Chapter 3 Water Fetcher
WATER FETCHER
Catch him.
People milled in the streets, trying to smother the small fires started by the elderly ghost.
Hold him.
Rat Tattoo’s yelling echoed, faintly audible above the racket. And Mercy veered away from the crowds, the noise, hands curled into fists, breathing through her nose.
Drag him to the water—
The refrain echoed through her head, cacophonously loud. Tight pain speared behind her eyes, as if her blood pressure were rising sharply.
—and keep him down until his blood is salt and his eyes are food for the fishes—
She held her face still as a stone statue and kept walking, conscious of Rat Tattoo still in the background somewhere. Conscious, too, of the local residents still flustered and cross.
The moment she turned a fresh corner, Mercy broke into a jog. She didn’t like running at the best of times and was soon out of breath, but she knew from experience that when the urge crept up on her, she should avoid other people. She needed space.
Space, of course, was the one thing that was not easy to find in Kowloon. The city was small in area, the foundations hemmed in by fort walls built long ago.
It compensated by being complex in structure.
Dozens of paths and alleys crisscrossed at all levels.
Of these, the Snakeskin triad guarded only the eight main roads which ran at ground level, and slapped wards on the bigger alleys or streets in upper areas.
It made sense to do this; the eight main roads were the most important to keep free of ghosts.
Most of the ground-level areas were steeped in perpetual shadow.
People still traversed the smaller roads and alleys, because they had to. They either lived there, worked there, could not afford the tolls too often, or all three. But those streets were less crowded, and that was what Mercy wanted right now.
Three streets over and two stories down, she finally came to a quiet little courtyard on the ground level, squashed on all sides by other buildings.
No sunlight at all. The only other person around was a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, who was drawing filthy water from a crude well.
It was too much to expect total privacy in Kowloon; this would have to do.
Mercy slumped against the nearest wall in a crouch, heels of her hands pressed to her eye sockets, waiting for her breath to settle and the headache to subside. Bao pressed close against her neck, oozing chilly comfort. She counted up to fifteen, then down again in reverse.
After so many years, Mercy had more or less accepted the intrusive thoughts she could not explain, because she could at least control them. Even when they overwhelmed her, it was never enough to drive her to unfortunate acts—apart from that very first time, as a girl at Silverstrand Beach.
Didn’t mean she wasn’t scared by it every time, though.
“Hey? Hey, auntie!”
Mercy looked up, trying to suppress a flash of irritation at being disturbed. Bao, who had immediately fallen into a nap, opened one resentful eye.
The young girl was gesturing at them, a hopeful expression on her face.
Mercy sighed. “What is it, little niece?”
She grinned. “You’re Madam Chan, right? The ghost talker who works for Cobra Lily?”
“Heard of me, have you?”
“I watched you talk to a ghost on my street,” she said, excitedly. “It wouldn’t speak to anyone except you.”
“I’m lucky.” Mercy hated this line of conversation, because she never knew what to say when it came up, or how to explain why ghosts responded to her. Maybe other people just didn’t use the right tone of voice. “I have a knack.”
“It ate a man’s head after you talked to it,” the girl said, chewing a ragged nail.
“She ate her husband’s head, and it was no worse than what he’d done to her while she was alive,” Mercy said, shortly. The head-eating thing was specific enough for her to recall the case. She added, with a hint of guilt, “Sorry you had to see that.”
“Naw, it was fun. You were clever, too.” She lifted the bucket, holding it up. “Need a drink of water, Madam Ghost Talker?”
Gray liquid slopped over the rim of the metallic pail. It had an oily sheen and smelled like rotten cabbage. Bao actually bared his teeth, as if threatened.
Mercy eyed first the girl, and then the bucket, with a raised eyebrow. Next to the well was a basket of cheap bottles that she had partly filled up.
Water fetchers were a common enough sight.
There were wells all over the district, though you couldn’t pay Mercy to drink from any of them.
Any water that came from the ground in Kowloon was heavily contaminated by open sewage and industrial waste.
Still, some folk had a use for it, and savvy kids could make a few pennies collecting and delivering.
“Not right now, sorry,” Mercy said finally, rubbing throbbing temples. Thankfully, the urge had abated, for now, which was a welcome relief. She needed to get home and report to Cobra Lily.
The girl’s face fell. She muttered something rude under her breath and turned back to her work. Even with a rope, her slight form had to lean over and into the crude well, just to lower her pail.
Mercy watched, struck by immediate remorse. She herself had not been much older when she’d first come to the Walled City, alone and friendless, struggling to stay safe and find work to feed herself.
Things were better these days than they used to be, with the war long done and modernity creeping in, but kids here still had a hard life. Harder than most people’s, all things considered. A few pennies meant nothing to her, these days, but would mean a lot to this girl.
She stood slowly, brushing dust off her legs. “Hey kid, I changed my mind. How much for a couple of bottles?”
The girl did not reply. Perhaps she hadn’t heard—her back was toward Mercy, her body leaned over the well. Head out of sight.
Bao stood up abruptly, suddenly alert when he hadn’t been before.
“Hey, little niece…” Mercy began, then trailed off.
The girl wasn’t moving. Her narrow frame was slumped and completely limp.
Mercy swore under her breath and darted forward, closing the distance between them. She grasped fistfuls of threadbare shirt and hauled the kid upward and back.
Sour-smelling liquid sloshed her shirt and the ground around them. Bao hissed, leaping off her shoulder and backing away to avoid getting wet. Even as a ghost, he disliked the sensation.
Dirty, oily water surged up and over the lip of the well, as if a pipe had burst or flooded from below. It pooled on the concrete, having nowhere to sink into, and showed no signs of abating.
The girl, meanwhile, collapsed in Mercy’s arms. She was soaked from the chest up, and Mercy realized with appalled horror that the kid’s head had been hanging upside down in water. That small face was white as death: chest not moving, lungs not breathing. She needed to get the kid breathing—
Pale lids flew open, sharp gaze fixing instantly to Mercy’s own. She should have been relieved, but instead the sight made her stomach sink. There was something watchful and alien behind those eyes. No trace of the hard-bitten child she’d spoken to only moments before.
“Shit,” Mercy said, wearily. “I’m too late.”
“Don’t worry, Madam Ghost Talker.” The girl broke into a slow, cold smile. “This body has been dead for days.”
From a few feet away, Bao hissed, ghost fur standing on end. He was telling her what she already could see for herself: the kid was possessed.
Water continued to glug from the well, slowly filling the small, sunken courtyard. It lapped at her sandal-clad feet, threatening to rise to her ankles.
None of this was good. A normal person might have dropped the kid and fled, but Mercy was too experienced for that. If it wanted to attack, it would have already. For whatever reason, this ghost wished to speak.
And talking to ghosts was the one thing Mercy Chan truly had a gift for. Best she deal with this problem, before it did harm to someone less adept.
She held the thin frame steady and said, with a calm she did not feel, “Who are you, then? What do you want?”
“I am a messenger.” The girl’s smile twisted into a snarl. “The demon who killed me wanted me to ask you a question.”
A bizarre answer. Most ghosts were confused, to one extent or another. Returning as an undead spirit meant portions of the soul were missing or fractured, and that in turn meant a ghost’s self-awareness and ability to reason were also damaged.
But this spirit did not sound confused. It sounded extremely confident.
“Who was this demon that killed you?” she asked, skin prickling with goose bumps. “Why doesn’t this demon speak to me itself?”
“How should I know?” Small flies landed on the girl’s face, crawling across the unblinking eyes, across the teeth bared in a fixed grin. “I am just a good little ghost, doing as I am told.”
“I see.” Mercy’s mouth was suddenly dry. “What was the question this demon wanted you to ask?”
The dead girl blinked first one eye, and then the other. “Do you remember the island, Chen Mei Chi?”
Her headache from before came crashing back, like a rain of stones on the inside of her skull. A strange, terrible pressure was building up behind her temples, so powerful it left her dizzy and staggering.
“No!” she gasped, as much to rebuke the pain as to answer reflexively.
“Lies! Lies, lies, lies!” The dead girl launched up at her, mouth twisted into a snarl.
Mercy didn’t even have to react. Bao tackled the girl from the side, lion sized and roaring.
Supernatural or not, the girl had a slight frame that buckled under the ghost cat’s hefty corporeality. She crashed sideways to the ground under a heap of maogui flesh.
And before Mercy could even think the word “stop,” let alone shout it, Bao put his jaws around the dead kid’s head and bit down.
There was a sound like a watermelon bursting, followed by silence. The headless body toppled into the well.
Mercy probably should have tried to catch the body and haul it out, rather than allow yet another contaminant into the water system below.
Instead, she was too busy swallowing sick, repulsed by the pop of blood and brains that squished from between Bao’s teeth.
She loved her pet, but in moments like these, she remembered why most people ran from ghost cats, or tried to banish them.
Around them, the gray water receded rapidly, seeming to either sink into the ground or retreat back into the well from which it had surged. The mangled head was gone, swallowed cheerfully into Bao’s gullet.
“What the hell was that about?” Mercy said out loud, hands still shaking from the encounter.
She’d faced down death before, and seen far more gruesome ghosts than this one.
Yet the intensity of the experience had unnerved her deeply.
“Demons leaving messages? Ghosts with a personal angle? I don’t like this. ”
Bao looked at her, tail lashing. Far from bored or indifferent, he seemed curiously alert and intense; he had still not shrunk back down to his kitten size. As if he still sensed a threat.
From elsewhere in the neighborhood, a clatter of noise echoed: voices talking, laughing, arguing. Even quiet spaces like this did not stay quiet long, in Kowloon. Other people would be here soon.
“Let’s put some warding talismans down,” she said, rising to her feet. “After that, we’re heading home. There are no answers here, and I still need a bath.”