Chapter 17: Parents He Never Knew

Chapter 17: Parents He Never Knew

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

There is a kind of curiosity that feels like a splinter. You can ignore it for a day, maybe two, but it never stops pressing.

Yun Zhou had been ignoring this one for eleven days.

He sat on the top bunk of a second-class train car with his forehead against the window, watching the city thin out into rice paddies and concrete drainage canals. In his lap lay a folded piece of paper with an address written in the body’s own cramped handwriting, found in the back of a drawer under a pile of unpaid bills.

Lotus Court, Block C, Unit 9. Eastern Ring.

The last place the old Yun Zhou had been happy.

I told myself the box could wait. The hunger could wait. The questions could wait.

But the man in the gray suit, the one who “regretted the accident,” keeps returning in my memory with a face I can’t quite see.

Whoever cleaned that house knew exactly what they were looking for. And my mother knew exactly who would come.

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Two hours to the Eastern Ring. A long way to go for a ghost.

***

Lotus Court was not what he had expected.

He had pictured something grim, a tenement, a slum, a place that matched the desperation of the boy who hanged himself. Instead, he stepped off the bus into a small, tidy neighborhood of low brick houses with terra-cotta roofs and little gardens crammed with marigolds and chili plants. Laundry fluttered on bamboo poles. An old man swept the front step of a shop selling dried fish. Somewhere, a radio played a song from thirty years ago.

It looked peaceful. It looked like the kind of place where nothing bad had ever happened.

Which is exactly how places look when something has been buried there.

He walked slowly, with his hood up and his shoulders hunched, the posture of a visitor who didn’t want to be noticed. His gloved hands were jammed in his pockets. His new charcoal shirt hung loose on his frame.

Block C was at the end of a short lane, a row of eight identical houses sharing a common wall. Unit 9 sat at the very end, a modest, narrow building with a green door, a shuttered window, and a small front yard choked with weeds.

A sign hung from the gate, bleached by the sun.

FOR RENT. INQUIRE WITHIN.

Beneath it, someone had scrawled in marker: NO ONE HOME.

Yun Zhou stood at the gate for a long time.

***

The memories came the way they always did, uninvited and out of order.

A small boy running through the weeds, shrieking with laughter, chased by a woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow.

A man’s rough hand on his head. “Don’t let your mother catch you.”

A kitchen. A radio. The smell of garlic frying in oil.

He pressed his gloved fingers against his temple and breathed through the wave of ache that rolled up behind his eyes. It wasn’t his grief. He kept telling himself that. The body carried it, like a stone in a coat pocket, and he was only the temporary wearer.

But the stone is heavy.

And I can’t seem to put it down.

He pushed the gate open. The hinges shrieked.

The yard was overgrown, the garden beds swallowed by weeds, but along the fence, a few stubborn marigolds still bloomed, tiny orange suns against the green. He walked up the cracked path to the door and tried the handle.

Locked.

He crouched. The lock was a cheap tumbler, rusted at the edges, and the old paperclip in his pocket made short work of it. Two clicks, a turn, and the door swung inward with a soft sigh.

Dust hung in the air like smoke.

***

The house was empty.

Not stripped, not ransacked. Empty, in the way a body is empty once the soul has left. The floors were bare. The walls were scarred with pale rectangles where pictures had once hung. A single mattress, rotting, slumped in one corner of the front room. In the kitchen, the cabinets hung open, their shelves bare. The stove had been removed. The refrigerator had been unplugged and left with its door ajar, black with mold.

He walked through each room slowly, running his gloved fingers along the walls.

Bedroom. Small. A square of lighter paint where a dresser stood.

Bathroom. Cracked tile, a rust stain shaped like a hand.

Back room. A child’s room.

He stopped at the doorway.

It was tiny, barely wide enough for a bed and a desk. The window looked out over a neighbor’s wall. The floor was wooden, scuffed and sun-faded, and on the inside of the door, at about the height of a ten-year-old’s chest, someone had drawn a series of horizontal lines in pencil.

He stepped closer.

Each line was labeled with a date and a number in a woman’s neat handwriting.

Zhou, age 5. 98 cm.

Zhou, age 6. 105 cm.

Zhou, age 7. 112 cm.

The marks climbed up the frame to age twelve, then stopped.

The last one read: Zhou, age 13. 148 cm. Too skinny. Eat more.

Yun Zhou stood very still.

In the silence, he could hear his own heartbeat, slow, cold, steady, and, beneath it, something else. A soft, tight pressure in his throat.

That isn’t mine.

It isn’t.

He traced the last line with his fingertip. The pencil was faint. The wood was dry and splintered. The woman who had written it had pressed down hard, as though she wanted it to last.

Eat more.

His jaw tightened. He closed his eyes for exactly three seconds, then opened them, and the moment passed. He pulled his hand away and wiped the graphite from his glove with a slow, deliberate motion.

Sentiment is a luxury. The dead don’t collect on it.

What I want is the cleaning crew.

***

He searched the house for an hour.

He lifted floorboards. He checked behind the loose wall panels. He crawled into the attic through a hatch in the ceiling and ran his hands along every beam. He found rat droppings, mouse nests, a cracked flowerpot, and a button from a child’s coat.

He found nothing else.

Too clean.

A house that’s been lived in for twelve years leaves a thousand small traces. Fingerprints in the grease. Scratches on the baseboards. Coins in the cracks. Someone didn’t just move the furniture. They stripped everything.

Even the dust is wrong.

He crouched in the back room and looked at the floor. A faint, even film of gray covered the boards, and he could see his own footprints, clear and distinct. But elsewhere, in the corners, along the walls, the dust was uneven. Brushed. As though someone had swept the surface and then sprinkled fresh grime over it.

A professional.

They didn’t just clear the house. They staged it.

They wanted it to look abandoned.

He stood slowly, dusting off his knees.

Not an accident cleanup. A cover.

***

The neighbor was an old woman sitting in a plastic chair outside Unit 8, shelling peas into a metal bowl.

She watched him come down the path with the sharp, unembarrassed interest of someone who had little else to do. Her face was a map of fine wrinkles, her hands knotted with arthritis, her white hair pinned in a messy bun. She wore a faded floral blouse and a pair of house slippers worn through at the toe.

“You’re the Yun boy,” she said before he reached the gate.

Yun Zhou stopped.

Careful.

He let his shoulders slump and his gaze drop, the picture of a hesitant visitor. “You remember me, ma’am?”

“Of course I do. You used to chase my chickens.” She squinted at him, then softened. “Goodness. You’ve gotten so thin. Come here, let me look at you.”

He approached and stood in front of her, hands clasped, head bowed. She took his chin in a calloused hand and tilted his face to the light. He let her. A small, apologetic smile flickered at the corner of his mouth.

“The neck,” she said quietly.

He lowered his eyes. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” But she didn’t press. She released his chin and patted his cheek with an odd, gentle roughness. “Sit. I’ll get you some tea.”

Pity. Genuine. She’s wanted to say something to this boy for years.

Don’t squander it.

He sat on the edge of the porch while she hobbled inside. A radio muttered somewhere in the house. Chickens scratched in the yard. A faint breeze stirred the leaves.

She returned with a chipped mug and a plate of sesame crackers. He accepted both with a small, grateful bow.

“I’m Auntie Mei,” she said, lowering herself back into the chair. “You wouldn’t remember. You were so little.”

“Thank you for the tea, Auntie.”

“Eat.”

He ate a cracker.

***

They talked for nearly an hour.

He started with small questions, the kind a lonely young man might ask. How were the neighbors? Had anyone moved away? What happened to the little shop down the lane? She answered at length, glad of the audience, and he let her wander, nodding in the right places.

Slowly, patiently, he turned the conversation toward the past.

“I don’t remember the night they died,” he said at last, very softly. “Not clearly. I was at school, and then there were men in the house, and then I was in a car.”

Auntie Mei’s hands stopped moving.

For a moment, she said nothing. A pea rolled from her lap and dropped into the dust.

“You don’t remember?” she asked.

“No. I’m sorry. It’s all...” He shook his head. “Everything from that week is gone.”

He lies, the old woman’s expression said. But the lie was soft, almost kind, and she accepted it.

He let a thread of Oculus slip out, very thin, very light, and met her mind.

A slow, grieving current ran beneath her thoughts. Old guilt. Old fear. And, at the center, one clear picture, sharp as a photograph.

...three cars. Black. No plates. Midnight. The men in gray suits...

...the poor boy sleeping at his teacher’s house, thank heavens...

...the woman screaming. Just once. Then nothing...

...I should have called someone. But who? And who would have listened?

He drew the thread back. A faint pulse of heat spread behind his eye. He took a slow breath.

“It was an accident,” Auntie Mei said, in the careful voice of someone repeating a lesson. “A car. On the road to the market. That’s what the men said. That’s what the papers said.”

“But you don’t think so.”

She looked at him.

For a long time, she said nothing. Her eyes, filmy and pale, studied his face, and he met them, as gentle and as open as a child’s.

At last, she exhaled.

“Your mother was never in a car that night,” she said. “She was here. In the house. I heard everything.”

***

Yun Zhou did not move. He did not let his face change. Inside, every muscle in his body tightened like a wire being drawn taut.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

She set the bowl of peas on the ground beside her chair. Her hands trembled.

“It was past midnight. I woke up because of the dogs. Every dog on the lane was barking. I went to the window, and I saw three cars parked outside your house. Black cars. Very clean. No license plates.”

She swallowed.

“Seven men got out. Seven. All in gray suits, very neat, like office workers. But they didn’t walk like office workers. They walked like...” She searched for the word. “Like soldiers. Like people who’d done this before.”

Seven.

The number landed in his mind like a stone in still water.

“They went into the house,” Auntie Mei continued. “I didn’t hear a door break. They just... went in. I thought it was strange. And then your mother screamed.”

Her voice cracked.

“Not loud. Not long. Just one scream, like she’d been surprised. Then silence. Then, a few minutes later, a man’s voice, shouting something. Your father’s, I think. And then silence again.”

“And then?”

“And then,” she whispered, “they worked. For hours. I could see the lights through the window. They carried things out. Boxes. Bags. Furniture. All night, until just before dawn. And in the morning, there was a police car and an ambulance and a man with a clipboard telling everyone it was a car accident. A tragic one.”

She looked at her hands.

“I never said anything. I was afraid. I told myself I was old, that I might have dreamed it, that the police would know better. But I didn’t dream it, boy. I saw them.”

Yun Zhou’s face was calm. A little pale. A little stunned.

Seven men. Three black cars. Gray suits. They stripped the house. They erased the evidence. They fabricated a cover story.

And Auntie Mei has been carrying this for seven years, alone.

I need details.

“Did you see their faces?” he asked quietly.

“Only one. The last one out. He stood under the streetlight for a moment, lighting a cigarette. Tall, older, silver hair. Very neat.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. But...” She hesitated. “He had a badge.”

“A badge?”

“On his lapel. A little silver pin. I only noticed it because of the light.” She held her hands a few inches apart. “A shield. About this big. Like the ones on the Association’s cars.”

The Hunter Association.

His heartbeat did not skip. His breath stayed even. But behind his eyes, something very old and very cold sat up and took notice.

“Are you sure?”

“I thought so, at first.” She frowned, searching her memory. “But it wasn’t quite right. The Association’s shield is plain. This one had a mark on it. Little dots, in an arc, here at the top.” She tapped the air above her left shoulder. “Seven of them.”

Yun Zhou’s fingers tightened on the mug.

Seven dots.

In an arc.

The same pattern pressed into the lid of the box.

He lowered his eyes, afraid that, for an instant, the mask might slip.

“Thank you, Auntie,” he said. His voice was small and steady. “For telling me.”

She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. Her palms were dry as paper.

“Be careful, child,” she said. “Whoever they were, they were not people to cross. And whoever told you your parents died in a car crash...”

She did not finish the sentence.

***

He stayed for another half hour, because leaving too quickly would have looked strange. He finished the tea. He ate three more crackers. He promised to visit again. When he rose to go, she pressed a small wrapped parcel into his hands, a bag of dried plums, still warm from the sun.

“For the road,” she said. “You’re too thin.”

“Thank you.”

“Eat them.”

“I will.”

He walked back down the lane with the parcel tucked against his chest, past the green door, past the overgrown garden, past the marigolds that stubbornly refused to die. At the corner, he stopped and looked back.

Unit 9 stood quiet in the afternoon light, small and dim and empty. A bird hopped along the roof tiles. A breeze stirred the weeds.

Seven men.

Seven dots.

A shield like the Association’s, but marked.

Gray suits. No plates. A professional cleaning.

His mouth curved, very slightly.

I came to look for ghosts.

I think I found a hunting party.

He turned and walked away, hood up, hands in his pockets, a thin, quiet figure vanishing down the road. Behind him, the afternoon sun spilled across the rooftops of Lotus Court.

And inside his jacket, pressed against his ribs, something small and dark and heavy gave one slow, patient thrum.

***

To be continued in Chapter 18: “The First Job”