Chapter 25 After Life
AFTER LIFE
Thirty-three years ago …
Time changes when you die, though not in the way you expect.
It doesn’t slow, so much as expand. You find, in death, that there is more space between each second as transience stretches itself thin. It takes an eternity to finally drown.
Followed by a darkness that lasts forever, and only an instant.
The next thing you recall is opening your eyes in the depths of the ocean, crying out reflexively.
A rush of water floods your throat, but otherwise silence. No speaking, no noises. You feel a great and terrible need for air yet you cannot breathe, the way a rabid dog thirsts for water yet cannot drink. In that moment, you would have torn apart babies for a chestful of oxygen.
Up you lunge from the ocean floor in a cloud of sand, dust, and murky water. Seagrass and old fishing lines clutter the water. All is darkness but somehow you can see as you shoot straight upward, picking out the swirls of movement from fish and fragmentary lights above.
Burst through the surface of the ocean. A nightly breeze stings your face, the sky a riot of stars above. Each of them is ringed by a nimbus of light, weird and unwaveringly bright.
All this you see in a kaleidoscope moment of perception, absorbing without truly processing.
You are too busy trying to breathe to take in anything else.
A cold, heavy wetness sits in your lungs that will not go away.
Struggling to breathe does nothing but send a twisting sensation through your chest, worsening the pain.
Memory returns to you in drips.
The lightning strike.
She’s here … She’s here!
Electricity flinging you from the boat.
I refuse to face her again.
Your mother, shattered by fear, rowing for her worthless life.
Mami, don’t go—
Waves carrying you back into the ocean. Sea Sister’s face, looming in your vision.
I will always love you.
Fearful and anguished, you lift both hands out of the water. Bone-white fingers, tinged green in the creases and tips. The digits elongated and skeletally thin. The nails have grown into something approaching claws, cruel-looking ones.
These aren’t your hands.
Except … they are.
When you look closely, there is a hint of transparency to your skin. A lightness to your form that belies its size; you weigh almost nothing, can feel that lack in yourself. Your physical body is gone, and all that is left of you is a semi-corporeal spirit.
Shuigui. Dead girl. Water ghost.
Sea Sister has made you like her.
Shiver and wrap both arms round your shoulders. There are no words for the transcendent hurt you’re experiencing. It’s not just the lungs, burning you inside out with a desire for air that cannot be met. It’s everything: Baba’s death, Mami’s abandonment, Sea Sister’s murder.
Every fucking person in your entire fucking life, who has ever mattered in any capacity, has done badly by you. And you hate them all for it with a power that cascades like a celestial flood.
Where is that disgusting monster, that vile Sea Sister? She was right next to you when you died, promising she’d stay with you forever. Surely she couldn’t have gone far. Didn’t she want to drown you to keep you close to her, after all? Wasn’t that the point?
It occurs to you that your skin isn’t burning, as Sea Sister’s did when she was out of water. Dry, yes, but not withering up. Look up; it is nighttime, judging by the stars and moon. The night sky looks as bright to you as the day. Ghost vision must work differently.
More importantly, it wasn’t night when you first died. Closer to mid-afternoon. Maybe the “returning” of your spirit took a while. Has it been hours? Days? Weeks or months?
Some ghosts come back straightaway. Some don’t return until Hungry Ghost Festival, or at other times of year when the veil is thin between living and dead.
Supposedly they spend time flying around to the underworld, but that hasn’t happened to you.
Well, not that you remember, anyway. If there are rules about these things, they feel flimsy.
The beach is empty and quiet, the waters bereft of any boats. Your gaze furiously scans the shoreline—and stops, catching on the mouth of the cavern as it yawns beneath the rise of headland cliff.
The cavern, and the temple. Surely, if she has gone anywhere, it is there, where her body lies rotted. At least it’s a place to start. Anger hasn’t gone away but it is, for now, a cold, hard thing, rather than lava in your undead veins.
You dive.
Waves part for you as easily as air, and darkness does not blind your eyes any longer. Dip, dash, slink through the tunnel with unnatural grace, and return again to the cool bliss of the cave.
It looks different to ghostly eyes than it did when you were alive.
The temple glows with unpleasant light, raising a faint rash on your skin.
No wonder Sea Sister was not able to enter it.
Everywhere else in this underground pit heaves and seethes with dark energy, though; the collected misery of an abandoned little girl, and her desperate rage.
The shadows shift, interplaying with the light of the temple. Someone is moving there, near the temple doors where the water is shallowest. Definitely a person.
Rise to your full height, and stride dripping out of the sea.
A woman is waiting.
No, “woman” is the wrong term. If you tilt your head, from one angle she is an elegant lady of ageless features, draped in flowing robes.
Tilt the other way and he is a young man with high cheekbones and a sculpted body.
Viewed straight on and unblinking, they are an androgynous figure, handsome features and a beautiful head of hair, an infinity of arms curving from an impossible number of shoulders.
It is me, of course.
It always has been.
“Hello, Sung Siu Yin.” I meet your dead gaze with my divine one. “Do you know who I am?”
You stalk through the shallow water, approaching slowly. Even at night, in a covered cave, the dryness begins to tighten your skin and make it itch. The ocean does not relinquish a water ghost easily. But what is a little more pain when you are already suffering without end?
Lady Kwun Yam. Lips move but no sound comes out. You’re communicating as Sea Sister once did, and your words don’t need air. Only thought. Or is it Lady Ma Zu? I never did get to the bottom of that.
“I am they. Kwun Yam, or Guanyin, or Avalokite?vara. All those names and more. Some believe that I incarnated on this earth as Ma Zu, among others.”
I saw your statue, in the temple. And in the dream.
“That’s right.” I incline my head.
My aunt, Mami’s sister, asked you to remember her.
“I did as she asked. She was one of my worshippers, blessed with a touch of my power, and she deserved to be remembered.”
Is that why she became a ghost?
“The memory of a goddess is a dangerous thing,” I say, a little sadly.
“There is a hint of the divine in that girl. She had a great connection to the sea, and to the spirit world. A soul of her power would always have returned as a ghost, but because of me, she is even stronger. Her body lingers here, never fully deteriorating, the bones trapped in perpetual rot.”
So you’ve been here the whole time, just “remembering” her? you say, caught somewhere between incredulity and anger. Don’t you have better things to do?
“I am, and can be, in many different places at once. In all places where I exist, I am busy.”
Why speak to me now? Why did you not help me sooner?!
“It is easier for gods and ghosts to speak than it is for gods and mortals,” I say, gently, “and you are now numbered among the dead, Sung Siu Yin. But I did try to help you, when you were in my cavern. I let you see the truth of her, and I told you to flee.”
What good did that do? you demand, fists curling tight in fury. She still killed me!
“I am sorry. I cannot puppeteer mortals or ghosts, however much easier that would make my work.”
Just tell me where she is! You cannot howl, so the wind does it for you, screeching over the headland and whistling down into this cave. Where is my cowardly murderer?
“She is gone. Days ago, now.”
Gone?! Gone where?
“She came to the surface, and a passing patrol picked her up.” I pause. “For whatever it is worth, Sung Siu Yin, I am very sorry.”
None of that sentence makes a jot of sense.
How in the hells did a boat pick up a spirit?
“It didn’t. The boat picked up a living woman.” When you continue to stare, I say, in a low voice, “Did your mother never tell you stories about water ghosts?”
She did, of course, but you’ve forgotten in the moment. The facts were lost amidst the shuffle of fresh wounds and bewildering betrayals.
So I explain it to you again.
The legends about water ghosts vary from place to place, sometimes story to story, but some basics are the same.
First, a person—usually a woman, for most ghosts are women—must die by drowning, and return as a spirit with unfinished business.
In stories, she spends many years feeling lonely and lost, consumed with the perpetual agony of suffocation, yet afraid or unable to leave the one place she haunts.
Trauma is familiar, and always calls us back.
When a victim finally approaches the body of water where she lurks, the woman’s spirit lures them into the water.
Sometimes she does this through seduction and sometimes through a hypnotic spell; the details on this vary.
Others will simply grab anyone foolish enough to go swimming during Ghost Month, when the undead are strongest.
Once she and they are both in the water, she will pull them down into the depths and hold them there until they drown.
It is here the stories begin to differ. Some say that once a victim is dead, the water ghost can rest, its spirit journeying on toward the underworld and eventual rebirth. Both souls simply pass on.