by James Palmer
I emerged from my hiding place and carefully followed Lao Fang. He did not continue on with his followers, but went into another system of tunnels after taking a lantern from one of the men who had delivered the woman to have her throat cut.
I followed slowly and carefully behind, using all the tactics that had served me well thus far.
Lao Fang entered a low-ceilinged chamber and set the lantern down upon a rock. Then he removed his hat and placed it carefully beside the lantern. He had long, straight black hair that shimmered in the flickering light, and a long mustache and goatee of a style warn by Chinese noblemen hundreds of years ago. His age I could not fathom. He could have been in his mid fifties, perhaps older.
What he did next will continue to haunt me for the rest of my days.
Lao Fang walked to the far wall of the chamber, where something large and dark stood. It opened at his touch, and he climbed inside, the door of whatever it was closing immediately and making a hissing sound. The lantern continued to sputter.
Slowly I entered the chamber and saw what Lao Fang had done. He had climbed inside a sarcophagus. I walked over and inspected it. It appeared to be constructed of some dull grey metal the likes of which I had never seen before. Strange writing was etched into its body, and the face was vaguely reptilian. I had never seen anything like it, and I wished I had never laid eyes upon it.
I dared to touch it, my fingertips tracing the odd hieroglyphs carved into its surface with magnificent precision. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that these marks were made by machine, not by hand, and yet this weird coffin must be many thousands of years old. Mustn’t it?
Then I regained my wits and remembered what I came there for. Lao Fang was inside, just inches from me. He was vulnerable. I would open this vile thing and throttle the so-called Master’s frail form to death.
I flailed about the coffin’s lid, looking for the secret trigger Lao Fang had used to open it. He merely touched it somewhere and it opened. But where? I could see no indentations, no worn places in the metal that would suggest constant use.
“You there!”
I spun on my heels. There, in the chamber mouth, standing between me and my freedom, was the feared Mustafa, and evil sneer on his face.
“I remember you,” he said darkly. “From The Lotus Petal. You’re supposed to be dead.”
I chill flew up my spine. He knew about me and Soo Yin. They all did.
“My master said that you might come. He knows and sees all.”
“What is he doing,” I asked, gesturing toward the sarcophagus.
“The Master sleeps,” said Mustafa. “Not that it is any concern of yours. When he wakes you will be dead, and Mustafa will have a double share of wine tonight.”
Remembering my pistol, I steeled myself. “Best get to it then,” I said.
My bravado must have caught him temporarily off guard, for he looked at me quizzically and hesitated. This was all I needed to pull the gun from my pocket.
“How do I open the sarcophagus?”
Mustafa raised his hands slowly into the air. “It opens only for the Master.”
“When will he awake?”
“An hour from now,” answered Mustafa.
I came toward Mustafa, the gun still trained on him. “What is he?”
Mustafa burst forth in great booming laughter. “The Master is forever incarnate. He is yesterday, today and tomorrow. He is the Hand of Yogul.”
It was my turn to laugh now, though my laughter sounded more nervous and less sure than Mustafa’s had. “Spare me your pious puffery. Lao Fang is just a man. A man who killed my friend, and who tried to have me killed.”
“And you wish to kill him,” said Mustafa, then laughed again. “The Master cannot be killed. He is the Hand of Yogul!”
Quickened with rage, the giant bounded toward me and snatched my gun from my grasp before I could squeeze the trigger. “The Master will know best what to do with you.” He grabbed me and, sticking my own gun in my back, marched me out of the antechamber where his master and my enemy slumbered.
*
The next hour was the longest, post painful length of time I have ever endured. I was tied to a post and given twenty lashes. I was beaten. I was doused with icy water from that subterranean river until I thought I would drown. Still I cursed Lao Fang and Yogul and everything that went on there. Still I called out the name of my friend, as if he were some avenging angel who could rescue me. Still I was defiant. I only told him my name and that I came to find my friend Charles Durant.
Finally, the Master awoke from his weird slumber, and joined us in a hall of weapons similar to the one I had encountered on my first visit.
“Mustafa!” Lao Fang called.
“Master,” said Mustafa as he turned away from me and bowed to the fiend.
“What is all this?”
“This man came to kill you,” said Mustafa. “He’s a friend of the white man who came here a few weeks ago asking after Yogul.”
Lao Fang smiled. “Ah, yes. The archaeologist. He was weak. It was a pleasure to slit his throat.”
I was tied to a board with heavy ropes, and I yelled and struggled against my bonds at this outrage.
“This one has fight in him,” said the Master. “A shame he cannot be brought to the light of Yogul’s existence.”
“What shall we do with him?” asked Mustafa.
“He’ll make a great sacrifice to Yogul,” answered Lao Fang. “The god’s power is growing, along with my influence over this place. I have never been stronger. Soon we’ll have enough people to overthrow the chains of the white man all over this planet, and Yogul will rule supreme.”
I laughed. “You’re insane, a criminal.”
“Yes, to your world I am a criminal. I lurk here in shadow, wallowing in the mire and the muck. But that is Yogul’s domain. It has been given to me, and me alone, to increase his power in the earth. When that day comes we shall be dwellers in darkness no longer.”
“You’re a madman living in a house of cards,” I said. “Even now it begins to fall down around you.”
Lao Fang laughed. “You have no inkling of who you are meddling with, nor the powers at my command.
I thought of Lao Fang climbing inside his strange sarcophagus, and I knew there was some truth to his words.
“It doesn’t matter. The police are on their way.”
Lao Fang glanced at Mustafa. “Now we know what happened to Soo Yin. She was a loyal servant once.” He shrugged. “No matter. She’ll swim in the belly of Yogul, her bones mingling with hers. It has been your fates since time began.”
“Release me,” I spat, “and I’ll show you my fate.”
Lao Fang turned and began walking away. “Release him, bring him to the river,” he called over his shoulder. “Summon one of the others to help you. We’ll dispense with these pleasantries now. And have my sarcophagus loaded onto a truck. The time has come for us to leave this place.”
“With pleasure, my Master,” boomed Mustafa.
Turning to me the great black Mohammedan unsheathed his dagger and sliced through my bonds. “I don’t need any help sending you to your doom,” he said, smiling.
I feigned weakness, falling to my knees. Mustafa sheathed his blade and lifted me up. That’s when I struck.
I kicked out with my right foot as hard as I could, connecting squarely with the Mohammedan’s left knee. He cried out as his leg bent at an awkward angle, and I took the opportunity to punch him in the side of his face with as much force as I could muster. It was like hitting a slab of stone, but the release of my pent up rage quickened me, and I display of swords on the wall and selected a swept hilt rapier.
Mustafa, seeing what I was up to, staggered quickly to his feet, and hobbled over to a lethal-looking scimitar, pulled it from its berth, and made it sing through the air in a display of swordsmanship like I have never known before or since.
“You want to play with swords, eh?” he taunted. Then,
lifting the heavy weapon over his head, he came at me yelling with rage.
He still wobbled from my blow to his leg, and I knew in an instant I could use this to my advantage. I sidestepped him easily and plunged the tip of my blade directly into his heart. I felt the blade slide between his ribs to the life giving muscle beneath.
Mustafa gasped, the weight of the heavy scimitar blade he held aloft pulling backward and crashing to the ground.
I still held the rapier, which was still vibrating from the wound it had delivered, the faint coppery tinge of blood hung in my nostrils. After taking a minute to recover my wits, I ran after Lao Fang.
Somewhere a gong sounded, and I knew the congregation was being assembled once again, Lao Fang’s assemblage of outcasts, criminals and addicts summoned to the river to watch him slash my throat. I had different plans, however.
I pushed and shoved my way through the small throng of people, and where shoving didn’t work, showing them the tip of my sword did.
“What is the meaning of this!” Lao Fang demanded.
“It’s over, Lao Fang,” I said through gritted teeth. “Your reign of terror is at an end. Even now the police are storming your upper levels, and they are on their way down here, lead by your faithful Soo Yin.”
I had no idea if any of this were true, but it worked to further unsettle Lao Fang. “You dare desecrate the sanctum of Yogul? You will die a thousand deaths for this.”
“Not before you, Sir.”
Lao Fang reached deep within his robes and pulled out a short sword that glinted hotly in the wan lantern light.
“Come at me, then. If you dare. Better men than you have died by my hand down through the ages.”
Through the ages? I thought. What in blazes did he mean?
I didn’t have time to reason this out, however, for Lao Fang closed with me, blade to blade while his throng watched helplessly.
“You think you are the first to challenge me?” said Lao Fang, parrying my every thrust effortlessly.
“You think you are the first to get his hands round my throat? I am older than time, boy. In my sarcophagus I am rejuvenated, by the will of Yogul. My empire stretches back to the time of the mammoths, to before Atlantis sank beneath the waves.”
Madness! He was clearly insane. Wasn’t he?
I pushed forward, attacking with greater ferocity, driving him back. If I could make him stumble and fall on the damp, uneven stone floor of the cavern, I could end this nightmare. But Lao Fang was a skilled swordsman and moved around deftly in the darkened cavern, as if he knew its every slope and crevice by heart.
“Do you know what I like about this cavern?” He asked as our swords sang and clashed. I didn’t know how he could speak–I was breathing heavily, but he hardly appeared winded.
It’s sameness. While your cities rise and fall, your people migrate and die, while your landscape is changed by war, famine, strife, and time, the world below remains the same.”
In his bravado he was slipping. I was driving him back, back, even as he matched me stroke for stroke. We came to a strange stone structure that appeared to arch over the underground river, like a natural bridge. Lao Fang climbed upon it and I followed, using my strength to my advantage as best I could. I was broader than Lao Fang, and I meant to use this against him.
But Lao Fang was possessed of a fighting prowess not evident in his gaunt frame. With preternatural swiftness he lunged, almost spitting me on his blade. The rush of the river below us thundering in my ears, I swept my sword under his and knocked it out of my way.
“You are strong, Mr. Casey,” said Lao Fang. “I give you that. But I have felled empires.”
He brought his blade around in a wild arc that sliced my sword hand, and I dropped the rapier into the river.
“Goodbye, Mr. Casey. You are a hardy foe.”
That’s when I felt the presence of some massive other in the chamber behind Lao Fang. A wet, swampy smell invaded my nostrils, and I felt rather than saw some vast reptilian or amphibian shape looming up behind Lao Fang in the darkness of the cavern’s ceiling. Unhuman yellow eyes looked at me with abject malice, and I wanted to flee, to run screaming. But I couldn’t.
As Lao Fang moved in for the kill, I pulled the pistol that I had taken from Mustafa’s lifeless corpse and emptied it into the fiend.
He shrank back from each shot, dropped his sword, his face frozen in a rictus of what could only be surprise, and fell into the subterranean river.
The vast presence was suddenly gone, as quickly as it had materialized. Maybe it was a product of my fevered brain, but to this day it still feels just as real as it felt then. Lao’s former slaves were shouting Yogul over and over again, but even this was drowned out by the sound of the river and shouts from overhead and all around. The glow of electric torches pierced the gloom, signaling the arrival of Constable Long and the police. The empire of Lao Fang had fallen.
*
I took the Constable to the antechamber where Lao Fang’s sarcophagus was kept, but it was nowhere to be found. I started to wonder fearfully if the fiend had escaped, and was then sleeping and recovering from his wounds in the back of a truck on its way to some other city, in some other country, to begin anew.
The Constable wisely ordered all idols to Yogul found in the tunnels be destroyed. Their master dead, his followers lost their will to continue with the god’s worship, and told the authorities what they could of their time as slaves of Lao Fang. The fiend’s assets, which turned out to be quite large, were frozen.
I never found the body of poor Durant, but I suspect he was washed away by the underground river, somewhere deep beneath the earth where no one has ever ventured, where no one can ever go.
I don’t know what the thing was I saw, or thought I saw, but I suspect it was Yogul, cheering his chosen champion, his priest Lao Fang, on to final victory. It alone is the source of most of my nightmares. Chief among them is one where I am buried alive in a cavernous vault, the weight of millions of tons of earth pressing down on me, and there, somewhere in the darkness, is a giant fish toad waiting to devour me.
I never saw Soo Yin after our final debrief. An old man and woman came to meet her at the police station, presumably her mother and father. She hugged them tightly and left with them, an addict made whole again by the power of Yogul, or Lao Fang. Or perhaps some greater power, if you can believe such a power would let something like Lao Fang loose upon the Earth.
I am sending a copy of this memoir to Constable Long of the Hong Kong Police Department, and placing another copy in a safety deposit box, to be opened only in the event of my death, whether my demise be natural or otherwise.
In the meantime, I must console myself with the fact that I found justice for my friend. I just wish I could find peace for myself.
If the reader of this learns nothing else from it, know this: Lao Fang could still be out there, and if so, he will rise again as he has since time immemorial. And we must be ready when or if he does.
The Hand of Yogul
Oh, to be safe in the knowledge that we are born once upon this Earth and after strutting briefly upon the stage of life, are seen no more. I do not know how the vast sweep of time was made known to me; I can only use what I have been given, be it gift or curse.
During most of this life I was a slave; now a prisoner, but I am not perturbed. For in my new found awareness I know that I have been a slave before, and a conqueror, and a poet. I have loved and fought and died thousands of times, stretching back to the first appearance of mankind on this planet. I have stood in animal skins, shivering from the frigid air and gawking at the first sight of our cousins, the brutish Neanderthals, that greeted us as we pushed north about of mother Africa. I have ran yelping with delight through the streets of Rome as it burned, my bronze sword bright with blood. I have killed alongside Hannibal and Ghengis Khan. I have chased mammoths across the frozen wastes and slit the sabertooth’s throat with a chunk of knapped flint. All my visions are basically t
he same. Always some dim, un-guessed age, always fighting, sword or bludgeon in hand, covered in gore and shaking with the rush of the kill. And in each vision of a bygone age I know without doubt that I am the person in my vision, even as I am now David Ashley, merchant sailor and one-time opium addict, who was freed from that heartless taskmaster only to be lashed to one even more cruel: the monstrous fiend from Hell, Lao Fang.
How long I have been his servant I cannot say, for time itself seems to bend and tear in the fiend’s presence. My existence has been one of bowing and scraping and running strange errands in the dead of night. A few nights ago I scaled the wall of an estate to place a deadly spider in the bed of a high-ranking member of the House of Lords. For three hours one late afternoon I stood in wait for an elderly gentleman carrying a gold-tipped cane so that I could slit his throat and leave him gurgling in an alley. I was never told who he was or why I was doing it.
Each assignment was more outlandish, more blood-soaked, more blasphemous than the last, and yet I carried out each and every one without question. And Lao Fang would smile upon me and place his long, thin hand upon my shoulder, and send me off on another barbaric task. Always with the promise of greater glory down the road. And I went out as one dazed, forsaking food and sleep if need be, for I was about my Master’s business and in that I could not falter. The punishment for failure was worse than getting apprehended by the authorities, this I knew from bitter, secondhand experience. So I took to my new stock and trade with reckless aplomb, my new tools the shadows, the cudgel, and the garrotte.
This is how I found myself in a new position in the Master’s shadowy organization. Mine was now a more important task, that of guarding Lao Fang himself.
There were always two of us seeing to the mummy-case. On that particular night when my new awareness came upon me, it was myself and Sahim the Mohammedan, a slim little troll of a man who sat on a little wooden stool in the back of the lorrie, right next to the sarcophagus, steepled his thin fingers, and looked at me suspiciously. Every now and again he would mutter something under his breath and chuckle.