Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

by Cassandra Khaw

  “So.” The tumbler vanishes without preamble, no dramatic deconstruction, no emission of diamondine light. Just—poof. “Are we going to deal?”

  “Yes.”

  He nods once. And just like the glass, Vanquis, the boxes, the train, the transit-choked warrens under London—it all disappears.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  STARLIGHT.

  Galaxies unnumbered, nested within spiralling nebulas; constellations twisting in their death throes; a thousand comets fleeing. My breath hitches. The lambency of the universe dims to needlepoints, and Nyarlathotep molts from the gloam, skin slick with ice. The stars flatten into a glittering, glass-like lamina under our feet.

  “Seven points for drama,” I manage, my voice a croak.

  He shrugs and reclines into the nothingness, an absence of existence that pulses blue-violet against the eye, like a ghost of the sun seared into the retina. “You were saying.”

  “Okay.” I lick my lips. The air isn’t cold as much as it is some unidentifiable variance of uncomfortable, dry, salt-tinged. “Firstly, I want to talk to you about what the terms of acquisition incur.”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you gain proprietorship over my soul? Do we share joint ownership of my body? If you buy over the entirety of my person, spirit and flesh, will you also take responsibility for all bodily functions?”

  Nyarlathotep shrinks his brows into a confused frown. “What are you talking about?”

  “Fecal elimination. Also, urine. You’d have to take care of all that. Similarly, if you want a monopoly, you’re going to have to make sure I’m walked, fed three times a day, preferably with high-quality produce, as opposed to McDonalds, and—” I know I’m gabbling, but if I stop, hysteria will catch up.

  “Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “When did it get so complicated?”

  I pace the emptiness, footsteps marked by growing ripples of light. “When you decided you needed to procure my, uh, er, me. So, which is it? What do you want from me?”

  His eyes color to gold; pupils become cephalopodic, black as eternity. Nyarlathotep sits forward, fingers steepled, and I catch an impression of tentacles in the valley of his cheeks, his features gaunter than I recall.

  “We need all of you—”

  “I miss hearing a living girl say that.”

  “—for three months. Tops.”

  I cross my arms. “And why?”

  “To infiltrate the Chinese pantheon so that we can destroy it and be on our merry way.” Nyarlathotep pauses. “That sounded rather super-villainly, didn’t it? The flesh keeps its idiosyncrasies, I suppose.”

  “It—what—nevermind. I don’t need to know. You understand that I don’t have access to anything but Diyu, right? I can’t go to Ti—heaven—whatever. I literally cannot. My soul—”

  “And you understand that the idea of heaven is nothing more than a fantasy created to instill comfort in the dying, right?”

  “You remind me of that Dawkins fellow. Only somehow less eloquent.”

  He glares.

  “Right. Wisecracking. Got to keep that in check.” I scratch at the back of my head and avert my eyes, take a step forward to learn that the landscape is apparently Escheresque. While I wasn’t paying attention, I’d somehow wandered up, around, and behind Nyarlathotep’s right shoulder. I halt. “Can’t you just—can’t you just, you know, go and beat up the Chinese pantheon without me?”

  “Yes. But we’d rather borrow a Trojan Horse, if you will.”

  Something finally clicks. “‘We’?”

  “You can’t mount an invasion with just one person. Although you can rest assured that I will be your principal contact in this agreement and will, in turn, take responsibility for the actions of my colleagues.” Nyarlathotep flashes a thin, cold smile. “Three months. Full insurance coverage. All expenses taken care of. You don’t even have to be switched on for the period.”

  “I’ve had my affair with recreational chemicals, thank you. Don’t need to lose days like that ever again.”

  “Whatever you like.” His tone grows clipped, impatient. “Rupert, I don’t know where you got the impression that we’re at odds, but we’re not. We both want the same things.”

  “Truth, love, and minimum wages for everyone?”

  “We both want the gods dead.”

  “I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shutting up, sir.”

  “You’ve been lied to. You’ve been incarcerated. You’ve been forced into demeaning labour. You—you cook for their livestock. You are an ancillary function, unimportant. Most importantly, you’ve been disrespected. Instead of telling you the truth, instead of letting you know what would happen if you let Minah go, they chose to lie to you.”

  He breathes in. “If this were a dystopian movie, this moment would be where you rise up, hold your fist to the sky, and vow vengeance on those who had wronged you. But instead, you keep making excuses for these… monstrosities. We want to give you a chance to change that. One little pantheon at a time. Help us help you.”

  “And you.”

  Nyarlathotep breathes out slowly, mouthing the numbers from one to ten; it’s an affectation I’m certain he doesn’t actually need, but secretly pray that he does. “Tell you what. As a token of good faith, you can have a freebie.”

  “What kind of freebie?”

  “Anything you want.”

  I sigh and rock on my heels, back and forth, before I bounce up, blowing out hard, hands waggled outspread, like an overeager boxer. This is it.

  “How about: I want Vanquis dead.”

  “Done.”

  “Wait. Wha—”

  Between one blink and the next, the landscape shifts, alters from nothing to something, geometries of inhuman construction, plastic seats, and ribs of greasy metal. The train sways, clips around a turn. Lights convulse, plunging the world in a stop-motion film, black and white and red and oh.

  It takes me longer than I’d like to admit to register the smell. The carriage stinks of feces and ruptured organs, gunpowder and bile. A faint miasma of urine provides an astringent counterpoint to the blood clotting in the air. I cup my hand over my mouth.

  The actual carnage is no less impressive, multi-tiered, a debauchery of slaughter to do Pulp Fiction proud. Vanquis agents lay spread over the carriage, decapitated, dismembered, disemboweled and, in some cases, deboned. I pick a route across the limbs and gray loops of intestines, discarded skins.

  Even more disconcerting than the mayhem itself is, perhaps, the fact that the massacre appears mutually inflicted. None of the corpses evidence any sign of struggle, no bruises around throat or wrist to suggest they’d fought back. Instead, I find bodies with their arms looped together, pistols pressed into each other’s mouths, the backs of the skulls split like melons, drooling curds of brain. Bodies in seeming embrace, hands dug below their ribs, fingers cupped about the hearts. The epiphany hits: this had been consensual.

  It had been a suicide.

  A sacrifice.

  “Is Vanquis really—”

  “Yes.”

  I kick a denuded skull across the way. “Aren’t these just its—”

  “No. More than anyone else, I imagine, Vanquis understood that we’re merely components in a grand invention, cogs and wheels and bits of machinery. We’re expendable in the name of the—I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” Nyarlathotep squats over a mound of bodies, each corpse slitted from mouth to groin.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’ll figure it out one day.” He stands and opens his arms to encompass the space, a messianic figure, spotless despite the environment. His grin says everything. He doesn’t believe the shit that he’s hawking. “You’ve gotten your wish. Let’s talk about mine.”

  “I could just run away.”

  He looks out the window with a smirk, even as we continue speeding through the void, traversing routes that only ever existed in an a
rchitect’s delirium. “You wouldn’t get very far.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Don’t keep me waiting, Rupert.”

  “I have three more requests.”

  Impatience darts across Nyarlathotep’s face, entirely too angular now to be mistaken for human, jaws and cheekbones extended to inhuman proportions. “Three. Really. Don’t you think you’re being—”

  “Hear me out. First,” I declare, very loudly, counting out my terms on my fingers. “You get me all-you-can-eat access to every restaurant in London. Second, you give me twenty-four hours to sort out my mortal affairs. And third, we start with the Greeks first.”

  His smile grows teeth. Not figuratively, literally. Dentition multiplies even as the smile extends past the normal capacity, lips stretching to accommodate the new coalition of pearly-whites. I count about twenty-five extra on each jaw.

  “Deal.”

  I DAB PALE, fatty broth from the rim of my grimace. Shoryu wasn’t anything like what the website had advised, but it was tolerable, which I suppose is good enough for an establishment in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

  Outside, tourists ripple across intersections, brandishing cameras in the encroaching twilight, while a lone busker plucks at his guitar, largely ignored by the crowds. A line of iconic red buses snake along the streets.

  Twenty-three hours and counting.

  I nibble at my last remaining slice of char siu, chase it down with another mouthful of soup. They’ve gotten the consistency mostly right, at least. My lips are oily from the rich decoction, the decadent porkiness underscored by garlic. But I’d have browned the aromatics longer, and I think there’s milk in the mix.

  “Can I get you anything else, sir?”

  A do-over for my entire life. “More beer?”

  The waitress nods and flounces away, leaving me to my study of central London. I glance down at the small black bowl beside my serving of tonkotsu. Once inhabited by a tea egg, it now iridesces with greenish-blue foam. When I’m certain that no one is looking, I use my fork to pry out a spool of muscle from a fingertip, wincing as I disconnect the tissue and deposit the bloody pink lump into the bowl.

  The froth consumes it. I press my thumb over the torn flesh, chant a quick summoning. Nothing grand, no conditional evocation; a rookie’s mistake in stereo, presented on a bed of seismic power. More than enough incentive, I hope, to compel a brisk manifestation.

  The light flickers.

  “I didn’t know we were friends.”

  The God of Being Missing is the quintessential girl next door: small-boned, attractively mousey, with a speckling of freckles and straight, dark hair, a smile like a feral thing. Her entrance is abrupt. One minute I’m alone and the next, she’s there, curled primly into the chair opposite mine, my eating arrangement perfectly mirrored, down to the mostly drained pint of beer.

  “We’re not. But I needed your help.”

  “I don’t have to help you.”

  I tense from the horrific memory of her prehensile maws, fanning from the stump of her throat. She’d eaten her way into Jack and then put him on like a jacket. “No, but I’m hoping to appeal to your incredible sense of generosity. By the way, how’s the mister?”

  “Digested.” The deity scoops her black bowl into small palms and sips from the foam, the very picture of decorum. I don’t need to check to know she has her ankles hooked together, knees welded shut. An angelic little girl dying for sexual emancipation; exactly the quarry her food need her to be.

  “Good to know. I guess.”

  “What do you want, Rupert?”

  The waitress returns with a fresh pint and a crystalline smile, deposits both without preamble and leaves again without casting a glance at my companion. I lap at the foam. “Information.”

  “On?”

  “Persephone.”

  “I never pegged you for a homewrecker.”

  “Cut the crap.” I put my glass down, and peck sullenly at the dregs of my ramen instead, gathering the noodles into a final, luxuriant heap. “Like you would care even if I was. I just need you to tell me: what’s her story?”

  “Millennia ago—”

  “No. I read up on that story already. I need to know what’s happening now. I think—I think I saw her body. At the Greeks’ hide-out. Hades had hurt her. Demeter was furious. And obviously nothing is going right—”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I—” I hesitate. “I don’t know. Because I’m tired of seeing the little guy get kicked around, maybe. Or, maybe, because I’d seen one innocent girl fucked by the system. If I could—I—look, that isn’t important, is it? She’s one of yours. Help her.”

  That hits a nerve. The goddess sheds her playful demeanor, smile leeching into a hard line. She slopes her head to the right, the dusk etching light along the contours of her jaw. Fingers beat an irregular rhythm on the wooden table. I wait. Nothing about her softens, although stereotypical thinking would suggest that this is where she divests herself of her predatory mien, exchanges it for maternal concern, gauzy and edgeless. But it doesn’t happen. If anything, she seems harder, brought into greater focus, accentuated. And in that moment, I’m reminded of Kali-ma, mother and murderess, not diametric sides of the same coin but a singular entity.

  “It was a compromise.” A sigh, deep. “When everything went catastrophically wrong, Hades realized that he had a problem. Persephone was bound to the underworld. Six months a year, she had to remain there. Oh, he tolerated it for an interval, but husbandly needs quickly overrode common sense. Hades wanted his wife available, so he took with him the only thing he can remove from the underworld: her body.”

  “And Demeter doesn’t like how the necrophiliac abuses Persephone’s corpse.”

  “Correct.”

  “Man, I always thought that Hades was one of the nice ones.” I bury the clump of noodles in my mouth and begin to chew, slightly resentful. The tepid broth had congealed unpleasantly.

  “Sexual fidelity isn’t necessarily representative of character.”

  “Fair enough.” I rest my cutlery. “And what about Demeter herself?”

  “Domestic abuse is outside of my realm.” She empties her bowl; a strand of tissue flashes momentarily into view, rat-tail whipping, before she slurps it down. Clink. A frown wrinkles her face, lips mashing into a moue. “You understand.”

  “I think I do.”

  A nuanced silence hovers between us, crammed with things unspoken, a hundred questions and arguments held at bay by a circumstance of allegiances. The waitress comes back after a few minutes, drawn, perhaps, by the lack of movement and the empty crockery. Space appears to be a premium in these London eateries.

  “They were right about you,” the God of Being Missing declares, softly, after I’d paid my bill with Lions’ credit card. (You’d be amazed, ang moh, by the things that swagger can buy. No one questions you when you look like you belong. Actually, ignore me. You probably know everything about that already.)

  “Who?”

  Her fingers find mine, thumb stroking spirals across my knuckles. Each rotation triggers a flutter of memory, mine and hers: children’s faces, frozen in monochrome; a thousand missing people posters, twisted into limbs and stretched across a birdcage torso. Ah. Of course. “What did they say, exactly?”

  Another show of teeth. A near-smile. “That you’re soft.”

  Somehow, it doesn’t sound as much like an insult as I thought it would.

  I smile faintly. “By the way, there’s one more thing...”

  WHAT BOON DOES Rupert Wong ask from the God of Being Missing?

  Can’t tell you yet, ang moh. The story’s not over.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “SICK TATS.”

  I squint at the teenager, wire-lean and pale, hair dyed mangosteen-purple, tips glowing yellow. Her eyes, swamped in black liner, are enormous in her face. “Thanks.”

  She reaches out a hand but recoils at the last instant, her smile uncertain, fingers w
ilting into loose fists. I appraise my forearms. The skin teems with star maps, indecipherable instructions to places I doubt any space program will reach; every coordinate is listed in an eye-watering alphabet, the sigils subtly protean, unmoving yet forever changing. It seems apt—poetic, almost; a replacement for the lives that Nyarlathotep flensed from my yearly income. I roll my sleeves down, smooth a bland smile into place.

  The girl blinks and twitches her head, a delicate motion, pupils dilating to their natural size. She loops a strand of hair behind an ear and grimaces at me, shaken by whatever’s fizzing through her brain, already bending away, turning towards the exit. I slouch in the opposite direction, only slightly concerned that someone might think I’d creeped on her or something and needed a rebuke.

  Slightly.

  God, I hope no one decides to be a good Samaritan.

  Luckily, no one succumbs to charitable behaviour, and the train wheels uneventfully into my station. As I scoot up the walkway towards the exit, a plangent droning sound assumes tenancy in my ears. “What the—”

  The noise clarifies into voices, whispers layered in strata, each half an octave above the last. They’resinging, the cadence matched to the high, sweet serenade of a flute. What about I have no idea, but there’s a chill slinking down my spine, and an itch kindling beneath my new skin, like muscles rebuilding in accelerando, or a cancer flowering. I could be wrong, but I suspect I don’t want to know what the voices are saying.

  Unnerved, I lengthen my gait and take the stairs two at a time.

  The night is orange-lit, freezing. No rain this time, but a wind that chews through the skin. I zip up my hoodie, although it offers no protection from the chill. Old habits. I scan the road outside of West Croydon station. In retrospect, I should have been wise enough to ask someone about safety procedures, if there are any bolt holes, emergency contact numbers for when a rival faction sets everything on fire.

  Oh, well.

  I debate making an immediate beeline for the estate, see if anyone had survived the pandemonium. It’s possible. They are gods, and I imagine Nyarlathotep would have indulged in at least some token gloating had the fire successfully consumed the lot. But it is also possible that the self-proclaimed Crawling Chaos is just a dick, preferring to let me nurture a dim hope for a little while before quenching it.