Many in her profession would have disregarded such an event. They would have called it an example of "unfocused neural impulses," or something equally random, and gone on ignoring the old man.
But Mary Melissa Mercy had seen it. Seen it with her own two eyes.
Over the next few weeks there were more such twitches. Mostly around the eyes, but some were located in the hand. The one with the strange super-hard nail.
Mary Melissa was changing the old man's linen one day when his eyes snapped open completely. They were hideous. Like twin fungi. She did not back away in fear as some might have but moved closer to him, peering down into his dark, drawn face.
Mary Melissa Mercy had thought those eyes hadn't seen the light of day in more than six years, but the sight of them told her it had been much longer than that. They were so white, it was difficult for her to discern any pupil at all. She finally gave up trying. It didn't matter, however. He could see. Perhaps more clearly than a sighted man. Those blind, milky eyes bored into her very soul.
He forced two words from between thin lips.
"Reject . . . meat."
"Yes, yes!" Mary Melissa cried, thinking the patient had absorbed her lectures on proper Vegan diet.
As quickly as they had opened, the milky eyes closed again. The old man seemed tired from his effort. His eyes rolled and locked beneath their parchment lids. The twitching stopped for several days afterward, as he regained what little strength he had.
Mary Melissa Mercy told no one of the miracle she had wrought.
Over the course of the next year, the old man's strength increased. He seemed to possess a boundless determination to recover. It appeared to Mary Melissa that, even in his obviously advanced years, the old man had some overriding reason to cling to life. A drive. Something that compelled him to beat almost insurmountable odds to recover.
In the second month after that first time his eyes had opened, the old man began to speak in complete sentences. The words seemed to be Chinese. The voice struggled laboriously over the pronunciation, as the vocal chords vibrated for the first time in over a decade. A few English syllables seemed to pepper the subvocal murmurings.
The head would sway from side to side-that started shortly after he had begun opening his eyes-and he would wheeze out a stream of unintelligible nonsense.
The words he said most often sounded like "sin and chew." They seemed to trouble the old man greatly. Often the phrase would seem a curse; at times it was said almost reverentially, and at others, as a plea.
Mary Melissa was so interested in the old man that she went to the public library to try to find out what had caused him so much mental anguish. It took some doing, but finally she found it.
It was Sinanju-just some tiny little fishing village in Communist North Korea, nestled in the heavily industrialized western coastline. It didn't even appear on most maps, it was so small. Mr. Nichols had probably spent some time there as a boy, she decided.
Like most Americans, Mary Melissa Mercy lumped the entire Asian continent into one big neighborhood.
The old man became more animated as time wore on. He also became consciously aware of Mary Melissa's presence. Eventually, he told her in his halting English that he had learned the language thanks to her and her hours of disconnected ramblings. He told her that, despite appearances, they were much alike.
"Really?" she asked.
"We do not soil our stomachs with the flesh of animals."
"How did you know I was a vegetarian?"
"We are one Creed, you and I, Missy," rasped the Chinese named Nichols. "Soul mates. Connected in mind and spirit."
A one-sided relationship, akin to idol worship, began to develop between the old man in Room 334 and Mary Melissa Mercy.
Then the bottom fell out. Orders were passed into the terminal ward saying that the old man was to be moved out of the hospitial at the end of the month. When Mary Melissa Mercy tried to find out where, she was told the new location was not known.
In tears, she ran to tell the poor old man of his fate.
He was sitting up in bed, propped against a half-dozen pillows. The blinds were opened wide and he was basking in the midday sun, which made his scaly skin appear livid and strange.
"Sir," Mary Melissa had said, sobbing. "They are taking you from me."
He smiled thinly-a corpse's grimace. "Taking me where?" he asked.
"I don't know," Mary Melissa answered. "I guess it must be your grandson's doing."
"Grandson?" he asked. His purple head still moved from side to side, like that of a cobra weaving to unseen music.
Mary Melissa had never mentioned the ungrateful youth to Mr. Nichols before. She had hoped to spare him the grief.
"Yes," she admitted. "He brought you here years ago. He has paid for you to stay here all these years," she added brightly, as if to sugarcoat the familial ingratitude.
The smile vanished. "Missy," he said coldly, "the grandson of whom you speak is no grandson of mine."
Mary Melissa Mercy shrugged-a wasted gesture. "I know, but what are you going to do with family?" She tried to joke, but her heart was breaking. In truth, she felt closer to the old Chinese man lying in that hospital bed than she did to her own kin. They all ate meat and drank the blood, which they called "juice."
"This 'grandson' is Sinanju," he spat. It was the first time she had heard him use that word since regaining full consciousness.
"He's from Korea?" Mary Melissa had asked. She was puzzled. A doctor had once told her that the man who dropped the old Chinese gentleman off had been Caucasian.
The old man beckoned Mary Melissa Mercy closer. His breathing was labored. She had grown used to his rank breath more than a year before. "He is not what he appears, this gweilo," he said. "He is servant to an ancient evil, as is his master. Both must be stopped."
Mary Melissa Mercy felt a strange tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach. There was something otherworldly about this elderly Chinese as he stared blankly up at her. There was something in those eyes that held the key to her destiny. She just knew it.
"It is this gweilo who rendered me immobile," he said, "condemning me to a living death. You will help me to stop him. You will help me to end the line of Sinanju."
"I don't understand. I thought Sinanju was a place."
"Sinanju is a cult of assassins. I am only one of their many victims. They have warred with my people for hundreds of years."
"Do they eat meat?" Mary Melissa asked slowly.
"They are duck-eaters."
"Then I hate them. I had baby ducks when I was eight."
Mr. Nichols nodded weakly. "You will help me to achieve the Final Death longed for by my Creed."
This was it! This was why he had pulled himself back from the brink of death. A mission! Mary Melissa could tell the old man was about to impart some great wisdom to her. This was why she had stayed so long. This was why she had found him so endlessly fascinating.
He brought his gnarled index finger into the air. Sunlight reflected off of the tip of the razorsharp nail. It remained poised there, as if to assist the old man in making some great oratorical point. But no more words came.
The finger dropped, slicing into the side of Mary Melissa Mercy's exposed neck in a delicate, almost loving gesture.
And her mind was opened to the universe.
Mary Melissa Mercy, gyonshi, obediently arranged the patient switch. She found another old Chinese man to take her benefactor's place. He was in the surgical wing for a gall bladder operation. It was easy enough to do. Practically no one but Mary had been in Room 334 for almost three years. They would not recognize the difference.
She had wheeled Mr. Nichols-whom she now addressed as "the Leader"-to an access elevator in the surgical wing and out of the hospital.
She had stayed on at Houston General only long enough to shape and strengthen the nail of the imposter to match that of the Leader by applying a varnish made from an ancient recipe.
And t
hen they had simply vanished.
It had taken several years for the Leader to regain his strength. Mary Melissa Mercy knew that he had recovered as much as his aged body would allow.
Several years to recreate the ancient poison. Several years for the Leader to perfect his scheme. Several years to engineer the downfall of Sinanju, a scheme which was approaching fruition at last.
And now, the evil Master of Sinanju had been defeated. They had been warned that his protege, the gweilo, was en route. He would be defeated as well.
Mary Melissa Mercy didn't know who it was who had called her to tell her that Remo was on his way, and she didn't care. She suspected it was whomever employed Sinanju in America. There was no other person who could have had knowledge of Remo's next move. And that person had become gyonshi now, as well.
The afternoon wind blew a fragrant lilac aroma through the huge broken window of Mary Melissa's Three-G office. She hadn't bothered to have maintenance fix the window. Right now they were too interested in eviscerating rats in the boiler room to install a new pane anyway.
She stepped through the window and out into the lush garden.
The smell was stronger here, and she lifted her slender nose to the air and inhaled greedily. They were here. All around her. The sacrifices.
From every tree in the thick garden there hung a skeletal corpse. Strips of flesh still clung to ribs. Blood still dripped slowly and deliberately from dangling toes.
The ground had been freshly turned in splotchy patches throughout the garden. The buried internal organs spread widening stains of darkness around the earthy mounds.
This was the smell that Mary Melissa Mercy so loved. The smell of the unclean meat-eaters. The smell of death. It reminded her of her first hospital visit.
She was even getting used to the taste of blood finally. But only because she had been assured drinking blood was central to the practice of the gyonshi religion-which it was.
The Leader sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the main path. A plaid afghan was tucked neatly around his knees and his hands were cradled carefully in his lap. But for the array of corpses that swayed and rattled like bony wind chimes in the breeze around him, he would not have looked out of place on the porch of any rest home in America.
"The gweilo will be here soon, Leader," Mary Melissa Mercy said.
He looked up at her, his white eyes unblinking. He smiled evilly.
"We will be ready, Missy," he said softly. "The Shanghai Web demands one last victim. Vengeance shall be ours. The Final Death will achieve dominion over this tired world." He paused, as if to drink in a vision only his sightless eyes could perceive.
"And for our eternal enemies, the Ultimate Death . . ."
Chapter 22
Night was falling on the longest day of Remo Williams' life.
He steered his rented car through the dying light, his face a mask of single-minded concentration.
Remo racked his brain, trying to remember all that Chiun had told him years before about the Chinese vampires, but the images were intertwined with flashes of other, more personal, memories.
He pushed these away.
The vampires cannot enter a residence unless invited, Remo recalled. He was pretty sure of that one. A lot of good that did him now. They were all over Three-G like glassy-eyed cockroaches. And they were as fast as Sinanju, but not as strong.
The first time Sinanju had encountered the gyonshi Creed had been in a forest near what would later become Shanghai, and they had asked the Master of the time if he would invite them in. Did that mean all Remo had to say was "no" and they'd leave him alone long enough to kill them? Who knew? It didn't seem reasonable, but neither did the idea of vegetarian vampires who drank blood.
They were shape-changers as well. Remo remembered that much of the legend. Would he find himself facing a gyonshi vampire one minute and a spitting cobra the next?
And they hid in mist, he recalled. Or maybe they became the mist itself. Remo wasn't certain which. The legends were vague.
All he could call up beyond that were images of bats and wooden stakes and garlic and castles-distortions of the reality that had given rise to the European vampire tradition.
His thoughts turned again to Chiun, lying alone, possibly dying, on that hospital bed back at Folcroft.
He was in this one alone, he knew.
Smith would be of no help. For all Remo knew, he had joined the rest of the vampires by now. At least Chiun had been saved that ignominy. His nervous system had given out well before the gyonshi virus could turn him into one of the undead.
Remo gripped the steering wheel of his rented car tightly and raced along the twisting mountain road. Woodstock lay ahead. And the hilly eminence that was Three-G Incorporated.
In the blink of an eye, on the shore that had no name because it did not belong to reality, the black mist congealed into human form.
The black-clad figure was sickly thin, with cadaverous features and pale, almost albino pigmentation.
The guillotine-shaped nail on its index finger shot forward toward Chiun's throat in a near perfect jab. Near perfect, however, was not good enough.
Chiun easily sidestepped the blow and fired his elbow in a backward thrust, crushing the windpipe and sending a font of blood squirting from the stricken creature's mouth.
Its eyes wide open in surprise, the gyonshi fell. The gray fog swirled around the body and accepted it. It congealed, squeezing like a vaporous fist, and slowly vanished from sight.
Chiun wheeled. Two more of the shapes were emerging from the mist behind him. They were as pale as the first, their cheeks sunken, their teeth clearly visible through the thin, almost transparent facial skin. Both raised their hands in the air, assuming a menacing posture.
Chiun took this as an invitation and sent both fists rocketing into the sternums of the two creatures. They howled in pain as twin rivers of blood erupted from their chests. They, too, retreated in the ever-thickening fog like skulking dogs.
"We are shape-changers as well, Master of Sinanju," the first gyonshi voice whispered in his ear. "Do you not fear us?"
"A Master of Sinanju fears nothing, Chinese vermin," Chiun replied haughtily.
"No . . . ?" the voice faded in the distance. The remaining misty shapes vanished amid the swirl of gray fog, leaving the Master of Sinanju standing alone.
The fog continued to move in circular patterns around him. It was as if his world were no bigger than the nearest visible point, only five feet all around him.
A sound fluttered somewhere in the swirling vapor.
Chiun's hunting ears were alert to it immediately. It was a graceful glide. More akin to a ballet movement then a footfall.
Something about it was familiar. Almost . . .
A lone figure stepped from out of the fog. He wore a black business suit and tie. His face was flat and smooth. His features were not unlike those of Chiun as a young man. And although his stomach bled profusely, the vision that stood before Chiun did not seem to mind.
Chiun's eyes widened in disbelief. "Nuihc!" he hissed.
The younger man smiled. "You are looking well, Uncle."
And now the Master of Sinanju knew he stood face-to-face with his greatest pain-alone.
The first thing Remo noticed, on driving up the wide strip of asphalt that serviced Poulette Farms Poultry corporated, was the unnatural quiet.
The second thing he noticed were the bodies.
The bodies were even quieter.
The building was surrounded on all four sides by an eight-foot-high hurricane fence. The fence ran parallel to the road and veered off along the property line.
Someone had snipped the chain link from its fastenings and rolled it up into two gigantic tubular coils at two corners of the fence. Suspended along the long, bare metal support bars were Poulette Farms employees, hanging by their feet like elongated pale-pink pigs in a Chinese butcher shop window.
And in the center of them all was Henry Poulette him
self, surrounded by his omnipresent gaggle of secretaries. His gentle tufts of yellow hair blew softly in the mild mountain breeze.
The difference between the Henry Cackleberry Poulette of the moment and the Henry Cackleberry Poulette of Poulette Farms' award-winning commercials was that in the commercials, Poulette's internal organs were tastefully tucked away in their proper body cavities under his well-tailored suit. Not buried in a mound of bloody dirt directly below his inverted head. Remo knew from past encounters what the mounds concealed.
Remo saw that all of Poulette's employees had suffered the same fate. Throats slit. Blood drained. Organs extracted and buried. It was some sort of combination of the Leader's vampire Creed and the ultimate vegetarian revenge.
Remo drove past the still, upended bodies toward the glistening patch of glass in the hills above.
It was time for the final showdown between Sinanju and the gyonshi.
"Behold your handiwork, Uncle," Nuihc proclaimed. He spread his hands wide. The raw wound in his stomach continued to pour blood into the cloud below him. Chiun saw that Nuihc's feet were invisible in the half-foot-thick blanket of fog. He maintained a pensive silence.
"Not the best stroke available to you," Nuihc continued, indicating his own stomach. "But one that effectively took me by surprise. Still, it is rather unlike you, Uncle. You are usually more tidy than this."
Chiun's face had become impassive. He stared silently beyond Nuihc, his expression carved from alabaster. He was remembering a time from many years ago. Nuihc had wrested control of the village of Sinanju from Chiun, usurping the title of Reigning Master. Remo, wounded, virtually helpless, had entered into mortal combat on Chiun's behalf. For the Master of Sinanju was forbidden to harm a fellow villager.
Remo had had no chance. He had stood on the threshold of death. And although it went against all tradition, Chiun had inserted himself into the fight, plunging his left index nail into his first pupil's abdomen so quickly that no one saw this and Remo received credit for the victory.
"You ignore me?" Nuihc asked. "After all of these years, not even a greeting?"
"You are not real," Chiun said tightly.
The Ultimate Death td-88 Page 15
