Thirty-Three Teeth

8:30 CORRECTIONS

“So, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Know where she works.”

“No. I have no idea.”

“Then how did you know she was here?”

“You just told me.”

“But why here, at Corrections?”

“It was next on my list. We’re investigating her. She’s tried this kind of thing before.”

“Who’s we?”

Siri produced his well-thumbed letter of introduction from the Justice Department. He was learning that in most cases, just having a document was enough to get him into places. Few bothered to read the long stodgy wording. The letterhead was enough. The clerk sensed he was already involved in a matter of intrigue.

“What’s she done, then?” the clerk asked.

“She goes around impersonating a nurse, you know, goes into this department and that, claiming this and that.”

“Damn. I knew there was something fishy about her. Didn’t look like any nurse I’d ever seen.”

“Suppose you tell me what happened.”

The filing clerk was visibly excited. His dull life desperately needed days such as these.

“She marches in here as if she owns the office and says Dr. Vansana asked her to come and look up something in the files. Dr. Vansana’s the physician we use at the correctional facilities. I mean, ha, as if anyone can just march in and claim to be this or that and get access to my files. I mean, she didn’t have so much as a P24.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I jest you not, comrade. Well, Dr. Vansana’s off at the reservoir today so there wasn’t even any way of checking her story. I wasn’t letting her get her hands in my drawers, I can tell you.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Right. So she kicked up a fuss and I told her I wasn’t even supposed to be talking to her till I saw an Int5Q, so she should go away and come back with some paperwork. I asked her, “Where do you think the country would be if everyone conducted his or her daily business without the correct forms?’”

“Good for you.”

“I can’t even tell you what she said to that. I said ‘Good day’ and went back to my deskwork. She stormed out, and I suppose I eventually calmed down and forgot about her. I found myself engrossed in a rejac. budg. requisition that needed some backup Rll’s. I’m a bit short-staffed right now. Normally I’d have a girl running back and forth to the cabinet room for files, but these days I’m having to do it myself. So I went next door and what do you know? The door was locked. I banged and banged and who should come to the door?”

“I think I know.”

“Her, brazen as anything, comes and opens the door. And she has the nerve to tell me she took a wrong turn and got herself locked in that room with the files. A likely story I do not think. I mean, the lock’s on the inside for the first thing, and there she was opening it. I was flabbergasted. I’d never seen such abuse of the regulations.

“Of course, what I should have done at that point was restrain her and call for security, the police even. But, well, she was a big girl and I’m not a physically well person, so I instructed her to leave, forthwith. Would you believe she strolled past me smiling without a glimmer of guilt?”

“I would.” He fought back his own smile.

“What?”

“I mean, she’s a hardened criminal. These people have no shame. Too bad you don’t know what file she was looking at.”

“Ha. Not know? You don’t think I could spend over a year setting up this system and not know what’s been tampered with? She didn’t even bother to put it back in the drawer straight. DC19368.3. That, Comrade, is a criminal record file.”

“I wish all our witnesses were as diligent as you, comrade. I’m afraid I’ll have to take a look at that file. It’s the only evidence we have against her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Her name? We refer to her as… as HJJ838.”

The man jotted it down.

Twenty minutes later, Siri walked out of the Corrections Department into a brick wall of dry heat. It had to be the hottest damned year he’d ever known. There hadn’t been more than a sneeze of rain since last December. Nothing was really green anymore.

A depleted flock of bicycle taxi pedalers wilted on their back seats beneath the gray leaves of a peacock-tail tree.

“Good health,” Siri said hopefully.

“Good health, Uncle,” a couple replied. They’d seen him arrive on his motorcycle, so they knew there was no chance of a fare.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.”

“I don’t suppose any of you recall giving a ride to a nurse here this morning, do you? About nine?”

“I do,” said a bare-chested young man with a stack of coat hangars inside his skin. “There was a heavy one this morning. It was me that took her.”

“Remember where to?”

“Out to Silver City, Uncle. Almost killed me it did, day like this.” “Thank you.”

Siri was on his way back to his bike when he glanced across the street. In the heat that shimmered up from the pavement, he saw Saloop sitting with his long tongue flopping out of his mouth.

“Saloop?” Siri said. “What the heck are you doing here?”

He remembered the old Lassie black and white films he’d seen at Le Cinй in Paris. Perhaps his dog had come to tell him there was danger back at the house. He couldn’t think how he’d traced him here. He waited for an old Vietnamese truck to pass before going across to see. But once the vehicle and its trailer of tarry black smog had cleared the lane, Saloop had gone.

“I never will get that dog,” Siri said to himself. Getting Warmer

Before the Silver City trip, Siri stopped off at the morgue to see whether Dtui had made an appearance. All he found was Geung sweeping grooves into the concrete floor. At the hospital administration office, Siri called Phosy and by a one-in-a-hundred chance found him at his desk. He told Siri about the appointment he’d completely forgotten the previous evening with Dr. Vansana. He also told him to call back if Dtui still hadn’t shown up by five. It was already nearly four.

There was one more stop before Silver City. He arrived at the ugly shanty behind the high wall of the national stadium and walked along the narrow dirt lane, wading through a flock of newborn chicks. At Dtui’s banana-leaf door, he called out Manoluk’s name before going in.

“Ooh, come in, Doctor. Haven’t seen you for ages.”

Dtui’s mother lay as always on the thin mattress in the center of the room. The head of the standing fan cluttered and groaned back and forth but did a poor job of lowering the temperature in the stuffy slum. She’d never looked well in all the time Siri had known her, but she’d looked a lot worse than she did today. He didn’t want to distress her by discussing Dtui’s disappearance.

“Good health, Mrs. Manoluk. How you feeling?”

“Just fine,” she lied. “What brings you?”

“I was visiting the family of one of our deceased around here,” he lied back. “Thought I’d drop in and see how you’re doing.”

He reached into his shoulder bag for his traveling doctor kit.

“Actually, I haven’t been in the morgue all day. I hope Dtui’s looking after the show for me.”

“Must be, Doctor. She left here bright and early this morning. Can’t think where else she’d be, unless she took off across the river.”

This was a long-standing joke in Vientiane. If so-and-so was late or his brother missed a day at work, they’d talk about him taking a swim to Thailand. It was only partly said in jest, as there were very few of the population of 150,000 who hadn’t given it a thought.

“No plans to go and have her hair done, manicure?”

“Goodness me, no. Can you imagine Dtui with a permanent wave?”

Damn. So, whatever came up was sudden and unplanned. Before leaving, as was his habit, he gave the old woman a checkup. They chatted, and he left some herbal tea to help her sleep. There were the constant cries of babies, the yelling of neighbors, the dogs. He wasn’t sure tea would help her sleep through that. He really needed to get her into a better place. Warmer Still

He was on his motorcycle, heading at last to Silver City. It was like riding into the blast of a hair-dryer set on hot. The sweat that had soaked him at Manoluk’s dried the moment he stepped out into the sunshine. Now his shirt was burning his skin. The heat didn’t help his troubles at all. There was one thing he couldn’t get out of his mind. Dtui was one of the world’s great carers. She knew about Geung’s condition and that he’d be frantic with worry about her. She wasn’t the type to be away all day without getting word back to him. Siri was sure something had happened to her.

For the first time, his wrinkled letter didn’t impress the guards at the gate of the Secret Police hq one little bit. The man on his stepladder looked down through the peep hatch and read it while Siri held it up to him.

“No. Nothing to do with us. Sorry, Comrade. Can’t let you in.”

After a good deal of contrived pouting and hammering and threatening from the doctor, the guard brought his commanding officer who, in turn, brought Mr. Phot, the interpreter. They still wouldn’t let Siri inside, but they did allow Phot to go out and talk to him. He brought out a large white parasol and opened it over their heads.

“What exactly have you got in there that’s so top secret?” Siri asked.

“Mystery,” was the reply. “People always need to think there’s something going on. It keeps them on their toes. If the proletariat knew we didn’t actually have any secrets, they wouldn’t respect us nearly as much.” Siri smiled. “So, you’re Dtui’s boss. She told me about you.”

“Has she been here today?”

“It was a flying visit.”

“Can you tell me what she wanted?”

“Don’t see why not. It was about something the Russian had started to say on her first visit. She hadn’t really taken much notice then, or perhaps I didn’t do a very good job of translating. He’d made a comment about the teeth marks.”

“The tiger’s?”

“He was sure it was some type of cat. A tiger was the most likely candidate. But there was something odd about them.”

“What kind of odd?”

“He said he’d never seen such sharp canines before. The indentations almost ran to a point. It was almost as if they’d been deliberately sharpened.”

“Sharpened? Why would anyone want to do that, and how?”

“Good questions, doctor. But it certainly makes the creature you’re looking for one scary old foe, don’t you think?”

They both stood reflecting on that for a few seconds.

“Hot, isn’t it?”

“Damned hot.” Getting Cooler

As he’d heard, Dr. Vansana was off at the reservoir. Siri sat in the back yard of his house downwind from a simply enormous fan that Sam, the doctor’s wife, had dragged out from inside. It was about three feet across and felt something like flying behind an Antonov 12. He had to hold his lemon tea with both hands.

“This is the coolest I’ve felt all day,” he yelled above the growl of the motor.

“I’m so glad you aren’t one of those vain men who wears a toupee. It would be in Nong Kai by now,” his hostess said.

He laughed, but she could tell he was deeply worried about Nurse Dtui.

“I just wish there was more I could do to help. I think I’ve told you everything we talked about last night.”

“But your husband was convinced this Seua fellow wasn’t the mass murdering type?”

“Absolutely. Vansana was quite disturbed after Dtui left, in fact. He was certain she was on the wrong track. But she seemed so convinced there was a connection. And to make matters even worse, she thought that connection might be supernatural. I’m afraid my husband doesn’t hold with that kind of talk. He’s a scientist.”

“Yes. I used to be, too. I can understand his feelings. Did she give you any idea of where she was planning to go today, apart from the Corrections Office?”

“That was it, I’m afraid. She mentioned she wished she knew more about spirits and werewolves. Nothing else.”

“Sorry, do you have a telephone?”

“Yes, Doctor. The regime kindly let us keep ours. The neighbors weren’t so lucky. Thank goodness Vansana’s a medical man.”

Siri tried to get through to Civilai and Phosy. Both were out of the office and neither had left messages to say when or if they’d be back. It was five already, and the last time anyone had seen Dtui was around ten that morning. He went off to the Police Department to file a missing persons complaint even though, without Phosy’s personal attention, he didn’t have much faith in the ability of the police force to find her.

Where had she gone after Silver City? What was preventing her from phoning or coming back? Perhaps she’d had an accident. For the moment, her trail had gone cold. Freezing

She couldn’t believe how cold it was in that place when the air outside was so hot. Or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to fear. She felt down the front of her uniform. It was caked in some kind of mud. Some of it was hard. It occurred to her it might have been her own blood. There was no way of telling. There were certainly injuries.

She’d been thrown to the ground and dragged like a sack of black beans and left where she now sat. Her chest, her face, her thighs were bruised and possibly bleeding. There was no light, not a trickle. The treacly blackness, the thin bad-tasting air, and the noises, these were the devils that made her physical health seem unimportant. They slowly added layer by layer to the horror of what she had stumbled upon.

There was nothing she could do but sit with her back against the wall and listen. Back and forth it paced, panting and shuffling and gurgling from its throat. Then there was the smell. She’d been in the morgue long enough to recognize death, but this was more. The blood and the death mingled with the creature’s own stink as if it were a part of it.

She had never feared more for her life. She could never have been more certain that this was her last day, and it was her own stupid fault. Why, she wondered at first, was she still alive when all the others had been killed instantly? But as her mind cleared, the reason became obvious. This was the final day of the solstice when the moon would be at its fullest. The others had been killed over the five days leading up to this night. The beast was waiting for that moon to rise before taking its final sacrifice. In a few hours, she would be just like the other women, except here in this cold black place nobody would ever find her body. Weretiger

It wasn’t until he arrived at Hay Sok temple that Siri realized he didn’t know the name of the monk he’d come to find. The moon was rising fast, and the temple grounds stood out in its light like the national stadium under floodlights.

He walked around the inside of the whitewashed wall until he got to the stretch that had been blown up the previous year, along with his house. The monks had done a good job of fixing it. There was no longer a hole to look through; but by standing on the incinerator, he could see the far side. The ruins of his former house still lay there. The rubble hadn’t been collected, and the side wall still warped and leaned inward. All but one, they’d been lucky to get out before the place collapsed.

“Are you up there thanking your lucky stars, Yeh Ming?”

The monk stood behind him, his pate freshly shorn. He wore his saffron wrap as a loincloth. In the moonlight, Siri noticed the rings of tattooed mantras around his upper arms and across his chest. It perhaps explained his magical abilities. Somehow the monk knew all about Siri and Yeh Ming. It was he who had rescued the white talisman, he who had predicted that Dtui’s mother would have a better year.

“I am that,” Siri smiled. “It’s been a while. How have you been?”

He sat down on top of the incinerator.

“You’ll eventually come to understand that luck and coincidence aren’t connected. It wasn’t a coincidence that your dog led you away from the house that night. It was no coincidence that the Indian tackled your policeman friend last evening.”

Siri laughed.

“Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Oh, yes. So many things, but not those things that concern you, Yeh Ming.”

“Who are you exactly?”

“You don’t need to know that. I see you’re wearing the talisman.”

In fact he could see no such thing, not with his eyes anyway. It was around the doctor’s neck beneath his shirt.

“It makes my skin itch.”

“You were fortunate in Luang Prabang. Didn’t I tell you to wear it always?”

“I was always poor at taking advice. But I think I get the idea now.”

“Good. What brings you here?”

“I thought you were all-seeing, all-knowing.”

“Only in spiritual matters.”

It was an odd comment that Siri would come to dwell on later.

“What do you know about weretigers?”

“More than I care to.” He walked over and joined Siri on the incinerator. “A weretiger is a tiger spirit that can from time to time possess the soul of a woman or man.”

“And vice versa?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could it be a man who turns into a tiger?”

“We are talking about spirits, Yeh Ming. Spirits don’t turn people into animals. They may make them believe they are this or that beast, but there’s no physical manifestation.”

Siri was taken aback.

“What? What about werewolves?”

The monk laughed.

“I’d say you have wasted too many hours watching motion picture films.”

It was true. Siri and Boua had sat through many hours of Lon Chaney with a face like a chihuahua biting into the necks of unsuspecting village folk. Given all that had happened to Siri over the last fifteen months, the least he expected was a parade of ghouls and monsters.

“Then explain this,” he said. “A man is released from Don Thao. He claims to be the host of a weretiger. A few days later comes the first of three killings, all showing evidence of a tiger’s bite and scratch marks.”

The monk looked perplexed.

“I cannot.”

“Is there a possibility?”

“As it indeed happened, there has to be a possibility. But in all these years, I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing.”

Siri shook his head and looked up at the huge moon.

“Do you think there could be a connection with the moon?”

“When did the killings take place?”

“The first was on the eighth. Then the tenth and eleventh.”

“The moon isn’t symbolic of spirit activity, but it is a great source of energy that unleashes a number of innate abilities and quirks. There are theories that the full moon can trigger electrical impulses in the mind. Not all insanity is connected to evil spirits.”

“Where do they hang out? Weretigers.”

“You mean apart from within the souls of humans?”

“Yes.”

“When they aren’t of this world, the Hmong believe they go to the other earth. It is a landscape not unlike the mountains they live their mortal lives on.”

“How do they get there?”

“You enter the other earth through holes in the ground or networks of caves. These lead you to a great body of water where spirits and humans can converse. It’s there that the supreme God, Nyut Vaj, decides whether you are eligible to enter the eternal Kingdom or whether you will have to float in purgatory.”

“I see. So all I have to do is find the other earth and I’ll have our friend, Mr. Seua.”

Siri climbed down from the incinerator and reached out a hand to the nameless monk, who ignored the gesture.

“Yeh Ming…?”

“Yes?”

“There’s no doubt these people were killed by a tiger?”

“Or some other large cat.”

“Then have you considered the possibility it was a real tiger?”

“We thought about it. But how could a wild cat run free in Vientiane without somebody seeing it?”

“What if it isn’t free?”

“You mean if it’s captive? It belongs to someone?”

“Do you know anyone who keeps wild animals?”

Siri’s mind raced to Dtui’s report of her visit to the circus school. He thought of the Russian and his puma. He had a mental image of the trainer late at night walking his big cat at the end of a leash. It was far-fetched but perhaps the only logical explanation, unless the monk was wrong about weretigers and werewolves. Surely Hollywood hadn’t made it all up.

“I may. And that reminds me. If there’s no such thing as a coincidence, I have one more for you to explain. I believe a bear might have sought me out and paid me a visit last Tuesday morning. Is there any connection between Yeh Ming and wild animals?”

“There’s an inseparable connection between Yeh Ming and all nature. Animals sense that.”

As he walked from the temple, one thought nagged at him. At Silver City, the interpreter had told him Dtui hadn’t been there long. He had said it was a flying visit. What if he’d been lying? But why would he? And what could Siri do if he had? The compound was a fortress, and he had no pretext to get inside. He was flustered and anxious and in such a state he couldn’t think as clearly as he’d like.

As it was close, he stopped again at Dtui’s room. He was disappointed but not surprised to learn that she hadn’t come home. So as not to worry Manoluk, he told her they had a case that might go on all night. He brought her a meal from the night stalls on Koonboulom and administered her medication. He did his best to appear calm; but all the while, his thoughts were on Dtui and what could have become of her.

He was in the back, searching for a glass into which to transfer the guava juice from its plastic bag. He pulled back a cloth on a low shelf and was surprised to find a row of textbooks. He squatted down and looked at the titles. They were in English but the words were similar enough to French to get the drift: Fundamentals of Surgery, Chemical Toxicology, Oncology, Urology, Basics of Nursing. Then there were dictionaries: English-Lao-English, English-Russian. And every book was twice as fat as it should have been because the pages were crammed with notepaper.

He selected the Surgery text. In Dtui’s tiny handwriting, on every page there was a detailed description in Lao, and presumably a translation in Russian. There must have been thousands of such sheets. Siri was overwhelmed for a number of reasons. He walked across to Manoluk with the textbook in his hand.

“Manoluk, does Dtui understand English?”

“She didn’t in the beginning. I think she’s got the hang of it now. She only reads and writes it. Can’t speak much. The problem’s going to be the Russian. She has to learn the whole thing again in a new language.”

“You think she actually knows what it all means?”

She gave him a look reserved for mothers whose daughters have been insulted.

“No, I didn’t mean it to sound like that. She’s an intelligent girl. But this stuff is hard enough in our native language. Learning it in two others is unbelievable. How long’s she been doing this?”

“Since before she graduated as a nurse. She originally planned to try for a scholarship to America. That was in the old regime and there were a lot of dollars around. So she started going through her old nursing textbooks, translating line by line. Then you folks came and took over, and all the American funds went out the window. So she started all over again with Russian.”

“I think she might have told me.”

“Well, she-”

“What?”

“She was afraid that if anyone knew she had other languages, they’d move her from the morgue.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Well, one, she got to like the work you do there. I think she’d like to be a, what do you call it?”

“Forensic surgeon.”

“That’s it. And two, you don’t actually have a lot of work in the morgue. Nothing’s so urgent that it can’t wait till morning. It’s a sort of eight-to-five job. She knows if she worked in the wards, they’d put her on shifts and get her translating and stuff. She wouldn’t have time for her study. She’s at it every night. She writes out little test sheets in Lao so I can test her, though I don’t really have any idea what it’s all about. She’s the one with the brains in this family.”

“So it seems.”

Dtui never failed to amaze him. All this time, she’d been preparing herself for further study, even before he recommended her for a scholarship. What he’d thought was an act of kindness on his part was actually the inevitable fulfillment of her plan. She was studying overseas with or without his help.

“Manoluk, we should talk about this again, but right now I have something urgent that needs taking care of. I’m going to have to run.”

He returned the textbook, gave Dtui’s mother her juice, and headed for the door.

“Thanks for coming in. Tell Dtui not to worry about me.”

“I will.”

He felt overwhelmed. As he shut the clunky door that didn’t fit its frame, tears came to his eyes. They were tears for Dtui and her dreams, and for her mother and her lifetime investment in her daughter. And they were tears of helplessness. Where on earth could he look next?

That’s when he remembered something Civilai had said.

Despite constant prodding and poking from the Party, Civilai had still managed to avoid installing a telephone in his house.

“If they want me that urgently, let them get out of bed and come and get me,” he said.

Siri and the bike trailing his pulled up in front of the wooden bungalow in the sprawling compound that had once housed the American community. If it weren’t for the vegetation, you’d swear you were in a suburb in South Dakota. The lprp had been only too delighted to take over this little piece of Americana and thumb their noses at the cia who were now confined to a couple of rooms at the embassy.

Six Clicks, as the Americans christened their home away from home, was six kilometers from town. It had a pool and a gymnasium and restaurants and was surrounded by a large wall that could make the expats forget they were in a nasty Southeast Asian country far from home.

As always, one of the armed guards from the main gate had accompanied Siri, just in case he had an urge to detour and assassinate the prime minister. He’d been here hundreds of times, and they still didn’t trust him. Siri beeped his horn.

Civilai appeared at the window and gestured for his friend to come in. His sweet wife appeared beside him and waved. Siri waved back but made no effort to get down from his bike. He pointed to his watch. Civilai had no choice but to come out to the street.

“We’re both over the hoof-and-mouth disease. You could come in, you know.”

“Sorry. I can’t stop. In fact, if you had a phone, I would have preferred to do this without the Six K’s.”

“Good, that. Coming from a man who only learned how to use a telephone last year. What’s so urgent?”

Siri looked at the guard and raised his eyebrows at Civilai, who dismissed the man. “It’s all right. He’s safe. You can go.”

The guard roared away, and Civilai came over to sit on his white front fence.

“You said at lunch you had a call from Dtui this morning.”

“And I thought you never listen to me.”

“It’s important, brother. She’s been missing all day.”

“Shit.”

“What was the call about?”

“Like I said, it was quite peculiar. She wanted to know whether there were any underground caverns or caves around the city.”

“You’re joking. How did she…? What did you tell her?”

“Well, do you recall the pl had its headquarters not far from the Black Stupa? It was just down from the U.S. compound. We used it as a base here till we took over.”

“Yeah.”

“We were always expecting to get attacked or kicked out. So we took a leaf out of the Viet Cong’s survival manual. We gave ourselves a number of escape options.”

“Tunnels?”

“That’s it. There’s quite a network down there.”

“Damn.”

“What is it?”

“Do any of those tunnels go in the direction of the river?”

“Of course. The water was the best way to get away at night. One of them actually passes directly under the French embassy.”

“How do you get access?”

“What are you hatching?”

“Just tell me.”

“Behind the main building, there’s an area covered with large paving stones. One of those stones has a small hole in one corner. You need a hook or some kind of jemmy. It lifts up.”

“Did you tell Dtui that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Listen. Go find someone with a phone.”

“What is it?”

“I think Dtui found those tunnels and something happened to her down there. The best we can hope for is that she got herself lost. But I’m afraid she might have found our weretiger.”

“Our weret…?”

“Tell Phosy to get some men there, armed, as soon as he can. If he’s not around, call in the bloody army. I don’t care what it takes.”

He kicked the starter of his old bike.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?”

“Siri, you do realize if she is down there with some animal or lunatic, she could already be…”

“I know. I’m putting my money on Dtui.”

He left eight inches of rubber on the road. Blind Panic

The creature that Seua had become sat on the riverbank watching the moon rise. He scratched at the blood-caked fur that covered him in patches and dipped his face into the muddy water to quench his thirst.

It would soon be over for another month. The nurse would be the last. With the moon at its zenith, he would make his fourth sacrifice on the steps of the Black Stupa. He would dedicate it to Nyut Vaj. It couldn’t be long, with all this love he showed, all this dedication, before his God would accept him into the eternal Kingdom. Then he would be at peace and cease to walk the earth in animal form.

He looked up again. It was time. Bent almost double, he prowled to the spot where the roots of the sadness tree tangled down the bank. He parted the thick reeds and crawled deep between the roots and into the earth.

Siri was in such a state when he arrived at the old pl headquarters compound that he almost drove into a pole out front. He skidded to avoid it and only righted himself at the last second. He killed the engine and ran to the gate. It was chained shut, and even with all the extra adrenaline pumping through his veins, too high to climb over.

He reached inside and felt around the chain for a padlock. There was none. The chain had been draped around the bars and tied like a rope. He wrestled it loose, opened the gate wide enough to get inside, and barged through. His heart was already beating fast when he started to run down the side of the main building and around to the back.

There he found himself on a grid of large rectangular concrete slabs. The moon was high and bright, and it didn’t take him long to find the secret entrance to the tunnel. He didn’t even need to use a tool to raise it; someone had been there before him and left the slab lying beside a gaping hole in the ground.

He hurried to it and looked down into a pit. A ladder of steep wooden steps led down into inky blackness. He had no hesitation: He lowered himself into the hole and, with his feet, felt his way down the rungs. The thought of sinking down into the earth reminded him of his being dragged below the stupa by the Phibob and without thinking, he stopped, undid the top buttons of his shirt, and re-hung the white talisman so that it was on the outside.

When the top of his snowy head was at the level of the ground, he reached into his shoulder bag for the flashlight. It was always there, so he hadn’t bothered to check before he left home. He never took it out, except on days when he got his teeth counted. His heart dropped. He’d forgotten to return the damned thing. It was missing.

It was a terrible moment. He was about to go down into the earth to find Dtui. He instinctively knew that every second could be vital, but he had no light. What help would he be if that thing were down there? At least the beam of a flashlight might have made it wary of him. How could he help if he couldn’t see? Suddenly a difficult project had entered the realm of the impossible. But there was no time and no choice.

After two more steps, his feet landed on packed earth and he glanced upward at the moon one more time before turning away from the ladder. It was hopeless. Only a yard from where he stood, there was nothing to be made out with the naked eye. There were no shadows or shapes. The channel of moonlight ended at a wall of black.

Again he fumbled in the bag, this time to retrieve the motorcycle tire iron he’d brought to lift up the concrete. It was a small weapon that could have little effect against the power he’d seen evidenced on his morgue slab. But it was something to hold on to, like a stick to a blind person: a cattle prod between himself and the unseen.

He walked forward. The walls curved over and above him to become a ceiling just above his head. A man of average height would have had to stoop through this narrow passage, but Siri could stand to his full height. He dragged his left hand along one wall and could tap the opposite wall with the iron: such was the width.

After ten slow, cautious paces, the tunnel curved to the left and any evidence of light from the outside was erased. Behind him now lay the same tarry blackness as ahead. He was blind. It was at this point that an anxiety of sorts began to infect him. It arose from his foolishness in abandoning logic and safety. He could make neither head nor tail of what he was doing. In the jungle, he wouldn’t have survived if he had showed such flagrant disregard for common sense.

He walked on. His dragging hand picked up a load of passengers that bit him and crawled up into his sleeve: probably red ants defending a nest. He slapped them off quietly against his side but didn’t slow his pace. The air was becoming staler. The dry earth and musty root smells mixed with other less natural, less healthy scents. He had no doubt that something had died down there in those tunnels, and he hoped beyond hope it was an animal.

On he went, slowly, nervously.

The tip of the iron struck only air. Siri stopped and felt the far wall with his hand. A second tunnel. It cut to the right. How far had he already veered left? Which route would take him in the direction of the river? He waited for a sign. Surely with all the bodies he’d put in the ground, one grateful spirit could come along and prod him in the right direction. But there was just him, and the blackness, and silence. Nothing more.

He went right, increasing his pace as his instincts warned him about time. He knew he had to get to the river. He was no longer careful about what his hand might touch or what might lie under his feet. He visualized a long, well-lit passage and marched along it, barely tapping with his iron.

When it hit him, it was so sudden and overwhelming that he panicked. It had quickly wrapped itself around him, covered his face. He flailed around, hit out with the iron bar, and fell back against the wall, kicking into space.

He clawed at the cold, thick accumulation around his mouth and neck and cleared space enough for an unrestricted breath. Still he swung his iron back and forth like a child in an imaginary sword fight, but he hit nothing, heard nothing, and soon understood that he was expending all his energy against himself.

He held up a hand and stepped forward. He had come to a thick barrier of spiderwebs that blocked the tunnel ahead.

If this was a test, it was a failed one. He waited for his breath and his heartbeat to cease their rantings, and de-webbed himself. He wondered whether he’d made too much noise fighting off his fictitious attacker-whether he’d been heard. He couldn’t be sure.

He quickly retraced his path to the main tunnel, turned right and proceeded somewhat more cautiously into it. Time hadn’t allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, so he knew there was absolutely no light filtering into the tunnels. He had completely lost his sense of direction. In a straight line, a brisk walk from the compound to the river would take no more than five minutes. To an old man in a pitch-black tunnel, a minute can stretch to a significant portion of the remainder of your life. The tunnel seemed endless.

Suddenly, the ground wasn’t there anymore. Siri stepped into empty space, and only his guiding left hand against the wall prevented him falling arse over apex. He pulled himself back, got to his knees and reached down into the void with his iron. It was no bottomless chasm, just a deep step. The metal clunked against something solid but not heavy, then once more. The smells around him were overly familiar, but he had no choice but to step down into whatever was there.

He waded ankle-deep through a well of what he was sure were bones. They crunched beneath his feet, so they were small and not all fresh. Yet with every step he dreaded treading on a larger corpse. Because of this threat, he trod respectfully, with his breath held.

When he finally arrived at something solid, it proved to be no more than the step on the far side. He remembered the geography of the Viet Cong cave networks and wondered whether this was a pivot room. If it were, there would be tunnels leading off in each direction. Matters would become even more confusing if he had too many alternatives, so he didn’t bother to find out. He continued going straight. He climbed the far step and set off again into the tunnel. But things soon went horribly wrong.

Late the previous year, after rescuing his neighbors from their ruined house, Siri had been hospitalized until the masonry dust could be cleared from his lungs. Although the dust was eventually flushed out, the air didn’t ever return with the same enthusiasm. Consequently, the doctor started to find himself short of breath at the worst possible times. But none of those times had been as inopportune as now.

The further he moved from the only obvious source of oxygen, the deeper he had to trawl for air. He knew he had to concentrate on his breathing. The attack of the spiderweb had taken a lot out of him and he was now in danger of blacking out. If he lost consciousness, this whole horrible ordeal would have been a waste of time.

He stopped, lay down on the ground where the richer air would still be, and gently meditated himself into a more relaxed state. He ignored the slithering and crawling around his head, and concentrated on replenishing his energy.

This was when he began to hear, or believed he could hear, sounds. They were muffled, far off, and could, for all he knew, have been coming from above the tunnels rather than within them. But this was late at night in Vientiane. There wouldn’t be much activity in the streets. He listened intently.

At first he didn’t recognize it. The noise was sporadic and muted like a bee in a tin can. He wasn’t able to identify it as either natural or man-made. But the longer he listened, the more obvious it became to him that the sound was getting louder. If it was in the tunnels, it could mean only one thing. It was coming toward him.

He told himself not to panic, reminded himself he had the element of surprise. But surprise on whom or on what? Some surprise it would be, with him flat out in the middle of a narrow passage. And what if there were no connection between this noisemaker and Dtui’s disappearance? Was he really considering laying into some stranger with an iron bar just because he was scared out of his wits?

Yes.

“Don’t panic,” he told himself. He breathed. He lay still. He thought calm thoughts, and the sounds got louder-not a buzz now, but a growl. Now and again the growl would rise to a howl, a human-animal high-pitched roar, and it came to him:

This was the sound from his dream in Luang Prabang. This was the unseen danger that approached through the jungle, the sound that he was to listen for in the future, to avoid, to flee with every iota of strength he possessed. He shuddered, and his nerve endings tingled the length of his body.

Still he focused. Still he breathed. No sort of attack or defense would be possible if he were unconscious. He devised a plan. When he had enough breath to carry it through, he would return to the room through which he’d just passed. There were corners there, perhaps other tunnels. These could give him a chance.

Because of the natural deadening effect of the earthen walls, it wasn’t possible to tell just how far off the creature was. But from the steady increase in volume, it was evident that it was traveling at a rapid pace.

Siri breathed. He concentrated. He heard other sounds. He heard footsteps, heavy shuffling steps, and, between the howls and grunts, a heavy wheezing breath like that of an old man with a hole in his windpipe. He heard a low steady dragging sound and a sniff. The tunnel was now carrying noise with a frightening clarity.

It was time. Siri got to his feet and walked slowly back toward the last room. Since he’d entered the tunnel, he’d counted the distances in paces. It was forty back to the deep well. At thirty-eight, he’d stop and proceed carefully until he found the drop. But as he walked, the sounds grew even louder behind him. He was tempted to run, but he knew the limitations of his lungs.

Then, one new sound made him stop completely. It was brief but unmistakable: it was the sob of a woman. He listened for a repeat of it, but heard nothing but the snarls and ever-loud howling. Could it have been…?

He reached the end of his count and began to tread carefully, bent over using his iron as a walking stick. The step was further than he’d calculated: annoyingly further. By the time he finally reached it, his breathing was strained again, but there was no chance to rest. He stepped carelessly down into the pit and crunched some of the debris under his foot.

The sounds behind him immediately stopped, and he froze in position. There was the standoff: Siri fighting for breath, half up, half down, not daring to make another sound. And there was the dilemma: was the creature also frozen, listening for other sounds, or was it already running silently in his direction? If the latter were true, it could be on him at any second.

He looked back over his shoulder, fearing the worst.

“Breathe, Siri.”

The view there should have been the same black tar he’d stared into since he arrived. He shouldn’t have been able to see a thing, but for some reason, deep, deep at the end of his tunnel, there was a gray speck. It hadn’t been there when he’d walked in that direction a while earlier.

It hadn’t occurred to him for a second that the creature might need artificial light. Something had always made him believe it could find its way through the maze in darkness, using its instincts. But if it were part human, part Mr. Seua, perhaps it needed to use a lamp to see its way. Perhaps the distant grayness was the reflection from that light source. And perhaps that could be his one chance.

There came an almighty howl that echoed along the walls and passed Siri in a gust. The creature was on the move again, and Siri could indeed see that the gray shadow shimmered in time with the footsteps. He sighed with temporary relief.

Once again he waded through the matter in the pit, skating his shoes so as not to make undue sound. He skirted the perimeter of the room on one side, tapping the wall with his iron. He passed two corners. He found no other exit. He arrived at the opposite tunnel with time running out and inspected the other side of the room with new urgency. His premise was mistaken. The room had one entrance and one exit and no alternatives. His only hope was the pit.

Light, like a very distant sunrise, was beginning to filter down the tunnel. With a lamp, Seua would see him soon enough if he stayed in the room. But the creature might not think to look down below the lip of the step. Siri carefully cleared a space by the aperture through which the creature would arrive. He was a little off to the right, so he wouldn’t be trodden on when it stepped down. He would have very little time to act.

There were two possibilities. If the creature’s destination lay beyond this room, he would stay hidden and let it go. If its goal were the room itself, he wouldn’t know until it had stepped down to where he was. He would eventually be discovered. But there might just be a few seconds in which to attack the creature, to spring at it from behind and hit it with the iron bar.

He knew he wouldn’t be allowed more than one thwack, so he would have to be deadly accurate. It would need every last gram of Siri’s strength. So he lay down against the step, practiced his meditation, and slowed his heartbeat to gather his resources for that one attack. And as more light filtered into the room, he could make out the carcasses of small creatures in varying stages of decay a foot deep all around him.

“Breathe, Siri.”

Events that until that moment had been happening so fast, suddenly slowed as if time were stalling. The tunnel must have been longer than Siri had anticipated. The approaching sounds continued but the doctor felt as if he’d been lying there for an age. He had the opportunity to think about Yeh Ming and wondered why the old sage had failed to send warnings of this danger.

If ever his temple-he, Siri-were under threat, it was now. A terrible feeling of guilt came over Siri. Despite all the careful planning that had gone into his choice as host to the grand old shaman, he’d let him down. He’d knowingly put himself into a life-threatening sit-

Suddenly the creature was there. The beam of a flashlight dazzled directly into the room from just behind the step. From where he lay squashed tight against the dirt wall, Siri couldn’t see who was holding it, but the sound of snarling was almost directly above him. Only a wedge of black shadow kept the doctor from sight.

His heart beat so loudly, he felt sure it could be heard. He breathed silently to a rhythm he’d set himself and gripped the iron bar tightly in his fist.

What happened next wouldn’t be fully explained for a very long time. There were two halves to the mystery-one to baffle his hearing, one his sight-that wouldn’t ever completely fit together. The sounds came first.

They began with footsteps shifting away from the step and the continued sound of dragging. There was one final howl. Then, from a point way beyond, came three incongruous sounds one after the other. First was the clucking of a chicken. Unlike all the other sounds, it didn’t resonate around the room.

There followed two heavy thumps and a loud crack.

Finally came the scream of a woman.

Then there was silence.

When he heard the scream, Siri abandoned all caution and clambered noisily to his hands and knees. But before he could hoist himself into a position to see over the step, the light from the flashlight went out.

It was a darkness more profound and a silence more total than he’d ever encountered in his life, because it followed directly on the heels of chaos. He had no idea what he’d just heard or what to expect. He couldn’t get the eerie scream from his mind.

“Dtui?” he shouted.

His voice exploded in the new silence like thunder.

“Dtui? Is that you?… It’s Siri.”

There was no reply.

If the creature were there in that blackness, Siri was now exposed. But there was no calling back his voice. There was no turning around. Something awful had just happened, and he needed to know what it was.

He climbed the step and shuffled forward, expecting his feet to find evidence of some horrific scene. His left foot kicked against something that rolled away. He knew it had to be the flashlight. He took a step forward and fumbled around in front of him on the packed earth. But his hand came to rest in something warm and wet and sticky like molasses.

He pulled away and took as deep a breath as he could. He knew what he’d found. But this was no time to become squeamish. He continued to sweep his palms back and forth until he made contact with the flashlight. He grabbed it, located the switch and, with his heart in his mouth, clicked it on.

Nothing happened.

“Please, Buddha, don’t say the bulb’s gone.”

He tapped the flashlight and shook it and tried the switch again.

Still nothing.

From a little way ahead of him, no more than a yard, there came a breath. He rattled the battery frantically, shook the flashlight again, smacked it harder against his palm.

Another breath came from the dark.

He took one breath of his own, concentrated, screwed the head of the flashlight tight, and tried the switch one more time.

The tunnel lit up like a theater and, looking around him upon its stage, he saw the most impossible, the most extraordinary scene. The Man Who Ripped Off His Own Head

Dtui awoke face-down. The scent of Breeze laundry detergent filled her nostrils. Her other senses were slower to come around. A fluffy white kitten lay some two feet from her head. It had no visible legs or face.

She couldn’t feel her own tongue in her mouth, so she knew the medication was strong. She didn’t want to begin to imagine what pain it was covering or what parts she might be missing. She just basked for a minute or two in the state of being alive.

The side of her face felt flat against the pillow, as if it had been there for an eternity. But no amount of willpower would convince her head to change its position. So she looked sideways at the familiar room through eyes gummy with the emissions of sleep.

There was nothing to distinguish one of Mahosot’s private rooms from another. They all had the same Wattay blue walls, one traditional Lao print of an elephant, a year-old Thai plowing calendar, and a window too high up to see out of. She’d spent many hours in these rooms before her morgue career, but never in a bed. She felt a little like royalty-very sore, immobile royalty.

The kitten stirred. Growing out of its bottom were a small nose, a mouth, and two very green eyes that seemed to take some time to realize Dtui was staring back.

“Dtui?”

“Hello.”

She sounded like a crocodile.

Siri was truly delighted. His neck was stiff from falling asleep during his watch again, but he clapped his hands and touched her numb cheek with the tips of his fingers. His smile made her feel important.

“Well, it’s about time,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t.”

Siri reached down below the sheet.

“Hey. What are you doing down there?”

She tried to smile but dribbled instead. Siri retrieved her arm and took her pulse.

“You have no more secrets from me, I’m afraid, Nurse Dtui.”

Pleased with the pulse count, he took a tissue from the roll and wiped her mouth and eyes.

“Why am I face-down?”

“Most of your wounds are on your back. Do you remember what happened?”

In fact she did. Most of it remained clear in her mind, although she would have preferred otherwise.

“I was dragged, and…”

“And beaten.”

“Dr. Siri?”

“Yes?”

“Did he… mess with me?”

“No. Not at all.”

“That’s good.”

She may have managed a smile. Siri may still have been talking. But she was soon unconscious again.

She swooned back into the room several more times that day. On one occasion, a big grinning Mr. Geung was leaning over her, encouraging her to stay awake, saying something about disinfectant prices.

On another, she may have been entertaining a flock of white-uniformed nursing students.

One more time, Civilai sat reading a report, making pencil notes in the margins.

The last time, it was dark but for a covered lamp on the table beside her. Siri slept in the corner of the room on an unlikely hospital reclining deck chair. She’d used up all her sleep, so had nothing to occupy her time other than reliving her demon. Now was the moment when she could either box him away in a dusty corner of her psyche and let him rattle from time to time, or exorcise him and let herself get on with life.

The night ticked on painfully slowly. The doctor slept with a crafty smile on his lips. She wondered what moment he was reliving in his dream, what happy time was revisiting him from the past. But she needed him awake.

“Dr. Siri. Dr. Siri.”

The poor man was disoriented. He’d had a full day at the morgue: an accidental double shooting at the army training ground. Half-awake, he remembered where he was, hurried over to Dtui and took her wrist.

“You’re doing very well,” he said, swaying slightly.

“Will I live?”

“A lot longer than me. You really are an amazingly resilient young thing.”

“Siri, what’s happened to my mom?”

He blushed. “Ah, yes. That.”

“Doc?”

“Well, she’s moved in with me.”

“You don’t waste any time, do you? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine now. She’s very relieved that you pulled through.”

“How bad was I?”

“The first three days, we weren’t sure you’d make it.”

“Damn.”

“You’d lost a lot of blood.”

“I’ve been here longer than three days?”

“Dtui, it’s April 10th. You’ve been here well over three weeks. It’s almost Lao New Year.”

“God, how am I ever going to afford…? I can’t pay for all this and ma, and…”

He smiled and shook his head.

“No. Don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t believe how well things have worked out on that front. I’ll tell you all about it later. The bills are taken care of.”

Siri spent some time looking at Dtui’s wounds and doing a few basic tests.

“Doc, I’m sorry I woke you up. I wanted to talk about it.”

“We will.”

“No, I mean now. I need to verbalize it. I really think the sooner I get it all out of my system, the better.”

“It could be quite draining. Are you sure you’re strong enough?”

“I’m wide awake and pumping.”

“Then talk away. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to solving this last little mystery. It’s been driving me nutty.”

He pulled over the straight-back chair from the desk and sat beside her with his hand on hers.

“Uncle Civilai told me about the tunnels.”

“What made you think of looking underground?”

“There’s this old lady at the slum. People call her a witch ‘cause she knows all about these old traditions and uses herbal potions. I went to ask her about the weretiger. She told me about the caves and the holes down into the other world. As no witnesses had come forward to say they’d seen the creature, it seemed logical that it was in hiding. But there aren’t that many places above ground you can hide in a city like Vientiane.

“I didn’t plan to go down there and be some Wonder Woman character, honestly I didn’t. I hate confined spaces. Even our room at the shanty gives me the willies. I just went down to take a look, really. I didn’t have any evidence, you see? I had nothing to prove he was down there. So I went to see if it was likely, or even possible. I opened the slab and went down to the bottom of the ladder and flashed my light down the tunnel. I called out, ‘Anyone down here?’

“There was no answer. I didn’t hear any sounds. There was no way in Hades I was about to go down that tunnel. So I was just climbing back up the ladder when this big shadow comes over me and bang, something smashes me over the head.

“I came to and he’s got my flashlight and he’s dragging me through the tunnel by the wrist just like I don’t weigh anything. I was dizzy, but I struggled and screamed and he gave me another thump with the butt of the flashlight. He was incredibly strong. It was a sort of superhuman strength.”

“You knew who it was straight away?”

“Dr. Vansana had described Mr. Seua to me. The physical description was the same, but this wasn’t the sociable, likable fellow the doctor knew from Don Thao: this was a maniac. I tried to talk to him, calm him down, but I knew something had snapped.

“He left me somewhere in the tunnel and went off with the light. That was worse than the violence: the dark. Siri, I’ve never been so scared. I was drowsy from the blow and bloody from all the dragging. And it was so completely black, I was just left with my thoughts.”

“I know exactly how you felt.”

“He came back once or twice with stray dog carcasses and squirrels. He’d sit in front of me in the lamplight and rip them apart with his teeth and eat them raw. I’ve seen some disgusting things in my life, but that beat ‘em all.

“Even then, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew about the victims and the tooth marks. But he was a man, a big powerful man but still a man. I supposed at some stage he’d turn into a weretiger once his blood tank was full, and I’d be his next victim. I was convinced when the moon rose, I’d get to witness the change.”

Siri took a tissue from the roll and dabbed at the tears that streamed down her face into the pillow.

“Thanks. I had my watch then and I kept thinking about the moon. I knew if I had any chance to escape, it would have to be before midnight. When he was with me he’d beat me, slap me cruelly, for no reason. I was already very weak but I knew there’d only be one chance. He went off once with the light and I mustered all my strength and headed into the blackness in the opposite direction. I believe my nerves had shut off the pain by then. I could barely feel my legs but fear drove me on.

“I don’t know how long I staggered. There was nowhere to hide. I didn’t know where I was going, but I prayed I’d come to a way out. Then there was a light. I was so happy that in my feverous state, I believed I’d been rescued. I looked through the beam, and there was Seua’s bloodied mouth snarling at me.

“That was the beating that finished me off. I only remember one more thing after that, waking up to an unbelievable sight. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed it, but it seemed so real.”

“Describe it to me in detail.”

“Well, the flashlight was on the ground shining directly at Seua. He’d changed since I’d last seen him. Not the metamorphosis type of change, I mean he’d changed his clothes. I realized what had happened. There was no weretiger, not in the physical sense, but he had this secret identity he could change into.

“He had this fur. Who knows what type of animal-or animals-it was from. It was tied around his body with ropes. It was on his arms and legs too. And there was a hood. That was made of fur as well, black fur with eyeholes cut out of it. He was pretty well covered, but I could tell it was him from the way he moved.

“On the back of his left hand, strapped there, was a paw. I assumed it was a real animal paw with the claws extended over his fingers. If he’d clenched his fist it would have made a frightening weapon. I can’t believe how clear that all was, how much I remember from those few seconds. On the ground at his feet was the jawbone of another animal, or the same animal. The teeth were really sharp. I got the feeling he’d dropped it. I don’t know how it fitted in with the rest of the costume at all.

“I became fixated with whatever it was that was happening to Seua. It was incredible. Something had certainly got into him, or into his hood. He was ripping at it with both hands in panic as if some insect or rat or something had crawled inside it. He pulled it off and the claw accidentally raked over his face. It left this deep fast-bleeding wound across his eye.

“But removing the hood didn’t seem to get rid of the problem, Doc. It even made it worse. He was slapping at his head like whatever had been in his hood was now inside his skull. I was amazed. He took a run, full speed and head first, at the side of the tunnel. Just like that. As if it was someone else’s head he was throwing at the wall. It didn’t work. He smashed his head again, then grabbed his ears.

“Dr. Siri, it was like he was trying to wrestle his own head off his shoulders. And the Lord Buddha protect me if he didn’t do it. He stood there over me, wrenched at his head with both hands, and snapped his own neck. He almost pulled it clean off. It just flopped down like a puppet’s.

“I screamed. I remember that much. Then I was out of it. I was swirling around in nightmare-land till I woke up today and saw your fluffy white head on my bed.”

“That was the day before yesterday.”

“I’m not surprised.”

All the while, Siri had been mopping up both their tears with a hand towel. Now, as soon as she was done with her story, the tears stopped and she smiled. She wasn’t purged of her demon, but he would be easier to control now.

“All this time, I’ve been worried I was wrong with the autopsy,” Siri said. “It didn’t make any sense. Who, in any state of mind, would be able to twist off his own head? I had to assume you or some other person had done it. But there was no evidence on his body that he’d been in a fight.

“The scratches were clearly from his weapon. The blood on his face matched that on the wall. He died from a broken neck, and I could convince nobody, not even myself, that he was the one who did it.”

“Well, he did, Doc. I’m a sorry witness to that. Did you get anything else at the autopsy?”

“The claw and the jaw bone were both from a real tiger, and they match the marks we copied from the bodies. God knows where he got them. He’d set up this complicated grip on the jaw so he could use it like a glove puppet. He’d wear it on his hand and he could really bite with it. It must have been confusing for him that he didn’t really materialize into the weretiger he believed he was.

“The fur was one more example of how much time went into this secret identity you mentioned. It was sewn together painstakingly from the pelts of all those animals I found in the pit: dogs, cats, possums, anything he could lay his hands on. He must have spent all the time between his release and the full moon to set it up.

“There were nodule growths on his brain: small tumors. I’m ashamed to say they meant nothing to me. It’s all a bit beyond my humble field of expertise. I have no idea what they mean, but I’m not counting out one theory I heard that night. There might be a connection between the moon’s energy when it’s full and the electrical impulses in the brain. It could explain the rapid change in his personality.

“I’ve taken samples of everything. When you go to Russia, you can take them with you, find yourself a good-looking young forensic scientist, and follow up on this for your thesis.”

“Yes. Dream On, I and II.”

“Not necessarily. The next exams are at the end of May. Given what you’ve done already, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get through those easily enough.”

“They wouldn’t even let me sit.”

“Your name’s already on the roster.”

“How the hell did you swing that?”

“They’re desperate for people with a basic grasp of Russian.” “How did you know…? Has my mom been engaging in pillow talk?”

“Don’t be vulgar, girl. Nothing improper is going on between your mother and me… or Mr. Inthanet.” “Jesus, is he still here?”

“I can’t get him to go home. But I must say, my house is a lot more palatable with other people in it. I don’t feel quite so much like a dowager duchess in her castle. The old fellow’s stepping out with my next-door neighbor.”

“Not the creepy guy from Oudom Xay?”

“No. Dear Mr. Soth moved out under mysterious circumstances. I came home one evening to find him and his family and all their furniture gone. I mean the other neighbor, my own Miss Vong.”

“Vong and Inthanet? You must be joking.”

“Not at all. They appear to be getting along very nicely, and it does keep her out of my hair.”

“Are they, you know, performing together?”

“Dtui. No. It’s all very proper. They go for motorbike rides down to the river, hold hands listening to her traditional tapes in the back garden.”

“How sweet.”

“I think it was all a bit too sickening for my dog.”

“Saloop?”

“He’s left home.”

“I thought you two were inseparable.”

“Obviously not. I think he’s found himself a-”

“Siri.”

“What is it?”

He hurried across to check her pipes and wires.

“I saw him. I saw Saloop.”

“Where?”

“That day. That day in the tunnel when I came around. It completely went out of my head till you mentioned him. He was just sitting, watching Seua run amok.”

“You sure you didn’t add him later, in your dreams?”

“No. ‘Cause when I saw him, I remember wondering whether you were around, too. I guessed you’d come looking and brought Saloop with you.”

“He wasn’t with me.”

“And you didn’t see him?”

“No. When I got the flashlight working, I saw the aftermath of the scene you just described, but with one addition. There was an old lady-I mean the spirit of the same old lady that came to our office often when you two had gone home.”

“You forgot to mention that.”

“Didn’t want to spook anyone. Well, she was there, or it was there, standing over Seua’s body. I went to do what I could for you, and she vanished. But Saloop; I have no idea how he found his way into the tunnels. I’ve been seeing him in some odd places lately, but he’s definitely gone back to his old street life. He doesn’t even have the manners to come and visit from time to time.”

“Perhaps he’s afraid of all those house guests, Siri, and he’ll come home when they’ve gone. Doc?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“For?”

“Everything. Thanks for coming to look for me that day. Thanks for taking care of Mom. Thanks for being here now. I owe you big-time.”

“You can pay me back by passing those exams.”

“Just as well you don’t want it in cash. What was the secret about paying the bills here you couldn’t tell me?”

“Dtui, sweetheart, it’s three-thirty in the morning and I have a kidney to dissect at eight. You don’t suppose I could have a little sleep before then, do you? Even if you aren’t tired, I’m exhausted.”

“Sorry. You’re right. Go get some sleep.”

“You need anything?”

She thought about spending the rest of her life with a triangular face.

“A new perspective? You couldn’t flip my face, could you?”

“I don’t see why not.”

He took her chin in one hand and her forehead in the other and gently dragged her nose across the pillow to face the other wall. It gave her a brief preview of the pain she’d be enjoying over the next week. Siri sighed and creaked back into his chair.

“G’night, Dtui.”

“G’night, Doc.”

“Oh, Doc?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it still hot outside?”

“Damned hot.” April New Year

Vientiane was preparing for New Year on the 14th with its usual verve. Houses had to be cleaned, repairs made, old scores forgiven. It was customary to begin the new year in a state of physical and moral cleanliness.

March and early April had been the hottest on record, and a lot of people had forgotten what rain felt like. Excluding the Government, everyone was looking forward to a few days of water tossing, and hosing down, and walking around in shorts and rubber sandals. Songkran was Laos’s most joyous and uninhibited calendar event.

All the splashing generally got Mother Nature in the mood too, and she’d join in with some generous pre-season rainstorms to begin the long process of slaking the thirst of the land. But if old Mother Nature had been in the meeting at the Interior Ministry on the eleventh, she’d probably have become as hotheaded as Civilai.

He stormed out after the final vote with his glasses steamed up and his two aides scuttling along after him.

“Fools,” was all he had to say.

It was Sunday. Inthanet, with the invaluable aid of his lovely assistant, Miss Vong, was making the final preparations for his big show. From his vantage point on the hammock in the back yard, Siri couldn’t help noticing the red flushes on their collective cheeks. Either sewing hems on Royal capes was hot work, or they’d been up to something. Siri didn’t relish getting a mental picture of what that may have been, but he was pleased that Miss Vong finally had a little romance in her life.

Manoluk lay sleeping on the cot on the veranda. One overworked fan whirled at her feet at the end of a daisy chain of extension cords that brought it out to the garden. Another chain led to the living room, where a second fan swept back and forth drying the new paint faces of a lineup of delighted puppets. A third fan puffed at the ruddy cheeks of the lovers in the back room. The radio played northern flute music live from the army studio. The refrigerator made ice for the lemon tea. The rice cooker prepared lunch.

The drain on the national electric grid from Siri’s house alone was enormous. He expected a raid at any second. So when the bell rang from the front gate-a bell that only strangers used-he knew the jig was up.

“Visitor,” Miss Vong called out.

“So I gathered,” Siri agreed. “I don’t suppose you’d like to go and see who it is, would you?”

“I’m threading.”

“Of course you are.”

The old Miss Vong would have been at the fence with her binoculars and notepad at the first footfall on the front path. Now she didn’t care. Siri reluctantly climbed down from the hammock and shuffled stiffly through the house. The bell had rung with great urgency twice more before he reached the front.

“Patience, patience,” he said, and creaked open the gate that was neither locked nor latched.

To his amazement, Mrs. Fah, the wife of his old neighbor, Soth, stood a few paces back from the gate. She’d been crying and was shaking violently.

“Mrs. Fah. What’s wrong?”

“Dr. Siri, can you come with me, please?”

These were more words than they’d exchanged in all the time they’d lived next door to one another.

“What is it?”

“My husband is dying, and he says it’s your fault.”

Siri rode his motorcycle with Mrs. Fah on the back, holding his bag. She gave directions, and he was interested to see that the neighbors had moved about a mile from their old house to a similar suburb. The woman insisted on getting off the bike long before the house came into view and walking ahead, lest her husband see her. In fact, the new house was almost identical to the one they’d left in such a hurry. It was all most peculiar.

Mrs. Fah hadn’t given Siri any details of her husband’s ailment, so he didn’t know what to expect. He parked in the street and followed the wife through the opulent house to the bedroom. The huge king-size bed contained a remarkably shriveled Mr. Soth at its center. His skin was gray, and his cheekbones stood out on his face.

“Mr. Soth, what’s happened to you?”

The man opened his eyes slowly and glared at Siri.

“As you see, Doctor, I’ve been struck down.”

“By what?”

He reached out for Soth’s wrist but the man pulled away.

“I don’t need your medicine. I can afford a dozen real doctors. None of them have helped.”

“I don’t understand. What caused this?”

Soth looked beyond Siri.

“That.”

Siri turned his head and was stunned to see a trim version of Saloop lying in the corner of the room with his head on one paw.

“Saloop? Well, I’ll be. So this is where you got to. How are you, boy?”

Soth’s eyes grew wide. “So you can see it.”

“Of course I can.”

“Of course? My wife can’t. The kids can’t. Nobody else can see the damned thing but me. I’ve had three fortune-tellers here telling me it doesn’t exist.”

Siri stared at Saloop, who showed no sign of recognizing his old master. His eyes were glazed and red like cocktail cherries. His fur was dull. His left ear seemed to sit lower on his head than his right. There was no movement but for the irregular rise and fall of its breath. Siri was overcome with a sudden pang of sadness.

What he saw there was not his dog; it was the malevolent spirit of an animal that had suffered an unnatural death.

“It’s dead,” Soth said, and a tear appeared in the corner of his eye.

“Why’s he here?”

“It’s here to haunt me. It won’t rest till it sees me on my pyre. It won’t let me eat or sleep. It plans to stay here until I rot away.”

“But why?”

“Why? Why? Because I killed it, that’s why.”

“You killed my dog?”

“Yes, but because of you. Because you tried to make a fool of me. You didn’t leave me with any choice. I lured it into my yard and brained it with a shovel. It was to get back at you. This is all your fault.”

“The dog didn’t have anything to do with you or me.”

“It was your dog. I knew you liked it. It was just revenge.”

“But of course he’s not going to see a connection. Only man would hurt a third party to get revenge on someone who’d wronged him. It’s against nature. If your grievance was with me, you should have settled your debt with me directly. The dog’s spirit doesn’t know why you hate it.”

“It’s you I hate. This was all your fault. The bloody dog drove me out of my house, then followed me here. I can’t shake it off. You make it go away.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Can’t? Look at me, Siri. Look what state I’m in. You want my death on your conscience forever? Call off your dog.”

“No. I mean it isn’t for me to do. You have to beg forgiveness from the spirit of the dog for what you did.”

“Huh? I’m not asking a damned dog for forgiveness. What do you think I am?”

Siri looked at the man, still arrogant even at the threshold of death. He showed no remorse. The only person who could remove this curse was Soth himself, but to do that he had to accept responsibility.

“Mr. Soth, I’m going to be perfectly frank with you. There’s only one way for you to save yourself, but it is possible. You need to stop shifting the blame for all this onto me. You have to perform a basee ceremony and truly believe that you and you alone have caused this. You have to ask the spirit of the dog to forgive you. No one else can remove this burden.”

“So you’re refusing?”

“No. I’m telling you what to do. I’m giving you a way out.”

“I curse you for this, Siri. I curse you a hundred times.”

Siri closed his bag and walked to the door. He looked down at Soth.

“You’re in exalted company on that front, Mr. Soth. Don’t forget what I said. It’s all up to you.”

Soth spat in the doctor’s direction.

In the living room, he reported his warning to Mrs. Fah and gave her the same instructions.

“He’ll never do it,” she said.

“If he doesn’t, he won’t survive this.”

“No? Good riddance.”

Her honesty shocked but didn’t actually surprise him. He’d heard how the husband talked to the wife. He’d seen her kept as a slave in his house. She was glad this was happening, and once Siri confirmed that her husband wouldn’t make it, she’d finally had the courage to speak her mind.

“If you need any help,” Siri said, “you know where I live. I’m serious.”

On the short ride home, Siri tried to put his emotions into some kind of order. He didn’t feel guilt at this haunting. He was sad his dog had died, but proud the animal had gone after the bastard. It’s what he would have done. As for Soth, this was the backlash of Yin to punish him for his years of Yang. He couldn’t fight that. It comes to everyone, either in this life or in the next. He was glad to see that even in times of confusion such as these, the laws of I Ching were still in order. No Spontaneous Fun-by Order

The sign at the back of the stage was written in stylish letters on a white banner.