The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder Read Free Book Online

answer – I will bury it. Yes. Somewhere – maybe here, under the piles of books and notes. Or maybe lock it in one of these cupboards, where I can forget it, where it will never distract me again.
    Or (and here my voice must become hushed), or I will read it. I will open it and read. Only a sentence. Only a paragraph. After all, when you consider it properly, what is the purpose of carrying around these forty thousand words, forty thousand words for the massacre, if they were never intended to be read? What harm can words do me? Can they pierce my flesh? And who is to care if I break my vow and grow fat eating these words? Maybe vows are made to be broken . . .
    I wonder, Will I recognize myself? I wonder, Will I care?
Nanking, 28 February 1937 (the eighteenth day of the first month by Shujin’s calendar)
    What has happened to the sun? Something in nature must have become unbalanced for the rising sun to look like that. I sit at this familiar window, the only window in the house that looks east over the city, and I am gripped with overwhelming unease. My hand is shaking as I write. The sun is red. And worse – through some trick, some conspiracy of the atmosphere and the landscape, its rays have been arranged symmetrically so that they shoot outwards across the sky in solid red stripes. It looks exactly like . . . exactly like . . .
    Heavens! What is the matter? I dare not even write the words. What manner of madness is this? Seeing signs in the sky! I must turn away and try not to let my thoughts wander like this. I am in danger of sounding like Shujin, of becoming like her – dealing remorselessly in superstitions. Really, I do wonder daily about Shujin. If she were awake now she would put her head on one side, look at the horizon thoughtfully, and immediately recall her old village wisdom: the folklore that ten suns take turns rising in the east, swimming in queues through the underworld to circle round and rise up in the east. She would look at this sun for a while then declare that something had gone wrong with it during its swim through the underworld, that it was the victim of an injury – an omen of something terrible to come. Because if there is anything she persists in it is this: the belief that time moves around us like a barrel – rolling up in front of our eyes, circling back round. She says, and she never tires of saying this, that she can see the future for the simple reason that the future is our past.
    I don’t argue with her village superstitions, I am helpless in the face of her vehemence. ‘Don’t ever try to change her,’ my mother said, before she died. ‘The tusks of an elephant will never grow out of a dog’s mouth. You know that.’
    But malleable though I have become, I am not an entire fool. While it is true that there is no need to change her, neither is there any call to encourage this hysterical nature of hers. No need, for example, to rouse her now from bed and bring her here to my study, where I sit on my day-bed looking fearfully out at the sun.
    It is hovering there even now, like a giant eyeing the city, terrible and red. Shujin would call it an omen. She would do something ridiculous if she saw it, she would run screaming round the house maybe. And so I will keep it to myself. I will tell no one that today I have witnessed the Chinese sun rising in the shape and colour of the Hi No Maru – the red disc on the Imperial Japanese Army flag.
    So! It is done! I should throw down the book and cover my face with shame. I have broken my vow. How odd, after all these years, to have given up quite suddenly and unexpectedly on an unremarkable summer morning much like any other, how odd to have succumbed. Now, as I run my fingers down the pages of the book, I wonder if I have learned anything. The paper is old, the ink faded, and my kaishu script looks rather quaint. But – and how funny this is, to discover that the important things remain the same – the dread is no