The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

  I pulled over and bought a pack of cigarettes and a bottle for the journey from a dumpy little roadside shack, then started off again. Back onto the highway, back towards the hills and the farms and the bits of the county no one gives a shit about. I didn’t see more than five or six cars all together as I retraced the route. My head was on fire. The roads poured out of the rear-view mirror, along with the dirt tracks and the badly hacked forests and the new developments and the tiny little plots of farmland that the locals squeezed every pathetic little penny from. I kept going past the exit, since I figured there was no point ending up on the wrong side of the hill again. After all, I’d already peered over the edge once and I didn’t think my stomach could hack another peep. I needed to take a look at the valley below.

  If anyone had asked me exactly why I had to see it, I’m not sure I could have said. But something wasn’t right. If Wei Shan was there, then why hadn’t his body turned up yet? And why had both the cop and Fishlips begun acting all shifty when I mentioned the mine the peasants had been going on about? And if there was a mine, then what did it have to do with the historian whose house I’d just visited? I couldn’t get my head round any of it, and for once the cheap stuff wasn’t helping.

  I took the next turning and followed the road around until the far side of the hill came into view. Even from far away it was clear that the whole area was a mess. No trace remained of the houses, huts, shrubs, hedgerows, crops or all the other crap that must have covered the hillside. Even the grass seemed to have been torn away in the landslide. But here and there a few trees that had somehow survived the fall flailed out almost horizontally. If I hadn’t known better, I would have been prepared to wager that they were held up by some invisible thread, since for the life of me I couldn’t work out why they hadn’t gone crashing down the slope along with everything else. I could make out undulating heaps of rubble and mud at the very bottom. Diggers and JCBs crawled over the debris like ants on a steaming pile of shit.

  Damn. Don’t they ever rest? How was I going to have a look around with cops or soldiers mucking about at the bottom? They had to stop once it got dark, though. So instead of pulling a U-turn or drawing closer to the wreckage, I decided to drive on for a bit and bide my time. I still had a few hours before I had to meet Xiang for dinner. Continuing north, the road drew alongside the low-lying curve of a great trench. Or a ditch. Whatever it was, it was filled with dirt and a few small brown puddles. Surely this couldn’t be the river Officer Wuya had mentioned? That muddy trickle couldn’t have swept any bodies away.

  I drove on in the wake of the dried-up river as it snaked round a corner and led further into the valley. Soon both the highway and the site of the accident were far behind me, though I could see little of interest up ahead apart from a thick bristle of trees at the start of yet another slope. All these hills were making me dizzy. The river – if that’s what it once was – still wasn’t looking very promising. Perhaps it was filled with water further on. Or perhaps something was blocking it. Either way, I’d soon find out. And then turn back to take a look at the hillside once the guys doing the digging had clocked off.

  I did my best to suppress a shudder as the road took me into the woods. I hate trees. Great twisted brutish things. All they do is take up space. And throw huge, malformed shadows over perfectly good pieces of real estate. Ugh. Not far into the forest I passed two turnings off the main track. A pair of crude signs told me that I could take the first left towards the Zhongshan Timber Company HQ or the second left to the 34th Regiment Field Centre. No thanks. Loggers or squaddies – a pretty unappealing choice. Wait. That wasn’t right. I pulled over at the side of the road, hitting the brakes so quickly that the bottle of rice wine between my thighs nearly flew out to smash against the steering wheel. No infantry division out doing training and manoeuvres deep in the country would be foolish enough to publicly announce the location of its barracks. Even soldiers aren’t that stupid.

  I made a clumsy three-point turn and started down the turning. Surely it couldn’t be. I’ve seen a couple on the outskirts of the city, of course. My father even visited one once – managed to get a bed thanks to an old colleague in the People’s Liberation Army – though he’d left it so late by the time he finally got there nothing could be done but try to make him comfortable. It wasn’t long before I saw the squat building rising up between the trees. Ha. I knew it. A little army hospital. I couldn’t believe my luck. A place where those with enough connections to the military could get a private room and a doctor to themselves. The rest of us have to make do with waiting for hours on splintered chairs set between brimming bedpans and old, coughing rheumatics in the cold, crowded municipal hospitals. This was the kind of place you could only go to if you knew someone who knew someone. Or if you were an actual soldier – though everyone knew that’s not how they made the bulk of their money. It was a long shot, of course, but I was gripped by the idea that this was where I might finally find Wei Shan. Besides, what else was I going to do now?

  I drove off the track and down into the wood, parking deep between the trees. My car would stand out like a turd in a jewellery shop among all those camouflage jeeps and shiny black foreign cars. I drank a quick toast to the Chairman then opened the car door as quietly as I could. I felt as if I’d struck gold. I mean, what were the odds, finding this place in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps Wei Shan really was inside, and somehow I’d been drawn to him. No, that’s idiotic. Instinct, that’s what the guys in the office call it. Good instinct. As if. More like a handful of good luck. I took a deep breath. I knew exactly what I was looking for. But that didn’t mean I wanted to find it. Get in, find the basement, get out again. I repeated it like a mantra till I was ready to go. The sun was already low in the sky. It was later than I thought. I stumbled through the mulch, my shoes half sinking in mud as I tried to find a path to the back entrance. There had to be a back entrance. There always is.

  A door was propped open beside the kitchen at the rear of the building. A few dull-eyed youths were scrubbing away at the sink but no one even turned around as I walked past. I found myself in a long, empty hallway. My soggy shoes slapped against the clean, shiny floor. It didn’t take me too long to find one of the locker rooms, halfway along the endless hallway, set between the admin rooms and the bogs. It was empty. Most of the time my life is dull, dull, dull. Examining structures, making sure safety procedures are followed to the letter. Boring as hell. But not today.

  I hung my jacket on a spare hook and put on a white coat. I looked in the mirror set between the tiles. The face looking back was fuzzy at the edges, and couldn’t seem to keep still. My eyes were bloodshot; I needed a shave. I practised smiling the way a doctor might, somewhere between reassurance and impatience. Then I moved my Double Happiness and the half-empty bottle to my new pockets. All set.

  The long white corridors were practically deserted. Creepy. A few nurses wandered past, barely bothering to look up from their clipboards. Numbered doors lined each side of the hall. I put my ear to one, picking up the wheezy snores of some well-connected arsehole. No, I wasn’t walking right, I realised. I should be walking like a doctor. Faster, as if I hadn’t a single second to spare. As if I knew exactly where I was heading and the whole world hung on my opinion. The corridors seemed to go on forever, slipping round corners and branching off into more hallways lined with more low-hanging white lights. There must have been hundreds of people in those pristine rooms – the sick, the ill, the crippled, the terminal and, without a doubt, some who’d slipped away from life completely without anyone noticing yet. But if he was here, Wei Shan wasn’t going to be in one of those. I needed to find the way downstairs. I backtracked and tried another route. The numbers on the doors began to repeat themselves. It must have taken me twenty minutes to find the stairs.

  I followed them coiling down to the basement. Why is it that when a place has a secret, chances are it’ll be hidden just beneath the surface? It made me think of the Cultural Revolu
tion, when everyone was burying books in the garden or stuffing antiques and dangerous love letters under the floorboards or in the cellar. I couldn’t help thinking of my father. He was a first-class cadre, and sometimes I think that was because of all the shit he kept hidden. Pushed all those secrets down into his gut, until finally his stomach took its revenge, and he ended up with a fetid little bag strapped to his side in a place like this, watching his insides pour out. If you keep holding on to all your secrets, the same thing will happen to you, my wife said. And she said it again and again and again.

  My steps rang off the metal staircase. As I clanged further down my breath turned to smoke. The basement was freezing. It was the kind of cold that sticks to your skin. Stone floor. Half the lights off. Metal doors with grills. A sleepy-eyed janitor wandered through one of the doors. I told him what I was looking for and he nodded at me in deference. I followed as he held the door open. I spotted the sign on the wall and followed the arrow past storerooms, supplies cupboards, galleries of prosthetic limbs. More hallways populated only by low-swinging lights with burnt-out bulbs. Little rooms taken over by armies of filing cabinets. Then – what’s this – a couple of poky, windowless classrooms with fusty blackboards. The tiny classrooms even had those funny wooden chairs with a tiny flat desk built onto the right arm, so the students could scribble their notes without the need for tables. Already I didn’t like this place.

  I kept going. It was the smell that got me first. Just the hint of something sour. Mould, perhaps. Mould and disinfectant. Your eyes can lie, play tricks on you. You can never trust what you hear. But if you can get a whiff of it, you’re on to something. There was another metal door blocking off the rest of the corridor and another sign telling me that I’d reached my destination. A padlock hung from the metal catch. It wasn’t hard to pick. I closed the door behind me and hoped that everyone down here had gone out for a long dinner. I fumbled for the bottle in my pocket and stole a quick gulp. Then I took a deep breath and tried to keep myself from falling over.

  There were three rooms. The first was more filing cabinets and a deserted desk. I had a quick look around for anything that might have been of interest, but all the documents I found were filled with medical terminology that might as well have been written in a foreign language. Opposite was the examination room. A flat metal table with a huge lamp angled over it. A tray on wheels, with four closed drawers. A sink in the corner and a pair of plastic gloves poking out of the top of a bin. The room was cleaner than any other I’d been in. You could have eaten off that metal table. But there was still that smell, stronger now.

  I could hear the fan purring in the third room before I’d even pushed open the door. I pulled the white coat tight over my damp shoulders as the cold air hit me. Four trolley trays, topped with four white sheets. Shit. Had I really found what I was looking for? I glanced at the clipboard on the end of one of the trolleys. Number 11. That was all it said. Nice of them to keep it brief. Well, no point waiting around. I pulled off the first sheet.

  A man. Potbellied, with sunburnt neck and shoulders. Shrivelled dick curled above his wrinkled balls. Stubby toes with yellow, broken nails. There was no way this man had worked in any kind of office. He had a ratty moustache and a receding hairline. Slap-in-the-face ugly. Must have been thirty-something. Pushing forty. And what’s this? The index and middle fingers missing on his right hand. Recent too. No stubs, just a mess of gunk and frayed muscle where they had been ripped off. Cuts and bruises all over both hands. The bone of his right shoulder poking up against the skin. His face was almost blue, his lips swollen. Asphyxiation. It had to be. I bent closer and smelt him. A touch of jasmine. Soap. Someone had given him one hell of a scrubbing down. I looked in his ears, up his nose. Fuck. I bet they were never this clean when he was alive.

  I tucked the sheet back over his face. Poor idiot. The next two were pretty similar – a scrawny, acne-spackled teenager with a few broken ribs and a horse-faced middle-aged bugger with his arm split at the elbow where the bone had been cracked back through the skin. Both with the same bruises, the same bulging blue lips, the same broken hands covered in lacerations. As if they’d spent their last few minutes scrabbling desperately to get free. The same sickly smell of soap.

  I looked at the three of them lying side by side. I wasn’t ready to pull back the fourth sheet. Not yet. I tried to think rationally. Fatty, Spotty and Horseface. It would have taken more than a hundred bottles of the expensive stuff to convince me they hadn’t died in the landslide. They’d clearly been buried under a huge amount of weight. I shuddered at the thought. So why the hell had Officer Wuya told me that no one had died? I asked the question out loud, but the three stooges here had obviously decided they weren’t going to help me out. Their clothes would have been incinerated by now, so that was a dead end. Everything in their pockets – wallets, ID cards, black and white family photos, scribbled phone numbers or boarding house addresses – could well have gone the same way. So what had happened? The bodies had been recovered, they’d be taken here as normal procedure dictates, cleaned up, examined by a medical doctor for the death certificate and then … nothing. It was as though, at the very last moment, someone had made a conscious decision not to release the bodies to the families. I had a bad feeling that in a few hours whatever was left would likely be dissected by clumsy students or else cremated. Someone had suddenly decided that these guys weren’t going anywhere. Shit. I lit up a Double Happiness and took a final look at each of their faces. Fatty, Spotty and Horseface.

  I moved along to the last bed. It was like playing Russian roulette. With every body I exposed, the odds on the next one being Wei Shan increased. But I’d come this far. I rubbed my hands together to fend off the chill and yanked away the sheet.

  I’ve got to admit, I let out a little sigh of relief, which is probably not the usual reaction when you see a corpse you recognise. But this wasn’t Wei Shan. He was much too scrawny, and didn’t have Wei Shan’s beer-belly. Even though the face was pretty badly cut up and one eye was missing, most of the dark monobrow was still there. He’d lost his wiry glasses and the best part of his leg, but there was no mistaking the fact this was the same guy I’d seen in the photo in the posh apartment. Jing Ren.

  If he had been down in Jawbone Hills too, then perhaps he was the foreman after all. But the foreman of what? Could these four have been part of a mining operation in the hillside? A bit of digging in the wrong place, or a few baldy placed explosives and they could have brought the whole thing down upon themselves. I covered him back up. Least I could do. I mean, I’d already broken into his flat and stolen a sip of his best rice wine. But as I was pulling up the sheet I noticed something near the top of his left arm. At first I thought it was a clump of mud or dirt that someone hadn’t been able to scrub off. But when I looked closer it was clear that it was a tattoo. Huh. I hadn’t thought he’d be the type. Didn’t look like a gangster though, so how the hell had he got himself marked? Something really wasn’t right here. It was a small black bird with a hooked beak and outstretched wings. A raven? A rook? A crow? I’d be lying if I said I could tell the difference.

  I stamped out the cigarette and put the stub in my pocket. For a while I just stood there, until I felt my skin chill to goosebumps. But strangely enough I wasn’t in any hurry to leave. There was something calming about the cold room. There’s an honesty in the dead that you don’t get anywhere else – a stillness that invites you to confess, that assures you your secrets will be kept.

  I fingered the bottle in my pocket, though I didn’t open it. The room smelt soapy and sour and I was clammy from the cold. This whole thing was a mess.

  I was in the Golden Dragon Seafood Palace, a little of the good stuff left in the bottle in front of me. No time to head back to the hillside today. That would have to be tomorrow’s job. After covering up the bodies, I’d legged it from the hospital and raced back to the city to meet Xiang. And wouldn’t you have guessed it – the bastard was late.

>   I picked up my cup and tried to ease the manic pounding in my chest. I had tried calling Li Yang from the payphone in the kiosk across the street. Twice. I could imagine that ornate red telephone up in the top-floor apartment ringing and ringing, the noise filling the large rooms stuffed with expensive crap, while Li Yang was out at some posh club or fancy restaurant. Probably with some guy who had more money and status than me. I took another swig.

  The owner was picking his teeth as he watched the old TV in the corner of the restaurant. Some wildlife programme about monkeys. Turns out they’re just as sneaky and vindictive as us. I looked at my watch. Xiang was always late. The mad rush to get the latest copy into the printer’s mitts, that’s how he put it. The last-minute bulletins rushing in and screwing up the front page. The censors getting fussy and suddenly reneging on the concessions that had been agreed upon. Even though I’d never stepped inside the paper’s offices, I had a pretty good idea what happened there from the way Xiang yapped on about how each tiny problem there got to his ulcer.

  ‘Hey, it’s pretty grotty in here isn’t it? Maybe we ought to start meeting somewhere else.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, don’t say it. I know, I know.’

  Xiang raised his hands into the air as if to signal that a higher force was in some way conspiring to throw as many little annoyances in his path as possible. He sat opposite me and helped himself to some of the liquor.

  ‘Oh, that’s better. Hey, you look like shit. Something tells me it wasn’t just another boring day at the desk. You ought to take some time off.’

  ‘What am I going to do with time off? Spend more time with my wife?’