Chapter 29 The Long Night #2
The body you’re in stumbles, knees briefly giving way. It won’t last in this chase much longer. Realistically, you need water to escape these men. If you can get to the nearby stream, they’ll not be able to catch you. Eject from this skin and slide off to freedom. Maybe kill a few as you go.
Looking back, it’s tragic how close you came to escape. A little more luck, and it would have all worked in your favor. But it is not, and has never been, your destiny to be lucky. The heavens were not so kind when plotting the course of your life.
In short, you reach the stream only to find that some of the exorcists have anticipated your thoughts. Two of them are already waiting.
Skid to a halt, bare feet dug into the damp forest earth. Breathing hard, parched and tired.
“Good afternoon, Thousand-Faced Girl,” says one of the men, in clipped English.
He is Western: fair-haired and too tall; pale-eyed, like a dead fish. His robes are long and black despite the heat, clothes designed for a chillier European clime. Delicate spectacles rest on a nose that could break rocks. In one hand he carries wooden rosaries; in the other, a fat old Bible.
The other man does not greet you, only stares coldly.
He is dressed similarly but instead of rosaries, he carries old scrolls and what look like cannisters.
Some of that famous holy water the Catholics are known for, and blessed salt.
You don’t know how supernatural banishment works in other cultures, other than that Europeans are especially good at doing it.
“Get out of my way. I only want to exist, not cause harm,” you snap, pointedly answering in Cantonese.
It’s been ages since your schoolgirl days, and your English is rusty.
Besides, why accommodate a man who has come to hurt you?
You don’t owe this gweilo any kind of courtesy.
“Didn’t I fight well in the war? Don’t I deserve as much respect as someone living? ”
“We mean no disrespect, Thousand-Faced Girl,” says the first Jesuit, even as he lifts his rosary beads high. His Cantonese is very good, which makes it even more annoying that he tried English first. “Your sacrifices and hard work will be engraved on a memorial—”
“A memorial! How wonderful and kind!”
“—but your time to rest is here,” he finishes, and then begins chanting in a language you’ve never heard before. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, something unknown to you. The other Jesuit joins him.
You try to dart around them, conscious of the other priests who are catching up. Needing desperately to reach the open stream not twenty yards behind him.
The second Jesuit opens a cannister and flings holy water in your face. It stings and hisses on your skin, as if he’s thrown boiling-hot acid. The pain is great enough that your spirit self is in agony, and your already weakened shell of a body staggers to one knee.
Immediately, both men begin throwing a ring of salt around you, still chanting in unison. You try to run over it and cannot, to your horrified shock. Strange, that; salt has never bothered you before. Whatever they’ve done to it, however they’re using it, is oddly powerful.
Things only get worse from there.
More priests arrive, some of them Taoist rather than Catholic.
Between their disparate groups, they trap you in salt and keep you cringing with their holy water.
Blessed smoke and fu talismans written in temple ink seal the ring into an impenetrable, painful prison.
It is almost as bad as being back in the ocean, perpetually drowning.
For the first time in years, you are again a scared young woman, far out of her depth.
The exorcism is excruciating, all the more because you are strong. It takes two attempts before they can force you from the corpse you’ve hidden in. When you finally crawl forth, trembling and wishing that water ghosts could cry, the sun is beginning to sink behind the hills.
Small mercies: between the cooling off of late afternoon and the shade offered by this valley, you do not die right away.
Thankfully, the Catholic priests do not seem to recognize how deadly the sunlight is. You are a different kind of ghost than anything they’ve seen in the West, and when their third exorcism fails to disperse your withering spirit, they decide to bind you, instead.
You’ll wonder, later, if the Taoist priests knew and said nothing.
Perhaps they were young and ignorant of water ghosts, or perhaps they felt disinclined to assist their Catholic cousins in dispersal and exorcism.
You are not a normal ghost, after all, and have made a name for yourself during these war years.
Anyone with a conscience would feel the weight of guilt.
Right now, you do not have space to consider this, and know only searing anger, wrenching betrayal. Even at Wing Yun, who unwittingly led them straight to you. His promises feel hollow in that moment, like everything else.
As the ritual reaches its climax, one of the Taoist priests steps forward with a large bottle gourd, elegantly painted and etched all over with glyphs. A fine, thin net stretches around it, shimmering slightly.
You know what’s coming. Bottle gourds have a long history of uses, from medicines to spirit-trapping. They’re not easy to make for one as powerful as you, but these men have come prepared, and are clearly willing to spend the resources.
Their chants rise louder, Latin and Chinese entwining in awful disharmony. Weakened, sun-frazzled, exhausted, and in pain, you begin to turn into mist. And that mist flows into the bottle gourd, like a genie in reverse.
Your last thought before darkness clamps down is that, if you ever get out of here, you will never forgive this city.