鬼说
I can barely stand. My eyes burn with a thousand fires. The blood in my sword arm slows to something more solid than liquid. If I believed in the spirits of my ancestors, I would ask them for the strength to finish my mission. I would ask them for the strength to kill the man who remains.
But I don’t believe. Not in the way that matters.
My belief has become like that of all who have become immigrants to America. It is something to wave at in a cultural parade, something to tell in a children’s story, something to study in the university’s anthropology department.
It is no more real than the ghost I pretend to be.
So I push through the pain.
The symbols on the note desire to jump across the paper, but I keep them still long enough to check the address against the street sign.
I have arrived, and it is the designated time for the monster to die.
In spite of the dying ghost I have become, he will be destroyed.
The children will be free.
The address is that of an apartment building. Six stories. I will have to fight my way to the top, I am sure. My enemy watches too many movies.
But I learn quickly that I am wrong.
Wu Song emerges from the door alone. He walks halfway between the door and me, and we both check the street to see that it’s mostly empty.
“It’s time,” I say, smoothing Alex Yang’s skin over my face and pressing the edges to secure the glue.
“Damn right it’s time. I didn’t expect to see you here, girl.”
“The ancestor cries out for your blood, demon.”
“The ancestors are just fairy tales, bitch.”
I shake my head. “You misunderstand.” I draw the dao from the sheath at my side. “This sword was given to me by my father. I have named it Zǔxiān because it is all that remains of my father and his fathers. It is not the spirits, but Zǔxiān who thirsts.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t bet on that, little ghost.”
He snaps his fingers, and two men, both in black suits, emerge from the building behind him. They carry a little girl, no older than twelve, between them.
“A wig this time?” I ask, my voice thick with disbelief.
“No tricks.”
“It doesn’t matter. It is your day to die.”
I step forward, the pain in my legs making me more sluggish than I want to let on.
“Not so fast today, little ghost,” my enemy says. “Can you dance around my bullets so gracefully today?”
He slowly pulls a revolver from his coat, and fires three shots. The first two hit my stomach, and the third misses by the merest of inches.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he says, grinning.
I say nothing. I can’t, not without spitting up blood from my gut, I fear. My feet discover strength I didn’t expect, and they carry me step by step to Wu Song.
He fires again, and a bullet blasts through my right thigh. Seven more steps and I am in front of him. Two more and my dao can finally taste vengeance.
The steps come at great cost, and I raise Zǔxiān to strike true. But it is too late. My strength is gone. Wu Song smiles, then laughs, then knocks the blade away from me with a single slap of his open hand.
“So,” he taunts, “do you still believe it is my day to die?”
I nod, and cough up blood.
“Like I said, I don’t think so.”
He squats low, on his haunches like a cat, so we are looking eye to eye.
“Let’s see who you are first, shall we?”
怪物说话
Wu Song reached his stubby fingers into the loose edges of Yang’s face and jerked it roughly from the fool girl’s skin. It ripped away with a loud complaining whine. The boss stopped in shock a moment later as he took in the full beauty of his niece’s face and dropped the skin mask to the ground.
His eyes filled with tears and he latched onto the girl with his arms in a tight embrace.
“Why?” he cried. “Why, Jiao? Why you? If only I’d known…”
“You… must be… must be stopped,” the girl coughed and sputtered.
“What I did, I did for you and your mother, flower.” His voice remained soft, low, gentle, pained. “I took care of you for the memory of your father.”
“You are nothing…” She spit up blood again, and sank deeper to the ground, her knees threatening to give way completely.
“Hush now, girl. The pain will be immense, but I will be with you through it.”
“My father…”
“What, my flower?”
“You are nothing… nothing like him…”
“Calmly now, Jiao. Calmly. Don’t upset yourself.”
He turned to his men to tell them to leave him, but they were no longer standing behind him. Only the girl remained.
“Leave me, girl. You no longer matter. Can’t you see I am in pain?”
“My name,” the girl said.
“What, child?”
“You asked my name. Now I would speak it to you.”
“I no longer care, girl. Leave me and my niece at peace.”
Jiao lifted her head to her Uncle’s ear. “You will never have peace,” she stammered.
“My name is Jun.”
“Who cares?” Wu Song asked.
“Heng Jun.”
“Who cares?” he repeated.
“I was not speaking to you, dead man. I was speaking to the Jiao who became the Zheng who became the ghost of murdered men and lost children.”
The girl walked to the sword on the ground and lifted it. It faltered in her hands, heavy as it was, but she held it steady enough.
Jiao nodded weakly at her, then tightened her grip on her uncle’s neck. He struggled, but something supernatural seemed to have reinvigorated his niece’s strength and it held him fast.
“You,” Jiao said, suddenly her voice strong again. “You sent me the address for this place.”
Heng Jun nodded and stepped behind Wu Song’s back. She pressed Zǔxiān’s biting teeth against the small of the man’s giant back.
鬼说
Zǔxiān pierces the monster, but not only the monster. It bites deep into my own gut as well and offers me the rest of my ancestors. It invites me to join them in the great nothing that my generation believes in. It slides steadily through my stomach and emerges wholly dripping with blood from my back. My shirt hangs heavy and thick and wet.
But I feel nothing.
The poison has done its work and taken even that from me. My eyes grow dark and darker still. There is little more than the weight of the monster’s massive bulk against me.
Then there is something more. A hand, tiny and gentle and yet more real than even the heavy man supported against my weak, smaller, dying form.
“You were wrong,” says a girl’s voice.
“I…”
“Don’t speak. It is almost time. Merely know that you were wrong. The ancestors were with you all along. They sent me to be with you. I have looked over you for years. They chose you because you had something of your father’s strong spirit in you.”
“I…” I try again, but give up. There is no strength left.
“You will see me again soon. You were right about names, though. Names are not only important. They provide destiny. Your first name was the false name. Your second name, that one was your true name. That name, Zheng, will be the name you take with you for the remainder of your journey.”
With what light is left, I watch the girl kneel to kiss my forehead.
“Thank you,” she says.
And then she is gone, like a light bulb turned out. Like a…
I smile.
Like a ghost.
Then the darkness takes me to my father.
THE CURSE OF CLOUD CASTLE
A Hindi Houdini Locked Room Mystery
by
Gigi Pandian
— :: —
Sanjay Rai had escaped from a coffin sinking to the bot
tom of the Ganges River with a full minute of air left to spare. He had remained calm and composed while appearing on live television wearing nothing but a lungi. He’d even kept a level head to avoid being burned alive when a fellow stage magician had miscalculated an illusion.
Most people would find those situations horrifying. Or, at the very least, stress-inducing. Though Sanjay would never admit it publicly, his heart rate did rise during all of those experiences. However, it was nothing compared to the abject dread he felt as he stood on the dock in front of the small motorboat.
Sanjay didn’t hate boats. It was his stomach that did. He felt queasy even contemplating a boat ride.
There was something else making him queasy this morning. Looking across the water, the fog-shrouded island in the distance gave him a sense of foreboding. Sanjay wasn’t superstitious. Quite the contrary. As a stage magician, he knew how to see beyond the obvious explanations that most people saw. On more than one occasion, he’d solved crimes that appeared impossible.
But he also knew the power of suggestion. The fact that a curse had been attributed to Cloud Castle played on people’s subconscious minds, even when they didn’t believe in curses. And Sanjay Rai did not believe curses.
“It’s only a twenty minute ride,” Vik assured him.
“I’m only doing this because it’s you.” The wind at the edge of the ocean flipped up Sanjay’s collar and carried his words out to sea.
“I don’t understand,” Vikram said with a shake of his head, “how someone who can settle comfortably into a coffin without getting claustrophobic can possibly be so afraid of a little boat ride. We’ll be able to see the mainland the whole time.”
Vikram, who’d gone by the nickname Vik as soon as he realized he had free will, was one of Sanjay’s oldest friends. Vik was two years older, but they grew up in the same neighborhood in Palo Alto and bonded as two American born kids of parents from India. ABCD. American Born Confused Desi.
Early in life, Sanjay had done what his parents expected. Right up until he dropped out of law school to become a professional stage magician, much to his parents’ disappointment. After several years struggling, he’d become a huge success, selling out a long run of shows at a Napa Valley theater and having a short-lived TV show on Indian MTV, which featured the Ganges escape.
After a short phase as a Goth slacker in high school, Vik followed in his computer programmer parents’ footsteps, making millions in the latest Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Thanks to a his “Om” app, which sent calming and inspiring messages to a cell phone whenever the program detected the user needed to relax, he made his first million before he turned twenty five.
This weekend, Vik was celebrating his thirtieth birthday. With the same gusto that made him successful with his tech start-up, he planned to celebrate his big day by throwing a party on a small island off the coast of Northern California. Nothing too extravagant, by Silicon Valley standards. He was limiting it to forty of his closest friends.
Cloud Castle stood on a private island visible from the mainland only on the clearest of days. Even then, the rocky island was a tiny speck on the horizon, small enough to make one wonder if it was a trick of the light. Aside from a guard outpost next to the dock, the fifty room mansion was the only building on the island. It was ostensibly the vacation property of a tech billionaire, but the man had lost a fortune in the last stock market crash. To avoid losing his toy castle, he was now forced to rent out the property when he wasn’t using it. Luckily for him, the industry was booming again, and there were plenty of young men like Vik who were happy to throw their money around. The castle was rented for getaways ranging from two days to twenty—however long the renter could stand to be away from their cell phone and the Internet. The ethos of the island was to enjoy luxury while taking a break from modern technology.
While Sanjay dragged his feet, a small motorboat waited to shuttle eight guests to the island: Vik, his fiancée Geneva, his little sister Priya, her Welsh husband Broderick, and four friends, including Sanjay. The rest of the guests would be arriving the following day, on Saturday, to stay the night at the castle after the catered party with almost as many hired staff as guests. Sanjay fit into both categories: friend and hired help. He was to be part of the entertainment for the weekend, performing his Hindi Houdini stage show during the party. That’s why he’d been invited to come to the island a day early along with Vik’s family and closest friends. Sanjay and Vik had once been close, but with the demands of their vastly different careers, they rarely spoke these days.
Vik’s fiancée stepped off the boat to join Vik and Sanjay on the dock. Geneva worked long hours as a human rights lawyer, and Sanjay had never seen her without harsh clothes perfectly tailored to her thin six foot frame, and an even harsher expression. It was partly her name that played into Sanjay’s impression. Thirty years before, her mom was presenting a paper at an academic conference in Geneva, Switzerland, while eight months pregnant. She unexpectedly went into labor, and since she and her husband hadn’t yet selected a name, Geneva it was. Sanjay knew her name wasn’t her fault, but it was telling that the more casual nickname Genny never stuck. As she put her hand on his arm and gave him a warm smile, he wondered if he’d misjudged her. For Vik’s sake, Sanjay hoped he’d been wrong about his initial impression of her.
“I don’t know how much good it’ll do right before you get on the boat,” she said, “but I have an extra seasickness patch.”
“I’m already wearing two,” Sanjay said. “But thanks.” With a deep breath big enough to rival that of a Yogi, Sanjay stepped onto the motorboat.
The boat lurched as it pulled away from the dock. Sanjay closed his eyes and focused on breathing.
“Don’t you dare throw up so close to us, Sanjay Rai,” Priya shouted across the boat from where she stood at the bow, her long black hair swirling around her face. Five years younger than her brother Vik, Priya had tagged along with the two boys when they were kids. She had a crush on Sanjay up until she left for college. She was a sweet kid until then, too, he remembered. Once she got to college, she learned there was a whole world out there beyond the rules imposed by her conservative parents. Unfortunately, one of the first lessons she learned was that her good looks could get her anything she wanted.
“If you’re going to barf,” she continued, “at least lean over the side of the boat.”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“Haven’t you learned to ignore Priya yet?” Vik said, leading Sanjay to the tiny enclosed area of the boat with padded benches. “Engaging only encourages her.”
“Why did you invite her, then?”
Vik blinked at him. “She’s my sister. How could I not?” He looped his hand into Geneva’s and pulled her down to sit on his lap. They were a good looking couple. Vik was confident enough that he didn’t even mind that Geneva was a few inches taller than him.
“It was their parents,” Geneva said, lowering her voice and squeezing Vik’s hand. “Priya complained to them that she and Broderick were only invited to the party on Saturday night, not tonight’s pre-party island fun.”
“You want to meet the rest of the gang?” Vik asked, nodding toward the five people at the front of the boat with the hired driver.
“I think he’d rather wait until we’re on solid ground,” Geneva answered for Sanjay.
For someone so brilliant, Vik could be terribly unobservant. Sanjay smiled weakly, then gripped the edge of his seat. For one startling moment, he could have sworn he was seeing double and feared doubling up on seasickness patches might not have been a good idea. Then he remembered two of Vik’s friends were twins.
Emilio and Elena were famous in the tech community for being the brother-sister team who invented a promising social media platform, then sold it for a price that boggled Sanjay’s mind. Sanjay hadn’t met the twins before, but had heard good things about them through Vik. As he watched them, the wind blew Elena’s hat into the ocean. Her long black hair that h
ad been tucked up inside now flowed freely around her. She didn’t seem to mind. Her attention was focused on Cloud Castle, slowly coming into view through the fog.
Sanjay hoped the twins would be better company than Priya and her husband Broderick, whom he’d spent more time with than strictly necessary for a well-lived life. For the most part, Sanjay could ignore the vacuous woman Priya had become, but Broderick’s gregarious personality ignored all subtle cues that someone didn’t wish to speak to him. The tall Welshman was at least ten years Priya’s senior. He’d won her over with his suave British accent and his overflowing bank account.
“Bore da,” Broderick shouted into the wind. “What a beautiful morning for a boat ride.”
Priya raised a skeptical eyebrow and stepped across the boat to sit with her brother. “Why is the island covered in fog? There’s no fog anywhere else around here.”
“Why it’s the curse, of course,” Vik said with a straight face. But he couldn’t hold it. A second later, he burst out laughing. He’d always been a terrible actor.
“Who’s that standing with Broderick?” Sanjay asked.
Vik followed Sanjay’s gaze. “You don’t recognize Kevin?” Kevin was a good friend of Vik’s from high school, but Sanjay remembered him as a scrawny kid who didn’t remotely resemble the portly man on the boat. On second thought, Sanjay revised his opinion. In baggy jeans, an oversize t-shirt, and floppy brown hair tousled by the wind, Kevin only appeared big and slovenly in such close proximity to Broderick’s bespoke suit and close-cropped strawberry blond hair.
“Do you guys know,” Sanjay heard Kevin shout over the crashing waves, “what one strand of DNA said to the other? Do these genes make me look fat? Get it? Genes, not jeans.”
“Why would DNA be talking?” asked Elena.
“It’s a joke.”
“Oh.”
Sanjay closed his eyes and practiced his breathing exercises for the rest of the short boat ride that wasn’t nearly short enough. When the sound of the engine changed, he opened his eyes. He was alone on the bench. Everyone else stood at the front of the boat, watching the impressive sight coming into view.
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