The Devil of Nanking (35 page)

Now when I stop writing all I can hear is my heart thudding. The snow falls silently outside the window. What about skin? Scrapings of human skin? What sort of unspeakable trophy was the
yanwangye
harvesting?

‘That’s one of them.’

The child hadn’t been very old. Maybe three or four years. Liu’s son took us to see her. She lay at some distance from us, in the street at the side of the factory, face down, her hair spread round her, her hands tucked under her body.

I looked at the boy. ‘When did this happen?’

He shrugged. ‘She was there last night.’

‘She needs to be buried.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ But he made no attempt to move.

I went a short way down the street to look at her. As soon as I got near I saw that her jacket, dust-silvered in the sun, was moving. She was breathing shallowly. ‘She’s alive,’ I said, looking up at them.

‘Alive?’ Liu gave his son a fierce look. ‘Did you know this?’

‘No,’ he said, backing away defensively. ‘I promise – I promise I thought she was dead.’

Liu spat on the ground. He turned away from his son and came to stand next to me. We peered down at her. She wore a quilted jacket and cannot have weighed more than thirty
jin
, but no one had picked her up. Her feet were bound with a scrap of olive wool – the material of a Japanese army blanket.

I bent to her. ‘Turn over,’ I said. ‘Roll on to your back.’

She remained motionless, only the shadows of a maple branch overhead moving across her back. I bent, took her by the arm, and turned her on to her back. She was as light as firewood, and once on her back her hair and arms lay where they fell, loose and spread out in the snow. I took a step back, choking a little. The front of her trousers had been cut away and a hole about the size of a rice bowl had been scraped in her right side, just below the ribs where her liver would be. I could see the blackish stain of gangrene around the edges of the wound, where she had been gouged at, and the smell made me grope instinctively for my sleeve, fumbling to hold it over my nose and mouth. It was the smell of the most vicious gangrene. Gas gangrene. Even if I could get her to a hospital she would not live.

I stood with my arm across my face, staring at the hole in the child’s stomach, trying to imagine why it had been made. It was not accidental. It was not a stab wound. This hole had been carved out of her body with a purposefulness that made my blood run cold. ‘What is this?’ I muttered to Liu. ‘Is it a trophy?’ I couldn’t think of any other reason for such a mutilation. ‘Is this a trophy he’s taking?’

‘Shi Chongming, don’t ask me this question. I have never seen anything like this . . .’

Just then the child’s eyes opened and she saw me. I didn’t have time to lower my arm. She caught the disgust in my face, she saw my sleeve held tightly against my mouth, trying to block out her smell. She understood that I was sickened by her. She blinked once, her eyes clear and alive. I dropped my arm and tried to breathe normally. I wouldn’t allow my disgust to be one of the last impressions she had of herself in the world.

I turned to Liu in anguish.
What should I do? What can I do?

He shook his head wearily, and went to the side of the road. When I saw where he was heading I understood. He was making his way to a place where a heavy paving-stone had come loose at the foot of a building.

When the act was complete, when the child was quite dead and the stone smeared with her blood, we cleaned our hands, rebuttoned our coats and rejoined the boy. Liu took his son in his arms and kissed his head over and over again until the boy became embarrassed and struggled to get away. The snow was falling again and we all headed in silence in the direction of our houses.

Old Father Heaven, forgive me. Forgive me for not having the energy to bury her. She is lying in the snow still, the reflections of clouds and branches and sky moving in her dead eyes. There are traces of her on the front of my greatcoat and under my nails. I am sure traces of her are sticking to my heart too, but I can’t feel them. I don’t feel a thing. Because this is Nanking, and it is not new, this death. One death is hardly worth mentioning in this city where the devil stalks the street.

Around me the room was emerging slowly from the darkness. On the futon I sat very still, my heart thudding, and waited for the noises outside to become recognizable. But every time I thought I’d got the tail of it between my fingers it faded under the racket of the storm. Shadows of leaves carried by the wind passed the window, and sitting in the semi-dark like that I began to imagine all manner of things: I hallucinated that the house was a little raft in the dark, juggled on the waves, that outside my room the city was gone, blasted away in an atomic attack.

The sound again. What was it? I turned to the door. My first thought was of the cats in the garden. I’d seen their kittens sometimes, clinging like monkeys to the mosquito screens, screaming into our rooms like baby birds. Maybe a kitten was in one of the other rooms, crawling froglike up a screen. Or maybe it was . . .

‘
Jason?
’ I whispered, sitting up straight, my skin crawling. This time it was louder, an odd, ululating sound lisping round the house. I tipped on to my hands and knees and crawled to the door, opened it a little way, very silently, trying to take its weight so it didn’t shriek on the runners. I peered out. Several of the shutters had been pulled back and opposite Jason’s room a window stood open, as if he’d stopped there after our argument just long enough to smoke a cigarette. Outside, the garden was rearing and thrashing in the wind – branches had broken, and near the window a Lawson’s Station carrier-bag, brought on the wind and caught in a tree, shifted and hissed and crackled, throwing its eerie shadow skittering round the corridor, up the walls and across the
tatami
matting.

But the storm wasn’t what had woken me. The more I looked at the familiar passageway, the more I knew something was wrong. It was something about the light. Usually it wasn’t this dark. Usually we left the overhead lamps on at night, but now the light coming under the doors from the Mickey Rourke poster was the only source of luminance, and instead of a row of lightbulbs, I could see jagged glitters of broken glass. I blinked a few times, my thoughts moving curiously slowly and calmly, allowing time for this to sink in. The lightbulbs in the corridor had been smashed in their fittings, just as if a giant hand had reached up and pinched them out.

Someone’s in the house
, I thought, still strangely calm.
There’s someone else in the house
. I took a breath and stepped silently into the corridor. All the doors on this side of the house were closed – even the kitchen door. We usually left it open, in case someone was hungry or thirsty in the night. The toilet door, too, was shut tight, eerie in its blankness. I took a few steps up the corridor, stepping over the broken glass, trying to ignore the howling wind, trying to concentrate on the noise. It was coming from the third section of the corridor, where the gallery bent sideways and Jason’s room lay. As I stood there, breathing carefully, the sound began to separate itself, detaching minutely from the wind, and when at last I recognized it my pulse leaped. It was the soft sound of someone whimpering in pain.

I stepped sideways and opened one of the windows a crack. Another noise was coming from the same part of the house: an odd, furtive rummaging, as if every rat in the house had converged on one room. The trees bent and whipped, but from here I had a view directly across the garden to the far corridor. When my eyes got used to the tree shadows bouncing off the glass, what I saw made me drop to a crouch, gripping the frame with trembling fingers, peering cautiously over the sill.

Jason’s door was open. In the half-light I could see a shape in his room: a hideous, stooped shape, more a shadow than anything. Like a hyena crouching over a meal, intent on disjointing its prize, unnaturally crabbed, as if it had dropped straight down on to its prey from the ceiling. All the hairs went up on my skin at once. The Nurse. The Nurse was in the house . . . And then I saw another figure in the room, standing slightly to one side, half bent over as if he was looking at something on the floor. He was in shadows too, his back to me, but something about the shape of his shoulders told me that I was looking at the man who had sworn his allegiance to Fuyuki earlier that evening: the
chimpira
.

I blinked a few times, thinking in a surreal, fevered way:
What is this? Why are they here? Is it a joke?
I straightened a little, and now I could see the top of Jason’s head and shoulders: he was face down, prone, pinioned to the ground by the
chimpira
, whose foot was planted directly on the back of his head. Just then the Nurse shifted a little, and settled herself in a sitting position, her big, muscular knees in the black nylons parted wide and high either side of her shoulders, her arms straight down between them. That thin, awful sound I’d heard was Jason pleading, struggling to get free. She wasn’t listening to him – she was going about her business with unnerving concentration, her shoulders hunched, rocking herself calmly back and forth. Her hands, which were just below the frame of my vision, operated in small, controlled motions, as if she was performing a complex and delicate operation. I don’t know how I knew, but I had a moment’s rare clarity:
You’re watching a rape. She’s raping him
.

My trance fractured. A sweat broke out across my back and I stood up, opening my mouth to speak. As if she had smelt me on the wind, the Nurse looked up. She paused. Then her huge shoulders rose, the polished wig swayed round her great angular head, which she held back a little, as if she was rising from an interrupted meal. I froze: it was as if the whole world was a telescope, containing me at one end, the Nurse at the other. Even now I wonder how I must have looked to her, how much she saw: a moving shadow, a pair of eyes glinting in an unlit window at the far, lonely end of the house.

At that moment the wind made a ferocious lap of the garden, screaming like a jet engine, filling the house with noise. The Nurse tilted her head and spoke in a low voice to the
chimpira
, who immediately became rigid. Slowly he straightened and turned to stare down the long corridor to where I stood. Then he pulled back his shoulders and flexed his hands. He began to amble casually towards me.

I lurched away from the window and bolted for my room, slamming the door and locking it, tripping and scuttling backwards like a crab, stumbling over the books and papers in the dark, banging into things blindly. I stood, pressed against the wall, staring at the door, my chest as tight as if I’d been thumped in the ribs.
Jason
, I thought, feverishly.
Jason, they’ve come back to get you. What games have you been playing with her?

At first no one came. Minutes seemed to pass – time when they could have been doing anything to Jason, time when I thought I should open the door, get to the phone, call the police. Then, just as I thought the
chimpira
wasn’t coming, that he and the Nurse must have left the house in silence, I distinctly heard, through the wind, his footstep creak in the corridor outside.

I shot to the side window, scrabbling crazily at the edges of the mosquito screen, breaking my nails. One of the catches gave. I flung away the screen, threw open the window and looked down. About four feet below, an air-conditioning unit that might hold my weight stuck out from the neighbouring building. From there it was another long drop into the tiny space between the buildings. I turned and stared at the door. The footsteps had stopped and, in the awful silence, the
chimpira
muttered something under his breath. Then a kick splintered the flimsy door. I heard him grab the frame, getting a hold so he could punch his foot straight through.

I scrambled on to the windowsill. I had time to see his arm splinter through the hole, his disembodied hand in the lavender suit groping in the dark for the doorlock, then I pushed myself out, landing noisily, the air-conditioner shuddering under my weight, something ripping my foot. I dropped into a clumsy squat, scrambled on to my stomach, dangling my legs out into the darkness, the wind whipping my pyjamas around me. I pushed away and dropped straight to the ground with a soft thud, rocking forward a little so that my face slammed against the plastic weatherboarding on the neighbouring house with a painful
thuck
.

Another splintering sound came from above – the noise of something metallic – a screw or a hinge, maybe, ricocheting round the room. I hauled in a breath, sprang to my feet and flew out into the alley, diving into a gap between two buildings opposite where I crouched, the blood thundering in my veins. After a moment or two I dared to shuffle forward, my hands on the two buildings, and peer up at the house in mute horror.

The
chimpira
was in my room. Light coming from the corridor behind amplified every detail of him, as if through a magnifying-glass: individual hairs, the light shade swaying above his head. I pulled the collar of my pyjama jacket over my mouth, holding it there with both clenched fists, my teeth chattering, staring at him with eyes as hard and round as if I’d had adrenaline dropped into them. Would he guess how I’d escaped? Would he see me?

He hesitated, then his head appeared. I shrank back into the gap. He took long, patient minutes to study the drop from the window. When at last he pulled his head inside, his shadow wavered for a moment, then he disappeared from view, almost in slow motion, leaving the room blank save for the swinging lightbulb. I started to breathe again.

You can be as brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious – that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.