“It certainly wasn’t the worst thing you did. You were lying to people for years about serious things. Pretending to talk to relatives on this side. Having the mourning ones hand over their valuables. Giving them false hope. You’ve pissed off a lot of folk, Samart. A lot of lost souls are dying to meet you. We have a little admiration society. We Buddhists may not have a heaven, Teacher Wong, but we have a nice selection of hells. We’re on our way to one I think you’ll enjoy.”
The scene beyond the windows had passed quickly through purple dusk to a mauve-black night. The only lights beside the road came from bushes burning. The car began to slow and figures stepped out from behind the bonfires. It occurred to Samart that whoever researched for the Living Dead movies had done a field trip to purgatory because zombies really did look like that. Some of them made Halfhead seem positively pretty. They laboured painfully toward the car as it rolled to a stop.
“Look,” Samart said, holding back his panic, “I want to lodge an appeal. I get sent to hell because I got the lottery numbers wrong? That’s ridiculous, and it’s not fair. I was just starting to make something of myself.”
“Based on lies, Samart. As always. Do you really think it doesn’t matter? People came to you out of desperation. They wanted help. My husband was a security guard. He got laid off during the recession. He was depressed. He turned to drink. Our poor but happy life was disintegrating. My neighbour told me you had a gift. I came to you and…”
“I know you?”
“You probably don’t remember me. I’ve let myself go a bit since then. I told you about our problem. I gave you a sack of rice and my mother’s ring and you gave me the lottery numbers. I asked if you were sure. You were confident. You said you’d seen the numbers in a dream, but you couldn’t be certain what order they would appear in. I believed in you. I put all the savings I’d hidden away from my husband, sold our fruit handcart, borrowed money from friends and bought every ticket—every combination of those numbers. Every ticket I could find from one side of the city to the other. And the lottery numbers were announced, and not one of your numbers came up. Not one, Samart. Now what are the odds of that? There should be a prize for having no numbers, don’t you think?”
“It’s a gamble. You can’t blame—”
He was interrupted by the clawing of blackened fingernails against the windows. To his horror, Halfhead started to wind down the glass.
“Well, I do,” she said. “You gave me your word and I believed you. My husband was sober when I told him I’d lost all our money. He smiled and walked out. When he came back a few hours later with the machete, he was drunk. I don’t know where he’d found the booze. We had no cash. He’s a strong man. It only took one blow to do this. Impressive, isn’t it? Split down the middle like a coconut. I didn’t feel a thing. Not until I got here. Then the hurt and resentment began.”
“I didn’t…”
“Yes, you did. And you deserve whatever’s coming to you. You’ll have an awful time here, Samart. My job’s done. I’ll eventually move on to somewhere with better décor, but you’ve accrued so much bad debt, you’ll be here for a very long time. You’ll have an age to meet all those spirits you claimed to be talking to when you were back there. And you’d be surprised how many of us gals are still in need of a good invoking from time to time. You’re going to have your work cut out for you, Teacher Wong.”
Icy hands reached in through the window and caressed the petrified shaman, lifted his shirt, pinched at his soft flesh. His eyes were red even without the benefit of makeup. His heart was full and heavy as lard and sliding gradually down to the hole in his front. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he imagined his future. A miserable future without end. And as if all that weren’t bad enough… the beer was crap.
Colin Cotterill
Colin Cotterill was born in London and trained as a teacher and set off on a world tour that didn’t ever come to an end. Colin has taught and trained teachers in Thailand and on the Burmese border. He spent several years in Laos, initially with UNESCO and wrote and produced a forty-program language teaching series; English By Accident, for Thai national television.
All the while, Colin continued with his two other passions; cartooning and writing. He contributed regular columns for the Bangkok Post. It wasn’t until his work with trafficked children that he found himself sufficiently stimulated to put together his first novel, The Night Bastard (Suk’s Editions. 2000). The reaction to that first attempt was so positive that Colin decided to take time off and write full-time.
Since 1990, Colin has been a regular cartoonist for national publications. A Thai language translation of his cartoon scrapbook, Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket and weekly social cartoons in The Nation newspaper. In 2004, an illustrated bilingual column ‘cycle logical’ was launched in Matichon Weekly magazine. Later, both comic strips have been published in book form.
In 2009, Colin Cotterill received the Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library award for being “the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users.”
Dolphins Inc.
Christopher G. Moore
1.0
Where are you?
Queen Sirikit Center, Bangkok, Thailand
Inside one of the smaller conference rooms, the air-conditioning blasting multiple streams over the audience. In the back a youngish Thai man—just out of his teens—his hair short, as if he’d recently disrobed as a monk or left military service. But he didn’t seem like the type for either the monkhood or the army. Chinapat had the soft, nerdy look of a man-boy slumped before a computer screen as a way of life.
He sat in quiet serenity, either meditating or somewhere online inside his skull, slowly rubbing his hands, moving his fingers together as if the meat locker chill temperature had seeped deep into his body or he had lost his concentration, hand on the mouse, the cursor frozen on the screen. Dressed in a suit and tie, and cheap black shoes from the Sunday market, the kind with thick rubber soles. Such shoes allowed Chinapat, like a phantom, silently and without notice, to disappear inside a room.
Inside the frigid room was the object of Chinapat’s first professional job.
A middle-aged Japanese man in dark glasses looked him over the way a father looks over a son, part pride, part doubt and disapproval, as if his expectations had been exceeded and dashed at the same time. The Japanese man showed him a photograph of Tanaka.
“Eliminate him,” he said.
Chinapat glanced at the podium. Mr. Tanaka, a representative of an obscure but well-financed Japanese film distributor, spoke to the early morning symposium. It was Friday at 8:30 a.m. Chinapat couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake at 8:30 in the morning; no memory came back.
He watched as Mr. Tanaka began to read from his notes, looking up at a thin audience of no more than seventy-five people—a scattering of journalists, film students, some representatives from the Japanese embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a few walk-ins who had read about the event in the Bangkok Post. Most of the audience had blue lips from the cold. They’d been paid a handsome sum to wrap themselves in coats and scarves to survive the arctic blast from the ventilation system. The first two rows of hard-looking Japanese men, with thick necks sticking like redwoods from their white shirts and dark suits, sat so still they looked like sculptures. Chinapat sighed, thinking as he examined the men in the first rows that he’d signed onto a very long payroll.