He felt his will dissolve with every step. The house was a place of evil.
A wicked family had lived there. It had for countless years been residence to shaman. More recently Nuihc, the current Master of Sinanju's nephew and the greatest enemy of modern Sinanju, had been born and raised there.
For some reason lost in the mists of ancient time, the family that had lived there had rejected direct assistance from the Masters of Sinanju. The shamans took payment from the other villagers for their spells and tonics.
Pullyang was certain that the Masters of Sinanju knew why the occupants of this house alone in all the village rejected the generosity of their protectors, but the reason was never told. If the family of the last shaman who had lived there knew, the secret had died when his daughter disappeared two years ago.
The hut was in disrepair. Here and there the mud-and-thatch roof was falling in.
Pullyang no longer saw smoke coming from the chimney. The warming sun burned steam from the rotting roof.
Maybe he had been mistaken. His eyes had remained strong all his life, but it was possible he had confused the steam with smoke.
The path to the front door was overgrown with weeds. There was no indication that a single human foot had touched the ground from the old road to the dilapidated house since the dwelling had been abandoned two years before.
Old Pullyang felt his nerve grow stronger.
He had to have been mistaken. He had exerted himself too much this morning. He was hungry. That, coupled with the strangeness of the night before, had caused his tired old eyes to leap to flights of fancy.
It was time for breakfast. He would take a single peek inside the hut before heading back to his daughter's home.
His belly growling at thoughts of food, Pullyang rested a shrunken hand of bone on the door frame and leaned his face inside the open doorway.
Nothing. As he had now expected.
No one lived there any longer. He was foolish to have imagined seeing any sign of life in that unholy place.
The fireplace was black.
Wait. There was something. Specks of orange glowing amid the ash. They became clearer as his eyes adjusted to the dark interior of the hut.
Someone had been here. Pullyang's heart tightened. Movement. Something to his right.
Startled, Pullyang whipped his head to the source. He saw something in the dark. A flat face. Sinister eyes drawn up like those of a cat.
And then Pullyang's turning head kept going. It was off his neck before he knew what had happened. The decapitated head hit the frozen floor of the hut with a dull thud.
Shocked old eyes already growing dull in death, the head of the Master of Sinanju's loyal caretaker rolled into the corner of the abandoned hovel.
The body fell. Slowly. With great and lingering purpose. As if reluctant to leave the life it had clung to for so many years. The clutching old hand slipped away from the wooden door frame, and the body toppled forward.
For a moment all was still.
A scratching sound came from within the hut. Pullyang's body shook as an unseen hand took hold of his clothing.
Toes dragging in the dirt of the abandoned front path, the body of the Master of Sinanju's caretaker disappeared inside the squalid hut.
Chapter 4
Remo turned off the city street. A wooden barrier across the road blocked his way. Slowing to a stop before the lowered gate, he leaned out the car window, passing the security card he retrieved from his dashboard through the scanner. The gate lifted and he drove onto the private main road of the development complex that he and the Master of Sinanju were currently calling home.
The roads were laid out as carefully as a Monopoly board. The street names strained to be cute. Remo turned down Gingerbread Lane to Hopscotch Road.
Half of the community was for rent, while the rest were condos for sale. Every building looked exactly like the one next door. Remo's rented town house was a simple duplex with absolutely no distinguishing features whatsoever. It was a plain gray-sided number with tidy white trim, a green-turning-to-brown lawn and a private one-stall garage.
As places went, it wasn't so bad. It beat the old hotel ritual Upstairs used to make him engage in back in the early days. A few days or a week in one place and he had to move on. But, thank goodness, that had eventually changed. He and the Master of Sinanju had lived in two houses for a number of years without incident. The last had been home for a decade and, even though it fell victim to arsonists, the burning of that house hadn't really been work related.
At first Upstairs resisted the idea of another more-or-less permanent home, but Remo insisted. In the end he won out. Remo, for one, was grateful. He hadn't looked forward to living out of suitcases again. Not that he ever actually technically owned a suitcase, but it was the principle of the thing.
Remo parked in the garage and headed around to the side door of the duplex.
The Master of Sinanju wasn't in the living room. The big-screen TV was off.
He didn't need to call out. There was a pulsing vibration in the air, like the plucked string on some musical instrument in tune with the very forces of nature.
Remo followed the thrum of life through the kitchen and out the sliding doors to the small garden patio.
Chiun was sitting cross-legged on the colored flagstones. The old Korean had been sitting in the same spot when Remo had left for Milford earlier in the afternoon. His shimmering scarlet day kimono was arranged carefully around his bony knees.
"Hey, Chiun. Anything happen when I was out?" The Master of Sinanju's leathery face was upturned to catch the dying rays of the cold white sun. He did not bother to open his eyes.
"No," the wizened figure said.
"You sure? Everything was quiet while I was gone?"
"The only time that it is quiet around here is when you are gone," the old man replied.
"It's just that when I was heading down the street I thought I saw what's-her-name. Becky? Barky? Binky? That woman that keeps trying to show the place next door."
The complex had been trying to rent the vacant side of their duplex ever since Remo and Chiun had moved in six months before. The woman who had rented them their place had tried showing the adjacent town house a number of times.
The first time she made the mistake of trying to rent to a Japanese businessman and his family. The afternoon they came for a look, Chiun stood on his tiptoes on the stone birdbath, his nose thrust over the fence that divided the property. In flawless Japanese the old man offered something in calm and certain tones that at first might have been mistaken for a welcome to the neighborhood. Becky wasn't sure what Chiun had said to them-after all, she didn't speak Japanese-but by the time they left, the wife and children were in tears and the husband was shouting a stream of what could only have been Japanese obscenities.
The next two times she tried to show the place to American couples, each of whom had mysterious, unexplained problems with their cars while they were inside the house. The first car had all its tires flattened and its seats ripped out. The second couple's vehicle had somehow rolled down the hill and landed upside down in the complex swimming pool.
Each time when they asked the old man who had been sitting on the lawn out front the whole time if he had seen anyone suspicious, Chiun replied that the only suspicious people he had seen recently in the neighborhood was a family of Japs.
"Check their embassy," he suggested. "But leave your wallets at home."
After the last time, word got out. Becky ran the other way whenever she saw Chiun, and no one else came to see the little duplex at the lonely end of Billy Goat's Bluff.
"So was she up here, or what?" Remo asked.