Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

I stood for a while outside my room and looked down the long corridor. It was dawn. The light coming through the broken gallery windows cast jagged shapes on the dusty tatami mat and everything was still and ominously silent, except for the drip drip drip of the tap in the kitchen. Every store room had been looted: they all stood open and silent, the air freezing, piles of dusty and decaying furniture lying all over the place. It was as if the developers’ wrecking ball had come through early. Most of the doors were open. Except Jason’s. It drew the eye, that door, all the way from the end of the corridor. There was something shamed and sinister about it, the way it was closed so tightly.

Instead of knocking I went to Irina’s room. I’m that much of a coward. When I drew back the door two bodies recoiled in the dark: Svetlana and Irina, gibbering with fear, scuttling backwards as if they’d climb the walls like rats. ‘It’s me,’ I whispered, holding up my hands to hush them. The room was musky with the smell of fear. ‘It’s me.’

It took them a moment to subside, sinking to the floor, holding each other. I dropped down next to them. Irina looked terrible – her cheeks were tear-streaked, her makeup everywhere. ‘I want to go home,’ she mouthed, her face twisting. ‘I wanna go home.’

‘What happened? What did she do?’

Svetlana stroked Irina’s back. ‘ It,’ she hissed. ‘ It, not she. It come in here – push us in here, and the other one take our money. Everythink.’

‘Did she hurt you?’

She snorted loudly. I could tell it was an act. Her usual bravado was gone. ‘No. But it don’t gotta touch us to make us – pssht.’ She used her hand to mime the two of them flying into the corner in fear.

Irina wiped her eyes on her T-shirt, holding it up to her face and pressing it into her eyes. It came away with two black mascara smears on it. ‘It is a monster, that one, I tellink you. A real d’yavol.’

‘How they know we got money, hmm?’ Svetlana was trying to light a cigarette, but her hands were trembling so hard that she couldn’t control the flame. She gave up and looked at me. ‘Did you tell to anyone how much money we make?’

‘They didn’t come because of the money,’ I said.

‘Of course they did. Everythink always about money.’

I didn’t answer. I bit my fingers and looked back at the door, thinking: No. You don’t understand. Jason brought them here. Whatever he did or said to the Nurse at the party – we’re paying the price now. The silence coming from his room made my blood cold. What were we going to find when we opened his door? What if – I remembered the photograph in Shi Chongming’s portfolio – what if we drew back the door and found…

I stood. ‘We’ve got to go into Jason’s room.’

Svetlana and Irina were silent. They looked back at me seriously.

‘What is it?’

‘You didn’t hear the noise he make?’

‘Some of it – I was asleep.’

‘Well, we…’ Svetlana had managed to light her cigarette. She held the smoke deep in her lungs, and blew it out through tight lips. ‘ We hear everythink.’ She glanced at Irina as if to confirm this. ‘Mmmm. And it not us going in there now and look.’

Irina sniffed and shook her head. ‘No. Not us.’

I looked from face to face, my heart sinking. ‘No,’ I said woodenly. ‘Of course not.’ I went to the doorway and stared along the corridor to Jason’s room. ‘Of course it should be me.’

Svetlana came to stand behind me, her hand on my shoulder. She peered out into the hallway. In front of Jason’s room a suitcase lay up-ended against the wall, its contents spilling out on to the floor – his clothing scattered everywhere, his passport, an envelope stuffed with paperwork. ‘My God,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘Look at mess.’

‘I know.’

‘You sure they gone?’

I looked across at the silent stairway. ‘I’m sure.’

Irina joined us, still dabbing her face, and we stood in a huddle, looking timidly down the passageway. There was a smell – an unmissable smell that made me think, inexplicably, of offal in a butcher’s window. I swallowed. ‘Listen… we might have to…’ I paused. ‘What about a doctor? We might have to get a doctor.’

Svetlana chewed her lip uneasily, exchanging a look with Irina. ‘We take him to doctor, Grey, and they gonna wanna know what happened and then the politsia gonna be here, looking snoopy-snoopy, and then-’

‘Immigration,’ Irina clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Immigration.’

‘And who gonna to pay for it, hmm?’ Svetlana turned her cigarette and looked at the tip, as if it had spoken to her. ‘No money left.’ She nodded. ‘No money left in whole house.’

‘ Davai.’ Irina put her hand on the small of my back, and propelled me gently forward. ‘You go see. Go see, then we talk.’

I went slowly, stepping over the suitcase, stopping in front of his door with my hands very stiff at my sides, staring at the doorhandle, the terrible silence ringing in my ears. What if I didn’t find his body? What if I was right about Fuyuki and his medicine? The word ‘hunt’ came to my mind. Had the Nurse come here hunting? I glanced back down the corridor to where the Russians were huddled in the doorway, Irina with her hands over her ears as if she was about to hear an explosion.

‘Right,’ I murmured to myself. I turned, put a jittery hand on the door, and took a deep breath. ‘Right.’

I tugged but the door wouldn’t slide open.

‘What is it?’ hissed Svetlana.

‘I don’t know.’ I shook it. ‘It’s locked.’ I put my mouth to the door. ‘ Jason? ’

I waited, listening to the silence.

‘ Jason – can you hear me? ’ I tapped on the door with my knuckle. ‘Jason, can you hear me? Are you-’

‘ Fuck off.’ His voice was muffled. It sounded as if he was speaking from under a duvet. ‘ Get away from my door and fuck off.’

I took a step back, putting a hand on the wall to steady myself, my knees trembling. ‘Jason – you’re…’ I took a few deep breaths. ‘Do you need a doctor? I’ll take you to Roppongi if you like -’

‘I said fuck off.’

‘- we’ll tell them we’ll pay next week when-’

‘Are you fucking deaf?’

‘No,’ I said, staring blankly at the door. ‘No, I’m not deaf.’

‘He okay?’ hissed Svetlana.

I looked up at her. ‘What?’

‘He okay?’

‘Um,’ I said, wiping my face and looking dubiously at the door. ‘Well, I think, yes, I think he is.’

It took us a long time to believe that the Nurse wasn’t coming back. It took even longer to get up the courage to inspect the house. The damage was terrible. We tidied up a little and took it in turns to have baths. I washed in a daze, moving the flannel woodenly over my swollen face. There were scratches on my feet where I must have ripped them jumping out of the window. Coincidentally they were exactly where the dream baby had bitten me. They could have been the baby’s toothmarks. I stared at them for a long, long time, shivering so hard that I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering.

Irina had discovered some money in a coat pocket that the chimpira had overlooked and agreed to lend me a thousand yen. When I finished bathing I tidied my room, carefully sweeping up the broken glass and shattered door shards, stacking all the books into the wardrobe, arranging the notes and the paintings neatly, then put Irina’s money in my pocket and took the Maranouchi line to Hongo.

The rain-soaked campus looked very different from the last time I’d been there. The thick leaf cover had gone and you could see all the way to the lake, the complex and ornately tiled roof of the gymnasium rising up behind the trees. It was early but Shi Chongming already had a student with him, a tall, spotty boy in an orange sweatshirt that said Bathing Ape on the front. Both of them stopped talking when I walked in, my coat buttoned up tightly. My face was bruised, blood still crusted my nostrils, my hands were in rigid fists at my sides, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I stood dead in the middle of the room and pointed at Shi Chongming. ‘You made me go a long way,’ I said. ‘You made me go a long way, but I can’t go any further. It’s time for you to give me the film.’