The days had settled into a routine. Each morning, Mrs Pa and her new grandson walked down to the market. Everyone made a great fuss over Precious Dragon. Mrs Pa had been hard put to explain how, after being married for only a few days and being, in any case, dead, her daughter had somehow managed to produce a two-year-old child with the demeanor and vocabulary of an elderly gentleman, but people seemed to understand. It was pretty odd, but then so were a great many things. Her neighbors appeared to accept it, at any rate, and walking through the market, the little boy was showered with candies, biscuits, and trinkets, all of which he accepted with the gravity of a visiting potentate. After the market each day, Mrs Pa took her grandson down to the edge of the wharf, where they sat watching the boats from Teveraya. Once they had watched a tanker bound for Beijing, built to withstand the equatorial storms. It was an enormous thing, almost a mile long, and Precious Dragon's mouth fell open when he saw it, nearly dislodging the pearl.
Later in the afternoons, they would sit outside Mrs Pa's house and receive visitors. Mr and Mrs Kung came, of course, hotfoot to see the little boy who was their grandchild, too. All the neighbors came, bringing their own children. The house had been a focus of activity for days. Mrs Pa found that she was enjoying herself. The only cloud on the horizon was her inability to contact Mai. She had been trying to phone for several days now, but on each occasion the line had crackled and spat, finally settling into an electronic hum. Mrs Pa went to the temple and renewed the spells that allowed communication between the two worlds, but they still failed her. She tried to tell herself that this was no more than some occult interference, but the matter still worried her.
Mrs Pa was washing the dishes when Precious Dragon came in, holding his toy tiger. He plucked at her dress.
"Grandma?"
"What is it?"
"Someone's in the outhouse."
Mrs Pa said, "How do you know?" Children, obviously, were fanciful, but it did not occur to her to treat this lightly.
"I heard them. They were scuffling about. I don't think we should go out there."
"Precious Dragon, if there's someone messing about in the backyard, I'm not just going to sit here. And I'm not going to call the police."
"I don't think we should go," he repeated. He did not have a normal child's stubbornness; this was a calm and reasoned statement.
"Then what should we do?" Without realizing it, her voice had dropped to a whisper.
"We should just watch. Put the light out. Pretend you've gone to bed."
Mrs Pa, trying not to look out of the kitchen window, crossed the room and switched the light off.
"Now," Precious Dragon said softly. They sat down on the seat by the window and waited. The sky was illuminated by the thousand lights of the city and so the yard was never completely dark, but it was difficult to see what was going on. Various possibilities were going through Mrs Pa's mind. It would be stupid to burgle her little house; there was nothing here, but someone might be sufficiently desperate or even crazy. They sent those of the demented whom they could not cure to the security fortress on the island of Moritana, but many took refuge in the disused mines of Bharulay or Orichay, or were sent for use in the hospitalization wings of the corporations. Those people, though, were the really hopeless cases, those whom the drugs were unable to reach—and not so many of them were wandering around the streets. Perhaps it was some lout having a joke, which would be on him, Mrs Pa thought. She kept a pepper spray under the sink; used correctly, it would blind. She reached for it now.
There was definitely something in the outhouse, because she could see the edges of the door rattling. Perhaps someone was stuck. But why on earth go into someone else's outhouse in the first place, if you didn't have to, of course? There were high walls between the houses, edged with razor-wire. Mrs Pa was beginning to feel rather unwell, a sick, dense pressure building up behind her eyes that she attributed to nerves, but it was most unpleasant. Unsteadily, she got off the chair and went to the back door. Outside, the light seeping from the door of the outhouse continued to grow, pulsing with the neon colors of sickness.
"Grandma?" Precious Dragon said in an urgent whisper.
"I don't know what's—" Mrs Pa murmured, indistinctly. She wrenched the back door open, and as she did so, the door of the outhouse also flew back on its hinges and something shot across into the kitchen, knocking Mrs Pa aside. The sense of pressure vanished abruptly. She shrieked. The creature was about the size of a person, but it was spinning so quickly that it was impossible to tell what it was. The air around it was streaming with light, a bloodstained red. The whirling stopped with a great rush of air. Bright eyes looked at Mrs Pa out of a pointed, black mantis face. Mrs Pa whisked the spray can up and pressed the button, releasing a stream of iridescent gas. The thing ducked its head under the spray, then, wheeling round, it made a grab for Precious Dragon. The little boy ran into the bedroom alcove and crawled rapidly under the bed, which stood on four paraffin-soaked feet to deter roaches. The creature bent, seized one small foot and pulled him out, holding him upside down over the bed. Precious Dragon yelled. Mrs Pa took one look and beat at the creature's black back with her fists. The skin looked slick, like that of a sea lion, but it felt hard, similar to horn. It opened its complex mouth and breathed, a long exhalation that singed Mrs Pa's hair and raised a wall of flame around the front door. Then it swatted Mrs Pa to one side. Fortunately, she fell on the bed, but knocked the side of her head against the cupboard as she fell. The creature shook Precious Dragon sharply.
Mrs Pa could not remember the next few minutes very clearly. There were shouts, a sudden sound like a waterfall, and then an acrid, smoky smell. The front door crashed open. She thought she recalled seeing her grandson twist in the creature's grip like a fish and spit at it. He hit it in the eye, and it wailed and staggered backward, knocking into the chest of drawers, then it span out into the garden as though reeled in on a line. The child ran after it and she heard the door of the outhouse bang shut. Someone was bending over her, speaking soothingly. Gradually, the smoke and the pepper residue began to clear and her eyes stopped watering. She looked into golden eyes, rimmed with a thin black line as though drawn by a careful pen.
"It's you," she told the demon. "From the bus."
"So it is," Zhu Irzh agreed. He squatted down on his haunches in front of her.
"Are you all right?"
"I think so." She struggled upright. "Where's my grandson?"
A man came in through the back door, holding the little boy. Mrs Pa had the impression of a pleasant, round face. Precious Dragon was choking. His face was pale and he was wheezing.
"Give him to me!" she demanded, and the man put him gently down on the bed. Other people seemed to be milling indiscriminately about her small house.
"It must be the pepper spray," someone said. Precious Dragon shook his head violently. His lips were turning blue and his eyes started.
"He's got a picture in his head," the demon said, dreamily. "Something round."
"It's on the floor!" Mrs Pa said, realizing to what he referred. She and the demon dived for the carpet.
"What am I looking for?" he asked.
"It's a big white pearl! There it is!" She could see it, gleaming in the corner under the bed. The demon slid beneath and retrieved it, handing the round object to Mrs Pa.
"It must have rolled." She stuffed the pearl, fluff and all, into her grandson's mouth. He drew a painful breath. The other man was staring, his eyebrows up near his hairline. Zhu Irzh stalked rapidly through the kitchen and out the back door. When he returned, he remarked, "There's not much damage. The carpet's wet, but the fire doesn't seem to have touched it, nor the wall. There's no one in your lavatory, either," he commented to the child, now recovered and sitting quietly on his grandmother's lap.
"Not anymore," Precious Dragon said. There was a dangerous glint in his eye.
"What happened?" Mrs Pa had time to feel bewildered now.
"One of your neighbors saw the fire and kicked the door in," the round-faced man said. "He had an extinguisher, luckily. His wife called the police precinct and they called my colleague and he spoke to me. I live on the harbor, you see, so it didn't take us long to get here." The round-faced man displayed a policeman's badge as the neighbor in question, Mr Sheng, appeared in the doorway.
"I'll ask my wife to come in," he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat.
"No, please. We'll be all right." Mrs Pa said. Her neighbor took a lot of convincing, but after many protestations of gratitude agreed to go back home. Everyone else seemed to melt away around him, apart from the middle-aged man and the demon.
"Well, I'm glad you're living here," Mrs Pa told Zhu Irzh. "Whatever people may say." In the universal human response to a crisis, she got up and made tea. When she came back in she said to her grandson, "What was that thing?"
"A demon. Like me. Well. Not quite like me. I'm from the upper levels of Hell. That wasn't. Actually, I don't know what it was."
"I thought it must be something to do with Hell." She didn't know much about Hell, but she knew a bit. "It's where my daughter lives, you see. She's been there since she was three."
The round-faced man frowned. "Why did a three-year-old go to Hell?"
Mrs Pa sighed. "It was a long time ago. Things are better now, they say—more regulated. But it was different then. My husband and my daughter died at the same time and I paid a funeral parlor to have the papers filled out for Heaven. That's where they were supposed to go. My husband was a good man and Mai—of course she was good, she was just a little girl. But the man who ran the funeral place took the money and didn't do what he was supposed to do—I think he had some kind of arrangement with Hell. But he's dead himself, anyway. I hope he went there. The same sort of thing happened with the Kungs' son—my daughter's husband, you know. We fixed things for my husband, but it wasn't possible for Mai—she'd already become indentured to one of the Ministries. It wasn't until years later that my husband managed to contact me, but we can't talk much, I don't know why. It seems easier to talk with Mai."
"I'm sorry," the middle-aged man said. "Things like that shouldn't happen. If you want, I can try and do something about it. It's my department now."
Mrs Pa seized his hand. "That would be wonderful." And it was. A new grandson, Mai married, and now the chance that things would finally be put right.
Zhu Irzh yawned with a snap of his fanged teeth. His companion looked at him askance, but after the events of this evening Mrs Pa was past being alarmed. They stayed quite late, talking to her. How strange it was, she thought, that this young man from Hell could still be so like her own people in some ways.
Precious Dragon, worn out, slept beside her as they talked. She checked on him occasionally, for there were things that she did not want him to hear, but he slept soundly on, his mouth open around the bulge of the pearl. When Chen and Zhu Irzh left, the dove-colored light of the rising sun was already pale in the sky behind Paugeng, and Ghenret was awakening around her. Just as well, Mrs Pa thought, because she wouldn't have gone to that outhouse in the dark for anything after all that.