The Geomancer's Compass

by Melissa Hardy

  “So let me get this straight. You’re saying that, if we manage to find Fu Man…Qianfu’s bones and rebury them in a place with good feng shui, the curse will be lifted.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “And then we’ll be OK?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “Will I be able to read?” The longing in his voice … I’m not going to lie; it made my heart hurt.

  “Are you asking me if curse-lifting is retroactive? How should I know? Nobody’s spelled it out for me. Maybe it will just be better in the future. Maybe we’ll have to make do with our various problems, but there won’t be any new ones. Maybe the symptoms won’t be so extreme.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t have done it earlier,” he said soberly. “You know. Before.” His eyes had a stricken, faraway look. I knew that he was remembering the last year of his mom’s life, when she could barely lift her head from the pillow, when she kept asking to be allowed to die. It had been hard on us all, but it had been hardest on Brian. His father dead, Oliver holed up in his own little world, and Aubrey so starved that her brain wasn’t working right. I tried to imagine how I would feel if my mother kept pleading with me to let her go; even the thought was unbearable.

  “Hey!” In an effort to distract him, and in the interests of full disclosure, I retrieved the wooden box containing the geomancer’s compass from my knapsack. “I’ve got something to show you. A-Ma gave me this the night she died.”

  He looked at me and his eyes lit up. “What is it?” he asked. “Can I see it?”

  “Wipe your hands first,” I said. “You’ve got pie juice all over them.”

  He wiped his hands on his napkin, then took the box and opened it. “Wow. This is amazing. What workmanship!”

  “It’s a lo p’an,” I explained, “a geomancer’s compass. It belonged to The Grandfather. It came down through the family. I don’t have a clue how it works, some gobbledygook about harnessing chi, but I was supposed to bring it with me on this trip. Apparently The Grandfather is going to use it when the time comes to deal with Qianfu. If we can find a bundle of bones that disappeared over a century ago, which I’m not convinced we can.” I took the box from him and, reaching into my knapsack again, retrieved the key that A-Ma had given me. “She gave me this as well.” I handed it to him.

  “What’s it to?”

  “The first locked door we encounter. That’s what she said.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “What?”

  He slipped the key into a pocket. “I wonder … are you through with that coffee?”

  I pushed my cup away untouched. “This isn’t coffee. This is hot water a flea drowned in. Then there was an oil spill. I don’t want to think about what would happen to me if I actually drank it.”

  “Alrighty, then.” He rubbed his hands together with relish and yelled, “Svetty! Oh, Svetty!”

  “But you haven’t finished your pie.”

  “Precisely why doggy bags were invented.”

  Svetlana emerged from the kitchen, looking grumpy and hard done by. She lumbered over to the table and stood there scowling and kind of twitchy, like she was spoiling for a fight. I could sympathize. I had often wanted to throttle Brian myself. It was bad enough having your name shortened to “Randi”; being called “Svetty” would be the worst. I decided to give her a ridiculously large tip to make up for it.

  “Check, please, Svetlana,” I said, sliding the lo p’an box back into my knapsack. “Oh, and could you point us in the direction of the Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium?”

  She gave me this look – what it meant was hard to tell, given the no-eyebrow thing, but it didn’t strike me as friendly. “Head east on River Street. That way.” She pointed. “You can’t miss it,” she said, with a sideways slide of her eyes at Brian. “It’s … Chinese-looking.” The way she said “Chinese” – not nice.

  Maybe not such a big tip, after all.

  We were not half a block from the restaurant when I spotted this homeless man camped out on the sidewalk at the junction of an alley and River Street. A scrawny black dog with a makeshift collar of twine and a leash improvised from a piece of rope lay coiled at the man’s feet. I stiffened and, taking Brian by his elbow, drew him closer. “Don’t you dare talk to that guy!”

  “Why not?” he asked in a perfectly audible voice. Which he did on purpose to embarrass me.

  “Shhhhh! I mean it, Brian!”

  My entreaty fell on deaf ears, of course. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Brian was making a beeline for the dog. He really likes dogs. I mean, he is over the top about them. I like dogs too – if they’re clean and don’t drool. I couldn’t tell whether this dog was a drooler, but it was definitely not clean.

  “Nice dog,” Brian was saying to the homeless man. “Can I pet him?”

  The man stared at Brian with heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes, then blinked. He looked startled. “Uh … sure,” he croaked.

  Probably people didn’t talk to him much, I thought. Probably they just walked on by, pretending he wasn’t there. Either that or they yelled at him to go away. That’s what I would have done – not yelled at him, but walked on by, looking everywhere but at him and his dog in the alley. Now, because of Brian, I couldn’t very well do that. I had to stand there looking at a homeless guy, which is hard because homeless people tend to look pretty rough, like their lives are rotten, and it makes you sad to look at them – and kind of frightened. This particular guy was First Nations, with copper-colored, deeply lined skin and high cheekbones. He looked to be in his forties or fifties; the hair that poked out from his Winnipeg Warriors toque was almost blue-gray.

  Brian hunkered down and held his hand out, palm open, to the dog, which lifted its head and sniffed it warily. “What’s his name?”

  “Her…her name,” said the man. He had a big gap between his two front teeth. “It’s Lois.”

  “Lois. As in ‘Lois Lane.’ That’s a good name for a dog. Hi, Lois. How you doing, Lois?” Brian scratched the dog under her muzzle. She evidently liked this, lifting her muzzle higher to accommodate his fingers. “I’m Brian.”

  “Name’s Elijah,” said the homeless man. “Elijah Otter.”

  “Glad to meet you, Elijah.” Brian extended a hand. Elijah hesitated a moment, then extended his own grimy one; it was encased in an old black glove with the fingers cut out. They shook hands. I made a mental note to give Brian one of my antibacterial wipes as soon as we were out of Elijah’s sight.

  “Do you and Lois like pie?” Brian asked.

  The man looked uncertain, as if this might be a trick question. “Well, yeah.”

  Brian hoisted the paper bag containing his leftover saskatoon berry pie from the restaurant. “Because I couldn’t finish this, and I don’t think I want to carry it around all day.”

  “We can take it off your hands,” said Elijah.

  “Could you? That would be a help.”

  “Sure,” replied Elijah. “No problem.”

  Brian handed him the bag. “Great. Well, nice to meet you, Elijah. Keep it real.”

  “Thanks, Brian.” Elijah sounded almost happy. He peered expectantly into the paper bag. “Have a good day now.”

  When we were out of earshot, I poked Brian hard in the arm. “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what I mean. Talk to people like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Homeless people.”

  “He had a dog. I had a doggy bag.”

  “You would have talked to him anyway, even without the dog and the doggy bag. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Not to me.”

  “It is to me.”

  “You’ll just have to get over it, won’t you?” He stopped walking and turned to face me. “Either that or – I know, Randi, maybe all the homeless people could go live in the tunnels, so that decent hardworking Canadians like you and me wouldn’t have to see them.”
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  My face flushed. Defiantly I handed him an antibacterial wipe. He had me; we both knew it. He made a show of wadding up the wipe, unused, and dunking it basketball-style into a nearby trash can. “C’mon, Little Miss Bigot.”

  And suddenly there it was: rearing up from the broken sidewalk, a two-story, wood-frame, pagoda-style building with an upward-turning hipped tile roof, boarded-up lattice windows, and a moon-shaped door leading to a second-story balcony the width of the building. Definitely Chinese-looking, unmistakably so. Svetlana had been right on that count.

  I pointed to the sign over the store’s heavy wooden double door, studded and outfitted with elaborate, corroded lion-head pulls. A hundred-plus Saskatchewan winters had faded the letters until they were no more than a glimmer of paint on bleached wood. Still, I could just make out the words: Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium. “This is it,” I said. I stepped forward, intending to try the door or peek through one of the boarded-up windows.

  That’s when I felt it – the cold. You know how, sometimes when you’re swimming, you come across a current of water much colder than the surrounding water? Or maybe you dive down really deep and hit this zone of super-frigid water? It was like that: a discernible sudden drop in temperature depending on where you were standing relative to the store. Hastily I retreated back into the warmth of the August afternoon. By comparison, it felt almost sweltering. What’s up with this? I wondered. If I’d known it was going to be cold, I’d have brought my new hoodie with the cool CanBoard logo. My second thought was a more sobering one: Why? Why is it perfectly warm here on the sidewalk and, not a yard away, freezing cold? It made no sense. I hugged myself and eyed the building with suspicion. There was something creepy about it, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I was getting weird vibes from it. I know that sounds crazy, but I was. Usually abandoned buildings are like blown husks, all dried up, empty-feeling, but this one didn’t seem empty. It seemed full. Full of what? I felt this little flutter in my gut that I recognized as the beginning of a panic attack. Because, yes, I do have panic attacks. Not very often, but sometimes, and they are really annoying and the last thing I needed at the moment, which meant I had to calm down. Breathe, I told myself, breathe. Slowly, evenly.

  In the meantime Brian was consulting his watch. “Five o’clock on the dot. Were we supposed to meet The Grandfather outside the store or in?”

  “He didn’t say. Outside, I guess. Presumably it’s locked. Brian, listen …”

  Brian removed the key A-Ma had given me from his pocket and waggled it at me. “The first locked door we encounter?”

  Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that? What other building in Moose Jaw would A-Ma have been likely to have a key for?

  “Let’s see if it fits,” he said.

  Again the flutter, stronger this time, more urgent, accompanied by a tightness in my chest. Not good, but I could get a handle on it. “OK but, if it does, don’t turn it.” I didn’t say this so much as squeak it.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t, Brian. I have a bad feeling.” I hugged myself and rocked back and forth on my heels in an attempt to soothe my nerves. Calm down, it’s just a building. No it isn’t. Yes it is.

  “A bad feeling? Hmmm. That’s totally rational.” Brian walked over to the door and slid the key into its keyhole. “What do you know?” he called over his shoulder. “It fits.” Then, “Cripes, why’s it so cold?”

  “I don’t know,” I said miserably. “It’s like there’s some weird kind of perimeter or something around the building, a sort of cold zone.”

  “Cold zone?” he scoffed. “Probably somebody left the air conditioner on.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped. “They didn’t have air conditioning back then.”

  Brian considered this for a minute. “I once saw this show where ghost hunters used infrared thermometers to detect cold spots in places that were supposed to be haunted. The cold spots indicated paranormal activity.”

  “Brian! Could we not talk about this?”

  Then he did it: he started to turn the key. He knew I was freaking out and he just couldn’t resist nudging me a little closer to the edge. “Stop!” I practically shrieked, before clapping my hand over my mouth and looking quickly to see if anybody had heard me. Luckily the cold zone around the haunted store turned out to be not much of a hub of activity. The homeless guy and his dog were the only sentient beings in sight, and even they were out of earshot.

  Brian’s face exploded into a grin. “Randi! Don’t tell me you’re scared? Scared of a ghost?”

  “Don’t you dare tease me, Brian Liu!” I protested. “Of course I’m scared. It’s irrational, I know, but I can’t help it.”

  His grin widened. “But I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?”

  “I don’t. But I’m still scared of them.”

  “You can’t be scared of something you don’t believe in. That’s just silly.” He turned back to the door.

  “Get away from there!” I grabbed onto his vest and tried to drag him away, but without much success. He’s big and I’m not, so it boiled down to me yanking at his vest and pummeling him on the back and trying to grab the key, while he laughed and held the key up over his head where I couldn’t reach it. The good news was that this tussle served to distract me and keep me from panicking.

  “A-Ma gave us the key for a reason, not so we would never use it,” he argued.

  “She gave me the key, not you.”

  “And you gave it to me because I’m a Man of Action, and you’re a scared little girly-girl.”

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. Girly-girl.”

  “Please, Brian. Can’t we just wait until The Grandfather gets here?”

  “But what if The Grandfather’s inside?”

  “He’s not inside. I’m sure of it. That’s not the way this thing works.” The truth was, I didn’t know how “this thing” worked, but I must have been figuring it out at some level because what I said next made sense to me. “He needs us to log onto the feng shui network and do a search for him.”

  Brian looked skeptical. “Isn’t he just going to appear? The way he did on the tour?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. If we’re not in a virtual space, he can’t get to us. He needs to be … summoned.”

  “So summon him.”

  I considered this for moment. “I’ll log on using my Zypad, and we can split the signal and have it go wirelessly to our I-spex. That way we’ll have a virtual environment to interact in.”

  “OK, brainiac,” Brian conceded. “Give it a go.”

  “First we’ve got to find him.” I crossed to the curb and sat down on it, with my back to the store. Brian hunkered down behind me, looking at the screen over my shoulder. I logged on, entering through the New Age portal and selecting the feng shui network. Then I did a control-find for “Charlie Liu.” Up came a question: “Do you mean Liu Xiazong?” The Grandfather’s Chinese name. Affirmative – I clicked on it.

  The avatar wavered into view on the screen, green globe luminous. “Yes!” I removed my I-spex from the knapsack and swiped them with my CanBoard card. “Now yours,” I instructed Brian, who fished his set from one of his vest pockets and handed them to me. “I charged them fully before I left Calgary,” I said. “They should be good for hours.” I swiped his I-spex and handed them back to him, then swiped the Zypad to establish the connection. I took a breath to compose myself and turned to Brian. “Ready to rock?”

  “I’m always ready to rock. I’m not the girly-girl.”

  “Shut up if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I’m not the one who’s scared of ghosts.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, put my I-spex on, and powered on. So did he.

  Because we were not actually entering the virtual environment, but only calling up the virtual presence of a simply delineated avatar, the entry bump was much less jarring than it had been for the Below Gold Mountain
tour. Still, there was that sense of dislocation and elongation, as if we had suddenly shot up several inches in height, as if the ground were that much farther down. I glanced down at the screen of my Zypad. The avatar had vanished. For a moment I panicked. Then –

  “Shall we?” The voice came from behind us. We twisted around to see the avatar hovering in front of the big double door. In daylight it looked sketchier than it had in the virtual tour of the lo p’an or during the Below Gold Mountain tour. Now it was little more than a line drawing, almost cartoonish, in luminescent green ink. It was nevertheless 3-D, thanks to the I-spex’s stereoscopic capacity, which gives the illusion of depth to a computer-generated image. Not a bad job.

  “My first business venture,” the avatar said. It gestured toward the store, its voice heavy with regret. “At the time, it seemed unbelievably grand. We lived on the top floor, above the shop. I can’t tell you how hard it was for me to give it up, all that we had achieved, what we had sacrificed so much for. My brother and I were of humble origins, yet we rose from the tunnels to build this business from the ground up. With considerable opposition from our white neighbors, I might add.” It sighed and shook its head. “But Qianfu’s ghost would not allow us to rest. Not here. Not anywhere. I haven’t set foot inside this store since I moved the family to Vancouver, and that was a very long time ago.”

  “Why is it so cold?” Brian asked.

  “Probably a leak from the store. Buildings of that era were not so well insulated as they are now, and there’s no place colder than the haunt of a hungry ghost.” Brian gave me a look that said, “See, I told you.” The avatar continued. “Now, children, before we go in, we must have a little chat.”

  “A little chat?” Brian repeated.

  “A little chat,” the avatar confirmed. “I need to prepare you for what you are about to experience. It will likely be … frightening.”

  “How frightening?” I asked. Could I be more frightened than I was now? Yes, I could. Not a reassuring thought.

  The Grandfather turned to me. “You, Miranda, will be very frightened. Brian a little less so.”