Chapter 26 Woman Overboard
WOMAN OVERBOARD
Thirty-three years ago …
Mei Chi awakes to a world of confusion.
She is lying on a pallet in a cramped, poorly lit room, with bandages around her chest. Nothing is familiar. She tries to gasp, and winces. Her left lung feels soggy and bruised.
Still, the lung moves and breathes. She hasn’t breathed properly in such a long time. Another inhale, and this time she holds it before releasing slowly. Such an easy thing to take for granted. Until one can’t do it anymore.
Scrubbing grit from her eyes, she sits up.
This is a medical room of some kind: poorly stocked, rife with maggots. Two men and a few other women lie stretched on rickety pallets. One of the men has flies crawling across his open eyes, and smells like a corpse. The floor is stained with repeated drippings of blood and viscera.
Badly made cabinets hold a smattering of unsterilized equipment, bandages that appear to have been used and washed again, and various pill bottles without labels. Shek Ham Chau had no hospital, but this is still grim to her eyes.
Shek Ham Chau. Yes. That is the island she was born and raised on. The island she died on. Because she is decades dead, long since become a ghost, and all of this is impossible.
Mei Chi looks down at her hands, daring to examine herself.
Gone are the clawed fingers, the algae-stained flesh, the emaciated form with its atrophied innards.
Living human skin covers living human meat and bones, prickled everywhere with small, soft hairs, unevenly tanned from months beneath a bright winter sun.
She touches her lips; chapped, salt-stung, damp with saliva and perspiration. Blinks her eyes, stretches her hands. Her toes wiggle expertly. She rolls her neck, hearing it crick.
The truth is here, obvious as daylight. What she remembers is no nightmare, no flight of imagination. She is—
Can’t say it. Not yet. Needs to see it, first.
There’s a small shaving mirror on the nearest cabinet. She picks it up.
Sung Siu Yin’s face gazes out at her, head and shoulders reflected hazily. Mei Chi touches her cheek; in the silvery, flat surface, Siu Yin raises a hand to touch Siu Yin’s face.
A blood-red mark winds from neck to wrist on the left side, where lightning from her own storm struck Siu Yin’s boat. Still red and angry, and it will scar terribly, but it is healing. A gold tiger charm bracelet encircles one wrist; a gift, from Siu Yin’s father.
Mei Chi drops the mirror as if it were a poisonous snake and crawls back to the pallet, curling up like a frightened pangolin.
As a water ghost, the need to take a skin had warred with the soul’s desire to have companionship, which had collided horribly with Siu Yin’s rejection. She had fought the urge to drown Siu Yin, even as she’d found her niece’s company irresistible. A balm against the unending loneliness.
But Mei Chi is not a ghost anymore, not with a body to complete the parts of her soul that were missing, and she can feel the horror and regret for everything she has done.
She may have died as a child, but she has years of accrued memories.
Plenty of awareness to understand the devastation her spirit has wreaked.
What now? Sit and wait for Siu Yin to return, as one of the dead? What will Siu Yin think, finding Mei Chi alive and breathing in Siu Yin’s body? Can she leave, vacate this form, give it back? Can a spirit ripped from its flesh live again, find itself again?
The idea of giving back the body fills her with fresh fear. The memory of that eternal drowning pain is not pleasant.
Yet she should get back to Siu Yin, if she can, or at least to the place where Siu Yin died. It is her duty. Maybe she can exit this body, crawl back to the ocean. But for that to work, she’ll need a clear run to the sea, with no soldiers. This boat will be difficult to escape.
No, doesn’t matter how difficult it is. There must be a way to fix it.
Mei Chi puts a hand to her chest, inspecting under the bandages. The stab wound is healing well. Whichever Japanese doctor treated her has done a good job. They’ve drawn the excess oxygen out of the lung, allowing it to reinflate. Though bruised and a little weak, this body will live.
She can hear men outside the door, speaking in Japanese; someone is standing guard outside. She is a prisoner of war, then? Something like that. From one prison beneath the waves, to another above them.
“Are you the girl they pulled from the ocean?”
Mei Chi turns her head.
On the next pallet over, a young woman about her age is leaning close to whisper. She’s been injured in some kind of explosion, and her thickly crusted bandages are in need of changing.
“I don’t know.” Siu Yin’s voice coming out of her mouth. No, out of Siu Yin’s mouth. From Siu Yin’s throat. She cringes, feeling like the world’s filthiest thief.
“You must be,” the bandaged woman says, insistent. “I saw the soldiers bring you in here.”
Mei Chi swallows a Then why did you ask, if you already know response. Best not to alienate her one source of information. Instead, she says, “Why would the Japanese soldiers save my life?”
“Not soldiers. The military exorcists,” the bandaged woman says. “They keep an eye on the ghost islands in these parts, and they’re kinder than soldiers. Former priests, most of them.”
Military exorcists, Mei Chi echoes silently. She would have assumed they’d take one look at her and realize she was possessing this shell, but they clearly haven’t.
That itself is interesting. Perhaps she does not look like a possession case because possession happens to the living; two spirits crammed uncomfortably into a single body.
What she has done is … corpse animating, possibly, or something akin to reincarnation.
Indistinguishable from simply being alive, unless they examine much more closely.
As a ghost, her mind was clouded with anger and grief and loneliness.
In a human skin, her thoughts are clear and cold—for the moment.
She wracks her tattered memory. Everyone knows what a water ghost does to its victims, but she can’t recall any tales about what happens to them once they’ve found a living person to switch with.
Do they just … disappear into society? Live normally, like a human? Strange that the stories always stop with the murder, and never discuss the aftermath. Maybe they just carry on living, having found a second life to exist in.
The idea makes her chest constrict in horror and shame, even as her cheeks flush with excitement.
Being in Siu Yin’s body means no more drowning.
Freedom to live, breathe, be real. But it comes at someone else’s expense, someone she has killed and betrayed.
She does not know if Siu Yin has become a water ghost, or moved on to the next life, and can’t tell which outcome is worse.
“—and they said we were insurgents, all of us. I am only a farmer!” The bandaged woman is still talking. “Now I am here, going to heaven knows where.” She grimaces, reliving some private memory.
Mei Chi tries to refocus and pay attention. “Where is here, exactly?”
“Some military ship. We’re being transported.”
“Oh. Where are we going?”
The bandaged woman gives her a look, like she is a child who insists on poking an anthill with bare fingers. “To where all the prisoners go, idiot,” she said. “If we are very lucky, we will live in Stanley prison camp. If we are unlucky, a soldiers’ brothel.”
Mei Chi crosses her legs reflexively. “How long have I been unconscious?”
“Two days, I think. A long time.”
“And we’re still not in Stanley?” It should only have been a few hours’ travel.
“None of us were well enough to travel till today,” the bandaged woman says, irritably. “Don’t you remember the military hospital?”
“If I did, would I be asking questions?” Mei Chi retorts, sitting up carefully. This body is weak, worn to death and dragged back again by an unfamiliar spirit; it is barely holding together. Slowly, through sheer willpower, she stands once more.
The bandaged woman eyes her uneasily. “What are you doing?”
“Getting out of here. I can smell the sea. I must swim to shore.” And find her way back to the island.
“Idiot,” the bandaged woman says again. “How will you get past the man outside our door? Let alone all the others.”
“I’m not staying here, and I’m not getting shipped away to become—” She can’t even say it. “I have to get back to someone. She … the one who needs me … she is on the island, still.”
“Aiyah, we all have people depending on us. Dying won’t get you there any faster, unless you hope to meet them in hell.”
Her patience is used up. “Do you have a better idea, or are you just pissing on mine?”
“I was only trying to help you,” the bandaged woman says, reprovingly. “Who is she, anyway?”
“Huh?”
“This woman, whose life depends on you returning.”
“Oh, she is … Erm.” Mei Chi pauses, flummoxed when she draws a blank on the name. Her best friend, her only friend in years. The woman whose body she has stolen. They’ve done so much together, like …
Like what?
Bottles with pictures, one bottle with a poem. Yes, those are good. Also diving and swimming, hand-in-hand, around the waters of …
… of …
A swell of frustration rises within her.
The island. Her home. The place where she has lived for so long. What is it called.
What is it fucking called!
This is ridiculous; it is on the tip of her tongue, just out of reach. Yet the name has fallen out of her head, disappeared like a wild rabbit through an unlocked gate, and she cannot seem to summon it back.
Bandaged Woman is still waiting, expression unreadable beneath the gauze.
“A friend,” Mei Chi concludes lamely, and hopes the flatness of her tone sounds evasive rather than distressed. “She is a friend.”
“So you said.”