The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wah Sung,” he’d murmured. “You’re as lovely as your mother was at your age.”
    Here was a man who had sacrificed everything, and his reward? Steadily decreasing sales, steadily climbing bills. Even dry goods could go bad, in a place as wet as this, and each order Wah placed reflected their shrinking budget. Before, her father had done well exporting smoked salmon to Canton, but the state had outlawed Chinese from selling locally caught fish years ago.
    “I never wanted to be a fish monger, anyway,” her father said, shrugging when she asked.
    Wah sighed as her eyes passed over the sacks of rice crowding the bottom shelves. Great clay jugs of moutai and yellow wine had once occupied that space, but when the federal government outlawed alcohol, her father had insisted on obeying the law.
    “I never wanted to be a wine merchant, anyway,” he had told her as they gently argued the point over sweet dew tea. “And I certainly don’t intend to become a smuggler. They treat us bad enough when we follow the rules.”
    Yet rice didn’t cover the overhead the way booze had—or fish, or any of the other mundane stock they were forbidden from moving. She’d joked about converting the basement into an opium den, but her father had replied that thieves had once broken through the walls below and trashed his shop, presumably in search of the precious dragon. The whole city was apparently riddled with abandoned tunnels, and many a basement in the business districts abutted them. As if Wah needed another reason for disliking that mildewed hole, where the walls seemed to breathe softly whenever she descended to retrieve a crate of crockery or tools…
    The bell at the front of the shop tinkled, and Wah clicked her teeth—she hadn’t heard his key in the lock, which meant he’d left the door open again. It was bad enough he insisted on making deliveries to all the family associations himself, but his forgetting to lock up was simply unsafe. Ducking through the curtain, her slippers whisking against the boards, she saw his familiar silhouette across the dark shop. He’d turned and was locking the door.
    “It doesn’t do much good, now,” she said, trying to keep the chiding tone from her voice. “When I’m in the back, though, try to remember to—oh!”
    The white man smiling at her across the shadowed bins and shelves was not her father.
    “I sorry, honorable sir, but we closed right now,” she said, speaking with deliberate fresh-off-the-boat awkwardness even as her mind raced.
    Her father was probably talking over old times at some association by now, and might not return for hours. It wasn’t late enough yet for the police to be rattling doorknobs, and they rarely took much notice of crime in the Chinatown anyway. Who would hear if she screamed? Mr. Dong next door, perhaps, but perhaps not…
    Top shelf, middle aisle. As she stepped around the counter, she studiously kept her eyes on the intruder, instead of the modest display of cutlery. If she could just—
    “How excellent,” the stranger said, speaking in perfectly unaccented Szechuanese as he glided toward her, past the knives. “That means we shall not be disturbed.”
    The smile he gave her stretched his strangely ageless face into a rictus—like most white men, his exotic features somehow coalesced into a bland, nondescript whole. His black coat and broad-brimmed hat were wet with the night’s rain, leaving puddles on the floor, but his skin looked parched as scrolls from a temple. He reached inside his coat, and Wah flinched, wondering if it would be a weapon, or worse, handcuffs—given the choice between a stickup man or a plainclothes Seattle policeman, she would take the lesser villain. Instead, he held out an envelope to her, as dry as the withered hand that held it.
    “My name is Clarence Kernochan, and I have a business proposition to discuss with you.”
    “My father—” Wah began, but he cut her off in the rude fashion of Americans,