CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

“SO, IT REALLY was the Furies?”

Jian Wang shrugs and sips from his cigarette, the cherry blazing a lurid blue. He exales octagons of smoke; everyday physics has no authority over the dead. “Bodies like midnight, hair filled with bite. Hound’s breath, and wings of the bat.”

I champ on the impulse to critique his poetry, pitching my weight from one foot to another. While hardly the most inspired recitation, Jian Wang’s impromptu rhymes are, as he has haughtily noted, still volumes better than my slaughter of his mother tongue.

“I’ll take that as a yes?” I sluice Dettol over my forearms and wince as the antiseptic fluid sears across my injuries.

Jian Wang smiles thinly and hooks skeletal fingers under his right knee, towing his leg closer, cigarette now dangling between his teeth. He is sitting, improbably balanced, on the summit of a fire hydrant.

So far, the ghost has refused to acknowledge any attempt at explaining my linguistic shortcomings (public schooling, errant parents, adolescent certainty that Shakespeare would disrobe any woman, no matter how svelte), choosing instead to throw my shame in my face by demonstrating his adroitness with Cantonese, if not poetry.

I throw a cagey look over a shoulder, hunting for evidence of Hao Wen—or worse, the attentions of a well-meaning police-man come to see why a blood-drenched lunatic is talking to himself in the middle of Chinatown. Thankfully, no one emerges from the gloom.

“Right. So do you know why the Erinyes killed Ao Qin’s daughter?” My skin throbs. It’s a long shot, sure. But there’s nothing that passes through Petaling Street that Jian Wang is unlikely to see.

The revenant drums fingertips across his lower lip, one corner of his mouth rising. He transfers his cigarette into a hand, drinks deep. “The Gracious Ones only venture where they are summoned; creatures of responsibility, unlike certain commoners.”

Burn. On a more positive note, Jian Wang is no longer broadcasting low-frequency loathing in my direction, his speech reduced to one-dimensional boredom.

“Who summoned them, then?”

His eyes—bottomless, the black of rot—flash with laughter. “No one of matter, no one loved. Just a broken little dove.”

Tension knits my ribs tight. He knows something. “What does that even—”

Jian Wang tuts an objection, an admonishing finger raised as he hops onto his feet. The ghost oils forward. “Eye for an eye, hand for a hand. Knowledge is yours, when I have what I demand.”

He’s baiting me, it’s clear. What really unsettles me is his confidence in opening a new channel of negotiation. The spell should have him trussed so tight, he’d need permission to speak. I work my nails into my palm, and force my mouth to maintain its amiable rictus. “Fine. Fine. What do you want?”

“Freedom.”

For the tenth of a nanosecond, I can see Jian Wang as he was, rather than what he has become: a child, frightened, suffocating around a throat stuffed with metal, dying incrementally. The world closing above him in bursts of dark loam. Alone, for however many decades he’s been buried here.

“Look, I only push pencils. I have no influence over Diyu—”

“But you can fast-track my application.”

That brings me up short. “I can?”

“I’ve checked.” Jian Wang sniffs, head bobbing, all pretenses of intimidation and nicotine addiction discarded. “You have the authority to at least push it to the attention of middle management.”

“I do?”

“You do.”

The fact that Jian Wang knows things about my position that I don’t, that he knows complex bureaucratic privileges that I wasn’t even aware existed, disconcerts me in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. I clamor hopefully for an intelligent rejoinder. “Since when?”

Before I can get my answer, a new voice intrudes, bassy and roughened by hard use, the words couched in lowbrow Malay. “Boss, what you doing so late?”

I spin in place, nearly tripping over my own feet, excuses cycling across the tip of my tongue. A flashlight cast lines of white up my legs, my torso, which gather on my face. I shade my eyes, catch the glint of a badge in the glare.

“Just cleaning up,” I tell him absently, already aware that this is really just a show of cordiality at this point. There’s absolutely nothing I can say, I’m sure, that will make any of this look okay in the incredulous eyes of the law.

The policeman sways closer, body reeking of cologne and the sweat of a fourteen-hour shift. Although his uniform strains over a rotund belly, sleeves slicing into pillowy arms, his face is hard, his gaze clear and alert. If he spends any time behind a desk, it isn’t of his own volition.

“I can see that,” he booms. A name tag reveals his name as Muhammad. His torch dips from my countenance, glides across the platter of offerings; lingers on the rooster, and its nest of feces and eldritch scrawlings. “Black magic?”

I shuffle back, arms behind my back, fist locked over wrist. His forwardness surprises, but not as much as the matter-of-fact delivery. “No lah,” I demur, lapsing back to creole. “Only good magic lah.”

“You sure?” Muhammad seems unconvinced. When he speaks, his tone is easy, a pitch calculated to disarm and reassure. It chuckles: Ah-ha-ha. We’re all friends here. It’s a voice I recognize from a different life. Muhammad hasn’t committed to an interpretation of me yet, meaning I have about five minutes before I’m walked off in the direction of a balai.

“Of course lah.” I say, a little too quickly. You’re getting soft, sneers a voice in my head. “Business not doing so good, so got to ask god for help loh.”

The officer strokes his armament of chins as he limps forward, flashlight wedged into a loop at his belt, spare hand braced against a cane. “I see. But normally, people use roast duck, or hell money, or fruit. Not blood.”

“Um.” I retreat a step. “You’ve got a point.”

“Do you need help, Rupert?” Jian Wang inquires, mildly.

It takes every molecule of self-control to not jump out of my skin. I’d somehow forgotten about Jian Wang, who seems deeply amused by my oversight. Muhammad, perspicacious as always, follows my wild gaze to the vacant space visible to mundane eyes.

“Am I interrupting something?” He says, every word selected with elaborate care. Under the manufactured concern, I hear the real question: how high are you right now?

“No?”

Chink. A snap of metal. Handcuffs catch the glow of the streetlamps, circles of orange steel. I take another step backwards. Muhammad’s gait elongates, smooths out, discloses a muscular strength that promptly puts me on high alert. “Tell you what, how about we go down to the station, check in with my friends, and then we can all go to the mamak, hm?”

“I can help you, Rupert,” Jian Wang purrs. “You just have to let me.”

“I’m... I....” My eyes oscillate between the two, death and flab, a ghost and a cold cell. I try to sidestep the policeman, circle around to the other side of Mount Muhammad.

He shifts quickly despite the cane, intercepting me, still wearing his congenial smile although his eyes have grown mirror-blank. “Don’t make it hard for either of us, yah?”

“I’m not trying to—” I’m really not. Muhammad has the advantage of bulk, but I’m fairly certain I can incapacitate him before he can retaliate in kind. And if not, there’s still the cleaver, an enticement sprawled seductively within arm’s reach. Maybe. He is pretty fast. The muscles in my jaw convulse, and teeth click. “There’s nothing to worry about here.”

“Uh huh.” He chucks the act. Officer Friendly vanishes, replaced by steely resolution and the growing certainty that Muhammad might be my martial superior. “Come on.”

“Rupert.”

I don’t want to hurt Muhammad. I’ve got a natural soft spot for embattled professionals, being a card-carrying member of the tribe myself. Men like Muhammad and I, we just want to do our jobs and go home. Under other circumstances, I’d seriously consider allowing him to apprehend me and then paddling through the paper trail home. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to hemorrhage any more time.

“Okay, Jian Wang.” A tickle of rawboned dread, a whisper in my mind that sounds very much like What are you doing, Rupert? I ignore it. “Do your magic.”

And he does.

Jian Wang rips through the air, silhouette blurring halogen-bright. I watch as he leaps onto the man’s shoulders, faster and more fluid than anything humanoid has any right to be, and squat down to watch. He braces small feet between Muhammad’s clavicles and rams his fingers into the policeman’s mouth, grinning derangedly the whole time. Down, down, he reaches, until he is embedded shoulder-deep. Pausing long enough to leer at me, Jian Wang then begins pushing his head between Muhammad’s lips, which contort grotesquely, a loop of meat like a misaligned scarf, almost comical in appearance.

“Whhh—” The cop gurgles, a death rattle noise. His eyes bulge. Air wheezes through the slit of his mouth, and it keeps going and going, even when it no longer seems possible for his lungs to squeeze out more.

His shoulders snap back, chest protruding. His sternum pops. Muhammad rises onto his toes like a fish on a hook, head canting backwards. His mouth dilates, the skin of his cheeks unstitching, turning red and white as muscle fibres unravel and tear, ivory gleaming wetly beneath yarns of pink. An arm suddenly lunges from between his teeth, fingers balled in triumph. Something grey and weak struggles within the hand’s grip, dribbling black gunk. Muhammad is making new noises now, feather-fragile, confused, a feeble, whining ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay.

“Such a small man for such a big shell.” Jian Wang tsks, as he slicks free, glistening like a newborn, features pliant as a balloon, re-inflating as they reenter the humid air. Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I announce, blearily.

Snap. Muhammad collapses into a heap, a discarded puppet.

“Fuck.” The word tears free. I jam a knuckle into my mouth, dancing back. Great. Perfect. I’m a cop killer by proxy now, or at least, the only visible suspect in a ten-metre radius. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. FUCK.”

Jian Wang fixes me with a look of cool reproach, closing his fingers around his acquisition as it flutters and thrashes against his skin. He brings it to his face, and his hand clenches. The thing, whatever it was, erupts into a foul-smelling smear.

“What did you do?” The words uncoil, even though I know the answer, know it would only be met with scorn. Creatures like Jian Wang don’t care about creatures like us.

“Stopped him,” he replies, petulantly. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“Most people don’t help someone else by killing a person. Equivalent force. Equivalent force, damn it!” I fling my arms at the corpse, which is already somehow loosening its stranglehold on its bowels. “I didn’t want him dead.”

“You should have said so,” Jian Wang counters smoothly.

“Fuck,” I repeat for the umpteenth time.

Lights flare. A shiver of voices; movement. Large shapes mill in the penumbra outside of the street lamp, resolving into dark blue uniforms, concerned faces. Muhammad had friends. I raise my hands at the warning click of safeties being thumbed back. Someone, voice trembling through each staccato-gasped word, calls for back-up. They’ve seen Muhammad’s body. They’re making the logical conclusion. I’m so screwed.

“Rupert.” Again, that tone: knowing, predatory, smug.

I look over at Jian Wang, hands still in the air. “Mmm?”

“I can help you. Just say yes.”

So, so screwed.

In range of a firing squad, tottering at my wit’s end, I say yes. Yes, as a nasty thought dislodges itself from a miasma of awful thoughts. Isn’t this all a little convenient? But I’m not given room to entertain its unpleasantness. A weight crushes into my spine, even as shadows rush over my vision, sounds dimming to an underwater roar, and I drown.