Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

Jason’s door was open. In the half-light I could see a shape in his room: a hideous, stooped shape, more a shadow than anything. Like a hyena crouching over a meal, intent on disjointing its prize, unnaturally crabbed, as if it had dropped straight down on to its prey from the ceiling. All the hairs went up on my skin at once. The Nurse. The Nurse was in the house… And then I saw another figure in the room, standing slightly to one side, half bent over as if he was looking at something on the floor. He was in shadows too, his back to me, but something about the shape of his shoulders told me that I was looking at the man who had sworn his allegiance to Fuyuki earlier that evening: the chimpira.

I blinked a few times, thinking in a surreal, fevered way: What is this? Why are they here? Is it a joke? I straightened a little, and now I could see the top of Jason’s head and shoulders: he was face down, prone, pinioned to the ground by the chimpira, whose foot was planted directly on the back of his head. Just then the Nurse shifted a little, and settled herself in a sitting position, her big, muscular knees in the black nylons parted wide and high either side of her shoulders, her arms straight down between them. That thin, awful sound I’d heard was Jason pleading, struggling to get free. She wasn’t listening to him – she was going about her business with unnerving concentration, her shoulders hunched, rocking herself calmly back and forth. Her hands, which were just below the frame of my vision, operated in small, controlled motions, as if she was performing a complex and delicate operation. I don’t know how I knew, but I had a moment’s rare clarity: You’re watching a rape. She’s raping him.

My trance fractured. A sweat broke out across my back and I stood up, opening my mouth to speak. As if she had smelt me on the wind, the Nurse looked up. She paused. Then her huge shoulders rose, the polished wig swayed round her great angular head, which she held back a little, as if she was rising from an interrupted meal. I froze: it was as if the whole world was a telescope, containing me at one end, the Nurse at the other. Even now I wonder how I must have looked to her, how much she saw: a moving shadow, a pair of eyes glinting in an unlit window at the far, lonely end of the house.

At that moment the wind made a ferocious lap of the garden, screaming like a jet engine, filling the house with noise. The Nurse tilted her head and spoke in a low voice to the chimpira, who immediately became rigid. Slowly he straightened and turned to stare down the long corridor to where I stood. Then he pulled back his shoulders and flexed his hands. He began to amble casually towards me.

I lurched away from the window and bolted for my room, slamming the door and locking it, tripping and scuttling backwards like a crab, stumbling over the books and papers in the dark, banging into things blindly. I stood, pressed against the wall, staring at the door, my chest as tight as if I’d been thumped in the ribs. Jason, I thought, feverishly. Jason, they’ve come back to get you. What games have you been playing with her?

At first no one came. Minutes seemed to pass – time when they could have been doing anything to Jason, time when I thought I should open the door, get to the phone, call the police. Then, just as I thought the chimpira wasn’t coming, that he and the Nurse must have left the house in silence, I distinctly heard, through the wind, his footstep creak in the corridor outside.

I shot to the side window, scrabbling crazily at the edges of the mosquito screen, breaking my nails. One of the catches gave. I flung away the screen, threw open the window and looked down. About four feet below, an air-conditioning unit that might hold my weight stuck out from the neighbouring building. From there it was another long drop into the tiny space between the buildings. I turned and stared at the door. The footsteps had stopped and, in the awful silence, the chimpira muttered something under his breath. Then a kick splintered the flimsy door. I heard him grab the frame, getting a hold so he could punch his foot straight through.

I scrambled on to the windowsill. I had time to see his arm splinter through the hole, his disembodied hand in the lavender suit groping in the dark for the doorlock, then I pushed myself out, landing noisily, the air-conditioner shuddering under my weight, something ripping my foot. I dropped into a clumsy squat, scrambled on to my stomach, dangling my legs out into the darkness, the wind whipping my pyjamas around me. I pushed away and dropped straight to the ground with a soft thud, rocking forward a little so that my face slammed against the plastic weatherboarding on the neighbouring house with a painful thuck.

Another splintering sound came from above – the noise of something metallic – a screw or a hinge, maybe, ricocheting round the room. I hauled in a breath, sprang to my feet and flew out into the alley, diving into a gap between two buildings opposite where I crouched, the blood thundering in my veins. After a moment or two I dared to shuffle forward, my hands on the two buildings, and peer up at the house in mute horror.

The chimpira was in my room. Light coming from the corridor behind amplified every detail of him, as if through a magnifying-glass: individual hairs, the light shade swaying above his head. I pulled the collar of my pyjama jacket over my mouth, holding it there with both clenched fists, my teeth chattering, staring at him with eyes as hard and round as if I’d had adrenaline dropped into them. Would he guess how I’d escaped? Would he see me?

He hesitated, then his head appeared. I shrank back into the gap. He took long, patient minutes to study the drop from the window. When at last he pulled his head inside, his shadow wavered for a moment, then he disappeared from view, almost in slow motion, leaving the room blank save for the swinging lightbulb. I started to breathe again.

You can be as brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious – that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.

The Nurse and the chimpira stayed in our house for over an hour. I watched them roaming through the corridors, slamming into rooms, throwing the shutters off their hinges. Glass smashed and doors were ripped away. They overturned furniture and ripped the telephone out of the wall. And all the time I sat squashed and frozen between the buildings, my pyjama top pulled up over my mouth, all I could think was: Shi Chongming. You shouldn’t have let me get into this. You shouldn’t have let me get into things so dangerous. Because this was more, much more, than I had ever bargained for.

The way I remember the rest of that night is like one of those time-lapse films you sometimes see of a flower opening, or the sun moving across a street – jerky, with people shooting suddenly from one place to another. Except my film is all lit in the electric cordite colour of disaster and the sound has a horrible slowed-down underwater quality, with the creaking noise that you imagine big ships make. Zoom, and there’s the terrible shadow of the Nurse and Jason, making me think of something in a book, beast with two backs/beast with two backs, then zoom!, there’s me crouched between the buildings, my eyes watering, the muscles in my flanks twitching with fatigue. I’m watching the Nurse and the chimpira leaving the house, stopping briefly at the door to cast a glance up the street, the chimpira swinging keys on his fingers, the Nurse tightening the belt on her raincoat, before melting away into the dark. I’m frozen and numb everywhere, and when I touch my face where I banged the wall, it doesn’t hurt as much as it should. There’s just a little blood coming out of my nose and a little more where I bit my tongue. Then zoom again, and the Nurse hasn’t come back – the alley has been quiet for so long, and the front door is wide open, it’s been popped out of its catch, so I’m creeping back up the staircase, shivering crazily, hesitating at each step. Then I’m in my room, staring in disbelief at the devastation – my clothes scattered on the floor, the door caved in and all the drawers open and rummaged through. Then zoom… into a terrible close-up of my face. I’m standing in the middle of the room, looking into an empty handbag, my heart sinking because this is the handbag where I store all the money I’ve earned in the last few months. It has never, until now, occurred to me to put it somewhere safe, but now I can see that the Nurse and the chimpira have not only come to torture Jason, but also to milk everything they possibly can from this rambling house.