Snake Agent

by Liz Williams

  Chen closed the connection, then rang Inari. “Darling, it’s me. Look, I’m sorry, but it looks as though I’m going to be late tonight. Something’s come up that I have to deal with myself, and—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Inari’s voice was resigned. “I’ll make some dinner and leave it on the stove. It’s not a problem.”

  “Thanks,” Chen said. He added, “How’s your day been?”

  “Fine,” Inari said brightly. “I’ve been shopping. To the market.”

  “On your own?” Chen blinked. His wife’s adventurousness was commendable but worrying. He could hear music in the background: something quick and foreign. Inari laughed.

  “No, of course not. I took the teakettle with me. Don’t worry, Wei.”

  “Well,” Chen said. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Look after yourself.”

  “You, too,” Inari said, and rang off. Chen stepped back through the door of the parlor. There was a rustle behind the door as something grabbed him by the throat and tipped him neatly onto the carpet. Chen found himself staring up into the furnace gaze of Mrs Tang: her eyes as hot and yellow as the sun. Her tongue flicked out, stinging his cheek like a razor. Frantically, Chen rolled away, glimpsing the crumpled body of the industrialist as he did so. Mrs Tang hissed with fury and leaped high in the air, coming down astride Chen’s body. Chen snatched at his pocket, seeking his rosary, but Mrs Tang flung his hand aside. Her jaw dropped in dislocation and Chen watched with fascinated horror as her teeth began to grow, twisting into sharp points like the tendrils of vines breaking from the earth. Her clawed hand clamped around Chen’s throat. The world grew red as blood.

  2

  “See?” Inari said to the teakettle. She held up the radish, carved into a delicate lace of petals. “Isn’t that pretty?” She placed the radish in the middle of the table and studied it with her head to one side. Even though she had followed the instructions in the magazine so diligently, it was the first time she had managed to finish a whole one without the edges breaking off. She gave the teakettle a look of mock disapproval.

  “I hope you’re not sulking because we went out without telling Chen Wei. Or perhaps you’re just tired. We walked a long way today, didn’t we?” She grimaced suddenly, and sat down on the couch to examine her feet. Even though she had put on the thick cotton tabis, the soles of her feet still felt a little raw, but at least they had not burned as badly as they had on her first excursion. And this was now the third time she had ventured from the safe confines of the houseboat. Inari felt encouraged. “Not so bad today,” she said hopefully, to the teakettle.

  She thought back to the market: a marvelous place, filled with lights. When evening began to draw closer, the lamps that hung from the high beams of the market came on, sending shadows across the green mounds of pak choi and cabbage; gleaming from the glistening sides of carp and mullet. Clutching the bag containing the teakettle, Inari had walked in a trance through the coolness of the fish stalls; sensing the flickering, newly released spirits all around her as they snapped their tails and swam towards a different sea. The meat section had, in turn, been filled with the vast, bewildered shades of cattle: stepping delicately across the blood-wet floor to where the shadowy avatar of Wei Lo, lord of the herds, waited with infinite, enduring patience. Their presence, and their acceptance of their fate, had saddened Inari and she moved on, among the stalls where the vegetables were stacked in rows and the air was redolent of earth and greenness and growing, sunlight and storms. Inari bent over the leafy bales of kale, and tasted rain.

  The rest of the market was filled with things: clothes and trinkets and electronic equipment, none of which Inari understood. They were dead, and always had been; she passed them by. But she spent a long time in the remedy section of the market, studying the powders and roots, the acupuncture diagrams and the posters depicting the shiatsu meridians. Bamboo and dandelion; lotus and plantain … The spirits of the plants surrounded Inari, murmuring of healing, and she stopped to listen. A basket filled to the brim with pale, dried snakes rustled into life as she passed, hissing sibilant warnings into the air, and Inari looked up to find the stall holder staring at her with manifest suspicion. The teakettle stirred uneasily in its bag. Inari gave the stall holder an apologetic smile, and walked hastily on. Her favorite stalls of all contained spices and money. She lingered over cinnamon and star anise, scenting the incense meals of her childhood: her mother stepping barefoot about the kitchen, trailing odors of cardamom and ginger and fire in her wake. She studied the hell money with a grin, noting how little it cost, and she fingered the paper stoves and chairs and teacups—flimsy shreds suitable only for a dollhouse. Inari sighed, knowing that these days she could afford to replace all the furniture in her mother’s home for less than the price of lunch in the local noodle bar, but she did not yet dare. The authorities were watching; the wu’ei constant in their vindictive vigilance, and the last thing Inari wanted was to bring more trouble on her family, whatever they had done to her. Reluctantly, she had left the market and stepped out into the rose-gold light of evening.

  Now, back on the houseboat, Inari emerged from her memories to see that something was happening to the teakettle. It had begun to rock back and forth on the stove, as if in agitation. Its shiny iron sides seemed to twitch. Then the metal sides of the kettle sprouted into a thick pelt of striped fur. The handle disconnected itself at one end and flattened into a short tail. The spout of the kettle snaked through the air, as if seeking a shape, and then shortened. Two cold black eyes appeared above the spout. Teakettle had become badger.

  “Whatever is it?” Inari asked in alarm.

  The badger sat up on powerful hind legs and spoke in a dark, earthy voice. “Danger!” it said.

  3

  The chanting seemed to have been going on for years. Chen could not remember a time when it had not been ringing in his ears: a surging, insistent note, threaded through with discord. He blinked, trying to clear his head. A red and gold ceiling swam above him; lights sparkled by. By degrees, he realized that he was still lying flat on his back on H’suen Tang’s carpet. The chandelier that hung at the far end of the room was spinning like some gigantic crystalline top. The harsh voice chanted on, and there was now something distinctly familiar about it. Chen raised his head. Lao Li, the police exorcist, was standing in the centre of the room, his feet braced apart beneath his robes. The long, scarlet tail of a charm fluttered behind him as he recited, vanishing into sparks as he called forth the words. Under the chandelier, Mrs Tang was spinning, too. She whirled too fast for Chen to see her properly, and she was emitting a wail like a steam kettle. A painful heat pricked across Chen’s chest and for a dazed moment he wondered whether he was having a heart attack. Then he realized that the stinging sensation was coming from his own rosary, tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket. Chen seized the rosary and struggled to his feet to assist the exorcist. Whatever had possessed Mrs Tang was close to emerging. Chen could smell the betraying reek of Hell: spice and metal and blood. Mrs Tang’s revolving form began to slow, and her head snapped from side to side. Something long and thin crept from her gaping mouth, congealing into a greasy stain upon the air. Teeth snapped from a blind, narrow head; it reminded Chen of one of the phallic clams that occasionally crept from buckets along the harbor wall. The thing bunched itself into a mass of wrinkles, aiming at the chandelier, but at that point Chen threw the rosary. The string of beads, each one a hot, glowing coal, snaked through the air and wrapped around the creature’s bunched body. There was the sudden pungent smell of seared flesh and the two halves of the entity fell writhing onto the floor. Chen glimpsed a thick honeycomb of cells within, and then the demon was nothing more than a little heap of ash. Mrs Tang lay quite still, her head twisted at a distressingly unnatural angle. Chen crouched by her side and checked her pulse, though he knew it was useless. He raised his head to meet the angry eyes of the police exorcist.

  “Shit,” Lao said, brushing ash from his hand
s. “Couldn’t hold it. I fucking hate losing them.”

  “You did what you could,” Chen said in resignation. “You probably saved my life, anyway.” From the look on Lao’s face, this accounted for remarkably little.

  “But not Mrs Tang’s,” the exorcist added bitterly. Chen straightened up.

  “Where’s her husband gone?”

  “What husband? Was Tang here?”

  “She jumped me when I came through the door. I saw him lying on the rug.”

  Lao passed a distracted hand through what remained of his hair. “When I came in—the front door was wide open, by the way—there was just you and the woman. She was on the point of finishing you off, so I skipped the formal introductions.”

  They stared at one another for a moment, and then Chen said with quiet anger, “Then where the hell’s Tang?”

  Together, Chen and Lao conducted a hasty search of the mansion, but there was no one to be seen. Tang had mentioned the presence of his personal physician, but Chen could find no trace of anyone. The servants’ quarters were tidy and empty and quiet.

  “All right,” Chen said wearily, as they came back down the stairs. “One corpse, and one missing person. At least. I’d better call the specialists.”

  It was some time before the forensic unit arrived. Chen and Lao spent the time cautiously searching garden and house. Chen lingered in the bedroom that had evidently belonged to Pearl: a sad shrine, with cosmetics and stuffed toys lining the large, white dressing table like objects upon an altar. Methodically, Chen searched all the obvious secret places, found nothing except a box of novelty condoms, and turned his attention to the undersides of drawers and the backs of photographs. This yielded a single item of interest: a snapshot of an ornamental facade, a dragon lantern washed by rain and a girl’s face staring from a window. The face was not that of Pearl Tang. This girl was equally as young, and in the sharp, digitized image of the photograph her face seemed filled with a kind of repressed excitement, the mouth pursed as though she was trying not to laugh. Her hair was arranged into an over-elaborate style that looked curiously antiquated. Chen tucked the photo carefully into his wallet and resumed his search. He found nothing more.

  Downstairs, the forensic unit was arriving. They were not, as Chen had specifically requested, the special team that dealt principally with supernatural cases. Chen sighed. Yet more evidence of prejudice on the part of the department, or, more likely, sheer penny-pinching. Beside him, Lao echoed the sigh.

  “Just what we need. A bunch of skeptical arseholes trampling over everything and ignoring the obvious. Are you going to deal with them, or shall I?”

  “Best if I do it,” Chen said hastily. Lao had a tendency to become patronizing, and subsequently argumentative, when dealing with non-specialists.

  The scientist in charge of the team was someone that Chen had never seen before: a small neat woman of Vietnamese extraction. Chen took her aside and explained the situation as best he could. To his relieved surprise, however, Dr Nguyen volunteered none of the usual inane remarks to which Chen had become resigned over the years, saying only, “I see. Well, we’ll take the body back to the lab and I’ll make sure that your team gets a look in at the autopsy. Tell me what tests to run and I’ll make sure they’re completed.”

  Chen gave her a brief itinerary, then went back into the hallway where Lao was pulling on his coat.

  “Can I go back to my dinner now? You won’t be needing me any longer,” the exorcist said. In the half-light, his long face looked even more mournful than usual, and his rat’s tail moustache quivered. “Or so I fervently hope.”

  “I hope so, too,” Chen said, and meant it.

  Two hours later, the forensic team completed their work and left. Chen checked back with the station to see how the search for Tang was progressing, and decided that enough was enough. He took a taxi back to the harbor, then walked along the wharf. It was now close to midnight, an hour that Chen preferred not to spend alone. Dark water lapped against the sides of the wharf, and the neon lights of Shaopeng obscured the stars. In the little window of the houseboat, a single candle was burning, welcoming him home.

  4

  “We were worried,” Inari said. She got up from the couch and padded across to the stove, where the teakettle was once more sitting, peacefully inanimate. “It changed, you see, and told me you were in danger. We tried to phone you, but there was no reply. So we phoned the station and they wouldn’t tell me where you were. So I cursed them.”

  “Oh, Inari—” As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Chen thought.

  His wife said defensively, “It was only a little curse. And it won’t last beyond dawn.”

  “The thing is, love, your ideas of what’s little and other people’s tend to be a bit at odds. Remember that poor man’s beard?” A startling sequence of possibilities was flashing before Chen’s mind’s eye: the precinct house transformed, scorpions in the lavatory, filing cabinets changed to the semblance of decaying flesh. “And remember that I’m the one who has to do penance. Not to mention apologize to my colleagues.”

  Inari’s face fell, and she looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve made problems for you. Again.”

  Chen reached out and took her hand. It was no use blaming Inari; she was what she was, after all. “Oh, look. No, I’m sure you haven’t. It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.” He spoke as swiftly and as reassuringly as he could. It was nearly one in the morning, he had a case starting that had all the hallmarks of the murder from Hell, and the last thing he wanted was to make Inari feel guilty over what she couldn’t help. They were back to the same old problem again: the pivotal difficulty on which their marriage spun, and at this hour of the night Chen simply couldn’t face it. He turned and looked at his wife. In the dim light of the houseboat, her pupils had expanded until they lay like great dark wells among the elegant planes of her face. Only a thin rim of crimson delineated each iris. In this light, Chen thought with a rush of affection, she might almost be human.

  “Let’s go to bed,” he said, and rising, blew the single candle out. Beyond, there was only darkness, and the soft sound of water under the night wind.

  When Chen awoke next morning, the sun was flooding through the shutters and Inari was already up. The bitter fragrance of green tea was spreading throughout the houseboat. Chen wrapped himself in a silk dressing gown and went out onto the deck. Something soft and furry brushed his ankles as he stepped through the door; looking down, he saw nothing, but the teakettle was no longer sitting on the stove. The neighbors were already up, and going about their business. Old Mr Wu was doing his t’ai ch’i on the dock, and empty spaces among the houseboats revealed that the fisher families had long since departed for the morning’s catch. The skyscrapers of Shaopeng were towers of shadow against the strong morning sunlight, which lay in a dazzling arc out across the bay. A single gull wheeled up from the water and was lost in the sun’s glare. Chen moved briskly through his ch’i kung exercises, then went downstairs to get dressed. It was still not eight o’clock. Inari was humming under her breath: a quick, complicated tune, very different from the discordant songs that she had sung when Chen had first met her. Like himself, she was not one for conversation first thing in the morning, communicating via eyebrows and gestures. They drank tea in companionable silence.

  “Weather forecast says there might be more storms this afternoon,” Chen said at last.

  “That’ll be nice.”

  “Going to the market today?” Chen asked, with careful indifference.

  “Maybe,” Inari said in a small voice.

  “Well, look after yourself,” Chen said, and was rewarded with her startled smile. “Time’s getting on. I’d better go.”

  As usual, he caught the tram to the temple of Kuan Yin, which lay a few blocks from the precinct house. At this hour of the day, the temple was always busy, filled with office workers from the banking district and, lately, the lab technicians of the new
gherao dormitories of the bioweb, the latter clad in their distinctive white overalls. There were the regulars, too: the madwoman who ate chrysanthemums petal by petal, the young boy with an anxious face who seemed always to be looking for someone, a pale girl in a black dress. Chen exchanged small nods of mutual recognition and purchased his customary gift: a thick stick of crimson incense, which he placed carefully in the sand below the brazier, and lit. Then he bowed his head in prayer, and said the words that he had, a year ago, so painstakingly written: Kuan Yin, forgive me for my betrayal. Hear my penance, and my regret for causing you, the Compassionate and the Merciful, such sorrow. Hear my prayer, and my plea … As always, he was obliged to force away the ungrateful thought that he was not regretful at all. If he had to do the same thing all over again, he would; he could not do otherwise. It was ironic, he reflected, that it was effectively the goddess’ own instructions which had led to his sin, but then all gods were like that: the knife behind the smile, the drop of poison in the honey jar. They like to bind you to them, make you dance on razorblades. Now, Kuan Yin’s voice echoed inside his mind, the words she had spoken at his dedication so long ago: All you have to do to merit my eternal protection, Wei Chen, is to be immaculate in your dealings. All you have to do … From the way she’d said it, with all the calmness and serenity of the changeless celestial present, anyone might think it was easy. To his eighteen-year-old self, indeed, it had sounded easy and perhaps it even would have been, too, if Chen had been a poet or a gardener, but it was hard to behave in a manner worthy of a Taoist sage when you were a functioning member of the Chinese police force, with corpses and informers and double-dealing colleagues at every turn. But then, Chen had to admit, it had been his own choice to compound his problems a thousandfold, and marry a demon.

  He was getting off the subject again. He repeated the prayer, trying to infuse it with a greater degree of conviction, and opened his eyes. The incense was smoldering, sending a thin thread of mixed emotions into the ether on Chen’s behalf. Uneasily, he turned to bow to the statue of the goddess that stood, book in one hand, peach in the other, at the far end of the courtyard. Her flawless jade face looked even more austere than usual; Chen felt like the boy at the back of the class, caught with comics or catapult. It was an uncomfortable feeling at the age of forty-three. Chen had to restrain himself from shuffling his feet.