Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (33 page)

We took turns carrying the body of the guide. Once I had touched him and got over my squeamishness, that part of it didn’t bother me too much. What did was the weight of the corpse. I never believed a dead man could be so heavy. After ten minutes my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets. I began by carrying the legs, and quickly decided the man at the head, carrying the torso, had the best part of the deal. I suggested a change round, which was effected, only to find that the other end of the man was twice as heavy. I began to hate him, this leaden corpse.

After four hours I had had enough.

‘I’m not humping him around anymore,’ I stated bluntly to the cop who was trying to take my wife from me. ‘
You want him outside
,
you carry him by yourselves
. You’re the bloody boss man. It’s your damn show.’

‘I see,’ John said. ‘Laying down some ground rules, are we?’

‘Shove it up your arse,’ I replied. ‘I’ve had you up to here. I can’t

prove
you planned to dump me in here, but I know, pal, and when we get out of this place, you and I are going to have a little talk.’

‘If we get out,’ he muttered.

He was sitting away from me, in the darkness, where my lamplight couldn’t reach him. I could not see his expression.

‘If?’

‘Exactly,’ he sighed. ‘We don’t seem to be getting very far, do we? It’s almost as if this place were trying to keep us. I swear it’s turning us in on ourselves. We should have reached the outside long ago.’

‘But they’ll send someone in after us,’ I said.

And one of the policemen added, ‘Yes. Someone come.’

‘’Fraid not.
No one knows we’re here.’ It came out almost as if he were pleased with himself. I saw now that I had been right. It had been his intention to drop me off in the middle of this godforsaken building, knowing I would never find my own way out. I wondered only briefly what he planned to do with the two men and the guide. I don’t doubt they could be bribed. The Hong Kong Police Force has at times been notorious for its corruption. Maybe they were chosen because they could be bought.

‘How long have we got?’ I asked, trying to stick to practical issues.

‘About five more hours.
Then the demolition starts. They begin knocking it down at six a.m.’

Just then, the smaller of the Chinese made a horrific gargling sound, and we all shone our lights on him instinctively. At first I couldn’t understand what was wrong with him, though I could see he was convulsing. He was in a sitting position, and his body kept jerking and flopping. John Speakman bent over him, then straightened, saying,

‘Christ, not another one...

‘Six-inch nail.
It’s gone in behind his ear. How the hell? I don’t understand how he managed to lean all the way back on it.’

‘Unless the nail came out of the wood?’ I said.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is two men have been injured in accidents that seem too freakish to believe. What do you think? Why can’t we get out of this place? Shit, it’s only the area of a football stadium. We’ve been in here hours.’

The other policeman was looking at his colleague with wide, disbelieving eyes. He grabbed John Speakman by the collar, blurting, ‘
We
go now. We go outside now,’ and then a babble of that tonal language, some of which John might have understood. I certainly didn’t.

Speakman peeled the man’s stubby fingers from his collar and turned away from him, toward the dead cop, as if the incident had not taken place. ‘He was a good policeman,’ he said.
‘Jimmy Wong.
You know he saved a boy from a fire last year? Dragged the child out with his teeth, hauling the body along the floor and down the stairs because his hands were burned too badly to clutch the kid. You remember. You covered the story.’

I remembered him now. Jimmy Wong. The governor had presented him with a medal. He had saluted proudly, with heavily bandaged hands. Today he was not a hero. Today he was a number.
The second victim.

John Speakman said, ‘Goodbye, Jimmy.’

Then he ignored him, saying to me, ‘
We
can’t carry both bodies out. We’ll have to leave them. I...’ but I heard no more. There was a quick tearing sound, and I was suddenly falling. My heart dropped out of me. I landed heavily on my back. Something entered between my shoulder blades, something sharp and painful, and I had to struggle hard to get free. When I managed to get to my feet and reached down and felt along the floor, I touched a slim projection, probably a large nail. It was sticky with my blood. A voice from above said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘I—I think so. A nail...’

‘What?’

My light had gone out, and I was feeling disorientated. I must have fallen about fourteen feet, judging from the distance of the lamps above me. I reached down my back with my hand. It felt wet and warm, but apart from the pain I wasn’t gasping for air or anything. Obviously, it had missed my lungs and other vital organs, or I would be squirming in the dust, coughing my guts up.

I heard John say, ‘We’ll try to reach you,’ and then the voice and the lights drifted away.

‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t leave me! Give me your arm.’ I reached upward. ‘Help me up!’

But my hand remained empty. They had gone, leaving the blackness behind them. I lay still for a long time, afraid to move. There were nails everywhere. My heart was racing. I was sure that I was going to die. The Walled City had us in its grip, and we were not going to get out. Once, it had been teeming with life, but we had robbed it of its soul, the people who had crowded within its walls. Now even the shell was threatened with destruction. And we were the men responsible. We represented the
authority which
had ordered its death, and it was determined to take us with it. Nothing likes to die alone. Nothing wants to leave this world without, at the very least, obtaining satisfaction in the way of revenge. The ancient black heart of the Walled City of the Manchus, surrounded by the body it had been given by later outcasts from society, had enough life left in it to slaughter these five puny mortals from the other side, the lawful side. It had tasted gweilo blood, and it would have more.

My wound was beginning to ache, and I climbed stiffly and carefully to my feet. I felt slowly along the walls, taking each step cautiously. Things scuttled over my feet, whispered over my face, but I ignored them. A sudden move and I would find myself impaled on some projection. The stink of death was in the stale air, filling my nostrils. It was trying to drive fear into me. The only way I was going to survive was by remaining calm. Once I panicked, it would all be over. I had the feeling that the building could kill me at any time, but was savouring the moment, allowing it to be my mistake. It wanted me to dive headlong into insanity, it wanted to experience my terror, then it would deliver the
coup de grace
.

I moved this way along the tunnels for about an hour: Neither of us, it seemed, was short of patience. The Walled City had seen centuries, so what was an hour or two? The legacy of death left by the Manchus and the Triads existed without reference to time. Ancient evils and modern iniquity had joined forces against the foreigner, the gweilo, and the malodorous darkness smiled at any attempt to thwart its intention to suck the life from my body.

At one point my forward foot did not touch the ground. There was a space, a hole, in front of me.

‘Nice try,’ I whispered, ‘but not yet.’

As I prepared to edge around it, hoping for a small ledge or something, I felt ahead of me, and touched something. It was dangling over the hole, like plumb-line weight. I pushed it, and it swung slowly.

By leaning over and feeling carefully, I ascertained it to be the remaining local policeman, the muscled northerner. I knew him by his Sam Browne shoulder strap. I felt up by the corpse’s throat and found the skin bulging over some tight electrical cords. The building had hanged him.

Used to death now, I gripped the corpse around the waist and used it as a swing to get myself across the gap. The cords held, and I touched ground. A second later, the body must have dropped, because I heard a crash below.

I continued my journey through the endless tunnels, my throat very parched now. I was thirsty as hell. Eventually, I could stand it no longer and licked some of the moisture that ran down the walls. It tasted like wine. At one point I tongued up a cockroach, cracked it between my teeth, and spit it out in disgust. Really, I no longer cared. All I wanted to do was get out alive. I didn’t even care whether John and Sheena told me to go away. I would be happy to do so. There wasn’t much left, in any case. Anything I had felt had shrivelled away during this ordeal. I just wanted to live.
Nothing more, nothing less.

At one point a stake or something plunged downward from the roof and passed through several floors, missing me by an inch. I think I actually laughed. A little while later, I found an airshaft with a rope hanging in it. Trusting that the building would not let me fall, I climbed down this narrow chimney to get to the bottom. I had some idea that if I could reach ground
level,
I might find a way to get through the walls. Some of them were no thicker than cardboard.

After reaching the ground safely, I began to feel my way along the corridors and alleys, until I saw a light. I gasped with relief, thinking at first it was daylight, but had to swallow a certain amount of disappointment in finding it was only a helmet with its lamp still on. The owner was nowhere to be seen. I guessed it was John’s: he was the only one left, apart from me.

Not long after this, I heard John Speakman’s voice for the last time. It seemed to come from very far below me, in the depths of the underground passages that worm-holed beneath the Walled City. It was a faint pathetic cry for help. Immediately following this distant shout was the sound of falling masonry. And then, silence. I shuddered, involuntarily, guessing what had happened. The building had lured him into its underworld, its maze below the earth, and had then blocked the exits. John Speakman had been buried alive, immured by the city that held him in contempt.

Now there was only me.

I moved through an inner darkness, the beam of the remaining helmet lamp having faded to a dim glow. I was Theseus in the Labyrinth, except that I had no Ariadne to help me find the way through it. I stumbled through long tunnels where the air was so thick and damp I might have been in a steam bath. I crawled along passages no taller or wider than a cupboard under a kitchen sink, shared them with spiders and rats and came out the other end choking on dust, spitting out cobwebs. I knocked my way through walls so thin and rotten a single blow with my fist was enough to hole them. I climbed over fallen
girders,
rubble and piles of filthy rags, collecting unwanted passengers and abrasions on the way.

And all the while I knew the building was laughing at me.

It was leading me round in circles, playing with me like a rat in a maze. I could hear it moving, creaking and shifting as it readjusted itself, changed its inner structure to keep me from finding an outside wall. Once, I trod on something soft. It could have been a hand—John’s hand—quickly withdrawn. Or it might have been a creature of the Walled City, a rat or a snake. Whatever it was, it had been live.

There were times when I became so despondent I wanted to lie down and just fade into death, the way a primitive tribesman will give up all hope and turn his face to the wall. There were times when I became angry, and screeched at the structure that had me trapped in its belly, remonstrating with it until my voice was hoarse. Sometimes I was driven to useless violence and picked up the nearest object to smash at my tormentor, even if my actions brought the place down around my ears.

Once, I even whispered to the darkness:

‘I’ll be your slave. Tell me what to do—any evil thing—and I’ll do it. If you let me go, I promise to follow your wishes. Tell me what to do...’