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Hong Kong was as hot as I had ever experienced, but the sizzling sunshine here was not hand in hand with other typical features I associate with this level of uncomfortable humidity - beaches, sand, hotels?. No, this was an urban kind of uncomfortable. And skyscrapers did leer over me, but I met the city in a different kind of way, down on the ground in the most exuberant clusters of street culture. Stalls stretched their way down on every side, selling all kinds of seafood I couldn't have imagined, much of it still alive and fruitlessly squirming. In spite of being drastically out of my comfort zone, I think I found my love of cities here, drenched in a vibrancy that the torpid simplicity of an English seaside town could never possess. An odd kind of thing to take away from a horrendous experience.
It was dark by the time I actually found the place where Emily Lau was supposed to be. I was deep within the market flux, and I entered what was a Chinese restaurant on the first floor of a medium-story tower, flashing in the night with vibrant Cantonese neon signs. The waft of barbecued pork and poultry hit me as I edged between packed tables, but I proceeded straight past the glances of the waitresses and out a back exit. What I was really looking for were the dwellings below. Down some steps, and now I was in a kind of courtyard space surrounded on all sides by skyscrapers, the sound of the market flooding into it. To my left I could see the door to the household I was looking for.
There was no answer, however, to my knocking, no matter how long I tried. Perhaps she was simply not in? I could wait. Only, I noticed the window nearby. Dozens of flies were teeming between the pane of glass and the casually draped curtain, the only sign of life here. Quizzically I approached. The window, it turned out, was unlatched, and upon my releasing it dozens of flies spilled out into the street and away into the night. I hesitated, frightened. Flies in a window were a usual sign of a thing of which I did not want to find. Incredibly, and after what I hope must have been some serious deliberation, I still found the drive to grasp away the curtain and crawl into the darkness.
I was thankful to find the source of the flies was the far-gone remains of a meat-heavy meal left to sit on a plate, left to sit on an otherwise clean kitchen sink. I reached for a light switch but none worked, but with the light from the neon street signs flooding in through the windows in front of me I could still see clearly, and in that light I caught sight of a door leading to a back room. There was nobody here, so I proceeded forward. At some point I called out Emily's name. At some point I pulled the door to find it opened immediately on some metal stairs which spiralled down. I went down those stairs, into something like a store room (cold tiled floor, shelves, boxes, nothing warm whatsoever) only there was a desk in one corner reminiscent of a study. I worked my way between the shelves.
I don't know if the smell or sight hit me first, or the profound sense of terror, but as I came onto the far corner of the room, phone in hand as the only real source of light, I saw the corpse of Emily Lau, as far-gone as the food I'd been thankful to see before. Her body was limp across the floor in a corner welded with heavy pipe work. Pipe work that was broken in multiple places. Pipe work that had something protruding from it. Massive tentacles had burst from every break, had clasped themselves around Emily Lau, had squeezed the life out of her, had attempted, it seemed, to squash her into the tight corner with as much force as it could muster, and even now they flexed and leered at me. No flies were here with the corpse, as if they sensed the danger themselves. I didn't scream for paralysis, but when I left running from the store room I had to resist every urge imaginable and not be sick.
Along the Darkening Coast | Jamie Campbell
Along the Darkening Coast Page 7
