Chapter 23 Water Ghost
WATER GHOST
? years ago …
Water laps you to wakefulness, cold and fishy-smelling. Cough and splutter; you are lying on an uneven, rocky surface, covered in several inches of seawater that swirls gently back and forth. If you had landed face-down, you might have drowned, but you have landed on your back.
Above, the cavern roof gapes larger than it did before. The edges of it have crumbled in, widening the crevice. The temple itself—a mere handful of steps away, you have landed within clear sight of its arched doorway—is the same as always: quiet, peaceful, beautiful, ancient. Nothing changed there.
Head spinning, you try to sit up. It is hard work. Your legs do not move, nor do your hips. You cannot feel any pain, only heaviness, and that worries you. Dazed and anxious, you look around.
And start screaming.
You’ve landed atop your grandmother, whose body has cushioned the fall. Ahpo’s head and belly are smashed open, entrails and brain matter and bones everywhere. She is very dead. Like the victims in Shanghai and other bombed cities, you think, then feel confused because that thought makes no sense.
A shadow drifts across the patch of light. Look up; it is Daiyu, face full of terror and horror. She cries at you with confused, warbling words that are choked through her tears.
“Are you okay, little sister? Where is … oh, no! Ahpo!”
“Help me,” you plead, because everything feels real and not any longer like it is a dream. A real and visceral terror is spreading through your veins. “Please, big sister!”
“I will!” she promises, sobbing. “I will go get help!”
“Don’t leave me alone!”
“I can’t get you out on my own, there’s no path down anymore,” Daiyu says. “I’ll be back.” She disappears from sight, her promise lingering as an echo that bounces off the cavern walls.
The time passes.
The tide rises.
Tears are all that remain. You cry for a while, because you are still just a girl, not even six, and the shock of it is awful. You regret everything you have ever done, your whole life and existence, and all that you have brought to this world; none of it is good.
But soon enough, the self-recrimination fades, replaced by resentment. The islanders who came knocking share this blame. They feared you, used you as a convenient excuse for everything that went wrong on Shek Ham Chau. Including the death of your parents. It is their fault you are here.
And above it all, your grandmother did not deserve to die like this. She did nothing wrong.
You are angry. So terribly, terribly angry about all of it.
Waves wash higher, slapping your belly. The tide is coming in, and when it does, the cavern will flood. You must not lie here crying, and need to get out first. Anger can come later.
Surge upright, away from the soggy, stinking mess that used to be Ahpo. Already, the ocean is dispersing the flesh and blood into a miasma. Leaning forward, you try to pull yourself along the ground.
Agony fires nerves in your back and sides from the heave of movement. That, you do feel, but only in your ribs, which are extremely tender. Something in there is broken, or at least bruised very badly. Your legs still feel nothing.
The panic becomes cloying. If you can’t walk, you can’t get out of here, and that will be a death sentence. At the moment, the cavern is covered in half a foot of water, and that’s in low tide. In a few hours’ time, it will rise enough that you will be in over your head.
No one can swim or climb with paralyzed legs. If someone doesn’t help soon, you will drown down here.
Just when you are about to despair, more shadows populate the shrinking patch of sunlight. Again, you look up, and again, you find the view obscured. Not by one head, but by several. The villagers are here, leaning over the edge. You can’t quite pick out their faces.
A fragment of joy lifts your spirits. Daiyu has kept her promise, and told someone.
“Help me,” you plead, anguished that your weak voice doesn’t carry very well.
No one answers you, but snippets of conversation trickle down in drips and fragments.
“… girl … too weak now…”
“—is that the little girl? Horrible—”
“… high tide! High tide in a few hours!”
“… treacherous … stairs damaged…”
“… Heaven’s will … God’s plan … is what she deserves.”
You stare up in horrified disbelief. They really are going to do it: they will leave you here to die.
As the villagers leave, one figure leans out farther: your big sister, Daiyu.
“I’m sorry!” She is crying, begging for your forgiveness. “I’m so sorry, little sister!”
“Stay,” you beg her, because you know she can’t help anymore. “Just stay with me!”
“I can’t,” she wails, sounding desperate. “I don’t want to watch!”
She disappears from sight for the last time. Your wordless screaming follows her. It is a sound that will pursue her for the rest of her life.
The time passes.
The tide rises.
No one comes.
Every so often you try moving your legs, pinching them even, but it’s as if the legs are no longer there, just a strange and inanimate curiosity attached to the body.
Even sitting up, the water is at your chest now. Your head is clear and you can breathe, though not for much longer. However, your body is floating, you realize. Eventually, you’ll sink again. But for now, it’s a help; you can move, slightly. Enough for one last effort, one last burst of energy.
You twist round, crawling on your hands, dead legs buoyed by the ocean.
Crawl inch by agonizing inch into the temple and hold on to the carved statue of Kwun Yam.
Things are not working in your body. Dark patches of bruising are spreading all along your skin; you feel cold, a sickly chill in your very marrow that simply will not abate.
Small cuts abound, trickling with blood. Still, you persevere.
Ocean water rushes into the cavern, and you begin to flounder. There is very little light here, just darkness and water and echoes braided with shadows. Grab the statue, struggling to pull yourself a little higher out of the tide.
A soft meow; you look up.
Your cat is there, or rather his spirit is. Still small and white, the way he died when the men of the village crushed his head with a rock out of spite. He deserved better, and you were relieved when his ghost returned.
“Bao,” you say, softly, and it fills you with wavering joy to see him.
The cat curls in the crook of Lady Kwun Yam’s arm. He peers down at you with red, red eyes.
“Goddess,” you rasp, and the stone temple catches your soft words, flinging them around the crags and crevices of the walls and ceiling. “Please do not forget about me, the way my village has. Please remember my death!”
Almost, you could swear that the statue turns its head, ever so slightly, to look down.
The tides flood as you dip a finger into your own blood, and write your name on the statue’s cold surface.
And because you want to be sure, you don’t just write it once.
You write everywhere you can reach on Kwun Yam’s statue.
Even if the water washes some of it away, you keep doing it. There’s plenty of blood, at least.
Over and over, you beg the silent goddess to remember you, pleading with the heavens and the underworld and any other being you think will listen, to let you return as a ghost.
“Let me catch them,” you whisper into the dark, “and hold them, and drag them to the water, and keep them down until their blood is salt and their eyes are food for fishes, and there is nothing left of them but empty skin!”
It is the curse of a little child: simple, repetitive, mean-spirited as only children can be when angered.
The villagers were right in one respect: you do have a kind of power. When you are angry, bad things can happen. And now you are angrier and sadder than you have ever been. Though you cannot prevent your own death, you can certainly twist your own spirit in the process.
You don’t know that, not yet. All you know at this point is exhaustion, and agony. Pain conquers every part of your body that you can still feel; numbness has claimed the rest.
Alone and defeated, you open your mouth to the waiting sea and draw it in like breath—
The ghost dream fades.
You are yourself once more: cold, damp, shivering in a dark cave. Nose to nose with Sea Sister, her forehead pressed against yours, her horrifying gaze locked with your own.
Fear rockets through your body. You’ve been close to her before, swum side-by-side and face-to-face, but it’s different now, in this sacred place, with the glamour stripped from your eyes.
For beneath that cold skin, she is made of stillness: no heartbeat, no rush of blood, no intake of breath. She is not thin from hunger or malnutrition, but from decay. Internal organs she no longer needs have atrophied into almost nothing.
She is no mermaid, nor even a monster. Sea Sister is a corporeal spirit.
Shuigui. Water ghost.
I don’t think you should go swimming.
A memory rises in your mind: Mami’s anxious face, the first day you arrived.
You will stay out of the water.
Sea Sister, beautiful and dangerous, sharp-toothed and luminous.
In the ocean, no one can cry without drowning.
Clawed, green fingers, snaking around your wrist.
No one else remembers me.
The sharks who feared to approach, watching you from the depths.
It was an accident.
Words crowd in your head, only to fade in your throat. Hot and cold, hot and cold. Your body moves from flushed to a slight shiver, and back again; your hand, still clutched in her emaciated grasp.
“Ghost!” you cry, ripping free of her. “You are a dead person, like the other islanders, up in the village!”
She nods her head slightly, a single dip and lift of the chin.
“It was you.” The words croak from your throat. “The little girl I dreamed of. The one who summons storms, and speaks to spirits.”
Sea Sister hides her face. She looks like she wants to cry and you remember what she told you days or perhaps weeks ago, that sorrow is silent beneath the sea.
Idiot. Idiot.
You should have figured it out sooner.
Except, a small part of you has always known. If you’re truly, unflinchingly honest. This is a ghost island, after all, according to the people on the mainland—a place inhabited and overrun by its former storm-wracked villagers.
What else could Sea Sister have ever been, but another one of Shek Ham Chau’s lost spirits? No different from the creeping, selfish dead who hound your mother day and night.
Worse, in fact, because this girl and her rage are what summoned a storm and killed the village. She’s not just a dead child. She’s an angry, twisted, vengeful dead child, and she has brought you to the place she died so that you can die where she died, your corpse keeping her remains company.
A terrible revulsion is growing in you, where there was only certainty and excitement before.
“Please let me go home,” you whisper. “I want to see my mother!”
Home? She lifts her head from her hands. But you said you wanted to be like me. To become as I am, free and strong and forever swimming. We will be together in the ocean, forever and ever and ever.
Her words fill you with ice. You thought she was your friend, but she was only doing what a ghost always does: trying to charm its victims, for its own dark reasons.
How many stories have you read or heard about ghosts who trick men into marrying them?
About demons who weasel their way into homes, only to kill at their leisure?
How stupid you’ve been.
“Sea Sister, you are dead, and I am alive!” The shout tears from your throat. “The dead have no claim on the living. I want to go home!”
No. NO. This isn’t how it was supposed to go!
Sea Sister bares her teeth, head thrown back.
The temperature in the cavern drops from cool to a crisp chill.
You shiver violently, teeth clacking. Everyone leaves me.
It isn’t fair! You were supposed to be my friend!
MY FRIEND. That is why I brought you here, to where I died.
I trusted you to love me, when you saw how they treated me!
She reaches for you, claws extended, and fear snaps your paralysis like a shard of ice. You leap away from her, back into the temple.
Come here! Come here, right now! Sea Sister surges out of the water to follow, but stops at the temple’s doorway. She does not cross the threshold; can’t set foot on it. Her pitiless dead gaze bores into you. How did you ever find such a creature beautiful, or loving?
Sea Sister senses her mistake. She tries to soften, baring her teeth in a smile. Come out, Siu Yin. It is time to swim.
“Where are we swimming to?” you call back, shakily.
You said you wanted to be like me. Don’t you still want that?
“I thought you were a jiaoren, not a ghost! You tricked me!”
Sea Sister shrieks like an oncoming train and you clap both hands over your ears, because the sound is unbearably loud in this echoing cavern. She is in a rage, and it is the rage of a child being thwarted.
Surrounded by a swell of water, she flings herself against the temple doorway.
Water floods through, leaving you soaked and gasping. But that’s all it is: ocean water. She cannot pass temple doors as a ghost. Not now, not ever. Even in this forgotten place, my presence has a power she can’t defy.
One final scream, and the ghost of Shek Ham Chau flings herself violently into the cavern’s waters. A sucking whirlpool forms from the speed of her departure as she plunges down and out, away from the cavern.
“Go, young one. Now, while the tide is low, and the rocks can be crossed.”
You whip your head around. There is no one else here.
But within the shadows of the temple, light is glimmering across the statue’s stern face. My eyes, looking out at you, through one of my many avatars.
“Lady Kwun Yam?” you whisper. “Do you speak, goddess?”
The lights flash stronger. “GO! There is no time to explain. Get your mother and leave, before it is too late!”
Shakily rise to your feet, and look upward through the crevice. The sky is darkening, thickening. A storm is brewing. Sea Sister’s childlike rage is building to a storm.
Exhaustion fills you. It is years in the making, this tiredness. Grief, fear, stress, loneliness are all things which wring the body and tax the heart, and you have carried so many of those for so long, despite your youth.
But the murdering spirit of your aunt is coming to drown Shek Ham Chau yet again, until you are as dead as the rest of the village. Until you are a lonely raging spirit, like she is.
So you get to your damn feet and you run, out of the cave mouth over jagged, slick rocks, on hands and knees. Fast as you can, like your life depends on it.
Because it does.