‘Me? I do not take them,’ Kim retorted. ‘They take their own lives, themselves, with own hand. It is Kwisin who is taking their souls. That is why Kwisin was so grateful to you, and brought your cat back to life. But what did you do? You showed no gratitude in return, so the cat died for a second time.’
At that moment, Judii collapsed sideways on to the floor, and lay underneath her desk, whining for air, her sneakers kicking spasmodically against her shoulder bag.
‘Do not even think of helping her, Mr Rook,’ Kim warned him. ‘One move from you and they will all immediately cut throat.’
‘It seems to me like they’re determined to die anyhow. What difference will it make?’
‘Yes, they are all determined to die. But if you try to stop them, then you will have encouraged them to do it.’
Jim pulled Kim even closer. ‘Tell them to throw down those box-cutters, you little bastard. Tell them to take that Saran wrap off of their faces.’
‘I cannot do that, Mr Rook. Kwisin wants their souls, and I do whatever Kwisin asks me to do.’
Jim wrenched Kim’s shirt so violently that he tore off the top two buttons. It was then that he saw that Kim was wearing what appeared to be two necklaces. One was made of brown and yellow tiger’s eye beads, but the other was a plain metal chain with two rectangular ID tags hanging on it. They looked like the aluminum tags worn by the US military, in the days when they were called ‘dog-tags.’
Jim grabbed at the dog-tags and held them up in his fist, so that the chain cut into Kim’s neck. ‘Is this you? Let’s take a look, shall we, and see who the hell you are!’
Kim tried to twist away, but the chain broke.
‘Give me those!’ he screamed, and his face was contorted with rage, like a Korean demon-mask.
Jim dangled the dog-tags up in front of him, but he was at least four inches taller than Kim, and when Kim tried to snatch them back, he lifted them out of his reach.
‘You do not understand! You do not understand! Give me those back!’
Jim pushed Kim hard so that he stumbled backward, and collided with Jim’s desk. He threw himself at Jim again, but Jim dodged to one side and tripped him up. He tumbled on to the floor, and when he tried to get up, Jim kicked him hard in the hip and said, ‘Stay down! You got me?’
Kim desperately reached up for his dog-tags, his fingers clenching and unclenching. ‘You do not understand!’
Jim kicked him in the shin, harder this time. ‘I said stay the expletive-deleted down!’
He squinted at the dog-tags. The classroom lights went out for a few seconds, so that he was unable to read them at first. But then the lights jumped on again, even brighter than before, and he could see them clearly. Embossed in both rectangles of aluminum was the name Rook, Roland G., Blood type O, Episcopalian.
He felt as if another earth-tremor had run through the floor beneath his feet. He said, ‘These are my grandfather’s dog-tags, from the Korean War. What the hell are you doing with my grandfather’s dog-tags?’
‘You do not understand.’
‘You bet your ass I don’t understand! Do you want to explain it to me?’
‘Your grandfather, Mr Rook.’ Suddenly, Kim sounded quite humble. ‘Your grandfather. My great-grandfather. You and I, we have same blood in veins. Same inheritance.’
‘What? What are you trying to tell me? We’re related?’
‘Your grandfather, Mr Rook, he marry Korean girl in Pusan.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
‘I promise it is true. Your grandfather marry Korean girl in Pusan and together they make boy-child. But at the end of the war, he go back to United States and leave them behind.’
‘And that boy-child, he was your grandfather? Is that what you’re saying?’
Kim nodded, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘What your grandfather did not know, he married Kwisin. Unmarried dead girl.’
‘So what happened to the baby?’
‘Kwisin’s family took the boy-child to the Sǒn masters in the monastery at Songgwang-sa, so that they could raise him to follow the Great Way that has
no gate, and see the future as well as the past. Also to learn the language of Hwadu, which cannot be understood by ordinary men and women. And even though the Sǒn masters forbid it, he learned also to speak with demons.’
The lights dimmed again and another detonation of thunder shook the whole college right down to the depths of its foundations. Smoke alarms were meep-meep-meeping in every classroom, a high-pitched chorus of hopeless panic, and plaster dust was dredging down from the ceiling. The windows at the back of the classroom cracked from one side to the other like pistol-shots, and two of them fell out completely and shattered on the floor. In the dust and gloom, the students of Special Class Two looked like a gathering of aliens, their film-wrapped heads glistening, their eyes bulging as they slowly suffocated. Four of them had now collapsed on to the floor, shuddering, but all the same they kept their box-cutters held against their throats.
Jim reached down, gripped Kim’s arm, and hauled him on to his feet. ‘You can forget about the past! It doesn’t matter a damn if you and me are related, even if we really are! You have to tell these kids not to hurt themselves! Tell them, Kim, or I’ll break your goddamned arm! Do it now!’
‘I cannot,’ Kim gasped. ‘I have to give Kwisin what she wants. It is a promise that I cannot break.’
‘What promise? Who promises anything to demons?’
Kim coughed, and coughed again, and then he said, ‘My grandfather, Eui-kon Wook. When he came of age his mother Kwisin visited the monastery and they spoke together. She made him promise that he would take revenge on my great-grandfather for leaving her. She made him promise that he and his sons and his sons’ sons would look for the sons and the sons’ sons of Roland Rook, and bring her the souls of all the people they cared for the most.
‘My grandfather could never find any of your family, and neither could my father. They were both poor men, and could not travel to America to search for you. But then came internet, and I look for Facebook, and there you were. I found you.’
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