The E-mail in Due Course

Leo Kee Chye

Saturday, July 3, 2004 

When I laid my eyes on that e-mail, my seated body jerked back violently. The wooden chair against the marble floor let out a disturbing squeak. Never for once, even a second, had I expected to receive one. Now that I had seen it, I could do nothing but wait. There was no escape.

Still petrified in my chair, I somehow managed to grin in resignation as I pondered over my life. The old adage “the chicken coming home to roost” made perfect sense.

The story of my life began not in 1970 but 1977 when I was seven. A typical boy in a typical neighborhood, I could not have been more ordinary. Nothing to that point in my life suggested otherwise until…

I lived with my mum; she brought me up all by herself. Of my dad I knew nothing except he was long dead before I could utter my first word. Life was hard but not unpleasant. Enough was for survival but nothing beyond. My mum rented a room above a shophouse, not the whole room but only a miserable corner. The room was shared by three more families, partitioned only by curtains and cardboard. Privacy was a word unknown to us. While my mum laboured in a sweatshop, I divided my time between school and merrymaking with buddies. I remembered clearly that three shops away resided a hideous looking old woman and her equally hideous looking dog. Not a dog but a beast, we used to call it, a diseased beast of monstrous size, with half of its fur gone, would easily scare the daylight of anyone with its gleaming set of saliva-drenched teeth and malevolent eyes. The old woman, no better, we called her siao char boh which means mad woman in our dialect, was the quirkiest person I had ever come across. We half suspected some nuts and bolts went loose in her brains for nothing delighted her more than having her beast sprung on unsuspected passers-by and watching these terrified people scampering for their lives. Cranky she might be, she was careful to have her dog tied to a pole but having the leash long enough to create spectacles for her amusement.

I avoided the woman and her dog as much as I could until the day when my good buddy was made a victim of her indulgence. He was too engrossed in his new found bicycle that he cycled dangerously close to the forbidden area. The beast sprung out. Gripped by fear, he lost his balance, and fell into the drain. Concussed, he was rushed to hospital. At that point, I sworn revenge, at an age when I doubt I could spell the word.

I could not say how I knew but I just knew it. Picking a time when I knew the woman would be out for her daily grocery, I went to her place. Sure enough, the beast darted out, brandishing its incisor, unleashing its deafening barks. Knowing the leash and collar would hold it back, I quickly set out to do my work. Grabbing a handful of soil, I then scattered them on the pavement. I was a little more than half a metre from the beast. Climbing onto my feet and hands, I zigzagged my fingers across the pavement. An unintelligible pattern slowly emerged. The moment I finished, I turned round and ran as fast as I could, as I had never run before, not stopping until all my strength left me and finally I collapsed.

Two days later.

“Did you see that?” my mum asked our co-occupant Mrs Tan as we were having dinner. “How horrible!”

“Heaven forbids!” Mrs Tan exclaimed, putting down her chopsticks. “Siao dog, I told you so. It must have been trying to flee. In its struggle, the collar just snapped its head off. Both body and head….about four metres apart in a pool of blood.”

“Never heard of a dog committing suicide,” Mum said.

“I told you so already, the dog’s mad like its owner. They’re siao one. The old woman will be next, believe me.”

“Mum, I want another bowl of rice!” I interrupted them innocently. “The food’s delicious today.”

I never knew how I did it nor I bothered to find out. But from the causal gossiping between my mum and our relatives, I surmised that dad might have a part to play. He was a priest with some temples, as far as I could gather. Of what sort of priest and what sort of temple, I knew nothing. But dad was not a full time priest but held on to some odd jobs as well. I faintly recalled that in the evening after work, he would bring me to some of those priestly gatherings, performing rituals, writing talismans of the sort. Incidentally, my grandfather, great grandfather were also priest. Perhaps, something runs in our family, consciously or subconsciously.

I had never given much thoughts to my peccadillo till I reached the prime age of twenty-five. Then, a garment factory employed me as one of their clerks. Everything seemed fine, especially when I was not a person who could see beyond having three meals a day and a roof over head. My supervisor shall change all that. Bastard Lim, as I would call him, was an irascible chap who singled out me for the whatever woes he might have suffered. I was made more than a scapegoat but also a vent for his inexplicable outbursts. Poor me put up with him as much as I could until the day when he accursed me of dipping into the petty cash box which I did not. That, I told myself, sealed his fate and mine. I wasn’t going to be pushed around anymore.

This time round was different. It involved a human being not a beast. My plans had to be foolproof. I was not going to write him a letter for I was well aware of the emerging technology of DNA which can trace a strand of hair to its rightful owner. You never knew what they could squeeze out of a letter. An absolutely brilliant idea then came to me in a flash. I would send him an e-mail instead.

Immediately, I proceed with my plan. I drew up a pattern and had it scanned. Then I dropped by one of those cybernet cafés. Using a web-based anonymous e-mail account, I delivered my sentence to Bastard Lim.

Two days later.

“Ong! Don’t go in there!” my fellow clerk caught my arm. “The police has cordoned off the place.”

“What’s happened!” I remarked casually.

“Didn’t you know? Lim’s killed himself. Jumped off from his office window.”

“Suicide?”

“Dunno lah! The police is suspecting foul play because…come on…no one who wants to commit suicide would crash through the glass window. The least he can do is to open it before jumping. Farnie rite!”

The police never suspected me, not in a million years. They finally listed the death as suicidal under unusual circumstances.

I could not fully describe the feeling — it was a sense of exhilaration, no pang of remorse or whatever. For once, I felt like a demigod, having the power of life and death over mere mortals. From then on, I embarked on a new career and a new life. For the next seven years, my service was highly sought after by Russian mafias, South American druglords as well as some so-called “righteous” politicians for I was the one person who could rid of their “enemies” at a click of the mouse button. None of them really knew how I did them. Every one of the executions was a clean job. My clients would not argue with a job well-done and money was nothing to them. That made me an extremely comfortable man.

But the recent few months had made me uneasy. There were several deaths of prominent people under circumstances similar to what would happen if I were to execute those orders. Could there be someone out there who possess the kind of skills as I have?

I knew the answer now as I looked at that e-mail again.