Numbly, I took the paper from his hand. I glanced at it, seeing the address: 123 Lakefront Drive. I shivered as I read this.
"Yes," Mr. Li told me. "I live less than three miles from where we now stand. I jogged over here as a matter of fact. I'm sure you've noticed my house a time or two as you sat out on your back deck. It's the brown one you can see across the bend of the shore."
"But, how…"
"Tonight," he said, turning from me and stretching his legs a bit. "Everything will be answered tonight. Just be sure to be there."
He began trotting off down the road, his legs pumping as he ran. In less than thirty seconds he'd disappeared around the bend.
I spent that day very troubled, very uncommunicative with my wife. She commented upon it a few times and finally dismissed it as a case of PMS on my part. She retreated to her private den to study some medical journals, leaving me to keep an eye upon our brood.
I mechanically made lunch and then dinner, serving everyone about five o'clock. I only picked at my food. After Nina began doing the dishes I told her that I had to go into town to take care of some business. I don't believe that she bought the lie that I gave her but she didn't question me.
I climbed onto the Honda motorcycle I'd bought a few years before and headed off, arriving before Mr. Li's house less than ten minutes later.
It was more modest than ours was but definitely expensive. A single story, four bedroom or so with a swimming pool. I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell with a trembling hand.
Mr. Li answered the door before the echo of the doorbell even faded away. He was dressed in a pair of sweats and was shirtless, his stomach and chest without an ounce of fat upon it.
"Bill," he nodded, stepping aside. "Come in please."
I stepped in and he showed me around his house. There were indeed four bedrooms, two of which were empty. Pictures of an Asian woman were in every hallway, on every wall. She was pretty and the pictures were from various points in her life. He made no comment upon them. His den was what interested me the most. It had an expensive roll-top desk and a modern computer upon it. The window looked out over the lake and my house was plainly visible from there. A large telescope sat next to the window.
Mr. Li led me back to the living room and offered me a seat upon his couch. He disappeared for a moment and then came back holding an icy cold bottle of my favorite brand of beer. This didn't surprise me at that point, I simply took it from him and gulped down half the bottle in less than ten seconds.
"So you remember what you did for me?" I asked, although it was not a question as much as it was a statement.
"Yes," he nodded, sipping out of a bottle of Chinese beer. "I remember everything."
"How did you do what you did?" I asked. "What powers do you have?"
"Powers?" he scoffed, "I have no special powers at all. None except for one special gift that I'm allowed to pass on at my moment of death. I passed my gift on to you Bill. I shouldn't have done it, but I did. What has allowed you to do what you have done was the result of a miscalculation of thinking on a dying old man's part. An old man whose judgment was severely impaired by the effects of enough narcotic painkillers to kill an average person. An old man who'd been consumed by loneliness and loss but who should have known better. When I think of what might have happened, what could have happened, I still shudder to this day."
I stared, unable to comprehend exactly what he was saying.
"I am descended from ancient Chinese royalty," he told me. "My family has been instilled with this gift, the granting of a single wish, for the past sixty generations at least. The gift is intended to go to the first born grandchild of each recipient. It is intended that no one else but that grandchild even know about the gift. Don't ask me who gave it to us, why we have it, what entity powers it. We have this gift, I know not why. Only the bare essentials of it were explained to me when I received it for reasons which will become clear in a moment. The gift must be passed on by each holder upon his death or it is lost forever." He looked sternly at me. "I had no one to pass the gift on to, at least no one I would have trusted it to. I'd spent the years of my life thinking that it was finally going to die when my cancer took me away."
"You have no kids or grandkids?" I asked.
"My only son is dead. I have no daughters. My only grandson lives in Seattle. He is a greedy, shallow man who is only interested in himself. It is he who had me sent to that horrid place when my cancer finally reached the stage that I was unable to care for myself. If I had given the gift to him, God only knows what horrors might have occurred. I'd decided long before you were even a part of this earth Bill, that he would not receive the gift. I decided to let it die with me before he would have it."
"You were given this gift?" I asked, sipping from my beer, trying to comprehend.
"By my grandfather," Mr. Li nodded. "It was 1938 and I was nineteen years old. This was in Nanking, in Manchuria. We were under occupation by Japanese troops and it was not a gentle occupation. The Japanese were running wild in the streets, killing men at random, especially service-aged men such as myself. They were raping any women they could get their hands upon, even the elderly and children, often killing them afterward. They burned houses, temples, dug mass graves, slaughtered thousands.
"All of my family died that year at the hands of the Japanese," he continued. "I was not the one intended to receive the gift, I had two older brothers and a sister. I was the baby of the family. My oldest brothers were both killed in the army, fighting the Japanese. My parents and my sister were killed in Nanking on a night that I had been out visiting the girl I was courting. Even in the horrors of war some things still go on. Love is one of them. I was taking a great chance by leaving the safety of our family house to go see her. Had any soldiers seen me I most likely would have been shot on the spot, maybe even tortured first."
"It is perhaps ironic that I had been the one taking a huge risk in leaving the house but that while I was gone on that day, it was the house that became a deathtrap. A squad of soldiers had wandered by while my sister was out getting water. They took a liking to her and followed her back home. There, they held my family at gunpoint while they took turns raping her in front of them. Then they shot everyone, leaving the bodies there to rot while they continued about their business.
"When I returned home I found all of them dead in the living room, my mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, all except for grandfather. Can you possibly begin to imagine the horror of finding such a thing? Can you imagine it Bill?"
"No," I answered honestly, shaking my head.
"Grandfather had been shot twice in the chest," he continued. "He was covered in blood, both his own and that of grandmother who had been shot in the head while she'd been sitting next to him. He was dying fast but he was awake when I came in, he was alert. And he was staring at me, beckoning me over to him.
"I was still trying to deal with the knowledge that my entire family had been slaughtered like pigs, worse than pigs actually, people didn't torture pigs first. I was looking at their corpses, their beloved faces that were now dead and locked in screams of terror. My sister was lying naked in the middle of the room, her legs spread wide, bruises on her body, a hole in her throat from a bayonet. Father had died trying to protect mother with his body, he was lying atop of her, more than twenty bullet holes in his back. The bullets had simply traveled straight through him and into mother.
"I wanted to scream. I wanted to go find a rifle and start killing any Japanese that I saw. I wanted to attack their headquarters in Nanking personally, seeing how many of them I could kill before they cut me down. I wanted revenge Bill.