Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  “I said fuck you. With greater emphasis on the first word. Fuck. You.” The words surprise me even as they abandon my mouth, falling, cold as coins. “There is always a choice.”

  Sisyphus restores his glasses to their roost, face smoothing, bland. He taps the frame to the bridge of his nose with a finger—the middle one, of course. Blink. Stare. Crocodile smile, no heat, nothing but swampwater cool. In that moment, Sisyphus transcends into everything we associate with kings, terrible and absurd and full-on, fuck-you-peon swagger. “If that helps you sleep at night.”

  Before I can grunt an objection, he discards me, discards our conversation like yesterday’s crusty boxers. I’m speechless as he struts into the crowd, Veles’ fingers gouging a warning into my clavicle.

  “Stay,” he rumbles, although he still sounds amused.

  “Not a dog.” I jerk my shoulder, hoping to dislodge him, but the motion only compels him to strengthen his grip, nails cutting through fabric and into skin.

  I let the tattoo spirit fall from my hand, to be mashed into the floor by passing feet. The urge to claw out of my shirt, check out how many tattoos have gone the way of the first, is overwhelming. But I don’t think I want to cash in on that suspicion. I know what I’ll find: indecency charges, and a spine beaded with dead ghosts.

  An image of the man from the train resurrects itself, smile mild, head cocked, the apocalypse skinned in banality, a kid standing on a mound of crawling ink.

  “Da. But is rude to talk about someone’s handicaps.” He chortles at his own joke; a whuffing, thundering noise. “Don’t make ruckus, Rupert. Sisyphus has big ball.”

  “Don’t you mean balls?” I fumble for wit, discover schoolyard humour instead, a vaguely acceptable compromise. Sisyphus has gone back to doodling pictograms on Helenus’ entrails, each fresh inscription eliciting another rapturous shudder from the prophet. I avert my eyes as Helenus’ pleasure grows carnal, flaccid cock rousing from its matted bed.

  “That too.” Hand anchored in my flesh, Veles walks me towards the bar, shouldering aside anyone unfortunate enough to intersect with our route. “Come. Veles will buy his lucky bunny a graveyard.”

  “Er, that doesn’t sound so—” The thought of escape stirs to life, and is expunged the next moment. I’m not winning this one, not this far out of my element, not with a cloak of corpses on my back.

  His grin is the moon, the smile of a wolf on the cusp of a kill. “Is great. One drink, and you won’t just see two Veles, you’ll see twelve.”

  “I swear, Veles, that did not sound as good as you think it did in your head.”

  NOW, LISTEN, ANG moh. Listen. Forget everything you’ve learned about getting drunk. That bottle of Chivas, cut with bottles of cheap Coke, might get you there, but graveyards are a one-way ticket on the fast train to Knockoutville.

  A trifecta of whiskeys, triple sec, equal amounts of rum, vodka, gin, and tequila. Mix with beer and stout. Consume. You won’t know what hit you.

  Actually, you will. Because unless you’ve lived a truly unfortunate life, chances are that first sip will be the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE I’m standing.

  More slumping than standing, to be fair, most of my weight hanging off the crook of a stranger’s arm. But there is still a degree of standing. Somewhere. My toes scrabble for purchase on the rippling pavement. I push upright, tip sideways. Whoops. Someone catches me. I beam hazily, my world cottoned with daubs of orange fluorescence, and boxy shapes that only tangentially resemble a street.

  It could be cold. I’m too numb to tell.

  “Careful.” Not Veles. Not Hildra, either. The voice is unfamiliar, bassy, straight from the gut.

  I blink, blink again, crane my sight up and stare until the summit of a top hat comes into focus. “Jack!”

  The glob of shadow crooks at its zenith, suggesting a nod. “Jack.”

  “Jack!” I repeat and totter in place, vinegary bile pushing against the underside of my tongue. The sliver of brain matter not otherwise committed to staying upright is racing with a hodgepodge of images, and impressions of tastes too vile to duplicate even in memory. I drank—something. Many instances of something. Pulped roadkill, most likely, left to ferment, essential oils reconstituted into a blasphemy of alcoholic reprieve.

  “Jack,” I announce again.

  He pats my head, innocently paternalistic. “We will have you home soon. I just need to do one thing first—ma’am.”

  His voice cracks through the damp, piss-piquant silence. Out of the periphery of an eye, I catch movement, the lineament of a woman cosseted in dense, dark fabric. She stops, cigarette-cherry burning in the gloam.

  “What.” A French accent.

  I feel a shimmer of power—asphalt, tar, alleyway-dust—as Jack gently deposits me in a corner and steps forward. The street empties. The air stills. And suddenly, it’s just the three of us, strangled in sidewalks and silence, and something is not right. I reach out, snare the tail of his coat between my fingers.

  Blood, arterial, boiling from a heart that refuses to quiet. Her pulse, a thunderstorm beneath its sheath of silken brown skin. If I made an incision here, I’d be able to—

  “What the fu—” I bend over, throw up on his shoes.

  Metal shaves through the air in a wide silver arc, nicking my skull, pares a curl of skin and hair from my scalp. Pain foams. My vision clarifies into a portrait of Jack, haloed in the street lamps, his face a slurry of nictitating meat. Flesh drools in gelatinous skeins, aligning into new jaws, fresh arrangements of teeth and eyebrow. Even the eyes saccade between colors, numbers, shapes and depths.

  “Diu.” It’s amazing how quickly abject terror can burn through booze.

  I fall backwards, hit the ground ass-first, scrabble across the cobblestones as Jack, Jack the Ripper, Jack the First, Jack the Trypophobe’s Best Nightmare, advances. Lips extrude from swirling muscle fibers, wrap about the dentition, twist into a snarl. He blinks. Sixteen eyes. Four. Three hundred. Two.

  Behind him, rooted in place, the girl, blank gaze refracting the light.

  Then she winks.

  She is on him before my brain stem can articulate a reaction, a blurring; her skin bunching, distorted, distended from a prize pack of auxiliary body features, barely elastic enough to hold under the rapid-fire mutations. A fan of mouths opens, bites down. Jack wheels, roars, claws at his back. He howls as she burrows deeper, chewing herself an access point between the span of his shoulders.

  Slurping, audaciously loud. I see a tongue extend, snake across the gore dribbling from the planes of his back, see muscles half-masticated. The girl-thing nuzzles into his scapula. A crisp snapping follows, like twigs being halved, and Jack’s right arm goes slack. He screeches, enamelled razor clattering to the ground.

  In desperation, Jack flings himself backwards, crashing into the wall, maybe hoping it’d loosen her grip, but it doesn’t. Draperies of wool animate, thrashing. Fabric attenuates into needlepoint; spears burst from his torso, six on each side.

  Out of misguided loyalty, I stagger upright, shouting the first spell that wanders into the orbit of my consciousness. I shred my lip, spit blood into the incantation. It fizzles into confused life, quaking, as dubious of its existence as I am with its creation. On a whim, I extend an invitation to the tenants tattooed on my skin, only to find a rotting silence in my head. I forgot about that. Damn it.

  “Let my, er...” Not ‘friend.’ Deranged, sustenance-starved chaperone, maybe? I pause, wilting with indecision, before finally concluding: “...coworker, who I have absolutely no personal ties to, go!”

  She stares and she smiles, smiles with too many mouths and just enough teeth, alimentary canals snaking in the chilly air, a ruff of sinuous tubes and disembodied ligament. My stomach turns. One of her maws snaps forward, grabs my cantrip as it sings through the air. Swallows.

  That’s that, then.

  “I tried. I’ll be going now.”

  “No.
” Her voice is polyharmonic. As I watch, her mouths rear like cobras. I see Jack’s features pulsate, consolidate into pure, animalistic fear. The air rankles with ammonia; he’s pissing himself.

  Then, just like that, it is over, and Jack’s body is on the floor, face-down, throbbing periodically as the girl eats into his ribs, hollowing him out. It is only when she is done, when she’s colonized the topology of his meat, when her eyes open behind his eyes, and she smiles again, that I wheeze out:

  “I am very scrawny and would taste horrible, even if you fry me and dip me in ketchup.”

  She laughs at me, glides closer, and pins my chin in Jack’s stolen fingers. Another tickle of power, an explanation transmitted through skin. And I think: oh.

  If there can be a God of Missing People, scrapped together from a thousand parents begging pleasepleasecomehomeplease, there can be a God of Being Missing, a goddess of waiting for it to end, a deity of clenched teeth and knife wounds and prayers emptied into corners where no one will come, of a rage that holds on. All of the hurt in the world had to come together somewhere, didn’t it? Makes sense that it’d coalesce here, gathering to gestate a killer of killers.

  She pushes Jack’s tongue into my unresisting mouth, and I hear her crooning, sleek and dark and gorged on his essence, coiled like an embryo in the womb of his bones. Of course she’d hunt things like Jack. Of course. Of course. Of course.

  She breaks the kiss, a strand of saliva yawning between our mouths. I wipe it away, try not to think too deeply on what just transpired.

  “Tell them they cannot prey on ours any longer. Tell them they are no longer wanted here. Tell—” A smile, incandescent and peculiarly girlish. The next words are sly, a joke hemmed between the pauses. “Tell them that we are coming for them.”

  And that is all she says before she walks away, wearing the body that Jack built, even as the world restarts in fits and London comes pouring through the cracks.

  On the plus side, at least I’m sober.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “RUPERT, OLD CHUM, old pal, old ball and chain. The mightiest of all Asian recruits, master of dumplings, sovereign of chopsticks. How are you doing? Good. Of course you’re good. Why wouldn’t you be good? Say, I was going to ask, are you going to make a bet today?”

  I knot apron strings behind my back, sluggish despite the four cups of coffee I’ve already consumed. Sleep had been difficult, haunted by nightmares of Ao Qin grinning up at me from the shower drain. And then there were the actual morning ablutions, which became an exercise in funerary attrition. I spent an hour disentangling tattoos from my epidermis, and then another hour figuring out how to unclog the toilet.

  All in all, not a pretty morning.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about Jack?”

  The fox flicks white-tipped ears forward, jaw hanging in a grin. A gray tongue laps over his nose. “No.”

  No one cares that Jack’s gone. Then again, no one gave a damn when we lost the knockers in the first attack; their corpses were eventually crammed into black trash bags and left outside for collection.

  The best the group ever musters is a threadbare sort of disgruntlement and even then, it’s never entirely holistic, contaminated by self-absorption. Forget the dead men/women/anthropomorphizations/things. What about the responsibilities they left behind?

  (A thing worth thinking about, I suppose: when we die, will people weep or whine?)

  Still, it was enough to make me leave the breakfast table in disgust, allowing them to bicker over cups of tepid coffee and stale scones, the rusalka lazily devouring fat sticks of butter. There aren’t many people that I like, fewer I trust, but I’d at least ponder a minute of silence, if one was serendipitously axed. Not rant on about bathroom duties.

  Ang moh, am I right?

  “I understand,” drawls the fox, as though my thoughts were printed on the air above my head. He sucks in a breath through yellowed incisors. “Such things are important to you and surely, they’re just as important to me. But Jack is Jack and Jack is dead, and Jack is a relic of older times. Poor, unfortunate Jack. Yes. So tragic. So terrible. But we can’t help the dead, can we? We can discuss the dead, but that’s hardly useful. What’s useful, though, is you telling me: are you going to place a bet or not?”

  “Sure.” I pick up the mop, squeeze its tendrils dry of yesterday’s brown foam, plant it back on the ground, and push. “What am I betting on?”

  A gleam of sharp teeth. “Thebet, obviously.”

  I sigh. Sunlight slants through grime-clouded windows, gray, cold, unbothered by the rain. No one has stepped in yet, despite the ‘open’ sign hanging skewed from the door, a nervous entreaty to benefit from our free food. Maybe word of the massacre has finally gotten out.

  “That’s not helpful, Reynard.”

  He stiffens. A frisson coughs up his spine, hackles pluming. His brows pucker. “My name is not—”

  “I know.” I stop him before he starts. “It’s a joke. It’s—”

  Wood scrapes across linoleum. A squeal of hinges, caked in dried gore. The door opens and my head shoots up, alarm dinging in my ears. The soup kitchen no longer stinks of shit and offal, but there’s a certain unmistakably metallic je-ne-sais-quoi loitering in the air.

  A figure, gaunt even under its candy-striped parka and oversized cap, inches through. I open my mouth, ready to circumvent any signs of gibbering panic, but the rusalka makes a precipitous appearance, padding from bathroom to door. She seizes the new arrival by the crook of an arm and smiles. A wash of magic, faint, almost negligible. But enough. The stranger droops, docile, and the rusalka leads him triumphantly to a bench.

  I watch as the rusalka cups the figure’s face, fingers rested under the jut of the malnourished chin. Her chest inflates and the newcomer imitates her. A silvery mist twirls from the latter’s nostrils, spiralling into the rusalka’s open mouth. She breathes again, the rusalka does. Deep. And I can see something go out of her victim, see them grow smaller, shrunken, sapped of substance, the light in their eyes dimmed, decayed by the rusalka’s appetite.

  “Bet? Yes or no?” says the fox, barking each word, enunciating with elaborate care.

  I glance back, disgusted. A soup kitchen, but not for the homeless, helpless people that wobble through the front door, convinced of altruism. Those people are just food. “So you eat these people—”

  “Rupert! That is not important! That is not the hill that you should choose to die on!” The fox is almost shouting in his agitation. “I asked you a question! Are you playing! Will you place a bet! A bet! It is critical you tell me if you’d make a bet!”

  “Sure. Fine. I—”

  “Live.” His tongue lolls from a muzzle halfway to humanity, bone already shrinking into a mannish skull. “Or die?”

  “What? That is completely not ominous at—”

  Boom.

  No fucking warning, not really; the sound comes milliseconds after the fact. The shock front takes us all unaware, too fast, too close, searing through the air. It hits hard. I feel bone give, and ribs snap, and tendons sever, even as the softer components of the human body are pulped, windpipe and intestines and all manner of tubular offal collapsing onto themselves.

  I breathe. Or, at least, the body endeavours to breathe. I heave air into lungs that won’t inflate, pressure constricting around my chest, bones splintering through useless tissue. Every gasp sears through my nerve endings, agonizing. It takes a moment to develop a chronology of events: I’ve hit the wall, fallen over, and am now prone on the tiles, with a gut neatly bisected by a panel from the dishwasher, the dials somehow still ludicrously intact. A mass of exposed intestines slops over my apron, black with soot, or else burned.

  “Shit.”

  With that, the ceiling comes down.

  “MR. WONG. MR. Wong, are you alive yet?”

  Yet. The first motes of consciousness string together around the word, an utterance that catalyzes curiosity. Muzzily, my brain concludes that ‘yet�
� is a weird adverb to use in that sentence, something that should be expressed.

  I gum the air, smack my lips over sounds that should have been words, but arise as dumb mewling. This is not good.

  “Mr. Wong.”

  Something pries open my eyelids, fingernails scraping over corneal membrane. The world goes white. I flinch seconds after the fact, reflexes crippled by internal trauma, sensory ganglia still reviving. I lick blood from my mouth. My tongue strokes across a thread of dangling nerve. I snap it at the root. Hopefully, it didn’t go anywhere important.

  “Mr. Wong.”

  “Will you just fuck off. Ham kha chan.”

  Laughter, completely pleasant, disarmingly reminiscent of the Boss’ frothy, friendly chuckle. “We’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”

  More hands come, brace against my back and shoulders, propel me into a sitting position. And I scream. A long, wet note of anguish that goes on longer than I’d thought I had breath or dignity for. The blinding sunlight resolves into silhouettes, then placid, smiling faces. I blink through a bloodied film, take in the half-circle of observers.

  “Don’t tell me,” I slur. “Mormon boy-band?”

  Polite chortling all around. The men—no, not just men, but women too, with slicked-back hair and identical smiles, immaculately suited—exchange knowing expressions, before fixating on me afresh. “No. We are Vanquis.”

  “Oh.” I rummage through myself for something more articulate to say. “Oooooh.”

  “We have a proposition.” One voice, twenty-six mouths. Not a choir of voices, or even one voice duplicated by twenty-six larynxes. Just one voice, emanating from the general vicinity of twenty-six mouths, all pantomiming the words in unison.

  “Uh huh.” I take inventory of the adjacent damage. The soup kitchen’s gone, every profit margin buried in chunks of rubble like broken teeth. My legs are doing marginally better: one borders on functional, even if the other is nothing but cords of bleeding muscle, skewered by bone. I run fingers up my arm, find untattooed skin.