Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  The chanting does little to alleviate the pressure of the kitchen help’s scrutiny. I keep my eyes on the prize, though. Hygiene first, difficult answers later. Pot and pan are plunged into a hot storm of suds, even as the help eddies about me, clearly impatient. The ring of bodies spasms tighter, shoes and talons scuffing at the floor, tacit demand for acknowledgement. I reply by taking a rag to the counter. One of us will break, but it won’t be me.

  “Ach, can we give up on this standstill already? I don’t even know what the point in this fucking madness is. The dens are gonna close in a few hours, and I, for one, would like to cash in on the bloody prize.”

  At least, I think that’s what the voice said. The suet-thick brogue borders on impenetrable.

  Something leaps onto the tap, and I see hands—fingers fat, meaty, pink as raw chicken—close around the steel pipe, even as a tail dips into my field of vision. The entity continues: “Seriously, laddie, all the huldra wants is to know your real name. Not your human-name. You can’t lie to us. It’s obvious you’re not human. We can smell your kin on ya. All nine hundred and seventy-two o’em.”

  “Actually, there are only nine hundred tenants and believe me, I’d know if there were squatters in—” I wring out my sponge, make the mistake of looking up. “Aggwaghhhh.”

  Bright, sea-glass eyes glare at me. “Wot.”

  “Agggh.”

  “Bit of a rude one, ain’t cha?”

  “You’re a cat”—I pause, affirming the visceral reality of the next words—“with hands!”

  “I suppose I am!” The scraggly tom, banded in scars and black stripes, one ear chewed into a necrotic stub, lifts a wrist to daintily lick the back of his hand. “Ooohwee. Such wit you’ve got there. Wouldn’t know I was a cat with hands if you hadn’t told me the now. Now, what great revelation will you surprise us with next, laddie boy?”

  “What the fuck are you?”

  He hunkers down, hindquarters arched. The cat touches his forefingers together and grins like the devil on the dismount. “Like ye said. A cat with hands. I suppose it would have been nicer if I was the cat with hands, but we cannae have everything now, can we? Now. Like the nice huldra asked, what’s your name? Give us a bone, and we’ll give you the whole rack of lamb.”

  “Fine.”

  This won’t work. This can’t work. This had better damn well work. A smile in place, I let inspiration ricochet into a recitation of Bob’s true name, a polysyllabic maze of stridulations and guttural consonant clusters, like a cicada singing racist epitaphs. It’s a gamble, but if I’m right, they’ll take it at face value, what with Bob’s recent monopoly of the dermal real estate.

  Note to self: talk to Bob about said monopoly.

  I chew at my tongue, breath caged behind clenched molars. To my surprise, it does work: the group bobs in unison, hivemind in concert, and take up Bob’s name like a hymn. Only the cat is silent, grinning, body dangling off the tap by its plump pinkies.

  “Such a pretty name. Who’d thought that a dam’d be so kind to a wee runt like you? I’d almost think it belonged to someone else.”

  His expression turns sly, but I’ve played enough Big Two with Horse-face and Ox-head. He’ll need to try harder if he wants me to fold. “Don’t I know it.”

  The cat yowls a laugh. “I suppose it’s our turn then, eh? He showed us his, and we should show him ours.”

  A flush of power in the air replies, seismic, dizzying, sweet from mythos older than entire civilizations, and a rawer energy, static discharge tingling in the hairs on the back of my neck. Like being baptized in electrified gin. “Sounds good.”

  “Glad ya think so, but you...” The cat jumps onto the counter, head rotated one hundred and seventy-nine degrees, so that he’s staring at me upside down as he haunch-swings along the metallic surface, tail curled into a question. He pricks an ear—the healthy one, not the rotted stub—in the direction of the outside world. On cue, something roars, jangling metal and mammalian anguish, a ceaseless ululation that invokes the image of a machine being vivisected without anesthetic.

  “...are going to have to wait till later. The Body Train calls.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE BODY TRAIN, as it turns out, is both an actual train and a myth. According to the Cat, it is operated by the London Necropolis Railway, which was very much a real entity, but one which was interred along with the city’s plagues. This paradox has, naturally, done nothing to slow services. In fact, I’m told that the Necropolis Railway is considerably more reliable than any of the subterranean lines known to the general populace.

  “But does it play funky tunes?” I ask as the group promenades through the tunnels of Waterloo. Getting here has been an adventure unto itself. As far as I can tell, the process is as much ritual as it is movement: sixteen steps to the left, four to the right, open a door thrice, shut it twice. Ceaseless, senseless gestures that my companions—alfar, huldufólk, whatever the politically correct description might be—assure me are completely necessary.

  I wonder how many of them were responsible for keeping the dead at bay. For all that ghosts unsettle me, their absence worries me more. Since we began this journey, I’ve not seen a single apparition, not a wraith or a tremor of ectoplasm, nothing to suggest that this place once bred tragedy—which is, I guess, code for a place that once was alive.

  “Wot?” The Cat scrapes enthusiastically at the underside of his jaw. As a human, he’s less phantasmagorical, more standard-issue menacing, a wire-thin skinhead collared with equal amounts of gristle and fat. His face is a transcript of every fight he’s ever lost, scarred where it isn’t knife-marked with runes. The hands remain repulsive, yellow-nailed and gangrene-black, the fingertips swollen, soft.

  “Body train. Soul Train. Vehicles of mass melodies? The popular ’70s TV show? No?”

  “No.” The Cat wipes his knuckles over an eye and then laps obscenely at each bloated finger. “Don’t know if you realized, but I’m a cat. An unneutered tom, I might add. I got better things to be doin’ with my time.”

  Oh, that conjures imagery I’d rather not have suffered. I flinch from the thought of the Cat groping at a sleek little Persian, discolored fingers scrabbling in her fur, stroking her ears as he positions himself. “Like licking your asshole?”

  He yowls a discordant laugh. Three round-faced women, all blonde, all feigning adolescence, dart curious glances in our direction. The Cat tips an imaginary hat at them as we cross longitudes on the moving walkways, them going in one direction, us going in another, strangers in a nowhere place. One blows the Cat an unsteady kiss, before the trio burst into screeching laughter.

  The huldra—I call her Hilda, which isn’t her real name, but as close as I come to pronouncing the real thing—rolls her eyes and slouches an elbow over the handrail. Her seeming, freshly reinvented, now includes mile-long legs and pitch-dark hair, a waist small enough to trap between your fingers, a latex dress that barely skims propriety. Guilty spouses and hoodie-armored teens, skinny as alleycats, flash her yearning stares, but she ignores them. To be fair, I’d gawk too, but she’s shown me her hollow back, her graceful spine and the splines of wetly glistening rib.

  “Don’t play with your food,” she rumbles, voice too low for her elegant face.

  “Have a heart, ye black-hearted sow. Can’t a cat take what few pleasures he has left in life? The Greeks barely feed us scrap from their tables.”

  “That isn’t his problem to hear.” Hildra exposes unsettling dentition: baby teeth packed in flat rows, too many and much too small, all the more disconcerting for their roundedness. Supernatural anatomy is defined by spikiness, and any variation from the norm is, like all deviance, deeply alarming.

  “And who made you judge? Ain’t he one of us now?”

  Of the six in accompaniment, the huldra and the Cat seem most invested in my company. The others—a rusalka, a fox, a feldgeist, a man who proclaims himself to be the first Jack, or so sayeth the huldra—seem content to share in my
cordial, nameless indifference.

  “I suppose,” the huldra drawls, eyes lidded. “You can answer his questions, if you like.”

  The Cat revolves his head like a demonic owl, skull rotated two hundred and seventy-five degrees. “You got any questions then, laddie?”

  “What are you?”

  The huldra laughs, a bark of wry, astringent pleasure. She loops a curl of charcoal hair around a long, long finger and gazes deep into the encroaching crepuscule. “What an excellent question.”

  The walkway ends, and we spill onto the platform, seven in a row. The rusalka and the feldgeist intertwine fingers, touch shoulders. The fox, one side of his head artfully shaved of crimson hair, exchanges a grin with a young mother, while Jack continues to loom in foreboding silence, a man out of his era. Fortunately, since it is London, land of endless theatre, no one questions the waist-coated giant in Victorian regalia.

  Even if his shadow is convulsing in desperate, soundless torment, nailed in place by a polished boot heel.

  “A thing like Jack is a good place to start, I suppose,” the Cat drawls, coming to stand beside the towering character. “Jack came from the nightmares of the Big Smoke, from all those stories of a man who could kill and nae be found. He was a fantasy that people brought alive. Like a god, but better, ’cause ye dinnae have to listen to anyone pray.”

  I examine the two, who could not appear more different, between the Cat’s industrial savagery and Jack’s urbanity. The killer stares at the two of us, head tipped just so, as though to say he is, at the very least, nominally intrigued by the lecture.

  “And you’re”—I give the Cat a once over—“an urban legend as well?”

  “Nah, mate. I’m a YouTube video.”

  “What?”

  Another train, orange-banded white like a coral snake, roars past. I fidget as it disgorges passengers and foetid air, halitosis and body odor mixing with the warm damp of the dark, soil and steel and scurrying things.

  “Well, I suppose that’s not fair,” the Cat muses, scratching at his jowls. “I’m more of a short film than a YouTube video. A man named Robert Morgan spun me out of his sister’s nightmare and then the Internet gave me some meat to my bones. And ever since then, I’ve been a real boy, sustained by page views and retweets, gorged on every ten-minute twitch of human horror.”

  His grin is ghastly. “Don’t look so surprised, now. I’m just like yer gods. Only hipper.”

  The thought of Yan Luo or Guan Yin participating in modern trends, trading phrases from MTV videos or donning hipster-glasses, elicits a strangled laugh. The Cat grins wider. “You heard it here first: churches are dead; YouTube and Snapchat and Facebook are the new houses of worship.”

  To my surprise, I find I have nothing to say to that.

  The platform empties. We continue to haunt our corner, waiting, no one speaking. The fox yawns and levels a bright, cold eye at me. Two more trains come and go, and then reality stutters. If Demeter had unstitched the natural world in a blaze of numinous authority, the Body Train simply steals between the seams, a maggot squirming through cuts in the skin.

  It doesn’t scream its arrival. It rumbles and growls, an exhausted beast of burden, shaking as it worms up to the platform. The carriages are metal and meat, strung together with cartilage, the windows membranous. A moment later, reality flickers again, and the grotesquery eases into something more palatable: oxidized steel, metallic rivets, clouded glass, a faint twinge of ammonia.

  For once, I don’t ask any stupid questions. This is clearly the ride we’ve been waiting for. I follow as the group piles through an orifice and scatters across the plump, velvet-tasselled seats. Before I can take my spot, the air fritzes. Fabric becomes skin, becomes sinew dyed an inoffensive periwinkle blue. Another heave of the air, and everything skews up, strobes to black.

  I spend the fraction of a heartbeat concerned I’d accidentally died. But normal comes back the way it left: quickly, without rhythm. By the time vision returns, it is mundanity all the way down. No overstuffed seats, no gilded tables, no sandalwood paneling on the walls, and no evidence of intestinal furnishing. Just regulation-compliant blandness: slightly grimy, typical of any piece of public transportation.

  The doors dilate. More commuters enter, and I glance to the Cat, who shrugs, leans back, ankle hooked over a knee. His reflection grins from the window.

  “They’re normal people.” The feldgeist has a little-girl voice, sweet and trembling and high.

  I glance over. This close, she’s almost ordinary, coltish and lanky, maybe seventeen at a stretch, but likely older. Blonde dreadlocks, woven with pearlescent beads, clatter as she fidgets and shifts, half-squatting on her seat.

  “I figured. What are they doing here, though?”

  The rusalka strokes her companion’s back in wide circles, leaning forward as she does. She works fingers into the feldgeist’s hair and begins scratching her like a churlish pet. “I thought education in Asia was exemplary. You should know this.”

  There’s a schoolmarm’s bite to her voice, the accent crisply Eastern European. She smiles truculently, but I don’t smile back, drumming fingers against the back of my seat. The feldgeist pops a knuckle between her teeth, begins to gnaw, eyes flitting nervously between us.

  The rusalka sighs. “Isn’t it obvious? The Body Train loves its snacks.”

  I’M IN TROUBLE.

  Again.

  The lights have been going out periodically during our journey. Each time they do, they return with one less passenger, one less drunk in a three-piece business suit, one less teenager with a thousand-dollar phone.

  Nothing for us to worry about, said the rusalka, plaiting the feldgeist’s maize-yellow hair. We’re invited. Despite her tart reassurances, however, everything’s gone belly up. The last electrical malfunction didn’t just pinch a commuter, it took everyone. Everyone except me, and the guy at the tail of the carriage.

  I watch him as the halogen bulbs stammer, a Silent Hill standoff. Horror movies always begin with ‘hello.’ If I say nothing, maybe this will stay nothing, a rush-hour purgatory in the belly of a literal beast.

  A smile crawls onto the man’s lips. He cards his fingers through dense curls before heaving himself onto his feet. He is lanky, slightly stooped, furtive in the way of the habitual criminal. The lines of his face are simple, and unnaturally sharp. Not unhandsome, but not quite human either; a sketch of a man, an idea.

  He saunters up to me, smell of tobacco and synthetic leather, skull tipped to one side. He digs his hands into his pockets and lets the smile creep up one side of his face. When he speaks, it’s with the rolling accent of Croydon, consonants kept to a minimum.

  “Hey.”

  I glance at the window. No reflection, just a distortion in the glass about the width and length of a six-foot man. “Hi.”

  “I suppose that was a bit dramatic.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Mm.” His quiet unsettles, for reasons I can’t yet put in words; it scratches at the inside of my cranium. My head is a casket full of fog, thoughts eating themselves, looping into incoherence, and I feel like a senile old man trying to recite his own last rites. “I needed to get your attention. Sorry.”

  He isn’t. We both know it. But I let the insincerity of the apology slide, rap fingers along my thigh. Itch, itch. Itch. A crawling pressure develops behind my right eyeball, presses down. Something is wrong, a degree of nope that surpasses even the inherent stickiness of the whole situation.

  “That’s fine. I’m fine.”

  The conversation, stilted from the beginning, shudders to an uneasy halt. I palm my neck, while he watches on, not breathing, not moving. My apprehension grows, and I’m quickly reminded that the fight-or-flee response is actually closer to fight-or-pee. Again, the man smiles. I’m now convinced that he’s tuned to my internal monologue, one more god with a finger on my psyche.

  “No,” he says, lips peeling back over gray-pink gums, his eyebrows scr
unched together, expression marginally pained.

  “No, what?”

  “I’m not a god, bruv. You couldn’t get me to be a god even if you paid me.” He plops himself beside me. His presence contracts further, a comma of projected self, so small that it might as well be hypothetical.

  And maybe, that’s what gets me: the silent insistence he’s indistinguishable from the everyman, a chump, a pal, a man of the people. Because clearly, Guan Yin help me, clearly, he’s not.

  His smile twitches. Right, he’s still listening.

  “I’m better than a god,” he says, drawling the second word, be’ah rather than better. He sheds his humour as he leans forward, an intensity sieving into the vacancy. The train eels on, preternaturally noiseless, and as it takes a corner, I find myself wondering if it’s eavesdropping.

  “Okay.” The safest of all answers. I tilt back. “Better how?”

  “Better,” he repeats, listless, eyes now tracking the darkness beyond the glass. A faint smile appears. I don’t follow his gaze. I’m afraid of what I’d find. “Because I believe in due compensation for services rendered.”

  “There’s always fine print.”

  His grin is crooked, all jagged teeth. “Of course there is. But the difference is I’ll let you read it first.”

  It feels a little like coming home, that announcement, that subtle challenge, slid under the door like an envelope stuffed with news. And in a way, it is. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t work, would just laze in off-season Ibiza, a Singha in hand, and never worry about bagging bloodied bones again. But if I had to choose a labour, it’d be something with paper.