Soon the dark wood first floor bar was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Over the club chairs and fine oaken tables they lay, all sweetly dreaming their fondest dreams. Some of tortures, blood, and victory. Some of an end to the war and a great New Asia under Japanese leadership. Some of large factories, personal success, and massive wealth. And some simply of wives, mothers, children, or lovers, and their own natal villages by the sea or in the hills, not so different from the villages they had plundered and torched these the last five years. Still others, soaked in horror and their own culpability, though they couldn’t admit it on pain of death and dishonour, dreamt of emigration to Canada, Australia, or the United States. They dreamt of becoming someone else someday, somewhere else.

Cheung watched them as he’d watched the little tan-coloured dog with the curly tail. He watched them dreaming, watched their peaceful faces. He became a twisted guide to the underworld, a dreadful shepherd, a broken boatman. They swam the waters he controlled, and he guided them through visions of their own horrors, paddled beside them as they gasped and drowned. He was a frightful alchemist, a blue shaman, walking beside them through fires that scalded and burned, that recriminated without end. Every fingernail remover felt his own nails painstakingly peeled off one by one. Every water torturer drowned, gasped, was revived, and drowned again. Every swordsman felt his own head sliced off, and the blood gush skyward from his aorta. The sleepers twitched. They slept and dreamt some more. They twitched again. They writhed. When the first one arched his back, Cheung breathed a sigh of relief. The medicine was working.

But some of the Kempeitai men were stronger than the little tan-coloured dog. They grunted. They cried out. They fought the air, punching and dodging. One of them, still asleep, got up and walked across the room to another table, sat down, and returned to snoring. One of them sat up and spoke, a long monologue in his mother tongue. Cheung didn’t understand a word. Eventually, the speaker drooped forward in his chair, until his forehead touched the table again. Cheung watched them, mesmerized. To ease them on their way, he sang to them, his favourite mountain song:

Lonely on the mountain path

Through mist and rain

Through rain and mist

I’m searching always searching

Searching for you

Lonely down beside the river

Through mist and rain

Through rain and mist

I’m searching ever searching

Searching for you

Lonely by the ocean too

Through mist and rain

Through rain and mist

Searching still I’m searching

Never finding you

It took them the whole night to dream, squirm, arch, and die. But die they did, first one, then ten, then thirty. When morning arrived over a hundred men were dead in the red velvet chairs of the first-floor bar.