(Some of that is true, but I’d advise you against judgment. There’s a kink for everyone, big and small, strange or stranger.)
Peel through the obvious and, like an onion, you’ll find even more layers, maybe even realize that some of the women aren’t just out for cash or the prospect of foreign nookie, they’re gunning to secure lucrative pre-nups, international visas, a comfortable lifestyle for the next three generations. (Don’t let the media fool you, ang moh. An absent education often only exacerbates a fierce intelligence, and lipstick’s the woad of the modern Amazon.)
But I’m not here for those ladies, no. Mixed within their esteemed ranks is a smaller, more secretive demographic, no less potent but more tangibly dangerous. For reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, Beach Club is a haunt (get it?) for the country’s most well-to-do penanggalans: an entirely matriarchal and very progressive line of vampires who are most famous for their ability to detach their own heads, spines, and digestive tracts.
They’re also violently territorial, which is partially why I’m visiting to discuss matters with Beach Club’s latest manager.
“Ah Siong!” I bellow as I hurdle a conga line, slide between extraordinarily bad dancers, and park myself at the bar. It’s crowded here. Only nine pm, and the counter is already an elbow room exclusive. A massive Scandinavian, blonde and bearded, his arms wreathed with eager women, steps on my foot, and I bite back a snarl as I tilt a scowl upwards. My stomach flip-flops. It could just be that I have no facility with Caucasian features, but there’s something of the chef from today in his mien. Vomit sours my tastebuds.
But I don’t move away, reciprocating his aggression, wedging my shoulder between his ribs. Too drunk to take offense, he reels off a line about small men and bigger people and staggers away. By the time I look back to the bar, Ah Siong’s right there, ugly mug made uglier by the strobing neon lights.
He beams at me. “Rupert, how you doing? You want whiskey? I can get you whiskey—”
“I’m not—” I slouch onto a stool.
“Tequila!” He announces, incandescent with inspiration, plucking a bottle from a spectrum of colored glass. “I know how much you like tequila. Girls also like tequila, am I right? You drink. They drink—”
“Ah Siong, seriously—”
“You got heartache, is it? Miss Minah again? Tell you what. Vodka will fix it. I just import smores flavor from overseas. You try. I—”
“That’s not—”
“No? What about—”
“Are you—”
“—going to make you a cocktail? Can also!” His unctuousness nearly propels me into another objection before the offer connects and I hesitate, an argument dangling from the tip of my tongue. Ah Siong might be a detestable louse, a tick on the unkempt coat of Jalan P. Ramlee, but he’s very much the Wayne Rooney of cocktails. “What kind you want?”
“Paloma Hermosa?” I read about it once in a magazine, a concoction sandwiched between drinks that demand gold leaf and drinks that need garnishes of opium, if you know what I’m saying.
Ah Siong doesn’t miss a beat. “Okay!”
I count out the seconds as the bar manager trots between booze and juice station, swilling together tequila, St. Germain Elderflower liqueur and fresh grapefruit, dousing it with lime and agave, before adding egg whites and finally crowning it with an unnaturally phosphorescent blue lotus.
“What’s this?”
“Straight from Greece. Very fresh.” His answering smile is a miasma of rotten enamel, gold teeth and missing gaps. “Got power, you know?”
“Yes? No? That doesn’t answer my question! Seriously, man, we’ve got to—”
He glides the brew across the syrup-mottled bar, and I’m struck by the intensity of the fumes, and a sly whiff of something even more insidious. “Nymphea caerula are contraband.”
“Not if you got the right license,” comes the response, coy.
“Do you have the right license?” I stare longingly at the drink nonetheless, already feeling it dismantling the stress of the afternoon. Realization hits: I’m tired. Bone-tired. Drooping-meat, saggy-knee exhausted, the kind that makes you sleep for forty-eight hours straight. I breathe and the lotus teases a sigh from my lungs, a grin from Ah Siong.
Bastard. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“Aiya, what you say la, Rupert. We’re old friends, right? Old friends don’t ask difficult questions.”
Wincing, full of loathing for the decision, I nudge the glass away with a finger, my smile collapsing into a professional scowl. Around me, Beach Club heaves and writhes, the music switching from Soul Train to Skrillex. A German spills his beer on a tattooed Indian man and a fight attempts to break loose, only to be stymied by poor reflexes and worse balance.
“I wish I could,” I begin, slow, letting menace leak in my words, or at least a dollop of measured direness. “But I’m here on official business.”
“Fine.” The greasy charm slides off Ah Siong’s face as he sighs, relaxing into a subtly more intimidating posture. He signals an underling with the barest crook of a finger before swivelling back to slouch, elbows rudely propped up, at the bar top. “What you want, then?”
“To tell you that the penanggalans are not happy with you.”
Eyebrows go up. “Unhappy? Why unhappy? I do everything they want. I give their boytoy special discounts. I got Sabtu Special. I even pay their protection fee. I am a hard-working businessman. What more do they want from me?”
“You really don’t know?”
“No. Honestly, no. Cross my heart and hope to—”
“So, you’re not giving the pontianaks a happy-hour discount if they promise to keep the floor clean and to buy at least one bottle of vodka per five-woman group?”
“—call my lawyer before you can make any more slanderous accusations.”
It’s hard not to be impressed. He slicks effortlessly from put-upon innocence to educated insolence, nose arched slightly higher than before, as though my words nauseate him.
I snarl. “You’re fucking kidding.”
We hold each other’s stares, with all caution you’d use with a loaded gun. Neither of us speak, both of us all teeth and tension, both of us teetering on the brink of fight-or-flee. For Ah Siong’s sake, I hope it’s the former; if he makes me run after six cardio-free weeks, I will pummel him with his own leg.
He breaks first, slumping. “What do you want me to do la? You really going to take away my rice bowl? You really going to make me suffer? I’m just a man lah, Rupert. A man with children—”
“No, you’re not.”
“—from another mother. A man with responsibilities, a man with cats—”
“You’re allergic.”
“—dogs—”
“You hate dogs.”
“—plants that needs to be water—”
“You killed the cactus we gave you last year!”
Ah Siong, fist held against his sternum, manages to look profoundly injured, mouth pinched tight. Clearly, he wants more time for melodramatics, but he’s run my patience into the mud. I slap both palms on the counter and force out an amiable smile, even though my forehead is pleated like an accordion.
“Stop,” I say and as I do, I feel the start of a migraine congregate behind my right eye socket. “Not another word. You know exactly the problem. You know what you have to do. And you know you’re going to have to say ‘yes,’ because if you don’t, we’ll need to have worse words and I don’t want to do that. You were Minah’s friend. I—”
I lose the plot of my own soliloquy, trip over a tongue abruptly clumsy with pain. Invoking Minah’s name was a mistake, a knife in the ribs I hadn’t anticipated. Even now, it hurts to think about her. Six months ago I sold the world to buy her a one-time pass straight to the wheel of reincarnation, and right out of my life forever.
I haven’t stopped missing her. I’m still listening to her voicemails, still listening to her reminders to eat, sleep, and cultivate a healthy e
xistence.
“—help me out, okay? Follow the rules. The penanggalan don’t care about competition; the competition just need to be policed.”
Maybe, it’s the look on my face, maybe, it’s mention of the finally departed, but something empties Ah Siong of his chatter. His expression loses its frantic gleam and he palms a hand over the back of his neck, sheepish. “Okay. I see how.”
“No. No ‘see how,’ Siong. You know how this is done. You got to sign it in blood.”
A sigh wheezes out of him. “Okay lah, okay lah.”
Blood. Everything starts and ends with blood. Ah Siong rolls up a sleeve and extends his forearm, a faint disdain marking his features, his eyes narrowed against the oncoming ceremony. There was a point in my life where I’d have hesitated, thought twice about doing what I’m about to do next, but those are ten years gone, dead and buried under a decade of bureaucracy-led bloodshed.
I don’t waste time. I extract a pocket knife, split an artery on Ah Siong’s arm. Blood wells inhumanly black. A customer, rotund and badly stuffed into a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, gasps and mumbles something loudly about gay men and their predilections. I roll my eyes and count the gaps between Ah Siong’s heartbeats, tying the rhythm to a simple spell of binding. The enchantment is standard-issue, nothing fancy, an agreement to play by the rules or risk having his license revoked.
(What, ang moh? Did you think our Hells are as gratuitously vicious as yours?)
A second slips by. Two. Six. When I’m done, I blot the wound, swab it with iodine, and delicately tape a bit of cotton in place. Years in this job teaches you a few tricks, including basic first-aid. “There. Kau tim. See? Not so bad.”
My patois buys me a judgmental stare. Ah Siong huffs like a winded horse, breath shaking in his chest, the noise interlaced with small profanities. I ignore them. I’m done here. I have, at the very least, delayed interspecies warfare, a key function of my underpaid station. As I move to stand, a hand, large and impassively strong, shoves me back down.
A hasty glance reveals an unfortunate development.
“Horse-face!” I shout. “Ox-head! Buddies! How are you doing?”
Two monolithic figures, human skins practically smoking from contact with hellion flesh, glower silently. Ox-head is the more attractive of the two, with a linebacker’s silhouette draped in vaguely fashion-conscious attire. Horse-face, on the other hand, can barely give a fuck. He grins, and the epidermis pulls back against distinctively equine bones, warping the shadows of his borrowed countenance into a glue merchant’s worst nightmare.
“Ao Qin is on trial.” Ox-head has a voice like the last call on your last night in the last bar on earth: a notice of execution, sonorous and grim.
This won’t end well.
“That’s unfortunate,” I reply, groping behind me for the cocktail that Ah Siong had tried to bribe me with. Unsurprisingly, my fingers only find empty space. “What did he do?”
“Treason,” says Horse-face and his voice bubbles like the fat of his tongue is being deep-fried. There’s a kind of pleasure in his proclamation, drawn out into a hiss where appropriate, that makes my skin recoil from its fat.
“I see.” This definitely won’t end well. In hindsight, I really, really wish I had accepted that bribe. “Um, I’ll send him a gift card, I guess. A hamper? They don’t really do extravagant Hell offerings in the store this season, but I’m certain—”
“He’s named you in the trial,” one of them says. I don’t register which because, frankly, it doesn’t matter.
My blood congeals into ice. “Oh.”
A smile flutters at my mouth, the corners twitching, but it doesn’t take hold. There’s no further explanation, and none is needed. All three of us know what’s coming next. Sulphur coats my tongue as the two move closer, the air growing molten, every motion executed in absent lockstep, their physiques eclipsing the writhing mass of inebriated humanity. I don’t try to escape. You don’t escape the guardians of Diyu.
You could try, I suppose, but it’d likely end in dismem-barassment.
I manage to suck a breath between my teeth before the dagger punches between my ribs. It’s a testament to Ox-head’s skill that I feel nothing, at first, only the tiniest filament of pain, red-streaked as it tendrils between failing neurons and misfiring electrical impulses.
A gasp slides loose, an involuntary error that jolts my lungs into agony. The taste of copper bubbles from the back of my throat, vomit-stained, astringent. Balance dissolves. Muscles grow jellied, impotent, and before I know it, I’m oozing off my stool. My last thought before consciousness fades is this:
I hope I get back here before I shit myself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CHINESE HELL isn’t such a bad place if you’re just visiting.
Unpleasantly warm, sure. Cacophonous, definitely. But the denizens are cultured, fastidious about personal hygiene, and too practical for blanket judgments. If you can get over the idea that the entire dimension pivots on an industry of deserved torture, Diyu, while hardly a top vacation spot, is rather like a more sanitary Kuala Lumpur.
That’s once you get there. The path in, at least the one I’ve been consigned to, is outright agony. Boiling air whistles between my bones as I plummet through dimensions, cooking viscera that won’t cease regenerating, heat scorching the shrieks from my lungs, the thoughts from my synapses. For an endless interval, I’m anguish incarnate, and then I am not.
Colors adjust. The phantasmagoric blur resolves into extravagant architecture, archaic in a way that feels entirely purposeful, gabled roofs and an abundance of dragons, some of which are very much alive, lidded eyes burning like embers against sandalwood columns. What isn’t inspired by ancient China is very much neo-futuristic: endless glass, endless steel, intimidatingly cold and monochromatic against the infernal landscape.
(Fun fact: The Matrix was a hit down here. Don’t ask me why.)
I hack a bloody wad of phlegm, spit it out on the pavement. Beside me, Ox-head and Horse-face loom, colossal in their natural guise. The former’s got his human self on the flat of a palm, neatly folded, the creases smoothed out. Horse-face, on the other hand, didn’t bother changing. Translucent ribbons of skin trail from the slats of his armor. There’s bits of brain and bone snarled in his mane, a loop of intestine tangled around the pommel of a sword bigger than I’m tall, some sinews in his sleeves.
Good old Horse-face. You can always trust him to be a traumatic influence.
“Aaah,” he says with a gusty sigh. “Much better.”
I probe my mouth with my tongue and find a loose tooth, which I extract with a quizzical frown. The morphogenetic properties of the human soul remain a mystery to me. Technically, I’m just a soul here, but that hasn’t ever stopped my discorporeal form from being hurt. Of course, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, I get through being boiled alive without a scratch. This time? I lose a tooth. Go figure.
“Hate to seem like a country idiot, but where’s the party?” I scan the desolation, frowning, the hairs on the back of my arms prickling. Diyu loves its parties, you see. Loves them. They’ll use any excuse to throw a festival. Marriages, divine birth, civil uprisings, executions. Anything.
But right now? There’s nothing.
“Everyone is inside,” supplies Ox-head, already lumbering forward. “Ao Qin’s trial is a thing of gravity.”
“So’s a mass beheading, but that didn’t stop anyone from borrowing Freddie Mercury—”
Horse-face whickers into the side of my head, his breath a fetid marriage of rotting meat and moldering hay, the worst of all worlds. I gag. It takes me about a minute to realize he’s laughing at me. “The little one is afraid.”
Damn straight. But I’d rather cut off my own balls than let him know that. “You’re conflating curiosity with fear, man. I just wanted to know if I could get a beer. Not sure if you register it, being foaled and raised in these brimstone pastures, but it’s hot here. Can’t blame a guy—”
“Walk.”
“Okay.”
We march silently into the gargantuan structure, three abreast, footsteps completely silent. Even when we traverse a long corridor of glass, which arches over concentric tiers of suffering, each a different climate from the last. I don’t look down. Eventually, the glass transitions to volcanic rock, blackened in the kiln of the metaphorical earth itself, and the ceiling itself begins to rise. Higher, higher, until there is nothing but darkness uninterrupted. But my concerns don’t belong there.
A low chatter snags my attention, sweeps it through an auditorium recently rebuilt in the style of Grecian coliseums. I scan the crowd as Horse-face and Ox-head march me towards the witness stands. Everyone’s in attendance. Every Buddha ever put to paper, every bureaucrat ever consecrated as a saint, every yaoguai ever disemboweled on the altar of misplaced blame. Even Guan Yin is present, colossal and impossibly effulgent, her expression veiled beneath white silk. The Yellow Emperor’s absent, of course, but I hear he doesn’t get out of bed for anything but a gastronomical miracle, like a style of xiao long bao he hasn’t tasted before (i.e. never).
I flash a cloud-maiden a grin as we pass, and she crinkles her nose, eyes rolling back to the two-tailed cat beside her. It laughs at me, mouth razored, muzzle practically human. A phoenix empties its bowels on a nearby balustrade, eliciting an outraged scream from a retinue of kitchen gods. Business as usual. No one else takes notice. And besides, the crowd has eyes for one thing and one thing only:
Ao Qin.
The Dragon King stands speared in a column of orange light, fully bipedal, questionably human, hands loosely folded behind his back. For someone accused of high treason, he appears remarkably composed, a half-smile balanced on the line of his jaw.
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