Arrival

"One case holds five hundred thousand dollars. If you're willing, this is the deposit." I raised my hand, and the assistant behind me opened the case to show Ash.

Ash's first reaction was, Oh my God! His second reaction was still, Oh my God! So rich people really did hand out money just like in the movies...

"Um... I... holy shit... give me a second to process this..."

I raised an eyebrow. "Your monthly salary is only fifteen hundred dollars. Even with commissions, you've never made more than two thousand in your best month. And with you occasionally turning up late or skipping work, you can't even afford insurance right now, can you? As far as I know, you're currently living in an RV with its leaks patched with tape..."

"Enough. Don't say another word." Ash waved his hand and declared with righteous solemnity, "I'm in."

I smiled at him. "Smart man." I placed a case in front of him. "This is the deposit. Once the job's done, I'll pay double."

"Double?" His voice nearly cracked.

"But now you need to come with me..." "Wait... where?"

"To make sure you survive."

For the first time, Ash felt a little disgusted with money-but only a little-because he had finally grasped that there was no such thing as a free lunch, only idiots who wanted one.

He endured three months of inhuman training: combat, weapons, and every other area. He felt like a failed pancake-the batter had gone wrong, the flipping had gone wrong, and in the end, he had become a puddle of shit. His only small consolation was that his boss underwent the same training alongside him.

The difference, however, was that his boss seemed to have been training for longer, so Ash was the only one getting tortured. That made the consolation very small indeed.

After yet another training session, Ash felt as though his entire body was falling apart. Back in high school, he and Chet had stayed up for several nights, played games all day, then taken drugs, drunk at a bar, and picked up a few girls. One had happened to be the girlfriend of a baseball team captain, and they had been surrounded and beaten up. Even then, he had not been in such a sorry state.

His boss looked much the same. His skin was pale, and blue and purple splashed across his face like an oil painting. He was also missing a leg. When Ash had learned that, his jaw had nearly made intimate contact with the tops of his feet. This was practically an inspirational version of Bruce Lee.

Three months later, Ash broke down again. "Oh my God, you're so rich! Fine, I won't say anything about a big boss like you coming along, but couldn't you at least send a couple more people? That Black combat instructor who flattened me into a pancake, that kung fu master from China who pinned me three times in a minute, that gorgeous redheaded weapons expert-please, at least let her come..."

"They're very good."

"Exactly! You know that too, right?"

"That book can control people. If even one of those three gets controlled, the two of us together won't stand a chance."

"Fuck!" He stamped his feet in anger, but clearly, he realized that too.

"And just as you said, that thing controls the monsters and spirits around it. Some of them will be humanoid, and they can use weapons too, right?"

"Yeah. So what?"

"I believe Ms. Tally taught you that quality matters more than quantity with weapons. And right now... you're like a walking arsenal. I don't think you need that many rifles, pistols, and rocket launchers..." I looked at him, struggling to take even a couple of steps.

"Okay, okay, I get it. But at least let me bring a small rocket launcher. Please, I really like this one."

"All right." I nodded. "But if you fire that rocket launcher at someone you shouldn't, you know the consequences..."

There was no helping it. Ash simply loved these things too much. All the firearms were engraved with magic circles. The bullets were silver, filled with gunpowder mixed with holy salt. Every bladed weapon was pure silver, including his fully articulated high-tech prosthetic hand and his boss's prosthetic leg-even those were silver-plated.

So in the end, only the two of us set off in the car. I had my own judgment on the matter. Over the years, I had met very few people with genuine abilities, and pitifully few who knew about the Book of the Dead. People like that would only hold us back. Besides, that sort of thing loved nothing more than picking one unlucky soul out of a group and turning them into all kinds of disgusting things. With only two people, the odds would be much lower.

I had also already put a plan in place. We had only five days. If neither of us came out after five days, or if either of us showed anything unusual when we did, this land would become a future nuclear strike test site.

I drove while Ash sat in the passenger seat, looking ready to face death.

"I think my driving is pretty decent, so why are you so scared?"

"Um... boss..." "Just call me Luoyaer."

Closing the distance between us a little would help improve the mission's chances of success.

"All right, Luoyaer. Don't you think it's getting dark awfully fast?" He swallowed, staring outside.

As the tires crushed the last dry branch, the final sliver of light was swallowed completely by the pine forest. A thin black mist filled our surroundings.

We had not even been driving for an hour, and it had been seven in the morning when we entered.

I nodded and told him, "That thing recognizes me. It knows I'm here to deal with it. It isn't dark yet. There's just a layer of mist."

"But don't worry. We won't be attacked until we're fully inside its range. I still have about half an hour of driving left. Just think of this as a welcoming ceremony."

But it would have been a lie to say I wasn't nervous. Over the years, I had been here before and encountered countless monsters and spirits. I gripped the steering wheel tightly, the sweat from my palms soaking the leather cover.

Suddenly, we both sensed something. Something was approaching. In the passenger seat, Ash had his head lowered as he wiped the silver axe tempered with holy salt. The Elder Sign engraved on its blade gleamed cold and hard in the faint light of the dashboard.

The navigation system had completely died half an hour earlier. The flickering static on its screen had twisted into the shape of a skull. Now, intuition was all we could rely on.

Just then, a sudden tapping came from all around the car, as though someone were knocking on the metal with bent knuckles. But we knew perfectly well that it was no human.

The car's exterior, however, had been wiped down with holy water steeped with salt. That was how you dealt with these inhuman things.

After a few more wails, those sounds vanished along the road, replaced by the rustling of leaves scraping across the roof.

"Stop staring at the rearview mirror, kid." Ash's voice had grown hoarse. It was the first time I had seen him look so dependable. Without raising his head, he swept the tip of his dagger through a cold arc in the dashboard's faint light. "The evil things in these woods love finding an opening when you're feeling uneasy."

"Thanks. I'm good at accepting well-intentioned warnings, but I'm thirty-two this year. I hardly qualify as a kid." (That was counting my abnormal rate of aging. By a normal count, I was several years older than him.)

"What the fuc... you look like you just graduated college. OK, OK, I've heard about that. Asians..."

"Your personality doesn't seem like that of a forty-three-year-old man, either," I replied modestly.

"Forty-three! That's a man's prime!" he shouted fussily.

Before long, he was looking in the rearview mirror, actually tugging at the crow's-feet around his eyes. He had not even managed half a minute of being dependable. After three months together, I had a rough idea of his personality.

Suddenly, he hurriedly shrank back, nearly hitting my arm on the steering wheel. Before I could speak, he stared out the window and began speaking in a low, rapid stream...

"Attention! Attention! Attention! Warning! Warning! Warning! ...I just saw a few rotten faces in the mirror..."

Suddenly, something seemed to land on the roof. Even the reinforced sheet metal was dented in several places, as though something had jumped down from those tall trees.

Now it was using its sharp claws to try to scrape open this tin can.

"Hold on!"

"What? Ah..."

Ash was immediately flung against the window on his side by centrifugal force, taking a hard knock. The things on the car were hurled off, leaving only one clinging tightly to the metal along its side. It had bluish-gray skin and pale, bloodshot eyes. In the rearview mirror, several dusty-gray shapes flashed past-they had hunched backs and moved on all fours, their skin hanging loose like waterlogged rotten flesh.

"Old acquaintances I never wanted to see again as long as I lived!" Ash spat out a few ugly curses, but he was fairly mentally prepared.

I did not ease off the accelerator. The SUV kept roaring forward. Ash abruptly rolled down the window and flung out his arm, scattering white salt like a torrential downpour. As the grains struck the rotting corpse, black smoke instantly rose with a sizzling sound, and the stench of scorched flesh spread.

Its hands could no longer hold and snapped off. Looking back, we saw only two white bones with rotten flesh clinging to them, still wedged firmly in the gaps of the car.

Thanks to our increased speed, we reached the little cabin just as the last glow vanished over the horizon. This place had become even more desolate and silent. Though it had been quiet before, it had still brimmed with life; otherwise, it would not have drawn lost travelers to set foot on this land again and again.

Now, however, the silence was terrifying. The chirping of insects and calls of birds seemed to have severed all ties with this place. It was as though we had stepped into another world.

It had been a dozen years or so, hadn't it? I suddenly thought of that fellow named Paul. If this had been what he saw back then, he probably would never have opened the counselor training center nearby, even under threat of death.

"Oh my God, this is just like that young man in the Grimms' fairy tale who left home to find fear. Not a very famous one, huh? It's about a young man who stayed in a haunted house for three days to learn how to be afraid, all just to learn fear. Ha ha, funny, right? But right now, I really wish I were him..."