The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (5 page)

Her father had crossed the Pacific even before the Revolution, paid back every debt accrued in setting up the import/export business, and survived all the random cruelties his adopted country heaped upon him. He’d gone without seeing a single family member for a decade, and had used up most of his carefully saved money to send for Wah just before Congress banned any further immigration from their homeland. Wah had barely recognized the haggard old man who retrieved her from the squalid detention center. Only when they stepped outside and he embraced her right there on Union Street, tears mixing with the drizzle, could she see past the wrinkles to the smiling father she remembered from her childhood.

“Oh Wah Sung,” he’d murmured. “You’re as lovely as your mother was at your age.”

Here was a man who had sacrificed everything, and his reward? Steadily decreasing sales, steadily climbing bills. Even dry goods could go bad, in a place as wet as this, and each order Wah placed reflected their shrinking budget. Before, her father had done well exporting smoked salmon to Canton, but the state had outlawed Chinese from selling locally caught fish years ago.

“I never wanted to be a fish monger, anyway,” her father said, shrugging when she asked.

Wah sighed as her eyes passed over the sacks of rice crowding the bottom shelves. Great clay jugs of moutai and yellow wine had once occupied that space, but when the federal government outlawed alcohol, her father had insisted on obeying the law.

“I never wanted to be a wine merchant, anyway,” he had told her as they gently argued the point over sweet dew tea. “And I certainly don’t intend to become a smuggler. They treat us bad enough when we follow the rules.”

Yet rice didn’t cover the overhead the way booze had—or fish, or any of the other mundane stock they were forbidden from moving. She’d joked about converting the basement into an opium den, but her father had replied that thieves had once broken through the walls below and trashed his shop, presumably in search of the precious dragon. The whole city was apparently riddled with abandoned tunnels, and many a basement in the business districts abutted them. As if Wah needed another reason for disliking that mildewed hole, where the walls seemed to breathe softly whenever she descended to retrieve a crate of crockery or tools…

The bell at the front of the shop tinkled, and Wah clicked her teeth—she hadn’t heard his key in the lock, which meant he’d left the door open again. It was bad enough he insisted on making deliveries to all the family associations himself, but his forgetting to lock up was simply unsafe. Ducking through the curtain, her slippers whisking against the boards, she saw his familiar silhouette across the dark shop. He’d turned and was locking the door.

“It doesn’t do much good, now,” she said, trying to keep the chiding tone from her voice. “When I’m in the back, though, try to remember to—oh!”

The white man smiling at her across the shadowed bins and shelves was not her father.

“I sorry, honorable sir, but we closed right now,” she said, speaking with deliberate fresh-off-the-boat awkwardness even as her mind raced.

Her father was probably talking over old times at some association by now, and might not return for hours. It wasn’t late enough yet for the police to be rattling doorknobs, and they rarely took much notice of crime in the Chinatown anyway. Who would hear if she screamed? Mr. Dong next door, perhaps, but perhaps not…

Top shelf, middle aisle. As she stepped around the counter, she studiously kept her eyes on the intruder, instead of the modest display of cutlery. If she could just—

“How excellent,” the stranger said, speaking in perfectly unaccented Szechuanese as he glided toward her, past the knives. “That means we shall not be disturbed.”

The smile he gave her stretched his strangely ageless face into a rictus—like most white men, his exotic features somehow coalesced into a bland, nondescript whole. His black coat and broad-brimmed hat were wet with the night’s rain, leaving puddles on the floor, but his skin looked parched as scrolls from a temple. He reached inside his coat, and Wah flinched, wondering if it would be a weapon, or worse, handcuffs—given the choice between a stickup man or a plainclothes Seattle policeman, she would take the lesser villain. Instead, he held out an envelope to her, as dry as the withered hand that held it.

“My name is Clarence Kernochan, and I have a business proposition to discuss with you.”

“My father—” Wah began, but he cut her off in the rude fashion of Americans, waggling the envelope.

“I trust you will surely find this to the advantage of both yourself
and
your father, Miss Sung.”

Wah looked back at his face, and in the instant before she saw him straight-on, she could have sworn that his black pupils seemed to undulate, as if something wriggled behind them.

***

A quarter of an hour later, the fragrance of green tea flooded Wah’s nostrils as she calmly poured some into Mr. Kernochan’s cup. Having heard the man out, there seemed to be no immediate danger beyond arousing her father’s annoyance, if he returned to find her entertaining a stranger in their back room.

“Thank you,” Mr. Kernochan said, leaning forward and inhaling. “It is a cold night, I appreciate the hospitality.”

“It’s nothing,” said Wah. “But your proposal is… unusual. We do business for ourselves. There are other ways to transport packages.”

“Indeed,” he said politely. “But safely, without undue inspection, and without their couriers taking an interest in the scrolls’ contents? I would prefer to avoid the more, ah,
rigorously
lawful channels, as it were.”

“We are not criminals,” she said, her irritation causing the chipped pot to shake slightly in her hand as she poured for herself. “There are plenty of others who would—”

“I apologize. There was no offense intended. These scrolls are family records, precious to my colleague up at the University, but nothing that should trouble the authorities. You know what can happen when overzealous customs agents get their hands on such things.”

She winced, remembering the hard expression on the face of the official at the docks when he handed her the packet of letters that her aging uncle Bao had naively entrusted to the shipping company. Torn and smelling of piss, they were practically illegible, nor did they contain the locket that the letter had mentioned.

“I am willing to pay well for your services,” Mr. Kernochan said, opening the envelope he had initially tempted her with and casually dropping more cash on the table than Wah had seen grace their cash register for three long months. “An advance. Shall we say ten times that, when I receive my scrolls?”

Wah did not reply, couldn’t have, even if she had wanted to. This was it, the answer to prayers she had never voiced. Yet even as the relief swelled, her common sense was quick to resurface, freeing her vocal chords.

“And?” she asked him, taking a sip of tea to wash down her initial foolishness.

“And?” Mr. Kernochan did not seem surprised by the question. If anything, his sparkling eyes seemed amused.

“And when we import these scrolls for you, Mr. Kernochan, what else will we find in the box?” Wah set down her cup and crossed her arms. “A false bottom, perhaps, containing opium?”

Mr. Kernochan’s chuckle did little to put Wah at ease. “Oh, no no no, no secret compartments, no opium. Just the scrolls, nothing more—you have my word.”

His word. Most of the words Wah heard from white men had to do with her eyes, dress, or what they expected her to acquiesce to, so it was not that Wah took him on such a shaky thing. Rather, his word gave her all the permission she needed to focus on the money before her, instead of unduly concerning herself with the contents of yet another crate arriving at their shop.

Clearing her throat, Wah asked, “So how does this work, Mr. Kernochan? I write to your contact in Wuhan and request these…
Chin-ts’an Scrolls?”

“The Gold Silkworm Scrolls are already on their way to your shop, as part of your next shipment.” Mr. Kernochan said this last in English, setting his empty cup back on the lacquered tray. “I was confident we could come to an arrangement.”

The affront of his presumption barely registered to Wah, for her ears had begun ringing as soon as he said “gold silkworm.” The tannins in the tea turned bitter on her tongue, and as Mr. Kernochan stood and retrieved his coat and hat from the peg, Wah found herself unable to rise from her chair. She felt as though the slightest movement would upend her onto the floor…

Golden-hued silkworms, a countless number, sliding over-under-around-through one another, packed tight into her skull, threatening to burst from her eyes, nose, mouth, ears…

“Shall we shake on it, Miss Sung?” asked Mr. Kernochan, and, just like that, Wah was herself again, the ringing in her ears fading to a distant echo. Getting shakily to her feet, she accepted his dry palm in her damp one, and found surprisingly soft fingers yielding beneath her firm grip. Tucking the money into her pocket, she showed him to the door, praying that her father would not return at just that moment. “Good night, Miss Sung.”

“Mr. Kernochan,” Wah said as he stepped out onto the slick boards, having almost forgotten to ask. “How did you learn Szechuanese? Over here even most Chinese don’t speak it.”

“I was a missionary,” he said, smiling blandly. “Still am, in fact.”

Then the rainy night took him, and Wah hurried back inside to clear the teacups away before her father returned.

***

Wah’s father was gone so long, she finally asked the milky-coated horse that helped her in the storeroom to go find the old man.

“Bring me the scrolls,” the black-eyed equine said in immaculate Szechuanese, and Wah nodded her assent.

When the beast returned a short time later with her father, she snatched a cleaver from the top shelf of the middle aisle and hacked its ear off. It tried to flee, but her father took up a hatchet and helped her. The dead-dying-deathless creature stared at them with enormous eyes as they flayed it. A pile of red-stained skin gradually rose up next to the carcass.

“I never wanted to be a horse thief, anyway,” her father told her as they worked, both wet as new arrivals slouching down Union Street, already wishing for umbrellas. “In Mongolia they have horses that sweat blood.”

Wah had to go down to the basement some time later, though the very thought of it filled her with the blackest, oiliest dread. If she didn’t go down the creaky steps, though, her father would find out she had taken Mr. Kernochan’s money, so she went. Pausing on the dark stairs, she realized that she wasn’t entering the basement, but a tunnel.

A cave.

Turning back, she fled from the darkness, slipped on the slick moss and stone. Tumbled. Skidded to a stop in the resinous pine needles carpeting the forest floor. For the first time since coming to Seattle, it seemed, the sun shone from a clear sky, warming her face. Warming the heap of horse skin that sat beside her in the clearing.

The bundled skin shifted the slightest bit. Maggots, no different from those boiling all over the dead cat she’d found in the alley a couple weeks back. Just worms, lending the semblance of movement, of impossible life.

No.

The hollow head of the horse reared up from the coiling, roiling mass of skin, poising to strike like a centipede or a snake. She tried to flee, but the horse skin exploded from its bower of dripping and sun-dappled pinewood. The membranous hide enveloped her, lifting her off the ground as it tightened, wrapping tighter and tighter—

***

Wah tried to sit up, but the clammy sheets swaddled her tight, and her aching limbs lacked the strength to extricate herself. Even before the back room came into focus and she saw the worried faces of her father and Dr. Yam, the apothecary, she knew it was a fever. Before her mother had died, Wah had fallen victim to the same pox. She had been the one to bring it home.

Lying there, waves of heat and cold sweeping over her body, Wah remembered looking up at her mother. The woman’s graying hair pulled back into a loose bun, features tight as she’d sponged the sweat from her daughter’s face. Then as now, Wah felt like a child all over again. Usually she was as hardy as any peasant’s daughter, but in the shadows of the lantern-lit room, all manner of
yaoguai
had laughed and capered, the demons mocking her suffering.

The worst of that fever had come toward the end, as she shivered on the raised, heated platform where the family slept—her mother had kept the
kang
warm even as Wah roasted alive. She’d dreamed of a pinch-faced crone at the edge of the bedding, tall as an old gingko tree, with joints like knots, whispering blasphemies that Wah could no longer remember. Even with her mother’s hard, knobby hands wiping away the sweats and residues of sickness, she had flickered in and out of view. Wah remembered convulsing with the last wave of chills as the limbless, needle-mouthed flukes circled her bed in a wave, rearing up to caress her toes with their slick cheeks.

“What are you dreaming of, Wah?” her mother asked.

“I’m not,” Wah panted. “Nothing.”

“Miss Sung, I asked if you ate or drank something peculiar,” the apothecary said.

Her pox-killed mother’s face melted into that of Dr. Yam, the old apothecary’s tobacco-stained teeth something that she could fix on, cling to as a jetty of reality emerging from the tumultuous fever.