congested flops on the third floor of a five-story tenement in the middle of Tangrenbu, the twelve-square-block area of downtown San Francisco that the whites called Chinatown.
An opium den occupied the basement, and rumors circulated among these poor and illiterate peasants, many of them migrant farm workers who flooded the city each autumn when the central valley's harvest ended, that a demon roamed the hallways at night, tracking down souls to devour. The bodies of three men had been discovered recently in the alley behind the tenement; throats slashed, hearts ripped from their bodies.
Offerings left in shrines outside their doorways, what little money these Chinese could scrape together collectively, appeared to placate the monster. Each night they heard it prowling outside their doors and each morning the offerings were gone. But no one else had been killed in the week since the offerings began.
Of the four hundred men living in this building, only one had seen the demon and lived to tell about it: the building's trustee—a pockmarked, thick-necked bully in charge of gathering each day's rent and, more recently, the money for the offerings. This demon had the head of a dragon, a thousand eyes, and ten ravenous mouths, he testified, a first-rank demon, one of the ten thousand that figured in their complex belief system. He had watched it use its hideous talons to rip open the chests of the men found in the alley, as easily, he said, as if it were peeling an orange.
Each room was now locked by the trustee at night, but even if they had been able to, none of these men would dare venture into the halls after dark, which left personal sanitation a concern to be attended to locally. There were times when Kanazuchi wished his senses were not honed as sharply as the Grass Cutter that lay beside him in his bundle; the ripe stink of these unwashed provincials occasioned one of those moments.
Amid such fear, squalor, and destitution, Kanazuchi knew that since his arrival the day before no one had taken notice of him, but not being able to move freely at night was unacceptable. Sighs, guttural snoring, the whimper of a troubled dreamer, underscored the darkness around him. He did not want to leave the room until its occupants were sound asleep, and the thin man with the fever two beds down was still tossing and turning.
Kanazuchi had been visited by his dream again last night; one image leaped out with the solid clarity of a lead worth pursuing.
His first two days in Dai Fow, the Big City, New Golden Mountain—what these Chinese called San Francisco —had failed to shed light on this mysterious image. Menials like these ignorant slum dwellers were of no use. He had considered cultivating the local merchants, but they spoke a more cultured dialect than the guttural Mandarin of the peasants he'd made the crossing with; it would take another week to master its nuances and they were notoriously tight-lipped to anyone outside their social tongs. His other option was to move beyond the ghetto into the white sections of the city, but every person he had spoken to in Tangrenbu had warned him not to. A wave of anti-Asian rage had swept through America in recent years; in Chinatowns up and down the western coasts, crimes of violence against Asian immigrants had grown steadily worse—murders, riots, lynchings. Whenever the whites needed someone to scapegoat for their economic misfortunes, the 'yellow peril' was emphasized in public sentiment and these acts of racial barbarity inevitably followed. What more could you expect from such uncivilized people? Kanazuchi was hesitant to go into white areas, not for fear of being attacked, but only because killing any white men in public would trigger unnecessary complications.
First things first: A more direct path to the information he sought might lie right in front of him.
The man two beds down had settled, breathing strained but slow and regular. Kanazuchi shouldered his bundle and stepped between the sleepers, careful to avoid the four creaking floorboards. He stopped at the bed of the trustee next to the door. Using the tip of his
One minute later, he stood in the hallway, eyes already conditioned to the darkness. The air pungent with the smoke of the joss sticks burning on the shrines; each one still packed with fruit and coins. Kanazuchi examined the dust on the floor; no one had moved through the hall since their doors were locked at midnight, two hours before. He drifted to the center of the hall near the stairs, blended into the shadows, stood still, and listened.
Sleepers breathing in the four rooms on his floor. In the rooms above and below. Cockroaches scuttling behind the walls. He pushed the reach of his extraordinary senses further out; an old, familiar exercise, slipping into it as easily as a well-worn garment.
An alley cat tipped a trash can outside. Rats foraging. A carriage clipping by. Drunks laughing. The shrill negotiations of a prostitute. Horses shifting, stamping their feet, snorting in the stables next door.
Footsteps; nearer.
He reeled the net of his senses back in and cast it down to the tenement's first floor.
One man entered. Heavy. Tall, by the length of the stride. Western leather boots. A sack dragging on the ground behind. Rattling, hissing like a snake. A soft scoop, then the clink of coins falling together. Banging sounds; a clash of tinny cymbals.
Sleepers waking on the lower floors. Fearful whispers. Cowering. No one moving from his pallet.
Footsteps climbed the stairs. Second floor. Drumbeats, cymbals louder: hissing and rattling. More coins collected: moving closer.
Terror spread through the building. Prayers mumbled, worry beads clacking frantically. Kanazuchi turned his mind away from the chattering peasants and toward the leaden footsteps coming up the stairs.
The demon turned at the landing. A bulky, intimidating figure; dragon's head, feathered limbs, avian claws clutching a tambourine that banged against its hip. Large burlap sack behind, bumping up the risers.
As the demon reached the third floor, a coin dropped at its feet; it stopped, looked down. Gold; the demon reached for it. A shadow moved; the demon's mind registered confusion and a flash of something silver moving toward him in the instant before consciousness ceased. The sword cut so quickly the demon's eyes were still sending information to its brain—the room spinning out of control—as its head tumbled backward down the stairs away from the still-stationary body.
Kanazuchi cut up at an angle so the demon's body would shoot no blood onto his clothes. He sheathed Grass Cutter, reached out in time to lower the body silently as the arteries began to pump onto the floor. He jumped lightly to the landing, and pulled the demon's head out of the cheap paper dragon costume—eyes and mouth caught wide open in surprise; the flat, stupid face of a common thug.
Kanazuchi pulled the flute from his belt and headed back toward his room.
When the trustee heard the demon stop outside, he reached for his key, then for his knife when he found the key was missing. The knife was gone, too. Just then the door swung open and he heard the hollow, reedy whistling of an evil wind. The rest of the men in the room huddled under their blankets.
The bright paper dragon head peeked around the corner of the open doorway. A clawed finger pointed at the trustee and beckoned him forward.
What the hell was Charlie doing? thought the trustee. This is not how things are supposed to work.
Annoyed, the trustee walked out into the hall. The wind stopped suddenly; the door closed behind him. A sulfurous white cloud of smoke billowed before him in the hall, and in a flash of light he saw the head and body of his cohort, Charlie Lee, laid out on the blood-soaked floor. Before his legs could run, an iron vise grabbed him around the throat and lifted him straight off the floor. His captured breath swelled in his chest like a balloon.
'The gods are unhappy with you,' said a harsh whisper in the trustee's ear.
What a horrible voice! He kicked his legs futilely and struggled for air: Nothing moved inside him. Surely he was about to die....
'They have sent me to punish you with the death of a thousand torments.'
Heaven protect him: a real demon!
'Maybe you don't deserve such mercy. Maybe I should just eat you one piece at a time.'
The demon shook him like a helpless kitten.
'Lucky for you I am in a good mood. Return the money you've stolen from these men and maybe I will let you live.'
The trustee tried to nod his head: anything! A trickle of breath slipped through the demon's grip, keeping him on a thin edge of consciousness.
'Tell me: Do you steal this money for yourself?'
The trustee frantically shook his head no.
'Really? Then who told you to steal this money?'
