Frogmouth

"I've got it!" Constable Lim, starting to jump up and down, said in triumph, "It's the ghost of someone you beat to death in one of the cells downstairs and he's come back to exact his revenge and the terrible howling sounds and the scrapings and the chain-rattling"—so far there hadn't been any chain-rattling, but if he was right that would come later—"How many people have been beaten to death in this station over the years, would you say, sir?"

Senior Detective Inspector O'Yee said, "None."

"Suicides!"

O'Yee shook his head.

Lim said, "Bad accidents!" It was how detectives worked things out: a step at a time. Lim said gently, "I don't suppose . . . I don't suppose we could both be imagining it, could we?"

. . . Creak . . . herk . . . AAARRAGAH— Wah!

RAAAHHGGG!. . . Whoomph!

Lim said sadly, "No."

FROGMOUTH

The Yellowthread Street Mysteries

YELLOWTHREAD STREET*
THE HATCHET MAN*
GELIGNITE*
THIN AIR**
SKULDUGGERY
SCI FI
PERFECT END
THE FAR AWAY MAN**
ROADSHOW*
HEAD FIRST*
FROGMOUTH*
WAR MACHINE*
OUT OF NOWHERE**

Also by William Marshall

THE FIRE CIRCLE
THE AGE OF DEATH
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
SHANGHAI
MANILA BAY
WHISPER

*Published by
THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS
**forthcoming

MYSTERIOUS PRESS EDITION

Copyright © 1987 by William Marshall
All rights reserved.

Cover design by George Corsillo

Mysterious Press books are published in association with
Warner Books, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10103
A Warner Communications Company

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in hardcover by The Mysterious Press.
First Mysterious Press Paperback Printing: June, 1988

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Hong Bay district of Hong Kong
is fictitious, as are the people who,
for one reason or another, inhabit it.

I
n blackest still night, all over Hong Kong, the sleepless lay awake in their beds, their eyes flickering at shadows and wan plays of light on ceilings.

There was a steady rain falling. Without force, without breaking the silence and the stillness, at 4:00
A.M.
it turned all the deserted roadways coal dark and ran in courses down the yellow faces of streetlamps and blurred them.

"Daisy."
In Yat's Animal and Bird Life Park and Children's Zoo on Kwai Chung Street near the harbor, the rain caught in the leaves of trees, grew heavy with weight and overflowed onto unlit stone walkways and ran away in drainage channels by the cages and wire fences to discharge through a pipe across rocks at low tide out into the sea.

In their beds the sleepless turned and glanced at the outline of those who could sleep beside them. They listened to their breathing.

"Daisy . . ."
CROCODYLUS TOMISTOMA: SUMATRAN CROCODILE.
"Daisy."
DO NOT PUT HANDS OR ANY PART OF THE BODY AGAINST THE FENCE.
The same warning was painted in Chinese characters on the wooden sign below the English. Below that was the warning in another language: Hindi or Arabic—in the poor light all the symbols were dim.

The awake tossed and touched their thumbs and forefingers to their temples: they could find no sleep.

"Daisy . . . !" It moved. In its warm earthy place beneath a half-submerged log in its pool, the crocodile moved.

"Daisy—" Beneath the log the rain made filmy cascades at the mouth of the hole and pushed ebbs and currents. The crocodile, only its snout showing above water, opened one eye.

"Daisy."

All was darkness. The eye saw a movement.

The movement—a blur through the rain, a silhouette—something solid and living and moving, came closer. The crocodile, with no effort or sound, came up a little from its submergence.

There was a beating. The figure was making the sound. It was the sound of a hundred rapid heartbeats.

The figure bent down to see into the hole and the beating turned into a sudden fall of water into the pool.

In all the cages and compounds of Yat's Animal and Bird Life Park there was only a stillness. Everything slept or did not sleep and was silent.

Beneath its umbrella, the bending figure at the edge of the pool called again.

It was cold and wet. The crocodile was snug in its hole. It heard the heartbeats.

"Daisy . . ."

The rain, falling suddenly heavier, hammering on corrugated iron cage roofs and in the pool took away the sound of the beats.

The crocodile began sliding out of its hole. Both its eyes were open. The figure, the shape, was at the very edge of the pool, in the sand. It thudded something hard on the sand: a stick, a rod. The vibrations came in the water.
"Daisy—"

It was cold and wet. The crocodile, five and a half feet long and young and hungry, began moving a little at a time.

"Daisy—" There was a sense of something that registered far back in a gland or a cell or a memory of the crocodile. The sense tingled in its jaws.

"Daisy . . . Daisy—"

It began to come out. The figure, black, indistinguishable, but living and flesh, changed its shape. There were two shapes. The second was only a thing.

At the water's edge the figure put down its umbrella.

The crocodile caught the sense of rain and flesh and fear.

"Daisy!"

It came. It began to come out.

"Daisy!"
It heard a thud again as the stick touched the sand. It came effortlessly, half-submerged. All the other creatures in the place were silent. It touched sand. It saw the figure move back through the rain—like all creatures at night the figure was black. The crocodile's legs bottomed and its snout rose to the sand. It paused, unblinking, the tingling in its jaws turning into an ache. Its guts pained with hunger. The pain, the ache, the spark, accumulating, reached its tail, its rudder. The tail tensed, grew stiff, gathered strength for the rush.

"Daisy . . ."

"Daisy . . ."

"Da-i-sy . . ."

The other shadow by the figure was lifeless: it was a shape, an object—the umbrella—all the heartbeats as the rain fell on its fabric were coming from it. The crocodile—Daisy—for an instant—

In that instant it died with its head crushed by a single blow behind the eyes from an iron bar. In that instant—

In that instant the iron bar, coming down again and again, smashed its brain to pulp.

In that instant, the figure, pulling hard, dragging it from the pool, turning it over with effort, with a long glittering blade, with a hard, two-handed dragging movement, starting at the soft skin at the center of the sternum, disemboweled it.

There was only the rain. All over the city in the darkness there were the sleepless—the still awake. They tossed with half-dreaming fears, half-remembered words, the sounds of rain and other days and days to come. Those that had them glanced at their sleeping partners at peace and envied or hated them.

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of life."

In all of Yat's Animal and Bird Life Park and Children's Zoo on Kwai Chung Street near the harbor there was only the increasing intensity of the rain. The figure, gathering its umbrella and shaking it, moved as an unhurried shadow toward the wire fence of the pool and the warning sign in three languages.

Hong Kong is an island of some thirty square miles under British administration in the South China Sea facing the Kowloon and New Territories areas of continental China. Kowloon and the New Territories are also British administered, surrounded by the Communist Chinese province of Kwantung. The climate is generally subtropical, with hot, humid summers and heavy rainfall. The population of Hong Kong and the surrounding areas at any one time, including tourists and visitors, is in excess of five and a half million. The New Territories are leased from the Chinese. The lease is due to expire in 1997 at which time Hong Kong is to become a special semi-independent administrative region of the People's Republic with British laws and, somehow. Communist Chinese troops to enforce them.

Hong Bay is on the southern side of the island, and the tourist brochures advise you not to go there after dark.

The sleepless, at 4:20
A.M.
, counted the hours until dawn. Perhaps, intermittently, they dozed.

In Yat's, all the other animals and birds were silent. All their cages and pens were broken open and in each of them all the occupants were silent.

They were each one of them gutted or stabbed or bashed. They were all dead.

At dawn with the light and the end of the night and the rain, from the crocodile pool, in lines along the walkways up to and inside and all around the children's Tame Animal Section and Pets' Corner they lay bloodless and washed clean and awkwardly extinct.

The figure had gone. With the rain it had left no footprints.

In their beds, in their homes, at the end of all the darkness, from their terrible, brief dormancy, the sleepless, one by one, awoke.

The rain ceased.

It became day.

W
hat it all came down to in the end was just you, the fly and The Terror That Had No Name. You hobbled, limped, staggered, reeled, and sometimes ran toward it (the fly got there by air) and, when you finally arrived, The Terror That Had No Name was there to try you.

In the Detectives' Room of the Yellowthread Street Police Station, Hong Bay, Senior Detective Inspector O'Yee was watching the fly.

In the room, the Assistant Feng Shui Man, little round mirrors stitched here and there to his official feng shui coat was watching his lo pan, his geomancer's divining compass. He was squatting down near the far wall with Constable Lim moving his compass first this way and then that, divining evil influences in the room and, generally, checking how the delicate balance of the psychic forces in the universe was doing. It was a nice compass, one of the old style: clay with the symbols for Yin and Yang, and, baked on in the center of all the other lines and circles that represented the eight symbols of nature, the twenty-four hills of the Middle Kingdom, the seventy-two elemental combinations, and finally— beautifully done—the 360 constellations.

O'Yee looked at the fly. It was a nice fly. Hovering around above the Assistant Feng Shui Man's and Lim's heads, it went in happy, lazy circles just below the light and didn't even make a buzzing sound to discommode people. It was a Hong Kong horsefly,
Tabanus maculcornis haematopota Oriental
—nice.

It was doomed.

Squatting down, the Assistant Feng Shui Man said just to make sure, "The nine dragons of Kowloon are—" He pointed north. He was speaking Cantonese. He dropped his voice. "—are in that direction?"

Lim said in a whisper, "Yes." He looked at O'Yee sitting at his desk staring straight ahead and nodded.

"Ah." The Assistant Feng Shui Man, adjusting his lo pan, said confidently, "A simple matter." Somewhere someone or something had dislodged the balance of the world or called up a malevolent interest. He made a throaty sound. But it wasn't much of an imbalance or a malevolent interest. Child's play. The Assistant Feng Shui Man said, "Just a matter of rearranging the tiger's tail of heaven where it sometimes droops over the edge of the world." He began taking off one of his little round mirrors to put it in the right place against the wall. He asked Lim, "Did you call me in?"

"Yes, sir." Lim was nine months in the force, his brass and leather belt still shining. Lim said quietly in Cantonese, "I thought it the only thing to do."

The fly was still hovering. It hovered above Lim and the Assistant Feng Shui Man, looking down with interest. It was having an interesting time.