Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

“What exactly have you got in there that’s so top secret?” Siri asked.

“Mystery,” was the reply. “People always need to think there’s something going on. It keeps them on their toes. If the proletariat knew we didn’t actually have any secrets, they wouldn’t respect us nearly as much.” Siri smiled. “So, you’re Dtui’s boss. She told me about you.”

“Has she been here today?”

“It was a flying visit.”

“Can you tell me what she wanted?”

“Don’t see why not. It was about something the Russian had started to say on her first visit. She hadn’t really taken much notice then, or perhaps I didn’t do a very good job of translating. He’d made a comment about the teeth marks.”

“The tiger’s?”

“He was sure it was some type of cat. A tiger was the most likely candidate. But there was something odd about them.”

“What kind of odd?”

“He said he’d never seen such sharp canines before. The indentations almost ran to a point. It was almost as if they’d been deliberately sharpened.”

“Sharpened? Why would anyone want to do that, and how?”

“Good questions, doctor. But it certainly makes the creature you’re looking for one scary old foe, don’t you think?”

They both stood reflecting on that for a few seconds.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

As he’d heard, Dr. Vansana was off at the reservoir. Siri sat in the back yard of his house downwind from a simply enormous fan that Sam, the doctor’s wife, had dragged out from inside. It was about three feet across and felt something like flying behind an Antonov 12. He had to hold his lemon tea with both hands.

“This is the coolest I’ve felt all day,” he yelled above the growl of the motor.

“I’m so glad you aren’t one of those vain men who wears a toupee. It would be in Nong Kai by now,” his hostess said.

He laughed, but she could tell he was deeply worried about Nurse Dtui.

“I just wish there was more I could do to help. I think I’ve told you everything we talked about last night.”

“But your husband was convinced this Seua fellow wasn’t the mass murdering type?”

“Absolutely. Vansana was quite disturbed after Dtui left, in fact. He was certain she was on the wrong track. But she seemed so convinced there was a connection. And to make matters even worse, she thought that connection might be supernatural. I’m afraid my husband doesn’t hold with that kind of talk. He’s a scientist.”

“Yes. I used to be, too. I can understand his feelings. Did she give you any idea of where she was planning to go today, apart from the Corrections Office?”

“That was it, I’m afraid. She mentioned she wished she knew more about spirits and werewolves. Nothing else.”

“Sorry, do you have a telephone?”

“Yes, Doctor. The regime kindly let us keep ours. The neighbors weren’t so lucky. Thank goodness Vansana’s a medical man.”

Siri tried to get through to Civilai and Phosy. Both were out of the office and neither had left messages to say when or if they’d be back. It was five already, and the last time anyone had seen Dtui was around ten that morning. He went off to the Police Department to file a missing persons complaint even though, without Phosy’s personal attention, he didn’t have much faith in the ability of the police force to find her.

Where had she gone after Silver City? What was preventing her from phoning or coming back? Perhaps she’d had an accident. For the moment, her trail had gone cold.

She couldn’t believe how cold it was in that place when the air outside was so hot. Or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to fear. She felt down the front of her uniform. It was caked in some kind of mud. Some of it was hard. It occurred to her it might have been her own blood. There was no way of telling. There were certainly injuries.

She’d been thrown to the ground and dragged like a sack of black beans and left where she now sat. Her chest, her face, her thighs were bruised and possibly bleeding. There was no light, not a trickle. The treacly blackness, the thin bad-tasting air, and the noises, these were the devils that made her physical health seem unimportant. They slowly added layer by layer to the horror of what she had stumbled upon.

There was nothing she could do but sit with her back against the wall and listen. Back and forth it paced, panting and shuffling and gurgling from its throat. Then there was the smell. She’d been in the morgue long enough to recognize death, but this was more. The blood and the death mingled with the creature’s own stink as if it were a part of it.

She had never feared more for her life. She could never have been more certain that this was her last day, and it was her own stupid fault. Why, she wondered at first, was she still alive when all the others had been killed instantly? But as her mind cleared, the reason became obvious. This was the final day of the solstice when the moon would be at its fullest. The others had been killed over the five days leading up to this night. The beast was waiting for that moon to rise before taking its final sacrifice. In a few hours, she would be just like the other women, except here in this cold black place nobody would ever find her body.

It wasn’t until he arrived at Hay Sok temple that Siri realized he didn’t know the name of the monk he’d come to find. The moon was rising fast, and the temple grounds stood out in its light like the national stadium under floodlights.

He walked around the inside of the whitewashed wall until he got to the stretch that had been blown up the previous year, along with his house. The monks had done a good job of fixing it. There was no longer a hole to look through; but by standing on the incinerator, he could see the far side. The ruins of his former house still lay there. The rubble hadn’t been collected, and the side wall still warped and leaned inward. All but one, they’d been lucky to get out before the place collapsed.

“Are you up there thanking your lucky stars, Yeh Ming?”

The monk stood behind him, his pate freshly shorn. He wore his saffron wrap as a loincloth. In the moonlight, Siri noticed the rings of tattooed mantras around his upper arms and across his chest. It perhaps explained his magical abilities. Somehow the monk knew all about Siri and Yeh Ming. It was he who had rescued the white talisman, he who had predicted that Dtui’s mother would have a better year.

“I am that,” Siri smiled. “It’s been a while. How have you been?”

He sat down on top of the incinerator.

“You’ll eventually come to understand that luck and coincidence aren’t connected. It wasn’t a coincidence that your dog led you away from the house that night. It was no coincidence that the Indian tackled your policeman friend last evening.”

Siri laughed.

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Oh, yes. So many things, but not those things that concern you, Yeh Ming.”

“Who are you exactly?”

“You don’t need to know that. I see you’re wearing the talisman.”

In fact he could see no such thing, not with his eyes anyway. It was around the doctor’s neck beneath his shirt.

“It makes my skin itch.”

“You were fortunate in Luang Prabang. Didn’t I tell you to wear it always?”

“I was always poor at taking advice. But I think I get the idea now.”

“Good. What brings you here?”

“I thought you were all-seeing, all-knowing.”

“Only in spiritual matters.”

It was an odd comment that Siri would come to dwell on later.

“What do you know about weretigers?”