Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

Fear scuttling up under my hair I whipped the torch round the walls, over the cobwebs, the peeling plaster ceiling. The beam played over a flimsy cupboard panel in the side of the room and I lurched at it, scrabbling at the catch, gouging my fingertips, my feet tattooing on the floor in frantic fear. The panel clicked open with a noise that echoed away into the rooms behind.

I thrust the torch in and saw that it wasn’t a cupboard but a doorway that opened on to the top of a rotting staircase and led away into the darkness. I stepped straight into the opening, carefully pulled the door closed behind me, and went down two steps, clinging to the rickety banister. Dropping to my haunches I shone the torch around. It was a small cellar, maybe a foodstore, about five foot by ten, the walls of thick stone. At head height ran shelving on rusting brackets, upon which crowded dozens of old glass jars, their contents browning. Below that lay a silent, thickened skin of pale pink algae. The stairs led straight down into a stagnant indoor lake.

I looked back up at the closed panel door, stretching my ears out into the unlit rooms I’d come through. Silence. I’d stood on a branch – I couldn’t have left any tracks under the window, and my trail would be impossible to see through all the undergrowth. Maybe they hadn’t heard me at all. Maybe they were just checking all the windows out of routine. Please yes, I thought. Please. I turned and played the beam around the cellar. From a small crack in the rendering of the right-hand wall trickled a weak rivulet of brown water – this was what Jason had told me about: the pipes in the street that had cracked in an earthquake and filled up the basement: green and copper tidemarks marked the changing water levels over the years. The beam skimmed a low, bricked arch. I bent close to the skin on the water, and held the torch out, angling the light upwards. It was a tunnel, flooded to within an inch of the ceiling, leading away into the depths of the house. It would be impossible to-

I stiffened. A loud boom echoed through the rooms behind, as if the loose grille on the window had been wrenched from its moorings.

I began to pant with fear, my mouth open like a dog’s. Holding the torch in front of me like a weapon I lurched into the water, making it rock around me as if I’d prodded the belly of something sleeping, disturbing things that had been motionless for years. It was freezing. It set my jaw tight and made me think of teeth, mysterious fins and mouths, and the possibility that this was something’s home. I thought of the Japanese vampire goblin, Kappa, the swimming predator who would pluck down unwary swimmers by the heels, suck them dry of blood and discard their empty, bleached husks on the riverbank. Tears of fear sprang to my eyes as I waded on.

I stopped at the far wall and turned to look back the way I’d come. Around me the water slowly stopped sloshing, and silence descended. The only sound was the panicky shush shush of my breathing bouncing back off the walls.

Then another crash came through the silence. More furniture being overturned. I scanned the cellar desperately, the wavery torchbeam bringing the yellowing ceiling swooping in and out of focus. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to… The archway! I bent my knees and sank down until my shoulders were submerged and my chin was almost touching the surface of the water. Some of the jars around me broke the skin with an elastic glooping noise, and disappeared out of memory into the water below, taking their darkened pellets of pickled plums, rice and small sightless fish with them. I pushed my hand into the dark insides of the tunnel, rolling it sideways, opening and closing my fingers so they scraped against the slimy roof. Only when I’d straightened my arm and my cheek was pressed tight against the wall could I feel the ceiling rise, my hand emerge into air. I pulled my arm out and shone the torch at it. How long was it? Twenty-five, thirty inches maybe? Not far. Not that far. Shivering frantically I looked back up at the staircase, at the flimsy panel door.

From somewhere close, maybe even the kitchen, there came another crash. I had no choice. I pulled out the parcel and tied the handles of the bag tightly, sealing it completely, then pushed it back into my jacket, which I zipped up to the neck. As I did I lost my grip on the torch. It slipped from my numb fingers and landed on top of the skin, the beam hitting the nearby wall in a distorted oval. I grabbed for it, got it, began to lift but lost my grip and dropped it again. The skin tilted this time, tipping the torch forward, plopping it down into the water, its beam seesawing up through the rotting pink colonies of organisms, sending their lacy shadows swirling up on to the walls. I plunged after it, swinging for it, my hand moving in slow motion under the water, swirling up dustclouds under the surface, but the torch sank silently away, pirouetting lazily, its faint yellow glow thinning to just a glimmer. Then – gloop. Quite near me something small but weighty dropped into the water and swam.

Tears of terror welled in my eyes. The torch. The torch. Don’t need it. Don’t need it. You can manage without it. What’s that in the water? Nothing. A rat. Don’t think about it. At the top of the staircase, a thin light filtered round the cracks in the panel. I heard a man’s voice, low and serious, and above it the Nurse’s hot equine breath moving round the kitchen, as if she was inspecting it, trying to smell what had come through it.

Stop to think and you’ll die. I sucked in a breath, put my hands on the wall, bent my knees and dropped face down into the pitchy tunnel.

The freezing water filled my ears, my nose. I thrust my hands out and tried to stand, crashing into bricks, grazing my elbows, stumbling around in the floating murk. An unearthly noise reverberated inside me, my own voice, moaning in fear. Which way? Which way? Where did the arch end? Where? It seemed to go on for ever. Just as I thought my breath would run out and it would all be over, my hand shot up from the ceiling, clear above the water, and I went after it, scraping my head, pushing desperately forward, after the hope of air. I surfaced, retching, spitting, my head jammed painfully into the ceiling. I couldn’t stand up straight, but if I bent my knees and held my neck sideways, there was just enough room – a four- or five-inch gap between the water and the brickwork – to breathe.

Breathe. Breathe!

I don’t know how long I was there, or what state of crisis my body entered – maybe I fainted, or went into a fugue state – but as I stood, shaking, only the insistent life-beat of my heart for company, so loud it sounded several hundred times its size, as big as the house itself, something, the cold or the fear, picked up my consciousness and siphoned it slowly out of my reach down a long, silent tunnel, until I was nothing, nothing except a thudding, hollow pulse in a place with no geography, no boundaries and no physical laws. I floated in a vacuum, no awareness of time or existence, bobbing lazily like an astronaut in eternity and even when, after a millennium had rolled by and I became aware of a faint pinkish light coming through the water to my left – the Nurse shining the torch along it – I didn’t panic. I watched myself from a different place, seeing my frozen face floating on the algae, my lips blue, my eyelids half lowered. Even when the light left and eventually, after an eternity, retreating footsteps sounded in the rooms upstairs, I stayed absolutely still, a modern Alice, my head canted to one side, cramped and so desperately cold that I thought my heart would freeze closed and fossilize me there, metres under the ground.

At dawn, as the first light was moving over the garden, when the house had been silent for hours, I reached the open window. I was so numb with cold that it had taken hours to crawl back. Every inch was a fight with the seductive lethargy of cold, but at last I was here. I peered out cautiously, my heart thudding dully, sure that the Nurse would come charging down on me from some hidden lair. But the garden was silent, an eerie, crystalline world, as still and quiet as a ship marooned in ice. Everything was covered in little diamonds of frozen drops, surreal against the snow like necklaces strewn among the trees.