The Best New Horror 2 (39 page)

“If?”

“Exactly,” he sighed. “We don’t seem to be getting very far, do we? It’s almost as if this place were trying to keep us. I swear it’s turning us in on ourselves. We should have reached the outside long ago.”

“But they’ll send someone in after us,” I said.

And one of the policemen, added. “Yes. Someone come.”

“’Fraid not. No one knows we’re here.” It came out almost as if he were pleased with himself. I saw now that I
had
been right. It had been his intention to drop me off in the middle of this godforsaken building, knowing I would never find my own way out. I wondered only briefly what he planned to do with the two men and the guide. I don’t doubt they could be bribed. The Hong Kong Police Force has at times been notorious for its corruption. Maybe they were chosen because they could be bought.

“How long have we got?” I asked, trying to stick to practical issues.

“About five more hours. Then the demolition starts. They begin knocking it down at six A.M.”

Just then, the smaller of the Chinese made a horrific gargling sound, and we all shone our lights on him instinctively. At first I couldn’t understand what was wrong with him, though I could see he was convulsing. He was in a sitting position, and his body kept jerking and flopping. John Speakman bent over him, then straightened, saying, “Christ, not another one . . .”

“What?” I cried. “What is it?”

“Six-inch nail. It’s gone in behind his ear. How the hell? I don’t understand how he managed to lean all the way back on it.”

“Unless the nail came out of the wood?” I said.

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. All I know is two men have been injured in accidents that seem too freakish to believe. What do you think? Why can’t we get out of this place? Shit, it’s only the area of a football stadium. We’ve been in here
hours
.”

The other policeman was looking at his colleague with wide, disbelieving eyes. He grabbed John Speakman by the collar, blurting. “We go now. We go outside now,” and then a babble of that tonal language, some of which John might have understood. I certainly didn’t.

Speakman peeled the man’s stubby fingers from his collar and turned away from him, toward the dead cop, as if the incident had not taken place. “He was a good policeman,” he said. “Jimmy Wong. You know he saved a boy from a fire last year? Dragged the child out with his teeth, hauling the body along the floor and down the stairs because his hands were burned too badly to clutch the kid. You remember. You covered the story.”

I remembered him now. Jimmy Wong. The governor had presented him with a medal. He had saluted proudly, with heavily bandaged hands. Today he was not a hero. Today he was a number. The second victim.

John Speakman said, “Good-bye, Jimmy.”

Then he ignored him, saying to me, “We can’t carry both bodies out. We’ll have to leave them. I . . .” but I heard no more. There was a quick tearing sound, and I was suddenly falling. My heart dropped out of me. I landed heavily on my back. Something entered between my shoulder blades, something sharp and painful, and I had to struggle hard to get free. When I managed to get to my feet and reached down and felt along the floor, I touched a slim projection, probably a large nail. It was sticky with my blood. A voice from above said, “Are you all right?”

“I—I think so. A nail . . .”

“What?”

My light had gone out, and I was feeling disoriented. I must have fallen about fourteen feet, judging from the distance of the lamps above me. I reached down my back with my hand. It felt wet and warm, but apart from the pain I wasn’t gasping for air or anything. Obviously, it had missed my lungs and other vital organs, or I would be squirming in the dust, coughing my guts up.

I heard John say, “We’ll try to reach you,” and then the voice and the lights drifted away.

“
No!
” I shouted. “Don’t leave me! Give me your arm.” I reached upward. “Help me up!”

But my hand remained empty. They had gone, leaving the blackness behind them. I lay still for a long time, afraid to move. There were nails everywhere. My heart was racing. I was sure that I was going to die. The Walled City had us in its grip, and we were not going to get out. Once, it had been teeming with life, but we had robbed it of its soul, the people that had crowded within its walls. Now even the shell was threatened with destruction. And we were the men responsible. We represented the authority who had ordered its death, and it was determined to take us with it. Nothing likes to die alone. Nothing wants to leave this world without, at the very least, obtaining satisfaction in the way of revenge. The ancient black heart
of the Walled City of the Manchus, surrounded by the body it had been given by later outcasts from society, had enough life left in it to slaughter these five puny mortals from the other side, the lawful side. It had tasted
gwailo
blood, and it would have more.

My wound was beginning to ache, and I climbed stiffly and carefully to my feet. I felt slowly along the walls, taking each step cautiously. Things scuttled over my feet, whispered over my face, but I ignored them. A sudden move and I would find myself impaled on some projection. The stink of death was in the stale air, filling my nostrils. It was trying to drive fear into me. The only way I was going to survive was by remaining calm. Once I panicked, it would all be over. I had the feeling that the building could kill me at any time, but it was savoring the moment, allowing it to be my mistake. It wanted me to dive headlong into insanity, it wanted to experience my terror, then it would deliver the
coup de grace
.

I moved this way along the tunnels for about an hour: Neither of us, it seemed, was short of patience. The Walled City had seen centuries, so what was an hour or two? The legacy of death left by the Manchus and the Triads existed without reference to time. Ancient evils and modern iniquity had joined forces against the foreigner, the
gwailo
, and the malodorous darkness smiled at any attempt to thwart its intention to suck the life from my body.

At one point my forward foot did not touch ground. There was a space, a hole, in front of me.

“Nice try,” I whispered, “but not yet.”

As I prepared to edge around it, hoping for a small ledge or something, I felt ahead of me, and touched the thing. It was dangling over the hole, like a plumb-line weight. I pushed it, and it swung slowly.

By leaning over and feeling carefully, I ascertained it to be the remaining local policeman, the muscled northerner. I knew that by his Sam Browne shoulder strap: Speakman had not been wearing one. I felt up by the corpse’s throat and found the skin bulging over some tight electrical cords. The building had hanged him.

Used to death now, I gripped the corpse around the waist and used it as a swing to get myself across the gap. The cords held, and I touched ground. A second later, the body must have dropped, because I heard a crash below.

I continued my journey through the endless tunnels, my throat very parched now. I was thirsty as hell. Eventually, I could stand it no longer and licked some of the moisture that ran down the walls. It tasted like wine. At one point I tongued up a cockroach, cracked it between my teeth, and spit it out in disgust. Really, I no longer cared. All I wanted to do was get out alive. I didn’t even care whether John
and Sheena told me to go away. I would be happy to do so. There wasn’t much left, in any case. Anything I had felt had shriveled away during this ordeal. I just wanted to live. Nothing more, nothing less.

At one point a stake or something plunged downward from the roof and passed through several floors, missing me by an inch. I think I actually laughed. A little while later, I found an airshaft with a rope hanging in it. Trusting that the building would not let me fall, I climbed down this narrow chimney to get to the bottom. I had some idea that if I could reach ground-level, I might find a way to get through the walls. Some of them were no thicker than cardboard.

After reaching the ground safely, I began to feel my way along the corridors and alleys, until I saw a light. I gasped with relief, thinking at first it was daylight, but had to swallow a certain amount of disappointment in finding it was only a helmet with its lamp still on. The owner was nowhere to be seen. I guessed it was John’s: He was the only one left, apart from me.

Not long after this, I heard John Speakman’s voice for the last time. It seemed to come from very far below me, in the depths of the underground passages that wormholed beneath the Walled City. It was a faint pathetic cry for help. Immediately following this distant shout was the sound of falling masonry. And then, silence. I shuddered, involuntarily, guessing what had happened. The building had lured him into its underworld, its maze below the earth, and had then blocked the exits. John Speakman had been buried alive, immured by the city that held him in contempt.

Now there was only me.

I moved through an inner darkness, the beam of the remaining helmet lamp having faded to a dim glow. I was Theseus in the Labyrinth, except that I had no Ariadne to help me find the way through it. I stumbled through long tunnels where the air was so thick and damp I might have been in a steam bath. I crawled along passages no taller or wider than a cupboard under a kitchen sink, shared it with spiders and rats and came out the other end choking on dust, spitting out cobwebs. I knocked my way through walls so thin and rotten a single blow with my fist was enough to hole them. I climbed over fallen girders, rubble, and piles of filthy rags, collecting unwanted passengers and abrasions on the way.

And all the while I knew the building was laughing at me.

It was leading me round in circles, playing with me like a rat in a maze. I could hear it moving, creaking and shifting as it readjusted itself, changed its inner structure to keep me from finding an outside wall. Once, I trod on something soft. It could have been a hand—John’s hand—quickly withdrawn. Or it might have been a
creature of the Walled City, a rat or a snake. Whatever it was, it had been alive.

There were times when I became so despondent I wanted to lie down and just fade into death, the way a primitive tribesman will give up all hope and turn his face to the wall. There were times when I became angry, and screeched at the structure that had me trapped in its belly, remonstrating with it until my voice was hoarse. Sometimes I was driven to useless violence and picked up the nearest object to smash at my tormentor, even if my actions brought the place down around my ears.

Once, I even whispered to the darkness:

“I’ll be your slave. Tell me what to do—any evil thing—and I’ll do it. If you let me go, I promise to follow your wishes. Tell me what to do. . . .”

And still it laughed at me, until I knew I was going insane.

Finally, I began singing to myself, not to keep up my spirits like brave men are supposed to, but because I was beginning to slip into that crazy world that rejects reality in favor of fantasy. I thought I was home, in my own house, making coffee. I found myself going through the actions of putting on the kettle, and preparing the coffee, milk and sugar, humming a pleasant tune to myself all the while. One part of me recognized that domestic scene was make-believe, but the other was convinced that I could not possibly be trapped by a malevolent entity and about to die in the dark corridors of its multisectioned shell.

Then something happened, to jerk me into sanity.

The sequence of events covering the next few minutes or so are lost to me. Only by concentrating very hard and surmising can I recall what
might
have happened. Certainly, I believe I remember those first few moments, when a sound deafened me, and the whole building rocked and trembled as if in an earthquake. Then I think I fell to the floor and had the presence of mind to jam the helmet on my head. There followed a second (what I now know to be) explosion. Pieces of building rained around me: bricks were striking my shoulders and bouncing off my hard hat. I think the only reason none of them injured me badly was because the builders, being poor, had used the cheapest materials they could find. These were bricks fashioned out of crushed coke, which are luckily light and airy.

A hole appeared, through which I could see blinding daylight. I was on my feet in an instant, and racing toward it. Nails appeared out of the woodwork, up from the floor, and ripped and tore at my flesh like sharp fangs. Metal posts crashed across my path, struck me on my limbs. I was attacked from all sides by chunks of masonry and
debris, until I was bruised and raw, bleeding from dozens of cuts and penetrations.

When I reached the hole in the wall, I threw myself at it, and landed outside in the dust. There, the demolition people saw me, and one risked his life to dash forward and pull me clear of the collapsing building. I was then rushed to hospital. I was found to have a broken arm and multiple lacerations, some of them quite deep.

Mostly, I don’t remember what happened at the end. I’m going by what I’ve been told, and what flashes on and off in my nightmares, and using these have pieced together the above account of my escape from the Walled City. It seems as though it might be reasonably accurate.

I have not, of course, told the true story of what happened inside those walls, except in this account, which will go into a safe place until after my death. Such a tale would only have people clucking their tongues and saying, “It’s the shock, you know—the trauma of such an experience,” and sending for the psychiatrist. I tried to tell Sheena once, but I could see that it was disturbing her, so I mumbled something about, “Of course, I can see that one’s imagination can work overtime in a place like that,” and never mentioned it to her again.

I did manage to tell the demolition crew about John. I told them he might still be alive, under all that rubble. They stopped their operations immediately and sent in search parties, but though they found the bodies of the guide and policemen, John was never seen again. The search parties all managed to get out safely, which has me wondering whether perhaps there is something wrong with my head—
except
I have the wounds, and there are the corpses of my traveling companions. I don’t know. I can only say now what I
think
happened. I told the police (and stuck rigidly to my story) that I was separated from the others before any deaths occurred. How was I to explain two deaths by sharp instruments, and a subsequent hanging? I let them try to figure it out. All I told them was that I heard John’s final cry, and that was the truth. I don’t even care whether or not they believe me. I’m outside that damn hellhole, and that’s all that concerns me.