Appointment with the Red-Eyed Demon King

Footsteps came at an even pace, circling upward along the stairwell. Their hard rhythm, mingled with the rasp of metal, shook the beat of the heart itself. From the other side of the wall there drifted now and then the sound of a husband and wife quarreling, sometimes barking dogs, sometimes shrill heavy-metal music. He left it all behind him, layer by layer, his expression intent as a lover hurrying toward a tryst, though a hunter's cold light showed at the bottom of his eyes. His white gloves were smeared with chaotic bloodstains already stiffening in the chill air to a dark, sullen red. Ninety-nine steps led straight to the rooftop. The door was unlocked. He nudged it open with two light steps and stood in the shadows, looking across. The towering building rose into the night sky under a dim shroud of fog. From far away it looked like a crack split open through the city. "I won't lose to you." A boy in black stood beyond the railing, backlit by the thin crescent moon, and said it with final resolve to the hidden shape in the dark. Sirens wailed nearer and nearer, gradually throwing a cordon around the building.

The iron door trembled faintly. The reflection from the lightning-lit sky was like the devil's sneer, and the murderous silence pressed down until it became unbearable. The boy gritted his teeth, stepped back once with his left foot, and then flung his lean body outward without another thought, as though diving into the bottom of the sea. Curious onlookers all along the building threw open their windows and saw a figure drop past before their eyes. The boy remained wide awake the whole way down, his gaze sweeping across one startled face after another, their screams striking his ears in jagged bursts. A north wind poured through an open window. Red curtains slapped across his cheek. In that instant he saw, hanging naked from the ceiling, a corpse, while an answering machine played a Cantonese rendition of Sonezaki Shinju, the desolate song sounding like a funeral farewell. Below, the delivery truck driver fled from his cab in terror as the boy's body tore through the canvas roof and crashed deep into a load of feather quilts. White goose down burst into the wind and scattered like a sky full of snow, dressing the uneasy night in false beauty.

Kusano received Arikane Mizue's call in the middle of the night. She said nothing, only cried, her muffled sobs making him think she had watched another tragic film and had deliberately woken him to vent. Yet by dawn every television station was reporting the death of the Patriarch. He stared at the screen for a few seconds, did not even have time to change clothes, and ran out in his slippers. Kusano was a poor high-school boy with a severe reading disorder. He had come to know the billion-yen heiress Arikane Mizue through a bizarre burglary-murder case, and afterward the two of them had been swept together into one strange affair after another, forging a bond that ignored the gulf between their stations. The Patriarch was Mizue's grandfather and the head of the Arikane conglomerate. At ninety he ought to have seemed cold and iron-hard, yet Kusano remembered him less as the fearsome titan of rumor than as a shrewd old man with eccentric tastes who doted on the granddaughter who stayed by his side. Mizue's father, the youngest and most beloved of the Patriarch's sons, had died young of a congenital illness. Out of compensation, affection, or both, the old man had loved Mizue more than any other relative and publicly designated her his heir. His death, in a single stroke, had thrust that still-young successor onto the crest of a storm.

As Kusano edged his way toward the drawing room, Mizue, dressed in black mourning gauze, flung open the door and barked at the bodyguards who had been piling on top of him like hounds, "Hands off him, all of you." Dozens of burly men turned in unison. Kusano poked his head out from the middle of them and could not help laughing. "Didn't you give me a pass? Why did I still have to climb the wall to get in?" "I forgot to bring it," Mizue said coolly. After dismissing the entire room, she collapsed gracelessly into an armchair with a long sigh. "I'm exhausted." Kusano yanked up the trousers that had nearly been torn off him and studied her face. "You're all right, aren't you?" "Didn't I just say I had business with you? Did water get into your brain, or are your ears broken?" Her tongue was even sharper than usual, but the blue shadows under her eyes and the sheer fatigue written over her face stopped him from arguing. Instead she asked, "Have you heard of Beidou Tower?" He thought for a moment. "The skyscraper where that murder happened last year?" "Grandfather financed its construction. Before he died, he told me to transfer the deed to someone named Lin Li." Kusano rolled the name over several times before it clicked. "The adopted son of the serial robber-killer they called the Red-Eyed Demon King?" "Exactly." Mizue sat up. "Grandfather said he had made a promise with the Red-Eyed Demon King. After he died, he was to help him destroy that building." She lifted one shoulder. "He died before he could explain anything, so I want you to investigate it with me." Then, after a pointed look at his sleeves, she asked, "This isn't women's sleepwear, is it?" Kusano tugged at them self-consciously. "My mother got too fat for it and stuffed it onto me." Mizue gave two wicked little laughs, then took pity and had a servant bring him a coat, warning him in advance that it was designer and worth thirty thousand.

The two of them sat in the long black limousine. Mizue finally gave in to sleep in the back seat while Kusano watched the news footage she had prepared. The story dated back to the strange case that had erupted just before Christmas the year before.

From the very beginning, the case had been full of contradictions.

At the same moment prosecutor Wang Chenyi was found dead, wrapped round and round in white silk like a cocoon about to hatch, Chen Kong was pushed from the rooftop. By chance he landed in the truck below and survived, but the fall left him half paralyzed and a blood clot lodged at the back of his skull, causing severe damage to both memory and perception. A full week later he awoke from the haze, and no matter whether the questions came from police or reporters, he insisted that the one who pushed him was the Red-Eyed Demon King. But Zhang Xiaofeng, the man known by that name, had already been in prison. At the rooftop crime scene, however, the gloves and bloodied clothes were indeed found to carry his blood and skin flakes. Nor was that all. Every resident who had witnessed the fall said that on the rooftop they had seen a pair of red eyes, just like the demon of legend. Later, security footage from a nearby bank showed Zhang Xiaofeng's adopted son Lin Li lingering around Beidou Tower before and after the incident, so people naturally concluded that he had committed the bloodshed out of revenge.

In the recording, Chen Kong's voice sounded as though it came from the bottom of some hollow well. "Someone was chasing me from behind... so frightening... I kept walking. It was dark all around, and I just kept walking, kept walking, until at last I saw light. It was red eyes." His body trembled slightly. "I won't lose to you." Someone off camera asked, "Do you still remember how your mother died? What happened in your house before you ran to the rooftop?"

"The hanging body... was that your mother? Who was singing?" Chen Kong tilted his head and answered blankly, "No... it was a child. A boy. Red eyes. The answering machine. Sonezaki Shinju..." Then he collapsed, clutching his head and screaming hoarsely, "So scary. So scary."

Their car crossed the river bridge. On one bank, Beidou Tower thrust upward from flat ground, so tall it seemed to split the clear sky in two. Under the bridge sprawled an old slum district, low red-brick houses piled into the hollow like ugly, stubborn growths. As soon as the car stopped, Mizue woke, fished a bulging sack from behind the seat, and threw it at Kusano. "Carry it." When he asked what it was, she said, "There are a lot of children in places like this. If they see someone dressed well, they'll pester them for gifts. Hand out the snacks inside and we can get away." Kusano looked down at his clothes and understood at once that the expensive coat had been given to him partly so he could serve as bait. Refusing both driver and bodyguards, they went in on foot. Just as Mizue said, children swarmed them along the way, and the snacks vanished in no time. At the low house by the bridge pier, Mizue pushed in without knocking. An old oil lamp burned within, and the walls were plastered with clippings. Kusano could not make out the text, but the photographs told him they were all reports about Zhang Xiaofeng. A clear voice cut through the silence. Nineteen-year-old Lin Li stood in the doorway, an apron tied around his chest, a cucumber in one hand and a cleaver in the other. After staring at them for a moment, he fixed his eyes on Mizue. "I know you," he said. "Not from television. From your house. We even played together once." Mizue stared. Lin Li reminded her that when he had been seven or eight, his foster father had worked as a cook under her grandfather. So the memory came back: the Patriarch had loved a Manchu dish with the absurd name of "Chicken Fights the Dog," and anyone who could satisfy his appetite, even a condemned criminal, might still win a measure of favor. At that moment several children burst in laughing and shouting. One of them, a little girl with pitiful eyes, suddenly dropped to her knees and hugged Mizue's leg. "Big sister, buy a flower..." Lin Li's face changed at once. He threw down the knife, rushed over, yanked the girl up, and shouted, "Are you crippled? Then don't kneel to people." The other children all lowered their heads in shame. Mizue, rubbing her temples at the spectacle, slipped off a black obsidian bracelet and laid it in the girl's hand. "I don't have cash. Will this do instead?"

The girl glanced at Lin Li's face, saw him give the slightest nod, and ran to a cupboard for a basket of wildflowers she had picked by the river. As soon as the basket was moved, a strip of white cloth showed behind it. Kusano tugged Mizue's sleeve. "That." It was identical to the white silk found wound around Wang Chenyi's body. Mizue swallowed the question that rose to her lips when she saw the children nearby and only said, "Come outside. Let's talk."

Lin Li pulled off his apron and followed them out in a yellowed shirt. "Don't misunderstand," he said. "People outside all say I killed the woman prosecutor, but that's only a misunderstanding. I could never have avenged my foster father that way." Mizue said quietly, "I know. There isn't even a memorial tablet for Zhang Xiaofeng in your house. If you really revered him, you'd be worshipping him." Kusano asked instead why Lin Li had collected so many clippings about the man. Lin Li answered that ever since Zhang Xiaofeng had been executed, people everywhere had treated him as an accomplice and refused to hire him. "If this keeps up, I won't be able to earn money to feed those kids. That's why I bought the same white silk and started studying the case myself." The children, he said, were like him, orphans Zhang had brought home one after another. Asked whether Zhang had been wrongly convicted, Lin Li shook his head. No, there was no mistake. Yet the white silk and Sonezaki Shinju were not his foster father's doing, and he had never entered Wang Chenyi's apartment. Truthfully, Lin Li admitted, even he could not be certain what kind of man Zhang had really been. Sober, he was gentle and cooked for the children. Drunk, he flew into rages, his eyes bloodshot like a demon's. Lin Li knew he had committed robberies, because he could find no work and still had mouths to feed. But even after sentencing, Zhang Xiaofeng had always insisted that he had never killed anyone. "Then why were you near Beidou Tower that night?" Kusano asked.

Mizue and Kusano turned to him together when he said Chen Kong's name. Lin Li nodded, expression complicated. Chen Kong had loved radio-controlled helicopters. Once one of his models crashed into a utility pole on the bridge and fell outside Lin Li's house. Lin Li had worked before in a watch shop and knew how to fix fine mechanisms, so he repaired it. After that Chen Kong would meet him now and then to play. "Why was none of that in the police file?" Mizue asked. Lin Li gave a mirthless smile. "Who would have believed it? He was an honors student newly admitted to law school, and I was just a slum punk. If people had known we met in secret, his mother would have exploded." After the incident, police brought Lin Li to identify Chen Kong, but Chen Kong had forgotten him completely. Kusano asked whether Chen Kong had ever spoken about the boy hanging from the ceiling. Lin Li lifted his head. "He meant himself." Chen Kong's father had abandoned him before birth. His stepfather, like Zhang, was a violent drunk. Whenever he got wasted, he would tie Chen Kong to the ceiling fan and beat him. Mizue remembered the layout of Chen Kong's house at once. There had been a huge mirror in the sitting room. So the testimony in which Chen Kong described the hanging boy had in fact been a hallucinated replay of what had happened to himself. "Right," Kusano said. "And did his stepfather like listening to Sonezaki Shinju?"

Back in the car, Mizue pulled up old child-abuse records on her laptop and searched in silence. Chen Kong's name was nowhere in them. Could Wang Chenyi really have failed to notice what was happening to her own son?

"So next we go visit the amnesiac survivor?" Mizue curved her mouth and told the driver their new destination. They ate a makeshift lunch in the car. To Kusano the so-called light meal looked lavish enough to cover half a month's food at home. As he bit into a sandwich layered with shredded abalone, he muttered, "I still don't understand why the Patriarch wanted to hand Beidou Tower over to Zhang Xiaofeng. Was it really meant for him?" Mizue wiped her hands and answered, "Grandfather said it was for the Red-Eyed Demon King. At this point, do you still think that meant Zhang Xiaofeng?" Kusano hesitated. Everyone had called Zhang that because when he prowled around drunk his eyes were bloodshot red. But how could a man so muddled by drink wrap bodies with such painstaking care in white silk and tie dead knots in them? Wang Chenyi, by contrast, had been found with her hands bound behind her back in movable slipknots. If her death was linked to the others, perhaps that difference meant something.

The sanatorium stood in the far suburbs, famous across the country and ruinously expensive. The Patriarch himself had once stayed there during a serious illness, only to flee back to the business world because he found the life unbearably dull. A small electric shuttle took Mizue and Kusano to the recreation building. Chen Kong sat alone in the screening room watching an old fantasy anime. Mizue switched on the lights and cut the projector. The room blazed bright. Chen Kong turned around in confusion. "What are you doing?" "I need to talk to you," Mizue said harshly. She walked toward him step by step, reciting in a low voice the spell they had just heard in the cartoon, about a darkness blacker than dusk and a blood-red river of time. Then she stopped in front of him and asked, "Tell me. For you, which demon are you truly afraid of? Your stepfather, or Zhang Xiaofeng? Or have you already stopped being able to tell them apart?" Chen Kong's lips trembled. She pressed on. Had it reached the point where every time he saw Zhang Xiaofeng, he also saw the stepfather who had tormented him, and because he had never dared rebel against the demon in his heart, he had transferred his rage onto innocent strangers instead? "No!" Chen Kong clapped his hands over his ears and shouted for them to get out. Kusano seized the back of the wheelchair and said quietly behind him, "Try to remember that boy in the mirror. You wanted desperately to save him, but your enemy was too strong and you had no power to resist. Reeking of alcohol, red-eyed, he was the Red-Eyed Demon King of your life." Chen Kong struggled and cried, "My mother drove him away. He was gone." Mizue smiled with witchlike coldness. "Was he really gone? Demons do not vanish. Just when you finally grew up and thought you had escaped the shadow, you found the demon had attached itself to someone else. To your friend's foster father, Zhang Xiaofeng." Chen Kong froze. Mizue's voice went soft and terrible. He had watched Zhang force children out to beg. He had watched him stumble drunkenly into robberies. He hated him, but every time he saw those bloodshot eyes he was too afraid to move. "So what were you supposed to do?" Kusano said. "You didn't have the courage to kill the demon, but you couldn't stand to let him keep walking the earth. In the end you thought of a way. You would borrow the demon's own power and lock him up." Through tears, Chen Kong whispered hoarsely, "Yes. I wanted to borrow the demon's power and lock him up." Mizue let go of the chair. Kusano swallowed and asked, with difficulty, how he had done it. Chen Kong confessed that he had followed behind Zhang Xiaofeng during the robberies. After Zhang took the money and left, Chen Kong killed the victims. But he had not wrapped them in white silk. He had merely waited for them to stop breathing and fled. Wang Chenyi was not one of the people he killed.

The more they uncovered, the stranger the affair became. Kusano studied the photograph of Wang Chenyi's death. The ceiling in that apartment was more than three meters high. Her toes hung fifty centimeters above the floor, and beneath her there was nothing at all that could have served as a step. They had already spoken with Chen Kong's attending physician. Children abused in early life were indeed more fragile than others, and Chen Kong's nerves were badly damaged, but in his present condition he had no ability to construct elaborate lies. Could Lin Li somehow have taken Zhang Xiaofeng's blood and skin flakes and planted them? Certainly. Yet Lin Li had never entered Beidou Tower that night. So how had Wang Chenyi died, and who had sent Chen Kong over the edge?

On the lawn outside, children were playing with toy water guns. Kusano's attention caught on the red blink at the muzzle of one, and suddenly he said, "A remote-control aircraft." The tail light on a model helicopter would indeed show up red in the dark. The residents who watched the rooftop from below had mistaken the light for a pair of crimson eyes. Kusano reasoned that Lin Li must have lured Chen Kong to the roof and then used the aircraft to knock him over. But Mizue was already shaking her head. The model helicopter had been left at the scene, damaged from impact, and the remote had later been found in the living room. Stranger still, Chen Kong's mobile phone had never been recovered. Wang Chenyi's apartment had no landline, yet Lin Li claimed he had phoned Chen Kong that night. One way or another, Lin Li was still hiding something from them.

After the murder case, Beidou Tower had gradually gone out of use. There was no electricity, so Lin Li could only climb the stairs on foot when Mizue summoned him to room 19B. It was his first time entering the skyscraper. For some reason, a strange sorrow churned in him all the way up. When he reached the door, he heard the slow spin of rotor blades inside. The room itself, where a woman had once died so horribly, lay hushed beneath the slanting light of evening. Kusano sat there idly flicking the switch on the model helicopter's remote while Mizue lounged against the sofa, looking toward the door. Kusano stood up the moment Lin Li entered. He reminded him that the truck driver whose load of quilts had saved Chen Kong was Lin Li's former employer and friend, and that the person who called the police that night had also been Lin Li. Then he said flatly, "Wang Chenyi killed herself." Shock finally broke across Lin Li's face. Kusano held up the remote. There had been no stool in the room. If someone had wanted to lift Wang Chenyi onto the fan, there should have been something to stand on, yet there was nothing. That was because she had not needed another person. She wrapped the white silk around herself, slipped the noose around her neck, and looped the other end through the fan mount. Then, using the helicopter, she struck the switch at the door. Once the fan began turning, the rope wound itself around the blades and her body rose with it. Afterward the helicopter was shut off and the remote tossed into the sofa. The trick was complete. Mizue, one leg crossed over the other, told Lin Li not to waste time any longer.

Lin Li gave in at last. After Chen Kong confessed the first murder to him, Lin Li had at once conceived of using the chance to throw Zhang Xiaofeng into prison for good, because he hated the man no less than Chen Kong did. He found Wang Chenyi and told her about her son's crimes, hoping she would cooperate in pinning them all on Zhang. But just as they were preparing to call the police, Chen Kong committed a second murder. Wang Chenyi panicked. To deepen suspicion against Zhang Xiaofeng, she imitated scenes from The Injustice to Dou E, bought the white silk herself, and asked Lin Li to collect Zhang's hair and skin flakes so the bodies could be wrapped and staged as the work of a serial killer. On the surface she looked like a good mother, but in Lin Li's bitter words, she cared above all for preserving the face of a successful strong woman and the illusion of a harmonious family. When Chen Kong committed a third murder, she finally broke down. Realizing her own indulgence and selfishness had driven her son onto a ruinous path, she chose to use her death to end a guilt heavier than blood. She left Chen Kong money, inheritance, and insurance, believing it would at least spare him want. Yet Chen Kong, knowing none of this, came home and found her body and in his terror believed the Red-Eyed Demon King had returned. Lin Li said Chen Kong called him then, half-mad already, and ran to the rooftop insisting he would fight the demon to the death. Lin Li called the police and summoned friends to help. What he had never expected was that Wang Chenyi, even at the end, had left traces of Zhang Xiaofeng both on the rooftop and in the apartment, cleanly shifting suspicion onto Zhang's adopted son. To conceal his connection with Chen Kong, Lin Li took the boy's phone away. "So Chen Kong really did jump by himself?" Mizue murmured. "Then why did everyone say they saw the demon's red eyes?" The sun sank fully below the horizon, and at that very moment the giant building outside blazed to life in a burst of dazzling warning lights, as though the answer had always been there.

Mizue took out the title deed she had brought and placed it in Lin Li's hands. "The one Grandfather made that promise with," she asked softly, "was it you?"

Lin Li told them the truth at last. The runaway son of the Patriarch's sixth daughter had, strictly speaking, been Mizue's cousin. His mother, rebellious from childhood, had been nicknamed the Red-Eyed Little Devil by the old man. After she died, the Patriarch found Lin Li and asked him to come home, but for the sake of his mother and his own dignity he refused. As compensation, the old man promised him a single wish, and Lin Li asked for Beidou Tower. When Kusano asked why he had wanted it destroyed, Lin Li looked down at the slum beneath the bridge and said that as a child, when there was no money, he had been locked in Zhang Xiaofeng's cellar. The little window there faced northwest. Only for a moment at dusk would sunlight fall through it. After Beidou Tower was built, even that last scrap of sunlight was blocked out. The tower had seemed to him an unforgivable thing.

But now, Lin Li said, he had changed his mind. Better than destroying the place would be to bring all those little ghosts of his in to live there, where they could face the sun every day. Perhaps the Patriarch had waited until after his death to hand over the deed precisely to give Lin Li time to wear away that old obsession. "What a complicated old man," Lin Li said with a faint smile. "He was our grandfather too," Mizue replied.

Kusano squinted at her. "So dragging me all over town today was just your way of luring the tiger off the mountain?" Mizue nodded wickedly. "Come with me to Enoshima. I promised Grandfather I'd scatter his ashes where the seafood is best. It would be a waste to let that outfit of yours go to nothing."