The Devil of Nanking (44 page)

I pulled the window open in tiny increments, lifting the pane to stop it squealing and at that moment, as if she had heard me, she turned from the gate and looked back in the direction she’d come, her head rotating very slowly.

I didn’t wait. I hooked my leg through the gap and with one push levered myself into the house, dropping down into a crouch in the dark. I stayed there, shocked by the noise I’d made, my hands on the floor, waiting until the sound had spent itself, echoing around the closed-off old rooms. Somewhere in the darkness to my left I could hear the scattering footsteps of rats. I fumbled in my pocket, switched on the torch and, holding my hand over it, allowed a timid beam to creep across the floor. The room leaped into flickering life around me – small, with a cold, flagged floor and piles of rubbish everywhere. A few feet ahead was an empty doorway. The beam extended into it, smooth and featureless, far down into the depths of the house. I clicked off the torch and crawled like a dog, pushing through cobwebs and dust, head first into the doorway, then on into the next, going deeper and deeper into the house until I had gone so far into the warren of rooms that I was sure they would never find me.

I stopped and looked back the way I’d come. The only thing I could hear was the thudding of my heart.
Did you see me? Did you see me?
Only silence answered. From somewhere in the darkness came a steady
drip drip drip
and there was a smell, too, rich and peaty, the mineral smell of trapped water and decay.

I crouched there, breathing hard, until, when an age seemed to have gone by and I could hear nothing, I dared to switch on the torch. The beam played over piles of furniture, timbers that had broken from the ceiling, a confetti of plaster and wiring. I could hide here for ever if I had to. My hands quivering, I pulled the package out from my jacket. I’d expected something weighty, something dull and clay-like, but this was too light, as if it contained balsawood or dried bone. I put my fingers inside and found something wrapped in tape, a smooth surface that had exactly the quality of butcher’s paper – thick and shiny. Blood wouldn’t settle long on its waxed surface. I had to stand for a while supported against the wall, breathing hard through my mouth because the thought of what I was holding was too much. I picked at the tape, got hold of the end and pulled at it, when from behind me, a long way back in the darkness, I heard an unmistakable sound. Metal screeching against metal. Someone was pushing open the window I’d climbed through.

I shoved the package inside my jacket and scrambled forward blindly, banging into things, my panicky sounds echoing off the walls. Through one room into the next, then the next, not thinking about what I was passing – the rows of kimonos hanging in the corner, as quiet as corpses, the low table in the shadows of one room, still set for a dinner, as if everything had frozen when the landlord’s mother died. I was deep, deep inside the bowels of the house, in endless darkness, when I realized I couldn’t go any further. I was standing in a kitchen, with a sink and a western-style cooker on one wall. On the other wall, unlike the previous rooms, there was a blank where there should have been a doorway leading onwards. No way out. I was trapped.

Fear scuttling up under my hair I whipped the torch round the walls, over the cobwebs, the peeling plaster ceiling. The beam played over a flimsy cupboard panel in the side of the room and I lurched at it, scrabbling at the catch, gouging my fingertips, my feet tattooing on the floor in frantic fear. The panel clicked open with a noise that echoed away into the rooms behind.

I thrust the torch in and saw that it wasn’t a cupboard but a doorway that opened on to the top of a rotting staircase and led away into the darkness. I stepped straight into the opening, carefully pulled the door closed behind me, and went down two steps, clinging to the rickety banister. Dropping to my haunches I shone the torch around. It was a small cellar, maybe a foodstore, about five foot by ten, the walls of thick stone. At head height ran shelving on rusting brackets, upon which crowded dozens of old glass jars, their contents browning. Below that lay a silent, thickened skin of pale pink algae. The stairs led straight down into a stagnant indoor lake.

I looked back up at the closed panel door, stretching my ears out into the unlit rooms I’d come through. Silence. I’d stood on a branch – I couldn’t have left any tracks under the window, and my trail would be impossible to see through all the undergrowth. Maybe they hadn’t heard me at all. Maybe they were just checking all the windows out of routine.
Please yes
, I thought.
Please
. I turned and played the beam around the cellar. From a small crack in the rendering of the right-hand wall trickled a weak rivulet of brown water – this was what Jason had told me about: the pipes in the street that had cracked in an earthquake and filled up the basement: green and copper tidemarks marked the changing water levels over the years. The beam skimmed a low, bricked arch. I bent close to the skin on the water, and held the torch out, angling the light upwards. It was a tunnel, flooded to within an inch of the ceiling, leading away into the depths of the house. It would be impossible to—

I stiffened. A loud boom echoed through the rooms behind, as if the loose grille on the window had been wrenched from its moorings.

I began to pant with fear, my mouth open like a dog’s. Holding the torch in front of me like a weapon I lurched into the water, making it rock around me as if I’d prodded the belly of something sleeping, disturbing things that had been motionless for years. It was freezing. It set my jaw tight and made me think of teeth, mysterious fins and mouths, and the possibility that this was something’s home. I thought of the Japanese vampire goblin, Kappa, the swimming predator who would pluck down unwary swimmers by the heels, suck them dry of blood and discard their empty, bleached husks on the riverbank. Tears of fear sprang to my eyes as I waded on.

I stopped at the far wall and turned to look back the way I’d come. Around me the water slowly stopped sloshing, and silence descended. The only sound was the panicky
shush shush
of my breathing bouncing back off the walls.

Then another crash came through the silence. More furniture being overturned. I scanned the cellar desperately, the wavery torchbeam bringing the yellowing ceiling swooping in and out of focus. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to . . .
The archway!
I bent my knees and sank down until my shoulders were submerged and my chin was almost touching the surface of the water. Some of the jars around me broke the skin with an elastic glooping noise, and disappeared out of memory into the water below, taking their darkened pellets of pickled plums, rice and small sightless fish with them. I pushed my hand into the dark insides of the tunnel, rolling it sideways, opening and closing my fingers so they scraped against the slimy roof. Only when I’d straightened my arm and my cheek was pressed tight against the wall could I feel the ceiling rise, my hand emerge into air. I pulled my arm out and shone the torch at it. How long was it? Twenty-five, thirty inches maybe?
Not far. Not that far.
Shivering frantically I looked back up at the staircase, at the flimsy panel door.

From somewhere close, maybe even the kitchen, there came another crash. I had no choice. I pulled out the parcel and tied the handles of the bag tightly, sealing it completely, then pushed it back into my jacket, which I zipped up to the neck. As I did I lost my grip on the torch. It slipped from my numb fingers and landed on top of the skin, the beam hitting the nearby wall in a distorted oval. I grabbed for it, got it, began to lift but lost my grip and dropped it again. The skin tilted this time, tipping the torch forward, plopping it down into the water, its beam seesawing up through the rotting pink colonies of organisms, sending their lacy shadows swirling up on to the walls. I plunged after it, swinging for it, my hand moving in slow motion under the water, swirling up dustclouds under the surface, but the torch sank silently away, pirouetting lazily, its faint yellow glow thinning to just a glimmer. Then –
gloop
. Quite near me something small but weighty dropped into the water and swam.

Tears of terror welled in my eyes. The torch. The torch.
Don’t need it. Don’t need it. You can manage without it.
What’s that in the water?
Nothing. A rat. Don’t think about it.
At the top of the staircase, a thin light filtered round the cracks in the panel. I heard a man’s voice, low and serious, and above it the Nurse’s hot equine breath moving round the kitchen, as if she was inspecting it, trying to smell what had come through it.

Stop to think and you’ll die
. I sucked in a breath, put my hands on the wall, bent my knees and dropped face down into the pitchy tunnel.

The freezing water filled my ears, my nose. I thrust my hands out and tried to stand, crashing into bricks, grazing my elbows, stumbling around in the floating murk. An unearthly noise reverberated inside me, my own voice, moaning in fear.
Which way? Which way?
Where did the arch end? Where? It seemed to go on for ever. Just as I thought my breath would run out and it would all be over, my hand shot up from the ceiling, clear above the water, and I went after it, scraping my head, pushing desperately forward, after the hope of air. I surfaced, retching, spitting, my head jammed painfully into the ceiling. I couldn’t stand up straight, but if I bent my knees and held my neck sideways, there was just enough room – a four- or five-inch gap between the water and the brickwork – to breathe.

I don’t know how long I was there, or what state of crisis my body entered – maybe I fainted, or went into a fugue state – but as I stood, shaking, only the insistent life-beat of my heart for company, so loud it sounded several hundred times its size, as big as the house itself, something, the cold or the fear, picked up my consciousness and siphoned it slowly out of my reach down a long, silent tunnel, until I was nothing, nothing except a thudding, hollow pulse in a place with no geography, no boundaries and no physical laws. I floated in a vacuum, no awareness of time or existence, bobbing lazily like an astronaut in eternity and even when, after a millennium had rolled by and I became aware of a faint pinkish light coming through the water to my left – the Nurse shining the torch along it – I didn’t panic. I watched myself from a different place, seeing my frozen face floating on the algae, my lips blue, my eyelids half lowered. Even when the light left and eventually, after an eternity, retreating footsteps sounded in the rooms upstairs, I stayed absolutely still, a modern Alice, my head canted to one side, cramped and so desperately cold that I thought my heart would freeze closed and fossilize me there, metres under the ground.

At dawn, as the first light was moving over the garden, when the house had been silent for hours, I reached the open window. I was so numb with cold that it had taken hours to crawl back. Every inch was a fight with the seductive lethargy of cold, but at last I was here. I peered out cautiously, my heart thudding dully, sure that the Nurse would come charging down on me from some hidden lair. But the garden was silent, an eerie, crystalline world, as still and quiet as a ship marooned in ice. Everything was covered in little diamonds of frozen drops, surreal against the snow like necklaces strewn among the trees.

Climbing out of the window exhausted me. I dropped into the snow and, for a long time, I was too numb to do anything except sit where I’d landed, slumped drunkenly against the branch with the carrier-bag at my feet, and stare distantly at this silent winter world.

What had happened here? What had happened? Every one of the windows in the gallery had been smashed, the branches on the trees had been snapped, a shutter hung on its hinges, squeaking occasionally.

The drops in the branches are so beautiful
 . . . In the dawn light my mind moved slowly.
So beautiful.
I looked at the trees round the stone lantern, at the area of the garden that had so fascinated Shi Chongming. A slow bud of recognition was opening dreamily inside me. Frozen drops of blood and tissue were sprayed in the branches, as if something had exploded there. Draped across the stone lantern, like a faded paper chain, was . . . A hazy memory of a newspaper photograph – a nameless Japanese victim, his viscera spooling below the car.

Jason
 . . .

I stared at what was left of him for what seemed like hours, astonished by the patterns – the braids and furbelows, the little scrolls like Christmas decorations.
How could it look so beautiful?
A wind came, buffeting and pirouetting the snowflakes, springing the blood from the branches. The wind rattled through the broken panes in the gallery and whirled along the corridor. I imagined myself from above, I imagined looking down at the garden, at all the vermiform paths and the thickets, I imagined the way the blood would look, a halo round the stone lantern, and then as I drew further away I saw the roof of the house, its red tiles all gleaming in the melting snow, I saw the little alleyway with a solitary old woman clipping down it in clogs, I saw the poster of Mickey Rourke, then the whole of Takadanobaba, the ‘high horse field’, and Tokyo glittering and glinting next to the bay, Japan like a dragonfly clinging to the flank of China. Great China. On I went, on and on, until I was dizzy and the clouds came over and I closed my eyes and let the sky or the wind or the moon pick me up and drift me away.