Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  “I wish I could,” I begin, slow, letting menace leak in my words, or at least a dollop of measured direness. “But I’m here on official business.”

  “Fine.” The greasy charm slides off Ah Siong’s face as he sighs, relaxing into a subtly more intimidating posture. He signals an underling with the barest crook of a finger before swivelling back to slouch, elbows rudely propped up, at the bar top. “What you want, then?”

  “To tell you that the penanggalans are not happy with you.”

  Eyebrows go up. “Unhappy? Why unhappy? I do everything they want. I give their boytoy special discounts. I got Sabtu Special. I even pay their protection fee. I am a hard-working businessman. What more do they want from me?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No. Honestly, no. Cross my heart and hope to—”

  “So, you’re not giving the pontianaks a happy-hour discount if they promise to keep the floor clean and to buy at least one bottle of vodka per five-woman group?”

  “—call my lawyer before you can make any more slanderous accusations.”

  It’s hard not to be impressed. He slicks effortlessly from put-upon innocence to educated insolence, nose arched slightly higher than before, as though my words nauseate him.

  I snarl. “You’re fucking kidding.”

  We hold each other’s stares, with all caution you’d use with a loaded gun. Neither of us speak, both of us all teeth and tension, both of us teetering on the brink of fight-or-flee. For Ah Siong’s sake, I hope it’s the former; if he makes me run after six cardio-free weeks, I will pummel him with his own leg.

  He breaks first, slumping. “What do you want me to do la? You really going to take away my rice bowl? You really going to make me suffer? I’m just a man lah, Rupert. A man with children—”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “—from another mother. A man with responsibilities, a man with cats—”

  “You’re allergic.”

  “—dogs—”

  “You hate dogs.”

  “—plants that needs to be water—”

  “You killed the cactus we gave you last year!”

  Ah Siong, fist held against his sternum, manages to look profoundly injured, mouth pinched tight. Clearly, he wants more time for melodramatics, but he’s run my patience into the mud. I slap both palms on the counter and force out an amiable smile, even though my forehead is pleated like an accordion.

  “Stop,” I say and as I do, I feel the start of a migraine congregate behind my right eye socket. “Not another word. You know exactly the problem. You know what you have to do. And you know you’re going to have to say ‘yes,’ because if you don’t, we’ll need to have worse words and I don’t want to do that. You were Minah’s friend. I—”

  I lose the plot of my own soliloquy, trip over a tongue abruptly clumsy with pain. Invoking Minah’s name was a mistake, a knife in the ribs I hadn’t anticipated. Even now, it hurts to think about her. Six months ago I sold the world to buy her a one-time pass straight to the wheel of reincarnation, and right out of my life forever.

  I haven’t stopped missing her. I’m still listening to her voicemails, still listening to her reminders to eat, sleep, and cultivate a healthy existence.

  “—help me out, okay? Follow the rules. The penanggalan don’t care about competition; the competition just need to be policed.”

  Maybe, it’s the look on my face, maybe, it’s mention of the finally departed, but something empties Ah Siong of his chatter. His expression loses its frantic gleam and he palms a hand over the back of his neck, sheepish. “Okay. I see how.”

  “No. No ‘see how,’ Siong. You know how this is done. You got to sign it in blood.”

  A sigh wheezes out of him. “Okay lah, okay lah.”

  Blood. Everything starts and ends with blood. Ah Siong rolls up a sleeve and extends his forearm, a faint disdain marking his features, his eyes narrowed against the oncoming ceremony. There was a point in my life where I’d have hesitated, thought twice about doing what I’m about to do next, but those are ten years gone, dead and buried under a decade of bureaucracy-led bloodshed.

  I don’t waste time. I extract a pocket knife, split an artery on Ah Siong’s arm. Blood wells inhumanly black. A customer, rotund and badly stuffed into a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, gasps and mumbles something loudly about gay men and their predilections. I roll my eyes and count the gaps between Ah Siong’s heartbeats, tying the rhythm to a simple spell of binding. The enchantment is standard-issue, nothing fancy, an agreement to play by the rules or risk having his license revoked.

  (What, ang moh? Did you think our Hells are as gratuitously vicious as yours?)

  A second slips by. Two. Six. When I’m done, I blot the wound, swab it with iodine, and delicately tape a bit of cotton in place. Years in this job teaches you a few tricks, including basic first-aid. “There. Kau tim. See? Not so bad.”

  My patois buys me a judgmental stare. Ah Siong huffs like a winded horse, breath shaking in his chest, the noise interlaced with small profanities. I ignore them. I’m done here. I have, at the very least, delayed interspecies warfare, a key function of my underpaid station. As I move to stand, a hand, large and impassively strong, shoves me back down.

  A hasty glance reveals an unfortunate development.

  “Horse-face!” I shout. “Ox-head! Buddies! How are you doing?”

  Two monolithic figures, human skins practically smoking from contact with hellion flesh, glower silently. Ox-head is the more attractive of the two, with a linebacker’s silhouette draped in vaguely fashion-conscious attire. Horse-face, on the other hand, can barely give a fuck. He grins, and the epidermis pulls back against distinctively equine bones, warping the shadows of his borrowed countenance into a glue merchant’s worst nightmare.

  “Ao Qin is on trial.” Ox-head has a voice like the last call on your last night in the last bar on earth: a notice of execution, sonorous and grim.

  This won’t end well.

  “That’s unfortunate,” I reply, groping behind me for the cocktail that Ah Siong had tried to bribe me with. Unsurprisingly, my fingers only find empty space. “What did he do?”

  “Treason,” says Horse-face and his voice bubbles like the fat of his tongue is being deep-fried. There’s a kind of pleasure in his proclamation, drawn out into a hiss where appropriate, that makes my skin recoil from its fat.

  “I see.” This definitely won’t end well. In hindsight, I really, really wish I had accepted that bribe. “Um, I’ll send him a gift card, I guess. A hamper? They don’t really do extravagant Hell offerings in the store this season, but I’m certain—”

  “He’s named you in the trial,” one of them says. I don’t register which because, frankly, it doesn’t matter.

  My blood congeals into ice. “Oh.”

  A smile flutters at my mouth, the corners twitching, but it doesn’t take hold. There’s no further explanation, and none is needed. All three of us know what’s coming next. Sulphur coats my tongue as the two move closer, the air growing molten, every motion executed in absent lockstep, their physiques eclipsing the writhing mass of inebriated humanity. I don’t try to escape. You don’t escape the guardians of Diyu.

  You could try, I suppose, but it’d likely end in dismem-barassment.

  I manage to suck a breath between my teeth before the dagger punches between my ribs. It’s a testament to Ox-head’s skill that I feel nothing, at first, only the tiniest filament of pain, red-streaked as it tendrils between failing neurons and misfiring electrical impulses.

  A gasp slides loose, an involuntary error that jolts my lungs into agony. The taste of copper bubbles from the back of my throat, vomit-stained, astringent. Balance dissolves. Muscles grow jellied, impotent, and before I know it, I’m oozing off my stool. My last thought before consciousness fades is this:

  I hope I get back here before I shit myself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CHINESE HELL isn’t such a bad place if you’
re just visiting.

  Unpleasantly warm, sure. Cacophonous, definitely. But the denizens are cultured, fastidious about personal hygiene, and too practical for blanket judgments. If you can get over the idea that the entire dimension pivots on an industry of deserved torture, Diyu, while hardly a top vacation spot, is rather like a more sanitary Kuala Lumpur.

  That’s once you get there. The path in, at least the one I’ve been consigned to, is outright agony. Boiling air whistles between my bones as I plummet through dimensions, cooking viscera that won’t cease regenerating, heat scorching the shrieks from my lungs, the thoughts from my synapses. For an endless interval, I’m anguish incarnate, and then I am not.

  Colors adjust. The phantasmagoric blur resolves into extravagant architecture, archaic in a way that feels entirely purposeful, gabled roofs and an abundance of dragons, some of which are very much alive, lidded eyes burning like embers against sandalwood columns. What isn’t inspired by ancient China is very much neo-futuristic: endless glass, endless steel, intimidatingly cold and monochromatic against the infernal landscape.

  (Fun fact: The Matrix was a hit down here. Don’t ask me why.)

  I hack a bloody wad of phlegm, spit it out on the pavement. Beside me, Ox-head and Horse-face loom, colossal in their natural guise. The former’s got his human self on the flat of a palm, neatly folded, the creases smoothed out. Horse-face, on the other hand, didn’t bother changing. Translucent ribbons of skin trail from the slats of his armor. There’s bits of brain and bone snarled in his mane, a loop of intestine tangled around the pommel of a sword bigger than I’m tall, some sinews in his sleeves.

  Good old Horse-face. You can always trust him to be a traumatic influence.

  “Aaah,” he says with a gusty sigh. “Much better.”

  I probe my mouth with my tongue and find a loose tooth, which I extract with a quizzical frown. The morphogenetic properties of the human soul remain a mystery to me. Technically, I’m just a soul here, but that hasn’t ever stopped my discorporeal form from being hurt. Of course, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, I get through being boiled alive without a scratch. This time? I lose a tooth. Go figure.

  “Hate to seem like a country idiot, but where’s the party?” I scan the desolation, frowning, the hairs on the back of my arms prickling. Diyu loves its parties, you see. Loves them. They’ll use any excuse to throw a festival. Marriages, divine birth, civil uprisings, executions. Anything.

  But right now? There’s nothing.

  “Everyone is inside,” supplies Ox-head, already lumbering forward. “Ao Qin’s trial is a thing of gravity.”

  “So’s a mass beheading, but that didn’t stop anyone from borrowing Freddie Mercury—”

  Horse-face whickers into the side of my head, his breath a fetid marriage of rotting meat and moldering hay, the worst of all worlds. I gag. It takes me about a minute to realize he’s laughing at me. “The little one is afraid.”

  Damn straight. But I’d rather cut off my own balls than let him know that. “You’re conflating curiosity with fear, man. I just wanted to know if I could get a beer. Not sure if you register it, being foaled and raised in these brimstone pastures, but it’s hot here. Can’t blame a guy—”

  “Walk.”

  “Okay.”

  We march silently into the gargantuan structure, three abreast, footsteps completely silent. Even when we traverse a long corridor of glass, which arches over concentric tiers of suffering, each a different climate from the last. I don’t look down. Eventually, the glass transitions to volcanic rock, blackened in the kiln of the metaphorical earth itself, and the ceiling itself begins to rise. Higher, higher, until there is nothing but darkness uninterrupted. But my concerns don’t belong there.

  A low chatter snags my attention, sweeps it through an auditorium recently rebuilt in the style of Grecian coliseums. I scan the crowd as Horse-face and Ox-head march me towards the witness stands. Everyone’s in attendance. Every Buddha ever put to paper, every bureaucrat ever consecrated as a saint, every yaoguai ever disemboweled on the altar of misplaced blame. Even Guan Yin is present, colossal and impossibly effulgent, her expression veiled beneath white silk. The Yellow Emperor’s absent, of course, but I hear he doesn’t get out of bed for anything but a gastronomical miracle, like a style of xiao long bao he hasn’t tasted before (i.e. never).

  I flash a cloud-maiden a grin as we pass, and she crinkles her nose, eyes rolling back to the two-tailed cat beside her. It laughs at me, mouth razored, muzzle practically human. A phoenix empties its bowels on a nearby balustrade, eliciting an outraged scream from a retinue of kitchen gods. Business as usual. No one else takes notice. And besides, the crowd has eyes for one thing and one thing only:

  Ao Qin.

  The Dragon King stands speared in a column of orange light, fully bipedal, questionably human, hands loosely folded behind his back. For someone accused of high treason, he appears remarkably composed, a half-smile balanced on the line of his jaw.

  I keep my mouth shut as I’m wedged into the witness box. A magistrate strolls into the middle of the floor, unbottling and unrolling a vast scroll. As the parchment ribbons across the white sand, the official begins reciting a litany of names, none of which I recognize. The droning persists and I’m just about to beg for recess, when he says my name.

  Uh oh.

  “You.” Ao Qin hisses, head whipping in my direction. Frills balloon through the flesh of his cheeks and his throat, tearing it apart even as his body spasms and shakes, mammalian anatomy bending under the momentum of divine rage. He snarls, mouth distending too far, skin peeling to reveal oversized teeth, the bone straining as though it might launch itself from its imperfect meat. “You.”

  I raise Ao Qin the Vulcan salute. “Yo.”

  He screams then. And it is a hurricane gale, a tsunami, a psychic blow so potent that it should have atomized my very essence. But I only feel the damp echoes of the assault, a whiff of salt and death. Ao Qin’s lamplight stare widens.

  “Do that again and we will hold you in contempt of the court, Ao Qin.” A new voice. We both turn to its source: a man in the bright robes of a magistrate, unremarkable save for the pitch-black skin and the red tongue lolling from between his lips. Despite the magnitude of the organ, he doesn’t lisp.

  “Fan Wujiu, you would take his side over ours? He is vermin. He is mortal. He is dirt. He is nothing. He is—”

  “—not the one on trial,” Fan Wujiu interrupts, tone bland. “Rupert Wong attends this court as a witness, not as traitor.”

  The word is a gunshot. It culls all conversation, leaves the auditorium haunted by a terrible silence. Ao Qin glares at Fan Wujiu, chest already split open, reptilian breast heaving within a frame of broken ribs. A noise warbles in Ao Qin’s throat, wordless but unmistakable, a vow of violence. If the Dragon King lives, there will be a reckoning.

  “All rise for the venerable Yan Luo.” Another voice this time, similar in tenor but lower in pitch: Xie Bi’an, Fan Wujiu’s bone-colored counterpart.

  A different silence. Reverent. Everyone who is not already standing clambers onto their feet, and we bow in perfect synchronicity, a ripple of motion to follow the ingress of the massive figure. The King of Hell has arrived.

  “Sit,” he says, ascending to the bench, and the court complies. “Begin.”

  THE NEXT FEW hours writhe together, bizarre ritual and labyrinthian legal processes, a thousand rites plucked from a hundred cultures, a hundred dynasties. The charges filed against Ao Qin are horrific: perfidy, intent to incite, murder of foreign dignitaries, and more. I throw up when Xie Bi’ian gluts my vision with panoramas of the Erinyes’ death. Ao Qin is unmistakably a proponent of the old adage: an eye for an eye, a hideously disemboweled torso for a hideously disemboweled torso.

  Every now and then, I’m poked and prodded, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. They make me repeat my testimony so many times that the meaning of the words corrode, leaving only a stammer of syllables. But
it’s nothing compared to Ao Qin’s torture.

  There’s a downside to immortality, one that polite company rarely discusses. What you can’t kill, you can infinitely hurt. So, they burn him. Over and over. They cook him to the marrow and then pull apart the charred skeleton like a wishbone in a Hollywood Thanksgiving dinner, before waiting until he has reassembled and doing it all again. Through it all, Ao Qin keeps to his story, keeps to his conviction that I’m the patsy responsible for interpantheon war.

  “Ask him,” He croaks, eyeballs roasted to a cloudy white. Smoke drools between his teeth. His cheeks are yarn, tangles of scorched tissue haphazardly threaded between slack jaws. “Ask-k-k-k-k him.”

  “Rupert,” Yan Luo studies me, gray and sad, like a forgotten geriatric. “What do you have to say?”

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about, Your Majesty.”

  “Liar—” Ao Qin’s accusation crests into a screech as the flames roar up again, liquefying what little fat and sinew remain. The air sweetens with the smell of crisping bacon, then becomes choking with ash.

  Minah. I roll her name in my head, clasp it near.

  IN THE END, Ao Qin submits.

  In the end, he confesses.

  Because, dragon or monkey, that’s what you do when someone won’t stop roasting you alive.

  I know what you’re thinking, ang moh. And you’re right. I should have said something, should have halved his punishment by admitting my involvement. That would have been the honorable thing to do. But here’s the rub: damned men don’t get tax breaks.

  Besides, the asshole did cost me my deposit.

  “RUPERT.”

  I raise my head at Yan Luo’s voice, and turn to find the King of Hell looming behind me, no longer sixty feet tall but a more reserved seven-feet-eight. He looks more human now too, his official raiments supplanted by cotton robes and threadbare slippers. A doughy gut rests comfortably along his middle, complementing a bulbous nose and pleasantly round cheeks, creating an utterly unthreatening silhouette. “Yes, Your Majesty?”