“So that’s why she stays with you.”
The gums above Mad Dog’s top teeth showed. “What did you think of the story?”
Zhang shrugged. “It’s a ghost story, like a thousand others.” The hot food was making him sweat even more. Did he have a fresh shirt back at the office? He couldn’t remember.
Mad Dog put down his chopsticks and lit a Shanghai Gold. “When I met your blonde friend the other night, I felt uneasy. At first, I thought it was because she was foreign. But I’ve met foreigners before—obviously. I get irritated sometimes, confused as well, but uneasy? Never. So I watched her.” He brought his cigarette up to his lips and took a deep drag on it. “I watched her all evening.”
Pushing his bowl away, Zhang sat back. A breath of air moved through the yard. He had a sudden craving for one of Mad Dog’s Shanghai Golds.
“And?” he said.
In the light that filtered down through the corrugated plastic, Mad Dog’s face looked pale and sickly.
“There’s a moment in the story,” he said, “when the shopkeeper realizes that he is dealing with a ghost.”
“When the money turns to ashes?”
“Yes.” Mad Dog reached sideways, past the end of the table, dislodging the ash from his cigarette by flicking the filter with his thumb. “There was a moment, also, with your friend.”
Zhang was watching Mad Dog closely now.
“We were sitting on the terrace, just the two of us,” Mad Dog went on. “You’d gone inside, and Laser was over by the door, talking to someone. She wouldn’t meet my gaze—she was staring out into the park—but I didn’t take my eyes off her. Then, all of a sudden, she turned her head and looked at me, and that was when I saw her.”
“Saw her? What do you mean?”
“She was ancient,” Mad Dog said. “Her hair was gone, and her fingernails and teeth were black. Her eyes shone with a strange, cold light.” He paused. “She opened her mouth, as if to speak, and her tongue stretched out towards me, much longer than a human—”
“Stop,” Zhang said. “That’s horrible.”
Mad Dog shrugged, then dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and trod on it.
“You were drunk,” Zhang went on. “You said so yourself.”
Mad Dog slowly moved his head from side to side. “I looked and looked, and in the end I saw.”
Zhang shook himself, then checked his phone. Seventeen new e-mails, including two from Sebastian, and one from his wife. “I should be getting back.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Thanks for the lunch.” Zhang stood up and lifted his jacket off the back of the chair.
As he walked to the door that led out to the alley, Mad Dog called after him.
“What are you going to do?”
TO AROUSE HOSTILITY IN PEOPLE was nothing new. All her life, Naemi had encountered it, and almost always from men. But she was thinking of the first time, which had happened in a past so deep it felt invented. Her name was Netu then. After her family was killed, she had taken a random path through countryside laid waste by years of conflict. In an attempt to escape the violence, she had found her way at last to the coast of Finnmark, that acid-eaten edge of the world, all inlets and islands, which many believed to be the entrance to hell itself. In those days, hell was seen as a cold place, and no place was colder than Vardø, though she arrived on a summer’s day, when sea and sky were a matching blue, and the light breeze smelled of the pine tar used for caulking boats.
In time, she met and married a fisherman called Halgard, and went to live with him in a turf hut belonging to Elsebe, his mother. One of the richest people in the village, Elsebe owned a wooden shack down by the shoreline, a boathouse, and half a dozen racks for drying fish, but her husband had died of a fever not long after Halgard was born, and then she lost her left eye to an infection. Something in her had corroded, and she was always bemoaning her fate, rebuking a world she thought of as conniving and malevolent. She took against Netu from the beginning. It is possible she would have taken against anyone who came between her and her son. Some mothers are like that.
Halgard was tall, square-shouldered, and easygoing, with a ready grin that put Netu in mind of her father, but he was often away for twenty or thirty days in a row, hunting seal and walrus in the Barents Sea, or fishing for cod. The moment he was gone, Elsebe would begin to find fault with her. Not until the early spring, when the light returned, would Netu be able to get away. While the snow was still on the ground, she would strap on skis made from the shinbones of reindeer and leave the village, losing herself in the eerie magic of the tundra. In the summer, she would go for long walks up the smooth green slopes of Domen, or out towards the Kibergsneset peninsula. It might not have been safe to wander off alone, unarmed—by August, the polar bears were desperate for any sort of food—but that didn’t stop her. For those few hours, she could escape her mother-in-law’s constant insinuations and complaints. The old woman would be waiting for her when she came back, though. Shirking your duties again, I see. Doing as you please. I suppose you think you’re too good for us. By the time Halgard returned after a long stint at sea, exhausted and elated, she would be at her wits’ end. Halgard assumed it was because she had missed him—and she had, though that was only part of the story. When she attempted to explain what she had been through, he found it difficult to believe, since his mother was careful to hide that side of her nature from him. Also, he didn’t like to hear his mother criticized. She tried a different approach, asking if they might perhaps live elsewhere, but her entreaties usually coincided with his homecoming, when he was happy to be alive and back among his people. He had no desire to move, he told her. He belonged in Vardø. And besides, how could he leave his mother all alone, with no one to look after her?
There was another source of tension. Halgard wanted a family, but the years went by and no child came. Children were vital in a small community like Vardø—without children, it would die out—and barrenness was seen both as a failure and as a selfish or hostile act, a kind of withholding. Where are all my grandchildren? Elsebe was always muttering, which did nothing to dispel the pressure.
One June morning, Netu and Halgard walked out along the shore and sat on the flat rocks to the south of the village. The sea lay calm as a lake, the water silver gray, like the belly of a fish. The moon was half a chalky thumbprint high up in the sky.
“Is something wrong with you?” Halgard asked.
She had been asking herself the same question. When she first began to drink her own blood, her monthly cycles had become irregular. Then she stopped menstruating altogether. She had told no one, not even the women in the village. Especially not the women in the village. Instead, she faked her periods, using blood from slaughtered pigs and deer. She needed to prove she was the same as everybody else. Inside, though, she realized she was in the process of turning into someone—or something—unfathomable, and it occurred to her that she might have forfeited her fertility as a result. It was part of a bargain, perhaps—a bargain that had somehow been struck without her knowledge, a bargain in which she had had no say. She was as troubled by her inability to conceive as he was. After all, aside from any longing or frustration she might feel, it was a threat to her.