The Girl with Ghost Eyes

by M. H. Boroson

  Bok Choy sat across from me, twitchy and hyperkinetic. Puffing on his cigar, he grinned his gilded teeth at me. “Might as well start calling me Boss, Li-lin,” he said.

  Sparring had taught me enough to know when an opponent was trying to make me lose composure. The crowd pressed closer, watching us play. I didn’t want to let them see how nervous I was.

  Bok Choy smirked at me. He was trying to make me lose composure. It was working. I was so tense I was nearly hallucinating. Staring at the pips on the pai jiu tiles, my vision blurred till I thought I saw a contract. I remembered Mr. Wong’s contract girl, facing the wall in silence, the apparition of a cane over her. I remembered the grunts and moans behind the closed doors. I knew they spent years like that, in those fetid, dingy rooms, paying off a contract.

  My breathing grew shallow and quick. I shouldn’t have taken the bet. What was I thinking? I’d been thinking of the men on the southwest side of Chinatown, decent men who labored twelve hours every day and slept three men to a bed so they could send money to their families in China. I had been thinking of my father, who sacrificed one of his eyes to save me.

  “You can still forfeit,” said Bok Choy, his smile wild and golden. “Forfeit now and there’s no contract. I’ll let you start leaving me red envelopes, but you won’t have to come work for me if you forfeit.”

  I opened my mouth. I wanted to say yes, I forfeit. Yes, I’ve had enough of this game. I was terrified of what would happen if I lost. It shook me to my core.

  And yet forfeiting the game would mean I’d lose a chance at getting his support. With thirty armed men I might be able to stop them from raising a Kulou-Yuanling. With thirty armed men at my side I could descend on Liu Qiang and his allies as an army.

  I took a deep breath and placed the next pair of tiles. I played meihua, mei pai, a matching pair of dominoes, with ten pips each. It was a strong hand, worth ten points. I began to feel a little more confident. I was eleven points ahead. Hands worth eleven or twelve points are very rare.

  Bok Choy began to giggle. He stood up, nearly knocking his chair over. With a flourish he placed one domino down. Twelve pips. I felt the contents of my stomach begin to come up as the gangster grinned his gold-pocked smile, and placed his other domino. Also twelve pips.

  Tian pai. The License of the Sky. The rarest, most valuable hand.

  The only hand worth twelve points.

  Vaguely I was aware of cheering all around me, but I had entered a deep silence, like the silence of opium dreamers or drowned men.

  Bok Choy leaned over the pai jiu table. A gold smile gloated at me. “You work for me now,” he said.

  The world came to a stop. If I refused to honor my bet, then the Xie Liang tong would be coming after me. I wouldn’t live long. No one would trust my word ever again.

  The room was still cheering. I hated these people, cheering Bok Choy’s victory. Cheering my defeat, my degradation.

  “Do you know English?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, and then the implication hit me. Some contract girls work in bathhouses catering to white San Franciscans. The men who came there were often opium addicts, or workers who resent the Chinese competition. They were rough with Chinese women. How long would I be able to last before I was broken?

  Someone brought a sheet of paper over to my side of the pai jiu table. A contract. My eyes were wet with tears, but I would not weep.

  The men in the room were lining up to congratulate Bok Choy. The man dressed as a whore congratulated him. Even the waitress, his wife, who had helped me, came up to congratulate him on his victory. My eyes glazed over. I was ruined.

  “Sign the contract, Li-lin,” Bok Choy said with a smirk. I had already begun to hate his smirk.

  I met his eyes. Once I signed the contract, I was his. They’re called three-year contracts, but it’s a lie, to trick gullible girls into signing them. It costs money to live—rent and food. For three years, a contract girl works on her back, but she develops a debt. When the three years are over, the contract girl thinks she’s free to go, but she now has to work to pay off all the money she owes. Usually, the only way a girl can get out of a contract is when another man buys it.

  I fought back my tears. “Sign the contract,” he said. I stifled a sob.

  “It will give you much face to have the girl who beat Tom Wong working for you, won’t it,” I said.

  “Sign the contract,” he said.

  I stared at him, and heard the cheering of the Xie Liangs in the room. They weren’t my people. I hated them, hated each and every one of them. I wasn’t going to let them see me cowed or craven, trying to renege on a bet.

  I took the pen and signed the contract.

  Bok Choy handed the signed paper to one of his men. I felt so defeated. His wife came over to him. Glaring at me, she counted out five dollars and handed them to Bok Choy.

  He grinned at me. “I bet her you would sign the contract without reading it,” he gloated.

  A sick wave went through me. I had made yet another mistake. The last days were a roadmap of my errors. Trusting Liu Qiang, failing to protect my father, and now coming here. I scowled at myself.

  “Wait,” I said to Bok Choy, “please. Give me tonight. Let me finish this. Let me stop the ritual.”

  “And give you time to run away?”

  “I will not run away,” I said, choking on the words. It was the truth. If I ran, word would get out. Everyone would know I was a runaway whore, someone who couldn’t even be trusted to honor a contract. My father would disown me. There was no one who would take me in. Even my spirit powers would diminish, since talismans are contracts too. “Give me tonight. Tomorrow I will come and work for you.”

  Bok Choy gazed at me, sizing me up with the mind of a gambler. He was wondering, I knew, if I was worth betting on. He was teetering on the edge of a decision.

  It was up to me to tip him so he’d fall where I wanted. He might even send men to help me after all. It was outlandish, but I thought I knew what was most important to him

  “Your daughter’s life is in jeopardy, Bok Choy.”

  The gangster gestured to the table, where the pai jiu tiles spelled out his victory. “You lost, Li-lin. Accept it.”

  “But this is serious,” I told him.

  “You want to know what’s serious?” he said, with a maniacal gleam in his eye. “I worship the gods of gambling, and you lost the damn game. Now go out there and do your thing. Jump up and down. Ring your little bell, burn some funny paper, and shout ‘yo ho.’”

  I stared. Bok Choy was out of his mind. Bai mu—white-eyed from blindness. He was mocking all that was sacred. What kind of man risks his future on the roll of a die?

  “Go on,” Bok Choy told me with a smirk. “Get out there and chant your nonsense and burn your phony money until your scary giant monster goes away.”

  “Yo ho,” I said with a scowl. I stood. The Xie Liangs made room for me as I strode out of the gambling hall and into the night.

  22

  A breeze blew westward from the Bay, bringing a chill to the dark San Francisco night. I shivered. There were only three hours left, three hours before Liu Qiang performed his ritual.

  No matter what happened, I was in a position now where there was no way I could win. If the one-armed sorcerer managed to call forth a Kulou-Yuanling, there would be such a reign of destruction I could scarcely imagine it. And if I stopped the ritual, if I defeated the man who cut me and ruined my father’s eyesight, then the sun would come up in the morning, and I would go to work as a whore for the Xie Liang tong.

  I wanted to cry at the injustice of it. I remembered how my life had been, once, young and hopeful and married to a hero, when my future seemed as if it were going to be spent in day after day of contentment with the man I loved.

  What would happen if I did nothing? I didn’t have to oppose Tom and Liu Qiang. I didn’t have to try to stop their ritual. The Kulou-Yuanling would rise, and my life would go on. Simply by do
ing nothing, I could escape a whore’s fate.

  And yet, if I did nothing, Liu Qiang would triumph. He wouldn’t allow my father to go on living. The one-armed man would come for him with a monster that could slaughter armies, a monster that even the Senior Abbot who founded the Maoshan lineage was not strong enough to fight. Father would be killed.

  Thinking of Liu Qiang made me go stiff with anger. If he managed to raise the Kulou-Yuanling, he’d kill my father, but he’d probably let me live. That’s how insignificant he considered me, no threat to him in any way. Fury bubbled inside me. I wanted to see the one-armed man broken and defeated.

  I had to defeat Liu Qiang. No one else was going to do it. Even if it meant I was going to live a life of degradation, I needed to stop him.

  Liu Qiang. His monstrous arm. Tom Wong. Evil spirits. Gangsters from the Ansheng. Men and monsters were arrayed against me, and I had to face them alone.

  I didn’t even know where the ritual was going to take place.

  I thought for a moment. To perform the ritual, Liu Qiang would need to burn a hundred corpses. They wouldn’t do that indoors, so it had to be somewhere out in the open. They had to bring the corpses there somehow. Chinatown is too small to carry dozens of corpses around without people noticing. Smuggling that many dead men to one place is bound to attract attention.

  Was there anyone who’d be willing to tell me? Maybe. But I only had three hours. There was no time to go poking around in the hope that someone would give me information.

  I needed a more direct approach.

  I arrived at the monastery and found Shuai Hu. In the austere quarters, he was eating, using a windowsill as his table. My eyes bulged. The tiger monk’s demeanor had shown so much discipline, composure, and self-control. But he’d never learned to eat with utensils.

  There was sauce dripping from his hands and smeared on his chin. There was rice scattered along the windowsill where he was eating. He stuck out his tongue and licked sauce from his fingers the way a cat laps water from a bowl. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.

  “Shuai Hu, I need your help,” I said.

  “No,” said the tiger-man, shaking his bald head. “I already told you, Daonu Xian. I will not fight, and I will not kill.”

  I smiled. “Are you willing to scare people?”

  He pondered for a moment. He wiped sauce from his mouth with one big hand. His face broke out in a cheerful, lopsided grin. “I can do that,” he said. “If you promise me something.”

  I walked to the territory of the Ansheng tong with Shuai Hu at my side. Beneath the painted balconies of Tian Hou Temple Street we found what we were looking for. Six of the Ansheng hatchetmen, traveling together. They were men in their teens and twenties. They had hatchets at their belts. They wore layer upon layer of heavy cotton shirts to protect against knife attacks. I had repaired some of those shirts when they’d been torn.

  “There’s a ritual tonight,” I said to them. “You’re going to tell me where it is.”

  The men glanced at each other. What they saw in each other’s faces reinforced their confidence. They thought they could take a girl and a baldie in a fight. “Why would we tell you anything?” one asked.

  The monk spoke, his voice serious, solid as iron. “People will suffer if you don’t tell us.”

  The men laughed. “Shut your mouth, Baldie,” one of them said.

  A ripple moved through Shuai Hu’s tiger shadow. The ripple rose out over the monk in a wave. His shadow pulsed with unnatural darkness, as though it were breathing. At each pulse the monstrous shape around him grew larger, more physical. The men watched, their stances growing less and less certain.

  It took only moments. They were facing a man; seconds later there was a tiger standing in his place. A tiger with a man’s shadow.

  But not any tiger. Shuai Hu was huge, bigger than any tiger on record. He must have been as tall as a horse. Nothing human could stand against him. I staggered back, startled by the size of the wild beast. He could crush a wooden carriage between his paws, rend brick with his claws. And behind him, visible to all eyes in the ten o’clock light, three tails waved like banners of war.

  Shuai Hu growled, baring fangs the size of small swords. A feral smell blew from his mouth. The men scattered, fleeing in panic.

  I managed to grab hold of one by the collar of his shirt. “Now,” I said, with the enormous supernatural tiger glowering behind me, “you will tell me where the ritual is taking place.”

  The man screamed and tried to pull away. I gripped his wrist with my other hand. “Tell me,” I said. He screamed again.

  I turned to the tiger. “Brother Hu,” I said, “his screams are hurting my ears.”

  A pair of eyes focused on me, huge, green and gold and inhuman. Suddenly I was afraid. Was the monk still himself behind the monster’s eyes? I would not want to go into combat against that beast, not even with my father leading the charge and an army of men with pistols and muskets. If Shuai Hu lost control of himself, there would be no stopping him.

  Dark stripes and orange stripes poured into his shadow. The tiger vanished as though a chalk drawing had been wiped off of a blackboard. The monk staggered in its place, bald and silent. Muscles clenched and unclenched in his jaws. He seemed to struggle for awareness and self-control.

  I watched his transformation and decided I would not ask him to do this again.

  The hatchetman screamed once more, his voice hoarse by now, and then was quiet. His eyes had gone wide as saucers. He stared at the monk and began to shake.

  “Where will the ritual take place?” I asked again.

  The man looked at me with glassy eyes and shook with fear.

  “Where?” I demanded.

  “I,” he began, his voice meek, “I don’t know.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t know? I had less than an hour to find Liu Qiang and this man didn’t know.

  “K-keep it away from me,” he said.

  “Tell me what I want to know and he’ll let you live.”

  Shuai Hu smiled at the man. “Grr,” he said, in a human voice drenched in wit. It was enough to push the man over the edge.

  “I don’t know about any ritual,” he said, desperation in his voice, “I just got back to town!”

  I looked at him. “Where were you?”

  “Wyoming!” he shouted. “I was in Wyoming!”

  I had a sick sense. Horror crept through me with the comprehension. I knew where he’d been, and I knew what he’d done there. But I needed to hear him say it. “Where in Wyoming?” I whispered.

  “Rock Springs!” he said.

  I took a deep breath. Some years back, there was a massacre at a Chinese settlement outside Rock Springs. Dozens of men were slaughtered. Their bodies were buried without ceremony in a mass grave. The mob that murdered them went unpunished. Liu Qiang would have his hundred corpses. It wouldn’t be so hard to find a hundred Chinese men who died badly, here on Gold Mountain.

  “You went on a mission to bring corpses back from Rock Springs,” I said.

  “Yes,” he cried, “yes! Six of us. We dug them up and brought them back in carriages. It’s an auspicious undertaking. The corpses are going to be buried in China, with their ancestors.”

  I rolled my eyes. This man believed what Tom Wong’s men had told him, as my father had believed it. Sometimes it is easier to believe in the goodness of men’s intentions.

  “Where did you deliver the corpses?” I asked.

  “A warehouse,” he said. “There were other corpses there, not just the ones we brought from Wyoming.”

  “Corpses from Oregon and Los Angeles,” I said, because I knew Chinese workers had been massacred there as well. “Where is this warehouse?”

  “On California Street.”

  Something clicked into place. “California and Pike? They dry fish there?”

  The man nodded. I cursed and let him go. With one last glance at Shuai Hu, the man ran off. He did not look back.

  �
��You know something about this warehouse,” Shuai Hu said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Mao’er brought me there a few days ago.”

  “Who is Mao’er?” the tiger monk asked.

  “A cat spirit, with two tails. Mao’er is almost like a friend to me. I don’t think you’d like him. He loves to fight.”

  Shuai Hu ignored that. “And this warehouse?”

  “It’s an Ansheng building, warded by my father’s talismans, but Mao’er brought me there,” I said, taking a breath, “because there’s a back door.”

  Shuai Hu gave me a steady gaze. “A back door, meaning that spirits can cross past his talismans.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Liu Qiang must have done something to Father’s talismans. He may have taken them down and replaced them with copies that had no investiture of power.”

  “Why would he do that, Daonu? It seems like a lot of work to accomplish very little.”

  “When I first met Liu,” I said, slowly, “his arm was an ordinary stump. This was at my father’s temple. He must have temporarily removed his demonic arm. I thought it was due to my yin eyes. They knew I’d be able to see the monster, and they wouldn’t have been able to trick me. But now …”

  “Now you think it was also because your father’s wards would have prevented his arm from entering the temple?”

  “That’s it exactly, Shuai Hu. If Father’s talismans retained their power, Liu would need to remove his arm every time he entered the building. To prepare for the ritual, Liu Qiang needed to go in and out, with his spirit-arm whispering secrets in his ear.”

  “Daonu Xian,” the monk said, bowing, “I take my leave.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “You can’t go. I need your help. Their ritual will begin in less than an hour. I don’t even know where it’s going to take place.”

  “Very well,” he said. “Let us reason. If you were performing such a ritual, at such an hour, where would you do it?”

  I mulled it over. “In a graveyard. But it would take a long time to carry a hundred corpses out of the warehouse. Constables would catch them.”