The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder

pressed his nose against the window. ‘That’s the third wing. Closed off too.’
    ‘Part of this house?’
    ‘I know. We inhabit a zip code. The Forbidden Palace. There are maybe twenty rooms in this place that I know exist for sure, another twenty you only get to hear about in rumours.’
    Now I could see how much ground the house took up. It covered most of a city block and was arranged round the garden, on three sides of a square. From above, it would look like a bridge with the Salt Building blocking the fourth side. The house was decaying; rot had started in the far wing and Jason said he didn’t like to think what was in the closed-off rooms downstairs. ‘That’s where the ghosts hang out,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘According to the baba yaga twins.’
    We passed countless sliding shoji doors, some locked, some open. I got glimpses of belongings in the gloom, piled-up furniture, dusty and forgotten – a teak butsudan, an ancestor’s shrine, empty except for a stack of dusty glass jars. My slippers slapped in the silence. Out of the gloom ahead of us appeared the door to the closed wing, padlocked and braced with an iron bar. Jason stopped at the barricade. ‘This is no go.’ He put his nose to the door and sniffed. ‘And, Jesus , in the hot weather the stink .’ He wiped his face and turned back, tapping the last door on the corridor. ‘Don’t worry, you’re cool here – this would be yours.’
    He slid back the door. Sunshine poured through grimy sheets tacked over two windows at right angles. The walls had once been covered in pale brown silk and the remains of it hung down, disintegrating in long, vertical slashes, as if a huge clawed animal had been kept locked in here. The tatami mats were fraying, there were dead flies on the windowsill and spiders’ webs in the light fitting.
    ‘What do you think?’
    I stepped inside and stood in the centre of the room, slowly turning round and round. On the near wall there was a tokonoma alcove, with a battered rattan rocking-chair pushed against the wall where the seasonal scroll should hang.
    ‘You could do anything you wanted to it. The landlord doesn’t give a shit. Even forgets to collect the rent most times.’
    I closed my eyes and held out my hands, feeling the softness of the air, the dusty sunlight on my back. It was twice the size of my bedroom in London and it seemed to me so welcoming. There was a soft smell in there, of decaying silk and straw.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘It’s . . .’ I said, opening my eyes and fingering the silk on the walls ‘. . . it’s beautiful.’
    Jason pulled back the sheet covering the window and opened it, letting some of the hot air into the room. ‘There,’ he said, pointing out of the window. ‘Godzilla’s playpen.’
    Coming here, dwarfed by all the skyscrapers, I hadn’t realized how high Takadanobaba was. It was only now that I saw the land dropped away from this vantage-point. The tops of buildings stood level with my window and everywhere faces shouted from video screens hung up high. A vast advertising hoarding, only fifty feet away, filled most of the view. It was a huge sepia photograph of a movie star smiling a crooked smile, holding a glass up, as if he was toasting the whole of Takadanobaba. The glass had the words ‘Suntory Reserve’ etched on it.
    ‘Mickey Rourke,’ said Jason. ‘Babe magnet, evidently.’
    ‘Mickey Rourke,’ I echoed. I’d never heard of him, but I liked his face. I liked the way he was smiling down at us. I held the window frame and leaned out a little. ‘Which way is Hongo?’
    ‘Hongo? I don’t know – I think it’s . . . that way, maybe.’
    I stood on tiptoe, looking sideways, out over the distant roofs and the neon signs and the TV aerials painted gold by the sun. We must be miles away. I’d never be able to see Shi Chongming’s office among all those other buildings. But it made me feel better to think that it was there, somewhere out there. I