Five Monsters

i

Beautiful black eyes, with horizontal pupils, like a goat’s. Grey, scaly skin of surprising suppleness, flowing over a massive set of bones. The teeth are small and close-set. When it moves, the air buckles and pitches around it: the air is like water to it, and it swims above the ground rather than strike the earth with its feet. Twenty years ago it came to live in the park by the harbour, just as they were starting to build the new bridge. Every afternoon in summer the wind stirred in the trees, and it descended on the building site, scattering workmen left and right, and terrifying the young men pumping out bilge from the boats queued for dry-dock. The beautiful eyes swept down and circled the bridge pilings; the supple grey skin rippled in the gale of its motion, and brushed the workmen as they hastened away. Every time a man was touched by one of the scales, he developed a rash on that part of his body, and had to leave off work for a week. His sores ached and itched. His breath took on an unpleasant briny odour that only he could detect. He felt nauseated by the most simple foods, and could only take meals after sunset. In this manner, every man hired on to build the new bridge was taken ill. Young men from the docks stepped in to fill their places, and they too dropped away when they were brushed by the grey scales, or fled in terror from the beautiful eyes. Day by day work on the bridge continued from morning until nightfall, when the wind blew again, and disabled another handful of workers. Work progressed slowly, and the new bridge was not finished for years. They say that another twenty years will pass before we finish paying for the extra labour. The wind always blows hard in summer. No-one can be sure if it lives on in the park by the harbour.

ii

When a fishing boat dropped its line next to the shipping channel out in the bay, and after the fisherman waited an hour or more for a strike, it came. The line went taut, then slackened again. The fisherman was using little ocean fish as bait. His fishing co-operative raised the little fishes in a farm just up the coast from their docks. They were silver and blue, and in the water they looked like winking stars. The line went taut, and slackened again. Then the line went taut again. The fisherman was sure he had a strike, and that the fish on his line was just the kind of fish he was looking for. He was not using a reel; he pulled the line in hand over hand, gripping the near end tight with his clumsy rubber gauntlets. Metre by metre the line came in. He saw the float clatter over the gunwale and drop to the deck. Only ten metres more. Then five. Then two. He saw a twinkling in the dark water of the shipping channel, like the play of lantern lights on a rain-swept street. The end of his line was in sight. He pulled with both hands; he braced his legs against the gunwale and pulled with all his body. As the boat rolled with the waves, he caught fleeting glimpses of the water before him: always the same glistening, just below the surface, where his catch waited as if anchored in the swell. This went on for nearly half an hour. Finally the fisherman tired, and let the line go slack for a moment. He saw the line bow slightly with the release of pressure. Just before he could take it up again, the line jerked backward, and the hook-end flew out of the water, leaving an arc of silvery spray behind it. The line lay loose on the deck. A little bait fish twitched in a puddle of ocean water. The hook was nowhere to be seen.

iii

Long ago the river was much wider, and the mouth of the river was much further inland. Over the centuries the river carried mountain soil down to the ocean, and the people built up dykes and levees to catch the silt, and farms began to march down from the flat lands to the old tidal pools. The river contracted under the pressure of the farms. Near the end of the ancient delta, it shrank into two channels, with a long island in between. A town grew up on the island, populated by merchants and artisans. This town burned out after a bombing raid in June in the last year of the war. After the Occupation, when the merchants began to prosper again, the island town redeveloped itself as an entertainment district. First they brought in girls from the countryside. Then layer after layer of girls came to the island, from all over the province, and later on from other parts of Asia and Europe. They built up multi-storey buildings full of hostess bars, with high-class restaurants below. Every time they made a new building, they sank another foundation into the soft sand below the island. Last autumn, the papers told of a couple who went walking along the banks of the river on the night of the district festival. Neon lights make the river shimmer with a soup of colours, until the landward end approaches, and everything becomes a steely grey tinged with red. The young lovers were caught short by a foul smell emanating from the land around them. It was like – so they later told the police – a tank of nightsoil with the lid open in the height of the humid season. They were from the country, and so could be expected to know about such things. This story was only in the papers for a day or two. Later on, there was a small notice that the two young people had married in their home town, and planned to live with the bride’s parents.

iv

Every community had its execution grounds, of course; but we don’t know where they are any more. It was only speculation to assume, as they did, that it came from a corner of earth made unkind through years of cruelty. Two women and four men had stopped off for a nightcap at a street stall on the road by the castle moat. The row of stalls appears at twilight every day, starting shoulder-to-shoulder in the business district, and thinning out as it strings along the perimeter of the old town. It’s something we’re proud of, and no amount of trouble will do away with them. There were two groups that night: the women and one of the men came together, and the other three men arrived separately. The two parties occupied all the seats between them, and the first group had to shift two stools to the left to accommodate the second. When it came to the stall, there was no room to sit down. The customers were eating and drinking; the master and his assistant were busy making fried dumplings and noodles for their customers. No-one heard it approach, and no-one saw it at first. A man from the second group felt an unfamiliar pressure in his back, and the master – who, contrary to expectations, was a non-smoker – caught a whiff of old earth below the pleasant aroma of his pork dumplings. The master was the first to look up, and all he could see through the curtains of his stall was a shape outlined by the weak light of street-lamps from across the road. He assumed it was a new customer with an odd hat, and he called out a greeting, apologising for the wait. One of the women – who was very drunk – looked over, and assumed it was someone in fancy dress. The man who had sensed a slight pressure in his back began to feel ill. His companions looked around, and saw a succession of dark metallic shapes in the dim light beyond the curtains, as if the new customer was clothed in lacquer ware boxes. The damp earth smell grew more powerful. The master sensed that something was up among his customers, and he called out again, with another apology, and asked if everyone was doing all right. Everyone looked back then, but no-one had the courage to lift the curtain. It shifted its weight from one leg to another, and turned back toward the castle. Why he felt ill, he couldn’t say; but the man who felt its touch was sure he saw a dark silhouette, of the scabbard of an old long sword, when it walked away.

v

We could have known about the new bypass long before, because it was mentioned in the minutes at city hall and at the prefectural assembly, and later on in the little government newspaper they send around. All the same, it came as a shock when they drained the old reservoirs. There were at least half a dozen of them, in a ring around the city. Each had served a different rice-farming village in the old days. Some were little more than ponds; others were impressively large, like minor lakes. One or two had been re-developed as local parks, with baseball diamonds in the dry ground above the flood-water line. They were all set about with old trees, and there were local shrines next to most of them. When the farmers were active, these reservoirs served a few dozen households each, controlling the flow of water to the fields. No-one owned them, so eventually it seemed that we all owned them together, which meant that they were public property when it came time to choose a route for the new bypass. It’s always cheaper to build on public land than to expropriate, and one can see that it’s less disruptive, too. We didn’t know they were there, at the beginning. The reservoirs were drained in the summertime, and that’s the season when the fireflies are active. There were always fireflies in the damp places out there at the edge of the city. One wouldn’t be surprised by a dull glow at night, emanating from the hollows of the old reservoirs. It continued through the summer, and into the autumn. It continued when they brought in sand and loose fill to level out the ground. Every load of rock that went into the hollows sent up dust, and in the dust, a dull yellow-orange light. At night the light changed, and became pearlescent. The land below the pilings for the new bypass began to sink. More rocks, and more concrete, went down into the pits. With every load, another burst of light came from somewhere below. They should have known about that. It should have been obvious, that there was something down there. The little government newspaper says they plan to bring back the reservoirs once the bypass is finished: that the pilings will eventually be like islands in the water; that the trees will be replanted again. Well, seeing is believing, as they say. They said the same about the new subway. They said it about the new bridge over the harbour. We’re paying for it still.