The little demon climbed the iron willow tree and pulled the plug on all the lights; a soft threat filled the enclosing darkness:
I’ll bite the ear off anybody who squeals!’
He then walked over to the artificial hill, where he washed the blood off his mouth at the waterfall.
A clatter of footsteps sounded outside the door. Most likely a horde of people about to enter the room. So the little demon picked up the rock with which he’d smashed the wall lamp and hid behind the iron willow tree to wait.
The door was pushed open and a white figure entered, hugging the wall as it groped along in the dark. The little demon took aim at the upper half of the figure and let fly. The figure cried out in pain and started to wobble; the people on the other side of the door ran off in panic. The little demon went over, picked up the rock, took aim on the white figure again, and heaved it with all his might. The figure crumpled to the floor.
A while later, beams of bright light streamed in the door, followed by people with flashlights. The little demon scooted nimbly into the corner, where he lay on the floor, face down, and pretended to be asleep.
Then the lights snapped on above seven or eight husky men, who picked up the unconscious serving woman in white. They also picked up the injured boy, along with his severed ear, and carried them out of the room. Then it was time to find out who was responsible for all this evil.
The little demon was flopped out on the floor snoring loudly. When a man in white picked him up by the nape of his neck, his arms and legs flailed in the air as a series of wails erupted from his mouth, like a pitiful little cat.
The ferreting-out process produced no results. The children were exhausted from a very tiring day, and unbelievably hungry. And after being harassed by the little demon, they could barely hold their heads up and couldn’t think straight. And so the investigation ended amid the rumble of snores.
The men in white turned off the lights, locked the door, and left. In the darkness, the little demon smirked.
Early the next morning, before the sun was even up, the little demon got to his feet in the misty room, took the brass bells out from under his shirt, and rang them as hard as he could. The frantic pealing startled the children out of their sleep. After squatting on the floor to relieve themselves, they rolled over and went back to sleep under the glaring eyes of the little demon.
Once the sun was up, a red light flooded the room; by then the children were up and sitting around weeping. They were famished. Hardly a trace of the previous night’s excitement remained in their heads. All that energy, all that time spent trying to nurture a sense of power in them, totally wasted. The frustrated little demon wondered how he was going to make anything out of this bunch.
Just so I won’t screw things up as a storyteller, I’ll narrate my tale objectively, avoiding, as much as possible, any descriptions of what was going on inside the heads of the little demon and the children. Ill stick to their behavior and their speech, and leave it to you readers to interpret what sparked their behavior and lay behind their speech. This is not an easy story to tell, because the little demon keeps coming up with ways to smash it to pieces. He is not a good little boy, that’s for sure. (In truth, my story is just about wrapped up.)
Breakfast was sumptuous: egg-drop soup, steamed rolls made of fine flour, milk, bread, jam, salted bean sprouts, and sweet-and-sour radish slices.
The old man who delivered their breakfast took his job seriously, carefully filling each plate or bowl and handing it to one of the children. The little demon got a portion, which he received with his head lowered deferentially, so as not to upset the old fellow, who nonetheless watched him out of the corner of his eye.
After the old fellow left, the little demon looked up, eyes shining, and said:
‘Comrades, children, don’t eat a bite of this! They want to fatten us up before they eat us. We’ll go on a hunger strike. Children, the skinnier you are, the later they’ll get around to eating you, and maybe never.’
But the children paid no heed to his impassioned plea; maybe they had no idea what he was talking about. The sight and smell of all that food was all they could think about, so they dug in, stuffing their faces and raising quite a din. The little demon’s first impulse was to get rough with them, but he put that foolish thought out of his mind just in time to see a tall man walk into the room. With a furtive look at the man’s big feet, he picked up his glass of warm milk and took a long, loud drink.
Sensing the contemptuous look on the man’s face, he went back to his milk, with a vengeance, and attacked a steamed bun, making a point of getting his face as dirty as possible and gurgling loudly. In other words, he turned himself into a gluttonous fool.
‘Little pig!’ he heard the man say.
The man’s legs, both the thickness of stone pillars, ambulated toward the front, so the little demon looked up to stare at his back. He noticed that the man had a long, oval head beneath a cap from which several curls of brown hair peeked out. When the man turned around, the little demon saw a ruddy face, with a long, greasy, beaklike nose that resembled a deformed water chestnut smeared with lard.
‘Children.’ the man said with a devious smile, ‘did you have a good breakfast?’
Most replied that they had, but some said no.
‘Dear children.’ the man said, ‘you mustn’t eat too much at one sitting, or your digestion will suffer. Now let’s go play a game, all right?’
No response from the children, who blinked in disbelief.
The man smacked himself on the head and admitted that he had foolishly forgotten that they were only children and hadn’t yet learned what games were all about. ‘Let’s go out and play the hawk and the chicks, what do you say?’
Shouting their approval, the children followed the man out into the yard. With apparent reluctance, the little demon tagged along.
As the game began, the hawk-nosed man chose the little demon to be the mother hen – maybe because his red clothes made him so conspicuous – with all the other children lined up behind him as the brood. The man was to be the hawk. Flapping his arms, he stared at them and bared his teeth as he began to screech.
Suddenly the hawk swooped down, scrunching up its beak until it nearly touched its thin upper lip, a menacing glare radiating from its eyes. This was indeed a savage, carnivorous raptor. Its dark shadow fell upon the children from above. Nervously, the little demon eyed its deadly twitching talons, as it settled onto the carpet of green grass, then rose into the air, unhurriedly toying with the children, waiting for the right moment. A hawk is a very patient hunter. And since the initiative always rests with the attacker, the defender must never let down its guard, not for a minute.
Suddenly the hawk swooped down like lightning, and the little demon reacted by rushing valiantly to the tail-end of his troops to butt and bite and scratch until the targeted child was wrenched free of the hawk’s grasp. The other children whooped and hollered, excited and frightened at the same time, as they fled from the hawk. The little demon nimbly threw himself between hunter and prey. The glare in his eyes conquered that of the stunned hawk.
The second attack commenced, drawing the little demon back into the fray, as he broke free from the brood of children. His movements were too nimble and focused for a mere child. Before the hawk had time to react, the little demon was at its neck, and it suddenly feared for its life. It felt as if an enormous black spider had attached itself to its neck, or a vampire bat with bright red membranes flaring beneath its limbs. It wrenched its head violently to shake the child free, but in vain, for by then the little demon’s claws were buried in its eyes. The excruciating pain took all the fight out of it, and with a tortured howl, it stumbled forward and thudded to the ground like a felled tree.