by David Lubar
“This whole place is falling down,” I whispered to John.
The guy glared at me, hissed a couple of words at John, then led us down a hallway. It was too narrow to walk side by side. John went first. I was just a couple of steps behind him. We moved past several closed doors. There was an open door ahead on the right. John glanced in, then turned his head away like he’d accidentally looked straight at the sun.
I took a longer look. The room was large, but lit by a single lamp on a table. That was enough for me to see more than I wanted. It was like someone had bombed a zoo. There were animal heads, paws, tails, skins, and other parts stacked all over. I saw a pile of elephant tusks, and another pile that looked like rhino horns. An old man at a table was grinding one of the horns into powder with a file. Except for the lamp, the scene could have been set five hundred years ago.
The guy with the cheap suit poked me in the shoulder and grunted out a couple of harsh syllables. I didn’t know the words, but I’m sure it was the Chinese equivalent of Get moving!
We walked toward a door at the end of the hall. The upper half was frosted glass with S. YUNG, RESTAURANT SUPPLIES painted on it in black above a row of Chinese characters. Behind me, I could hear the rasp of the file on the rhino horn. But the sound was soon covered by the creak of the floorboards as they groaned beneath my weight. I was eager to get this over with as quickly as possible and return to the fresh air of the street.
The guy with the cheap suit opened the door and motioned us inside. He came in behind us, spoke a couple of words, then stepped out, leaving John and me alone with Sam Yung, the third importer. Sam was a thin guy in his forties, with the face of someone who’s survived more than a couple of knife fights. The phrase “You should have seen the other guy” flitted through my mind.
“You are inquiring about me?” he asked as the door closed behind us. His English was better than mine.
For a moment, I couldn’t find my voice. I knew this guy could snap his fingers and have me killed. I knew he was a criminal. But someone was planning to murder him, and I refused to keep quiet. “You’re in danger,” I said. My words died in the room like dialogue from a bad movie.
Sam Yung spread his hands. At least he didn’t laugh at me like a villain from a bad movie. “It comes with the job. Half the punks in the city would kill me if they thought they could get away with it. What’s the deal, here? I’m not going to find you amusing for very long.”
“I saw what happened to Shaoming Li,” I told him. “It wasn’t his heart.”
Sam Yung barely reacted, but I noticed a slight ripple of tension flash across his cheeks. “Tell me.”
I told him what I’d seen happen to Shaoming Li, and what I suspected happened to Hop Ngo. When I mentioned the albino, Sam Yung nodded and muttered the name “Richter.” When I was done, he said, “Has it occurred to you who would have the most to gain from the death of my competitors?”
Not until that instant. Oh, God. I’d never even thought that Sam Yung might be behind the murders. I felt like I’d just been kicked in the gut. I looked at John. He glanced over his shoulder, like he was thinking about making a dash for the door. But we both knew the other guy was right on the other side. I turned my attention back to Sam Yung.
The slightest smile twitched at his lips. “Foolish boy,” he said. “That’s not our way. We don’t hire outsiders to solve our disputes. You know nothing about us.”
I realized he was playing with me. “But you seem to know the man I saw. You called him Richter.”
“I know of him. He’s tried to benefit from my hard work. He wants what isn’t his. But this other thing you spoke of, this is nothing but a children’s story. My grandmother used to scare me with tales of shape-shifters. You have an active imagination. You’re young. You don’t know what you’ve seen. But I thank you for coming to warn me.”
It didn’t matter whether he believed me. All that mattered was I’d done what I had to do. I’d warned him. That might be enough. At least he wouldn’t be easy to surprise, the way Shaoming Li had been. I was ready to leave.
But Sam Yung wasn’t finished. He glanced at John, then back at me. “We have one problem that must be resolved. You’ve seen things you shouldn’t have.”
“We didn’t see anything,” John said. “Neither of us.”
Now I understood why John had looked away from the room down the hall so quickly. There was enough illegal stuff going on in there to send Sam Yung to prison for a very long time.
“Of course I have your silence,” Sam said to John. “You know what would happen to your family if you spoke.” Then he pointed at me. “But I don’t know if your friend can hold his tongue. Or whether it needs to be removed.”
He stared at me with the cold eyes of a surgeon trying to decide whether to cut away a tumor.
I wanted to say something, but I had no idea what sort of words would make any difference to him. I knew it was useless to beg, or to point out that I’d gone out of my way to warn him. Maybe I could just swear I’d keep silent about what I’d seen. Before I could speak, the glass in the upper half of the door exploded. Something flew past me and thudded to the floor by Sam Yung’s desk.
A head.
It took a moment for me to recognize the guy without his cheap suit. Or his body.
Someone—something—crouched outside the door. His face was all scales and teeth—somewhere between human and reptile. But it shifted back as I watched.
“Richter.” Sam Yung snarled the name.
The albino reached into his coat pocket and drew out a furry brown claw. He held it to his body.
Across the room, I heard Sam Yung fumbling through a desk drawer.
I heard John whisper something in Chinese.
I heard the roar of a bear.
The albino crashed through the remaining portion of the door. His body was still rippling and changing. He dropped the dried claw on the floor. The lower half of his face was that of a bear. One hand was a claw. His massive shoulders stretched his shirt.
As he ran past us, he threw a backhanded swipe. The blow lifted me off my feet. John and I crashed into the wall.
For an instant, as my head and body struck the plaster, the room went soft and black. I fought the darkness, knowing that if I sank into the comfort of unconsciousness, I would never wake.
My head cleared just in time to see Sam raise a gun. His hand jerked as the gun spat out a small pop, no louder than a cap pistol. A patch of flesh in the albino’s shoulder exploded in a mass of red.
It didn’t slow him.
He crossed the room before Sam Yung could fire again. The claw swipe caught Sam under his chin. With no effort, the albino removed most of the man’s face.
It happened so fast, Sam didn’t seem to realize yet that he was dead. For a moment, as flesh and gore dripped down the splattered wall, and most of his jaw bounced across the floor like a shattered ashtray, he stood in place, a life-sized version of that plastic man in science class, half-exposed to the eyes of the curious, brain and muscle and bone revealed for all to see. A bubbling sound rose from the ruins of his throat. His tongue moved, as if searching for teeth.
Then he fell across his desk.
The albino turned toward us.
I staggered to my feet. “John, run!”
John didn’t move. I reached down to help him up, but he was knocked out cold. There was no way I could carry him. There was no way I could protect him. There was nothing I could do for him except try to lure the monster away.
I ran into the hallway.
Heavy footsteps followed me.
Another of Yung’s men rushed up the stairs. He pulled a gun from inside his jacket. It would be the final sick joke of my life if I ended up getting shot by the lesser of two evils while running from the albino. I ducked into an open doorway.
Outside, a single gunshot punched the air. Then I heard a scream overlapped by a wet, ripping sound. A body thudded down the stairs. I knew it was the gunman.
The albino stood at the edge of the doorway, red clots of skin dripping from his claw as it completed its transition back to a hand.
“My curious friend,” he said, nodding toward me, speaking almost in a whisper. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his hand. “You have been a bit of an inconvenience. An amusing one, but an inconvenience nonetheless. I can’t allow your continued existence.”
I backed away from him. As the earthy stench of hides and bones hit my nostrils and I realized the full meaning of where I was, I lost hope. I’d truly screwed up. Of all the places to seek shelter, this was the worst imaginable.
“Lovely,” the albino said, his eyes caressing the stacks of animal parts. He patted his coat pocket. “I brought my own supply, but this is truly splendid. What shall it be?”
He reached out to the nearest crate and stroked a wolf’s head. “Our noble pal Canis lupus, perhaps?” His hand, where it met the gray fur, began to change. “I think not. Too swift. Wolves kill quickly, efficiently. They have no instinct for cruelty. You deserve better, my young friend.” He studied me with those pink eyes. “I want you to linger. I want to savor our time together. Now, where would they keep the snakes?” He flicked his tongue like a serpent.
I moved deeper into the room. Beneath my feet, the wood creaked. Behind me, I heard a rasping breath.
The albino took another step. “Or maybe a leopard?” he said, reaching down to stroke a spotted skin. “Yes, that seems right. Cats play with their prey. Sometimes for hours. Thank goodness there’s such a large stockpile. We’re going to have so much fun.”
I could hear the old man, the one with the file. He was crouched under a table, whimpering. I risked a glimpse over my shoulder. One chance … If I was wrong, I was dead. If I was right, I might still be dead. If I was right and very lucky, I’d live to have nightmares about today.
I plunged my hand into the box and scooped up a handful of the chalky powder. I threw it at the albino, trying to believe that this would save me. I threw a second handful, then a third.
He laughed. “Is that it? Your best effort? Oh my, I truly hope you give me more sport than that.”
He reached to brush the dust from his cheek.
The change began.
For a moment, he seemed puzzled.
His hands grew thick. They grew large and gray, like dense lumps of clay. His face twisted and changed. His shirt split as his chest swelled. A horn thrust from where his nose had been.
He dropped to all fours with a heavy crash, then lowered his head, aiming the horn at me. He took a step with one hulking leg. And then another step. There was less than two yards between me and death.
A scream ripped through the room. But it didn’t come from any living creature. The air filled with shrieks as the ancient wood gave way beneath the weight. One leg crashed through the floor. His chest hit with an ear-numbing boom.
For an instant, that was it. He raised his head toward me and bellowed a cry of rage. The eyes within the rhino’s face were hot coals of hate.
He struggled to pull the leg free of the hole.
I backed up another step.
He fell.
He dropped so suddenly, it was almost as if he’d been sucked through the hole. An instant later, I heard another crash. Then another, fainter. And far away—a thud, a wet smack of flesh against concrete.
That was it. He was in the basement.
I inched toward the hole like I was moving on thin ice, expecting the floor to collapse at any moment. But the floor held. Down, far down—so far, I felt dizzy as I looked—lay a crumpled mass of white and red.
Around me, the lifeless eyes of countless animals bore witness to the moment. A sound from down the hall caught my attention. I edged past the hole and went back to Sam Yung’s office.
“How you doing?” I asked John.
He’d managed to sit up with his back against the wall, but still looked pretty dazed. “Did we win?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I held out a hand and helped him to his feet.
He winced. “Oh, man. My head hurts.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You should see the other guy.”
I walked with John back to his place. As we passed through the streets of Chinatown, I thought about how foreign each of us is when we leave our small part of the world, and how much there is that none of us will ever understand.
“You know what’s scary?” I asked John when we reached his front door.
“Your face?”
“Besides that.”
“I can’t imagine anything scarier, but go ahead.”
“If Richter was a bigger monster than Sam Yung, I guess it’s possible there’s someone out there who’s a bigger monster than Richter.”
John patted me on the shoulder. “If there is, I’m sure you’ll run into him. And drag me along. But maybe that can wait for another day.”
“Fine with me.”
At least I knew there was a little less evil in the world. It was a small change, but a good change. And that’s something to be glad about.
Whoodoo
“You come in for a spell,” the whoodoo lady said.
I nodded twice, once for each possible meaning. She swung open the door of her shack. I was relieved my knock hadn’t broken it from its hinges.
“Don’t be shy,” she said.
I followed her in.
“I have whoodoo for finding gold,” she said, pointing to a dried rabbit’s head. “That one cost ten thousand dollars.” She grinned, showing that the first gold I’d find would be in her mouth.
I shook my head. With what I was getting under the table rebuilding engines for the guy down the block, I’d need to work for years to raise that kind of money.
“Kill a man?” she asked, pointing to a tarry black root shaped vaguely like a person. “That be five hundred. Worth every penny. Never fail.”
“Not today,” I said.
“Five hundred is cheap to kill a man.”
“Maybe some other time,” I said. Even that would take me a month to earn.
“What about love?” she asked.
I nodded, and hoped it came cheaper.
The whoodoo lady let out a laugh. “A strapping boy like you. What he need with love spells?”
“It’s for my father,” I said.
“He not look like you?”
“A little. But that’s not it. He’s divorcing my mother. I figured, if he loved her again … well, you know…”
“I know, boy,” she said. She moved to a corner of the room and picked up a dried flower. “Love is easy.”
“How much?”
“Not five hundred,” she said. “For sure. To kill is hard. To love is easy. Only fifty.”
I gave her the money and took the flower. “How do I use it?” I imagined some intricate ceremony, possibly involving full moons, spilled blood, and candles.
“Crumble it over their shoes. Half on his. Half on hers.”
“That’s all?”
“Love is easy,” she said again.
I left and did as she asked, crumbling the dead, dried petals and brushing the flakes on two pairs of shoes.
It worked immediately. Dad moved out of the basement. They went to dinner the next night, and to a movie the night after that. They went dancing three times the next week.
I came home one night less than a month later to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table, her face bruised. Like before.
“I fell,” she said.
“Was it Dad?”
She shook her head.
“It was him, wasn’t it.”
“You don’t understand,” Mom said. “That’s just his way. He doesn’t mean to hurt me.”
“But—”
“He loves me,” she said. “More than ever. He loves me so much. So very much. He always will.”
I got up from the table and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Mom called.
“I
need to see if I can pick up more hours at work,” I said. Just for a while. Just until I had five hundred dollars.
The Ex Box
It’s not a date, Vida told herself as she stepped into the grease-scented air of the Lamberton Diner. It’s just coffee. No way she was dating so soon after ending her three-month mistake with that loser drummer whose name she would never ever mention again. She’d already exiled his vital statistics to the box. She wondered whether she’d need a larger container soon. The box was getting full.
“Over here,” Art said, walking past the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign.
Vida hesitated.
Art glanced back and said, “I got my own spot.”
As she followed him down the narrow aisle between chrome counter stools and vinyl booths, she noticed the waitress nod at him. A fair assortment of the other diners exchanged greetings with him, too. Vida caught a couple of lingering glances as they checked out the newcomer. No big deal. She wasn’t shy. Art stopped by a table near the end of the row and waited for her to slide in on one side.
“Coffee’s good here,” he said as he took a seat facing her. “Great fries. Decent pie. Stay away from the chili unless you want to…” He made a face and let the sentence dangle unfinished.
“Pie sounds right,” Vida said, pleased that he hadn’t resorted to crudeness—unlike that mechanic she’d dated last year. This guy was gorgeous. She had a weakness for skinny guys with dark hair and dark moods. Too bad that nine out of ten of them turned out to be jerks. Or ten out of ten. She’d spotted Art at the party the moment she walked in. She could tell he’d spotted her, too. He was cool about it, but she’d felt a slight tingle run down her neck as she turned away, as if his eyes caressed her from afar. She’d waited. She wasn’t chasing anyone. Not anymore.