Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One

by M. Scott Carter

  The walk back to the docks should have been a joyous one; I should have been revelling in a freedom the likes of which I had scarcely felt in years. Instead I walked slowly, reflecting on what had just happened.

  It was the wordless stares from the crew by the gangplank that confirmed that the changes were not just in my imagination. I went over to the deck rail where Tom Adams was waiting to greet me.

  "Daniel, you seem different," he said. He was frowning at me, and had an uneasy edge to his voice, as if reticent to even ask the question that had to follow. "What, what has happened to you?"

  "Different in a good way?" I asked.

  "Yes," he said, his eyes darting over my face as if trying to take in the renewed colour and vigour all at once. "In a very good way."

  I told him, as truthfully as I could, during which time he stared at me in amazement. I could see on his face the battle between the absurdity of my story and the evidence of his own eyes. When I had finished he didn't reply immediately, but looked away, out over the water.

  "This does not seem natural to me," he said at last. "I am glad for you, but it concerns me greatly."

  "Do you think I was wrong to go?"

  "It was your choice, Daniel. You have no idea what is going on here, but it was your choice."

  I can barely put into words what the next morning was like. To say that the pain had returned would hardly cover the extent of the sensations that forced their way into my body. I am sure that I was mid-scream when I awoke, though that, and the minute or so which followed, passed in a delirium of panic of which I can scarcely recall the details. I must have been acting on instinct alone when I grabbed for my supply, though I remember dropping the pouch several times, throwing myself to the floor in my attempts to retrieve it. Only then could I try to dull the pain, though a dulling seemed to be all I could achieve.

  I dragged myself back onto the bed, hoping I had not been heard, and waited for whatever recovery might come. Three times I filled that clay pipe over the next hour, lying there as the sun came up, sounds of movement above betraying the crew's early morning activities. My leg felt as if it was on fire as I alternated between laboured stillness and fretful agitation, each of those two extremes apparently worsening the hurt. I took more, caring little for the harm it might do me, finally reaching a state where I felt I could dress and attempt to leave my cabin.

  Every move had to be planned as I climbed to the deck and then off the ship. Every footfall, every step had to be anticipated and strategised so that I could keep a handhold at all times and stop whenever necessary. As a result, it wasn't until I was halfway down the gangplank that I saw the newly arrived delivery of tea chests lined up on the dockside, ready for loading.

  "It's all here, Captain. If we can get them in within the hour, we can catch the morning tide. The Empress and the Iselda are already getting set. Do you think we can do it?"

  Matt's enthusiasm, normally the prime motivation for my pride in him, only disquieted me more. The prospect of an early departure, and of facing this pain unaided for weeks at sea, horrified me.

  "Matt, load up, but don't make ready yet," I said. "We may have to stay here longer."

  Even those few words were an effort, to speak and keep my composure at the same time. To then face a demand for explanations, from my own First Mate at that, was the last thing I needed.

  "But Captain, the Empress! If we lose this tide we'll be half a day behind her! We can't afford to-"

  "We will do exactly as I say we will, Mister Jarrow!"

  If those first words had been an effort, these last nearly killed me. I knew that no more exchange could take place without my condition becoming obvious. I therefore left things as they were, and turned my back on Matt's disbelieving face, striding as purposefully as I could from the dock with my fists clenched so hard against the pain that I felt blood on my palms.

  However, the tea chests on the dockside were not to be the only thing I failed to see in time that day. As I staggered along the path to the only place I could think of going, and rounded the final corner to see that bamboo warren with those bizarre healers in its upper reaches, my lack of attention very quickly became my undoing.

  It was as if my legs had suddenly disappeared from under me. One minute I was walking, step after agonising step, the next minute the ground was rising up to meet me, my reactions too dulled to even break my fall. I hit hard, a whole new world of pain exploding through me, but I was not to be given the time to recover. I felt weight on my back like a knee being pressed into my spine, then suddenly both my arms were twisted up almost in line with my shoulder blades, my face pressed into the dirt so that it gagged and choked me.

  Then I was being shouted at, a female voice, speaking Chinese, her words spitting out at me like venom, though I had no idea what they meant. Only then did she speak in English.

  "What have you done with him?" she shouted. "What have you done? Answer!"

  "Done with who?" I managed to say, the dust caking my lips and tongue, though my head was spinning with this new agony, and I am sure I lost consciousness for a second or two. I was aware only of finding my mouth full of earth, with both the pain and the screaming from behind me still in full flow.

  " Why did you take him? Why?"

  I had never heard so much fury or scorn from a woman, though I am sure at times in my life I had deserved it. The pain, the confusion, the complete helplessness of my situation, unable to struggle, unable even to understand what was being asked of me; it was as if every jilted female I'd ever left hanging had come together into this one frenzy of hate and retribution.

  "I don't know what you want!" I said, my words slurring with the pain. My heart was racing as if readying me for a fight, and only the blood rush gave me the energy and awareness to talk at all. "Just tell me what you want!"

  "What have you done with my father?"

  I tried to work out what she might mean. "I don't know your father! I don't even know who you are!"

  "You have him! You have taken him away, in there!"

  Comprehension was dawning, albeit slowly.

  "There is a man in that building, an old man," I said, trying to keep my voice and my mind on the level. "I don't know if he is your father, but he is there. He is healing people. Please, just let me go."

  And that was when she said something which opened a whole new vista of horror and awareness within me, something which took the events of the last few days to even greater heights of the unnatural.

  "What have you done with my father's body?"

  I froze, my arms and legs going cold, as I tried to take in the implications of what she had said.

  "His body?" I replied, and something in my voice must have communicated my confusion and revulsion, as the beginnings of a still barely believable realisation dawned on me. "What do you mean, his body?"

  She said nothing, clearly waiting for me to continue.

  "Please, let me go, it hurts."

  That was as much as I could say, though it was enough for her to loosen her grip. And as I turned over, seeing the legs and feet of over a hundred closely packed onlookers as I did so, I looked up into her face, and suddenly knew where I had seen her before.

  "You followed me yesterday," I said. "I saw you. Who are you?"

  She didn't answer immediately, barking some kind of instruction to the bystanders instead, to make them disperse or fall back. Then she looked down on me again, distrust still flaming in her eyes.

  "Are you with them?"

  "No, I went there, but I'm not with them."

  "Explain," she said. So I did, painfully and fitfully, lying in the dust of a Shanghai street, with her still holding me down, ready to resume the beating if necessary.

  It was when I described the healing process itself that I saw her resolve crack, and tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. She released me, seemingly having lost the energy to restrain me, and buried her head in her hands.

  "My father is dead," she said.
"He has been dead ten days."

  "But this man was alive," I said. "It cannot be him. I was told he was near death, and he looked it, but he was definitely alive."

  She shook her head as she sobbed, then raised her reddened eyes to face mine. "No," she said. "Those people deal with devils. They have made him Jiang Shi. They have made him walking corpse."

  Walking corpse, hopping corpse; many were the words for that apparition of Chinese ghost stories. Stiff corpse was the literal translation that I was later to learn, for it appeared that whoever was behind The House of the Unbending Spirit was not without a sense of irony. At the time, however, my reaction to hearing the reality of what I had encountered was far more down to earth. I have never been one for superstitious fantasy, but somehow I did not doubt what she had said. As a result, the knowledge of what I had seen -- what I had touched -- made me violently ill, there and then.

  "Take me to him," she said, as I lay there shivering in the stench of my own sick. Her composure, and her determination, seemed to have returned.

  The building itself, visible down the road, was the last place I wanted to go. However, it appeared that I was to be given no choice.

  "Take me, or I will make you hurt. If you try to leave, I will make you hurt. And not even your poppy filth will help you then."

  And I knew that she could do it. The blood rush that had previously masked the pain was gone, evaporating as my stomach heaved its contents into the road. Now the pain was back, and only the thin veil of opium, screening my senses from the agony, was allowing me to even stand upright. Another beating would end me; this young girl, slight, pretty, and possibly half my age, had a hold on me as firm as if she'd put a gun to my head. "Alright," I said. "We'll go."

  I led her into the building, hobbling and wincing with every step. We followed the long corridor, exactly as I had the day before, finally reaching the door with that same Chinese inscription. Then she stopped, waiting for me to open it.

  The younger man was waiting to greet me, as if he had never left his spot. And behind him, still in the same position, was the old man. The door swung open further, the younger man initially smiling in welcome, but it was then that my new companion stepped into the doorway, and saw the scene for herself.

  She screamed, a sound that could only have been born of recognition, and then she cried out, shouting threats and obscenities - I know not what - at the younger man.

  His reaction was immediate. He ran at her, pushing her into me and almost knocking me off my feet, but she was more attuned to the task of staying upright than I, and soon she was on him just as hard.

  Three times in quick succession she hit him, fighting with an athletic grace that any man would be hard pressed to match. However, his attempts to block her showed that he too was no stranger to the art of physical combat. He hit back, connecting once to her cheekbone, while all I could do was stand and watch like some gawping child at a prize fight. Then he drew a knife.

  I could tell she had no such protection as she backed away in anxious, tiptoe steps, ready to swerve or duck at any time. He lashed out at her face, then at her body, forcing her into a corner from which it was clear she had no escape. Again he swung for her head, and this time he hit, and as she cowered against the onslaught with blood running down her face, I could tell that the next stroke of the knife would finish her.

  The man was on the ground before I knew the gun was even in my hand. I stood, frozen, as the smoke cleared, looking down on the second man I had ever killed in my life. The girl curled up on the floor as if she thought she could roll into the corner and disappear. I went to see to her, as gently as I could, and coaxed her into turning over.

  Her face was a mass of blood when finally she let me look at it, though the wound itself was not deep, merely a gash over the eyebrow, bleeding profusely as wounds of that nature do. She looked at me with fearful eyes as I tried to clean her up, but I think she could tell I meant her no harm, despite her earlier besting of me. In truth, I admired her. She had taken on two fully-grown men that day, and survived a lethal attack at the hands of the second. She looked up into my eyes, and I hoped at that moment that she understood.

  The noise behind us cut off any time we might have had for soul searching. It was a laugh, throaty and gurgling, like water running down a drain, and could have come from no mortal throat. We both turned toward the source of the sound, and the sight that was before us will live with me forever. The old man had risen from his seat and was now walking toward us, his face disfigured by a leering, strychnine grin that made him look as if his cheeks had been slashed to his ears. The laughter bubbled out of him like blood from a punctured lung as his purple, distended tongue hung down onto his chin and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. The girl screamed, and kept on screaming, as her mind appeared to be in danger of divorcing itself from reality. Brave as she was, on this occasion it was my turn to act.

  I fired at the walking corpse, once, twice, my direct hits having no effect. Then I threw myself at it, ignoring the revulsion, ignoring the smell that the candles had previously masked, and knocked it to the ground. It fought back though, and in that it was like nothing I had ever fought in my life. The body was frail and decayed, its tissues softened by putrefaction; but within it, deep in the core of its limbs, something lithe and strong was in control. The pain in my body was intense, but somehow the blood rush and frenzy were keeping me going as it bucked and twisted within my grip, its strength measurably greater than mine, all the while laughing that hideous, sickening laugh. Then it grabbed for my leg.

  I felt my own voice rather than heard it, as those screams issued from my mouth. It felt as though my mind had stepped out of my body, blind and deaf to everything except the pain and the tortured wailing from my throat. It knew how to hurt me, and by those means it was going to beat me. For a second, the world went black.

  Then there were three of us in the fight. The chair came down on the corpse's back, dislodging it from me and breaking its grip, the chair splintering into pieces as the girl swung it downwards. Again and again she hit, the back of the chair being all that remained until even that fractured and she was forced to kick and stamp on the prostrate corpse of her father. I saw its limbs break, the arms and legs adopting strange angles as the bones snapped. Even the head was forced sideways, out of alignment. The laughter had ceased; from that point onwards, it - or whatever was controlling it - could no longer fight. But what happened next was to stretch my sanity to its limit.

  Something left that broken, twisted body, some force or controlling agent, invisible, silent, and took itself back to wherever it had come from. However, it did not go alone. It only lasted for a second or two, but whatever portal it used seemed to be open to me too as I lay there gripping the corpse. And in that second I saw things that I can still only half believe as I remember them now.

  It was a landscape of fog and mountains, with pillars of rough black rock covered in tangled vines and creepers. It was high as well, high up in some cold, drizzling mountain range that I am still not convinced forms part of this world. This was where that controlling entity had returned to, and I felt rather than saw that malicious presence as it rushed away from me and disappeared into the mist. And only then could I see the full horror of this place.

  There were people here, whole fields of them on the plateaus and ledges between the rocks, people like ragged wind-tattered dolls tied to stakes and crosses while others of their kind whipped and mutilated them with fire, chains and blades. This much I saw clearly - I could see the blood, the cuts and the burns, I could hear the screams, I could even feel the cold and the rain on my back. And then the vision was over.

  I found myself back in the room, and turned to the girl to see her looking at me, wide-eyed with fear.