Free Swamp Foetus by Poppy Z. Brite Page B

moment stretched out long, punctuated by the blinking of neon outside. On—and the inside of the shop was bathed in garish night rainbows. Off—and there was only the lamp behind its faded paper shade, and the soft web of shadows. At last my manners came back to me and I pointed at a chair. “Go ahead. Disturb us.”
    He sat neatly, his hands folded before him. They were like old ginseng roots: long-fingered, tapering, dry. The beard waggled again. “You were saying you needed money for the night’s... ah... festivities.”
    His perfect English suddenly annoyed me. I became tough, but suave; all I needed was a snap-brim hat and a pencil-thin moustache. “You want to give us some?” His eyes seemed to burn a hole through my facade. “Not give... not exactly. I am a businessman, you see, and I require a service. If I were to offer you five dollars each, might you be able to perform a service for me?”
    “Five dollars!” Robert snorted. “We wouldn’t wash your chopsticks for five dollars.”
    “I see,” said the old man. “And if I were to add that you might have unlimited use of a bottle of good cognac?”
    Before Robert could say anything I leaned across the table and put my face right up next to the old man’s. “Just what business are you in, mister?”
    The man paused. I saw neon flickering across his eyes. On—and they exploded with a thousand firework colors. Off—and they were flat black, the color of dynasties long fallen to dust, the color of Mystery incarnate.
    “I am an undertaker,” he said.
    It turned out that the man wanted Robert and me to keep vigil over the corpse of a middle-aged woman while he slipped out to drink with another undertaker. His apprentice was ill, he explained, and his parlor had already been broken into twice. Bandits came through the window and robbed the corpses of rings, watches, even—on one occasion—an artificial foot. I wondered who had wanted the foot, and why, and if the other undertaker was also abandoning his charges to go out drinking. At the back of my mind was still that disquieting image, the one I could not quite visualize.
    Robert looked sidelong at me. It would be an easy ten dollars—if the old man’s story was true. Why would he trust us to watch over the corpse of a stranger, and a Chinese one at that? At worst the man might lead us to a secret slaughterhouse where we would be hung on hooks, bled dry by tubes of bamboo shoved beneath our skin, and sold as cheap sides of pork to the less reputable restaurants. At best, he might lure us to an opium palace where we would be used like other, choicer cuts of meat, kept blissfully stoned every hour. But if the old man was telling the truth, his cognac would give our evening a fast start. Robert stared at me: he would not refuse, so neither could I. “All right,” I said, and we followed the old man out of the sweet shop.
    It was getting late now, and a party had begun in Chinatown. The street was a dazzle of lights, a feast of smells. Neon ran riot. Traffic signals stayed red or turned green, and cars inched along the narrow street flashing their headlights impatiently. Slabs of pork sizzled on a grill, oiling the air with the tender red scent of meat. I saw a row of ducks hanging in the window of a grocery, skinned, their eyes scooped out and their beaks tied shut with dirty bits of string. Below them was a porcelain bowl filled with what looked like thousands of tiny dried-up human hands.
    The man led us down an alley, along a steep unlit back street where tough Chinese stood on the corner passing a pint of wine. We entered a high vaulted passage, then wound through a maze of corridors that opened onto a courtyard made of moonlight and stillness. Here flowed a small stream over rocks of luminescent alabaster. Here grew trees that seemed carved all in jade, each leaf, each twig. I looked up. The square of night sky above the courtyard was a deeper purple than we had seen earlier, a velvet hand