The Girl with Ghost Eyes

by M. H. Boroson

  “So they’ll perform the ritual in the warehouse?”

  “No,” I said. “It will need to be outdoors, under the moon.

  “So …”

  “The ritual will be performed on the roof of the warehouse.”

  “You know where the ritual is going to be held. I have completed my end of our agreement. You will keep your end of it?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to let him hear the reluctance in my voice. “I will not kill any human beings tonight.”

  He gave me a lopsided smile that was somehow more human than any I’d ever seen. Without saying a word, he turned and walked away.

  I watched him go. Shuai Hu was a strange man, I thought. Then I reminded myself, a strange monster.

  23

  I’d seen massacre before. I was six years old. I was a coward then. I saw the White-Haired Demoness, I saw her eerie, horrifying beauty, and I ran away. The town’s guards confronted her. She said “Give me your hearts” and the hearts burst out of their chests. She floated through our village, killing my friends, my cousins, everyone.

  I will never forget the screaming. I hid at the bottom of the well while my people fled, screamed, and died.

  The next day was warm and sunny. Arms, legs, and human heads dangled from the branches of the trees, each suspended by a white hair. A stench rose from the mutilated corpses. They had been my friends, my uncles and cousins, my neighbors. My mother.

  I had stuffed Mother’s innards back into her body. Her eyes had been gouged out. Looking into the hollow sockets of her eyes, I swore that I would never hide from monsters. Never again.

  Crowds of men parted around me as I strode through Chinatown. A man stood at the street corner with a barrel, selling rice. Another called out to everyone, offering to repair dented pots. These were hard-working men. Some of them were saving their money. Others were sending their earnings to support their families in China. I would not allow another massacre. I would die before I let that happen. To keep this Kulou-Yuanling from rising, I would risk my life a thousand times over. I would accept the fate the Gods of Gambling had dealt me.

  I was carrying my paper talismans, a bagua mirror, my peachwood sword, and my rope dart. Liu Qiang was out there in the night. I was going to find a way to stop him. To stop him, and to punish him, I thought, brushing my hand over my stomach. His cuts itched.

  Rage pounded in my ears. I walked faster, intent. Everything that happened in the last days, everything happening now, all of it started decades ago. Before I was born. In China, a group of young bullies harassed a boy. They’d been cruel to him, for no reason. Anger and rejection twisted that boy until he became a kind of monster himself; first a soulstealer, and now something worse.

  The monster grafted to the stump of Liu Qiang’s arm terrified me. I could still see Hong Xiaohao at the moment of his death, his body twitching and going limp when the serpent arm bit through his throat.

  Half a block away from the warehouse, I stopped. The traffic of Chinatown continued as always. The men’s queues swished from side to side as they walked. It was a different kind of movement that concerned me.

  Here and there in the crowd were men who didn’t seem to be in a hurry. A teenager in a black cap paced a dozen steps back and forth. An older man stood just inside a grocer’s doorway, watching the crowd. I picked out a third, a fourth, a fifth.

  They were guards.

  The moon was rising, vast and somber. It was nearly eleven o’clock, the hour of the First Earthly Branch, when the deathly powers would be at their strongest.

  And the warehouse—the entire building—was surrounded by guards.

  There could be forty men between me and Liu Qiang. It might be the entire force of the Ansheng tong.

  “Ai!” a man shouted. It was the man in the grocery shop’s entryway. He was pointing right at me. Instantly men shot into motion—the teenager, another man I’d seen, and three more I hadn’t. Drawing their weapons—knives, hatchets, iron bars—they looked to the older man, and saw him pointing in my direction.

  The ritual was only minutes away. I didn’t have time to fight a group of men. Even if they had no training, even if they came at me one at a time, an armed man would gut me the instant I made a mistake.

  I turned and fled.

  “Don’t let her get away!” a man cried. I ran down Dupont Street. To my left I saw a carriage drawn by a white horse; I considered jumping aboard, or panicking the horse, but neither one was a definite escape. I needed to get away, and I needed to do it fast.

  I heard their steps as they ran along the cobblestones. I sped for the wall, beginning to lighten my steps with qinggong. Each step was lighter than the one before it, and when I reached the wall I kept on running. One step. Two steps. I grabbed onto a wooden awning and pulled myself up.

  There was cursing down below me while I climbed up the side of the building, finding handholds in the joints of wood or on balconies. I had escaped.

  It was probably eleven by now. Liu Qiang would have started performing his ritual. I climbed to the roof and looked out over Chinatown. Below me on the street, a yellow trolley came to a stop. Some men climbed off, some climbed on, and it continued on its way. Its bell chimed more quickly as it picked up speed. At one corner, a man was hawking a basket of vegetables that had been fresh this morning. Throngs of men flowed below me. Some headed east, toward the granite facade of the Sub-Treasury Building. Others congregated around street vendors. A few stood eating rice porridge, engaged in animated conversation. It struck me how peaceful it all seemed, how normal. These men should flee for their lives, but they had no idea of the terror that was about to be unleashed. I watched them living their lives, and I was consumed by the knowledge that I’d failed them.

  It was frustrating. Chinatown was in danger, and no one could help. Bok Choy refused to help. Shuai Hu refused to help. My father was too fragile in his current state—because of me, because of my mistakes. Rocket would have done something, but Rocket was dead.

  There was no reason to hope. The forces of evil were closing on Chinatown—a soulstealer with a demon for an arm, a giant monster, and a dark undercurrent of the biggest criminal empire in the city.

  I looked out, across the street. On a rooftop across the way I could see light, and movement, and a very large pile. A fire was burning, and there were men standing on the roof. It was them. I realized what the pile was. It was a pile of dead men. A hundred corpses who died of hunger or violence.

  The ritual was already underway. I stamped my feet in frustration.

  I needed to interrupt Liu Qiang before his ritual was complete. I examined my options. I could climb back down to the street, and try to sprint past the Ansheng guards. But the guards had seen me already. They knew where I was. They’d close in on me before I even reached the ground.

  I could fight them, I supposed. I’d try to take them one at a time, but it was unlikely that would happen. No, they’d attack me all at once. Even though the attack would be uncoordinated, there would be too many fists and feet to account for. Even if I fought my way through, I’d emerge so battered that I wouldn’t be able to stop the ritual.

  I looked across the street, to the other roof. The street divided me from where I wanted to be. The street flowed between us, like a river. My eyes went up to the sky. The full moon’s brightness kept me from seeing the stars, but I knew they were still up there.

  One of my favorite legends involved a weaver girl and a farmboy who loved each other. They could not be together. They became stars, on opposite shores of the Silver River in the sky. Their love was eternal, and so was their loneliness. But what I loved about the story, what made the story bittersweet rather than simply tragic, is that one night each year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, all the magpies in the world would gather to help the lovers reunite. On this one night each year, the lovers come together, crossing the Silver River by walking on a bridge made of magpies.

  I flipped through my paper talismans
until I found the one I wanted. Blue paper stamped with row after row of birds.

  I lit the talisman on fire and watched it burn. Smoke rose from the burning page, in wisps at first. The flame crackled. The old, familiar, sooty smell filled my nose. The smoke billowed from the sheet in dense black puffs. A bird burst through the smoke. A seagull. From a hook-shaped, pale orange beak, it gave out a cackling noise. Others followed, flapping out of the smoke. In moments there were hundreds of gulls. Moments later there were thousands, and all of them wailed, keened, or cackled like maniacs. Some made guttural murmurs. Plumages of white and gray, or blue, or black, encompassed the roof I was standing on and the sky above me. The commotion of their beating wings accompanied the trills and squawks.

  The roof I was standing on was covered in birds, and so were some of the adjacent roofs. Hundreds of birds took to the air, circling me. Each gull of the multitude had a third eye in its forehead, a dark bead in a vertical slit. All around me I heard the grief and laughter of their cries: Aah! Aah! A kind of crazy joy met my anger in the wild spinning bird-filled night. I began to laugh like them. It was heartbreaking laughter.

  The hatchetmen on the roof saw me and gaped. The Haiou Shen are visible to everyone, but they look like seagulls; no one sees the third eye. The men on the roof saw seagulls, a cloud of seagulls, and the gulls were holding a rope.

  It was the line from my rope dart. I held the weight and dangled. Still murmuring their pandemonium, the gulls ferried me over California Street. I clenched the muscles in my stomach to keep the rope from spinning. My legs, crossed around the rope, were tense.

  When I had seen hot air balloons aloft over San Francisco, I’d wondered how it must feel to drift like that, between earth and sky. I do not know how those ballooners felt, but looking down at the street below me, the human activity and the perimeter of guards, I felt terrified—and exhilarated. I could not stop laughing. My laughter, like the caws of gulls, sounded mad.

  We reached the roof of the fish warehouse. Dropping the dart, I landed lightly, on three points. The scent of sweet incense reached my nostrils. A man’s voice was chanting. I heard the flapping of wings. The spirit gulls were flying off. Though I could not say how I knew, I knew they wouldn’t go far.

  The roof was flat, made of red bricks. At the opposite corner from me, Liu Qiang stood next to a pile of corpses. Somehow I’d thought a hundred dead bodies would take up more space than that. So much tragedy demanded more room, somehow, and yet they’d been heaped together, with no respect for the sanctity of dead men.

  Four hatchetmen stood between me and the corpses. Before I could stop the ceremony, I needed to get past them. The gulls had flown off with my rope dart. I drew my peachwood sword.

  One of the men advanced toward me, smiling. “Look, it’s the girl,” he said, lazily raising his hatchet.

  No killing tonight, I’d promised. I waited for my attacker to take a swing. I stepped inside his guard. With the pommel of my wooden sword, I smashed his mouth. Teeth broke and I swept his ankle. He crumpled to the roof. I stepped back into a low side-bow stance. The other three hatchetmen closed ranks, coming at me.

  Something brushed against my leg. Looking down, I saw Mao’er. The two-tailed cat spirit had taken one of his human shapes. He was male for once. Today he looked like a little boy, aside from his mouth. Purring, grinning, he bared cat’s teeth, long and sharp. “Fighty now, miao?”

  Seeing Mao’er made me smile. “My friend,” I said.

  He huffed at me.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “A cat has no friends. Be careful, Mao’er, these men are dangerous.”

  He didn’t seem to care. With a suddenness that surprised me, Mao’er shifted into a feline shape. He pounced on the closest hatchetman, clawing at his face. The man cried out, flailing. The other hatchetmen gaped, seeing a big cat rip bloody slashes across their friend’s face. But then Mao’er’s expression changed to a look of surprise. With one hand, now human, he touched the throwing knife that had pierced his neck. “Peachwood,” he said, dribbling spirit-blood from his mouth. Then he yanked the hatchetman backward. The two of them toppled together off the roof.

  Just like that, so quickly, my friend was gone. “Mao’er,” I whispered.

  Liu Qiang lowered the arm that threw the knife. “I can see your demons, Li-lin,” he called. “I wear a dog’s eyes over my own.”

  I glanced at Liu Qiang with fresh hatred. The soulstealer had thrown a knife into Mao’er’s throat and killed a dog for its spirit sight.

  He lit a paper talisman on fire. No doubt he’d prepared a number of spells in case he had to defend himself against my father. The spells would work just as well against me. I thought swiftly: slash his spell with my peachwood sword, or deflect it with my bagua mirror? Spells and spirits would merely bounce off the mirror but my sword would end them. But some magic would slip like vapor past my sword. I couldn’t afford to let the soulstealer infect me with a magical disease. Slipping my sword into my belt, I grabbed with frantic fingers, trying to unsling the octagonal mirror from my back.

  Liu Qiang dropped his burning talisman and drove a spirit at me. The spirit was a long stretch of smoky darkness, full of faces, screaming. From their terror and despair, I understood how this spirit worked. It devoured its victims, digesting them into its dark spirit-body. If it caught me, I would live forever, terrified, trapped, and alone.

  It came at me like a shooting star. Somehow I managed to hold up my bagua mirror in time. The spirit struck the mirror with enough force that I stumbled a few steps back, but I managed to deflect it. The spirit streamed away from the mirror, but it had already started curving its trajectory, turning its long smoky body around so it would face me again. I estimated I had a few seconds before it could attack me again.

  So long as the two remaining hatchetmen hadn’t been trained in kung fu, it should only take me a few seconds to disarm them. Shifting the mirror to my left hand, I drew my peachwood sword and charged at them. The first man swung his hatchet. I ducked under his arm and stepped past him. The second man was holding his hatchet too far from his body, a mistake made by men who over-rely on brute force. I lunged for him, dropping into a low forward strike, and yanked my sword’s wooden blade up from behind his hatchet. His weapon flew from his grip, clattering onto the roof. His face and throat were exposed, so I chopped at his jaw with the heavy bronze mirror in my left hand. Bone cracked and he fell backward. I spun to face the first man, but I’d been too slow.

  The scream spirit struck me like a hammer. It carried so much force. Being hit by a locomotive might feel like that. I went sprawling toward the edge of the roof, with black miasma clinging to me. The spirit billowed, swathed me in inky blackness. It burrowed into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears. I could not think. I felt darkness burning at my spirit like acid. My self, my soul, felt like it was being destroyed.

  Unnatural quiet came over me, then darkness. I was inside the spirit now. It was dissolving my memory, my identity. Before long, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to recall my own name. I refused to scream.

  24

  No time. There was no time left. I was beginning to lose consciousness. The scream spirit was eating my memories. That profound darkness etched deeper into me.

  Etched. Liu Qiang had cut a spell into the center of my stomach. My father had cut a spell into my left side. Now the scream spirit was erasing me.

  I began to drive a fingernail into the right side of my stomach. The pain was sharp and sudden. I needed three words to find myself again once I’d been lost. I needed three characters carved into my skin so I could climb out of this pit. I needed Jing, Qi, and Shen.

  Jing came first. Fourteen strokes for the perfected essence. I gouged it into my stomach. My fingernail met my skin with a biting pain. Then came Qi, ten strokes for the breath, the vital energy that moves in two directions through all living things. I drove my thumbnail into my skin, writing Qi. The pain made me squirm. Warm blood trickled out onto my fingers. Shen,
the character for spirit, came next. I stopped. How many strokes did the character Shen have? It was a simple word, but somehow I couldn’t remember how to write it.

  My mind felt hazy. I was feeling oddly relaxed, falling asleep. I lost track of whatever I’d been doing. My arm felt heavy. Soft, warm, and heavy. I felt it flop down at my side. It was heavy. I was tired. So tired.

  Small and frightened. Memories flitted through my mind like minnows in a stream. So many memories. The sensation was of something sifting through me, of things being torn from my grip. But what? I felt a loss but I couldn’t remember what it was or why it mattered.

  Ha, once there was a little girl. Singing a little song. Sing, sing, singing. Hahaha! Was that me? Ha. Father’s gaze hit me harder than a slap. “Where did you hear that song?”

  “A turtle was singing it, Father.”

  His eyes aimed at me, tense as arrows in bows, ready to shoot. “What kind of turtle was this, Ah Li?”

  “It was a silver turtle. The kind that floats in the air. It had an eye in the middle of its face. It was pretty.”

  He gave a tortured sigh. “It wasn’t pretty, Ah Li. It was an abomination. Do you see things like that often?”

  “All the time, Father.”

  He burned a yellow paper talisman, gathered its ashes, and stirred them into a cup of water. “Drink this,” he said. “It should blind your yin eyes.”

  I drank the water. Gagged it down. He looked at me gravely, his face sharp as the point of an axe.

  “You will drink talismanic water once a month, like a tonic, to keep you well.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said.

  He gave a quick nod. His right eye was twitching, moving, like it wasn’t part of his face at all. Looking at me, it said, “There are three treasures.”

  But wait, no, that didn’t happen. That wasn’t what happened. I felt confused. His eye didn’t say anything to me. What had happened?

  The ash-infused water worked. That afternoon I saw no spirits, anywhere.