by Brett Adams
When I’d slapped the laptop shut, my fears had crystallized.
Li Min of Hong Kong was marked for murder.
I knew it.
But no one would believe me.
And the cherry on top: the police suspected I’d assaulted Rhianne Goldman.
Surprise lit the face of the woman at the Qantas desk when she looked up to see me again. She took a moment, evidently, to remember me, and what I wanted. She smiled tightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “the waitlist hasn’t shrunk any.”
“How about Business Class,” I said.
She shook her head.
I sighed.
“First?”
Now her eyes lit with a new light. She tapped at her keyboard and confirmed there was a seat.
“How much is that?” I said.
She told me.
I did the sums in my head. It was more than a month’s pay, and my bank balance was already skimming, bouncing just above the mortgage line like a skipping stone. If I paid for this ticket, the stone might just bite on water and plunge into the silt . . .
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
The last thing I did before boarding flight QF97 to Hong Kong was photocopy all of Hiero’s notes, and post them to a nonsense address in Queensland, with a return address of Murdoch police station.
8
First Class was worth killing the mortgage.
I drank red wine before my entree of Ibérico Jamón Crostini with Date and Ricotta, again before my mains of Porcini Mushroom Cannelloni, and again after my dessert of Hazelnut, Coffee and Muscovado Syrup Cake, to bed it all down. And to bed the wine down, a finger of Glenlivet Single Malt Scotch Whisky.
On the video screen, which folded out from beneath my lounge chair like a piece of the International Space Station, I watched the movie Twelve Monkeys, the one that proved to me that Bruce Willis can act. When the credits rolled I lay my seat back, closed my eyes, and strafed the radio channels. I found a Sibelius marathon and left the dial there. The music reminded me of our honeymoon. We had played CDs of classical music so loud the hotel management had called. Sibelius had done it.
That was twenty-three years ago. Hong Kong.
That’s what I was doing. That was my cover for this ridiculous flight. The story I could quickly own. It was a re-enactment . . . spoiled only by the cold, empty seat by my side.
Eventually I slept, and my dreams were full of Sibelius, and the voice of an announcer who became as God.
But I must have drifted too deep for the radio to reach me, because I later dreamed of a meeting with Hiero. It was odd because it was simply a memory, with only the slightest embellishment.
I remembered Hiero telling me he wanted to write a modern Gothic horror. He had written a short story to test the waters, and read it to me.
His story began with a woman returning home. She had left the house to shop for groceries, but returned with a large, square, parcel that was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Oblivious to her husband’s questions, she ushered him into their bedroom, laid the object down, and gestured for him to open it.
Playing along, he began to tear away the brown paper, when through a hole he saw an eye staring back at him. The eye looked human, but its whites were lurid yellow. The shock of that burning gaze upset his balance and he fell back from the object.
Impatient, his wife tore the remaining paper from the painting, lifted it onto a hook, and stood back to view it.
“Isn’t it . . .” she said, but fell silent, lost in the image.
“What is it?” said the man, sufficiently recovered to appraise the painting in the whole.
“A painting,” she said.
“I can see that. But where did you get it? And why? And what on earth is it?”
“I bought it from a little old wisp of a man with a cart. He was parked out front of the mall this morning selling art. He said it is very old. I couldn’t resist—it’s so, so . . . spiritual.”
The man agreed it looked old. The oil paint was cracked and crazed, and the wood frame marred by numerous dents as if it had been repeatedly dropped.
The subject was a creature vaguely man-like. It stood in a grotto, surrounded by stunted trees so gnarled their crowns dug into the ground; and rocks that were pitted from wind and rain. Dull red scales covered the creature’s frame, marred by knots and burls. From its head sprouted four horns like elephant tusks, yellowed by age, and trailing tatters of rotting velvet. They resembled a grotesque crown.
But despite the creature’s nightmarish form, it was its gaze that froze the man’s blood. The eyes seemed to burn with a light of their own.
“How much did it cost?” he said at last. It was all he could think to ask.
When his wife appeared not to have heard him, he repeated the question.
“Two thousand dollars,” she said.
Anger flushed his cheeks, but something about his wife’s posture stopped his mouth. She stood erect, head canted to one side, gaze fixed on the painting.
The next morning, after she left for work, he took the painting down, wrapped it in a towel, and drove to the mall. There he hunted for a little old man with a cart of paintings, but found no sign of him. Worse, no one seemed to remember him.
He returned with the painting, but left it covered by the towel, stowed in the attic.
When his wife returned to find the painting gone, she flew into a rage. She stormed through the house until she found it and hung it again on the same hook.
That night as he lay beside his wife, listening for the rhythm of her breathing that would tell him she was asleep, and feeling the eyes of the creature staring at him unseen in the dark, he made a vow. When morning came he would talk to her. Reason with her that a thing so grotesque had no place in their house, let alone their bedroom. If she forced him to, he would insist.
He would take the painting down, drive to the dump, and watch it burn.
He knew better than to speak now, angry and afraid.
Vow made, he fell asleep. He fell asleep before his wife. Something that had not happened since the first years of their marriage.
It was the smell that eventually alerted their neighbors, who in turn summoned the police. The man’s decaying body was found in the same position in which he had lain down to sleep.
His wife was nowhere to be found, and became the prime suspect.
The second suspect was the artist, identity unknown, who had been commissioned to paint a scene of a grotesque monster, clasped in embrace with the dead man’s wife.
A judder woke me to semi-darkness and the thrum of the Boeing 777’s turbines. My ears popped with the rising air pressure. We were descending on Hong Kong.
The last image of that memory-dream to linger was of the creature staring at me past the wife’s tresses.
The creature winked.
9
I have a confession: if a student gives me a story that mentions the multiverse, I fall into a little ritual: I curse, locate my bottle of Johnny Walker, then work hard to find a reason to fail the piece.
The multiverse. You know the one. Hollywood caught a bad case of it a few years back—Source Code, Mr Nobody, Coherence, Everywhen, The Flash—and is still shaking the last of it off.
If you’re not up on quantum theory, the idea of the multiverse comes from a particular interpretation of some seriously weird shit that happens when you play with photons—particles of light. As far back as 1803, scientists observed that if you fired a photon at two slits it seemed to do the impossible: pass through both. Fast-forward to today, and one of the mainstream explanations of this weirdness is that the photon only really passes through one slit in our universe, it just happens to create an entire other universe where all is the same, except that in the new universe, the photon passes through the other slit.
(The other mainstream interpretation is the Copenhagen—famously poked at by Schrödinger’s half-dead cat, or half-pregnant nun, I forget w
hich—that states that until observed, the photon is not either-or but both-and. Which sounds just as daft to me.)
It’s one of the rare things Hiero and I agree about: the multiverse, the idea that every time a choice is made, a whole other universe splits off in which the alternative is simultaneously chosen, is the death of choice.
On the bright side, if you’re playing that carnival game where you pop ping-pong balls into the Clown’s mouth, you can rest assured there exists a universe where you walk away with the three-foot teddy bear.
10
I’d planned to check into a hotel, then hit the streets to hunt down Li Min, but I settled for sticking my head under a tap in the men’s toilets of Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. The dream of Hiero’s Gothic horror had blown away any thought of pretending I was in Hong Kong to reminisce.
Plus I only had a few hours buffer. Technically, her birthday began at midnight. I didn’t want to learn the hard way of a pedantic streak in Hiero.
I would find Li Min, and, doing my best to look sane, warn her to be anywhere but her bedroom—or apartment—on her birthday. No more lies. They just sat around like unexploded ordnance.
The address I had copied from the student database was an apartment block in Sai Ying Pun. I withdrew cash from an automatic teller, then waited forever for my luggage to appear. Somehow it had ended up on the wrong carousel. I exited Arrivals, and merged with a throng of travelers surging toward the taxi rank.
There was no queue I could discern, and on any other day, I would have floated at the fringe of the crowd, too polite to push forward. But the adrenaline coursing in my veins energized me. My height gave me a good view to curbside. I picked my spot, and drove toward it, surging forward into the smallest gap, and standing firm when the shoves came back.
Soon I was seated in the backseat of a red taxi, steeping in the driver’s Cantonese chatter, watching a million people I would never meet again rush past outside. The air was humid. The taxi’s air conditioner droned hard but added nothing but its noise to the cab’s atmosphere.
The apartment block was one of five built to the same design. Each offered a grand view of the other, and not much else.
I got out, paid the driver, and was deciding whether to ask him to wait when he tore off with a howl of the engine.
Retrieving the slip of paper with Li Min’s address from my pocket, I double-checked I was in the right place. Jade Gardens blazed in green lights, in English and hanzi. Each of the five towers was numbered; my stomach dipped as I realized that the address on the slip was not. I’d have to try each until I found the right one.
I began with number one. Its elevator shot me to the twenty-second floor in seconds, and I followed the signs to apartment fourteen. It was the last along the corridor. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I would have to stake it out if I ran out of luck in the other towers. If I hit another vacant apartment, I had no idea what I would do.
Tower two saw me invited to dinner by a smiling couple and their three kids. I regretfully declined, but was thinking, what the hell, if I found my girl, maybe I would return with a bottle of Merlot.
Tower three was an elderly couple.
Tower four’s fourteenth floor was being pulled apart.
Tower five housed a German man who, when roused from bed, offered me some choice Deutsch and slammed the door in my face. I returned serve to the uncaring door with a few choice words of Englishe and retreated to the lift.
By the time I returned to Tower One, the readout on my Medline watch blazed iridescent orange at 10:33 PM. Next to the time a heart icon flashed with a pulse reading. I was pushing 130 bpm, and needed to calm down.
On the twenty-second floor, I found apartment fourteen again and knocked. Still no answer, so I planted my backside on the door and slid into a sitting position on the floor.
Time passed.
I soon learned to discern whether the lift at the end of the corridor was rising or falling based on the rumble of its passage. Only three times in the next half-hour did the lift speaker ping announcing an arrival.
It made me wonder how many occupants the building had.
Which suggested another thought.
I rose from the floor with crackling knees, and strode down the corridor to apartment fifteen, and rapped on its door.
A young Asian man answered. He wore a singlet and boxer briefs, and massive headphones hung from his neck.
“Do you know the occupant of apartment fourteen?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Know if she’s in?”
I watched him trying to read me.
“Have you tried knocking?” he said.
“Yes. Is she out much, at night?”
His mouth tugged down at the corners. “She keeps to herself.”
Thanking him, I returned to fourteen.
I tried the apartment on the opposite side of the corridor, but got no answer.
Slumping onto the floor again, I checked my watch: 10:57.
My thoughts drifted, only to be snagged on a memory of the dream I’d had that day on the plane. I remembered Hiero telling his Gothic short, and one detail leapt out at me.
It was the smell . . .
Feeling like a fool, I twisted around onto my knees until I could dip my face to the crack at the bottom of the door.
I sniffed—and got a nose full of dust that set off a sneezing fit. When it subsided I tried again with less gusto.
The faintest odor of chaos touched my nostrils. I sniffed again, straining to identify it. It could be curdling milk.
I sprang to my feet and returned to apartment fifteen. The guy didn’t bother being polite this time, just grunted at me.
“Looks like a blown fuse in my car and I can’t get the hatch open,” I said. “Do you have a toolbox?”
He gave me a look like I had to be kidding.
I went down the apartments, rapping on doors, until finally, at apartment three, I found a middle-aged man, who disappeared and returned with a steel toolbox. He yielded it in exchange for my driver’s license.
The box banged against my leg as I carted it back to apartment fourteen, straining to quiet its clanking contents.
A quick rummage through it yielded a twelve-inch flat-blade screwdriver. With a glance up and down the corridor, I set it to the doorjamb.
There I paused.
For a moment I felt like I was about to pop the safety seal on Life.
Then I squeezed on the lever until, with a sharp crack, the door jumped backward. I eased through the gap, and shut the door.
Inside, the apartment was very dark, the only light came from outside where the corner of a venetian blind had caught on an empty vase.
Gingerly I crossed the room, fumbled for the blind’s dongle, and twitched open its louvers. Hong Kong light pollution leaked in, and my eyes adjusted.
The room comprised a kitchenette, dining area and lounge. Between a small, circular dining table, a two-seater couch, and a couple of bookcases, there wasn’t a lot of room left.
I stuck my head over the kitchenette’s sink and sniffed at the dishes piled in it. Two wine glasses sat on the draining board. Lumps of a whitish substance sat in the bottom of the sink amid a tangle of chicken bones. They might account for the smell.
Two doors were set in the wall opposite the kitchenette. Bedroom and bathroom, I guessed. I crossed the room, and chose one.
Turns out I chose the bedroom.
The bedroom was darker than the living room, but even so, I couldn’t miss it. Hanging over the edge of the bed, angled to catch the scant light coming from behind me, was a thin leg.
I swept a hand down the inside of the wall and caught the light switch. Dazzling light blazed over the room, and burnt the scene into my memory.
Li Min lay on top of the covers, naked, one leg crooked over the side of the bed, arms folded up over her head to form a love heart. She wasn’t smiling any more.
I moved to her side, and my hands reach
ed out mechanically. Her skin was cold to the touch. With two fingers I felt for a pulse at her throat, but it was as still as everything else in the apartment. Dead.
I retraced my steps into the living room, and for a moment wondered vaguely where the phone might be, with the notion of calling for an ambulance.
The next thing I knew I was hunched over in a dark space that smelt of tile cleaner—the toilet. I don’t remember how I got there. My guts surged again and again, like an animal trapped in my rib cage. My mouth gaped involuntarily. I don’t know how long I squatted there, but nothing came out of my mouth but a trickle of spit.
When the vomit-reflex finally let go, I collapsed onto the floor, my trunk wrung out and aching. And only then did great sobs tear their way out of my throat. Whole-body sobs. A child’s sobs.
After that, I sat for a time in darkness on the toilet floor, and listened to the echo of my breathing.
Returning to the bedroom, I forced myself to look at Li Min. I had never seen a dead body before, except once, at the funeral of a great aunt, although I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t constructed that memory from overheard conversation.
I cupped a hand under her leg that hung over the side of the bed, and gently lifted it and arranged it next to the other. It moved easily, which I guessed meant she hadn’t been dead long. In her wardrobe I found a dressing gown, and draped that over her.
My senses played tricks on me and I fancied I could smell Hiero’s aftershave in the air.
All this time I had to fight the urge to sit down again. My eyes wouldn’t stop blurring. But the thought that he had stood in this same room only hours before steeled my nerves.
I surveyed the room and tried to piece together the last moments of Li Min’s life.
A bedside chest of drawers held a lamp with a rice-paper shade, patterned with flowers and bees. Beneath clustered a zoo of stuffed animals around a digital alarm clock and a box of tissues. Lying in the scant space left was a shallow dish, still glistening with a trace of moisture, and a hypodermic needle, the kind I had seen in the dirt beneath the cisterns of public toilets.