[Previously: Nairobi]
NOVEMBER 1925: SHANGHAI
It was November; 1925 had almost run itself out. Based on the events of this last year, I was starting to think I’d be quick behind it. But we’d left Kenya with a lead: Jack Brady, formerly of the doomed Carlyle Expedition, was supposedly in Shanghai. He held a lot of answers to the questions Elias had left us with. We just needed to find him.
I was somewhat familiar with the so-called mysteries of the Orient from my time spent in Chinatown. The Los Angeles version sits mostly between Alameda and Macy Streets. While its history is one of working Chinese who built the railroad, now it’s mostly opium dens and gambling houses, with strong tong activity to keep the more proper folks steering clear. When we stepped off the boat in Shanghai, it didn’t exactly feel like coming home, but the culture shock wasn’t that fierce. Aside from the native language, of course. Though, if a universal translator exists, it’s money. Guns come a close second.
In my experience, needles in haystacks have got nothing on people who don’t want to be found. Luckily, we had an advantage. Shanghai might be a huge city, but Brady was an American. He’d stick out as sorely as we did. Someone here was bound to know where he’d holed up.
As we made our way around Shanghai’s less desirable areas, one name that wasn’t Brady’s kept popping up: Ho Fang, ostensibly a Chinese merchant but also a high priest of something or other To End The World, as so many cultists we’ve met seem to be fond of trying to do. His name was everywhere and nowhere, and – we were told – that he was untouchable.
Maybe we’d have to see about that.
Anthony Chang, the editor in chief of The Shanghai Courier, provided us some stories of strange goings-on around Shanghai. These included a fire on Chin-Ling Road, in which fleeing monks seemed to be chased by a floating cloud of flames; a double murder on Lantern Street supposedly perpetrated by a giant bat; and the unfortunately named Seaman’s Club damaged by what some drunken witnesses described as strange creatures that had come crawling out from the river. Possibly baloney…but I’d seen enough oddities of my own not to completely discount any of it.
We also found out that The Dark Mistress, a yacht registered to one Sir Aubrey Penhew, had been docked in Shanghai, though we didn’t find any evidence of Penhew himself. Of course, he wasn’t the one we were after.
Among Elias’s things had been a matchbook from a Shanghai bar, the Stumbling Tiger. Jack Brady had been known to frequent said joint. We found our way there.
The Stumbling Tiger’s main barman was a Chinese who introduced himself as Fergus McChum. A chatty type, he remembered Elias, who’d asked him questions about the Carlyle expedition and an American, most likely our boy Brady. McChum supplied us with a very interesting detail: About six months prior, two men had had a rough altercation at the Stumbling Tiger. McChum recalled one of the men saying, “Roger, you have to calm down.”
I was willing to bet that the arguing men were Roger Carlyle and Jack Brady.
McChum wasn’t done, though. He gave us another piece of the puzzle. Brady just so happened to be in love with a young Chinese woman named Choi Mei Ling. Mei Ling worked at the Yellow Lily, the same place that mercenary Nails Nelson had told us he’d seen Brady, back in Kenya.
The Yellow Lily was a flower house on Lantern Street. For those not in the know, “flower houses” have nothing to do with flowers, least of all the delicate kind. From my time spent in the Chinatown back in California, I’d learned flower houses were simply a more innocent term for brothel.
As if there’s anything innocent about a whorehouse.
We scrammed from the Stumbling Tiger to the Yellow Lily. A drunk from the bar and four spiffy sheiks tried to tail us, but we slipped them with a cab ride.
At the Yellow Lily, the adult in our group, Doc Frome, spoke to the brothel’s madam. The doc was the only one willing to pay the fee to go behind the door with the madam for some information. The rest of us waited in the bar.
I couldn’t get a pro, and Neptune couldn’t hold his drink. Molly got propositioned but somehow managed to swindle some guns out of the situation. I lost track of Bob.
Doc Frome returned with some important information. Choi Mei Ling had been at the Yellow Lily, and she had hidden Brady there with her. But then Mei Ling was sold to another brothel, and Brady disappeared. Not long after, another girl and a man who was presumably her client were killed upstairs at the Yellow Lily, in the room that Mei Ling had occupied. The wall had been smashed through, in a shape resembling a giant bat. Mei Ling was now at the House of Quiet Repose, led by the ruthless Lin Yen Yue.
Before we could make anything out of that, Bob came rushing in from the street, yelling about men with guns coming.
I grabbed Neptune by the collar and jumped behind the bar. Shots rang out, riddling the bar with bullets. The bottles overhead shattered. We couldn’t stay here.
I shouldered my way through the door that Doc Frome had taken with the madam. We ran up the stairs, with Molly getting off a few shots to cover us.
At the top of the stairs, we saw the broken wall. The only place to go was back down…or out and across to the next building.
Bob jumped to the fire escape across the way. Neptune, the doc, and I followed. Molly jumped, too. She almost didn’t make it, but Bob grabbed her wrist and hauled her up.
“You probably should have dropped one of these,” he said, noting the gun and cigarette occupying both of her hands.
We got down the fire escape and headed to the House of Quiet Repose.
When we arrived, it was just before a car. Out of it stumbled one of the spiffy sheiks, holding his gut. Molly’s cover fire had apparently connected. He stumbled into the brothel, leaving his car behind.
A car is valuable no matter where one goes. We broke in, finding two machine guns.
My first thought was that Christmas had arrived early. Unfortunately, so had Santa Claus, in the form of Madam Lin Yen Yue and no fewer than nine armed bodyguards.
I dove under the car, thinking that its chassis would save me a few precious moments before they started firing. Only they didn’t start firing. Instead, Madam Lin calmly invited us inside for tea.
While the others followed her into the brothel, I felt like a fool crawling out from under that car, brushing lightly at my jacket and trousers. At least nobody said anything about it. Not to my face, at any rate.
The House of Quiet Repose lived up to its name. An opulent parlor occupied the front of the house. Beyond lay another parlor, this one decorated with ancient-looking artifacts. A number of statues depicted a woman who was rounded, with a small head, large torso, and small legs. The face was a mask. I couldn’t see any eyes, but the mouth was a maw. Bob and Doc Frome named her as The Bloated Woman. She reminded me of Hypatia Masters.
I didn’t like thinking about the Masters girl, or what had happened to her back in Nairobi.
But Nairobi was the past. This was Shanghai, and Lin Yen Yue was holding court.
Madam Lin sat herself down in front of a heavy curtain behind which something stirred. Lin was also looking for Jack Brady. He’d stolen from her some scrolls called the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan.
Where had I heard that name before…? Hsan. Hsan. Then it came to me. Back in Nairobi, the old seer Bundari had talked about someone knowing how to reconstitute the Eye of Light and Darkness. Said they were in Shanghai. Called them Hassan. But it wasn’t Hassan, it was Hsan!
I could have punched myself for being so thick.
Lin Yen Yue continued to tell us that Brady’s girl Choi Mei Ling was no longer here, at the House of Great Repose. Mei Ling had been taken by Ho Fang, the so-called untouchable leader of Shanghai’s Order of the Bloated Woman cult. If we wouldn’t have guessed from the statuary, the Bloated Woman was a goddess of blackness and darkness. Her cult was a sister organization to the Bloody Tongue, with which we’d had plenty of run-ins already.
Because of course they were. Psychopaths tend to gravitate to each other. Though, what did that say about the five of us?
Lin made us a proposition, and not the kind one would expect from a brothel madam. She’d outfit us with whatever armament we wanted and she could provide, release Choi Mei Ling from her contract with the House of Great Repose, and let Brady – and us – live, if in the next twenty-four hours we retrieved for her the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. If we didn’t retrieve the scrolls and didn’t hand them over to her, she’d track down all of us and have us ripped limb from limb.
That threat sounded extreme, but on Lin Yen Yue’s command, from behind the curtain lumbered two great white apes that she called Ping and Tuntun. Funny names. Nobody laughed.
Without much choice in the matter, we accepted. A man named Wei was charged with taking us to Ho Fang’s. He let us choose some weapons from Madam Lin’s copious armory. I picked up a shotgun with a sling, a handgun, and a machete in case quarters were too close or we needed to be stealthy. Then Wei piled us into a Studebaker for a long drive through the night to Ho Fang’s impressive mansion.
We snuck into the mansion via a long underground passageway. There was a guard, but Bob knocked him out. We argued, probably for too long, over what to do with him. Molly and I favored throwing him down the ladder to the underground passage, but Bob and Neptune didn’t like the idea of killing somebody without reason. Doc Frome suggested tying him up and gagging him, which would at least slow him down when he woke up.
We avoided a guard’s barracks and snooped through the other side of the mansion. Unlike some other mansions we’d looted, this one was basically normal. No human sacrifices, deformed creatures, or ceremonial chanting. Doc Frome did find a desk with some notes and a telegram. No Seven Cryptical Books, though. And Neptune found what he thought was probably Ho Fang, asleep in his bedchamber. Why he didn’t kill the bastard then and there, I will never understand, especially after we found Choi Mei Ling.
She was alive, held in a terrible torture cabinet with scorpions and rats. We got her out of there, but Bob and I had to take turns carrying her back to the underground passage due to the rats having chewed on her feet.
Molly suggested we set the place on fire before we go. I wholeheartedly agreed. But Mei Ling just wanted to get to Jack, and Bob, Neptune, and Doc Frome thought it wiser to keep as low a profile as possible. Mei Ling would not be there when Ho Fang woke up, but he wouldn’t know who’d taken her. Unless he talked to the guard we’d left alive.
Mei Ling told us that Jack was with a friend, Mu Hsien. Mei Ling could guide us there. We got ourselves a car. There were too many of us to fit inside, even with Mei Ling laying across our laps in the back, so Neptune – being the slightest – had to ride in the trunk. He made a fuss for a while but eventually quieted down.
We made it to Mu Hsien’s house. He welcomed us inside. Brady was there, and he and Mei Ling had a happy reunion. Mu Hsien invited us to stay and rest.
I don’t know about the others, but I had a terrible night’s sleep. Snippets of the horrors I’d seen kept intruding on my mind: the walking dead, a monster of screaming faces, men and women tied to stakes and burned and beaten to bone, the slimy larva that had spilled from Hypatia Masters’s belly, Betty Too devouring those cultists…and that name we’d heard in the Bent Pyramid, the name I didn’t want to think for fear that if I did, something evil would crawl from my nightmares into my skin and eat me alive from the inside.
In the morning, we met with Brady again. He and Mu Hsien were having tea. Another Chinese man joined us: Chu Min, a friend of Brady’s. Together, they were working on some scrolls. The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan.
While Chu Min went to stretch his legs, Brady relayed his side of the Carlyle Expedition story. Most of it echoed what we’d already heard from Besart, back in Cairo. Brady did have some additional information, though. He had escaped from Nairobi with Roger Carlyle, who was now in a sanitarium in Hong Kong, suffering from nightmares of his own after his experience in the Bent Pyramid. Brady had also seen Sir Aubrey Penhew on his yacht, The Dark Mistress, here in Shanghai. According to Brady, Penhew was on Gray Dragon Island, where he was getting ready to do…whatever his brand of cult was trying to do.
Brady was determined to keep Penhew from accomplishing his goal. To do that, he needed the secrets held within the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan.
The five of us – Molly, the doc, Bob, Neptune, and I – debated what to do about that.
Under the terms of our deal with Lin Yen Yue, we owed her the scrolls. Nobody wanted to get dismembered by Tingting and Pun, or whatever their names were. But Brady and Chu Min needed them equally as much, to stop Penhew. We figured there was no reason why we couldn’t copy the information from the scrolls for Brady and Chu Min and then give the originals to Lin Yen Yue, thus honoring our bargain.
Before we could explain our plan to the others, Chu Min came running back into the house.
“Jack!” he shouted, as gunshots exploded from the front. “Run!”
Good idea. But where? And why the hell did I leave my guns back in my room?!
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